2010 will be remembered as the breakthrough of cloud computing. This was the year people gained a shared understanding of the concept, and most major players were investing heavily into its expected transformative effects. Nobody personify the rise of the cloud hype more than Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle. Entering 2010 he was known to ridicule cloud computing in public rants.

Few columnists really get China – one who does is Nicholas D. Kristof of NY Times. In a couple of recent opinion pieces he has covered the apparent contradiction between the hysterical paranoia of the party elite and the almost miraculous speed of progress and development that is evident on the ground.

Our friends at Innovation Works (www.innovation-works.com) are celebrating their first birthday these days. They will mark the event by going public with their first batch of interesting and creative ventures – primarily entering the Chinese consumer and mobile internet space, currently dominated by Baidu (search), Tencent (social), Taobao (eCommerce) and China Mobile (mobile internet).

Requirements are the basis of everything: estimation, development, testing etc. Some people think that requirements-related work is none of the developers' business and should be completely done by the project manager.

Have you heard of Google and Apple? I think 99.9% of people will say “sure”.

Yes. Google and Apple should be among the world’s most valuable and popular brands now. Today I want to talk about a new celebrity:  Android.  It is supported by Google but is the largest competitor of Apple in the mobile phone (iPhone) and tablet PC (iPad) market. Soon, it will be one of popular names the world.

The Mythical 5% comes from Bruce Eckel, the author of Thinking in C++/Java. It says that 5% of programmers are 20x more productive than the other 95%.

Most of the programmers seldom write technical blogs, attend technical conferences and salons. They do not do continuous learning and seldom read some books.  So, most of these kind of guys don’t go to big companies or attend great projects.

The blogosphere was flooded with sarcastic comments when Microsoft announced the future Windows Azure Platform Applicance offering at WPC earlier this month, quickly dubbed “Azure-in-a-Box”. eBay and large datacenters will implement Windows Azure cloud infrastructures in large server centers, supported by HP, Dell and Fujitsu.  But cloud in a box sounds like a contradiction, right? Cloud computing was supposed to provide endless scale and elasticity, how could you get this if confined to a single container? 

 I think the more dogmatic cloud prophets are missing the larger point. Yes, global clouds provide scale benefits and reduce cost– but the BIG disruption is the potential of a standardized application platform across public and private domains. So, what will this do?

Often times, a client will bring to me a great idea and ask for an estimation. The problem is, for me to make a good estimation, I need to imagine the product from the back: at the last day of delivery, looking back to the project start, what happened? I need to also be able to see the product on that day.

Lately I've been having thoughts about polymorphism. Let's get this straight, I'm not talking about the Object Oriented principle in Programming. I'm talking about good old-fashioned Biology 1A - Polymorphism. It's been decades since we've studied it, so here's a summary:

Sometimes a gene mutates and you see two different variants in the same population. The classic example is the peppered moth.

Having been working on building R&D teams both for Chinese customer and western customer for many years. There are lots of debates about how to build a innovative and efficient team in China. Here are some tips for western companies when considering building operations especially R&D force in China.

1. Think before take action