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iPhone announced

Jan 9, ’07 10:29 AM

The rumors are true — Apple announced an iPhone today. Actually, are still announcing it, because Jobs’s keynote is still going, but they’re wrapping up the iPhone demo now. I think it’s going to be a great success, given the feature set and the photos I’m seeing on Macrumors from the conference. EDGE and wifi connections, IMAP email in addition to POP (which I’m very happy to see…I’ll be able to purge the last vestiges of duplicated-POP-messages from my life), and of course all the multimedia features one would expect and more. GPS is included, apparently, because google maps shows the current location of the phone — that will be handy for navigation and travel.

My friend Bill and I have a gentleman’s wager: he doesn’t believe the iPhone will be successful, and I do. Our bet was based purely on our analysis of cell phone markets and Apple’s track record of hardware and system design, but today we’ve finally got details to go on. I’m going to stick with my side of the wager, especially since there’s a dinner with good Chateauneuf-du-Pape at the end of it for me. But I wonder, after seeing the keynote details today, whether Bill will feel the same way about his half of the wager.

Wow…they just announced free Yahoo IMAP email to all iPhone customers. Not that I use Yahoo IMAP, but that’s a good thing to announce alongside the hardware. Jobs has clearly learned via the iTunes/iPod and OS X experience the importance of having an ecosystem simultaneous with hardware release is critical — a lesson that most of us believe drastically held back the Macintosh in its first ten years.

I’m not going to keep translating the great live notes from MacRumorsLive.com, but check out the transcript for yourself. All that remains between me and ordering one is details: pricing, carriers, timeline for availability. Even just looking at screenshots and the transcript, the iPhone is going to make my Treo 700w look sickly in comparison.

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Last day at Microsoft

Jul 1, ’06 7:34 PM

Yesterday was my last day at Microsoft. After a very nice round of goodbyes with some of my team in the Enterprise Management division, I had my exit interview over in building 18 and then did the commute home for what will be the last time — at least for awhile.

I have some mixed feelings about leaving — except for the commute and my overall need to reduce my stress level and improve my lifestyle I thoroughly enjoyed the projects I was working on. Neither project has been generally announced yet, so I’m not going to discuss them in any detail. I will say that I saw a different Microsoft than one might have seen several years ago. I worked on two projects which were clearly enterprise management territory for most software companies, but not (traditionally) for Microsoft. And yet, I worked with people who were intensely interested in branching out into new territory, solving problems that Microsoft in the past hadn’t thought were important for Microsoft to solve, and in general breaking any number of stereotypes about what, and more especially how, to do things.

That’s not to say that I didn’t also encounter a fair amount of inertia, and people who already know “the way” that something needed to be done, but I also found most people I talked with — folks in program management, marketing, director-level staff, GMs, all the way to my chain of VPs — were open and amenable to new arguments if supportable and workable.

Clearly, there is still a lot of “religion,” and although the devotion to “all things Windows” is understandable from the Windows platform vendor, I did find that knowledge of enterprise-level mixed IT installations was relatively limited. This is being fixed by hiring from the outside — I was a case in point actually — so I expect this situation to be very different in a year. I encountered an organization that was working fast and hard to remedy any gaps it might have in order to be seriously competitive in nearly all areas of enterprise software.

Wow. That sounds like I swallowed a bit of kool-aid myself. But I didn’t, not really. I’m typing this on my Macbook Pro, and I don’t even have a PC laptop or Windows desktop anymore — all of that is virtualized by Parallels Workstation and does everything I need. My primary platforms are Mac OS X and Linux.

So the message is, that the Microsoft I spent part of a year working at is not the Microsoft of evil fantasy. The company is as flexible and open to change as the people who now run and work at it, and to my eye that’s getting more flexible and open all the time. I suspect there’s still a bright future for the folks in Redmond. I’m grateful for my time there, and happy I got to spend at least a little time seeing it from the inside.

And I’m happy to move on, to whatever is next…

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Allrecipes.com purchased by Reader’s Digest

Apr 3, ’06 7:23 AM

Last Friday, Reader’s Digest announced that they are acquiring Allrecipes.com, a Seattle based business providing food and recipe community on the Net. I’ve been on the board at AR for the last couple of years, and thus I’ve been keeping a very low profile during the sensitive period before we announced the deal, but now it’s public knowledge.

Allrecipes is a project whose history you can read (or will read) elsewhere, and I won’t rehash it except to say that my co-founder Tim Hunt did an extraordinary job over the years providing not only technical, but conceptual and business leadership — firmly understanding what the site’s users wanted (which is sometimes distinct from what the business’s actual customers want) and making sure they get it. Bill Moore, the company’s CEO, also has done an outstanding job driving our execution and helping the company capitalize on the growing return towards valuing successful internet content businesses. Bill, Tim, and the whole team continue to demonstrate community interaction creates long-lasting loyalty in a medium where “stickiness” is usually measured in seconds or minutes, not months or years.

As you can read in the various press releases and newspaper articles, Allrecipes will remain in Seattle and the team will stay together, which was an important goal for many of us. And it will continue to provide a great food and recipe experience in the years to come, now enhanced by its association with Reader’s Digest and Rachael Ray.

Congratulations to my original co-founders and to the entire Allrecipes staff on an outstanding accomplishment!

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Movin’ on…

Dec 9, ’05 4:05 PM

Well, I’m going back to work on Monday, after 10 weeks of break between jobs. The new job is at Microsoft, where I’ll be something called a “Group Program Manager” working on data center management products. I’ll talk more about this when it’s clear what is public knowledge and what isn’t, so for now there isn’t much to say — other than the fact that I’m excited about the opportunity and technologies I’ll be working with.

Time off has been good, but of course it’s always better when you get to plan when and how to be off work, and not have events simply thrust it upon you. I have used the time to get plenty of exercise (it’s been a fairly nice fall), work in the kitchen quite a bit, and read a great deal. The latter isn’t yet reflected here in postings, but I’d finished book #48 when we shut down Network Clarity, and I’m just finishing up book #62 this weekend. This means I have yet to post on books #57-62, but I have a whole slew of drafts pending in Ecto and some notes will appear shortly.

Things have been quiet in November and December on Progressive Commons — we apologize for that but everyone has been busy with work and personal issues. I’m sure our writing will pick up again fairly soon.

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Changes in my life…

Oct 4, ’05 4:31 PM

Well, it’s been a busy month, and I haven’t written much. But events are shaking out a bit, and I’m free to write about them now. My aunt passed away last week, seemingly in her sleep. She was our mother’s twin sister, and was always a “second mother” to Scott and I. Somewhat eerily, she died 9 months to the day after our mother, her twin, of natural causes. She had no children — other than Scott and I — so we’re handling her affairs and will have a dual ash-scattering ceremony for her and our mother fairly soon, which is something they’d have liked.

In other news, we’ve closed up shop at Network Clarity, a decision that was stimulated by slow business conditions and our inability to sell the company to a larger software firm. It was a difficult decision, obviously, and in many ways I’m very sad to see the fruits of our efforts these last three years go unrealized. But it was the right decision for everyone involved, and part of me is simply looking forward to whatever comes next.

I’m going to be looking for “what comes next” fairly soon, but in the meantime I’m going to enjoy whatever time off I can. I’m signed up for the LSAT exam in December, most just to pressure myself to get moving on the next (or “next next”) chapter of my life. More on this later. It’s too nice to sit inside at the Allegro, even to do some writing. Just needed to stop in and deal with some final Network Clarity business. Now it’s back out to enjoy the crisp, sunny autumn afternoon.

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We’ve still got the “bubble” monkey on our backs…

Feb 29, ’04 11:48 AM

 Stock market bubbles are like pure opium…even though we all say we’re clean, and we don’t want to indulge anymore, in our secret hearts we still do. 

Further evidence of this came in Forbes Magazine, which recently listed Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page in their 2004 list of world billionaires.  In spite of the fact that Google is not a public company and Google stock is non-negotiable in public circles.  Doesn’t that strike anybody as odd?

I’ve been through two IPO’s, and the day before each of them, in the outside world, my stock was worth…nothing.  The day after, it was worth something, because somebody could buy it from me (I’m skirting the lockup issue for clarity).  Google hasn’t even announced its IPO nor filed with the SEC yet (as far as anybody can tell).  What’s really going on here is that everyone desperately wants Google to have their IPO sometime soon, to possibly re-ignite an IPO market for technology companies.  Heck, I’d like the same thing, but this time, let’s hold the side order of insanity.  Brin and Page will be billionaires when and if Google is a publicly traded stock. 

To Forbes:  wishing doesn’t make it so. 

And congrats to J.K. Rowling, who did join the ranks of billionaires this year, and frankly, deserves it a hell of a lot more than Mikhail Khodorkovsky or some of the other folks on the list.  

 

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