Q&A: Mike Devlin, IBM Rational GM

Grok Headline matches for Q&A: Mike Devlin, IBM Rational GM

Interview: Rational?s Devlin touts
merger

Interview: Rational?s Devlin touts
merger 07/23/2004 08:02 PM
Mike Devlin is general manager of Rational Software as part of the IBM Software Group. Prior to IBM?s February 2003 acquisition of Rational Software for $2.1 billion, Devlin was Rational CEO and was a co-founder of the company in 1981. InfoWorld Editor at Large Paul Krill talked with Devlin about the merger with IBM, open source trends, and other issues in an interview at the Rational Software Development User Conference in Grapevine, Texas, earlier this week.

Rational ignorance

Rational ignorance 02/10/2004 02:51 AM

Lago

Rational Ignorance

Academic life is ruining the internet for me. An example: Today I read Joi Ito’s wandering entry on money, economics, and physics, and the first thing I thought of doing was to post a bibliography of all of the reading that should have been done before that post was made. And then I realized that posting such a bibliography is the equivalent of shouting at the television. It doesn’t matter what I say about it. The TV (and the internet) can’t really hear me.

Lago reacts to an interesting point that I in fact pondered yesterday before posting my thoughts from my lunch with Seth. Is it better for me to post my superficial musings with Seth in the one hour that I had before I needed to move on to the next thing, or do I scribble them in my notebook and write a more rigorous treatment with references. I decided, as Cory often says, that my blog is my notebook and that even though many of my thoughts were half-baked, it was better to write early/write often than to back burner the thoughts and probably never get around to posting them.

If you read on in Lago's post, he does raise a very interesting way to look at the trade-offs of shallow vs rigorous. What is the cost of rigor and is it worth it?

I am not an academic. I am an extremely busy businessman who happens be lucky enough to meet quite a few smart people from a variety of fields. As one good friend has told me, my primary purpose is to connect people. It probably adds more value to society for me to spend one hour getting two people excited enough to talk to each other than to sit and ponder a notion by myself. My blog is not a rigorous treatment of the topics that I'm interested in, but rather a collection of links, questions, thoughts and points of view. A great variety of people read this blog and I'm sure that just about any professional thinker in on any topic I write about will find my treatment of the topic rather superficial. The question is to me is whether this is valuable or whether my lack of rigor could actually be a disservice to the discourse.

Getting back to my last post... I actually did think about spending the weekend dragging out my old notes from Hayek, Coase, Arrow, Chandler, Shannon, Mauss, Simon, etc. and digging into my memory and trying to tie all of this together. Instead, I posted a my rambling thoughts because I knew I'd never do it if I put it off. Also, I realize that I will never be able to compete directly with full-time academic and that it is not my position to answer these questions in a rigorous way. I suppose that if I can end up getting Seth, an economist and a rabbi to sit down and chat about world views over dinner at some point, I will have served my purpose.

I don't want to ignite a academic vs non-academic flame-war here. I'm just trying to point out, as Lago does, that we are all making decisions about how much to study in order for us to make the right decisions. I don't have the time or the ability to do "all of the reading that should have been done before that post was made." Having said that, I would encourage people to post "a bibliography of all of the reading" since I am interested and so are many other people.

How IBM Is Tucking in Its Rational Tools

How IBM Is Tucking in Its Rational Tools 12/12/2003 10:26 AM
IBM executives give an overview of how they are integrating tools provider Rational Software while re-aligning software divisions.

IBM Rational focuses on software quality

IBM Rational focuses on software quality 07/06/2004 12:07 PM
IBM Rational on Tuesday will announce plans to standardize its suite of automated software quality tools on the Hyades open source platform and is unveiling concurrently a software quality campaign dubbed ?Continuously Ensure Quality,? or CEQ.

How to Fail with the Rational Unified
Process (PDF)

How to Fail with the Rational Unified
Process (PDF) 04/12/2004 06:14 AM
This article has a good summary of a lot of mistakes in the software development life-cycle, including a comprehensive critique of the waterfall model (waterfalls are pretty but they just don't work).

More info on RUP. At our company we don't use RUP (you have to pay to use RUP), but we do adhere to the ideas of the spiral model.

IBM Sets Course for Rational 'Atlantic'
Suite

IBM Sets Course for Rational 'Atlantic'
Suite 07/19/2004 08:15 PM
Officials say the next generation of the Rational development tool suite, code-named Atlantic, represents deeper integration between IBM's Rational and WebSphere product lines.

'It's A Miracle That It Sold Anything At
All. It Was Not A Rational Buy.'

'It's A Miracle That It Sold Anything At
All. It Was Not A Rational Buy.' 01/16/2004 11:04 AM
Happy birthday, Macintosh. By Jack Schofield (The Guardian via MyAppleMenu)

Rational exec envisions software
prominence

Rational exec envisions software
prominence 07/20/2004 07:30 PM
GRAPEVINE, TEXAS -- Projecting what the world will be like in 2031, Rational Chief Scientist and IBM Fellow Grady Booch predicted that software would touch every aspect of life and, thusly, developers would only grow in their importance to society.

IBM Rational Leader Charts UML's Path

IBM Rational Leader Charts UML's Path 06/07/2004 10:10 PM
Grady Booch, chief scientist at IBM's Rational division and one of UML's creators, talks about the language's ability to add value—and how Microsoft's changing approach to modeling could impact it.

Intel Promises Analysts "Rational
Growth"

Intel Promises Analysts "Rational
Growth" 05/13/2004 06:30 PM
With the dot-com bust completed, Intel Corp. is now returning to a period of "rational growth" driven by sound investment in new technologies, executives said Thursday.

Big Blue sails Atlantic (in Rational
manner)

Big Blue sails Atlantic (in Rational
manner) 07/20/2004 06:31 AM
Tooling up

Rational Extends WebSphere Tool Lines

Rational Extends WebSphere Tool Lines 05/10/2004 01:44 AM
IBM's Rational Software division unveils new versions of WebSphere Studio Application Developer and WebSphere Studio Site Developer that feature ease-of-use capabilities.

Rational unveils upgrade to next tools
portfolio

Rational unveils upgrade to next tools
portfolio 07/21/2004 10:59 AM
Computer Weekly Jul 21 2004 3:35PM GMT

Brainstorm 2004 tutorial notes -
Rational Executive

Brainstorm 2004 tutorial notes -
Rational Executive 07/15/2004 12:18 PM

The Agency Costs of Overvalued Equity - Michael C. Jensen

Here are my notes. They are rough notes and may be a bit inaccurate or unclear.

Any time two or more people try to engage in cooperative activities, there is a cost because they never have the same preferences.

Stock options should be adjusted to dividends and cost of capital or their incentives are not aligned with shareholders.

If you as a manager find yourself in a situation where your stock is overvalued. It sets up pressures that cause people to destroy value. When an executive commits fraud to deliver market expectation, they know it's overvalued. 70bn peak but was worth 30bn for Enron. They had a choice of defending the 70bn or confess that it's really only worth 30bn. The board and the investors won't feel that it is value reseting, but rather value destruction and would fire the CEO and look for someone who could perform. No easy way to correct. Probably prevent from getting there. If you're there, you've probably lost your job.

Enron could have stopped the run-up, but they didn't see the downside of the run-up. "Charlie and I get just as uneasy when a company is selling for more than the intrinsic value than when it is trading at less." - Warren Buffet.

Overvaluation is managerial heroin. Feels good at the beginning, but turns out really bad at the end. The pressures of the market cause messing with the gray area of accounting. People raise money to buy companies and destroy more value. Funding of risky investment.

For every $1 in the purchase price, $2.31 is lost in the value of the firm for Nortel when investors realized that the acquisitions were not adding value. Companies destroy value with acquisitions. They con the market into believing that they can add value so it postpones the day of reckoning, but it eventually comes and comes bigger. Bad acquisitions were overwhelmingly with stock. Auctions with multiple irrational people increasing irrationality.

Throwing stock options in is like throwing gasoline on the fire. The solution is in the governance system. Can't solve all problems with incentive systems. You need honest and intelligent people who are monitoring. Unwinding constraints. Lockups after vesting.

Why did the shorts shut down shop at the beginning of the turn-around and didn't correct the problems.

95% of waste from stock options went to people lower than the top five officers. Some people think it is costless to issue options, but this isn't true.

DON'T LET YOUR STOCK GET OVERVALUED. If your stock is overvalued, YOU ARE GOING TO BE IN TROUBLE.

Solution for not having stock overvalued. Communicate your strategy. Don't forecast earnings in value. Publish audit-able metrics for strategy. Stop producing short term earnings forecasts. Would not even do rolling 12 month earnings forecast. Managers should not be in business of forecasting.

Comment - TrackBack

IBM Rational: Rival Microsoft Faces
Uphill Battle

IBM Rational: Rival Microsoft Faces
Uphill Battle 07/29/2004 10:06 PM
In an eWEEK interview, IBM Fellow and Rational Chief Scientist Grady Booch discusses Rational's development strategy and competition from Microsoft with its Visual Studio Team System application lifecycle development tools.

Rational calendar with 364 days, extra
week celebrating Isaac Newton

Rational calendar with 364 days, extra
week celebrating Isaac Newton 01/04/2005 08:35 AM
Cory Doctorow: An American physicist has developed a "rational" calendar of 364 days, in which each date falls on the same day of the week every year, thus saving profs the bother of drawing up new homework schedules every September.

His constraints meant eight months would have different lengths than they do now. March, June, September, and December would each contain 31 days, while the other months would each get 30. To keep the calendar in synchronisation with the seasons, Henry inserted an extra week - which is not part of any month - every five or six years. He named the addition "Newton Week" in honour of his favourite physicist, Isaac Newton.

"If I had my way, everyone would get Newton Week off as a paid vacation and could spend the time doing physics, or other activities of their choice," he says.

Despite this incentive, Henry says he has encountered resistance to his plan - mainly because people would be "stuck" with a birthday that always falls on a Wednesday, for example. Henry, who is among that group, is not moved by the argument. "You have my permission to celebrate your birthday the preceding or following Saturday," he says.

Link (via Wired News)

The Raw Story | A rational voice »
Exclusive: Print document of Republican
Schiavo talking points leaked to Raw
Story

The Raw Story | A rational voice »
Exclusive: Print document of Republican
Schiavo talking points leaked to Raw
Story 03/24/2005 05:02 PM
that clumsy Republican talking points memo .. proper perspective .. Raw Story

rawstory.com/news/2005/index.php?p=202
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Mike out

Mike out 04/14/2005 04:17 AM
CNET Asia Apr 14 2005 8:27AM GMT

Mike Row se rinde

Mike Row se rinde 01/27/2004 06:38 AM

Mike and Robert

Mike and Robert 05/20/2004 05:34 PM

I met some folks yesterday whom I haven't seen for a long time: Peter Yared, whom I worked with at NetDynamics, and Mike Boich, whom I worked for at Radius.  Peter Yared was CTO of Sun's Liberty division and Mike, founded and headed Radius, Rendition, and Eazel.  He is now a VC at Alta Partners where Robert Simon, a long time friend, also works.

I forgot to take Peter's picture but here is Mike and Robert.

Kimchee~

Mike Linksvayer

Mike Linksvayer 04/05/2005 02:09 AM

(Next in a continuing series of blurbs about Commoners I'm thankful to have worked with.)

If there is one person whose heroics are most unsung at Creative Commons, it could very well be Mike Linksvayer. Mike has been the CTO for about two years. He came on at a crucial time, when CC was growing jerkily from a loose network of contractors to a real organization, and he brought stability from the get-go. Stability isn't sexy, and it's not very visible from the outside. If CC is like a band, then Mike's the drummer. People not in bands rarely ever get how much a tasteful, subdued drummer matters. But people in bands know that they're impossibly valuable. And CC, when you boil it down, is all about the drums.

Mike is the force behind, among other things: the vibrant cc-metadata mailing list (our most active), our membership at the W3C, our amazing multi-language license interface and Commons Deeds (have you taken a good look at our stuff in Suomesk i?, Dutch? -- amazing!), the discovery and harnessing of the mighty talent called Nathan Yergler (profiled here earlier), the move to leverage CC Search off Nutch's open code base, countless tech developments and deals, a huge chunk of our blog posts, and who-knows-how-many other technological things that I don't know about (because I simply don't understand them). Something else you may not know: He also knows the the nitty-gritty of our licenses as well as anyone.

Mike's got a fine, bleak sense of humor, which I for one appreciate. This year he sported the best, most efficient Halloween costume -- shorts, and a tshirt declaring a single phrase -- that I've seen in a while. Maybe the same fearlessness that fuels his humor also drives his ability to call anyone on their b.s. -- a skill and a will that are rare and crucial in this "space."

Another thing I love about Mike is his taste. I'm a firm believer in the notion that the more stuff you hate, the better taste you have. Mike, I can testify, hates a lot of stuff. Which means he loves the stuff only really worth loving. So I've learned a lot from him -- about what arguments are too cheesy, what sentiments too sentimental, and not least, what Bay Area radio is actually worth listening to.

Here's a toast to Mike Linksvayer, in the hope I get to work with him again very soon. All of you who still get to are luckier even than you might think.

"Mike Budai"

"Mike Budai" 06/04/2004 08:14 PM

"Mike Slone"

"Mike Slone" 03/23/2005 10:08 AM

Mike Industries

Mike Industries 06/16/2004 07:27 PM

Mike Davidson is writing here. Mike who? Only the driving force behind a little site called ESPN, and their conversion to standards-based design last year.

Mike Harris reports

Mike Harris reports 02/16/2004 09:28 PM
Mike Harris reports that Fedora Core won't support my video card any time soon. It'll save me the trouble of downloading all the beta releases.

Other News: Mike Rowe

Other News: Mike Rowe 01/28/2004 11:25 AM
Does anyone else think it's a little crazy that Microsoft feels the need to attack a teenager named Mike Rowe for creating a website called mikerowesoft.com?

Mike Little’s Journalized

Mike Little’s Journalized 05/24/2004 04:33 AM
Mike Little .. Journalized .. Mike

zed1.com/journalized
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Mike Rowe Keeps Raking It In

Mike Rowe Keeps Raking It In 02/10/2004 02:49 AM

Canadian teen makes money from feud with Microsoft: Mike Rowe sold all the correspondence between himself and Microsoft for about $1,000.

Bids for a 25-page letter from Microsoft lawyers, an inch-thick book outlining their case to the World Intellectual Property Organization in Geneva and e-mails between Rowe and lawyers had reached as much as 120,000 dollars (90,000 US dollars) during the 10-day online auction, but those were dismissed as bogus.

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Mike Rowe Settlement

Mike Rowe Settlement 01/24/2004 05:04 AM
Microsoft has reached an agreement with Mike Rowe, the Canadian teenager who was using the Web site mikerowesoft.com in alleged violation of the Microsoft tradmark. In exchange for Mike turning over the mikerowesoft.com domain to Microsoft, the company has:

• Agreed to help direct any traffic from mikerowesoft.com to Rowe's new Web site (which he's currently working on) to make sure he doesn’t lose any business. The company will pay any out-of-pocket expenses related to this change, including cost associated with changing over to the new url and any other expenses. (The Rowe family is now calculating those expenses.)
• Invited Mike and his family on to the Microsoft campus for the company's Microsoft Research Tech Fest in March. The company will pay for the travel and accommodations. No promises, but it's possible he could meet Bill Gates, depending on the Microsoft chairman's schedule, Desler said.
• Agreed to pay for Mike to get Microsoft Certification training. Depending on which courses he chooses, this could lead him to become a certified support technician, or system administrator, or something along those lines.
• Agreed to give Mike a subscription to MSDN, the Microsoft Developer Network Web site, with various tools for developing software around Microsoft products.
• Agreed to give Mike an Xbox game system, complete with a number of games of his choosing.

Mike and Daniel's Adventures in C#

Mike and Daniel's Adventures in C# 03/13/2003 10:22 AM
"Daniel" and I get some good programming done last night. We have been pairing up the past few weeks to work on some type of project. After a few weeks of what can only be called "Spikes", we settled in and are beginning to get some real user stories mapped out and some code written to fulfill them. Daniel chronicled the session below. Daniel and I are a good Pairing team and we go back a long way which helps. But it can also lead to unwanted sidetracks. Last night we stayed focused and didn't stray too far from the chosen path. Onward! Source: Archipelago

Mike Dixon: They Will Rock You

Mike Dixon: They Will Rock You 04/08/2005 08:13 PM

"We Will Rock You," a musical by Queen and Ben Elton celebrating the music of Queen, captures all of the elaborate harmonies, multi-tracked guitar orchestras and catchy melodies that transformed Queen members Brian May, Freddie Mercury, Roger Taylor and John Deacon into gods of classic rocks, heavy metal, progressive rock -- even rock opera. And it was written, scored and produced on Macs. By Barbara Gibson, Apple

Mike Milinkovich on Eclipse, Take Two

Mike Milinkovich on Eclipse, Take Two 06/05/2005 11:21 PM
Doug Kaye's posted a new Opening Move podcast at IT Conversations, where I talk again with Mike Milinkovich of the Eclipse Foundation. There's so much going on over at Eclipse that I figured I'd better ask him a few more...

Ask Mike Shaver About Lightning

Ask Mike Shaver About Lightning 03/30/2005 09:07 PM

Mike D, Adrock, MCA and ... Frogger

Mike D, Adrock, MCA and ... Frogger 06/29/2004 11:57 PM
Help the Beastie Boys get across the road safely to the political protest rally. Look out! The tyranny of the Bush Regime won't make it easy!

Mike’s Toolbar Icons 1.0

Mike’s Toolbar Icons 1.0 07/21/2004 11:08 PM
A free set of toolbar icons Mac developers can use to make their applications look cooler.

Ask Mike Godwin About Internet Law

Ask Mike Godwin About Internet Law 04/09/2004 04:09 PM

The New Republic Online: Be Like Mike

The New Republic Online: Be Like Mike 06/30/2004 04:40 AM
Andrew Sullivan: William Raspberry And Michael Moore -- Be Like Mike .. delivers the Fisking of a lifetime .. responds

tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=fisking&s=sullivan062904
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Mike Moritz: leadership through
literature

Mike Moritz: leadership through
literature 04/13/2005 02:39 PM
Blog: Some business leaders like to quote reports from management consultants. Others try to make their point with historical analogies....

Mike Melvill Chosen To Fly SpaceShipOne

Mike Melvill Chosen To Fly SpaceShipOne 06/20/2004 11:42 PM
Slashdot Jun 21 2004 3:12AM GMT
Grok Description matches for Q&A: Mike Devlin, IBM Rational GM
GrokA matches for Q&A: Mike Devlin, IBM Rational GM

Q&A: Mike Devlin, IBM Rational GM

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