Author: JP

on Pharma and the Because Effect

One of the joys (there aren’t too many of them) of being incarcerated in hospital depleted of energy, is the ability to read yesterday’s papers at leisure.

In yesterday’s FT there was an article on the difference in strategy between two major Indian Pharma companies, Dr Reddy’s and Ranbaxy.

Dr Reddy has been buying up component manufacturers and will partner and cooperate with anyone. As the FT article says, “this practice of supplying and partnering with other drug companies distinguishes it from rivals”.

Ranbaxy, on the other hand, “aggressively targets big drug companies with patent lawsuits.”

Intriguing. If we have more Pfizer-like instances, maybe the investors will insist on pooling of R&D risk. And all Pharma will be generic as the industry becomes coopetitive.

So how will they differentiate? How often do you accuse drug companies of being customer-friendly?

One way of differentiating: ethical pricing and distribution.

I know nothing about Pharma, but I know a little about what happens when something proprietary becomes commodity. So I shall continue to watch this space.

on locked in devices

Guess it had to happen sometime: with all my rants against device lock in, someone had to find a way of making me partially dependent on such a device.

Boy was it painful. But I’m alive and well and sore and tired. And fitted with the ultimate lock in. A pacemaker.

I think it was Churchill who said he detested the idea of old age until he considered the alternatives.

Thanks for all your wishes and prayers.I really appreciate them.

a milestone of sorts

Clustrmaps tells me that I had my 100,000th unique visitor yesterday.

It means very little right now, as an industry we have much to sort out in this respect.

The move away from page impressions to unique users. The period over which that uniqueness is defined. The role of different browsers and aggregators. The impact of corporate ISPs and firewalls. What happens when IP addresses get reused within a given time period.

In many ways it doesn’t matter to people like you and me. People who have no intention of monetising the traffic (what an awful phrase, almost as bad as content management or CRM or DEM).

But it could matter to us, and we need to take care.

Identity is a natural place to go. People will soon work out that the uniqueness is best defined by identity and not by IP address or similar.

So identity will get hijacked, from something personal to you and me, to something üsed by ad agencies to measure reach and traffic and eyeballs and I don’t know what else.

You have been warned. We have been warned.

a period of inactivity

I will be quiet for a week or two as I recuperate from some medical complications.

In the meantime, I wish all my readers and the extended community the best of the season. For those that celebrate it, Merry Christmas.

And may 2007 bring you a whole new time.

On Agile And Offshore

One of my posts yesterday drew a question and a response on the relationship between these two, so I thought I’d give the topic some airtime.

For anyone interested in the subject, a good place to start is Martin Fowler’s seminal article on the subject.

Read it for yourself, for sure it’s worth it. When I read it the first time around, I remember two things really stood out for me:

  • One, that the way to break teams up when seeking to do agile-with-offshore is “high cohesion and loose coupling”; you have to move entire cohesive units over, not what you would plan for in a waterfall or cascade approach. This is really important, since everything agile relies on good quality communication and team facetime.
  • Two, if you don’t do this, then you get a variation of Conway’s Law in operation. The system you build is a reflection of the team structure. So when you don’t have high cohesion loose coupling in the way you’ve structured the team, don’t expect to see it in your code.

There’s lots of good stuff in Martin’s article, and in the Thoughtworks Bangalore experiences he shares. Agile and Offshore can and do go together.

Incidentally, with all this talk about Agile. I thought it was worth linking to the Agile Manifesto, just in case one or two of you were interested in the subject and hadn’t actually seen it before. Rummaging around Martin’s articles, I came across it again, and felt it was worth sharing.

So here it is: The Manifesto for Agile Software Development.

I can’t resist copying it here, just for those who don’t bother to follow the link:

We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

Working software over comprehensive documentation

Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

Responding to change over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.

[Signed everyone who is anyone in Agile]