I met Peter Griess last night and heard him talk about his career. Even though he still has plenty of years ahead of him, he has already worked for NetApp, Yahoo, and now Facebook. He was part of a nine-person startup that worked on some interesting social email apps that eventually got acquired by Yahoo. Along his career he has seen very different kinds of cultures in these various software engineering departments, and as I was listening to his talk, I thought about the many software companies that I have covered over the years.

I would break them down into three different kinds of cultures (the names are my own construct):

• Mature Turtles. Until the Internets came along; this was your typical enterprise software company, such as IBM, Microsoft, Sun/Oracle and others. It was a slow adopter, came out with new releases once a year or so, after careful testing and lots of quality control. The company would have extended maintenance windows of several years, because customers would latch on to one release and stick with it, without upgrading because they were fearful that changes would break something that was mission-critical. Developers had firm specs before they wrote any code, and took that code through a lengthy dev/test process before it ever left the premises. There is a hierarchy of engineers and different silos depending on which pieces of the code you are working on, and usually you can’t cross over easily from one silo to another. Customers often had to wait months to see their suggestions make it into a code base.Why work for them: Not all departments are as evil as others. For example, being a data scientist at IBM right now is probably one of the best gigs going. If you can deal with the silos and the hierarchies, then this is a good place to learn some solid skills.
• Middle Earth.This is the type of company that was founded in the early Internet era, say the late 1990s. They want to be a changeling but are stuck in the slow-moving past. Yahoo and Cisco are good examples, but there are lots of others. They have large and mature markets but don’t know what to do with them. They have oddball product strategies and conflicting products that segment their own focus and split their development teams’ attention. Silos are still ever-present, and accentuated by frequent acquisitions that were never really absorbed into the corporate mainstream culture. They have legacy products and users who are reluctant to move off of them.Why work for them: If you want to get experience with an international company and find out how to support legacy products, these guys are the places to be. If you want lots of exposure to mergers and acquisitions, they have the cash. If you want your own office and peace and quiet while you code, this is the place for you.
• Internet Chameleon. This is the type of online software vendor that we are used to these days, such as Facebook, Google, Twitter and others. They move quickly and tend to break things as they add code on the fly. They get the cloud or are wholly based on it. They are using agile coding techniques and everyone is sitting in bullpens often at close quarters. Releases happen daily, if not more frequently, and get pushed out to real users, often to their dismay and frustration when they find something that is broken. There is a development culture where any engineer can add code anywhere: silos are gone and forgotten about. Features get added, morphed, or cannibalized whenever and wherever. These companies are controlled chaos sometimes. Gone also is the whole QA department: if you want to test something, roll it out to a small subset of the active population or try your code out on some internal staffers. Of course, it helps to have a level of trust with your end users so that you don’t lose them in the process of making these enhancements.Why work for them: Obviously, most of you are probably focused on this type of company right now, or want to start one yourself. But you have to have the fortitude to roll with the punches and be able to adapt to the constant flux of changes.

I’d love to hear from you about your own experiences in different engineering departments, and if you think there are subspecies to the three that I mentioned.

Over on ReadWriteWeb, we ask a daily question and cull the answers from our readers. Yesterday’s question was to find out the worst uses of an Excel (or any) spreadsheet, and the responses were funny to the point of being poignant and somewhat sobering. Clearly, people need to learn at least one other software package to do many of the things they stick Excel with.

There is something about the rows and columns of a spreadsheet that I guess just invite a lot of abuse. I always knew that Excel was the go-to database program for those who were confounded by SQL or Access or even Filemaker, but still some of the posts from our readers were extraordinary. One group of three took nine days to code up an inventory tracking app. That is just insane.

But it was when folks mentioned, several times, that they had seen word processing done on Excel that I had to just say, stop me before I hurt myself. Printing out labels? Or other documents? Drawing a map? Company brochures? Resumes? Don’t people know of Word or its equivalent? Haven’t they been taught anything about some other software tool? Apparently not. “They didn’t know that Word existed,” said one of our readers.

Others use Excel for presentations, putting each slide on a separate worksheet. Yes, I guess you can do that. But if you are going to go through the motions of cut and pasting a graphic, why not use something that already is made to do that, like, uh, Powerpoint?

Excel of course isn’t the only spreadsheet game in town, and now there are any number of online services that can be abused and twisted into odd applications. The online database company TrackVia recently came up with their own quirky apps that their customers have built in their service, including tracking the schedule of “exotic dancers”, free taco nights at the local ball park, and a museum in France that has an antique wine database. You can read that one here.

How about you? What is the worst Excel app you’ve seen in your career? Feel free to email me or share your comments below.

In a word, no. We may be reaching the point where the desktop OS is no longer important, eclipsed by the developments of the browser and ironically a victim of better integration by Microsoft and others.

Photo @ Creative Commons by kerplunk kerplunk

Yet we are all huddling around the news feeds coming out of Build 2011 as we try to figure out what Microsoft is attempting with Windows 8 and Metro. My prediction is that this will become the OS/2 of the modern era: an OS that is so elegant but instantly obsolete by events, designed for the wrong chip (the mobile ARM CPUs) and based on a cellphone design ethos that no one could care less about. Yeah, but it has a great new set of APIs!

It wasn’t all that long ago that Internet Explorer became almost indistinguishable from Windows Explorer. And with the rise of Chromebooks and how much of our time is spent online, the days of the particular desktop OS is almost irrelevant now.

Remember when the desktop OS did things like keep track of directories, protect us from viruses (and Windows still doesn’t really do that all that well), make copies of files to removable media, and handle printing? Who really cares about any of that stuff anymore? Yes, I know I still can’t print my Web pages out with any kind of fidelity. But is that the browser’s fault or my OS?

Now that you can get gigabytes of free file storage in the cloud, do you really care what is on your hard drive? Well, some of us dinosaurs (and I count myself among them) still cling to our hard drives but soon they will be totems from another era, much the way many of you look upon 5 inch floppy disks, or even 8 inch ones if you can recall back that far. Wow, we could carry an entire 360 kB of something around with us! (Of course, we didn’t have mp3s or videos either, but still.) And all this cloud storage is happening as hard drives are getting so cheap that they will be giving them away in cereal boxes soon: a 2 TB drive can be had for less than $50.

Meanwhile, Adobe next week is announcing a slew of features in the next version of Flash (I can’t tell you about them quite yet, sorry). They fully intend Flash to take over the kinds of OS-like services that I mentioned above (ditto on the protect us from malware issue too, at least so far). And Google is trying mightily to rejigger HTML with its Dart Web programming language. And VMware has a new version of its View too, which is probably the OS that I really will end up spending most of my time with going forward. Whatever comes of these efforts, it almost doesn’t matter whether we are running Windows or Mac or Linux. Because we don’t need them anymore for our online lives.

Now stop and look over that last paragraph. Whom have we trusted for the next OS? It isn’t Microsoft, and it isn’t Apple. It is a bunch of folks from the valley that have never built an OS before (well, give Google half credit). Think about that for a moment.

Back at the dawn of the computing era in the 1980s we all wrote dBase apps (and saved them on those darn floppies too). Then we moved up to use Lotus Notes, before the Web took root. Then we branched out in a dozen different directions, using all sorts of programming languages that used HTTP protocols. That was the beginning of the end for the desktop OS.

Now we’ll still have desktops of one sort or another. And yes, Windows isn’t going away, much as Microsoft is determined to pry every last copy of XP from our cold, shaking hands. But when Adobe, Google and VMware gets done with their stuff, it won’t matter what will be running on them.

There aren’t too many products that have launched their new versions on 60 Minutes that I can think of in the computing industry. Last night we got the first look at the new profile feature on Facebook. (Having trouble finding out how to turn it on? Go here — they sure don’t make it easy for you.)

While interesting, this just points out the real rag-tag collection of tools on your desktop and phone to read, post, and add friends to your various social networks. Sometimes you use your desktop browser, sometimes you are running an app, and sometimes you just have to get real work done and wish you never got started Tweeting or opening up your life to your 14 ex-girlfriends and former co-workers. (Only somewhat kidding)

I have been looking at a few services to try to better manage my social networks, and will talk about three of them here: the new service from Nimble that consolidates your contacts and allows you to collate their conversations on a single screen, the Flock browser that presents the real-time stream on a sidebar and can be used as a reasonable replacement browser on our desktops, and the Open Xchange email service which also can import and organize your Facebook and LinkedIn contacts.

There are lots of services that allow you to concurrently post to multiple networks, such as Pixelpipe.com and Ping.fm. There are many other services that are designed for multiple network access, such as Gigya.com, which has a single sign-on for social media sites. It has to be implemented from a Web site operator as opposed to by an individual.

These products aren’t what I am talking about here: I assume you are already using something like this, or have hooked up your networks so that a post on your WordPress blog automatically goes out to LinkedIn and then to Facebook and Twitter accounts.

No, what I mean is the harder problem: you have been diligently growing your networks, and now you want to dig deeper and manage these contacts. For example, you want to figure out whom to follow and whom not to, what folks that you have in your database that are missing from one or more of your social networks, or add people to one of your networks that are in another one. Ideally, I would like to run queries to see who is on both my Facebook and LinkedIn networks, and who isn’t, to see whether I should spend more time on one or another to expand my network or focus my attention.

Let’s look at how of the three services stack up.

Flock can set up its own ad hoc groups of contacts that can span all your social networks. You set up an overall Flock account on their site, and then import your contacts from Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and YouTube. You can then create various contact groups and then pick and choose who goes into which group, which is great for trying to understand your “social graph” of people that you pay more attention to on each of these services. While I liked the real-time feed that is displayed on the sidebar, it is distracting and there are a few Web sites that don’t display properly in a Flock browser session, and I found myself going back to Firefox and Safari for my daily Web browsing dose.

Nimble can also consolidate contacts, but doesn’t yet have any easy way to organize or group them (although they promise it is coming soon). It will display everything involving that contact, similar to how ACT or other contact managers work.

OX.IO is the site where you can import your Facebook and LinkedIn contacts. You set up a free account, and import them. In the process of doing my Facebook import, something suspicious flagged my account and Facebook wanted to make sure that it was I who actually was accessing my account. It is more of an email client that has some social media stuff bolted on.

Both Nimble and OX can import your Google address book and combine these contracts with their imports of the social media contacts too. But my Google address book has so many contacts that I was loath to try this out. With both of these, the imports can take some time and the service will email you when it is done doing the import, which is nice.

You can also use Nimble and OX.io as webmail clients, although it would take a lot to get me off of using an ordinary browser to access Google Apps and Gmail.

In the end, I probably will not use any of these services with any consistency. I liked all three’s attempts at trying to bring some more order to my social networking life, but they are still not yet ready for production use. In the meantime, I have some fiddling to do to get my Facebook profile the way I want it in the new “60 Minutes” schema.