Google's problem: too many Starters, too few Finishers

Google's Blogger rich text editor is richly broken in Firefox and Safari. This isn't a new problem, it's been broken in lesser ways for years.  You might image you can fix the broken formatting in the "Edit HTML" view, but that view is essentially obsolete. It doesn't provide full access to the formatting controls.

Google's My Maps is stuck in toy stage.

There are lots of other examples. Google is great at starting products, lousy at finishing them.

This isn't surprising. Google has a famously IQ and creativity focused recruiting policy, a policy strongly identified with Marissa Mayer.

That's a great way to get Starters. Starters are people who invent things.

It's not a great way to get Finishers. Finishers are the people who do the 80% of the work required for the last 20% of the product. Finishers are detail people.

Google's problem is too many Starters, too few Finishers. Google needs to change their recruiting and hiring policies.

Bubble III

Governments have injected trillions of dollars into financial systems. We're not set up to quickly deploy that much money, and loans are still slow. The big infrastructure projects are still months to years away.

The money has to go somewhere though. So where's it going? The market.

A few months ago, in a fit of contrarian optimism, I predicted Dow 9000 by Nov 2009. It's June and the Dow is at 8800; we could easily hit 9000 this month. That's not necessarily good. A November 9000 could be compatible with a reasonable recovery, but a June 9000 is crackers.

I think I hear something inflating ...

The mass murder of Navy sonar

I don't think the US Navy would get away with deploying technology that visibly tortured and killed large numbers of land mammals ...

Does Military Sonar Kill Marine Wildlife?: Scientific American:

... generate slow-rolling sound waves topping out at around 235 decibels; the world’s loudest rock bands top out at only 130. These sound waves can travel for hundreds of miles under water, and can retain an intensity of 140 decibels as far as 300 miles from their source...

... Navy documents which estimated that such testing would kill some 170,000 marine mammals and cause permanent injury to more than 500 whales, not to mention temporary deafness for at least 8,000 others...

Imagine the pain of being unable to escape this barrage.

It’s not Obama’s deficit

No great surprise, but even I’m surprised how relatively little Obama’s budgets have contributed to the Federal deficit …

How the U.S. Surplus Became a Deficit – David Leonhardt - NYTimes.com

… The New York Times analyzed Congressional Budget Office reports going back almost a decade, with the aim of understanding how the federal government came to be far deeper in debt than it has been since the years just after World War II. This debt will constrain the country’s choices for years and could end up doing serious economic damage if foreign lenders become unwilling to finance it…

…You can think of that roughly $2 trillion swing as coming from four broad categories: the business cycle, President George W. Bush’s policies, policies from the Bush years that are scheduled to expire but that Mr. Obama has chosen to extend, and new policies proposed by Mr. Obama.

The first category — the business cycle — accounts for 37 percent of the $2 trillion swing. It’s a reflection of the fact that both the 2001 recession and the current one reduced tax revenue, required more spending on safety-net programs and changed economists’ assumptions about how much in taxes the government would collect in future years.

About 33 percent of the swing stems from new legislation signed by Mr. Bush. That legislation, like his tax cuts and the Medicare prescription drug benefit, not only continue to cost the government but have also increased interest payments on the national debt.

Mr. Obama’s main contribution to the deficit is his extension of several Bush policies, like the Iraq war and tax cuts for households making less than $250,000. Such policies — together with the Wall Street bailout, which was signed by Mr. Bush and supported by Mr. Obama — account for 20 percent of the swing.

About 7 percent comes from the stimulus bill that Mr. Obama signed in February. And only 3 percent comes from Mr. Obama’s agenda on health care, education, energy and other areas.

So we’re talking 37% business cycle, 33% Bush, 20% Bush items extended by Obama (tax cuts, Iraq) and 10% Obama. It’s the last 10% that makes GOP budget “hawks” rabid.

Insofar that Obama’s spending is a stimulus package aimed at reducing the duration of the recession accounting for 37% of the deficit, it’s an excellent investment.

The Pre advantage: $1,200 cheaper

The Pre has three significant advantages over iPhone 3.0 [1].

1. PIM. Palm is far more committed to productivity (PIM) apps (calendar, contacts, tasks, notes) than Apple. To a first approximation Apple despises this entire domain.
2. Sprint. AT&T leads the League of Evil with cramming, rebate scams, SMS spam, overselling network capacity, and other low class trickery. Sprint is merely wicked, but AT&T is the Microsoft of phone companies.
3. Price.

The last is a biggie ...

We know the iPhone isn't cheap, but Billshrink shows the numbers

... , the cheapest phone to own over a two-year period is the Palm Pre, which clocks in at $2,400. The cost calculated is based off of a service plan with two years of unlimited voice, data, and messaging services. The Android G1 follows with $3,240 and finally the iPhone 3G S at $3,600...

I hope these are enough advantages to either make Palm viable or get a committed buyer for the company.

[1] I think limited battery life will make Palm multitasking a modest improvement over iPhone 3 notifications.

Google's HTML 5 - the netbook chromestellation platform

It’s been a few months since I’ve last written about the netbook chromestellation platform (Google Chrome + Netscape Constellation 1996). There’s been little of interest on the netbook side, except that Microsoft has successfully executed their only logical response – make XP effectively free on the Netbook. Price points have not yet fallen into the truly disruptive range.

On the software side though, we now have Google’s technology preview from their I/O conference: Google I/O - Google's HTML 5 Work: What's Next?.

One surprise is what a large role Apple has played. Clearly they made the right strategic choice when they split from Mozilla to create Safari/WebKit and introduced Canvas. Apple and Google are precisely aligned now, and both are pushing the vision of a browser as a technology platform. (From a very different direction, so is Palm.)

Another surprise is that the standards groups have abandoned the slow pace of seven years ago and resumed the 1990s model of adopting whatever the leaders are doing. HTML “5” today is nothing like HTML “5” of 2004.

It’s everyone against Microsoft now, rather than the 1990s Sun vs. Netscape vs. Microsoft battle (Microsoft hardly had to lift a finger in that one – Netscape and Sun killed one another). If you add the EU in then maybe it’s almost a fair fight, but Microsoft is immensely profitable and Windows 7 is due*.

So now we wait for the Google branded Cloud-powered $150 HTML 5 netbook …

* Windows 7 will sell so much hardware and software, it might inflate .com bubble 2.0.

iPhone 3GS - interesting disability features

The iPhone 3GS should be able to support magnifying text and acting as a reader for printed materials.

I expect that 'magnifying glass' apps will soon be as popular as flashlight apps.

Extra points to the first to combine the flashlight and magnifier features in a single app.

Apple WWDC: Yay iPhone, Boo Snow Leopard

Quick WWDC comments ...

• The iPhone 3GS is as expected, only surprise is accessibility and voice commands. That's a win over all. I'll buy the 32 GB version around August. I like what I hear about light sensitivity improving even as pixel count rises -- the current device is light sensitive. The macro feature is great and, of course, the video is excellent.
  
• There's nothing in Snow Leopard I'm interested in. The meager improvements, like an iChat that sucks less, could be implemented in Leopard. Only the $30 price is right. Definitely a 2012 acquisition. I want the Exchange client capabilities in 10.5, not 10.6.
  
• The MacBook Air is still too expensive. The new MacBook is superb; tough to choose between it and an iMac now.
  
• I don't remember Apple ever resurrecting something they killed. They made a mistake pulling Firewire from the MacBook. Now it's back everywhere. Don't wait for the apology.
  
• It's striking that there was no discussion of productivity apps on the iPhone -- nothing about calendaring, tasks, contacts, etc. The Palm Pre and the iPhone are staking different areas. I'm torn. Good news for the Pre!
  
• Given Snow Leopard's Exchange Server client features I expect MobileMe will move to provide Exchange Server-like services (as Google has). I'm neutral on whether MM will use Google's version of Exchange server or if Apple will do there own. They won't use Microsoft's implementation.
• I don't rule out a 10.5 add-on update to iCal and Address Book for MobileMe users after MM goes to Exchange Server.
  

Update: Oh, and whatever happened to the resolution independent user interfaces? It's not in Leopard, and I'm not sure it's in Windows 7 either. I didn't see mention of a keyboard interface for the 3GS, last I heard the dev version didn't have API support. Also, Apple really does hate AT&T these days. Looks like a divorce might be coming. I wonder if Apple will then sign with Verizon or ... acquire Sprint ... Now wouldn't that be interesting ...

Peak hydrocarbon output in 2020?

I'm comfortable with my Peak Oil call of Aug 2008. Of course I didn't mean peak production, but rather that going forward the demand/supply curve would force light "sweet" crude oil prices to rise inexorably until demand was reduced by either conservation or alternative power sources (more coal).

So no more big price drops over time, just occasional dips against a regular rise.

Then the price of oil collapsed.

Was I humbled? Of course not! The collapse of the world economy and a certain amount of speculation played themselves out, but the price is rising nicely now. We should be back up to $120 a barrel by the summer of 2010 -- unless the oil price rises send us down into recession.

What happens then? I assumed we'd just switch to coal and melt Greenland, but maybe I was too optimistic. It happens, even to me.

The problem, as outlined in an article that predicts Peak Hydrocarbon Production by 2020, is EROEI ....

Walrus Magazine Energy Crisis 2009: An Inconvenient Talk

... Energy return on energy invested, which geologists refer to interchangeably as EROEI or EROI. Canada’s exploration treadmill. Reserves-to-production ratios.

You pick one at random, fixate on it. The historical EROEI for conventional oil is 100:1... Invest a barrel’s worth of energy drilling and refining in a spot like Ghawar, then and forever the largest single crude oil deposit on the planet, and you used to get 100 barrels of energy-dense, easily transported fuel in return. These days, conventional EROEI for such places is closer to 25:1.

The EROEI on more recent “new conventional” deposits, which Dave cites mostly by their discovery and extraction methods (“deepwater oil, horizontal wells, 3-D seismic”) is also around 25:1. In Alberta’s tar sands, the surface-mined bitumen comes to market at an EROEI of 6:1. “In situ” bitumen — sludge buried too far under the boreal forest floor to excavate, which comprises the lion’s share of the most breathless estimates of Canada’s energy superpower–scale oil production — rings in at 3:1. Corn ethanol, that darling of America’s farm states, is somewhere between 1.3:1 and 0.75:1. Shale oil, another unconventional source held by its boosters to be capable of indefinitely extending the age of oil, has never been converted into fuel at a net energy profit, at least as far as Dave has been able to ascertain....

Presumably new technologies will improve EROEIs enough to truly bake the earth, but the article is worth a read. If peak hydrocarbon output is really only 11 years away then it's within the planning horizon of energy investors and national militaries.

So we should start hearing more about it pretty soon.

Personally, I've no predictions on PHP (peak hydrocarbon production) -- just "peak light sweet".

Foreign Policy review on child soldiers

FP takes us to the ugliness behind the hype (via Freakonomics) ...

Foreign Policy: Think Again: Child Soldiers

... Asymmetrical conflicts, however, are another story. Take suicide bombing, which child soldiers have carried out in the Palestinian territories, Iraq, Sri Lanka, and Chechnya. There is little that trained soldiers can do other than guess that a nearby child is in fact a suicide bomber. In Afghanistan, a 14-year-old was responsible for the first killing of a NATO soldier -- likely just one of the estimated 8,000 child soldiers who do or have worked as part of the Taliban's forces.

Face to face with child soldiers in battle, Western military forces are often befuddled as to what to do. Should they engage, retreat, surrender, or attempt to disarm? The U.S. Army's war manual, for example, offers no guidance on rules of engagement. The British Army only recognized the problem after one of its patrols was captured by child RUF soldiers in Sierra Leone, having been hesitant to attack the under-15-year-olds. Britain later used pyrotechnics and loud explosions in that conflict to induce panic among the ill-trained youngsters, many of whom would simply run away....

Since the US recruits at age 17, we technically employ child soldiers. Most are in Asia and the near East, not in Africa.

Armies use child warriors because they're effective. Much more effective, you may be sure, than I would be.

The conclusion? To end the use of child soldiers, we must first end the most common forms of modern warfare.

Update: Sarah, in comments, points out that technically the US is compliant with current law as long as our child soldiers don't fight (though some have). We violate international law when we prosecute child soldiers as adult war criminals.

Gingrich is a loon

Either Gingrich believes he can con the religious right into thinking he's one of them, or he really believes this ...

Shared sacrifices - Paul Krugman - NYTimes.com

... "I think this is one of the most critical moments in American history,” Gingrich said. “We are living in a period where we are surrounded by paganism."...

Either way, he's a loon.

The implications of cyber war in an interconnected world

This is the first cyber war discussion I've read that's had anything interesting to say ...

I, Cringely - Collateral Damage

... Forget for the moment about data incursions within the DC beltway, what happens when Pakistan takes down the Internet in India? ... The next time these two nations fight YOU KNOW there will be a cyber component to that war.

And with what effect on the U.S.? It will go far beyond nuking customer support for nearly every bank and PC company, though that’s sure to happen. A strategic component of any such attack would be to hobble tech services in both economies by destroying source code repositories. And an interesting aspect of destroying such repositories — in Third World countries OR in the U.S. — is that the logical bet is to destroy them all without regard to what they contain...

Sounds plausible. I'd say we have a problem ...

Requiem for a gerserker - Gordon's Laws of Geekery

So we'll go no more a-hackin
So late into the night
Though the heart be still as geeking,
And the moon be still as bright...

Apologies to Byron

Able I was ere I saw Elba. Anon.

It is hard to remember a time before the Man-machine war. Things were bad in the TSR years, and yet again when QEMM laid waste to the minds of men. Strong warriors weep to remember when Mac OS 7 crumbled before TCP/IP, or the Hell that was Hayes. We hoped for peace with OS/2, but got Me instead.

Yet we won those battles. The machines seemed chastened. Windows 2000 was peaceful. Modems died. OS X 10.3 was good. We thought a world of true productivity lay ahead.

We were wrong. The machines were only playing for time. The synchronization front claimed thousands of mortal minds. OS X turned vicious, and XP maniacally senile. The powers of Google gave us new hope, but was Google truly on the side of flesh?

It's not only that the machines are becoming ever more powerfully complex. We of the first generation are growing weary. Many comrades have retired from the front. We can't weave and dodge as in the days before bifocals. Exercise, sleep, work and ... yes ... family -- they take their toll.

Yet I fought on. I was a Gerserker; I threw myself into battle. When others held back I charged Sharepoint heights and fought Outlook hand to hand. Yes, I synced contacts with the iPhone.

I went too far. In my bones I knew the end was near. OS X Tiger lived up to its man-eating namesake. My ancient XP box was dying slowly of chip rot. Office 2007 bit my ankles.

I was weakened when I met IT. Active Directory is a rabid shark on steroids. We fought for weeks. Some days I was netlocked seven times, but I struggled to my keyboard every time. One day I thought I had it beat, but it raged back when I turned my head. Finally we fought tooth, nail and hackery until I pulled the poisoned dagger from the treacherous heart of Outlook 2007.

The battle was won, but the my war was done. Even replacing my mother's cable modem and upgrading her plain Mini to 10.5 had too many bizarre bugs.

My time as a Gerserker is done. I still contend, but no longer do I leap to the battle.

Just as I have sworn by Gordon's Laws of Acquisition, so I do By Darwin Swear upon Gordon's Laws of Aged Geekery ...

1. Avoid Microsoft. They are one with the Darkseid.
2. Fear authentication, above all fear authentication with synchronized credentials.
3. Fear that which is beyond the hand of the Geek, such as networked data that cannot be copied locally. Above all, fear the services of those foreign domains that lack an effective and responsive Help Desk.
4. Embrace redundancy.
5. Simplify, even at the cost of power.
6. Pace technology. Take on new battles only when the supply lines are strong and the forces are rested.

It's a new world for me. It means I don't want a 10.6 iMac -- instead I'll buy a 10.5 iMac once the 10.6 "up to date" program is announced. I doubt I'll do 10.6 before 2012.

I won't be doing any more Windows installs outside of a VM. I embrace the Virtual Machine and the Sandbox as my allies.

I'm putting off my new SLR purchase, partly because Canon has gone mad, but mostly because those images are too large for old G5. I will need to get a new iMac completely pacified before I take on new camera. The SLR will move into 2010.

I'm going to get the new iPhone -- but not at the same time as the new iMac. They'll have to be spaced.

At work I'll drastically reduce my participation in anything new beyond the absolutely essential.

In the fearsome Cloud I'll be stay closer to Google -- the Demon I ride -- and avoid the complications of distributed authentication and extended identity.

I have returned upon my shield, and the night is now for sleeping ...

Update 6/8/09: Added Virtualization tag (label) to my tech blog.

Update 7/13/09: I missed this Gizmodo cry for gadget reliability when it came out in late 2008. Peace brother.

AvantGo RIP - memories of the roaring 90s

The demise of AvantGo has not received much attention. I am one of the few who remember the deceased Palm application, so I'll deliver the obituary.

I knew it well. In 1998 I did a little presentation on AvantGo for the primary track of the American Medical Informatics Association (my little JavaScript driven slideshow applet still works btw - 10 years later on Safari 4beta). It got a mention on my 1998 PalmPilot web page and my old AvantGo targeted medical notes page is still around.

In its youth AvantGo was bright, clever and reliable. There were two parts - a server and a client. The net server based web spider processed a URL to specified limits and stored the results in AvantGo format. Then, whenever I serial cable synched my Palm III or Vx the results updated the Palm AvantGo client.

AvantGo was a way for me to carry static snapshots of web pages. Even then my extended memory was moving to the web, but there were no portable browsers, no G3 networks, no wireless to speak of - so a static snapshot of my web memories was pretty handy.

At work we built a handheld prescribing application around AvantGo and a server we controlled locally. In the late 90s AvantGo wanted to become a platform provider to the palmtop. That prescribing app was one of my ideas, for what it was worth (not that much unfortunately!).

Alas, the strategy didn't work for them. Their main business, unfortunately, was streaming newspaper output to the Palm. Yes, like Byline or Google Reader, but before feeds. Newspapers have been looking for electronic delivery options for a long time, AvantGo was just one more failure. You didn't really think anything was new, did you?

It was a nice idea, but there was no money in it. In retrospect AvantGo's failure heralded the death of the traditional newspaper business.

Even before the dotCom crash AvantGo was getting bloated and buggy. They wanted to become a handheld browser, but that was a tough road. We didn't get a decent small scale web browser until the iPhone -- AvantGo never got close. Even as AvantGo struggled the PalmOS platform was slowly dying.

I lost track of AvantGo, though even now I wouldn't mind the ability to offline cache spidered web pages on my iPhone. Heck, I'd even pay for that, though I'm probably the only one who would.

Now the AvantGo I knew is gone. Wikipedia says they the company was founded in 1997 and that it once had a market cap of $1 billion. It was sold to Sybase in 2002 for $38 million.

$1 billion. Back when a billion dollars was real money.

Man, the 90s were good times. 

Who will acquire Palm ... and the Pre?

As a long-suffering and occasionally joyful iPhone user, and as scarred and bloodied Palm-era road-kill, I'm very happy that the Palm Pre is receiving first class review coverage. Yes, Pogue and other reviewers are keen to praise the underdog, but this is a genuine achievement.

It's also a desperate Hail Mary pass -- and the goal is not corporate survival. The iTunes hack (the Pre forges iPod credentials) and the expected severe product shortage are just two early signs of how badly Palm is limping now.

I'm with Blodgett ...

The Palm Pre Will Bomb (PALM, AAPL) - Henry Blodgett

.. The smartphone game has become a waltz of elephants, and Palm is just a Jack Russell terrier.  In the US, the smartphone war is between Apple, RIM, and, to a lesser extent, Google.  Palm can yip a bit and run around nipping at the others' feet, but it's too late to become one of the big dogs.

One thing Pre does do for Palm is turn it into a more attractive acquisition candidate.  We doubt Apple, RIM, or Google would buy it, but there's always Nokia, which is nowhere in the US smartphone market...

Nokia is everyone's number one guess for the soon-to-be home of the Palm Pre. I'd wonder about SONY and Samsung -- neither company can afford to surrender the computer infrastructure of the next 15 years.

I also wouldn't write off RIM. It's difficult to describe how badly the BlackBerry OS sucks. Yes, I know it sells well in the consumer market, but that's because most consumers are clueless. I don't think that's going to continue. If RIM's only strength is Exchange server they're in trouble.

So my choices for the future home of the Pre are Nokia first, RIM second then SONY and lastly Samsung. Dell is a wildcard. Any other lists out there?