business issues – Observations from Uppsala

Notes from our DVCon Europe 2022 Tutorial

I presented a tutorial about the “verification of virtual platforms models” at DVCon Europe last week. The tutorial was prepared by me and Ola Dahl at Ericsson, but Ola unfortunately could not attend and present his part – so I had to learn his slides and style and do my best to be an Ola stand-in (tall order, we really missed you there Ola!). The title maybe did not entirely describe the contents – it was more a discussion around how to think about correctness and in particular specifications vs implementations. The best part was the animated discussion that we got going in the room, including some new insights from the audience that really added to the presented content.

Updated: Included an important point on software correctness that I forgot in the first publication.

A Study of Cognitive Biases in Software Development

I recently read a few articles on cognitive biases, decision making, and expert intuition from the field of management research. Then an article popped up from the Communications of the ACM (CACM) dealing with cognitive bias in software development. The CACM article is a small field study that serves up some interesting and potentially quite useful conclusions about how to think about thinking in software development.

DAC 2022 – Back in Person, Chiplets, an Award, and Much More

The 59th Design Automation Conference (DAC) took place in San Francisco, July 10-14, 2022. As always, the DAC provided a great place to learn about what is going on in EDA. The DAC is really three events in one: there is an industry trade-show/exhibition, a research conference that is considered the premier in EDA, and an engineering track where practitioners present their work in a less formal setting.

I had two talks in the engineering track – one on the Intel device modeling language (which actually won the best presentation award in the embedded sub-track), and one on using simulation technology to build hardware software-first.

The DAC was almost overwhelming in the richness of people and companies, but this blog tries to summarize the most prominent observations.

Minimum Viable (Replacement) Product – The Teams Example

During 2020 and 2021, Intel switched from using Microsoft Skype for Business (also known as Lync) to Microsoft Teams as the primary internal calling, chatting, and conferencing tool. While (finally) Teams has turned into quite a decent communications tool, the transition started a bit too early from a feature completeness perspective. Microsoft in essence gave us an enterprise Minimum Viable Product (MVP). Not a proper Replacement Product (RP). Teams left out many rather important and useful features, degrading the user experience and value, and making my life harder. I don’t think that was particularly well handled. I can understand it as a product manager, but as a user, I don’t like it all.

Thank You, Sir Clive Sinclair

A few days ago, Sir Clive Sinclair died. I owe him, or rather his most successful product, my career as a computer scientist. I bought myself a ZX Spectrum in my early teens, taught myself how to program it, and never looked back. The ArsTechnica obituary calls the Spectrum a “gaming computer”, and I guess that is mostly fair. Can’t say I ever used it for more than playing games or programming games.

Jerry Fiddler on the Early Days of Wind River and Building a Product

Wind River is celebrating their 40^th anniversary as a company with a series of historical look-backs posted on the Wind River channel on YouTube. One of the videos is an interview with Jerry Fiddler who founded Wind River back in 1981, by Wind River current CEO Kevin Dallas. Jerry Fiddler talks about how he got started in computers, and especially about how Wind River got started and grew. It is both a fantastic set of historical anecdotes and some solid product management and strategy insights.

Adjusting to Work-from-Home: Remote Live Simics Training

In the current world-wide lockdown due to Covid-19, many things that were done in-person in the past have to become virtual. The Simics® New User Training that we run at Intel and with our customers and partners is no different. In normal times, we run in-person classes around the world, but that is not an option right now. Thus, we shifted to running remote live classes as a substitute for the time being. This blog shares some of my experience from running remote live classes.

We changed the cover page of the Simics training to symbolize the change.

Living with a Nokia 7.1 Phone

For the past couple of weeks, I have been using a Nokia 7.1 phone as my main phone while my main Sony phone has been off for repairs. My habit for quite a few years has been to use Sony “flagship” phones as my work phones (and way back, even Sony-Ericsson). The question this poses – how was it to use a theoretically far weaker “mid-range” phone instead of a flagship?

Undo Reverse Debugger “Pivots” to Record-Replay

I just found a story about Undo software that was rather interesting from a strategic perspective. “Patient capital from CIC gives ‘time travelling’ company Undo space to pivot“, from the BusinessWeekly in the UK. The article describes a change from selling to individual developers, towards selling to enterprises. This is an important business change, but it also marks I think a technology thinking shift: from single-session debug to record-replay.

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Embedded World 2018 – Clever Giveaway from Microchip

Show like the Embedded World are full of vendors vying for attention and wanting to get their name onto your mind, desk, or appearance. This is the giveaway game: what can you hand out that will make people get a good and long-lasting impression of your company?

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Subscription Software = Better Programmer-User Alignment (?)(!)

IEEE Spectrum ran a short interview with Thomas Knoll, the creator of Photoshop, who made a very interesting point about the move to subscription-based software rather than one-time buys plus upgrades. His point is that if you are building software that is sold using the “upgrade model”, developers have to create features that make users upgrade. In his opinion, that means you have to focus on flashy features that demo well and catch people’s attention – but that likely do not actually help users in the end.

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”Figure out What to Do”, Says the Manual

I just spend some hours building a new living room PC for the home. I based on common components like a Fractal Design Node 202 chassis and an MSI Z270i motherboard for my Intel Core i7-7700 processor. Trying to figure out how to put it together was a bit interesting though – especially if I had tried to do so without the help of the Internet. The manuals that came with some of the components were just completely useless, essentially boiling down to “please figure out what to do”.

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Security for IoT Panel at the DAC 2015 – Can Security Gate your Release?

etc I had the great honor to be on a panel discussing IoT Security at the DAC back in June. The panel was part of the Embedded Techcon event that took place essentially as a little embedded corner inside the DAC – it was held in a couple of conference rooms next to the regular DAC sessions, and attendees were also mostly attending the DAC in general. Not a bad idea for meshing embedded and hardware design. The panel was a great one, and David Kleidermacher from Blackberry gave me a great take-away: unless security is allowed to gate releases of products, it is hard to think you take security seriously.

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Toyota Acceleration Case

I just read the EETimes coverage of the recently concluded court case in the US, where Toyota settled for 3 million USD in damages due to experts finding that the software in a 2005 Camry L4 could indeed cause “unintended acceleration”. In the particular case that was concluded, the accident resulting from the issue caused one driver to be injured and one driver to get killed. This feels like it could be the beginning of something really good, or just as well this could go really wrong.

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Qualcomm’s Batteryguru – and Branding

It is quite interesting to see how Qualcomm has emerged as a major player in the “processor market” and is trying to build themselves into a serious consumer brand. I used to think of them as a company doing modems and other chips that made phones talk wirelessly, known to insiders in the business but not anything a user cared about. Today, however, they are working hard on building themselves into a brand to rival Intel and AMD. At the center of this is their own line of ARM-based application processors, the Snapdragon. I can see some thinking quite similar to the old “Intel Inside” classic, and I would not be surprised to see the box or even body of a phone carrying a Snapdragon logo at some point in the future. A part of this branding exercise is the Snapdragon Batteryguru, an application I recently stumbled on in the Google Play store.

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Bliss: Failing to Pivot for Ideology

Note: This post was caused by listening to an interesting science podcast while thinking about the theories of startups, and the connection might seem a bit odd. Still, I think there is something to be learnt here. End note.

I recently listened to the episode on Bliss, by the Radiolab podcast. As always, Radiolab manages to take a theme and connect all kinds of things to it. In this case, bliss as in happiness turned into Bliss, the man, and his invention of Symbolics. Symbolics was an attempt to create a rational language based on symbols that would not allow the manipulation of human opinion or feeling like regular languages do. It was an attempt to create an antidote to the manipulations of dictators, tricksters, and populists (Bliss himself had been briefly interned in a pre-war German concentration camp, so he definitely knew what words could do). He designed a symbolic writing scheme that was intended to only communicate ideas clearly and unambiguously and with no room for demagogery and oratory. In the end, nobody wanted to use the language for its original purpose.

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Buying High Technology

Selling and marketing high technology is what I do for a living. My counterpart is the customer or buyer, and I help design, build, explain, an market these products. In this role, I am most usually the expert on the domain, helping potential customers understand what we sell and why it will help them. Both at the high-level value proposition and the details behind it. Some people focus most of the their energy on the high-level value proposition, but I feel that youoften need a bit detail backing that as well.

I recently had the enlightening experience of being on the buying side instead, experiencing the transition from high-level value proposition to low-level details. It struck me as being quite similar to what the customers for our virtual platforms would experience when coming in new to the field.

I bought a camera.

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Off-Topic: Angry Birds Space (Good Game, Bad Price)

Once upon a time, I was young man in high school where our little computer club got a new PC with a color screen and a floating-point coprocessor. One fun little program I wrote was a simple gravity simulator, where a number of point-size assigned various mass flew around interacting with each other. We used that program and tried to set up initial setting for sizes, speeds, and directions of bodies that would result in some kind of stable system. More often that not, all we managed to create were comets that came in, took a sharp corner around a “star” and disappeared out into the void again. Still, it was great fun. And when I discovered Angry Birds Space it felt like a chance to try that again. Overall, “space” as my son calls it is a great spin on the Angry Birds idea. However, the way it is sold does not make me too happy.

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Jan Bosch: Software Provocateur

Last week, I had the honor of presenting at and attending the talks of the Lindholmen Software Development Day. The first keynote speaker was Professor Jan Bosch from Chalmers, who did his best to provoke, prod, and shock the audience into action to change how they do software. While I might not agree with everything he said, overall it was very enjoyable and insightful talk.

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Wind River Blog: Stop, Think, and Tie Your Shoes Right

There is a new post at my Wind River blog, which could seem to be about shoes but which is really about process improvement. In particular, the need for companies to let their employees take a step or two back and look at what they are doing and what they could do better.

It is way too common to be so busy running around being inefficient that there is no time to think about how to become more efficient. Change also requires some discipline to actually keep pushing at habits until they change for the better.

All of this can be illustrated by tying shoes.

It’s the Problem, Stupid

For some reason, in the past few weeks I have talked to more than a few PhD students and researchers about various ideas. It is striking how often fundamentally very smart people have a problem in articulating just why what they are doing is useful, relevant, and potentially commercially interesting. Of course, we all know that this is hard, and all PhD students get some kind of training in presentation and selling their ideas. It is also unfair to expect a fresh graduate student to be able to put on a show like a Simon Peyton-Jones.

However, this did get me thinking some about the articulation of problems.

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Two Perspectives on Modeling

When I started learning about virtual platforms after joining Virtutech back in 2002, the guiding principle of our team was very much one of “model just enough to make the software happy – and no more”.This view was fairly uncontested at the time, and shared (implicitly or explicitly) by everybody developing virtual platforms from a software perspective. There is a second perspective, though, from the hardware design world. From their viewpoint, a model needs to be complete. Both views have their merits.

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Microsoft + ARM = ARM64?

The recent news that Microsoft has taken out an ARM architectural license has caused a lot of speculation about just what this might mean. There are several quite well reasoned ideas around the web, and I have one idea of my own: sixty-four bits.

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Eyjafjallajökull is Showing us Something

Wow. The eruption of Eyjafjallajökull in Iceland and the resulting ashcloud has had an effect that I would never ever have expected. A near-total closing down of the European airspace is such a drastic thing to happen to nobody seems to have expected. It has certainly not been included in the list of worst-case scenarios to plan for in company and government contingency plans. Where does this leave us? In a very interesting situation indeed. Worst-case, we will have to do without air travel for months.

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From Academy to Industry: Coverity

In the February 2010 issue of the Communications of the ACM there is an article by the team behind the Coverity static analysis tool describing how they went from a research project to a commercial tool. It is quite interesting, and I recognize many of the effects that real customers have on a tool from my own experience at IAR and Virtutech (now part of Wind River).

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The System, Not the Parts

I just listened to the November 16, 2009, issue of the BBC podcast called “Peter Day’s World of Business“. It is a rerun (in memoriam) of an interview with business professor Russell Ackoff, which was originally published in 2007.

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Marketing a Paper Magazine with a Podcast

I just found a fairly interesting podcast that offers a nice example on how do marketing for paper-based magazines using digital ephemeral technology. The ancient warfare magazine has a podcast that accompanies each issue, where a set of history buffs discuss around the theme of the current issue of the magazine.

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IBM JRD Now Costs 1500 USD per Year

opinion For the longest time, the IBM Journal of Research and development, and its entire archive, was online at IBM and for free to access. This publication was, I assume, seen as a way to publicize IBM systems and their research efforts. But now, it has unexplicable gone to a for-pay format. It costs 1500 USD/year to access it, which is pretty steep I think. Compare with sources like the Microprocessor Report, or regular IEEE or ACM memberships. I think this is a really dumb move, and I will miss reading their often quite interesting articles. Who will pay to read only about IBM systems and research?;

Cool Obscure Hardware: Sun SCC and Software License Protection

sunlogo In a very roundabout way, I recently got to hear about a cool Sun server feature introduced sometime back in 2003 or 2004: the SCC System Configuration Card. This is a smart card that stores the system hostid and Ethernet MACs, along with other info, and which can be transferred from one server to another.

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