Saturday, February 22, 2003

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I'm surprised this story, on NPR, hasn't received more coverage elsewhere. The study it discusses suggests that intensivity of overall medical expenditures within a geogrpahical area may not be well-correlated to overall outcome. It's not in this article, but the report said that, if all areas had Grand Rapids-style medical practice, it would be a 30% savings for Medicare. Wow! 11:28:05 PM    comment []

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One of my favorite, and one of the most under-appreciated, features in Microsoft Access is the ability to invoke a large, pop-up scrolling window to make it easier to read a lot of text that is contained in a small, scrolling text box. (You do this by Shift-F2, or selecting Zoom from the right-click menu.) You can make an HTML interface do this, but it's not as good (it never is). I think this would be a really cool feature for the browser developers to build right into the browser...I believe it is technically feasible. 10:03:44 PM    comment []

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Speaking of mis-treating customers...we've only had a DVD player for a couple of months. I was shocked to find that you generally can't skip past the boilerplate intellectual property warnings. So we are actually worse off, in that respect, than we were with videocassettes. Forcing viewers to watch anything--commercials, previews or anti-piracy statements--is a clear expression of contempt for the customer. Doing so for something as pointless, as non-value-added as anti-piracy statements, however, also indicates a fundamental cluelessness regarding customer expectations that is just mind-boggling. Let's take the analogy of click-wrap license agreements. There are plenty of things to object to in those, but at least they don't force you to wait, say, 5 minutes after they are displayed (the amount of time you might safely expect it would take anyone to read through it) to let you click "Yes, I waive all my rights and agree to all your onerous licensing terms" and get on with it. Conversely, I was surprised to find very few DVDs that have previews. I don't mind previews a bit, many times I actually enjoy them. Of course it goes without saying they should be easy to skip, right from the top-level menu, not just by fast-forwarding. 9:52:39 PM    comment []

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Liking NetFlix We signed up for Netflix about a month ago. 3 movies out at a time for $20/month. Setting aside the convenience and selection factors, it is cheaper than Blockbuster at 5 movies/month (fewer if Blockbuster late fees factor in your personal equation). We have been extremely pleased, with performance surpassing expectations. Reasons we are pleased, above and beyond the obvious benefits of the fundamental value proposition: Great selection. I keep a list of movies to see on my Palm, and there are a number that have been there for years, because Blockbuster doesn't carry them. So far, I have found every single one at Netflix (including classics and foreign movies). Ultra-fast turnaround. I figured it would take 2-3 days for each segment of the round-trip. So, if you returned a DVD on Monday, you might hope to have the replacement by Friday, with a reasonable chance for Saturday. Not so. We have very consistently experienced 2-day round-trip turnaround. The return address on the pre-paid mailer is local (Minneapolis), so obviously they have some good logistics in place. Perhaps we are lucky because this is a big city with a hub airport, so your mileage may vary (since they don't seem to tout this in their numerous on-line ads--more on those in a moment--I'm guessing 2 days is not the norm). A small nicety is the ability to add a not-yet-released movie to your rental queue now, so that you get it when it comes out. Something I really don't like is the fact that they routinely assault me, a paying customer, with their very annoying pop-ups entreating me to review the movies I have rented. You should never, never inflict a pop-up on a paying customer. Let alone do it repeatedly, every darn time they log on to your site.  So I'm really happy with Netflix, I just hope there is no smoke and mirrors involved. As long as they can keep collecting my $20/month, for instance, they don't actually have any incremental motivation to give me better selection or service. Obviously, the risk they would run is of my quitting for a competitor (and I don't think the entry barriers are very high in this market; I think the biggest one is the "Amazon factor" of web presence and name recognition. Speaking of Amazon, how did THEY miss out on this business?). I really they are on track to be profitable at current subscription rates, that they are not subsidizing the current service, hoping to get big and raise prices later. 9:34:47 PM    comment []

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While I was at Otis Elevator, through 1997, we were still using the old MS-Mail client. It was a pretty simple email-client, none of the enhanced Outlook functionality. Anyway, I had this developer contractor working for me, Jay, and EVERY SINGLE MESSAGE he sent me was marked High Priority. Every one, no exceptions. He was older, perhaps not of the "email generation", so for a long time I just let it go. Finally, though, I said to him "Jay, it would be a lot easier for me to tell when you really have an urgent issue if you would only mark the critical emails as high priority". He gave me a perplexed look and said "I never send anything high priority". My response was "Oh yeah?", and I showed him all the messages. Eventually we figured out that the mail client was too clever for its own good—it was inferring that, if you were going to the trouble of asking for a read receipt, then the email MUST be high priority! That got me to thinking of some emails I had sent…once or twice a year, lowly little me would get assigned an action item that involved reporting findings directly to the President of Otis North America. And of course, I wanted to know when (if) my email had been read, so I sent it with read receipt request. So the result might have seemed, to him, that this rather low-placed employee had a poor sense of the importance of his work, in the scheme of things. My only consolation was the thought that he may not have known what the high priority icon was supposed to mean, so he just might have thought, in passing, "what the heck is the funny red line next to the little envelope picture on that one email?". 8:02:14 PM    comment []

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Some people believe in applying the dictum "You can't manage what you can't measure" to employee performance reviews. On the other hand, there is the well-known law that "you get what you measure". For instance, Niton Bhide says: "Most measures of [programmer productivity] actually promote bad programming practices...For example, one good way to reduce the bugs/KLOC count is to do lot of 'cut/paste' code. This will increase the KLOC count and hence reduce the bug/KLOC.  So a good programmer who opts for code reuse (using function calls) and refactoring is actually get a lower performance rating than a bad programmer doing cut/paste code." Joel seems to be of the mind that since you can't measure performance accurately, all incentives and bonuses are harmful. I'm don't think I'm ready to go along with that. I agree that it is difficult to scientifically measure performance of knowledge workers, but that doesn't mean you can't evaluate it, realizing such evaluation will be inherently subjective. Anyway, all theorizing aside, the first rule of setting performance objectives must be: make sure they won't actively discourage one from doing right and good things. 4:03:29 PM    comment []