"Vienna will be evolving into a city of knowledge, away from repetitive work to a diversification of simple manual labor and high-skilled jobs. This already happens and must be aknowledged by economic politics."

somehow like this go the introductionary words of an Article titled "IT Stadt Wien" in "Information Professional" 4/2009, the magazine of the UBIT IT guild in Vienna.

What caught my eye is the wish for more software products coming from the Vienna region. As we have a lot of semantic web companies around, that could potentially also mean: how can we do semantic web products in Vienna? Currently, a lot of software is bought from international corporations (lets call some names: SAP, Microsoft, Siebel, ...) or done from scratch in software development projects. What we need are more product-producing software companies in Vienna. Especially we need them because by going for a beer with people working in productive companies, others can learn how to run a business (the author of the article put it "the needed knowledge is not here...").

My 2 cents:

1. yep, when I finished university, the choice was "install microsoft windows server 2000 for the rest of your life". or try something on yourself - which I did because the alternative is boring
2. what about Altova?

To my knowldge, Altova is the only company in the Vienna region that sold a PRODUCT. With PRODUCT I want to say: they have a software that has the quality, marketing, features needed to sell it worldwide as an off-the-shelf product. They opened up offices in Beverly, MA, USA also, as far as I know to improve sales in the US market (did they also move development and taxing?). Who else did this in Vienna?

Is Altova open to share their knoweldge? I would be the first one lining up to learn from them, being in the situation to try to do a similar feat.

Another point: the wko magazine didn't mention article author's names - for a magazine this is a no-go, I want to know who wrote what and to whom I can address letters. Add names!