Category: News

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.

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?”

With gas getting close to $5/gallon, it’s even making me think about alternatives to driving into the office. I say even me because I’ve prided myself in keeping gas prices in perspective with inflation. When I was a teenager, comic books were still 75 cents, and gas about a dollar. I don’t buy comic books any more, but I remember them going up over two bucks. Intuitively, it seems like inflation. And since long before I had a driver’s license, gas has been cheap if adjusted for inflation. According to inflationdata.com, we’re just now seeing gas about as expensive as it was in 1981 during the oil crisis.

It makes sense now to compare driving into work with my alternatives. We’ll throw out the idea of getting a new car. I just bought a Mustang last October and I love it. It gets 18mpg on the highway. (That’s what the computer in it tells me). Door to door, it’s 23 miles from home to work–46 miles round trip. Gas is $4.31/gallon at the Shell on the corner, but we’ll assume $4.50/gallon. One day of driving into work with the total freedom to go different places comes to $11.50/day. And that takes me about 35 minutes each way.

One really easy option for me is the Capitol Corridor train. It starts right here in Martinez, only 2 miles from my house. If it’s on time, it leaves Martinez at 8:40AM and arrives in Berkeley, only four blocks from my office, around 9:15AM. A one way ticket is $11! It’s almost twice as expensive as gas, or $22/day. If I buy 10 tickets at a time, the cost per day goes down to $13.60/day.  If I buy a monthly pass for $184 and get 20 days out of it, the daily cost is $9.20.  Only a tiny bit cheaper than driving.

Then there’s BART. Neither my office nor my home are very near BART. The nearest station to home is “North Concord/Martinez”, which is probably 5 minutes of driving away. From there, I need to ride to the MacArthur station in Oakland and transfer to the Richmond line and go back up to the “North Berkeley” station. This is a $3.70 fare one way, and it takes an hour if the trains are on time. Then there’s a 1.4 mile hike to the office. So, it’s cheaper except if you factor in that it takes twice as long.

Of course, riding on a train would allow me to read for some portion of the time. I already have more podcast content to listen to than I have time for, and I only listen to the Gillmor Gang, Coverville, TWiT and Egg City Radio. I really wouldn’t want to give up the Gillmor Gang.

I checked out riding the bus, and it’s $3.50 one way but takes two and a half hours! No thanks.

If I had a week where I knew I didn’t need to drive anywhere extra, I might buy a 10-ride pass on the Capitol Corridor. Otherwise, gas needs to get a little more expensive before I give up driving. And I suspect that we’ll see train fares go up before then. After all, the trains use Diesel, which seems like it’s even more expensive than gasoline.