16 February 2000
I've known of Ed Yourdon for over a decade. Where I worked in the 80's, Tom DeMarco's book Controlling Software Projects became required reading. We liked structured analysis/structured design so much, we almost bought a company :-) (Cadre Technologies).
Well, I confess that I never read Ed's books, but I wasn't going to miss a chance to hear him speak. He didn't disappoint. Why so many petroleum industry problems right before Y2K. Hmm. :-). Unfortunately, his Web page with the entry for "IT Megatrends" presently has a dead link. Oh, well. It was brilliant talk. I guess you had to be there. :-)
I was being my usual hounding self, and I spoke with him after the talk, in which he covered some interesting points about how "dead" some corporate Web sites look. I asked him, "Have you heard of the cluetrain manifesto?" Well, it turned out, he hadn't. The story would've ended there, except that nine days after I pointed him there, it showed up as his top featured book! I guess it made an impression on him :-). He even launched a discussion forum for it. Anyway, I wonder what will become of the other URLs I sent his way:
Document Author: Tim Chambers (ednme@timchambersusa.com), http://alum.mit.edu/www/tbc/