Did I mention we’d been bought out by another company some time ago? I think I may have ranted over the issue a few times

Anyway, we used to sell two products that shared some same code and did much the same. One was named after X (because it runs on Linux using X Windows) the other after windows because it runs on Windows.

The marketing guys at the new company decided they ought to have a streamlined name like “blah for windows” and ”blah for linux”. Great except we keep getting people trying to swap between them thinking they are identical. They seriously differ in places.

Choosing names is a big issue in marketing - Pen Island could have had a better name for their website than penisland.com for instance. They say the Mini Metro marketing team had to come up with a name and just as a starting point they were given 6,000 already considered and rejected!

However, a thought to engineering or even a moment to reflect why a company that knew the product used different names could have saved a whole raft of support issues and disgruntled customers. Marketing has its place but that place shouldn’t always be at the top of the heap.

Ages ago I bemoaned Music Match Jukebox no longer working properly http://www.itpro.co.uk/blogs/davef/2008/06/13/musicmatch-jukebox-cddb/

It appears the problem is yahoo bought it and scrapped the existing database to try and get people to upgrade. MMJB was one of the few bits of shareware I’ve actually paid for - because it was good. It also doesn’t work with ie 7 - but that was just another reason not to use ie7.

How many times do we see a great piece of software bought up by some huge bunch of bozos who *-* it up(1)? Usually it is Microsoft who buy it & *-* it. Auto-route was brilliant. I remember the first time I saw the DOS version (85?) and the whole office clustered round to see this brilliant thing work out routes, display maps and generally wow us. The later versions with full OS map overlays - still brilliant. Microsoft bought it renamed it and totally *-* it. It sits on a 1G PC with a 19″ monitor and people would rather use a Tom-Tom because it is easier and faster. How did they manage to ruin it that much? Staggering.

More than staggering for some of us. For some of us it is worrying. I am now part of huge multinational - what will they do to the software product we have been designing and selling as a small company for the last 20 years?

QT has been part of Nokia for a while but they seem to have started making their changes. Having been bought out once or twice I can assume most of the changes will be pointless ones that make the parent company feel in control and give waste of space managers something to do (bitter? me?) but their latest mail shows signs of real innovation

• Modular architecture for feature selection
• IP communications framework based on Telepathy
• New Qt UI Test, a tool for automated system tests 
• New reference design - Video IP Deskphone

Wow, IP telepathy - makes routing tables a thing of the past…

 I’ve just received a new company shirt in the post. It’s good to know that as a home worker I’m not forgotten and that the company values me and shows its appreciation with freebies. It’s not the shirt that is important as the message it sends.

However,  what message do I get from the fact that it is 100% polyester? Maybe they want me to destroy my hardware with huge charges of static. Perhaps I’m supposed to creep up on competitors and destroy their kit - but why would I do that in a shirt emblazoned with our logo?

Maybe it just means that that they don’t value me much.  Unless polyester is hip? Or more believably my company is about 40 years behind the times and have just discovered the new drip dry wonder material…

No not metres vs. feet & perches but ways of measuring performance. More and more we seem to be lumbered with dubious ways of telling how good a system is performing. Fortunately for techies it’s fairly simple - if you deal with numbers you can record & compare them without too much hassle. Unfortunately for the rest of the world they need to try and convert things into numbers so they can do the comparisons.

One thing I almost appreciated with my new big company is the need to use a hard password. They require you to use a 12 digit mixed case with numerics and you must change it every 12 months. A bit of a pain but I can appreciate the need for it.

However (you knew that was coming!) I’ve just discovered that each machine has an admin level account set with no password! Der, how secure is that? This is (I assume) to let support get access but to leave it blank? Maybe the logic is that even if it was set to a serious value then it would soon become well known and so pointless - but it would still be an improvement. A proper password hashed against the m/c serial number would be better.

Given the general efficiency round here it could just be the original account setup to allow config (these m/c’s arrive with user name accounts and passwords hashed against personal details so someone has set them up individually and we don’t use the Administrator account) and no one thought to remove it or give it a password.

As ever, it’s talk the talk, make the employees jump the hoops but at company level don’t even attempt to do it right.

So, have you checked your m/c - just nip into control panel, user accounts and see what accounts are there and if you don’t like them delete them or reset their passwords to something sensible.