Tuesday, June 08, 2004

Tomorrow (Wednesday) Microsoft Research is doing open house events in both our Silicon Valley and Cambridge labs. One of the things that people tend not to appreciate is that good research labs reflect the local and regional tendencies toward particular approaches and domains of research. Computer science research is not the same all over the globe, partly because students and researchers are not infinitely mobile; they often settle in geographic areas and look for research in that area within their chosen domain. Do a research university with a strong domain focus will often draw other research labs and startups with strong ties to those same domains. Microsoft has a research lab in the Valley because there is a wealth of great researchers there working in areas that are important to Microsoft and the industry as a whole, and we want to be able to both hire those people and collaborate with them in other institutions. The same is true for our Cambridge lab, as well as Beijing. There was a strange newspaper article earlier this week talking about how one of Google's strengths is hiring Ph.D.'s -- and how rather than have a "research division" they supposedly let all of their technical employees do "research" on the side for 20% of their time, in contrast to the traditional research lab model with full-time researchers. The reporter (who, by the way, spoke to someone in HR at MS but repeatedly declined opportunities to speak to someone in MSR) thinks this is some kind of magic formula for success. Frankly, I don't get it. A Ph.D. doesn't mean that you're smarter than everyone else, or that you're necessarily more knowledgeable than someone with, say, a B.S. degree, outside a very narrow domain. It does mean that you've been trained to do research, and shown some aptitude for it. I see lots of problems with their model. For one, why would you hire for a special skill and then only let the person use it 20% of the time? Second, what kind of  "research" are they really doing that only requires 20% of their time? Third, and I've complained about this before, Google employees aren't allowed to publish papers on research results. It's very easy in that environment to convince yourself that whatever you're doing is good research. The only way to know for sure is to have it peer-reviewed and debated by experts in an open forum. So what do they have? A bunch of very smart people (truly -- there is no doubt of that) with advanced degrees, scattered throughout the organization, splitting their time, and telling themselves that they are doing good research work without any real evidence. We have a critical mass of researchers, focused fulltime on research, publishing papers and getting tons of tech transfers (some of which we're showing at the roadshows tomorrow). Maybe they are on to something, but I doubt it and there isn't a lot of evidence to show so far. I'll take our model, thank you. And I hope for their sake that there isn't a mass exodus after the IPO. 10:38:39 PM    ; comment [];  I am way, way behind on blogging about the books I've read. I finished Moneyball less than 48 hours after I started. It's a very quick read, and I had a head start -- my brother in law writes for Baseball Prospectus and I play (badly, of late) in a rotisserie baseball league. Moneyball is the story of the Oakland A's, a team with a problem. You see, not all major league baseball teams are created equal; some, just by virtue of their location, have a much higher demand for tickets, merchandise and broadcast rights, and thus have a much larger amount of revenue that they can plow back into player salaries. The New York Yankees are the most (in)famous of these teams, and they flaunt it every chance they get. The A's are decidedly not one of those teams; they have low revenues and owners who are unwilling to sink large amounts of capital into the franchise in the hopes of signing an expensive winning team. Fortunately for them, they have Billy Beane. Beane, himself an ex-pro player, is a businessman and strategic thinker. He instinctively understands that where there are inefficiencies in markets, there are advantages to be had that can make huge differences -- and there are gaping inefficiencies in the market for professional baseball players. MLB teams make management decisions based upon years of experience, rules of thumb, and lots of mythology. Hard data and facts have almost nothing to do with it. Spend 5 minutes listening the the color commentary announcer on any baseball broadcast, and you will have more than enough evidence to convince you of this. When Beane landed the General Manager job, the first thing he did was bring in Paul DePodesta as his right-hand man, trusted advisor, and head number-cruncher. DePodesta had followed in the footsteps of luminaries such as Bill James in doing solid statistical analysis of the game of baseball, and discovered that the key predictors of the success of a particular team are not the statistics that are generally tracked for teams and players. He re-ranked all the major league and minor league players based upon his own analysis, and identified several undervalued palyers that could be had cheaply. Using this method, Beane wheeled-and-dealed and rebuilt Oakland into a contending team on a razor-thin budget -- in the process embarrassing Bud Selig, the incompetent owner of the Milwaukee Brewers and current Commissioner of Baseball, who has insisted that revenue-sharing and caps on player salaries are the only way to keep baseball competitive. Beane had to fight the system and the ingrained culture of baseball to bring about this change, but it worked. He no longer has a monopoly on this approach, as two of his proteges (including DePodesta) are now general managers of other major league teams. The inefficiencies will go away over time. But at least in the short run, there's little chance that Steinbrenner will see the light, and I'm more than happy to relegate him and his overpaid monkey-boys to the land of the dinosaurs. Moneybal is a great read, and a great education on how to think strategically and analytically in an environment where that is against the prevailing culture. 10:14:31 PM    ; comment [];  Fox has started re-running Arrested Development again from the beginning, in parallel with new episodes. This was the sleeper comedy of the fall. It's a wry look at a rich eccentric (and quite dysfunctional) family. The patriarch, who runs the family's realestate development firm, is arrested for fraud and embezzlement, and his one responsible son (a widower with a teenage son of his own) tries to salvage the business and hold his crazy family together. I roll on the floor laughing with every episode. Don't miss it. 9:49:15 PM    ; comment [];  Wow, I didn't realize that I'd gotten that far behind in my blogging. Lots to talk about. This past weekend, I was in D.C. on business -- I gave a talk to the ACE Council of Fellows, which is a group of senior university faculty and administrators who have been nominated to this program to groom them or bigger and better things. I gave a lunch talk on Sunday on the future of computing, and how it's changing science, learning, and our understanding of our world. Since the weather was cooperating, I then did a walking tour of the National Zoo. As zoos go, this one's ok. It's clear that they are trying very hard, but they have too many animals in cramped quarters, and that always depresses me. There was one thing that I thought was very cool, though -- the "o-line". They have an exhibit area, separate and distant from the great apes area, which explores how smart animals (especially primates) are. To get the orangs back and forth, they have a series of high towers, with climbing ropes between them. The orangs climb up the first tower in their home area, traverse the length of the ropes, then climb down the far end in the other exhibit. The middle towers go right through the middle of the zoo, right over the visitors' heads... the middle towers have low-voltage wires so the orangs can't climb down them, and the ropes are about 30 feet up and the orangs are too smart to drop down to the ground -- so they can't really escape. It's very clever. I didn't actually get to see the orangutans use it, but it's such a cool idea. In the late afternoon and evening, I met my friend Andy who lives with his wife and son outside of DC and we visited several of the memorials on the mall. I hadn't been to the Vietnam Memorial in about 20 years. It's still as striking, but the popular mystique has definitely worn off. When I first visited, it was fairly new, Vietnam was still a recent sore spot, and you could hear a pin drop as people walked through. Now there is just a general crowd, and while everyone tends to be respectful, there is a dull roar coming from the crush of people. Perhaps time is healing the wounds. It did leave me wondering, though, if at some point in the future we'll feel that same angst when we visit an Iraq war memorial. We visited the FDR Memorial, which is beautiful and wonderfully tranquil. Lots of waterfalls. Lots of famous quotes from FDR. Sparse and yet very moving sculptures. A must-see. Finally, we went by the new World War II memorial. I don't understand what the critics are complaining about; it's very tastefully done and yet equally powerful in its statement. It's situated directly between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial, and I think people were afraid that it would mess up the view in the reflecting pool, but it doesn't; they designed it very carefully to have a low profile. It was interesting that I happened to be there on the 60th anniversary of D-Day. There was a good number of people there, but not the overwhelming crowd that I expected for a new memorial (just opened last week) and on the D-day anniversary. On a related note: I tried something on the plane trip, and it worked so well I'm going to make it a standing practice on every plane trip now. Just before the flight took off, I put in earplugs, and I kept them in for the entire flight. I'd read that engine noise actually increases your fatigue, and I've tried earplugs and noise-cancelling headphones sporadically, but I've never had the discipline to wear them for an entire flight. Normally I can't sleep at all on an airplane, but this time I actually dozed off several times. And I walked off the flight feeling great. 9:43:02 PM    ; comment [];

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