Microsoft Yahoo Merger

The Chickens Come Home to Roost

Here is my theory, just based on personal experience, with no hard facts (but some rationales) to back it up:

Companies know more about their revenue sources than they are required to report. FASB rules require them to be consistent about how they report, but they are also allowed to change how they report from time to time. You can "book" revenue from a sale immediately, or spread it out over time, or put it off until all product is delivered if you want. I've worked for small, privately held companies where I knew the accounting people, and I know that while changing the way we booked revenue or merging or splitting of a part of the organization often had innocent (i.e. valid business) explanations, the real explanation was often to obscure failures at the executive level. Failures to sell new product, failures to manage cost of delivery, or (and this is especially true of small companies) failures to manage executive perks which often sapped company resources.

In the 2000 time frame I worked for a large organization that signed a volume purchase agreement (VPA) with Microsoft. I don't know when Microsoft started using these VPAs, but I do remember reading that they changed the way they "booked" them about that time too although that didn't strike me as interesting at the time. The process was heralded by people higher up in the organization as a major cost savings, but as time went on and as activities associated with the VPA either happened, or in some cases were just stated to have happened, I began to suspect that there was no actual cost saving and that we might actually be spending more on Microsoft products than we would have otherwise.

I remember us having to come up with a count, which was really an estimate, of how many Windows PCs we (the entire organization) had. I know the count was more of a wild ass guess than it was a count, and the count was rounded up to satisfy Microsoft and (theoretically) get a lower unit cost. This organization was big, very big. Very few of our machines were on the Internet, and most of the machines were only networked locally, in many hundreds of LANs with local administrators. Had some new inventory process been imposed on these people I would have heard about it, and I didn't hear about it. Furthermore, most of these machines were not typical desktops, but were in place to run a specific set of locally written applications. They did not need to run Microsoft Office, for example, but the counting process glossed over that fact and even included the rights to run Microsoft products that weren't in use at all. The whole thing seemed to be a publicity stunt for certain organization managers, sounding great for the customer, but was really a windfall for Microsoft.

We were running Windows 2000, and nowhere near ready to convert to XP since in fact there were stragglers still running Windows NT, so in effect, we were paying a second time for software we already had. No worry though, said Microsoft, the contract includes an upgrade to XP, whenever we decided to do it, that is, as long as it is within five years, after which you do another VPA (I remember out VPA being for five years, but I don't think all VPAs have that term, some are shorter, I don't know if they come in longer terms as well). Nominally in fact the VPA was for Windows XP, it's just that other than writing a big check to Microsoft, nobody cared when or if the upgrade actually occurred. Do I have to spell out the rest of the story?

My guess is that the number of deals such as this is large (the entire Federal government agency by agency for a start) and when Microsoft makes claims about the number of 2000, or XP, or Vista licenses out there it's a lot of accounting tricks, after all, we didn't get an actual copy of any Microsoft products for each machine we ran. Instead we installed off the net, or from copies of copies of copies of the original disks. No need to mess with those fancy laser printed product keys. A single key made all the installs work without contacting the mother ship.

Yes, there was a costs "savings" for these VPAs, but the savings failed to take into account that facts that: (1) the machines were purchased with Windows already installed, (2) previous licenses had paid for the software again, (3) VPA1 had paid again, and (4) a subsequent VPA2 paid yet a fourth time. The savings MIGHT materialize if there were more frequent product releases from Microsoft (but guess who controls that) and only then if the customer were able to upgrade almost immediately (something the technical people know wasn't going to happen, but then the company/government negotiators are not generally technical people).

So, when Microsoft does their quarterly reports on how many licenses of various products they have sold I figure they are about as accurate as a weather forecast for this day next month. This is not just because I don't trust Microsoft, but because I think a lot of companies play these games. Maybe all of them do.

The difference between these "booked" numbers and what Microsoft deposits into the bank every quarter gives them a lot of room to paint a rosy picture when things are dropping off. If that is the case, and they make subsequent cuts or change their business in some drastic way those ruts in income stream can be smoothed out and the problem resolved without stockholders ever noticing. The more other activities the company is involved with, the more room there is to spread the blame around, making it look like the sacred cash cows are still in good shape while only these new (and ultimately expendable) ventures are holding things back.

Of course these book-cooking operations can't hide a monotonically decreasing income picture forever. The actions you have to take in the background get more and more drastic. Microsoft could use the billions they have in the bank to pay off any shortfalls they have, but that doesn't impress the stock market. If instead, you do something to drastically change the way you keep your books, say merge with another large company, spend most of your cash, stock swaps, redundancy layoffs... Some of these actions may actually improve your picture, but even if they don't you get an excellent opportunity to obscure the picture even further and a chance to promise shareholders that once the merger costs are absorbed, things will be wonderful again.

That's what I think is going on here, and because I think Yahoo has been playing similar games, no matter if the merger goes through or not, both companies are going to face dismal futures unless they make actual and substantive changes to their business models rather than superficial ones. (And did I mention the long term costs of ignoring your customers actual needs while you tinkered with your company spreadsheets?)

(This post revised and extended from an original Slashdot comment I made)

Saving Facebook

It's all been said already by those who can say it better than I can:

The Children’s Hour: Facebook Apps Are for Toddlers (There, We Said It)
Blackbird, Rainman, Facebook and the Watery Web
Facebook ‘Grants’ Devotees a Disappointment

But when did I ever let that stop me before?

My history of "social web" goes something like this...

I've had a web page for almost as long as individuals outside of universities could have web pages of their very own. Why? Because it was there. I've always been more interested in the creating/writing/tinkering than with whether anyone was reading it. I've never even told family members or most of my friends (and certainly not employers) that I even had a web page. My web pages have always been anonymous, or as now, used an "online" identity, and I think with fairly good reason. Until someone pays me to be a journalist, I'd just as soon not have to worry so much about identity theft, stalking, and things like that.

In the time since the early Web, I've participated in dozens of online activities, chat rooms, IRC, instant messengers (just about all of them at one time or another), and on to 3D virtual reality systems, which led to operating a forum, creating a lot of content for the forum, starting a blog, then another, and another, buying a few domain names, and so on.

In the process, I've made a few online friends. People who I would never have met in real life, but who are just as much friends as those I have met in real life. Friendships are built on common interests, common viewpoints, common struggles, longevity, trust, and so on, and whether they are primarily face-to-face, primarily by e-mail, on-line chat, or Morse Code, I think is far less important than those other factors.

But I'm not sure the founders of Facebook see it that way. In fact they make it clear they want you to only use your real name, something I am loath to do. I know this because I saw one of them in a YouTube interview say exactly that, and that their goal was to mirror each persons "real world" network of friends, associates and relatives. I'm getting ahead of myself though, first back to my history...

One of the many things I did to experiment with the Internet was to set up a domain named "Paperworth.com". The original plan was very simple. At the dawn of the personal web page era, it occurred to me that there were far too many people giving far too much information out about themselves to total strangers. My plan was to do a tongue in cheek parody of such efforts as an example of what not to do. Paperworth, a name I chose because I couldn't find that real name in a phonebook or online anywhere (I have since) was going to be the name of a fictitious family in "mid-America" who's father had just gotten his very own web page for the family. I've told this story before, so I won't drag it out, but I was going to include photos of the family, pets, and kids, including such useful tidbits as where we hid the spare key to the house and what the kids route to the school bus looked like. I'd have photos that carelessly exposed credit card numbers, private phone numbers, and so on. The only thing that stopped me from doing it was having a real job at which I worked too hard, and too many other "hobbies" like getting drunk five nights a week and recovering the other two. OK, I probably shouldn't have divulged that last part, but I've reformed, retired, and told potential employers where they can stick it so many times that any career for me will have to start with busing tables anyway. Of course when I did have enough time to do the project it was too late. Real people everywhere were now telling more about themselves to the entire world than I could ever have made up, the joke had become real, only in its reality, it wasn't funny any more.

With that in mind, I've since anonymized my domain names, checked pretty carefully for identifying info on those web photos and so on. Do I think it would be impossible to track the real me down if someone were determined to do so? Of course not. Just as you can't keep some nut from picking you at random in the grocery store parking lot as someone worth giving a hard time to, nothing protects any of us from random acts of insanity, or from very determined villains either.

So, when I first wrangled an invitation to Orkut out of curiosity (and before they were acquired by Google), I used a fake name. Orkut was fine for what it was, but it wasn't all that interesting to me. If everyone I knew in the world had suddenly shown up at Orkut, I would certainly have wanted to continue using e-mail, the telephone and air travel as a means of communicating with people. The groups you could join on special topics were less useful than the average IRC channel or Usenet group or web forum on the same topic. I soon dismissed Orkut as not useful enough to stick with. In fact at some point when I realized that almost all the messages I was receiving in Orkut were in Portuguese I just deleted my account. Apparently it had become really popular in Brazil.

It wasn't until MySpace was in the process of getting purchased for billions that I decided to test those waters again. This time didn't take nearly so long. I hated MySpace. First of all I didn't know anyone there. The interface was cluttered from the get-go, and all the features that allowed you to customise your "home page" (or whatever they called it) only seemed to make it more so. Add to that the system was very slow at times, and the things that would often spill out onto the screen taught you more than you wanted to know about MySQL and PHP (or whatever language they were using at the time). My testing of MySpace ended after only a week. I kept the ID for maybe a month, checking back from time to time for an announcement that they had thought better of it, wiped it all out and started over. When no such announcement came I again cancelled my account. One less thing to generate e-mail reminders that I hadn't signed on for a while or... whatever.

Always a glutton for punishment, I was intrigued again by the hype over Facebook (instead maybe the nature of the hype should have served as a warning).

So I signed up. Nobody invited me. Nobody I knew had told me how great it was. I just made up a name, not my real name, and signed up. There was nary more than a mild warning that they wanted you to use your real name. But like the second thing they asked for, my credit card information (which they said would be for "my convenience" in making future purchases) I decided not to take that request too seriously. Like almost everything online today, my "proof" that I was a real person consisted only of my giving them an e-mail address they could send my authorisation link to. Whoop Dee Doo! But then, I wasn't as hung up on this "real person" angle as the Facebook people seemed to be.

Oddly enough, using my online name, I was eventually discovered by several of my online friends. Hey, this Facebook thing might be useful after all! Hopefully they weren't going around looking every new user up in the phone book or something. I continued to not worry about it.

But then I looked up my university. Not working at the moment, I couldn't "join" as a member of some company, but I wanted to join something that was more than just a special interest group "sewing for men" etc. So I went to my university, where I found out you had to actually have an e-mail address associated with the university to join. Hmmm, I'm a member of an alumni thing. Is there an email address associated with that? Turns out there was, but I had never signed up for it. So off I go to do that. Of course they are fancy and really serious about identity, they get your name and address so they can send you letters begging for money. And of course if you are going to have a chance to contact old school chums through that (assuming I had any) using a fake name you just made up a few years ago would hardly do.

So now I was stuck. To test this whole social network thing with my alumni association, I'd have to change my name to my real name on Facebook. Could I even do that? After all, I'd already sworn on a stack of Bibles that I had used my real name in the first place. But the name change option was pretty easy to find, well trodden path I would say, complete with a fresh warnings like "You must use your real name", and "Facebook staff must approve your name change". Sure they do. The staff seemed to have done their work in mere seconds. My network of Facebook contacts didn't even notice a ripple in the space-time continuum.

So now that I was the real me, I could look up people and connect like crazy with other folks I went to school with right? Well, maybe. Only problem being that as wildly popular as Facebook might be at Harvard, and Stanford, and Starbuck coffee shops around Silicon Valley, it didn't seem to have caught on so well with my ole buddies at Podunk U. I couldn't find a single name there that I even remotely recognized, nor a picture, and similar to my experience with Orkut, it seemed that everyone who went to college where I had, now resides in India or Brazil. What-up with this?

Then I tried my high school. Well, I didn't see anything that required I have an old high school e-mail address, if there even was such a thing. Only problem is, they had a drop-down for the year I graduated, only the years didn't go back far enough to cover when I graduated. Now I know I'm old, but this is ridiculous. It's not like I was in the first (or 8th) graduating class or anything. I don't actually know how long the school had been around before I went there, but I know it had seen some wear and tear. So, essentially, there was not a single soul I recognized from my high school either, even though they would have all been younger than me, I should have been able to spot someone or some name, that I'd recognize. Well, at least they all hadn't moved to India!

Now this last week, a fairly well known online celebrity known as "Mini-Microsoft" was unceremoniously ousted from Facebook for the obvious TOS violation. Now MM couldn't exist as he/she does being critical of Microsoft from within, and I'm quite sure the individual made no effort to join the Microsoft employees group as that would have required an identifiable MS e-mail address. So what was the problem? Did some MS exec apply pressure to the company they were talking about investing a few million in? Inquiring minds are still inquiring on that I guess.

So there it is on "Real" versus "Virtual" identities. Facebook is only interested in the former (preferably with credit card information to go along with it), and not the latter (even if you have more REAL friends online than virtual friends in the real world). They talk a good game about verifying identities, but they really let alumni associations and workplaces do all the work. Want to game the system? Get a free web site from Google (or AOL), form a fake company and you and all your fake friends are off to the races! Are you getting the picture yet about what this company is really all about?

Now on to usability, and usefulness of Facebook. In short, as far as I can tell, there isn't any.

Is there an IM (Instant Messenger) capability? Well, no, unless you count keeping a web page open and bringing it to the foreground every 30 seconds as there is no beep or other indication of activity. Do they hook up with AIM - no, MSN - no, or the free and open Jabber used by Google - no.

They have something that sort of resembles e-mail, except that you can't send from a real e-mail system into it, or from it outbound to a real e-mail system. No, instead, you are supposed to go about your business as usual, until something important happens like, uh, someone throws a virtual pie at you from within Facebook at which time you get an e-mail message that summons you to Facebook where you are informed that "Someone has thrown a pie at you". And that's it. No fancy graphic, no splat sound, nothing. You have to wonder why they couldn't have just included the text with the e-mail message they sent you... as in: "Someone in Facebook has just thrown a pie at you, you might have better things to do than check on that right now, but if not, come on in." Who in their right mind would want to use this for business, or anything that remotely resembles business? Oh, yeah, Robert Scoble.

Yes there ARE some people who get paid to play with technology and write about their experiences. I don't begrudge such people the idyllic life they lead. I do get annoyed at the presumption that they have anything meaningful to say about how the majority of us... and by "us" I don't mean factory workers and plumbers, I mean people who work with technology, like payroll system, billing systems, aircraft avionics, and so on... how that fairly large group of people are going to benefit by whatever the latest fad is in Silicon Valley. (And while we are at it, shouldn't some of these WhizzBang things be of benefit to factory workers and plumbers?) I mean unless you are in some sort of specialized area, that somehow (and I can't even imagine how) benefits from sending and receiving a constant stream of text messages regarding what you had for lunch, how is a service like Twitter of any use to you? Sorry, but to me it can never be anything but a toy, and if you really need text messaging from anywhere at any time, then Blackberrys are already in place and do that job just fine. A better use of Silicon Valley's supposed brain power would be to duplicate the functionality of RIMs service at a fraction of the cost. How about free?

Oh, but back to Facebook, a program, that like Myspace, might dump screens full of MySQL and PHP statements out at you at any moment. The same program that wants my credit card info RIGHT AWAY, just in case they, um, need it for something, takes a regular DUMP (we used to call it that in my mainframe days and nobody ever laughed, I don't know why, it seems like such an uncomfortable word to use now) on my screen with all sorts of information that I suspect the programmers would rather I not see. How can they expect to be taken seriously? Just because the kid that started it, or stole the code, or whatever he did, looks and acts a lot like the young Bill Gates? Pull the other one. That seems like a reason to avoid Facebook like the plague. Why would anyone want to go down that road again? The biggest detour 'round the barn that technology has ever taken, Windows, and we are looking for someone just like that to invest our time, no, time and dollars into? OK, I'm dense, I admit it. So 'splain it to me Lucy.

OK, so you've now figured out I don't have much use for Facebook. I don't. As it stands anyway. But I'm not above giving my advice, and then saying "I told you so!" later when the company has run aground. Like, you know, when I was against Apple's switch to Intel, which I'm still sure, eventually, in thirty years or so, or someday, will be seen to be the mistake that I.... Well, OK, I probably got that wrong.

Take Second Life for example. For the life of me I can't figure out what to do with it other than to go in there and play tinker-toys. It's fun. But I think it should be more than that. IBM thinks it should be more than that. I think it can be more than that, easily, relative to the difficulty of a virtual reality in the first place. I've begged in the forums (while they still had forums) for better interaction with the outside world. Nothing. But I go in to talk to an IBM guy, in a well built IBM "build" and he knows less about IBM than I do. Five minutes and I've done all there is to do there other than oooh and ahhhh over how nice their building is. But these things have to be more than just fun don't they? They have to be useful for something. I'm a big supporter of Second Life, have been since the beginning. I go to an IBM presentation, "simulcast" in "real life", "Second Life" and some other virtual world (one I used to use and don't have much ongoing respect for) and the whole thing seems silly. The slides aren't in sync with the speech, they keep having to pause for technical issues, and as far as I can tell, and I really had to stretch to get this out of it: "we're in there, because it's there, and we don't have anything better to do."

Well, there is nothing wrong with doing something just because it's fun. People play video games for fun, go bowling for fun, and if they want to send text messages to each other all day for fun, who am I to say they shouldn't? Just don't pretend to be anything else but a fun thing. Second Life, if after all this time you haven't seen the advantage of hooking your virtual meetings into an IM, IRC or other text interface, I guess you never will. Can I ever send a message to an SL user without going into the interface? Can't each SL user have their own web page? Can't Facebook, using standard old HTML and RSS and messaging technologies work seamlessly with iGoogle, MSN Live, and AOL Instant Messenger? It isn't rocket science, but I guess if you 're all about scoring the next big billion dollar buy-out you can make it look like it is.

Warning to investors: It isn't worth it. Scoble and some others will tell you that once a company builds that walled garden and gets a few million users inside you will never get them to switch. Some carefully chosen examples will support that claim. But tell Yahoo that people haven't migrated from Geocities or their own e-mail program, not to mention search. Tell Blockbuster that Netflix hasn't hurt their business, or tell Netflix that Walmart, Amazon and Blockbuster going online hasn't hurt theirs (even if some of those efforts haven't been spectacular). There is a healthy ebb and flow of customers in any healthy commercial ecosystem whether it's cell phone carriers or plumbing supplies. Where there isn't that free flow of consumers there is decay. Windows, and the ecosystem that surrounds it is a perfect example. That's being fixed though, it took way too long, but it will get fixed eventually, with or without Microsoft's cooperation.

I don't think the tech sector is stupid enough to go down that road again, not during this generation of users anyway. Maybe in another twenty years when the echos of "Where do you want to go today?" have faded.

What we need today are more projects like OpenID, Jabber, cross platform operating systems and browsers and a spirit that says "I'm going to compete on features, I'm not going to lock you in, I'm going to let you weave in and out of my system freely and into others that may be of more use for you in other areas. You can get my stuff on your phone, instant messenger, home page, or inbox, it's all up to you, and we will take input from all those sources as well. And one more thing, we'll value you as a person whether you use your real name or not. We'll take the real you or the virtual you, and let you hook up with other people however you choose."

I don't hear those words coming from Facebook, and until I do, they can't be the next big thing.

Update: Apparently Dave Winer has pointed out that Facebook is a closed system. So Scoble now agrees that it sucks. Which seems odd considering his name is on this document:

http://opensocialweb.org/

here are some other handy links on the subject:

http://microformats.org/wiki/social-network-portability

http://movemydata.org/home.html

http://groups.google.com/group/social-network-portability

The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet

Why in the world anyone would want to post their personal stories on the Internet I don't know. But people do, and some times these stories seem so tragic and real that you just want to reach out a helping hand how could I resist?...

My own little soap opera(s) of this nature happened in the late 70s early 80s and often enough that I think of my own emotional makeup as being more scar tissue than anything else, but I allowed myself to be too self absorbed (don't we all?) and got what I probably deserved in the grand scheme of things. Suffice it to say that I've retired from romantic entanglements, more by choice than by necessity (even though two CAN live more cheaply than one, managing ones finances as a single person is MUCH easier).

So here, semi solicited, is my very jaded view of the subject:

What is there that is more important about a (with emphasis) *modern* *human* relationship than ego?

Now let that last thought sink in for a bit while I say that we (mostly) have been conditioned by Ozzie and Harriet/Bradie Bunch (substitute your own TV adolescent societal programming) to think that the only NORMAL mode of human existence is to get married and raise as many children as your income allows you to support. Not only does (did) this formula seem to work on TV, but it clearly worked in real life for long enough for us as countries world-wide to develop schemes such as Social Security that actually DEPEND upon it. Ponzi schemes collapse without an ever broadening base. But even before Social Security schemes, this system actually worked very well. One kid could support two parents into their old age, two could do so better, three better still. There was a "natural selection" advantage to larger families, but not so extreme that smaller families were wiped out. If you are a Darwinian, you probably imagine that some process sets an optimum number of kids for things to just work nicely, with variations on either side being preserved in the gene pool for, uh, lets say, GLOBAL WARMING! (Al Gore is proud when you work this into conversations on ANY other topic.)

Now back to: What is there that is more important about a (with emphasis) *modern* *human* relationship than ego? Well, if you are really paying attention, there's sex for one. Part of that involves ego too though in ways that are really hard to tease apart. Let's simplify though and factor sex out of it on the assumption that, in this modern pr0n driven Internet world you can always become a do-it-yourselfer.

Oh yes, and one more thing, (at the risk of devolving into a Monty Python sketch) a fanatical devotion to spreading our DNA all over the place.

Our world has changed much faster than any natural selection process can keep up with. If we could just keep things steady for a few thousand years, with no major new technologies, industries, disruptive housing breakthroughs and so on, I'm sure the hand of Darwin would make adjustments to our psyches, gonads and so forth (in addition to having enormous heads and longer fingers as all the sci-fi authors predict) to make everything come out just right again. Of course this is complicated by the fact that so many of us have opted out of the gene pool in one way or another. Many of us may have ideal traits, but we certainly aren't passing them on, forcing nature to constantly re-invent the wheel so to speak.

Where was I? Oh, anyway, (human) society has placed a whole new layer of pressures on us beyond the formerly natural kill-or-be-killed simplicity that various animal species have to deal with. Take birds: watching one of those nature films, when the male birds parade around, wing and tail feathers spread wide, trying to gain the "affections" of the female birds, one male bird gets selected to fertilize those eggs. What does the rejected male bird feel? I've often wondered. Is it just sexual frustrations? Are their "egos" crushed? Do they become suicidal? If birds had Civ IV to resort to would they? (I'm serious!)

I've read where many, maybe even most, animal species mate for life. Others only long enough to get one generation of offspring going followed by each partner seeking another mate for the next time around. Maybe natural selection hasn't been able to settle on a "best" formula in this area which is why there seem to still be so many people who do it successfully one way and so many other people who do it successfully another way. We've all seen, known or even been a part of a family unit with one husband and one wife, mated for life, raising children (or sometimes not) little or no infidelities, friends for life, teammates, if you will. God bless them, and by the way, in my experience these are mostly religious people, who have succeeded in this lifestyle IN SPITE of egos, IN SPITE of sexual urges and IN SPITE of Darwinian propulsions to spread the seed a little further. They got where they were by human rationality of the type that has to be intentionally exercised (whether you agree with the results or not, they got the results THEY wanted).

The other successful model that comes to mind is Hollywood. Here copulation is king. Slam, bam, thank-you mam. Why do they even bother getting married? Oh, yeah, so that they can get their pictures in Variety. Not a lot of forward thinking goes on here. Or thinking at all as far as I can tell. But it makes kids in large numbers, and these people are rich, so the kids are well provided for, at least financially. And do these "stars" get too upset during the breakups? Not so you can tell in most cases. If you lower your expectations enough you can live with almost any circumstances I suppose.

I don't know about you, but as free-thinking as I once was, I couldn't picture myself in multiple casual relationships over my lifetime. Oh I did get around for a while, but for me it was always a search for what I hoped would be an ultimate permanence. I too was more often mentor than mentee, more often financial provider, more often the emotional support rather than the one supported and certainly gave as good as I got in the sex department (or at least that's the way it seemed to me at the time).

But at some point (and it took far too long as I had been given the advice many times) I realized I had never gotten comfortable with the notion of being alone. From high school onward I was always "on the make" holding off any thoughts of marriage until after college by an extreme exercise of will (and the knowledge that parents would probably cut off funding). And then in the AM (after marriage) it was one relationship after another, all ending as soon as the sex wasn't so good any more (for one of us). Without wanting to, I was leading the Hollywood lifestyle, when what I really wanted (or thought I wanted) was the Ozzie and Harriet lifestyle.

So I went solo. It was rough. Particularly since I am not the macho type of guy who likes to do manly things like fishing, hunting, or home repair for that matter. I went to restaurants alone, even nice ones where I'd never been without a date. Quite an exercise of self confidence to go to a fancy French restaurant alone, and sit there and read a book. This will flush out any secret desire you have to be the center of attention. Yes, people will think "what's WRONG with him, why isn't he WITH someone?" and whats more you will know that is what they are thinking. But after about two years (I think that's what it took for me) you won't care. And after another two or three years you might actually start to dread the thought of another relationship. Or you may decide to dip your toe in the waters again, find a woman on an Internet dating service who "loves" you for who you are, only to find that she's married with kids.(and not all that unhappily married as it turns out). And lest you think I'm making that up, it happened to me. (TWICE!)

But enough about me, lets get to what YOU think about me? No, that's from another comedy bit. In the final years of my career, I was hit on by many women, a few of which I actually found attractive and after they asked around and found out I wasn't turning them down because I was gay or anything their efforts only increased. I've been the intended victim/subject of several matchmakers. I keep telling them they are wasting their time. They invite me and the woman over for dinner at the same time (not telling me in advance) hoping for nature to take its course. I'm polite, but I know better than to let nature take its course, because that course is for us all to breed like rabbits, and whether we call it sex, or ego, or self esteem, or even layer some societal ponzie scheme requirement, or the need to spread the faith by out producing the other faiths, you know, deep down inside you know, that human happiness of a lasting kind is not what it is all about. Lookout Jim it's a trap! (Star Trek) that is, unless you get religion or some other "ion" and make that relationship you seek secondary to some other goal (and I'm not saying there is anything wrong with this approach).

In closing, if you are not discouraged enough, consider that:

(1) All the good ones are taken. Really, there is no getting around this. Of the happy old couples that I've known that live together until they die, they either got together when they were young, or they got together when they were so old that neither of them had enough time to jump ship first. If you want someone who is not a chronic ship-jumper during middle age, your going to have to find someone who's mate has tragically taken from us in the prime of life. You will never be loved as much, if at all. Your reason for being chosen as the replacement might be a subject best never explored.

(2) No matter how objective you try and be, all is probably not as you've presented it. Maybe you snore really loudly (I do) or your farts really stink (as do mine) and those are two things she has never been able to stand, but she has never been able to confront you with them because, since those things are so important to her, she thinks they might be really devastating to you as well. One of my gals had a big nose. But I never told her I really LIKED big noses. Come to think of it, most of my gals had big noses. Darn I wish I had thought about that sooner.

Anyway. Glad I could help you out with this. I look forward to updates.

How to Stop the Dilbertization of IT

"First" there was this article: How to Stop the Dilbertization of IT

Which was mentioned in this Slashdot article.

And them maybe coincidentally or not I thought yesterday's Dilbert cartoon was particularly relevant.

And I'll leave as an exercise the finding of the /. comment I was responding to, except for the last line I've quoted here. Leaving only the questions: "Can anything be done, and if so, what?"...

"Debt" is a ten thousand year old playground game.

I don't know if this and the rest of your comment are original material or not but it is profound, so I decided to say so rather than use mod points as I originally set out to do. More and more in my own observations of the modern world the term "game the system" pops, unbeckoned into my head and I don't even remember when I first learned the term.

I do remember in short studies of game theory learning that it is easy to construct a game in which a mutually beneficial outcome works against outcomes with are "best" for all participants. What continues to surprise me is not that such games spring into existence in the real world, but that those who have at least some power over the game rules continue to do nothing to change them so that the outcomes that are best for the individual are more synchronized with those that are best foor the organization.

I guess that's a round about way of saying "why doesn't someone above simply fire the PHB?" And if the problem exists at a higher level, why doesn't someone above that do some firing as well? Examples in the real world are easy to find. Imagine a Microsoft without a CEO who makes a PR blunder every time he opens his mouth. Imagine if Ken Lay, or the Enron board had fired Jeffry Skilling when he first announced that he wanted the company to be "as asset free as possible" rather than giving him even more authority to implement such a PHBesque notion.

In all my career the Dilbert-like (and this is certainly not a new phenomenon) activities have only sometimes been initiated by my immediate boss, and almost never at the top of the company, but somewhere in the murky in-between, where rumor has it that people are all first cousins or go to the same church (because there is no other rational explanation for their existence).

I suspect that in some very successful companies there is still one of those overpaid (though not in such case so much overpaid) people who can peer down into the organization and burn off the underbrush so that those doing constructive things have more chance to grow. Most companies somewhere along the line lose these key people at the top and become the Enrons and Microsofts of today.

One big problem though in many countries it is harder and harder to fire people for a variety of reasons, even when they grossly under-perform, or mis-perform. We have to look no further than our governments (particularly federal) for just how bad this can, and probably will get even for companies like Google that start out with so much talent and enthusiasm. Even if they can at first have a fairly good control over their talent pool (as they grow rapidly) at some point they are going to be full of "Wallys" who no one can figure out what to do with, but who have kept enough within the rules to avoid being terminated.

I don't by any means think, as the article implies, that this is confined to IT. Quite the contrary, we see it everywhere more and more. The change, if it is going to happen at all (I'm not optimistic) has to come from our elected officials who can once again make it easy for companies to clean house. After all, in a society that more and more takes care of the unemployed and under-employed, worse things can happen than being the victim of a corporate "downsizing". the question is whether there is anyone at most companies making sure that the right PHBs are let go during such events.

Post Office Pitches New 'Forever' Stamp

"Here's how it would work. If the 3-cent increase takes effect next year, the forever stamp would be made available for 42 cents, the same as other first-class stamps. If the first-class rate were to rise to 45 cents in a few years, the 42-cent forever stamp would still be honored for postage on letters. Once the new price took effect, forever stamps would then sell for 45 cents."

Such a drop dead obvious idea, I first started thinking about such a thing back when postage was under 20 cents.

I was reminded of it recently when I found a bunch of unmarked "temporary" stamps that the postal service often issues when they have asked for a rate increase but it hasn't been approved. Sometimes they will put a letter ("a" or "b") on it but usually it's just a flag, or flower. The concept is that people are supposedly going through stamps so fast that a sheet of these will only last a few weeks. Not me though. I used to buy sheets, then rolls, then books as the newer technologies came into play (books for the no-lick variety for example). But then I misplace them, only to find them a year or more later. I don't think I am alone in this.

Once a few years ago I put such a stamp on an envelope and presented it in person at the counter just in case it was not sufficient. It wasn't, as the postal employee gave me a dirty look and informed me that the stamp I had used was only worth a penny. I still don't know if I believe that, but by implication, they also have issued "supplement" stamps that will make up the difference between the old rate and the new as yet undetermined) rate. I have no recollection of buying such a stamp, but maybe I did.

More recently, I did a similar thing, not wanting to get the evil eye, I told the postal employee right away that I didn't know if the stamp was worth anything near first class postage and simply wanted to buy the difference rather than throwing all such stamps I had away. (An exchange program for stamps would be nice, but I don't think any such thing exists). This employee was at least friendly about it. Said he didn't recognize the stamp. Then consulted "The Book" and couldn't find it there either. I was about to call the whole investigation off if it was too much trouble, but he went around asking all the other postal clerks if they recognized it, finally going into the back of the post office for several minutes.

Hmmm I thought, maybe this wasn't a postal stamp at all, but some free decorative thing like some charities send out. Was I about to be arrested for postal fraud? Finally he came back though, telling me I owed two cents, which I also didn't believe. If they had had to search that hard for the stamp it must have been 15 years old or something, but I payed up and didn't think much more about it. Until just now when I heard this reported on the radio.

So, congratulations US Postal Service, for demonstrating that someone within your ranks has two contiguous brain cells. You must be taking classes in "innovation" at a Microsoft training facility somewhere.

I intend to stock up on these stamps and never have to buy stamps again!

Well, unless until I lose them.

Analysis: iPhone a 'wake-up call' for the industry

I'm glad they put that in quotes.

According to figures quoted by Steve Jobs during his keynote, 957 million mobile phones were sold in the U.S. last year. (That compares to 209 million PCs.) Just a 1 percent market share would mean selling around 10 million units, the Apple CEO figures—and that happens to be Apple’s goal for 2008.

But get this:

While it will be some time before the full effects of the iPhone will be felt, Apple has strong feelings on what its impact will be. “It will do for the phone market what the Mac did for personal computers,” Joswiak said.

Uh... and what exactly is that? This is one of the few times when I think the acronym "ROFL" might be appropriate.

I'm just about the only person I know who uses an Apple computer and I'm sick and tired of the fact that it is easier to use, more reliable (etc. etc. etc) getting absolutely no traction from my Windows using friends. If a Microsoft representative came to their homes to personally tread on their private parts they'd have no problem paying for the experience.

Apple "addicts" or "Mac Addicts", as they call themselves have true brand loyalty. But most Windows users are oblivious to what brand of anything they are using. It's "just a PC" and for most people it will be "just a cell phone", "just a music player", and so on.

One Slashdotter today referred to the US as the "third world of electronic gadgets". Do most Americans even know this?

What would be great for Apple at this point would be some new wave of American isolationism (not out of the question that this could happen, but I wouldn't place a large wager just yet): "Samsung, Nokia, LG, Sony and on and on, you guys all go experiment on the Asian and European market. Once you get something that works, bring it over here and we'll slap an Apple logo on it."

That must be the fantasyland (pun intended) that Apple is moving into. And once 2008 comes along and they've captured ONE PERCENT of the cell phone market... what next? Refrigerators? Window unit air conditioners? HEY! Office furniture! No wait, that's too limiting, HOME furniture! Your imagination is the limit.

Never mind the fact that there most certainly is going to be a tech retrenchment soon, and based on the "wonders" from CES, VERY soon, I think it's time for some mergers. Didn't someone let slip a joke about an Apple/Google merger? I think it needs to become non-joking material.

The most versatile company in America right now is (drum-roll, and in spite of my, um, non-fan status) Microsoft. Maybe this is Apple's attempt to diversify better too, but frankly, I don't think they are that well positioned. As dominators of only one market (online music) which has hardly gotten off the ground yet (really, when you look at the numbers it's peanuts) they are not in the same league with Microsoft. Microsoft is diversifying from controlling both the Home and Office software market to getting into portable devices (poorly at the moment) entertainment equipment (XBox is at least viable as a profit center), they compete in the online service and advertising business with Google, Yahoo, etc., and they claim to be moving into business consulting and a few other things (although I have my doubts still that they have the stomach for it). No American company is going to make hardware PERIOD. Intel and IBM have nice businesses designing chips, and AMD isn't going anywhere for a while, but in terms of end user products, we just slap the label on the box, uh, I mean we ask the nice people in Singapore to do that for us before they ship it to the customer.

So Apple, is a BRAND, and name recognition is a good thing. The Apple brand is a rising star as is Google, while a lot of older brands are sinking or stagnating. Marrying off one of these rising stars with a company that is otherwise in decent health could have some great synergistic effects.

Matchmakers matchmakers make me a match: Let the speculation begin. Who's it going to be? Apple-Yahoo, Google-Apple? Sony could use some diversification too at this point, and IBM... it's been a while since they tried to get into the consumer business, are they over embarrassment about the PC Jr? They could have course OWNED the PC business if they had taken it more seriously, was that failure so colossal that they can never think of the possibility again? A tech retrenchment might make strange bedfellows.

After all, the most fun part of the roller coaster ride is that big drop. Everyone hold your hands up and start screaming!

Update: I forgot to mention... some say that the BIG news today from Apple was their name change, from Apple Computer Inc. to just Apple Inc. I tend to agree. Maybe I should have just titled this post that way, but I got such a jolt from the two quotes in the Yahoo article that I couldn't stop myself from just linking it.

I even went over to one of the Apple forums to throw cold water on the iPhone thing and found them already shivering over the name change. Oh yea, more on names:

*here*

Slant of media is driven by audience, not owners, U.S. study shows

The authors calculated the ideal partisan slant for each paper, if all it cared about was getting readers, and they found that it looked almost precisely like the one for the actual newspaper. As Shapiro put it during an interview, "The data suggest that newspapers are targeting their political slant to their customers' demand and choosing the amount of slant that will maximize their sales."

But if this is true, can the financial difficulties of the MSM be completely explained by the advance of the Internet? Or is it that we are becoming a nation of illiterates? Maybe some combination of these things?

There is no question in my mind that the mainstream media deserves what is happening to them at this point. I happen to like biased media. The country was founded in a time when there were many small, mostly local news sources with differing, (and this is critical) openly stated points of view.

When possible, I like to read the same story from both a conservative and liberal perspective, and if both don't give me the "hmmm, I never thought of it that way" reaction then I've wasted my time.

Sadly, you don't have to read much beyond the title and first paragraph of MSM stories to know there is nothing new in it at all, and all too often the online media isn't doing much better.

Direct citizen driven journalism as made possible on the Internet has great potential, but also could reduce important issues to the level of WWF competitions.

There is reason for cautious optimism.

*Related Link*

Ambulation

A few years ago a very well-to-do liberal (did I have to mention that?) colleague at work took an interest in my preference in shoes as they often do. She didn't think my somewhat old Sperry Topsiders were suitable to the task of, well, enclosing my feet and all those duties associated thereto.

Now I should add that the Sperry Topsiders (let's just call them "boat shoes") were not my idea in the first place. Several years prior to that I had worn some sort of "sneaker" which took the form of "running shoes" except that they had Velcro fasteners where there would have otherwise been shoe laces. Not having laces was a problem for this (oh, did I mention) other well-to-do liberal person who took an interest in my footwear. She convinced me to switch from my awful Velcro laden sneakers that I think came from somewhere like K-mart for $10 a pair and switch to these nice upscale boat shoes, complete with LEATHER shoe laces that needed to be re-tied about every 15 minutes. Not to mention I feel much safer in them when I am on a boat, that is, if I had a boat.

The cost of the boat shoes was around $75 at he time I think, which I considered excessive. But they were almost as comfortable as the $10 Velcro sneakers and eventually I got used to wearing them. I tried gluing the leather shoe laces to keep them tied, since I never used the laces when putting the shoes on or taking them off (just as I never used the Velcro on the sneakers.) All shoes should go on when you forcibly shove your feet at them and come off when you step on the back of one shoe and pull. Seems simple enough to me. Glue didn't work though, and after a few years of this, and other solutions, I took to tying the laces with square knots, so that even if they LOOKED untied, they remained snugly on my feet. Even the square knots would come undone eventually. I really don't think cow skin was designed to be used in this way. Snipping the excess off at the square knot wouldn't do since there wouldn't be anything to grip to re-tie it. I ended up just tying a series of square knots one on top of another until the top of my shoes looked sort of like an old-time Chinaman's pony tail.

Maybe that's why the more recent liberal fashion consultant thought that I should visit the Earth Shoe store and get something that (to her at least) looked nice and was comfortable too. So I did. And about $150 later I was wearing sort of brown leather clog-looking things with no laces (I liked this) and no heels (I wasn't so sure about this part). They are big up front where the toes are, and the lack of heel was supposed to cause the foot to comfortably "roll" forward as you walked.

These shoes were indeed comfortable for a few days. For some reason though which I don't recall at the moment, I felt compelled to go back to my "boat shoes" after a couple of weeks. This immediately got noticed. My excuse of "not wanting to wear the Earth Shoes out too quickly" was met with the suggestion that I buy a second pair.

I suppose many a friendship has been sacrificed over such a thing. In any event the Earth Shoes found there way here to the beach, where I am now where I thought they might serve as "dress shoes" if I ever needed such a thing (apparently I don't) and the next time I laid eyes on them the special protective spray which the Earth Shoe store salesman had convinced me was essential to proper enjoyment of the shoe had turned into some sort of smorgasbord for green mold. Nothing else in my closet was similarly affected, so I think they really did like that spray. Or perhaps they came in on it.

I've continued to wear the Sperry Topsiders, and only that brand, not just ANY boat shoe, for many years. I've had 4 or 5 pair. I wear them until they disintegrate. Well, actually longer than that, for as they disintegrate I "fix" them as best I can, applying glue here, string there, and whatever it takes to avoid the need to break in a new pair. I've even found an "outlet" store at the beach where I can get them for $50 or so, which is a fraction of what they cost now in regular stores.

All of this, preamble (word chosen carefully) to my shock and horror at seeing a pair of Earth Shoes at Walmart the other day for $15. On a whim, I bought a pair. There was no spray to go with them, and no salesperson nearby to suggest I needed any. They are made in China. I bet the pair I got for ten times as much was too. I wonder what these Topsiders actually cost to make? If I were paying $15 for them I'd be a lot more inclined to throw them away and break in new ones more frequently than I do. If this makes me a tightwad then I'm comfortable with that. I like to know what things cost to make, and that the people in between me, the consumer and those Chinamen who make the shoes and inform me as to how to tie the laces are not making too comfortable a profit.

For well-to-do liberals, money is no object, if it achieves the goal of making MY feet look better, just as personal taste is no object to those in the condo association who want everyone's door to be the same horrid orange. Those who know something about how government works, and who don't either work there, or have unlimited resources, would do well to shop for less expensive alternatives I think.

Or maybe it's just a coincidence that my last two shoe consultants were liberals.

And all of THAT as preamble to my slipping on my new Earth Shoes today and going for a walk on the beach. Spring has sprung I guess, or the 50 degree temperature and lack of wind combined for very moderate FEELING weather. That, coupled with my new shoes, and their "rolling" action and before I knew it I realized I had walked a VERY long way.

Yesterday being St. Patrick's day had a noticeable impact on the beach. Or at least I guess that's what did it. This place is deserted this time of year and it's common to not see another single soul on the beach or any sign of humanity. From the parking lot, and noises in the distance I infer that some are making a long weekend here out of St. Patrick's day, one of the many holidays that I can be blissfully unaware of unless it is brought to my attention. Oh yes, I was careful to get off the streets early yesterday and really had forgotten all about it until I noticed all the tire tracks on the beach. It seemed that every dune crossing had been the site of drunken celebrants testing their four-wheel-drives. Quite a few had apparently brought wood with them to half burn for warmth in the night and then quickly cover with sand until the flame was gone, or not.

I wasn't consciously paying that much attention to the tire tracks or the burnt wood so much as the things uncovered by last nights activity. Due to my eyesight being no better than average for a person my age I tend to collect mostly brightly colored or large things on my beach walks. I'm sure many a tiny treasure has escaped my notice.



As a result, a large snail shell (A) that isn't broken will usually get my attention. The ones found here are not often very attractive, although with some oil and a bit of work they can be made to be quite decorative. Since attending a lecture on the subject broken bits of glass (B) are now picked up by me rather than being passed over. Some people actually SELL this stuff making an old Heineken bottle carelessly tossed into the ocean a modern investment vehicle. I used to think that such glass was worn down mainly by the action of sand, but I learned that salt water actually weakens the structure of molten silicon dioxide (and whatever else they happen to mix with it) accelerating the speed with which those razor sharp edges become harmless, and rendering a Noxema, Haley's MO, or some fancy new fruit drink's bottle (C) difficult to distinguish and giving the glass surface a patina hard to duplicate by mecchanical means. Of course, at the lecture I attended, I found that through proper chemical and spectroscopic analysis one can trace these glass fragments back to their source, be it a modern day bottling plant or a hand blown item from the 1600s (none of which appear in my collection I am sure.)

In fact I often note that the beach is one of the few places that you can safely walk barefooted without much concern. Almost anything except a discarded hypodermic needle is quickly rendered safe to the bottom of the feet in one way or another. Most things submerge themselves in the wet sand at a uniform rate so that if you "relax" your feet (I'm not entirely sure I know what I mean by this) you can walk down the beach without looking where you are going and only occasionally feel something uncomfortable enough to make you check for skin breakage. Almost any metal corrodes rapidly to the point where it is unrecognizable. There is no such thing as stainless steel here. Only gold has much chance of surviving in a recognizable form and I have yet to collect my first dabloon. Wood rots in interesting ways and plastics of all sort may last, but they are quickly covered with sea plants, snails, and other mollusks to the point where you might recognize a familiar shape without being able to see any of the original surface. No, my feet are safe as I amble down the beach this time of year in my Earth Shoes. I have absolutely nothing to worry about.

That is, other than crushing something I'd like to collect (D) like this tiny conch shell about whose inhabitant we can say "We hardly knew ye." As the sand protects our feet from sharp things, it also protects items such as this from multi-ton drunk-driven ersatz dune buggies on St. Patrick's day nights. Our tiny departed conch friend is indestructible by comparison to it's former lodgings (E) which I have seen on the beach frequently thinking it is some sort of washed up plant. But actually I found that these are conchs egg casings. Normally I find these totally empty with a small hole on the outer edge where the young ones have left. Close by to this one however I found a separated unit (F) with no such hole, and not one, but many tiny unborn inside, shell, and all.

The conch, like the snail, of course, makes do with only one foot, albeit the majority of its body serving that purpose, and has no need of an Earth Shoe, or a boat shoe for that matter.

When one walks, one thinks, and without knowing it finds that they have reached the public beach in Delaware with a pocket full of treasure and a seemingly long (now) slog back to that speck in the distance called home. One can but try to get back before damage is done to those collected beach goodies and thoughts.

Making up for months during which I mostly cut and pasted excerpts and my quick reactions to things "collected" on the Internet it occurs to me that the quality of such "blogging" isn't far above the time wasted watching TV. It is nice then from time to time to actually create something, especially as I sit here and realize that those shoes have rubbed a small blister onto the inside of my right foot.

I should go now. I have an "Urgent" message from Sears, informing me that they are all out of the money I gave them to insure I'd never have to have a kitchen appliance replaced. It occurs to me now that Sears gets my money if something breaks, and they get my money if it doesn't too. There is something of the "Earth Shoe" phenomenon in this that I'll have to study more carefully. Look for an update.

Update: Well, I'm here adding tags to my old posts. I noticed I promised an update, so here it is. I let all my Sears extended warrantys expire. Most of this stuff costs about twice as much to replace or insure as to fix, plus, in replacing them you usually get new features, energy efficiency, etc. Also, I'm still wearing the Waolmart Earth Shoes. They don't ever seem to wear out. They smell a bit though. So I throw them in the washing machine from time to time.