Geodog: Technology

An evening with Regis McKenna

Tonight I went to an event put on by The Entrepreneurs Resource Network, where Regis McKenna was the featured speaker, promoting his new book, Total Access. He is a good speaker, funny, and and a good storyteller. He also comes across as being very smart. I don't think that I can do justice to his ideas in a late night blog post, but suffice it to say that I had a new perspective on marketing after the night was over. Part of that is the history of marketing that he carries around in his head -- he spent a long time talking about what marketing was all about in the early 1900's -- distribution and enabling the consumer to buy. He also talked about how many more choices consumers have today than they had even 15 years ago. The statistic that stuck in my head was that WalMart now has 300,000 SKU's that they carry, and that WalMart updates the database of what people have purchased nationwide every 90 minutes. Holey Moley!

Regis McKenna closed with a funny story to illustrate how different the buying experience is today from the past, and what assumptions our kids are growing up with. He was driving somewhere with his two granddaughters, 7 and 9, and his father-in-law. His granddaughters were lobbying to have him buy them an iMac. McKenna said to his grandchildren, "but does the iMac come with enough software? - Maybe we should look into computers that have more software bundled in with them." The 7 year old replied, "But if I need more software, I can always get it over the internet", and the father-in-law chimed in with "Yeah, Dummy".

I don't know enough to recommend buying the book Total Access, at this point, although I plan to, but I can highly recommend going to see him talk while he is on the book tour circuit. Hearing him speak reminded me of what I miss most about not having a full-time job -- not getting to spend the day interacting in person with really smart people. Also, I was reminded how everybody is connected, especially towards the top of social and financial networks. While chatting with him after the talk, I discovered that he is having dinner tomorrow night with my old boss at GO Corporation, Bill Campbell aka "Coach", currently chairman of Intuit. They worked together at Apple almost 20 years ago. Small World.

And my doctor just told me to drink 8 glasses of water a day

Heinz Valtin at the Dartmouth Medical School did a search of the scientific literature and could find no evidence at all for the widely held belief that drinking 8 glasses of water a day is heathly. None. Valtin's study was published in the American Journal of Physiology.

My doctor really did just tell me to do this, claiming all sorts of benefits. I wonder how doctors sort out what they know with what level of confidence - it can't be easy. What is based on data from statistically valid studies and what is just lore? Not that lore can't be useful, or that so-called scentific studies can't be biased because of financial or ideological biass. Makes a patetient nervous, but I guess that is why Lewis Thomas called it "The Youngest Science."

Tip o the hat to David's Science News over at the cool blogs at Salon.

What does the future hold for software developers?

Some people seem to love bad news. And I must confess, reading the news and blogging every night probably hasn't made me a cheerier person. If it isn't terrorism, it's the war on civil liberties. If it isn't war, it's the economy. At least the job market is going great guns <g>.

A couple days ago I ran into this gem, a depressing riff on the future of software developers by Phil Wolff, which he wrote after reading an InfoWorld column by Bob Lewis. Lewis talked about how programming jobs are being exported to India and other countries where there are high quality programmers who will work for substantially lower wages than American developers. Lewis' advice to software engineers: Find a different field of endeavor. Unless you're in the top rank, there's little future for you in IT. [of course that doesn't explain how to deal with engineers' seemingly congenital belief that they are all in the top rank.]

Phil Wolff's riff has a lot of good reasoning as to why it is easier than it has ever been to export programming jobs overseas, which can be summarized in one word - Internet. Plus there are an increasing number of good software engineers overseas. While he makes the point that technical people with so-called soft skills (like project management) or jobs that require a lot of face time don't face as much competition, he basically concludes that Lewis is right, and that American software engineers are going to face rapidly increasing competition and downward wage pressure from overseas engineers.

I've been noodling on this for a little while and decided to try to get some unformed thoughts on this out there into the blogosphere to see what others think (one of the advantages of writing for free is that you can do stuff like this, instead of waiting until you have all the loose ends tightened up.)

It seems crazy to be predicting a long-term surplus of software engineers when three years ago I was offering newly minted college grads what seemed to me to be obscene amounts of money plus bonuses to come work for my company (and they thought they had somehow earned the right to that much money). And we have heard this warning before -- I have a book in my bookshelf (unread, I confess) called The Decline and Fall of the American Programmer, published in 1992, that warned of exactly this future. It certainly didn't come true in the late 1990's. I have learned to be very wary of trying to predict the future using reasoning - there are always factors that you don't account for which end up having huge effects. People thought the internet would be big in 1996, but who would have predicted the excesses of the internet boom before Netscape went public? Finally, my career in high-tech has all been with startups working on new products and new technologies, where the spec and the dates get revised frequently, and the ability to communicate and to change rapidly when new data comes in (or the boss gets some bright idea :-) is critical to success. Attempts to outsource that kind of work seem doomed for failure. I can't imagine having outsourced the development of a new embedded OS for instance, although I did successfully outsource things like the IrDA stack, and had an outside company do a great job. In my experience, one of the keys to success in outsourcing is tightly defining the deliverable, and understanding the costs, direct and indirect of making changes to the deliverable. In running a consulting business, one of the most lucrative though frustrating situations is having a client who constantly changes his or her mind. But when you develop something that really is new, you have to change a lot on the way.

It seems to me that there will be downward wage pressure from the availability of qualified software engineers overseas, as well as from the availability of high quality Open Source software, which none of these authors mention. But the likelihood that the American Programmer will "decline" is dependent on how fast the rate of change in the software business is, and if it remains led by the US. I have worked through two booms, the rise of PC software in the mid-1980's and the rise of the net in the latter half of the 1990's, and in both cases the rate of change in everything that a developer needed to know was extremely high. New tools, new languages, and new platforms rose and fell by the wayside rapidly. Large numbers of new products for users were imagined, developed, marketed, copied and sometimes sold. Companies grew rapidly and failed rapidly. These were not conditions under which managers could outsource work, and it is hard to imagine that changing. I also worked through the doldrums of the early to mid 1990's, where it seemed like most development was incremental or me-too, and the lawyers were the one who got to be creative (remember the Lotus-Borland and Apple-Microsoft look and feel lawsuits?). A lot of that development could easily be outsourced. So which is the future going to look like? I don't know, although I fear that given the economy and the excesses of the internet boom, for the immediate future it will look a lot more like the doldrums. However, I'm betting that the roller coaster will come back around again in a while, and I'm ready for another ride.

Sorry about the length. I'm gonna learn how to do that >>>more<<< thing.

Microsoft at it again

The Register has an article about the End User Licensing Agreement you have to click to "agree to" before installing Win2k Service pack 3 or WinXP Service Pack 1. Apparently, to get the fixes to the bugs and security holes in the product you already paid for, you have to agree:

"You acknowledge and agree that Microsoft may automatically check the version of the OS Product and/or its components that you are utilizing and may provide upgrades or fixes to the OS Product that will be automatically downloaded to your computer"

So you have to give Microsoft the right to put software they think you should have on your computer automatically. Palladium here we come!

Sometimes, it just seems like the urge to world domination is just part of Microsoft's genes, and no legal decision is going to change anything about it.

ATT: Secure your networks - the pirates are coming

ATT is warning consumers to turn on WEP to secure their WIFI networks from pirates. What a joke! As if you could secure a network with WEP. I like the contrast with Jake Savin of Userland today announcing the location of his 80211b network at Church and 30th in SF. Hey, isn't that near where Ben and Mena of MovableType fame live? What a small world.

Betrayer of Constitution gets Pentagon spy job

A great and scary web page about John M. Poindexter's appointment as Director of the Pentagon's Information Awareness Office.

Remember Poindexter from Reagan and the Iran-Contra scandal? He was found guilty of conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and the destruction of evidence in 1990, but his conviction was overturned on appeal because of concerns that his public testimony before Congress while under a grant from immunity essentially made it impossible to fairly prosecute him. I can understand the legal decision, but it makes me furious that someone who violated their oath to the Constitution of the United States, but escaped jail time because of legal technicalities, is back in an office of trust. Essentially, he is being rewarded with a Pentagon job for having protected Reagan by lying.

And what is he doing? Well, check out the official site with the eerie logo:

"focusing on the development of: 1) architectures for a large-scale counter-terrorism database, for system elements associated with database population, and for integrating algorithms and mixed-initiative analytical tools; 2) novel methods for populating the database from existing sources, create innovative new sources, and invent new algorithms for mining, combining, and refining information for subsequent inclusion into the database; ..."

So this is the man who is figuring out how to spy on us more effectively using technology. Scary.

Whoever put together the Poindexter site also put together a great James Baker site as well. Recommended.

Really disappointed in Radio, Userland, and Winer.

This time I lost 2 days of blogging data to some Radio bug, this time permanently, as far as I can tell. This is the third time this has happened - you'd think that I would learn to back up Radio hourly. I am disappointed with Radio and with Userland. While Lawrence Lee was very helpful in getting me up and running again last time, nobody at Userland seemed to have any interest in figuring out what the source of the problem was, so it keeps recurring.

I also caught the flamewar going on between Dave Winer and others at queso. I generally ignore flamewars, but since Winer linked to it I thought I would check it out. I tend to cut anybody who is quitting smoking a lot of slack -- I remember walking around wanting to kill somebody for several months after I quit. But the picture painted in his posts of a self-aggrandizing, conceited, megalomaniac bully obessed with his primacy really disgusted me. I saw this before when he attacked Dan Gilmore when was out of Net reach, but I hoped it was an abberation. And Winer's defense of why he can revise his accusations against others was pathetic. I wonder if he knows what he is doing to himself. I have never met the man, and know almost nothing about him except what I have gathered from what he writes. And based on what he writes, I think that he is disgusting. Reminds me of Andrew Sullivan.

I'll probably move this blog over to Movable Type on my personal site once I figure out how to migrate the entries. The only silver lining to the whole lousy blogging week was that through Winer I got pointed towards the Winerlog, which is hilarious if you read Scripting News. Recommended, although the whole thing is sad.

Gallery Rocks

Like so many other people, I got a digital camera this year, and have re-discovered the joys of photography. I love the instant feedback, and the fact that there is no penalty for making a mistake. Plus I have a beautiful child, and I love taking pictures of him.

In the last year I have taken hundreds of pictures, and I have been trying to figure out how to display them. I spent hours trying dozens of desktop Windows applications, and none of them produced what I wanted -- clean simple html for several pages of thumbnails, with each thumbnail linked to medium and then a large sized version of the picture. Then I found Gallery, a php server side application. It does exactly what I wanted. I installed it, uploaded the pictures, used the "captionator" to add captions to the thumbnails, and voila - a beautiful gallery. A great application, if you have an account on a server that supports PHP. The only downside to Gallery is that the documentation is currently almost non-existent. If it doesn't work, you are hosed. Plus it advertises all kinds of cool customization features that I will end up trying, but as far as I can tell they aren't documented anywhere. With that caveat, highly recommended.

Mozilla rocks

For years I used Netscape Navigator because that is what I had started with, and because I avoid using Microsoft products whenever there is a decent alternative (see www.thebishop.net for reasons, if they aren't obvious. When I started doing a lot of web work professionally and personally, I got so frustrated with Netscape's bugs that I switched over to IE and Opera.

Well, I recently downloaded Mozilla, and after a week of playing with it, I have to say that it rocks and it is ready for prime time. I have a lot of customizations of IE (i.e. IE spell, Google toolbar, surfsave, etc) that will be hard to part with, but today I made Mozilla my default browser. I am looking forward to seeing what improvements people make on it, and what plug-ins they develop.

Microsoft claims right to put updated software on your computer.

Just ran across an amazing story in the Register that I somehow missed. According to the story, when you download the latest security patch for your buggy Microsoft product, the End User Agreement that you have to click on to download it states:

"You agree that in order to protect the integrity of content and software protected by digital rights management ('Secure Content'), Microsoft may provide security related updates to the OS Components that will be automatically downloaded onto your computer. These security related updates may disable your ability to copy and/or play Secure Content and use other software on your computer..."

Basically, to get Microsoft's bug fix, you have to agree that Microsoft can download software of their choosing onto your computer. Very Scary.

Tip o' the hat to Jeremy for the link.

Another interesting article on Palladium. Worth studying up on. Looks like Microsoft is using the current fears about security to get support for a new way of maintaining their monopoly.

Tip of the hat to Scott for the link.

Palladium

This Microsoft Palladium stuff sounds real scary. I need to find out more about it. Two starting points, the MS PR piece from Steve Levy, and the Cringely column. Politech has some stuff as well.

Competing with Microsoft

"My attitude is, everybody should try competing with Microsoft once in their life. Once."

Marc Andreessen, on being a veteran of the browser wars, in MacCentral, 14 June 2002

As someone who has spent most of his professional career working for companies that competeted with Microsoft, I would disagree. It is good and neccessary work to fight back against the evil empire. It does require a certain affection for tilting at windmills, and is not recommended if you are interested in becoming wealthy.

Tip o the hat to Owen Thomas of Ditherati for the quote.

Walmart shipping $299 PC's running Lindows

I worked as a consultant for a while for an ill fated company called GlobalPC. The goal of the company was creating a PC that was easier to use than Windows for the 50% of Americans who don't own a PC. The goal was admirable. The technology that they were using (GEOS) was also admirable, but was old, had a tiny developer community and was an incredible pain to debug apps in (object oriented x86 assembly). There were some great dedicated people at the company, but it ran out of money and was sold to some dubious characters from Florida, who were never able to get enough money to get the product to market, but found enough money to keep the company alive for over a year and to drive the stock price up to $30 at one point (See MYTN history). Somebody made money from it. ( I can't complain, I did just fine as a consultant. And I had a lot of fun putting together their internet portal).

The Holy Grail of the company was to get their Global PC for sale for $299 at WalMart, and the sales and marketing guys worked long and hard on trying to get that to happen, without success (you need to guarantee you can make the units before Walmart will commit).

Today I see that Walmart is offering a PC running Lindows for $299 on their site. The price includes AMD Duron 850 Mhz CPU, 128 MB memory, 10 GB hard drive, CD-ROM drive, Ethernet connection, 56 Kbps modem, and Lindows operating system -- does not include floppy disk drive or monitor. Pretty good deal - a lot better hardware than the GlobalPC was going to be able to provide.

It seems like a real milestone for Linux and for Lindows to have Walmart shipping computers based on them. I wonder who will buy them and for what reason? The GlobalPC people were targeting the lower half of the market, people who were disenfranchised by the prices of computers and how hard they were to use. I am curious if this is who Walmart is targeting. If someone sees any of their marketing material, I'd love to hear about it.

Thanks to Cory for the link. After posting this, saw the Slashdot discussion of the same story. Pretty vapid discussion.