I agree that software needs more focus, though it's harder to paint a quick picture in people's minds unless you say something like "make more apps."

I was actually very pleased that he used the example of firefighters downloading building plans on their way to a fire on their "PDA", since that's an app I actually built a few years ago (and current client ... http://getblazemark.com/

Focus depends on ease and effectiveness of narrative. If you can't get a hit in 10 seconds, it won't give the punch.

There's two opposing groups to reckon with here: the employees and the shareholders. The latter wants the highest profit.

So as a "good" corporate manager, which group are you kind to? The only real answer for the shareholder side is ... maximize profits until morale/turnover sinks to the point where product (and profits) suffer. Any further spending for the employees is a negative for the shareholders.

Or you can sway the balance to treating your employees better for other than profit motives ... good PR, good retention, higher creativity/productivity. Again, unless these translate into better revenues, it's taking away from the shareholders.

UNLESS ... the shareholders, as a group, also want to "do good" and treat employees better than the bottom dollar.

It's about the shareholders, not the managers.

And this is how we get to that scene in Wall-E as he's leaving Earth.

Google karma points are are 1/5th the cost in Kenya and India, but Indian workers come back as ...

Having just finished a non-trivial project using Java EE 6, I'm very pleasantly surprised at how far things have progressed in the Java world.

I used:

* Glassfish (app server)
* JPA 2 (EclipseLink)
* JSF 2 (Mojarra)
* EJB 3.1
* PrimeFaces (excellent JSF toolkit)
* Selenium/JUnit/Maven, etc.
* Java 6+

Java EE 6 completes the job started in Java EE 5, which is essentially ... re-do everything using the best practices developed in the last 10 years, learning from everyone's new ideas and jettison'ing the old. Convention over configuration, annotations, streamlining ... all decent throughout.

Standard Java EE is now very robust, speeds development, assures safety, and aids test-driven development.

I also think this particular stack will hang around for a good number of years, if not decades. They finally got it right.