Productivity Arbitrage

Posted by Jesper on December 21, 2005

ThoughtWorker Obie Fernandez came up with the nifty new term Productivity Arbitrage:

Productivity Arbitrage is a strategy of statistical arbitrage which leverages innovative new technology to deliver solutions at the market price that is based on the historical price/value proposition of older, less-productive technology.

In software terms, it is the competitive advantage gained by delivering solutions at or slightly below market price, but incurring lower delivery cost due to early commercial use of a new, relatively unproven technology. Over time, the market’s price/value expectation aligns with reality to reflect a new status quo, in turn diminishing profitable opportunities for productivity arbitrage until innovation once again causes a productivity imbalance to arise.

Also a great story on how ThoughtWorks recently won a $800,000 bid with a Ruby on Rails powered system.

Edit Page bookmarklet

Posted by Jesper on December 08, 2005

Here’s a quick little tip for Oracle Portal. If you’re tired of adding “&_mode=16” to the URL of pages without the standard “Edit Page” link, you can save yourself some keystrokes by adding the following bookmark in your browser:

javascript:location.href=location.href+’&_mode=16’
(bookmark this link: Edit Page, to create the bookmark)

Now, on any (Oracle Portal) page you simply select your bookmark, and the page reloads in edit mode. If you add the bookmark to your bookmarks toolbar, you can enter edit mode with just a single click.