Monday Keynote Presentation
8:30 A.M. - 10:00 A.M
Michael D. Capellas
President and Chief Executive Officer, Compaq Computer Corporation
Michael D. Capellas, 44 joined Compaq in August 1998 as chief information officer. Immediately before joining Compaq, Mr. Capellas held senior positions at Oracle Corporation and at SAP America, both growing out of his information technology and supply chain management consulting work at Benchmarking Partners, a leading Houston-based information management consulting firm, where he was a managing partner (1996)
William Heil, Vice President and General Manger of Business Critical Server Division at Compaq Computer Corporation will be sharing the opening keynote session with Mr. Capellas.
Tuesday Keynote Presentation
8:30 A.M. - 10:00 A.M.
Mark Minasi, Author
Mark Minasi wrote his first computer program in 1973, and has been an avid user of personal computers since they first appeared in 1974. That quarter-century of experience with PCs sparked the initial question that inspired TSC, namely "after 25 years, why is PC software still so bad?" Mark has worked as a computer journalist over the past twenty years, he has been a columnist for such magazines as BYTE, Windows NT Magazine, Nikkei NT, and Compute, and a contributor to Computerworld, Teleconnect, Programmer's Journal and Computer Language. He is the author of fifteen technical books on computers, with over a million and a half sold worldwide in 12 languages. He regularly speaks about the computer industry at computer conferences and to the national media. He lives in Virginia's Tidewater area. For more information on Mark's books and presenting schedule go to
www.minasi.com
Presentation Abstract
Why the software we buy is so bad ... and how to make it better.
Software has defects. (The programmers have taught us to call them "bugs," but they're defects nonetheless.) That, in and of itself, is not terrible: virtually every product has defects. What's amazing about shrink-wrap software, however, is the sheer number of defects. Popular operating systems, word processors, Internet browsers and e-mail packages have literally hundreds or thousands of defects -- can you imagine buying a microwave oven, a hamburger, a house or a car with thousands of defects?
Of course you can't. In our society, we normally put purveyors of low-quality products out of business. So why is software different?
In this thought-provoking talk based on his newly-published book, The Software Conspiracy, software industry veteran Mark Minasi discusses why we accept low-quality software in the first place, why it doesn't seem to get much better, and presents a concrete multi-point plan that YOU, the software consumer, can follow to fix the software industry. And we'd better move fast: the software industry is even now spearheading a campaign to pass laws absolving them of all quality requirements, and unfortunately they're succeeding. Even if you don't use computers, software quality affects you, believe it or not -- the U.S. dominates the world software market, and if we don't clean up our act, we'll lose that lead -- and the entire country will suffer as a result.
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