Star Power

This week's classes were packed with celebrities. Thursday's Technology-based Business Transformation class (taught by Irving Wladawsky-Berger) seen John Patrick, President of Attitude, LLC (Internet Pioneer and former IBM executive) talk about the intricacies of launching potentially big ideas in the form of new product releases. A few of his suggestions:

-Your product's name is extremely important
-Fail and fail often
-When releasing your initial product, just enough is good enough/trial by fire
-Think globally act locally. Webvan actually did the opposite and went bankrupt.

He also talked about the future of the Internet. Which was very interesting and paralleled what Professor David Clark of CSAIL told me awhile back: the real plays are at the edge of the network. He was very specific and I'll have a separate post on this topic, later.

Today in my Software Business class Professor Michael Cusumano asked software engineering's OO and UML creator Ivar Jacobson to discuss his impetus to create OO and UML, and later RUP. Apparently OO was born out of necessity when Ivar was working at Ericcson and needed to create a fairly complex software product. He essentially studied other industries to determine how they solved the re-use problem, extrapolated for the software domain and applied those lessons learned to the creation of OO.

About UML, he said the language is getting too big because everyone's trying to add more and more functionality. While UML is still usable though, in his opinion, RUP is the future of iterative software development.

Speaking of celebrities, someone told me yesterday that MIT has 25 Nobel Laureates in its employ and there's a very good probability that at least 11 of them are on-campus during any given Fall or Spring semester. That I could accidentally bump into one of them is humbling.

This place ceases to amaze me.