This morning went I got to the Subway platform I thought the nifty new electronic screen that they just installed was broken.  Because under news it said, "Nortel reporting $2.21 billion loss and to restate earnings again"  I thought this must be an old canned screen but it turns out it was the news.

I wasn't that surprised by the loss.  I think we can assume that this was going to be a big bath year for Nortel to give Zafirovski a clean slate to work with in the next year.  But another accounting scandal? 

Calum, the PVVG and I thought open source telephony would be Nortel's biggest challenge but it may implode from the inside.  I was doing research recently on Nortel and I found it surprising to realize that even in the hey day year of 1999, Nortel recorded a loss.  Zafirovski is going to have to really re-org the company at the top to turn this ship around.   I honestly really hope he does it.  There are so many talented people working on the products at Nortel.

When I was working in QA on an Enterprise software / hardware product, every time we found a Priority 1 problem and saw a series of hex error messages fly across the screen, as a joke we would say 'Alright, ship it!'.  Because a few P1s later, it would eventually be packed up and shipped out the door by someone named Ray in shipping. 
I have gone to two Toronto DemoCamps and seen various demos of projects people are working on, some commercial and some not so much.  But they are all generally web based, centrally hosted products with a consumer or retail target market.  One group Nuvvo explained that they were going to go after the Enterprise market second.

This is remarkably different than only 6 or 7 years ago when the same type of hobbyiest / would-be entrepreneurs always developed locally installed products.  Of course, this was how Shareware started and companies, like the one I work for, built up download BBS' and eventually websites on this model.

And everyone knew the money was in the Enterprise space.  Hire a sales guy, get him to flog your product and sign up a few customers and you were in business.  Now instead of Ship It, its promote it.  Fix the problems and incorporate feedback in a week after people use it in Beta.  Promote the code fix to your centrally hosted environment.

The famous example of this model is of course Google, a company that I'm guessing has never shipped anything out the door.  As I see these demos and read about the myriad of new products being highlighted in the blogs I read, I am intrigued by the change that is taking shape.  The ability to centrally host an application has dramatically reduced the cost of producing software, a production cost that was pretty cheap before.

It really amazes me to see this change in what I view as a short amount of time.  I think it is going to reshape the computer software industry very significantly in the next few years.  It is similar to the change that the multitasking OS brought about.