Si Chen

There’s an interesting story about the origin of ACT!, the first contact management and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software, from SoftwareAdvice.com. Apparently, they started out making a quote management system with a lot more features.  Then they realized what people really needed was simply contact management. The moral of the story? We made it too complicated, and in that effort, were blind to the realization that elegance comes from simplicity. How simple? Every one of the major software categories has only two words—that’s all it takes to describe it. ... (more)

Let’s Mash It Up and Make Enterprise Software Fun Again

My New Year’s Resolution: Make building enterprise software fun again. The Old Way Almost all enterprise applications follow the same architectural pattern: a single all-encompassing framework housing the data, logic, and presentation layers.  When applied to large-scale applications such as enterprise software, which must cater to the needs of lots of users with many different features, it creates some problems: Everything that you use in the application must be written in this framework.  You might really like X, but if you want to use in your application, you’d have to re-wri... (more)

A New Architecture for opentaps

When I first wrote opentaps 2.0 Planning, my goal was to come up with a new architecture that would make enterprise software more modular and more reusable.  But we will need to do much more in a mobile and API-driven world, so here are some of the guiding principles behind the architecture of the new opentaps: Universal data layer Today’s business software is still driven by tables in a database, even though relevant data is likely to reside anywhere — in a database, a document, or over the web through an API.  The answer is using the domain driven architecture to interface wi... (more)

My Favorite Quotes from the Platform Rant

A product is useless without a platform, or more precisely and accurately, a platform-less product will always be replaced by an equivalent platform-ized product. But making something a platform is not going to make you an instant success. A platform needs a killer app. Accessibility [is] the most important thing in the computing world. The. Most. Important. Thing. - From Stevey’s Google Platforms Rant ... (more)

Online Marketing and the Changing Value of Content

According to The Wall Street Journal, Yahoo!’s problems stem from the declining value of content: “People tell me that content is king, but that is not true at all,” says Rishad Tobaccowala, chief strategy and innovation officer at Vivaki, the digital-media unit of Publicis Groupe SA. “Most people make money pointing to content, not creating, curating or collecting content.” Which begs the question: If content has no value, then why are we creating it?  Why are so many online marketers rushing to create blogs, forums, videos, tweets, etc. — in other words, content? Because while... (more)