What
· Business
· · Accounting (1 fragment)
· · Blogging (13 fragments)
· · Intellectual Property (44 fragments)
· · Internet (62 fragments)
· · Law (2 fragments)
· · Marketing (56 fragments)
· · Microsoft (17 fragments)
· · Open Source (42 fragments)
· · People (1 fragment)
· · Publishing (1 fragment)
· · Software Pricing (3 fragments)
· · Sun (45 fragments)
· · Syndication (5 fragments)
· · Web (1 fragment)
· · WebFD (1 fragment)
No W Suites ·
I regularly visit Sun’s big Menlo Park campus, which at the west end of the Dumbarton bridge. I’d developed the habit of staying at the W Suites in Newark, at the east end of the bridge; convenient, and the bridge commute is scenic and refreshing. No longer ... [8 comments]
No UPS ·
Lauren has already written about UPS’s sleazy practice of slapping a “customs clearance” fee on ground shipments from the USA to Canada; people who are clued-in to this just don’t use UPS Ground any more. Well, as of last week, I’m not using UPS Express either; here’s why ... [5 comments]
Time To Twitter ·
I spend quite a bit of time talking about leading-edge Web stuff to mainstream Enterprise types. I have a well-polished explanation for the rise of PHP and Rails and so on: Time To Market. Here’s the sound-bite: “If you and I have the same good idea for a community-based Web site on the same day, and mine is on the air in five months and yours in eight, then you’re dead. And it doesn’t matter if yours is better, because the community has gathered.” Well, Twitter would be the canonical example. They went with Rails because it let them build fast; and they built fast. They suffered terrible pain for months trying to take Rails places it’d never been before; but they fought through it and they’re in a very good place. Smart people tell me that Pownce and Jaiku are slicker and better but who cares? Apparently 140 characters, distributed appropriately, gives you what you need. [39 comments]
Service in 2008 ·
What happened was, I wanted to buy a Ricoh GX00 and, in North America, there’s only one place to do that: Adorama (gotta love that name), a New York camera store with online pretensions. It didn’t work out well, but while we don’t know yet if the story has a happy ending, it certainly has a silver lining ... [6 comments]
Adoption ·
I don’t often devote a whole post here to just one link, but I think Simon Phipps’ The Adoption-Led Market deserves it. If you’re in the business of technology you probably need to read it. Especially the “Consequences” section. [3 comments]
The Big Switch ·
Clearly, Nicholas Carr disapproves of much of the culture in which I’ve immersed myself and which I nearly-wholly embrace, to which I would apply labels such as “online” or “Web” or “Internet” or “Twenty-first century”. (Carr and I have written back and forth already on the generalities.) So it would be reasonable to suspect me of bias in writing about his recent The Big Switch—Rewiring the world, from Edison to Google. And indeed, I do think that several of its key arguments are, well, wrong. But it’s a good book anyhow; well written and extremely apposite ... [5 comments]
Tab Sweep — The World ·
Yes, I’ve been posting fewer substantive original pieces here. Working on a couple of things that aren’t very public, and also feeling itchy because what was radical three years ago has become conventional wisdom, which leaves me feeling empty and in need of something radical. Today an amusing antique camera, Iranian video, where we went, nine days of winter, and what happens when everything’s free? ...
Microsoft + Yahoo ·
I have a Yahoo userid. I bet you do too. I wonder how many of those there are, in total? I wonder what that number divided by $44,600,000,000 is? [16 comments]
XBRL News ·
Last week I gave a talk at the 16th International XBRL Conference here in Vancouver. XBRL is an XML-based system for packing up companies’ financial information, and I think it’s real important. But its take-off has been kind of protracted and arduous. I was there as an Ambassador From the Web. Here’s a quick XBRL news overview ... [5 comments]
Message From the Web ·
Last week I gave a talk at the 16th International XBRL Conference here in Vancouver. XBRL is an XML-based system for packing up companies’ financial information, and I think it’s real important. But its take-off has been kind of protracted and arduous. I was there as an Ambassador From the Web. Here’s what I told them ... [7 comments]
Mortgages ·
I’m hardly alone in being fascinated by the current financial tumult; all these mortgage-backed financial instruments, and nobody really knows how much they’re worth. If there’s good news, it’s that the immediate short-term bloodletting will mostly involve high-roller investors, hedge-fund customers, those best able to afford it. Will it spill over into the broader economy? My personal bet is probably not. But anyhow, I don’t have anything new to say on the subject. I think Bram Cohen does, though. [8 comments]
Color Commentary ·
Read the excellent play-by-play from Andy Updegrove: Update on the US Vote on OOXML (and What Happens Next). He seems to have all the public facts, but speaking as one who’s been through a few of those processes, I thought I should highlight something that’s going on right now, but won’t be talked about much. The problem of figuring out the US vote is in the hands of the 16 members of the INCITS committee. So does that mean that everyone’s sitting still waiting for them to make up their minds? Nope. What’s happening right now is that the big players with skin in the game are applying executive-to-executive pressure, behind the scenes, to the committee members’ bosses’ bosses’ bosses. In a few cases it’ll work, and the members will be issued here’s-your-vote marching orders. I’ve seen it happen. In fact, when the intensity level gets up there, I’ve never seen it not happen. Nobody will ever know the whole story on what’s happening right now under the covers. I really don’t envy the committee members. [3 comments]
Tab Sweep ·
Mostly technology-centric, this time ... [4 comments]
Whither IT? ·
There are a couple of browser tabs I’ve had open for at least a week now and they’ve been making me think and I think they’re related but I still don’t have a synthesis. The first is Bill de hÓra’s Matchstick Men, which says a bunch of smart things about WS-* and REST, but that’s not what resonates, it’s this: Critically the upkeep and maintenance of legacy systems has come to dominate business software spending. Most large enterprise IT divisions now have the equivalent of a pensions fund crisis, except that all the money is being spent on old systems instead of old people. The second is Nicholas Carr’s Citi whacks IT, from begins: In yet another sign of the vast amount of waste inherent in big-company IT operations... ... [7 comments]
Misirlou ·
You know, I don’t often post here saying “check out this YouTube clip”, but today I’ve got two, both featuring Dick Dale. The first one I saw was this interview, where Dick offers advice based on bitter experience that illustrates, were that needed, how dysfunctional the music business is. Then serendipity led me to this 1963 video of Dick playing Misirlou. Because, you know, there are many different genres of music stretching back over the decades and centuries, but it seems obvious to me that anyone with taste and intelligence would have to acknowledge that the surf-guitar-instrumental stands head and shoulders above all the rest as the pinnacle of human musical achievement. [4 comments]
Cloudy Paranoia ·
Check out The Web 2.0 Address Book May Have Arrived by Tim O’Reilly, passing along (with approving remarks) David Pogue’s pitch for GrandCentral; it gives you a single phone number that rings all your phones wherever you are. Says David: “Its motto, ‘One number for life,’ pretty much says it all.” Since I have a similar service through AccessLine courtesy of Sun, I can appreciate a resource like this. But there was something about the announcement that was bothering me ... [8 comments]
Twenty-First Century Recruiting ·
Google is hiring. And there was a Tuesday in last week. Mind you, everybody’s hiring. But jeepers, I got a friendly email yesterday to my @sun.com address from a Google recruiter, subject “Exciting Job Opportunity with Google!” saying “saw your blog, we sure are a great place to work, want to talk?”. Now, it’s really easy to dig up my private non-Sun address. Not to mention my phone number. Am I old-fashioned, or does this seem a little desperate? I assume that more or less everybody in the biz who’s got a blog or is otherwise publicly visible will be getting email @work from the big G. Anyhow, I wrote back saying “Thanks, but enjoying my job just now.” and she wrote back saying OK and “Feel free to pass along my contact information to any friends or colleagues who you think might be interested in exploring opportunities with Google.” I’ll get right on it. What’s next; sandwich-men in high-tech parking lots? [8 comments]
Microsoft ·
Last week I spent time talking to a lot of different technology people, from all over the world geographically and organizationally and culturally. The conversation kept looping back to Microsoft, and to the same sentiment: They’ve lost their mojo. Lots of people will end up using Vista, but does anyone care? The Microsoft execs look haggard and joyless, and half the interviews feel phoned-in. There’s real innovation in the Office UI, and everyone says “But it’s OK, the old keyboard shortcuts still work”. The advertising campaign is vapid and lame, but then that’s nothing new; they haven’t run an effective one in years. I’m sure that Microsoft can come back, the way IBM did after their bad patch last century; maybe the energy is building in a building in Redmond where nobody’s looking. I’ve never liked Microsoft, but now I realize how much energy they used to inject into the ecosystem, because it’s not there any more and I miss it. [9 comments]
Hot Job Market ·
It seems that everybody I’ve talked to in the last little while has found a way to work it into the conversation: “Oh, and I’m hiring; know any good developers?” Plus, the pace of calls from head-hunters has picked up. It’s about as hot as I can remember it being, ever, including the bubble. [9 comments]
Startup Camp ·
I spent Thursday and Friday at Startup Camp, at the Computer History Museum. This event was sort of originally my idea, but smart Sun people retained the good parts—make it an unConference, involve David Berlind—and discarded my silly theming notions; the “Startup Camp” pitch obviously touched a nerve, because the place was packed ... [3 comments]
The Money Statement ·
Somewhere in the code running inside our big HP household printer (and, I suspect, every other printer on the planet) there’s a line of code, something along the lines of
if (drum_age > drum_warning_level)
display BuyNewDrumWarning
Well, that warning message comes up awful early. And it dawns on me that the value chosen for drum_warning_level has an impact on HP’s cash flow that’s measured in billions: smaller value, more money. And the temptation to move it down and then down again over the years, that’d be irresistable. [4 comments]
Transparent Business ·
I spent a couple of fascinating hours Tuesday at a round table hosted by the United States Securities and Exchange Commission. The subject was Interactive Data, a term which is hardly self-explanatory but really means “Business Transparency”. This in the same week that Jonathan sent a letter on the same subject to SEC Chairman Christopher Cox, who was also around the table. Mr. Cox and the SEC are definitely on the right track; I expect bumps in the road, but there’s a chance that Accounting As We Know It could be blown up. Which would be a good thing; and not just because Open Source is creeping in ... [7 comments]
Web Hacking With Real Money ·
Looking for some new data for your next mash-up? How about playing with real money? The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s Interactive Data Initiative has an RSS feed of company financial filings; not just the text, but in a highly-structured XML format called XBRL. I glance at the feed this morning and see data from ADP, Dow Chemical, Molina Healthcare, Xerox, GE, Infosys, 3M, Bristol Myers Squibb, and lots more. XBRL isn’t the world’s easiest format to grok; that’s partly because the formalisms that govern accounting are non-trivial in the extreme. But I’m quite sure there are fortunes to be made by people who combine hacking chops with financial savvy, and figure out how to automate digging insight out of this data. Of course, in most gold rushes, the best business angle is selling tools and entertainment to the miners; so there is obviously more than one way to work this territory. And a great big tip of the hat to the SEC for getting this stuff on the air. [1 comment]
How Much Work? ·
Here are links to two explorations of the same question: why do we work the amount we work? Suw Charman recently reported on a thought-provoking EuroFOO session by Ryan Carson, who has decided as a matter of policy to put his company on a four-day week. Then today Brad DeLong quotes Robert Frank on Keynes having been wrong about wealth and desire, but is left unsatisfied, still wondering “Why 40 hours?” Some of us, of course, have vocations not jobs and are happily writing code and chatting with colleagues and blogging at 11PM. But still... one would like the amount people work to be explicable by rational economics. DeLong doesn’t try, he veers beautifully sideways into Cowboy Economics or rather Junkie Economics; well anyhow, he quotes six verses of a song usually sung by Margo Timmins. Which is a sane way to address a mystery. But if I were going around again, I think I’d be an economist.
On Innovation ·
I really owe Nicholas Carr a vote of thanks; I believe no other single individual has provoked so many ongoing entries of the form “A is right about X” or “A is wrong about X”. Today, Nick is wrong about innovation. To be fair, this is something that has driven management practitioners and theorists crazy forever; the people running a company tend to know pretty well where some innovation would be useful; adding product value to give some price leverage; revamping manufacturing operations to tie up less capital; it depends on the company’s pain point. And that kind of works, but only for the little innovations. Maybe the best-known example is Kaizen, as applied in the Toyota Production System; which explicitly acknowledges that it’s chasing small, incremental, steps forward. But fortunes are made, and industry titans are built, where management isn’t really looking, almost always. The big pieces of innovation come out of garages and low-rent offices in lousy locations, and they’re produced by small groups without much management backing. It can be done at big companies (the business personal computer at IBM, Java at Sun) but then it’s always in an off-the-mainstream skunkworks. Nobody—I repeat, nobody—is smart enough to predict where the next big strategic innovation is going to come from. So if you “narrow your innovation focus”, you’re almost guaranteed to miss it. The best approach, I think, is a combination of conscious focused incremental innovation—kaizen—combined with a structure that’s loose enough that when someone wants to hide in a corner and try something crazy, you don’t get in the way too much.
Smallthought and Me ·
I’ve written before about Dabble DB, about being an unabashed fan of the people and company and technology. Since I think transparency is important, this is by way of disclosure: as of today I’m a shareholder in Smallthought Systems. After I’d advised them not to take any investment money, and then advised them that they should probably take the Ventures West offer, I asked if I could have a little piece of the deal, and everyone was fine with that, so today I signed the papers and gave them the cheque. I guess there may have been a little Vancouver home-side boosterism in my wanting to do this but not that much; I think I’m gonna get my money back and then some.
Startup Camp? ·
This fell out of a conversation at JavaOne, which, these days, is more or less the heart of the IT Establishment; we were wondering what the equivalent event might be for everyone else in the world. I said it ought to be an unconference or a camp or something along those lines, so there was more talk, some of it with David Berlind, who’s launched the very successful MashupCamp series. Now we’re seriously considering an Autumn event in the Bay Area. I wanted it to call it “Scaling 2.0”, but the consensus seems to be for “Startup Camp”, since the idea is to address people who are building new things from scratch, as opposed to working in the existing application space. Here’s an address: startupcamp@sun.com. Would you come? Is the idea lame-brained? If we do it, is there something we should be careful to do or not do? Let us know.
Freedom to Leave ·
That’s the title of a remarkable piece by Simon Phipps, long but worth reading all of. I suspect that most people who read ongoing have had a chance to hear Simon speak; but if you haven’t and you get a chance, take it. I think he’s actually better on the stage than on the page, and since this is a very good piece, the speech that went with it will have been outstanding.
Innovation Happens Elsewhere ·
Tantek Çelik writes, on the subject of work by Scott Reynen: “Companies take note - on the internet, there will always be smarter, more clever people building on each other's work than your secret internal committees, your architecture councils, your internal discussion forums — no matter how many supergeniuses you think you may have hired away and locked up with golden shackles in your labs. Either play open or expect your proprietary formats and protocols to be obsolete before they've even seen the light of day.” [Update: It’s been pointed out to me that some might not recognize the title, which was originally uttered by Bill Joy and is also the title of a book by Goldman and Gabriel.]
Hypocrisy ·
Maybe in an ideal world We’d All Just Get Along and there wouldn’t be attack bloggers, but that’s not where we live, and if we have to have attack bloggers I think we should have good ones. My fave is Billmon, and he’s just fired off one of the best take-downs ever.
Salem ·
On Friday morning I flew down to Portland, drove to Salem, and helped out with a Sun sales presentation to the state government from 10AM to 5PM. I don’t get to do many sales calls which is a pity because I love them. I probably shouldn’t queer the pitch by going into details (I will if we get the business, because it’s interesting), but I have to say that the state-government people we were pitching to had smart questions and were endearingly obsessive about the application; and I would be too in their position, it’s one of the Things That Matters. I flew home out of PDX that same evening and damn was I tired. But the State Capitol is worth looking at, so I took a couple of pictures ...
Un-Fascist Business ·
I ran across this Dow-Jones story entitled Dissident XM Satellite director a good role model; it’s about a Board-level dispute at XM Satellite Radio. The argument is simple and straightforward: whether they should focus on costs and profitability, or go all-out for growth; the right answer isn’t obvious. Lots of businesses have had this kind of argument; I’ve been in a few myself. What’s unique here is that they’re having it out in the open. In my two decades in business, I’ve seen a whole lot of management (sometimes Board-level) arguments, and the more important they are and the harder the problem is, the more fanatically determined people were to keep things secret. For most of my lifetime, the dominant school of management thought has held that the company must present a cheerful, united, confident face to the world and speak always with one voice and only one voice. I think a reasonable case can be made that this thinking is, in its essential characteristics, Fascist. It also strikes me as really, really dumb. How could anyone think the less of XM Radio because we know they’re agonizing over profitability-vs-growth? Unless the issue is something like “Oops, the new product is causing users to develop liver cancer”, I think that in general businesses would benefit from working on their hard problems a little more transparently.
People Bubble ·
It looks like talent is getting damn short out there. The frequency of calls from recruiters is up, way up. Total ice-cold calls, like “We need a CEO for a enterprise-class social software offering.” In a lot of cases they’re not after me, just “We heard that you know lots of people in the space.” The shots are noticeably longer and the frequency is up and up, particularly since the start of the year. No, I don’t know what it means.
Upcoming Gig: XBRL San Jose ·
On Wednesday Jan. 18th I’ll be at Adobe in San Jose talking at the XBRL Meeting. XBRL is about something that I’ve long felt is important: standardizing financial reporting. I’ve struggled a whole lot over the years with accounting principles and financial reporting, which are generally speaking a snake-pit. Those of us who’ve dealt with this stuff were less surprised by Enron and friends, because “Generally Accepted Accounting Principles” have historically included lots of latitude for egregious lies. The best answer is transparency, give intelligent investors enough information and they’ll sniff out the bad guys. Getting from the mess we’re now in to complete transparency has two essential steps: first of all, the regulators have to make Generally Accepted Accounting Lies punishable with lots of jail time. Secondly, we need technical infrastructure so we can build some standardized tools to do financial analysis; these exist today, but require a whole lot of hand-tweaking to weed through the GAAP-approved hand-waving and make one company’s numbers comparable to another’s. XBRL isn’t the solution, but’s an important piece of the puzzle, and if there’s anything I can do to help, I’m there.
Disclosure ·
For some time, I’ve been appending “Disclosure: I may have a conflict of interest with respect to Technorati” whenever I mention them. I’m happy to report that, as of this week, I do have a conflict of interest; the approval process worked its way through multiple levels of executive committees and I’m officially allowed to be a member of the Technorati advisory board. Who knows, maybe they’ll start taking my advice. While I wish I could see how this whole Web-as-living-data-stream thing is going to turn out, I can’t. But it’s clearly a world-changer.
Activa vs. Mrs. Lanteigne ·
That would be Mrs. Louisette Lanteigne of Waterloo, Ont., who has an extremely amateur GeoCities website that she’s been using to post illustrated complaints about what look like dangerous, shoddy, and environmentally damaging construction practices in her neighborhood, illustrated with her own pictures. Activa, one of the developers she’s been complaining about, has slapped her with a 2-million-dollar libel action. Plus, Slashdot knocked her site off the air (Google cache here). The litigation seems a little over the top to this non-lawyer; are there any good Waterloo-area geeks who’d like to fix her up with a higher-grade Web presence?
Infrae ·
Who is Infrae.com? And why the flaming hell are were they replicating the full text from ongoing, and doing the same to Jon Udell, Dare Obasanjo, and Paul Everitt? This really seems over the top. Whoever you are, please stop now. [Update: It has been pointed out that this may fall within the terms of my Creative Commons license. I guess they’re attributing properly, and it doesn’t look like they’re charging. On the other hand, this looks like it may be a product demo, and that would be skating close to the line. Hmph.] [Update: Infrae, who do Zope stuff, seem to be a decent bunch of people; Martijn Faassen, one of their founders, sent a nice note explaining that this was indeed a demo of their Silva product. And they’ve taken it all down; thanks.]
$46,213,000,000.00 ·
I was doing research for a Canadian TV spot I was on earlier this week, and I looked up the answer to the question: “What is IBM’s consulting revenue?” In 2004, IBM’s gross revenue was $96B, of which $46B was Global Services, i.e. consulting. I see that basically as testimony to how our profession—the IT profession—has failed our customers. Nothing against IBM; in fact, as solution-providers go, my experience is that IBM GS is pretty good. But if you see IBM as a microcosm of the industry, it shouldn’t cost $46B in consulting to deploy $50B worth of technology. It’s not going to be easy to get there, and it’s going to take a long time, but we just have to focus on making things simpler.
Adobe + Macromedia = ? ·
Seems straightforward to me. Adobe is in at the center of print production (PhotoShop & friends, InDesign, PDF), while Macromedia’s DreamWeaver is the single most important Web-design product. Dave Shea says this might be about Flash, but let me suggest exactly the opposite: if you’re hitching your career to Flash, it might be a good time to look at alternatives. Why’s that? Because, near as I can tell, Macromedia has never made any serious money with Flash. They’ve accomplished one of the great, heroic, marketing coups of all time, getting the plug-in onto substantially every desktop on the planet; and this bought them, uh, what exactly? They sell authoring tools, but seriously, how many Flash designers does the world need? Anyhow, most of the good things you can do with Flash, you can do about as well with DHTML (oops that’s called AJAX now) and your “back” button still works. I guess there’s no reason to actually shut Flash down, the tool revenue must about cover the engineering costs. But Adobe, historically, has been good at focusing on what works and dropping the distractions. (Can you remember PageMill?) Flash is a distraction. [Update: Smell something burning? That would be me, sizzling in a torrent of Flash-flavored flame.] ...
Errors and Omissions ·
Attending a meeting in a downtown office building in Vancouver, I photographed the nameplate on the door of a business that I hadn’t known existed ...
Per-CPU Pricing is B.A.D. ·
Today in the news, reports that Microsoft per-CPU pricing will treat multi-cored CPUs as one. The fact that intelligent people should even have to think about this is further evidence, if any were needed, that per-CPU software pricing is Broken As Designed. To start with, it’s unstable in the face of Moore’s law and things like multi-coring. Second, and this argument is really unanswerable, it’s radically decoupled from both the cost to the vendor and the value to the user. For infrastructure, the per-employee pricing that we’re trying here at Sun out seems to be the best bet for capturing the buyer value. There are some other classes of applications that deliver a lot of value but are used by small groups; CRM, traditional BI (but my last company Antarctica is trying to break that mold), trader’s-desk systems. For small-group software per-identified-user or per-parallel-user can each sometimes make sense. But I am completely at a loss to think of a single software scenario where per-CPU pricing is rational or defensible.
Outsourcing ·
Today in Victoria (which is British Columbia’s capital) I spoke at an IT-focused conference called Strategies for Public Sector Transformation. It turns out that by “transformation” they meant mostly outsourcing; the current jargon is “Alternative Service Delivery”. These are smart people and they are in the same squeeze as a lot of other governments: on one side tax-cutting politicians and on the other inexorably rising health-care costs. So outsourcing looks attractive, because lots of times it drives costs down. On the other hand, these are after all IT projects and, as such, a high proportion of them fail. I also think we should be honest and acknowledge is that some of the cost savings come, not from core competencies and all that, but from paying people less for the same work. There was also a fairly horrifying presentation by a woman from Texas about the state legislature leaning very heavily on the public-service agencies to outsource not just infrastructure but basics such as qualifying people for benefits. Huh? I thought the point of outsourcing was to focus on your core competencies. In any case, I was there mostly to talk about identity standards, which isn’t getting nearly enough attention; if I were a hotshot young developer looking for a niche to build in with lots room and upside, that’s where I’d go.
Bad Day at Work? ·
Well, things could be worse; check out David Morse’s epic struggle with the system. And those who fret about Microsoft’s chewing us all up with their ruthless efficiency may find their worries eased.
Market Failure ·
Right now we are encountering an irritating failure of the free market. We had some ductwork done a couple of months ago, and have a chunk of missing drywall in our living room. There are some other bits and pieces of drywalling that need doing here and there around the house, too. No problem, call up an expert, right? Wrong. At this moment in Vancouver, no drywaller can be bothered to take on a job that’s only one or two days’ work; they’re all coasting along doing ten-thousand-dollar-and-up mansion renovations. Drywalling is tricky, irritating, messy work best left to professionals... but it looks like we’re going to be taking it on. At any Vancouver social gathering, the general unavailability of tradespeople is a reliable conversation-starter. Hey kids, consider staying away from that expensive and arduous college education and taking up a trade; for damn sure your job won’t get outsourced to another continent.
Mark on Microsoft ·
OK, this is positively the last time I’m going to post here saying “Go read Mark Cuban’s latest,” the word about his high-energy naked-truth-at-great-length unpunctuated explosions must have pretty well gotten out by now. The subject this time is the Microsoft dividend, which is pretty big news.
C-$2MS ·
That title stands for “Computing Without Sending Money to Microsoft, and right here, with Java One and the Apple WWDC both happening here in San Francisco, we’re pretty well at the C-$2MS World Headquarters. Herewith some closing notes and pictures ...
Cuban on Sweat ·
Via Mark Cuban, some very wise remarks about how to build a business from scratch, and why you should avoid taking VC money if you possibly can. [PS: I’m not going to turn ongoing into a collection of pointers to other Web stuff, this is just a coincidence, partly due to the fact that I’m hovering over the aggregate PlanetSun feed to see how this experiment goes, and I keep seeing interesting things go by.]
James Surowiecki ·
This gentleman writes regularly in The New Yorker on issues of business and economics, and is one of the reasons I regularly buy that magazine. Today he’s got a fascinating essay in Wired on collective corporate wisdom. Seems to me that there’s a good case to be made that the companies who figure out how to put this to work are the ones that are going to win.
More Pricing Craziness ·
Down here in Oz, we’re making quite a few calls home over this and that, and while both of our cellphones work fine, even God couldn’t afford the roaming charges. But you can call Canada from halfway around the world for 2.8¢/minute, here’s how: ...
Bouncing Termsheets ·
I’ve been hearing these stories, several times in the last month, from both here in Vancouver and down in the States, of entrepreneurs having drop-kicked a VC termsheet and walked away, on the basis of terms and/or valuation. If you don’t know what this jargon means, a crash lesson on how the VC process works. For those who do know, a few remarks on VC trends ...
To Customer Service ·
Dear Customer Service: Today I had a problem and called your help-line. I (like quite a few people) would prefer to solve the problem myself using your website, and I (like an increasing portion of the population) am perfectly competent to do so. Unfortunately, your web site does not have a solution to this particular problem, so I need to talk to a person. Imagine my dismay when, at three successive levels of telephone menu, I have to listen to lengthy exhortations on the wonderfulness of your Web site and on how it could solve my problem if I would go away and (please, please) not call you. If I could use the Web site, I wouldn’t be calling. This guarantees that by the time I eventually get through to a person, I will be irritated and prone to unfriendliness. As the proportion of people who are Web-connected and Web-competent increases, the cost-effectiveness of this kind of go-away message is going to fall. Please bear this in mind.
Something Stinks ·
This morning, my news aggregator served up this innocuous-looking piece from Infoworld (take a moment and check it out) which I read and suddenly found myself angry. The anger is because what this article describes as “what looks more and more like the way of the future” strikes me as more or less like complete bullshit. Details follow ...
The Intangibles Market ·
The book business is easy to understand. An author writes a book, a publisher edits, prints, markets, and distributes it, and bookstores sell it. The money gets split up between the bookstore, the publisher, and the author, and it all works well enough to keep the books flowing. This is a successful market mechanism; not perfect but there aren’t any obvious better alternatives. Around the universe of brainware, it doesn’t usually work that well; wherever you look you see markets that are twisted or compromised or just broken. And it’s not obvious what the way forward is. Examples include TV, journalism, conferences, and increasingly what’s on your computer screen ...
Wrong Profession? ·
My brother writes to tell me of an unnerving experience, involved with hiring someone to manage a computer lab. It’s more than just a little tough out there. [Update: A Boxed pearl.] ...
Cashless? ·
Summer is distinctly here and I took a side-trip on a coffee expedition to the sunglasses emporium; the sharp-dressed young woman explained that the inexpensive sunglasses were on this side, the designer models on other. But then she wouldn't take my money ...
Microsoft Wants Your Love ·
Today, Don Box of Microsoft appeals for love (well, at least polygamy), inviting us all to snuggle up with their .NET stuff and pointing out that it works with Open Source technology. Scoble takes a Redmond job and also wants to start dating. I have this problem with loving Microsoft, it's just that I fear them so much ...
LA Times Whacks 'Em ·
An awfully good editorial in the LA Times (free registration required) about executive-pay follies in the decomposing corpse of Key3Media, best-known as promoter of Comdex, another decomposing corpse ...
A Lot of People Looking ·
Somebody wondered what old friend X is up to, and I know he's on the Web so I checked, and he's looking for work. This has happened a lot in recent months. There is a lot of serious, deep, high-quality talent out there waiting for the economy to snap back ...
Overheard conversation ·
In a coffee shop: "Business was OK but I had to quit because the CEO and I, one of us was gonna kill the other. He was a lying fuck and a pompous self-important asshole ...
I work at Sun Microsystems.
The opinions expressed here are my own,
and neither Sun nor any other party necessarily
agrees with them.
