"...an unusual number of people engaged in the business of making software...[would] really like to make a movie..."
Oh, oh! You've got me.
The explanation he gives is something that I realized on my first year in college. Very few people got that, but software is an art form. Yes, I've been told during parties in college that I was too drunk and I should go home.
I had a meeting with Hillel last Friday, and I don't recall telling him that, but I have videos that I produced that go back to 1986. Me and my friend Suzana Canuto (which is also a software engineer and left MSFT last year) wrote a feature screenplay. I also wrote two shorts, produced a couple of 1 minute videos, and, to this day, I continue to do quite a bit of editing, mostly to compile DVDs of my son's growth.
I've met a few engineers that were into art, from music to painting to movie making and quite a few writers (novel/romance).
One thing that I love about the software business is the instant reward. If you build a neat device, how long does it take to get to your customers hands? If you paint a beautiful landscape, how many copies can you produce and how many people will be able to see it*? Software is different. Since the early days, you could distribute your software through BBS, and then the Internet.
Not only that, but software, IMHO, is one of the best art forms there is because it is interactive. It changes, it expands, it evolves.
*PS: ImageKind has made the process of distributing art 100 times more efficient.
Here is a partnership opportunity that just opened at Sampa....
Do you want to be a key developer behind an up and coming Seattle-based Web 2.0 startup that has a unique angle on the latest Internet fire hose of user generated content? Join Sampa as a Sr. Engineer. The ideal person will be an energetic, risk seeking, experienced developer that has a proven track record of building great software experience. You will be responsible for designing, implementing, testing and releasing key elements of the Sampa architecture, including high performance/scalability/availability server side .NET systems, cross-browser AJAX and UI components and more, using a broad range of technologies. You should have deep experience with .NET, C# and networking. Knowledge of DHTML, JavaScript and SQL is a plus. You'll be a member of an energetic and passionate team trying to change the way everyday people express themselves on the web. We are looking for a team player who is driven to make a difference and willing to take the risk to earn the rewards that come with it. Send your resume to jobs@sampa.com and see if *you* can make a *real* difference to millions of users.
This is a funny coincidence (since I'm not a visionary), but it goes like this...
Last week, I was having lunch with Dottie Hall, a Sr. Marketing executive with many years on the software space. At one point she asked me which software companies would I consider to be successful. No doubt in my mind: Adobe.
Adobe has been a consistent software company, and that alone puts it ahead of the pack. Can you call Microsoft, Oracle or SAP consistent? Hardly. Software development has inconsistent cycles, inconsistent quality levels, inconsistent user experience, but not Adobe. It delivers all its line of products on a regular basis, each one building on the previous experience and extending it, at the same time maintaining a reasonable quality level.
Then, Dottie asked me what could Adobe do to jeopardize its position.
I reasoned: When software companies collapse, fail or become irrelevant is usually because of misguided directions from management. Usually big shifts in direction, either because of research risk (too complex) or execution risk (too different).
So, for me, the obvious answer to how could Adobe jeopardize their position was to become a service company, as in "software as a service" or "hosted services".
Do I think they will be dead in 5 years? Not really, but they are moving into uncharted territory for them. Even if they are the smartest people on the planet the risks are tremendous, from cannibalization of their product line to bottomless bugdet pits to make the service work.
I just read a post by Don Dodge on the Google Click Fraud data, where he quotes a Google report showing that less than 10% of all clicks are fraud and that less than 0.02% of the frauds get through to the advertiser.
That sounds too good to be true. Let me give you some data to prove my point.
We've been tracking ads-clicks on Sampa sites. Since Google Adsense doesn't report back to us which pages were the most effective, we created a solution that sounds very reasonable (lots of services do that).
Here is the last 3 days of data that we collected:
Feb/28: 60 clicks on Ads
Feb/27: 45 clicks on Ads
Feb/26: 42 clicks on Ads
Now, this is what Google Adsense tells me:
Feb/28: 29 clicks
Feb/27: 28 clicks
Feb/26: 28 clicks
That is anywhere between 40-50% less than what we are measuring. So why is Google eliminating so many of those clicks from our account?
There are some explanations from our side:
Our data is collected in UTC timezone and Google's data is on PST.
The script that we use to measure clicks might indicate a click on the "Ads by Google" or "Announce on this site".
First of all, the timezone shift can't really be responsible for multiple days. If a click was counted today in our system, but yesterday on Google's system everything should even out at the end of the month (or pretty close to it).
The possibility that users are clicking on "Ads by Google" or "Announce on this site" are pretty real, but it is unreasonable to think that 40% of our clicks are on those links.
So, here is Google telling us that only 10% of clicks are fraud, and I'm seeing them removing more than 40% of clicks on our sites. Sounds like a pretty big disconnect to me.
And, yes, there is the possibility that Sampa sites have a larger percentage of click fraud then other sites, but it is hard to see the motive since our users don't make money out of Adsense, and nobody associated with Sampa is allowed to click on any Adsense ad (we are that afraid of Google cutting us off)
Just one final note (for the purists), we do remove multiple clicks from the same IP, because we assume that Google does the same, so the number of logged clicks on our side is much larger, but we do our own "fraud detection" and cut that down by about 50%.
Reading how the Wired reporter Annalee Newitzbought her way into Digg it has become very clear that Digg is done.
My first Digg happened more than a year ago and it was amazing. The crowd was really in control and it was a fair and legit system: users vote for the articles they like the most, and the best bubbles to the top.
Now, "diggers" have grouped into gangs, and "digg" or "bury" stories using obscure agendas, mostly because of monetary rewards.
So, immediatelly I started thinking how can Digg be fixed...
TechMeme uses a different method of defining what is popular and what is not: how many people have linked to that page recently. What if Digg would use a TechMeme-like technology just to validate the votes.
I mean, when my story got "dugg", quite a few blogs linked to it because it was truly interesting (IMHO). If you see a Digg story with 100 votes, but no backlinks it sounds very suspicious.
Another solution is to add a reverse weight to each Digg user based on the number of votes they have. If a user votes just 2 times a day, that is worth more than a user that votes on 20 stories a day. Or, is it? Hummm... Just thinking out loud now.
I've just got my spanking new copy of Office 2007 two days ago. I am thinking about installing it today.
My biggest concerns revolve around Outlook 2007, more specifically, if it will work well with my Exchange 2003 server. I'm sure Microsoft consider this a key scenario and tested it, but you never know. So I went to the web to search for blogs, articles, forums, etc. talking about that case. I didn't find it much, on the specifics of running Outlook 2007 with Exchange 2003, but I found quite a few (angry) customers complaining at how slow Outlook 2007 is.
It concerns me a lot.
Outlook is probably the most used application on my machine. I depend so much on it that it would be sad if it didn't perform well. I certainly can disable indexing and the Business Contact Manager (which some people pointed as the two primary slow down reasons).
The thing with searching for information of this kind on the web is that you find clusters of people that suffered the same problem. Sometimes hundreds or thousands of people. But are those 1% of the customer base or 0.001% of the customer base? It is hard to find people praising Office 2007 or Outlook 2007.
Do you have any good/bad experience with Outlook 2007? Should I install it?
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November, 2007