Lueders Haus Blog

This article came in via my news reader this afternoon. Its nice to see that xenophobia is alive and well in the software industry. The article is a reaction to a interview Bill gave to a columnist for the Washington Post where he supported raising the cap on H-1B. Bill wrote an Op-Ed to this effect last weekend as well. 

The writer had some problems with the starting salary Gates mentioned but that was fairly debunked in the comments. (Bill was including the cost of benefits.) His main theory was that Gates was making up the labor shortage as a way to import more cheap foreign workers. Keeping down the wages for all software developers. He of course ignores the fact that many of these foreign workers have just received graduate degrees from fine American intuitions.

Immigration is a complex subject and it’s hard to find a source of information that does not have an agenda behind it. It seems too easy to me to blame this all on the foreign guys down the hall. Interest in math and science is dropping, there is a shortage of talent, and I think the reasons go deeper then just the pay.

The Soft got slapped with a $1.52 billion fine for the use of the MP3 format by Alcatel-Lucent yesterday. That is a mighty large number, where did it come from?

Alcatel argued that the damages should be based on a royalty of 0.5 percent of the total value of Windows computers sold.

Ok, so 1.52 x  200 = 304 billion.

Finally got around to reading the piece on Toyota in last Sunday’s magazine. It’s fascinating to see the similarities between engineering the next Tundra and engineering the next OS or browser. Toyota has gone from selling just 288 cars in 1958 to outselling Ford and soon GM. I tried to pick out as much of the “Toyota Way” as I could for the reader:

Toyota is as much a philosophy as a business, a patchwork of traditions, apothegms and precepts that don’t translate easily into the American vernacular. Some have proved incisive (“Build quality into processes”) and some opaque (“Open the window. It’s a big world out there!”).

Some of Ohno’s and Toyota’s ideas also had a deeply subversive quality. It is human nature to cover up a problem rather than call attention to it. At a Toyota plant, the identification of a problem became imperative and exciting. Because then it could be addressed.

Improving efficiency in the factory, though, doesn’t necessarily lead to greater profits. Savings on the assembly line can mean a nicer dashboard without making the customer pay more for it. “If you’re efficient in the things the customer doesn’t see, then you can put it into the things the customer does see,” Ron Harbour, a consultant whose company rates the efficiency of auto plants, told me. A result is a car more popular with customers. Success on the assembly line, in this way, begets success in the showroom.

Jobs wrote a nice letter on why I don’t buy music from the iTunes store. Sounds like most other people don’t either.

Today’s most popular iPod holds 1000 songs, and research tells us that the average iPod is nearly full.  This means that only 22 out of 1000 songs, or under 3% of the music on the average iPod, is purchased from the iTunes store and protected with a DRM. The remaining 97% of the music is unprotected and playable on any player that can play the open formats.  Its hard to believe that just 3% of the music on the average iPod is enough to lock users into buying only iPods in the future.  And since 97% of the music on the average iPod was not purchased from the iTunes store, iPod users are clearly not locked into the iTunes store to acquire their music.

Now how much off that non-DRM’ed music came from their friends’ CD collection or BitTorrent?

Sounds like Jobs wants to sell more music on iTunes. Is DRM really what is stopping people from buying music on iTunes? Or are kids just not buying as many albums anymore?