Several days ago I returned from Microsoft Academic Days which this year were held in Yalta. It was the first time I've attended this event and I've delivered two presentations there. On the first day I presented my view on key principles and ideas behind the 4th version of Microsoft Solutions Framework. The next day I delivered an introduction to Microsoft Robotics Studio. You can download these presentations here:

• Microsoft Solutions Framework Revisited
• Introduction to Microsoft Robotics Studio

BTW You can also download my other presentations.

It happened so that India was the first country to really realize benefits and impact of globalization of IT. They made their name and money on the wave of outsourcing. For many years now we say "outsourcing" and think "India". Often you can see this and that outsourcing locations compared with India, like this comparing Belarus with India. Everybody wants to be better than India. While many ideas presented mentioned make sense, some do not seem to be well elaborated.

Some items in comparison are not actually about advantages but about risk. And, you know, risks do not always materialize. For instance, time-zone difference allowing large working time overlap with US is an advantage of Belarus. But this does not necessarily mean than working with Belarus you will not have any communication problems or will have them less than with Indian vendor. Time-zone difference is not that important given that your outsourcing partner delivers value. And as I said before although some outsourcing locations are better than others the most important thing still is choice of partner and his ability to be a valuable contributor to your success.

Again, you outsource to certain company not to country. Make sure you partner can realize advantages of his geographical location and can properly manage risks associated with that.

Today I was listening to an older episode of Advanced Selling Podcast which was Income Inequality--How You Can Be At The Top End of the Income Scale. One of the most important messages of this episode was the idea that in order to be successful (i.e. get more income) you need to acquire some important knowledge and skills.

Although Bill Caskey and Bryan Neale produced this list of most important skills to develop with sales person in mind, I believe that it is quite applicable to software engineering as well:

• Communication skills. Verbal and writing. No-brainer. You must be a good communicator to be successful in any area, period. Most of software projects are done in teams and teams always depend on communication to perform efficiently.
• Problem finding and solving. As an engineer you deal with problems solving every day, but what distinguishes great engineers is an ability to look deeper and spot problems. Not sure if you can learn this anywhere.
• Sales and marketing. This one is a bit tricky. Many engineers believe that they are never going to need this. But they are involved in selling more often than they might think. They sell ideas and designs to their colleagues, designs and recommendations to their managers and so on. And again success depends on how well they do that.
• Financial side of business. Unless you are a novice junior developer (and even sometimes if you are) you make decisions that influence your project and you need to understand possible financial underpinnings of those decisions. This is especially applicable to development leads and managers.
• Planning. You build plans to make sure you have an idea how to make something happen. This again is applicable to any area you may work in.

If you are looking new inputs for self-development be sure to check out Advanced Selling Podcast.

Doing some experiments with Google Blog Search I suddenly realized that press-releases are dead. Dead in a sense that they can no longer serve as a means of attracting new customers. In modern world of blogs and social networks press-releases are just old-fashioned ridiculous way of informing about things happening that just does not work for technology people.

The interest to technology starts with two things: information about the mere fact of existence of technology or product and positive opinion about it. Press-releases can inform you, but they can not form opinions. At least it would be too thoughtless of you. Instead you would like to know what other people think about it. And blogs are just perfect for that. To me one human-made blog post about product means more than hundred of similar press-releases in news agencies feeds.

Now we've got past those times when vendors had to say that their product is great to sell it. Today they have to offer good products to sell them.

Do an experiment, check what people say about your company and its services with Google Blog Search. If they do not say much, probably, you want to change your PR approach.

Speaking about Niklas experience with outsourcing I wrote before. I could not help commenting his general description of his job. Don't get me wrong, but believe that outsourcing to 4 countries with 12 hours maximum time-zone difference that make you work 24/7 is not The Right Thing™. On the high-level I divide outsourcing into 2 types: outsourcing to save (i.e. Bad Outsourcing) and outsourcing to focus (i.e. Good Outsourcing).

When you outsource to save costs you send wrong signal to your vendor: whatever it is, it should be cheap. And when vendor receives this signal, he starts sacrificing things to save costs. The first thing he sacrifices is quality. Quality of office, quality of equipment, quality of workforce, quality of deliverables. This ends up as a nightmare for your managers and engineers.

On the contrary, I never repair my car myself. I outsource this activity to focus on my core competencies. And do not seek for cheap service providers. I seek for those whom I can trust, for those who save my time. Such outsourcing partners can boost your business by enabling you to deliver more value to your customers.

I did. Well, almost. And I love it. If you try to see not only immediate cause - consequence relations, but chains of events that make an impact - this is a book for you. You'll find true soul mates in Stevens.

And, guys, Freakonomics has blog!

When you download a trial version of a product you do not have any obligation to use or even install the product. The only your investment so far is time and traffic to download. If you do not have time to test drive the product today or tomorrow, no problem - you can download it again. If you installed it and do not like it, not a big deal - uninstall and go search for an alternative. Like it? Enter activation code and there you go!

Now you've bought a product with money back guarantee. You think "I need to try it. The more time I test it the more chance I'll catch the problem and get my money back." You do not have a single day to postpone this, you've already invested money into it. The positive case is simple - you simply continue using the product.

The negative case is way more difficult. One day you decide "This piece of software isn't worth the money I spent. Lets get them back." You start looking for the instructions how to apply for money back. You know what? No one even bothered with providing you such instructions! Developers did not want to think or probably even did not know about such feature of their product. You end up writing to sales with a claim for money back. I would imagine they reply with something like "We can offer you new updated version of our product. We are sure that if you try it you will reconsider!".

I bet you will not reconsider, they just ask for additional investment of time from you. And the money back begins! But technically and legally that is not an easy process. And I mean it. The situation is even more tricky if you bought the product from reseller, not the original vendor which offers the money back guarantee. But you go through it and get your money back.

Now you get an e-mail "It is unfortunate that our product failed to meet you expectations. Blah-blah-blah. Please help us improve by telling what was wrong." Are they serious!? They've just wasted your time and probably money (shipping is not refunded) and made you go to competitor and now ask you to invest more time in helping them become better! Well, they ask for to much.

You see, this whole money back guarantee thing is not at all about you. It is all about the vendor.

Want to attract customers and make sure their bad stories do not get even worse? Offer trial versions to let users test drive your product with as less effort from their side as possible.

This is actually a post by Seth Godin, which I will link to from my in Projections of life series: The marine iguana.

Blogging for me is not simply writing, but writing in English. So I seek every possibility to improve my English writing.

During recent times I twice came across 50 Tools that can Improve your Writing Skills from different sources (here and here). Still going through that list and trying to make use of these tools.

English punctuation rules is something I never could get right. Hopefully, I'll fix that with How to Use English Punctuation Correctly.

And last but not least take a look at Improving your technical writing skills.

The point is how you decide what is better for you. Good list of items to consider is given in a post on Jeitosa Group's blog:

• Workforce Quality/Skill
• Workforce Availability
• Workforce Costs
• Workforce Flexibility
• Government Support
• Tax Considerations
• Communications Costs
• Communications Infrastructure
• Real Estate Costs
• Statutory/Legal Requirements
• External Infrastructure
• Travel Accessibility
• Political/Economic Stability
• Multi-Language Abilities

As usual with list of comparison items like this you need to clearly understand relative importance of different items for your case. Sometimes workforce qualification and availability will be more important than cost. Sometimes travel accessibility will not be an issue. You want to know what matters to you and what does not.

When you will be looking for an offshore partner you should be aware that a company can address some general deficiencies found in peculiar to the country or region. For example, at SoftServe we have communications infrastructure much better than throughout the country which makes nearly any means of communication available to our clients and employees. Also we run a language school to make sure that "language barrier" is not an issue for our people.