I’ve been a Bank of America customer for a long time and have even gotten other people to switch over because I think their online banking is the best in the business. So, today I was looking around for a particular feature and couldn’t find it. After searching through their FAQs I decided that the feature just didn’t exist. So, being the helpful customer I am, I went to go send them a suggestion. I was going to tell them where they should put it, how it could work, how useful it would be and how it would make their site better. Basically, a solid gold use case they could drop into their product backlog ASAP. The “Contact Us” link was nice and easy to find and on that page was a link to “Bank of America’s Unsolicited Idea Submission Policy”, which reads:

Bank of America and its associates do not accept or consider unsolicited ideas, including ideas for new or improved products, processes or technologies, product enhancements, advertising and marketing campaigns, promotions or new product names. Please do not send any original materials, suggestions or other items.

-Source

Ouch, well, so much for listening to your users and working with them to create a better product. I get the need to protect your IP but go have a talk with the executives at Procter & Gamble who completely changed their R&D model to get more innovation from the outside. “Today, more than 35 percent of our new products in market have elements that originated from outside P&G, up from about 15 percent in 2000″, according to a March 2006 article by The Harvard Business Review. I am sure this number has grown just look at their huge web presence for external innovations called, P&G Connect + Develop. Time to get on the Train, BofA

However, exciting it is to move to a new city I will certainly miss being in the NY area and so close to many of closest friends.  I will remain at the same numbers which you all have and of course will try and continue to post here at least as infrequently has I have till this point.

If anyone is ever down in DC make sure to drop and line so we can meet up.

“There is no strife, no prejudice, no national conflict in outer space as yet. Its hazards are hostile to us all. Its conquest deserves the best of all mankind, and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation may never come again. But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain. Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas? We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too. It is for these reasons that I regard the decision last year to shift our efforts in space from low to high gear as among the most important decisions that will be made during my incumbency in the Office of the Presidency.”

Where has this type of spirit gone in our nation?  Is it dead or just sleeping waiting for the right time to reemerge?  It makes me sad I wasn’t around to see the US in it’s glory days, just in it’s seeming twilight, although this is a ray of hope:

Phoenix lander descends to Martian surface, shot from MRO

My blog has been quiet and I’ve been off Twitter for close to a month now, mostly due to taking some well needed time off after the SAP Fellowship but also weighing a pretty big choice I had to make.

Stay at Colgate-Palmolive or leave for a job working for Adobe in a new product group creating a new enterprise software offering.  A new job certainly has its risks especially when compared to the stable home I have made for myself at Colgate.  However, with some good advice from my friends I have decided to leave Colgate to pursue the opportunity with Adobe.

Working at Colgate has allowed me to do so much and opened so many doors for me.   I cannot begin to express how much I appreciated all the support through the years the company’s management has give me.  I’ve traveled ( and taken pictures ) all over the world from India to Bangkok to Dublin.  I got to learn what makes a business like Colgate run from both the IT and business side.  I’ve presented in front of thousands of people in both the US and EU.  These experiences cannot be learned from a book and having this as my first job out of school was a great experience.

However, working for Adobe is going to be a great new chapter in my life — getting to see how software goes from just an idea on a whiteboard to a full fledged product is going to quite an adventure and I look forward to the challenge.

Thanks again to Colgate and more importantly all the Colgate people that made my time there so enjoyable.

For those of you keeping track my last day at Colgate will be Jan 18th and I will start at Adobe that following Monday, Jan 21st.

Sorry all.

Looks pretty normal till you wait for the last line to scroll by:

Don’t know what the deal is with Zuckerman’s Mom but, hey if you need that bug fixed in the SDK just send a pie over.

UPDATE 11/02:

Deepa Subramaniam from the Flex SDK team was kind enough to shed some light on this for me:

Banana Cream Pie is a favorite treat of the FlexBuilder folks. Us SDK’ers are more partial to Peanut Brittle….
sugar = our friend.

So it turns out if you have a Flex Builder issue, Banana Cream Pie, if it’s a SDK problem Peanut Brittle c/o Deepa.

The new Synthesizer will have a few required tenets, listed in order of importance, underneath are a many “optional” components.  It’s okay if you don’t exhibit these characteristics — you might still be able to get a job flipping burgers:

Code

Sorry, namby-pamby non-coder types need not apply.  A real understanding of programming concepts is required.  However, I’ve found that Synthesizers are generally not language Nazis.  They are more opportunistic in their choice of language, they know a lot about probably one language but, also know when it’s not a good fit for what they are doing.  For instance, why would write a screen saver in ABAP?

Community

This is the area that allows Synthesizers to move faster then anyone else.  They know what is going on, they’re “plugged in.”  They know who is doing good work and they know how to stick those disparate parts together in order to get something better.  Doug Mccune ( my model synthesizer ) has put it best in a post about TileUI:

…how badass [the] open source community libraries for Flex are. I was able to grab these open source libraries and within a few days have something pretty sweet to show for it. A big thanks to everyone behind the PaperVision project, and to Alec Cove for the APE engine. You guys make this stuff easy. [ The making of TileUI ]

What else is in this quote?  Attribution, “A big thanks to Alec Cove for the APE engine.”  Promoter, you can tell from Doug’s tone how much the open source community helped him write this application.  Collaboration, without giving back to these communities you end up looking like a strip miner taking all the best out and not returning anything back.  A example from a totally different world is Thomas Jung, SAP geek and ABAP coder #1.  Thomas has built a ton of innovative stuff in ABAP from Matrix Screen Savers to a full replacement for the delivered web rendering system, changing it from HTML to Flex, named Flob.  At TechEd this year he released Flob, built using my library AJS, which he mentioned he had a few fixes for functionality.  This back and forth consumption and production allow open source projects to grow organically as need.

Communication

This is an obvious one, but again has a similar ebb and flow characteristic.  The most effective Synthesizers have a blog or are really active in forums.  They produce not only code but content, documentation, opinions — they care about what’s out there and what they are putting out there.  They probably read RSS feeds from dozens(at least) of different sources from many different areas.

Broad Knowledge

Underlying all these is less a tenet and more an obvious prerequisite.  Synthesizers want to understand stuff, they want to know about many areas not just Coding.  They might read about other sciences or be super into music.  Samuel Agesilas Pastel is great example of someone with groundings in music and design who also happens to be a sick programmer.  His UML modeling tool, called Saffron UML, parses actionscript libraries and generates great looking UML diagrams.  Just read his blog of a bit and you will see the diverse view he takes to software development.  That diversity allows Synthesizers to keep an anything goes mentality that enables them to see connections where other people see chasms they will never cross.

The funny thing with this set is maybe if you replace the first tenet with “industry analysis” or “accounting” you might get some other folks that are producing new Synthesizers — but I’m just a programmer what do I know.

Thanks to Synthesizer, maverick for the images.

This is the “Community Clubhouse” where a session is going on with people in their first life in Las Vegas and two people at SAP’s office in Second Life.  These two people couldn’t make it to the conference so they attended a roundtable style discussion about business KPIs from the comfort of their offices in Palo Alto and Germany.  I’m still not 100% sold on Second Life and it’s use in business but, what I do believe is at that it can greatly increase your communication bandwidth.  Since Linden added the ability to stream audio in it has moved far beyond just a phone call and stepped ahead of video conferencing on the communication bandwidth scale.   The idea of have a “physical” person moving around immerses you in the conversation much more then video conferencing can.  This side benefits of this immersion should be pretty obvious for both conferences and large multi-nationals to allow better collaboration among distributed teams.

Also if you are interested in what has already happened check out Craig Cmehil’s uStream channel to watch all the sessions that were live streamed yesterday from Community Day.

They also come in frogs, chickens, ducks and of course pigs.  They can be purchased from HandHeldItems for $4.00.  I will be getting one for myself shortly.

Ruby on Rails Meets Enterprise Applications