Author: Lynne

VC Loses Weight, Music Loses a Legend

SV is buzzing about former Mobius VC Heidi Roizen’s new vanity music CD Skinny Songs. Since leaving the investment game, Heidi decided to dedicate herself to losing weight (don’t you wish you had the time and money to do that?), but was dissatisfied with her exercise music. So she turned “songwriter”, crafting lyrics like “For years we were together, every Saturday night,/we’d go out dancin’, you’d hold me in tight,/but you were unforgiving and you wouldn’t let me grow/Now I can’t put you on – but I can’t let you go” (Skinny Jeans) and “I use wills of steel, at every meal, to control my every bite/And with my xray vision I can see without a doubt/There’s a skinny girl inside me, I’ve just got to let her out” (The Incredible Shrinking Woman – isn’t that the name of an old scifi movie too?). She didn’t write the music, sing, play, or produce of course, since she doesn’t know how, but she does know how to fund a project…

Meanwhile, Dan Fogelberg, a true artist, died of cancer yesterday, and the world got a little bit dimmer somehow. Dan was one of my first strong musical influences along with Christopher Parkening (I learned to play guitar from Parkening’s classical guitar book and no, I don’t use a pick because classical guitarist use their fingers!). I played and sang Stars and Be on Your Way while other kids were listening to disco.

I haven’t played his songs in close to twenty years I’m ashamed to say. When I have time, I spend it on my own compositions (and yes, I write the music, lyrics and sing and play, but my husband does all the digital production, and no, it’s not a business, it’s just for fun). But even after all these years, I still remember them.

So I pulled out the guitar last evening. The fire was warm and so was the music. I sang Longer while my husband listened and my daughter drew. Our cat Tiger came over from where he was sleeping, jumped up next to me and leaned his head against the guitar body.

Longer than there’ve been fishes in the ocean
Higher than any bird ever flew
Longer than there’ve been stars up in the heavens
I’ve been in love with you

Stronger than any mountain cathedral
Truer than any tree ever grew
Deeper than any forest primeval
I am in love with you

I’ll bring fire in the winters
You’ll send showers in the springs
We’ll fly through the falls and summers
With love on our wings

Through the years as the fire starts to mellow
Burning lines in the book of our lives
Though the binding cracks and the pages start to yellow
I’ll be in love with you
I’ll be in love with you

Thank you Dan for your wonderful music. You inspired a young girl to pick up a pen and a guitar and sing for the pure joy of it. I know your heavenly debut will be wonderful. But we will miss you here.

Silicon Valley’s Middle Class Dilemma

Almost everyone I know likes to claim that they are “middle class”. Yes, I know I live in Los Gatos, a nice little town that in many ways resembles Santa Monica or La Jolla. We’ve got a great library, a Christmas parade (I once marched in it with my kids as “California pioneers”), a nice neat downtown, several great parks, and what is generally considered a very good school system (although my daughter decided to short-circuit a slow educational malaise for Ohlone College after 7th grade). Yet we’re all “middle class”. Not wealthy. If pressed, someone might say that local resident Steve Wozniak is probably wealthy, even though he eats at Bakers Square during pitches.

But wealthy? No, most everyone I know (even several VCs) don’t feel wealthy. Oh, they hope to be someday. But with $5,000/mo mortgages, insurance and taxes going into Silicon Valley tract houses that went for $30,000 new in 1967, they definitely feel middle class. And scared they’ll lose it all if something – anything – goes wrong.

The problem with definitions of “middle class” is that they don’t take into account debt load and age. Many people who appear affluent in expensive areas of the country have very high debt load, dominated by mortgages. The only reason they survive is that good old mortgage deduction on their taxes.

People buy houses based on their current income and debt (unless, of course, they fell into the subprime disaster – note that many people who qualified for better ended up with these mortgages because brokers made more off of them). What if they lose their job, or their medical insurance tops out and they have to go out-of-pocket on medical bills? In this case, the fixed asset value of their house doesn’t help much, unless they can unload it at a profit fast, because once the debt load rises or you can’t validate the old mortgage with a paystub, you can’t refi and pull money out of that asset. But you still have to pay mortgage, taxes, maintenance and all that stuff. And in costly areas like Silicon Valley, that adds up real fast.

And finally, if you’re over 40, there’s a good chance you’ll not get as good a job, pay-wise, than you had when you were younger. We see it all the time here in Silicon Valley. It has nothing to do with education – I see very educated people here past 40 saying they’re “retired” rather than admit they have no job prospects. It has nothing to do with connections or talent – many of these people have established track records of products and successes and everybody knows it. It has everything to do with age. Nobody wants an employee over 40 because 1) the medical costs go up – I paid $70/mo for a 20-something in my engineering group in one of my startups and he had a major car accident that cost Kaiser plenty, while several 40-something engineers had monthly medical costs 10-times that and never got sick – and 2) old guys and gals aren’t “cool”, and investors and the few old survivor executives only want to be surrounded by youth to feel young.

Maybe that’s where the real Silicon Valley “wealth gap” lies. The super-rich winners believe they are immortal and beautiful (even if they are old toads) because they are rich, and only wish to deal with others like them (the current minimum in venture circles these days is about $100M) and they use the young to flatter their egos and not necessarily to line their pockets. The people who made them their successes – the generation of hard-working scientists, engineers and businesspeople that created the wealth – are disposable because their very presence is a reminder that the “wealthy” got there because of them.

So what happens to the guy who made that open source project succeed, or that gal who got those semiconductor patents together? They’re “retired”. Put out to pasture. There are no second chances in Silicon Valley.

The only bright light in this little meditation is that we should be happy they still use “retired” in the conventional sense, and not the Blade Runner sense.

Cyberbullying on the Internet

The Lori Drew case has hit the media this week, and the reaction is fairly universal – how could a mother behave in such a shameless narcissistic evil manner to drive a young girl to suicide? The anonymous use of the Internet and MySpace to bully this child provides the techno-grist for over-the-top analysis by doyennes of housewife journalism like Judith Warner (admittedly, I do like her style) who draws rather shaky lines between this nasty criminal weirdo and “helicopter parents” who dote on their offspring. Unfortunately, this trivializes and distracts from the centerpiece of this drama. Powerful technology like the Internet can be used by amoral predators to hunt down victims as efficiently and rapidly as normal folks use it to hunt for the best HDTV bargain.

The “good old days” mantra (oh sure, bullying didn’t happen before the Internet? I’ve got a bridge to sell you too) that pops up during this public debate is relevant only in the sense that the way we interact in society is vastly changed and enhanced by technology. Social networks like MySpace and FaceBook and business networks like LinkedIn are poor substitutes for real friendship, collegiality and love. But what if you don’t have any real friendship, collegiality and love? For whatever reason one would prefer to choose (consumerism, individualism, globalism, …), these businesses would not exist and flourish economically if there weren’t so many isolated people out there looking for validation of self. While technology like the Internet facilitates new forms of social interaction, it is not the sole catalyst for such interaction. That responsibility lies within ourselves and the way we treat others in the real world.

The major lament about the Internet is that it has no “controls” to prevent criminal behavior. Consider that the Internet (Arpanet for those oldsters who remember) was designed at a time when networks were few and conduct was scrupulously monitored. In the 1970’s, I knew quite a few people who were very careful with their postings for fear of losing their prized university or corporate accounts. However, balancing this was the belief that academic freedom was equally important, and that disputed statements should be heard and debated – not suppressed – in other words “Cui peccare licet peccat minus” (Ovid).

But in the real world, we also view actions separately from words. When words are used to torment and destroy another person, it becomes a difficult matter of law. It forces us to look at our values and behavior. How many times have you, dear reader, met with a poison-pen email or posting notable only for its vacuous viciousness and then actually met the writer and found him or her indifferent or unaware of the venom dripping from the words? I actually have on occasion, and it is very disconcerting.

Anonymity on the Internet has always been a bit of a misnomer. The Internet provides for much better tracking and record-keeping than sending an old-fashioned letter and is far less regulated than phone conversations. Cookies and behavioral search give businesses like MySpace a “snapshot” on buying habits and trends worth billions of dollars. People who use these “free” services may believe they are “untraceable” but the entire focus of the business is one of tracing a caricature of the consumer. Identifying users in criminal or civil actions is simply incidental to their business, but as the RIAA actions demonstrate, the information is available.

DNA analysis has revolutionized identification of criminals, but that hasn’t stopped all crime. The same goes for Internet tracking. Technology changes, but the desire for justice is timeless.

Oh Microsoft, Google is Calling – They Want the OS Space

With the announcement of Android, the Google open source mobile platform, there has been breathless talk of Google taking out the “locked” cellphone market with a Linux OS version. But we all know there are many open source Linux OS mobile versions already out there, so grabbing one and putting some stuff into it isn’t really that hard. In fact, one wag I know had this little joke:

How many Google Ph.D’s does it take to create a mobile operating system? Answer – 1000. One to download the OS, and 999 to add “Copyright Google”.

Hmm, ever since the bright kids at Google were accused of appropriating code to build their social networking site Orkut (see Google Stole Code? Is Social Networking that Hard?), many techies have expressed a somewhat low opinion of Google’s technical expertise, especially when doing the actual work with all those incredible resources in people and money is probably a lot easier than “borrowing” somebody else’s “crufty” code and figuring it out. Sometimes, by the way, “crufty” means “I can’t figure out your code because I’m too stupid so I’m going to run it down”. I got that a lot with 386BSD. But given the incredible brainpower Google has gathered, I would think they could not only eventually figure it out, but maybe do a better job from the beginning…

So if Google is so full of smart people, why I am asked did they just take a Linux distro and hack it? Why didn’t they give us a “from the ground up” genius OS?

Google is full of smart people, and Linux (and BSD and Windows BTW) are not optimal OS’s for mobile computing and they know that. They also do have the resources to completely change the paradigm of open source and mobile computing but choose not to. That’s a fact.

But choosing a Linux distro and entering the mobile space is the perfect feint if a very large and very rich company has decided to take on Microsoft in the OS market, but is worried given their rival’s monopoly that they already would look like a loser if they competed directly. By cudgeling one of the Unix lookalikes and stuffing it into a small device, they can appear like they are a real contender in a big space and work their way into the heart of Microsoft’s defenses.

So it is a smart strategy. Too bad people only think tactically nowadays – they’re missing the real battle.

Fun Friday – Nobel Peace Prize for Gore Validates Global Climate Change Concerns

Well, the Nobel Peace Prize committee decided that global climate change is important enough to award the Nobel to Al Gore and the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Some are already protesting that concerns over rapid changes in the environment have nothing to do with peace, but it’s pretty hard to promote peace when people start warring over rapidly-dwindling resources as drought, flooding, and loss of habitat threaten their very existence.

Of course, there are many people still in denial that their lifestyle can and does impact the earth – we’re actually all in this together. There are also many political and commercial interests who fear that recognition of this problem worldwide will impact their private deals before they mine out the money, and like the tobacco companies of an earlier generation feel compelled to promote and package rhetorical nonsense to muddy the waters. There is no absolution in denial, but there is vindication in an international award.

Silicon Valley, the heart of technological innovation and a lot of “green” investment, has embraced the concept of global climate change and there is a great deal of investment in this area. This is a complex problem demanding real long-term commitment and funding, and since it took us a while to get to this point, it won’t turn around overnight. But we’re well-educated, innovative, and opportunistic, and there’s a lot of gold in new clean technologies, so expect the unexpected! Until we get there, I hope you enjoy this short video “tone poem” entitled Global Warming – A Threat to our Life. It reminds us there is still hope for our world. I think the Nobel committee would agree.

Guilty Pleasures and Guilty Publishers

OK, I admit it. The New York Times has gotten rid of their notorious “Times Select” racket, and I’ve been busily catching up on all the columns that didn’t make the grade (the moderator likes politics) on Behind the Times. And so I’ve been glancing through Dick Cavett’s blog, and found his difficulties at getting his best selling book shipped to eager bookstores very interesting. Apparently, he had to resort to threats of canceling the book tour that was generating tons of sales for the publisher unless they shipped books to Chicago!

The comments were also very interesting. Many authors wrote in with stories of how impossible it was to get the publisher to ship any books to any bookstores, but they lacked the star-power of a Cavett to get the ball rolling. Several cited disasters with liberal arts incompetents masquerading as businessmen and women mishandling their projects and yes, I’ve experienced this myself, particularly the idiot from Wiley who couldn’t keep straight the project, the book, the times scheduled to discuss matters, and the communications. While I could cope with basic incompetence (I work in Silicon Valley, after all), I had to threaten legal action when she decided unilaterally wreck the project when it was essentially completed by contacting one of my business associates (who ran a lovely datacenter and was going to buy lots and lots of books) that she didn’t want to do the project and he shouldn’t deal with me. She then went on to sign a nobody to try and rip off the same manuscript (I hadn’t given her the good stuff yet, so there wasn’t enough to rip-off, because I had been clued in by my agent to be careful after my prior editor was off’d), and it went on to be a complete failure. Suffice to say she didn’t last long, but I never did business with that publisher again.

But the primary reasons for this lack of execution are economic and global in nature. Yes, execution is CEO-speak for doing, or not doing, the job, and it’s the executives that are ultimately responsible. Cavett found it almost impossible to get his publishing execs on the ball for executing on his agreement, even though executives are supposed to be the ones who make sure things go — that was my job in the last four companies I co-founded. In fact, I remember when execution was always on the top-three lists for CEOs, but last time I saw John Doerr he apparently didn’t think it was that important anymore — hmm, do you start to see a pattern? Sometimes when people hear words like global, they feel they don’t have to do anything because the problem is too large. This may explain the complete disinterest Cavett experienced — they just don’t feel they have to deal with any problem because it’s too big.

So I guess we have to reduce the problem down to a level where they have to take responsibility. So I’ll take a shot at it (anyone is free to comment on a better approach). The reason publishers blow it has much to do with how they have adapted, or not adapted, to Internet publicity and distribution. Book cycles are much shorter than 20 years ago, and demands for books are likely to be stochastic (a foreign word to most liberal arts publishers, but very understandable to technologists). If a publishing house is still doing publishing “the old fashioned way” (e.g. sign an author, wait for a complete manuscript and then do editing, get in-house art to handle the cover, in-house marketing to do the blurbs and publicity, recon the entire work into their own proprietary system, re-edit, rewrite, and finally, after much discussion, order inventory for storage from a book binder), then they’re putting themselves at a great deal of risk because they can’t respond to fluctuating demand easily. And the author loses out because the progression from signing to book takes a great deal of time — perhaps missing a good window of opportunity to establish it before trends shifted. No wonder book publishers only want to sign “pet autobiographies” and “self-help memoirs”, and fixate on block-busters. Perhaps instead of checks, publishers should just buy everybody in the biz lottery tickets, so that maybe somebody will make it big.

Of course, there are ways to adapt to the ever-changing marketplace. One approach is to embrace the long-tail, and not run away from it, perhaps by using some of the technologies available such as “instant book publishing” and software license arrangements (see Fun Friday – College Textbook Sticker Shock). But this would demand a fundamental sea change in how publishers relate to their authors and their business — one that would require just-in-time inventory, Internet updates, Internet publicity (online video, for instance of authors chats), investment in new technologies like kiosks, and so on. Their revenues would be based on licenses to read, and not on tangible inventories, and their financials would look completely different. And that is the real bugbear in the bookselling business.

This will happen, whether publishers want to adapt or not. And the end result will be bankruptcies, mergers, failures, and ultimately a few successes. The real sufferers are the book-buying public who wants to see the long-tail of new book ideas and the authors, who just want to write and sell books to those who want to read them.

When Security Means Silence

My daughter is studying the play “Judgment at Nuremberg” by Abby Mann for English Lit, so for fun we decided to rent the wonderful 1961 movie version and watch it together as a family. The play depicts the trial of four judges who committed crimes under the guise of executing the law under Nazism, the responses of victims, and the interplay between state mandate and personal responsibility. Intercut with actual footage of Nuremberg during that time as well as actual footage of atrocities committed by the regime, and filled with wonderful actors (Spencer Tracy, Burt Lancaster, Richard Widmark, Marlene Dietrich, Maximilian Schell, Judy Garland, Montgomery Clift, Werner Klemperer, and William Shatner), the play underscores the series of step-by-step legal decisions which ultimately denied justice, steps beginning with loyalty oaths and mandates against associating with inappropriate (labeled by the government) people and leading to the subversion of the entire judicial system in the name of maintaining the fiction of law during a genocidal war. And even though each judge was deemed responsible and “guilty” by the presiding trial judges (2-1, not unanimous), the lead defense attorney indicates that within a short time all those convicted will be released – which they eventually are.

I am struck with how much the lessons in this play, learned at such great cost in WWII, are still relevant today. Bruce Schneier in his latest CryptoGram security bulletin notes that non-classified NASA researchers working at JPL are now suing NASA and CalTech over invasive background checks. According to the Associated Press account of the lawsuit filed, “the Commerce Department and NASA instituted requirements that employees and contractors permit sweeping background checks to qualify for credentials and refusal would mean the loss of their jobs. NASA calls on employees to permit investigators to delve into medical, financial and past employment records, and to question friends and acquaintances about everything from their finances to sex lives, according to the suit. The requirements apply to everyone from janitors to visiting professors.”

I know there are people who will loudly proclaim that those who refuse to sign probably have something to hide. But this isn’t a standard background check – this is a blank check for the government to look at your mammogram results, bug your neighbors, examine your tax returns, follow you on vacation, and generally treat you as a criminal when you have committed no crime and there is no threat of a crime. Would anyone really sign a form that let’s their employer talk to your ex-wife or follow you into the PTA meeting or bar after work? Would you like your doctor asked questions about what you told him in confidence? I sincerely doubt it. It would be really stupid.

One thing about the leading researchers on the Mars rovers, the Galileo probe to Jupiter and the Cassini mission to Saturn — they are not stupid. They are well-known world-class scientists being told they must sign away their Constitutional rights (the 4th and 14th Amendment) or lose their jobs. It’s scary. And it’s absolutely suicidal for America’s space program.

Finally, for those pundits who say we don’t need a space program, I suggest they look at the progress China and Russia are making. America has dominated the space exploration biz for over 40 years, and we have reaped the rewards in scientific achievement (which translates into big bucks in the commercial sector over the long run) and prestige (which means we get things our way most of the time). In fact, we’re so used to getting what we want from the world that we actually think we don’t have to work for it. To use a common phrase, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. We can’t afford to kick out our best and brightest because some government bureaucrat wants to break out of the GS-12 dead-end pay level by inventing threats. Because at the end of the day, somebody has to pay for that lunch one way or another. Let’s hope that our lead in space exploration isn’t the price.

Fun Friday – College Textbook Sticker Shock

I took my daughter Rebecca shopping for her textbooks a few weeks ago at the college bookstore. I walked out stunned with a $300 bill for a soft-cover math book (used) and a soft-cover set of chemistry books (new). And I didn’t even buy any English books yet!

So Michael Granof’s op-ed piece Course Requirement: Extortion in the NY Times hit a nerve with me, and probably every other parent writing those college checks. Granof, a professor at the University of Texas, proposes a “site licence” approach to textbooks based on the projected number of students enrolled, just as a corporation purchases software. Books would be available electronically, or could be purchased in hard-copy form for an additional fee. Instead of being in the paper-pushing business, publishers would become more like software companies focussed on managing contracts for their materials, managing revenue streams, and finding new material and providing updates and revisions. Colleges and professors would be willing to experiment more with classes and new authors, because they wouldn’t be locked-in to the used book market. Textbook authors would find more small markets for their books – it’s all electronic – and could focus on new work and timely revisions for a global economy with deterministic royalties. Libraries and bookstores could invest in “instant book publishing” machines and materials (one machine sampled built an entire book in 15 minutes) and would no longer be risking significant investments in academic inventory (both new and used). And finally, students would find their out-of-pocket expenses for books get more in line with other segments of the book industry.

Hey, as a technologist I’d rather deal with electronic forms of content than hunt for a book on Amazon. As a textbook author, I’d love to spend my time writing new works in operating systems and networking and getting it to students and professors right away rather than worry about whether my older books are being resold and resold until they’re obsolete. And as a parent, I think we’d all like colleges to be in the business of educating our kids, and not in the business of book inventory management.

Of Virtualization and IPOs

VMWare is the little company that could. When it was launched in the late 1990’s, the “smart money” wouldn’t touch it. It wasn’t just that it was open source – a big “loser” badge at that time. It wasn’t just that it was founded in part by a husband-wife team who had established business (Tandem, SGI,…) and academic credentials (UCB, Stanford, MIT,…) – an even bigger “loser” badge that still persists in some dark corners. It’s biggest damnation by old-line investment was that virtualization was a trite idea. I heard this myself frequently from the horse’s mouth, so to speak, during the time I was working with 386BSD and InterProphet, and I pitched a similar idea to Tandem’s CEO back in 1996. It was the next obvious step – at least to a technologist.

Given the tremendous success of this IPO, you might ask “How could they have missed this one?”. Technology, like fashion, goes through phases, and sometimes smart people get so hung up on fashion they miss the trend line change from computer as a calculating device to computer as an organizing device (and vice-versa). If a computer is a calculating device, you want the most cycles. If it’s an organizing device, you want to spend time adding stuff, not managing stuff. A bit processor, like blit-bit processing for graphics, the more concrete, discrete and obvious the instructions executed at the bottom level, the more goodness you get out of the machine. A symbol processor, like parsing language or voice recognition built out of abstraction, is not as deterministic by the nature of the function desired, so capacity to process symbols and the benefit it provides overrides performance.

This happened with virtualization. At that time overfunded Internet companies (remember Egghead, for example, anyone?) and their backers absolutely believed that the most important technical issue was to build a site industriously out of C++ code to maximize performance. They didn’t believe sites based on scripting languages would be powerful or scalable enough for their millions of customers. They underestimated the demand for rapid creation and deployment of new features. Now everyone uses scripting languages like Perl, Python and PHP (we use Python on all our sites for example) – it’s faster and easier. VMWare realized that people allocated servers for containers of scripted sites when performance was impacted, and it didn’t make any difference if it was virtual or real. As reducing power demands becomes a “hot” button topic, virtualization will be increasingly used in datacenter and networking applications.

Safari Goes Corporate – Jobs Announces Windows Version

Steve Jobs today announced that Safari, the annoyingly broken browser for the Mac, would soon be appearing on Windows systems as another annoyingly broken Windows application. Aside from the obvious joy at the thought that browser compatibility testers would no longer require a Mac to do their job, is there any other import to this announcement? Well, there are a few possibilities…

One possibility is this is part of the strategy of going ever closer into direct competition with Microsoft, although Safari isn’t in the same class as IE (or even Firefox). Safari was built on the KDE Project’s KHTML layout, BTW. For a number of years there was frequent sniping between the groups – the KDE volunteers felt Apple didn’t comply with the spirit of open source (they’d take their time in submitting changes, for example) while Apple complained they weren’t quick enough fixing their bugs. I always found the latter complaint hilarious because Apple was notorious for never fixing their bugs even when they could. The source trees have diverged greatly since this initial schism (schism in open source? perish the thought), and there are dreams of somehow “mending the rift” through “unity” initiatives. But this is a lot of work for a questionable gain.

Open sourcerers are good at fractionating markets, but lousy at aggregating them. It’s just too easy for someone to run off and roll his own when he gets miffed for a potential quick gain (while wacking the older group). Fractionation totes up in the big book of life as a long-term cost hit on the entire open source market segment, and is something Microsoft loves to see.

As Apple has migrated off the PowerPC, the distance between them and a Wintel platform (Mactel?) has diminished mightily. The “next step” (yes, a pun) is moving their software onto Windows to develop an audience, so the distance between Windows and Mac becomes a matter of taste. Apple knows that eventually they have to face the harsh economics of the Wintel world. They also know Microsoft has to move the Windows franchise intact to a very broad market, while they only have to appeal to a subset of that market.

Is it better to be a remora or a whale? If they can profit from the current Microsoft open-source obsession (you know, “Get Linux”), they can do very well taking bites out of Microsoft’s market, since Microsoft prefers to fixate on one enemy at a time. If Apple gets too troublesome, Microsoft can always buy it. Of course, maybe something in that Microsoft-Apple agreement signed years ago makes this a lot easier than one might think (although nothing is ever easy around Steve Jobs).