Leon Atkinson

Computer science super genius and Python proselytizer JJ Behrens and I returned to LinuxWorld again this year. We’ve been doing this together for many years with only the pesky birth of a child interrupting my attendence. As JJ says, the conference was disappointing. It does seem like it’s on its last legs. The decline of this conference matches the shrinking posse that I bring with me. Two years ago I brought my entire department with me. It was pretty cool to have six Clear Ink technologist all running around hassling booth people. Last year, my department had shrunk a bit and this year, the one guy I’ve got reporting to me is didn’t come because he’s on vacation. At least I had JJ and Carl to hang out with.

One of the most enjoyable parts of LinuxWorld for me is the spectacle of JJ asking booth people really hard questions. The atrophying conference meant there were fewer people to put on the spot, although we did give the NYT guy and the mobius strip gal some trouble. When we passed the foot massaging shoe booth, I realized what this was–spam! My conference has been spammed! Yuck!

After the conference, I had the pleasure of chaperoning Dmitri Gaskin, Drupal wunderkind, to the PHP Meetup at the CNET building. Dmitri is 12 years old and the son of Igor Gasowski, with whom I’ve worked at Clear Ink for the past five years. JJ and I both had a lot of fun sitting in Starbucks and advising Dmitri on various computer science topics. There was a time when JJ was fresh out of college and I had a few things to teach him. I now find it hard to understand him half of the time. Fortunately, I can still understand the things Dmitri tells me, although when he first explained CCK to me a few months ago, it took me a bit.

One thing JJ and I agree on is that young programmers should read Hackers by Steven Levy. Programming techniques are one thing, but it’s harder to acquire an understanding for history and lore of the craft.

Dmitri and I had dinner with Lee Springer at Chevy’s and then headed over the CNET building for the PHP Meetup. Joe Stump talked about a new system in PEAR for hosting your own repository channels. It’s obvious how this can help keep code straight, especially for a company like Digg that has many production servers. PEAR’s system for installing modules is similar to Apt or RPM. Having been coding in PHP for so long (11 years!), my tendency is to do things the “old way”. So, while I’ve taken sips of the PEAR koolade, I’ve never taken a big gulp. I’m still trying to sort out PEAR versus Zend Framework versus sticking with my FreeEnergy codebase.

I’ve been casually repeating the following aphorism, and Rick Marazzani nudged me to blog it.

Microsoft is the new IBM. Google is the new Microsoft. Facebook is the new Google.

In the 80s, it was said that no one was fired for picking IBM. Microsoft was the hot new innovator in the 80s. In the 90s, got stagnant and then beloved for embracing open source. Microsoft turned into a villian. Five years ago Google was the new innovator that everyone loved. Now they are playing the kind of tricks we used to expect from Microsoft, why Microsoft is earning new love, probably coming from new leadership from Ray Ozzie.

It might feel early to some, but I think it’s time to say that no one will be fired for picking Google for their IT services. Search engine and adwords aside, Google’s office suite (especially email) is strong enough for the enterprise. But while Google has awesome products–products that are more exciting than Windows and Office ever were–it’s also playing games in the market.

Case 1: Android. Is Google serious? Yeah, it’s a move against Apple and the iPhone, but where’s the beef? Android phones should have been here by now. It’s not too late for Android to make a mark, but it does seem like Google announced early to scare off competitors. Fortunately, it hasn’t worked. Nokia/Symbian going open source is a strong move. And Motorola had news recently about their Linux phones, which actually are coming out. The more people at the party, the better for us users.

Case 2: Knol. A lot of people have noticed over the past few years that the top link on many searches at Google point to Wikipedia. For whatever reason, Wikipedia does not use Google adsense. They don’t have any ads. I remember Jason Calacanis begging them to put ads there, but they didn’t listen. Google can’t have so much traffic going off into non-monetized land. Their solution is to clone wikipedia and put ads on it. And just to make sure the traffic is going there, they seem to have juiced their search results. Techcrunch reported last week that Google Knol entries are appearing high in search results much faster than should be expected. That’s the kind of behavior that inspires Justice Department types. But worse, it erodes confidence in Google search results.

Case 3: Friend Connect. Google has clearly blown it in the social space. I don’t count them out entirely, but they have not been winning. Orkut is insigificant. They’ve been sneaking social features into Gmail and Reader, which depending on your perspective either treads close to or steps over the social contract with users. With Friend Connect, they seem to be pushing Facebook towards being more open and letting users keep hold of their data. This is a net positive for users because Facebook didn’t blink. They accelerated their own Connect strategy. Still, Google comes out looking like a bully in this.

At F8 last month, Zuckerberg talking about how the mission of this company is to bring people closer together, the enable better understanding of each other. That’s a big goal that sounds a lot like Bill Gates’ mission to have a computer on every desktop. Google’s do-no-evil motto seemed hip a few years ago, but their misteps sometimes make it seem like a joke. Their stated mission is to connect people to information. Boring. Give me the world-changing missing every time.

Lest there be confusion, I am in no way suggesting that Google itself is evil. It’s a corporation. Individuals are judged by morality, not abstractions. And I’ll be the last person to indict business and businessmen. If I could offer humble advice, I’d suggest to Google’s leadership that they not allow their teams to pull these tricks even if they seem to make sense in the short run.

Late last year, I knocked out a little facebook app that pushed a random status message into your facebook account. I used it as an excuse to learn about the API. It was particularly good because it’s one thing to simply put content up into facebook. It’s another thing to update a user’s status. I got to the idea by way of suggestinon from my buddy, John Szeder. He wanted his status to update without having to log in.

For many months, my little app didn’t do that, exactly. You still had to log in, click into the app and then click a submit button. I knew exactly how to make it automatic, but I let myself be lazy. I thought that if a user never came to use my app, he would never think about my app or see a bit of advertisement. Although I have no expectations that this app will generate real revenue, it’s fun to pretend it might. It’s good practice.

I should take a second here to reveal a “secret”. It’s not really a secret, because it’s easy to find if you want. I’ll tell you now. You can learn a lot of good ideas if you pay attention to Steve Gillmor and his Gillmor Gang. I have had the fortune of having discovered him about three years ago, plus I have a 35-minute commute that gives me a ample time to listen to the podcasts. Sometimes the ideas shared on the show simply spark my imagination. This time they gave me an idea I could use.

The particular idea was that every message on Twitter is an advertisement. As is typical with a Gillmorism, the metaphorical nature of this idea encourages you to leave your dictionary on your desk. Steve went for at least a year straight saying that MS Office was dead. It’s not that it makes no money. It’s not that no one uses it. It’s just that it’s headed for anilation, but hardly anyone has noticed yet.

So, don’t try to take this too literally. A tweet is not a billboard shouting at you about cigarettes that you don’t care to smell, much less smoke. Twitter is a medium for transmitting ideas that you might be interested. It’s smart because it allows you to opt in for those ideas. You’re smart because you chose emitters that you hope will send the type of ideas you’re interested in.

If a tweet is an adverstisement, then so is a facebook status. I’m already funneling all of my tweets into my facebook status. Therefore, they are the same thing. Most people are using the status messages to advertise to their friends the trivia of what they are doing. Some people use them to share links. I’m using them to send people to a random Amazon search on the off chance it will be amusing and they will buy something.

Granted, it’s a fine line. I think my weird, random status messages are interesting. So do about 15 other people (right now). Maybe their friends like it. Maybe their friends find it annoying. Maybe those people like that their friends find it annoying. If I were pushing 20th century shout-style ads, I bet people would be angry.

A little over two years ago, I wrote a post called It’s Time to Destroy Iran. At that time, UN representative Mohamed ElBaradei claimed that Iran was 5 to 10 years away from having nuclear weapons. The tone of the NY Times article was one of relief that we had so long to work on the problem. Of course, 5 years is brief moment in time in the realm of government action. Unfortunately, this week we are learning from the UN that the clock is down to 6 to 12 months.

In an interview with MEMRI, ElBaradei said “If Iran wants to turn to the production of nuclear weapons, it must leave the NPT, expel the IAEA inspectors, and then it would need at least…six months to one year. Therefore, Iran will not be able to reach the point where we would wake up one morning to an Iran with a nuclear weapon.”.

Given that his estimate of two years ago was 5 to 10 years, and the new estimate is 6 to 12 months, does this almost suggest that Iran virtually has nuclear weapons already? Does 12 months seem like enough time to prepare for an attack on Iran? There have been hints that our government has made some preparations, but it’s also clear that the Bush administration makes no plan to take action before its term is through. We can only hope that Israel will defend itself when there appears to be no alternative.

As with four years ago, the threat of totalitarian governments is the one greatest issue of the presidential campaign. We needed Bush, not Kerry, to execute the Iraq war. He’s fought it with one hand tied behind his back, but our military has made slow progress. I don’t feel any better about McCain than I did about Bush, but it’s very clear to me that Obama would be incapable of handling the crisis we’re headed for.

Last year, McCain joked about bombing Iran to the tune of the Beach Boys song, “Barbara Ann”. Our best hope is that this represents McCain’s true resolve, that he won’t paralize us with endless negotiation. The overwhelmingly important task of the next president will be helping the people of Iran to shed the chains of their totalitarian government, and therefore restoring security to the rest of the world.

I’ve spent my entire career in small companies. The largest was when the original Clear Ink ballooned to 150 folks on three floors of a big building in Walnut Creek. Aside from running a sole proprietorship, I was employee #1 at Quantal International. I’ve been much more comfortable on the lower-headcount side of things, perhaps because when there’s only 40 of us, I can have a real relationship with each person. The handbook of 20th century management would argue that it doesn’t matter, but I know it does. There is no more productive team than one that considers itself a community.

Today I was thinking about how at any given moment, the companies I’ve worked for have treated our working capital in two different ways: a precious resource to be saved or fuel for a list of entitlements. The latter attitude only works when there’s an embarrassment of wealth coming in. Sign up a client who wants to give you more business than you can handle and it’s all too easy to try to spend it as fast as you can.

Startups cannot afford this attitude. You can’t have employees walking around talking about how some piece of software is the industry standard and having anything else is a personal insult. Likewise, a startup cannot afford to have employees sticking to a strict 40-hour work week. A lumbering giant of a company can sustain itself with one-size-fits all policies. It’s probably a requirement if you accept a command and control style of management. The agile startup works best when no one leaves anything on the table.

Therefore, when it comes to managing money at a startup, my attitude is “don’t”. Try to keep your wallet in your pocket for as long as you can. In addition to managing developers, I’ve been running the IT effort at Clear Ink. Yes, people would love to have a new laptop every year. Our policy is that PCs are usable for three years. Servers last for four years. And we’ll make them go longer if we can. A three-year-old desktop machine is a good temporary server.

I don’t want to drop context, because sometimes you must buy your new hire a top of the line Mac in order to have them accept your offer. But when you’re considering spending money at a startup, your first question should be, “how can we not spend this money?”