AlexHopmann.com

Fun headline, right? Most of you out there are probably saying “duhhhhh”.

Matt Cutts wrote a good piece on his reactions to Privacy International’s rating of Google’s privacy as the worst. And I agree with most of his points (with a disclaimer that I’m not an expert so I don’t know first-hand which specific claims are true or false). However, the bigger story is that Google is going through a similar transition to what Microsoft dealt with in the late 90s when you have an internal group of people dealing with a widening perception gap between themselves and the greater community.

Now, Microsoft didn’t have a tag-line like “don’t be evil”, but for the most part I personally witnessed very little of the kind of thing that people complained about as Microsoft’s evil practices. Sure, we competed vigorously with each products direct competitors, but that’s just business/life. I can’t vouch for other parts of Microsoft like the sales teams or licensing, but for the technical folks in product development, we were all about building great products for our customers and trying to do some great technical innovation. When people started bashing us in public our reaction was very much like Matt’s. We were just doing the same stuff we had always done, doing the same stuff that all the other competitors had been doing, and now all of the sudden we were the evil empire and everyone was out to tear us down, usually (it seemed) unfairly. We would go build something cool and do the quick to market thing, and then get roasted over some security hole, or privacy implication, or impact on some strange enterprise scenario. We would sit around at lunch and gripe about how unfair it was that we got horrible press on some obscure security bug, yet some major hole from someone else got barely a blip of attention.

There are a couple of things going on at Google right now that relate to the extra scrutiny they are getting and some advice that I wish we could have figured out at Microsoft back in 1997 before it all got much worse.

First of all, suck it up. This is an inevitable result of being on top. The way the press and public treats you changes, and you just need to accept that. David vs. Goliath is the most popular story that the press likes to repeat over and over. Folks at Microsoft suddenly realized that while we had thought we were David (Exchange was #2 to Lotus Notes at the time for example), everyone else thought we were Goliath. Once you realize that everyone thinks of you as Goliath you need to do your best to focus on being the gentle giant. David gets to whine about how tough his situation is, Goliath doesn’t.

Second, realize that now that you are on top, you need to execute to a higher standard. Its not just good enough to be more careful than the other guy, you need to lead. Its assumed you have the best infrastructure, best ability to execute so the scrappy “lets throw something out there and see how people react to it” stuff doesn’t fly anymore in the press. If you need any more evidence of both this point and the previous one, I’ll just point out that there was a nice long segment on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart about the Google Street Views feature. To me Google Street Views is fairly innocuous- it doesn’t show anything that isn’t technically in the public sphere, but it has been roasted across the board. If some scrappy start-up did this feature the reaction wouldn’t be nearly the same.

Of course one implication of the previous point is that you now can’t be as agile, or at least its a lot harder. Microsoft hasn’t been slower just for the fun of it, but because they had already learned this lesson, at least somewhat.

Finally Google has one unique problem here. Google’s main initiative on things like these privacy issues are is “don’t be evil” slogan. However, while I hear that the communication inside Google is amazingly open and transparent, Google is a very secretive organization with respect to the rest of the world. Matt is one of the few exceptions, which certainly relates to why his blog is one of the more popular ones on the Internet. So the rest of the world hears a slogan like “don’t be evil” but doesn’t get to see how things actually work. What measures are being taken to make sure that the log files (which have personal information for 18-24 months) are kept safely? Who does information actually get shared with? What policies really are keeping this stuff private? Could a Google employee look at my private Google Spreadsheet “just to debug something”? I’d assume not, but we don’t really know. Or maybe even if they can’t look at my spreadsheet, can they do aggregate analysis of all the data that might leak keywords or something that is confidential?

So it all comes down to Google asking us to “trust us, we won’t be evil”. But given a society where the administration asked us to trust them that they wouldn’t break any civil liberties protections in their pursuit of terrorism (and their political enemies), most people are understandably a little bit skeptical. What happens the first time the Google execs are looking at the possibility of missing a quarterly earnings target? They have had an awesome run of growth, but the more you grow, the harder further growth gets, and the temptation to bend a few rules, cross a few lines to keep that stock price afloat/rising becomes incredible. Keep in mind, that while you can argue that Bill Gates, Sergei and Larry don’t personally care about the incremental net worth, many people in their organizations DO, and they all know that if it goes south they risk the whole organization unraveling and any of these guys would resort to extreme measures to stop that from happening.

All in all my best wishes are with the Google guys on this one. They have built a great company amazingly quickly and have so far had a decent track record getting out in front of other growth issues faster that Microsoft did, although at the same time their growth has been so meteoric that they have to react even faster. It will be interesting to observe how they tackle this- come to embrace that they are a big company and adapt to that, find some novel way to tackle this huge business challenge, or ignore the whole thing and go down in flames (or at least suffer a little bit).

Gigabyte now has silent versions of both brands. The Gigabyte GF8600GTS GV-NX86S256H is a two-slot silent card, and the Gigabyte ATI 2600 XT GV-RX26T256H is a one-slot silent card.

The NVidia version is available now, the ATI one soon (was just introduced at Computex). I would kill for a head-to-head comparison of these two cards.

The new version of Parallels Desktop for the Mac is out. Its funny- they were hyping it up for the last couple of weeks for the 3d support, file copying, and snapshots. I’m sure those will all be pretty useful features, but for me the bootcamp thing was critical- since I switched to running Vista in Bootcamp I haven’t been using Parallels at all so this is the big breakthrough in the new version.

I installed the new version of Parallels and after a couple of days hassle with my activation key, I finally was able to start it up and create a VM pointing to my boot-camp partition. It proceeded to boot Vista- at first it looked like it was hanging, but as best I can tell it was just doing a bunch of processing. Sign in, and it does some device install and reboots again. After it reboots, it again is installing something- this time the Parallels tools. Next lots of “Windows can’t verify the publisher of this driver software” dialogs appeared. This all took surprisingly long- not a serious problem or anything, but it does beg the question of what its doing for 30 minutes or so. The bigger problem was that there was no indication of progress so I couldn’t tell if it was stuck in a loop or something?

In the end it rebooted and it seems like everything is fine. The Coherence feature where each window from Windows opens in an individual Mac window is wild. For some reason the “Use Multiple Displays” feature was not on by default for Coherence. In the end it appears to be working great, although the performance of my Windows apps don’t appear to be in the same ballpark as they were when running natively. For example opening individual emails from Outlook appears noticeably slow.

I decided a couple of years ago to scan all my paperwork. All my bills, and other such stuff. So far its mostly been handy when I need to find a record from away from home or something like that, but today another application turned up.

Part of the cool thing of the scanning software (I just use a Dell All-In-One 962 printer with a built-in scanner) is that it scans each document and OCRs it and puts it into a PDF which contains both the image as well as the text version of the document.

Today I needed to remember if I’d paid for Parallels (the Mac VM stuff) and I was surprised that I couldn’t find any record of having paid for it in my email. But with the scanned documents I was able to do a text-search on all my credit-card records and find the charge. Pretty cool! Now that is the kind of scenario that I want enabled by integrated storage…

Dare posted links to a Back to the Future Spoof that was used in Bob Muglia’s TechEd keynote. Great stuff. I’m touched that Bob managed to include “web store” in the great list of failed integrated storage attempts. Ahhh, good times.

I also love the “get me all the pictures of me with the CEO at the company picnic for the past 5 years”- a good semi-inside joke. I knew WinFS was in trouble when this was the most common example of why you really needed to be able to do joins on semi-structured data like documents, photos and contacts. It was a classic case of “so we have this great technology that does this thing X. Hmmm, why would anyone actually care about doing X. Lets construct a scenario that needs it!”

To be clear, its not that WinFS couldn’t do lots of more basic things that people cared about. However, other, less complex technologies could also do those other things so the team had to keep constructing odd scenarios that those alternative technologies couldn’t accomplish.

I remember when the NVidia 7800GS AGP version came out and it was predicted to be the end of the line for AGP video cards. Since then we have been lucky enough to have two newer generations come out including some AGP models, the second being the AMD/ATI 8600XT that should be available in an AGP version from Sapphire. This isn’t the top of the line card but might be a nice choice to upgrade some of my existing AGP machines so they can support HD-quality video and all that stuff. I’m looking forward to seeing how it compares to my existing GF 7600GS for gaming. I’m planning on upgrading the base machine anyway soon but its nice to know that there is an option to put a real DX10 video card in my various AGP-based machines.

ATI also has the same problem NVidia does that the high end cards are missing the full video-decode support. So that makes it a lot less bitter that this card is the mid-range one which IS supposed to have the full video decode.

“Tog” wrote an article on subjective time, comparing my favorite punching bag American Airlines to Jet Blue. I couldn’t agree more with the suckiness of the experience on American and how slick it is that JetBlue does it better.

The amazing thing is that JetBlue does it better without charging more. If they weren’t just as cheap or cheaper, all their better experience would probably still result in a business failure. For some reason most of us are psychotically price sensitive when it comes to airline travel. For example, it would be awesome if Expedia provided a nice search engine that did some sophisticated scoring of flights based on my airline preferences (Jetblue = +5, Alaska = +2, Southwest = +1, American Airlines = -10), fit to my travel schedule, total time for the flight, on-time percentage and other similar factors. They may even have such a feature, but I bet no one uses it, instead pretty much just going straight for the “sort by lowest price” view. (to be fair, Expedia does appear to have a nice interface now that shows best non-stop fare, 1 stop, etc, so they do make it easy to pay a little extra to avoid changing planes as much- it looks like this has improved quite a bit since I last saw it).

How does the airline industry get out of this trap? I’d love it if there were some better choices in air-travel. For example a quick search shows that a flight from Seattle to London this fall would run about $800-$900. I’m a fairly big guy so being crammed into the usual economy seat for that long is pretty miserable, but going up to business class jacks it up to a minimum of $3500.

Imagine instead that an airline could offer an all business (or at least JetBlue class of service) for $1500 or even better $1300. For an international flight I’d jump at that in a second. I don’t need the full cushy business class, but an Enconomy Plus or whatever would be great. But as best as I can tell this option pretty much doesn’t exist- too many people just can’t see paying an extra $500-$700 for an extra 12 hours of comfort and I fear that airline would be a failure.

Its similar to the cilemma faced by photographer that takes pictures of your kids (or you skiing or rafting). I feel like Hillel is asking for them to charge a fixed $30 or $50 to take the photo and hand over the high-resolution image files. In practice, that is what I bought at Snowbird and will do for some of the rafting pictures. Then if I want an 8×10″ its $1.50 at Costco, not $20. But I suspect the business model is not that easy. I suspect the number of parents that would fork over $30 just for an emailed file are realitively low since you then quickly start thinking about the $0 COGS to the photographer and the value of the situation starts feeling weak. Is the professional photo really that much better than the one I can take myself? What am I really getting here?

Its interesting to note that the business model here is changing first in the situations where you can’t really take the photo yourself. I can’t snap a photo myself of that big hit on the river. Its also much harder for me to take some good skiing photos, although I think I’ve done alright. So those guys are more easily able to take your picture with no obligation and then they can hold the great “moment” hostage for the $30.

Its quite possible that some segments of these photographers will just die out. With the advances of modern digital cameras its just too easy to take your own good photos at your kids ballet or theater performance or soccer game. In a similar fashion I hope that the traditional airline system dies out in favor of the JetBlue style approach. Again, its one of those situations where the system has built up so many walls around itself that they have locked themselves into a model that is almost impossible to evolve from within. It takes the outside forces led initially by Southwest and perfected by JetBlue to undercut and rebuild the industry in a new way.

Hillel writes about buying photos of his daughter and the conflicts between traditional business models (selling prints) and our new digital world. I thought I’d add a few comments to the discussion.

First of all, the way he approached the photographer was destined to cause misunderstandings. I guess he knew it in writing “It probably didn’t help when I told him that if I wanted additional prints I wouldn’t order them from him anyway, I would just scan the print I got and make more.” Given that the photographer owns the copyright to the photos, even if they are of your kid and they sold you prints, what he pretty much said was “I’m going to steal your work”. Not the best way to help the guy work through the business challenges that he faces.

I’ve seen these same issues going on with photographers who take photos of rafting trips and people at ski-resorts. In the local white-water areas there are two outfits that take photos of you, one that sells online and will sell digital images and the other still takes photos on conventional film and only sells prints. I’m curious to see how it all works out, but I suspect the digital folks are going to win- they are able to take 10 photos of each boat as it goes by at no cost so its much more likely they are going to get the great shot that will make the sale.

At Snowbird a couple of years ago we passed by one of those guys taking photos on the hill. I’ve been by them many times but never bought a thing. This time we stopped by and there were actually quite a few shots that were much better than the ones I’d taken myself (go figure, they are the pros, I’m not). But what clinched the sale for them was that they were willing to sell me a digital photo for $25, or 6 for $100. Sure enough, taking advantage of the 0 COGS, helped them upsell me to the $100 package, and everyone is happy.

I do think Hillel misunderstands in his evaluation that the cost of the printed package has something to do with the cost of the printing. The cost of printing photos, even 8×10s is (relatively speaking) almost 0 today. You are paying for the photographers expertise and the intellectual property of their photo (and for a copy of it, not to own the copyright itself). They just have a pricing model where they charge more for more reproductions and bigger ones, just like Microsoft charges more for 4 copies of Vista than for 1, and charges more for 1 copy of Vista Ultimate than 1 copy of Vista Home despite the fact that the exact same bits are on each DVD, just different features are enabled/disabled. In many ways this photography business is closer to software than either side has realized yet.

Dare posts about a friend writing about the origins of LINQ and its history with ObjectSpaces. I also worked with the ObjectSpaces team as they went through several iterations forced by various political winds inside Microsoft. We were hoping that they were going to be a great compliment to databinding in Avalon (WPF). Ideally you could easily define some database schemas, create some .NET objects to represent your data logic, and then use WPF databinding to create great user interface on top of it. All resulting in an application with great abstractions so you can evolve the various parts independently as necessary.

I had done some similar experimentation back in 1999-2001 (using Java to model an object programming layer first for Exchange and later for SQL). From my perspective the key was to not try to do a full complex “object relational” layer where you make things artificially automatic. Don’t hide the underlying database, but make it a lot easier to interact with it.

So far the most effective version of this is pretty much the ActiveRecord library that is part of Ruby on Rails. Judy’s Book also has their own version for the various sites built there, and I’ve built my own as part of various Fast Carrot / Launch21 projects. Writing lots of custom SQL and dealing with generic records all over your UI logic can be a big pain, and you also get stuck with poor choices for where to put your business logic. Part of what makes these technologies contraversial is that the database purists want you to put all the logic in the database. You build stored procedures, triggers, or more recently .NET based custom types that live in the database. The advatantage of that approach is that you have a guarantee of consistent behavior no matter what client talks to your database. For certain OS or enterprise applications this is very important. For most of the web-applications we build on the other hand this is a non-issue and just makes building the whole thing a giant pain.

I haven’t had a chance to get my hands dirty with LINQ yet but I’m hopeful that its going to be really cool. I know there were a bunch of neat projects brewing in this space so if they make the database side of the programming really interface with .NET in an elegant way, that could be a huge win for .NET programming.

In-N-Out burger has a help line you can contact any time at 1-800-786-1000. This phone number gets answered by a real person who is always available to help you with directions to the nearest In-N-Out (which are sadly still limited to California and Nevada and I guess a few in Arizona).

It is somewhat surprising how many times I have used this service. Fairly frequently when I fly into California I’m on the phone to find the most convenient place for a snack. In-N-Out is a very well run operation- they have a solid system for just about everything that helps them feel efficient without sacrificing quality, and this help-line is consistent with the rest.