Motorola just doesn’t get it. Constant innovation isn’t their thing. They do well, and then stop innovating and fail again until it starts (or not!) back again.

I’ve just been made aware that Motorola will be closing their Montreal-based Research and Development Center as part of a worldwide mobile handset division restructuring. Not only are they closing their R&D here in Montreal, but also one they have in Adelaide, Australia, and a major one at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s Research Park.

You know Motorola (or any company) is doing badly when they have to lay off people and close off some of their business, but what you also know is that Motorola is doing VERY badly when they are laying off their R&D workforce, the founding roots of innovation > new products > sales > money.

Everyone was praising them when they released the RAZR, for its innovative sleekness. It sold out like crazy and took Motorola’s handset division out of its slumber. But did they think they could live from the RAZR – and all of its variants part of the LETRZ branding – forever?

History only repeats itself: Motorola did the same thing when they released the then revolutionary StarTAC – the world’s first true clamshell cell phone – in 1996. It was a tremendous success. Motorola then virtually stopped innovating, and plunged (until the arrival of the RAZR 7 years later).

The reason I think Motorola still has the second largest mobile phone market share (after Nokia and before Samsung and Sony Ericsson) mainly comes from the fact that they focused on low-end phones, the kind given for free with a mobile operator contract.

Maybe I’m wrong. I believe you need to be a pretty talented engineer to work at Motorola. If that is the case, it’s a management problem. Lack of creative freedom, ideas drowning in the Motorola ocean.

About 200 people are to be laid off from Motorola Montreal’s closing. In other news, Ericsson announced last week that their Montreal R&D center is looking forward to augment its workforce by exactly 200…

In the meantime, you can check out those other handset manufacturers who are actually profitable (there are less than you might think) such as Scandinavian pioneers Nokia and Sony Ericsson (Ok, part Japanese too). Or OpenMoko.

Many factors contribute to the success of those companies. One of them I think is putting user interface design, ease of use and high usability as a top priority. This will constitute the focal point of part II of this series.

– Pierre Nick

If you haven’t noticed yet, I just put online the script I created to make a nice banner image for my blog from my Facebook status, making Pierre-Nick truly dynamik. In 2 words, it uses SimplePie to fetch the RSS feed of my own status, grabs the latest one and creates an image (with ImageMagick) if not already created, based on date (a kind of simple way to cache).

The font I use is Elements from the free fonts website Urbanfonts. There are probably a few bugs.. If you see any, do tell!

Update: there is an uncaught exception causing fatal errors once in a blue moon (goes away when you reload) (update 2: it does it when the feed is unreachable: Facebook under maintenance, etc). Sucks. I need to put in a nice try and catch sometime ;)

Le nouveau Eclipse est sortit il y quelques jours. Eclipse 3.3 « Europa » plus que double le nombre de lignes de code en passant de 7 à 17 millions! (Press release!) Et ce n’est pas tout :

C’est tout de même extraordinaire! Véritablement wow!

J’ai toujours admiré l’humilité des projets open-source concernant la façon dont ils nomment leurs versions. Avec autant de changements et d’améliorations (et tellement de trucs qui n’existent que pour faciliter la vie), ils auraient pu l’appeler Éclipse 5. Mais non, en open-source – où on peut rester en version 0.x pour plusieurs années – on ne se contente que d’ajouter 0.1 au numéro de révision. Quelle humilité! Imaginez une nouvelle version de Photoshop chez Adobe du même calibre. Adobe Photoshop CS3 passerait à quelque chose comme Adobe Photoshop Extreme-Zenful Pure Work Flow ZX Meta-Universe Pro 2.0.

Et il faut mentionner qu’uniquement un an s’est écoulé entre Callisto et Europa! Ce projet open-source internationalement développé! Can we say efficient [agile] developing methods?

En poursuivant sur la même lancée, Eclipse version 2008 devrait avoir 369.615384 développeurs au travail! Pauvre 0.384616 développeur, il doit venir du 0.83 périodique des 30.083 périodiques pays qui seront impliqués dans cette révision.

Sérieusement, good job Eclipse Foundation. Et dire que tout ceci a débuté au Canada (remarquez que le communiqué de presse provient d’Ottawa)!

– Pierre Nick

Update: Olivier – de son puits sans fond – à trouvé une IMPOSANTE liste des nouveautés (toute illustrée et parsemée de captures d’écran) apportés par Europa. Tout simplement majestueux.

[This note appeared on my Facebook profile on Thursday, May 24 - Was loving it too much to leave it there]

I now understand why GoDaddy.com is the most poplar registrar of domain names on the Internet. People want and love sex. So GoDaddy only went with the flow and oriented their services towards what people want.

First off when you go to GoDaddy.com, you are greeted for no reason by a lady dressed up in tight leather telling you .info domains are 99c.. hot! The relation between a domain and a woman dressed in leather is pretty hazy.

I’m currently shopping for a new domain name since mine is about to expire and I’m tired of it. Which brings me to the best part. I tried searching for pn.com (my initials) which got rejected because it was too short. Instead, GoDaddy suggested the following to me:

YOURPN.COM $8.95*/yr
BIGPN.COM $8.95*/yr
NEWPN.COM $8.95*/yr
EASYPN.COM $8.95*/yr
HOTPN.COM $8.95*/yr
PNFORYOU.COM $8.95*/yr
PN4YOU.COM $8.95*/yr
YOURPNFORYOU.COM $8.95*/yr
YOURPN4YOU.COM $8.95*/yr
YOURPN4U.COM $8.95*/yr

Someone tell me what can I do with those domains other than host a site on which I offer sexual intercourse in exchange for remuneration.

[pierre-nick.com was the Chosen One]

While browsing around on Apple’s website (I always have to get my weekly dose of it), I stumbled upon their very interesting Pro section about this French company called Trafik. Founded in 1997, Trafik “designs dynamic visual art and interactive environments then builds the custom applications necessary to realize them.”

The main focus of the video is a piece called Sonic Cube, which consists of a large illuminated cube responding to ambient sound. I’m a suck up for this kind of new digital media; it is something I’d really like to venture in one day.

In the meantime, be sure to check out the video about those “artists of programming” and all the other cool stuff people do with Macs that seems to be cool enough for Apple to mention. [via apple.com]

Mwhaha! The Blogosphere is MINE! 3 years after I said to myself: “Hmm I should really get a blog, I’ve got so much to say!” Better late than never, hmm?

First of all, it was imperative for me to feel that this blog was truly mine, which is why I spent so much time playing and creating [read: heavily modding] a template. And since you will probably find a really big mashup of whatever here (and I mean REALLY, my friends will be able to testify), I felt the name was right.

To further enhance this marvelous dynamic experience, I’m using my Facebook status as a title. I’ve been on Facebook since the day they opened it up for people outside of universities (because of course, École de technologie supérieure was not something you’d find on there) in fall 2006. With the help of some PHP, ImageMagick and a cool font from the great UrbanFonts, I fetch the RSS feed related to my status update, grab the latest entry and turn it into an out of this world image!

Back then I didn’t know Twitter, and even now that I know it, I prefer Facebook’s status, even if less easily reached by all. I love technology, new software and über cutting edgeness, but I never really got into what Twitter was all about. Maybe someone can light my lantern.

Secondly: what will this blog be about? A lot of things. My brain works extremely fast. When I get a mental image, it can get so defined and clear. I can feel it flow and grow through my head exponentially; it is a very odd phenomenon, just like me. I’m a very odd phenomenon. Sometimes I feel that what I can imagine is what people on drugs would see, even though I never really did those that give you such sensations. When I’m bored, I like to compose weird stories, putting on paper what I perceive.

Of course I will have more serious stuff around and reviews of things I saw, did, created, or ruined. I have little boundaries and have a very twisted and darksided sense of humor

Évidemment (ou pas) je parle Français, ma langue maternelle. Dépendamment des cas, je vais écrire dans une langue ou dans l’autre. Je vais également parfois fournir une traduction en utilisant Google Translate, ma forme préférée d’humour sur Internet.

So you have it there. I promise my posts will never be this long! This was a special occasion for my 0^th anniversary

– Pierre Nick

PS: It is still a work in progress! There are some touch ups to be done here and there, and some other features I have in mind! Also, the Facebook status retriever isn’t all ready for prime time yet. The title banner in use at the time of writing is actually generated from a beta version of it. Soon.. soon.