Gadgetopia

SCO fires CEO Darl McBride, architect of litigation strategy : I wonder how this guy will ever get another job in IT.

In an SEC filing published today, SCO revealed that CEO Darl McBride has been terminated and is no longer with the company.

[…] McBride was the architect and public face of SCO’s misguided campaign against Linux. He claimed that the open source operating system infringed on SCO’s copyright and included a significant quantity of code stolen from UNIX System V.

Ramen Profitable: A good term to know.  Blend got ramen profitable after about a year.

Ramen profitability is […] a startup that becomes profitable after 2 months, even though its revenues are only $3000 a month, because the only employees are a couple 25 year old founders who can live on practically nothing. Revenues of $3000 a month do not mean the company has succeeded, or even found a path to success. But the ramen profitable startup does share something with the one that’s profitable in the traditional way: they don’t need to raise money to survive.

I’m just back from Web Content 2009, which I really enjoyed.  It got me thinking a bit about conferences, and the value of going to them, especially in light of Scott Abel’s discussion of the trouble the conference world is having right now.

I think conferences have benefit on five levels:

• Actual skill-based learning
  These are things you actually learn – discrete nuggets of information that you did not know before.  For instance, Maxwell Hoffmann gave a great presentation on globalization, and I came away with a dozen new ideas about things I needed to consider for Blend’s own globalization projects.
  
  What’s somewhat interesting is that I actually find this to be the least common benefit.  Unless you sign-up for an actual workshop or training session that’s designed to teach you a new skill, I find that I don’t actually learn a lot of hard skills at conferences.
• Soft learning, or “trend learning”
  There are the amorphous concepts that are floating around in your head that you “sort of know” or have “sort of heard of.”  During a lot of sessions, you start to hear about these things more and more, and their relative applicability to your work starts to shuffle.  Perfect example: XML databases and xQuery.  I had multiple sessions where people were talking about the shift away from relational databases in content management and toward storing things in pure XML in systems like Xindice, Mark Logic, and xDB.  I followed this up with a long conversation with the Mark Logic sales guy, and while I didn’t learn any concrete skills, I’m paying much more attention to that entire area of technology now than I was a week ago.
• Expansion of focus
  Conferences just open your eyes to the bigger picture.  The day-to-day of your job often leaves you fighting fires all the time, and never looking further down the road.  But listening to big thinkers for a couple days who are more concerned with your industry as a whole than with your specific business in particular, really helps you step back, get above the tree-line, and consider the entire forest for a minute.  Epiphanies can result.
• Networking
  This is the big one, and you why, if you pick the right conference, you could almost go, not attend any sessions, and still get huge value out of it.  It’s often said that the real value of a conference is what happens between the sessions, and my experience bears this out.  I had some great conversations with Stewart Mader about wikis, Ann Rockley about content modeling (she reviewed my presentation for me, even), and I had constant contact with other people in my industry that I’ll likely have reason to contact and interact with in the coming months.
• Morale
  This depends on how much you travel, but traveling to conferences can be…fun.  If you haven’t traveled for a while, it’s a nice reason to get to a bigger city, go out in the evenings, and get thrust out of your geographic world for a little while.  If you don’t travel much, it can be a nice way to take a break.

So, there you have it.  When most people go to a conference – especially their first, few conferences — they expect nothing but skill-based learning.  If that’s all you want, book a training session or workshop or something.  Conferences are often about the bigger picture and if you take a step back and focus on that area, you can learn a lot more.

SiCortex Meets an Untimely End: A very sad situation for everyone involved.

[…] the five venture capital firms supporting Linux cluster vendor SiCortex have pulled their funding, forcing the Massachusetts-based company to shut down its operations. As the company prepares to sell off its assets, there are said to be only a handful of employees remaining.

SiCortex was a Blend client, and a good one.  We worked on their Web site in one capacity or another for four years.  My first traveling gig with Blend was to visit them for three days in 2005 to help them piece together a Web strategy.

I remember interviewing all the of the stakeholders over the three days.  These guys were hardcore – the type that wrote code in 1s and 0s.  One of them worked at PARC back in the day.  Another was almost 70-years-old and still talked about processor design with the excitement of a 22-year-old starting his dream job.

They had a great product.  Their machines where fast, compact, and could plug into a 220-watt outlet.  When you walked into their offices in Maynard, Mass, they had a bunch of them sitting behind glass in the lobby.  If Darth Vader got into high-performance computing, this would be his machine.

We worked with some great people out there (one relationship thankfully continues on another venture).  So, we’re mourning both the loss of the relationship, and the loss of the technology and vision they brought to the HPC market.

Fallen star SGI to sell most assets for $25M: Kind of sad to see SGI end like this.

Former Silicon Valley star Silicon Graphics has filed for bankruptcy protection for a second time and agreed to sell most of its assets for $25 million to computing rival Rackable Systems.

Monetizing your Web App: Business Model Options: Here’s a solid analysis of all the different ways you can get money from your Web app.

Just subscriptions? He describes eight different flavors of subscriptions.

There’s also an analysis of the Webware Top 100 Web apps and how they’re monetized.

MySQL Leaders Bail Out of Sun Microsystems: Apparently the mySQL acquisition hasn’t gone well for Sun. Most of the executive team from MySQL has bailed.

[…] the loss of the core MySQL team bodes ill for Sun, which pushes the open source database as an alternative to similar products from Oracle, Microsoft and others. Much of Sun’s future hinges on its ability to turn the open-source MySQL and its open-source Solaris operating system into must-have business software that then drives interest in Sun’s hardware products.

Feds (finally) cracking down on H-1B abuses: The H-1B Visa program is regularly abused in exactly this way.

Long-time readers will remember me getting into trouble with a local Sioux Falls company for making fun of a job posting that even God himself would have a tough time qualifying for, all so they could claim “no qualified workers” and bring someone in from overseas, only to hold their passport essentially for ransom.

The most common abuse scenario goes something like this: a company looking to hire a low- or mid-level programmer posts a job advertisement containing some patently ridiculous set of qualifications, like 20 years of Java programming experience (Java hasn’t even been around that long) and a Ph.D. in computer science. Upon getting no responses, the company applies to the federal government to fill the position with an H-1B worker on the grounds that it can’t find any qualified Americans. Having hired the H-1B worker, the company may pay him less than the advertised wage, or it may offer him no benefits, or his working conditions may be poor, or some combination of these and other factors, yet the immigrant worker sticks it out for a set number of years in hopes of getting a green card.

I used to work in a multi-tenant building that had an office tenant who ran one of these outfits. There was a common “breakroom” in the building that held the coffee machine, and that perhaps 10 people a day would enter to get a cup of coffee and leave.

The guy put up a bulletin board in this breakroom, and would post jobs there all the time. This would satisfy the requirement to “publicly advertise” the position. He rotated a bunch of jobs on and off this board, only putting them up long enough so he could say that he posted them for 90 days, but couldn’t find anyone.

I was amazed that Ruth, the 60-year-old receptionist of the accountant down the hall, couldn’t fill the DBA/Flash Developer/C++ Programmer/Project Manager/House Painter position.

Time to Reboot America: Thomas Friedman goes on a rant about how the US has lost its edge in technology engineering compared to other countries.. It’s worth reading. Technologically speaking, is the US the first world anymore?

To top it off, we’ve fallen into a trend of diverting and rewarding the best of our collective I.Q. to people doing financial engineering rather than real engineering. These rocket scientists and engineers were designing complex financial instruments to make money out of money — rather than designing cars, phones, computers, teaching tools, Internet programs and medical equipment that could improve the lives and productivity of millions.

For all these reasons, our present crisis is not just a financial meltdown crying out for a cash injection. We are in much deeper trouble. In fact, we as a country have become General Motors — as a result of our national drift. Look in the mirror: G.M. is us.

There’s a common saying in business that “it takes three times more effort to get business from a new customer than from an existing customer.” I believe that to be true, regardless of your industry.

Yet, we’re all consumed with pursuing the next deal. Why is this? If your Web development company has dozens of hungry clients, clamoring for your time, why is there always so much emphasis on new business? Why do current clients tend to get neglected or placed in line behind new business which comes in the door?

Last month, I read the fantastic book “Managing the Professional Service Firm” by David Maister. It’s geared toward the traditional professional services — accountants and lawyers, mainly — but the lessons in it are widely applicable to any “I’ll do X for money” type of firm.

Though long, this quote is worth reading, regarding why firms are so obsessive about new business:

I have learned from numerous conversations on this topic with consultants, lawyers, accountants, actuaries, and other professionals that primary among all the reasons for the relative overemphasis on new clients is the simple fact that pursuing and getting a new client is more fun. New clients provide the “thrill of the chase” in a way that maturing existing relationships does not. Pursuing a new client proposal opportunity usually has the characteristics of a well-defined, finite, project with relatively clear tasks and specific deadlines. Nurturing an existing relationship often has few inherent deadlines, little obvious structure, and more ambiguous tasks. Consequently, it is reported to me, it is a less “satisfying” activity: It doesn’t provide the same “rush of adrenaline.”

It’s so true. New projects are perfect, in the sense that everything is theoretical. In your mind, the project is unsullied by reality. You envision perfect execution, and relish the chance to attack a new challenge.

Sadly, it’s a lot like relationships — the grass is always greener and whatnot. New business validates you as a company. Getting new work means someone said, “Yes, you are good enough to hire.” Not getting the new work — even if you have more than enough existing work — is like someone saying, “Stick with what you know. I’m rejecting you in favor of someone else.”

Sometimes, I’m convinced we over-emphasize new work to shore up our self-esteem and sense of worth as professionals.

Acknowledging this fact doesn’t solve the problem, but it makes you more aware of it and how destructive it is. Being cognizant of this — even just for the last month — has positively affected the way I do business.

I’ve read two articles in the last couple days about Japanese automakers — Toyota and Honda. Both were complimentary about their training and engineering practices. Both are worth reading:

• Engineers Rule
  At American auto companies, finance guys and marketers rise to the top. Not at Honda.

• What Toyota knows that GM doesn’t
  […] while … employees were not manufacturing automobiles, they were in training. They were doing safety drills, participating in productivity improvement exercises, attending presentations on material handling and workplace hazards, taking diversity and ethics classes, attending maintenance education and taking a stream of online tests to measure and record their skill improvements.

The second one, about Toyota, really speaks to me. I truly believe that the great companies spend downturns tooling up for the recovery. This is when you invest in training, R&D, and innovation. The economy will recover, and if Blend experiences a slowdown, we’ll won’t spend it sitting around.

Six Apart Hit by Downturn, Lays Off 8% of Staff: This is discouraging.

Six Apart, the producer of blogging platform Movable Type, has announced layoffs of up to 8% of its full time staff.

In addition to laying off 16 employees, the entire management staff is taking a 15% pay cut.

I was having an email exchange with my friend Kevin Shoesmith. He knew I had been with the guys at silverorange, and he pointed out a blog post from Dan James earlier this summer, about how to grow a Web development company.

One of the pieces of advice he gives might be shocking to a lot of people:

Don’t bid on projects, respond to Requests For Proposals (RFPs), or do mock ups for free. Number of proposals silverorange has written in nine years: 20-30. Number of projects silverorange has won by writing proposals: 0.

I was a little taken aback by this. No RFPs? Isn’t that how stuff gets done?

I mentioned this to Joe today, accompanied by “isn’t that nuts?” or something. But Joe responded thusly:

Well, remember that we’ve never won a wide-call RFP.

I was a little stunned, but he’s right. We have never “won” an RFP process at Blend, despite completing 12-15 of them. I know David complains about them as “cattle calls,” but I thought for sure that we had landed at least a couple deals from them.

But no, the RFP response effort at Blend has been a total bust over the years. And they’re so time-consuming — to really respond well to a typically in-depth RFP is a 6+ hour proposition, stretched over several days as you go back and forth, getting questions answered, rolling the dice and guessing on hours, etc.

As for never writing a “bid,” I’m not quite sure how they get away with that. We write “bids” all the time, though they’re usually just comprised of a couple pages that essentially say, “this is our basic understanding of what you want to do, and this is roughly how much time we think it’s going to take, and how much it’s going to cost, but this is just an estimate…” A lot of companies need these for internal documentation, budget approvals, etc.

But, the traditional RFP process — is this a complete time-waster? I mean, someone has to be winning these things…right?

Why we bill by the hour: Interesting page explaining why this particular development firm does not do fixed bid work, and only works by the hour. Good reasoning here.

It’s been my experience previously working at Compaq and later starting up our own business six years ago that in a fixed bid situation, either the client gets taken to the cleaners or the developers do. With fixed bid, the requirements of a project have to be so locked down and fine grained that there is no flexibility.

My Interview Experience at Microsoft: This is a really interesting account of one guy’s 9.5 hour interview process with Microsoft.

[he] explained the day’s events. He gave me a piece of paper with an interview schedule that went through the 2-3pm slot. He said, “I can’t tell you who comes after this. If you do well, the last interviewer will take you to the next person. If you don’t do so well, they’ll take you back here and we’ll talk about it.” Yikes.

Man, Microsoft interviews people hard. They kicked this guy’s ass for a full day. Sounds like he was crazy prepared for it too.