Posts by Paul Butcher 7 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Jul 2008
"Easy prey" meaning what, exactly? Hypothetically speaking, were I to simply declare everything I received as income, offset it against my expenses and, err, nothing else, how out of pocket would I be (bearing in mind that I would just be filling in a Self Assessment Form, much as I do right now)?
Just because he has $61million in share options does not mean that he has $61million. It doesn't even mean that after they fully vest. It means that he has the option (hence the name) to *spend* $61million on buying shares at some point in the future.
Of course, if Apple's share price has gone up in the interim, that's a great deal. And I wouldn't say no if someone offered them to me. But it's not like having $61million - nothing even close to that, in fact.
Yes, apps are huge, but most smartphone users have never installed a single app.
My wife is IT literate enough that she's the person other teachers in her school go to when they have questions about their computers, and she's had an Android smartphone for almost a year. A couple of months ago, just to see what would happen, I suggested that she try to install Angry Birds on her phone.
I watched her try for 20 minutes straight without success. She had no idea that there was such a thing as the Android Marketplace app - her first instinct was to type "Angry Birds" into Google (not such a stupid thing). But nothing at all that came up was any help whatsoever with installing it.
This may have changed now that Google have (finally!) web-enabled Android Marketplace. But the point still stands, most smartphone users haven't installed a single app on their device.
The term "Agile" has come to mean a wide range of different things. A lot of the practices commonly associated with agile development are intrinsically small scale. Large teams need more process (or ceremony as Alistair Cockburn puts it).
The basic principles, however, definitely scale. In particular, iterative and incremental development in which you always work on the highest value outstanding task and finish that task in its entirety (i.e. fully test it and fully integrate it with the rest of the software) before moving on to the next, is appropriate for a team of *any* size.
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