July 18, 2005

Books- Hiking

We are planning hiking trips to Glacier National Park and later to Zion National park and that made me think about getting some hiking books. Stuff to check out:

July 15, 2005

Press- Astroturf

Our product Network Magic was recently reviewed on CNET and posted on download.com. When I saw the posts I thought for about 2 seconds about writing a "user comment" and then gave it up as tacky.

Recently we noticed that there were several comments posted that were super-negative. The funny thing is that you can click on some of the names like "wireless_eddie" and there are exactly two reviews, one slamming us, and another with unrealistically glowing praise for our competitor. First of all, this is totally transparent if you look at all. But it is also just plain stupid from a business perspective. We are in this new industry segment where there is just tons of room for growth and creating an atmosphere of mud-slinging is just bad for business for the whole segment. Not to mention childish.

In any case, we are going to stay focused on growing the industry and being positive. Its been great to see some of our enthusiastic customers posting their own reviews on these sites to get the word out with some nice things to say (although one hint that they are real is that they do use their write-ups as an opportunity to plug their favorite feature requests).

I should also say that I was a bit disappointed with the CNET review. To be fair a lot of the feedback in the review was accurate (although they did miss a few details- for example if you have a ton of machines, more than 5 you can just buy a second license). We got an "8" for setup and interface, but only a "6" for features. I'm not sure I understand that given that this is such a new industry segment- we have tons of features we are working on, but in the context of what exists we are super feature rich. Finally we have had a bunch of confusion about our support policies (which are actually pretty generous- in practice you can just email us and call us all you want for free). Because we didn't really have that clearly spelled out though we got dinged in this area. Again, I would hope this kind of thing would be in the context of comparable software and our support is just really solid and professional. Plus, they have a great community area with tons of useful articles about wireless networking and some great forums with an active user community.

Also- we have been exploring the notion of "Power Toys" lately. This is really cool for me since it potentially gives me a chance to actually ship a little bit of code (although in an "experimental way"). Not sure if we are going to go live with the next beta release or wait until we ship the final version, but we have some cool surprises in store for people I think.

July 14, 2005

Airlines- Alaska, JetBlue

John Dvorak on how Alaska Airlines has gone down hill. I totally agree. Right when I was out of college I loved Southwest. Cheap, they had the friends fly free thing, it was easy to change tickets and easy to show up at the last minute. Then Southwest got way more crowded and I started flying Alaska a bunch, especially after I started at Microsoft in the San Jose office and was flying up to Seattle a ton. Seat 6F was my regular (almost once a week) on the 6am flight from OAK to SEA. I loved the MD-80s (and was excited to see Dvorak observe the same thing), the service was great and the flights were rarely that crowded. However since 2000 or so they have gone way down-hill and now they are just as inconvenient as Southwest without any of the advantages that Southwest has because of its great streamline operations.

JetBlue- please, Please, PLEASE don't go downhill! The snacks are great, the seats are great, the non-stop flights to NY are great, the free wireless in the terminal is great when it works (which is only like 25% of the time, but its a nice idea), even the spa in the NY terminal is great and one of the rare examples I've seen of not getting price-gouged in an airline terminal. The willingness to open my bottle of wine for me is great (although I've learned the hard way it needs to be screw-cap due to security). I'd love more direct flights out of Seattle, but whatever you do, don't screw up what you have right now. I'd settle for just the New York flight if that is what it takes to not screw it up.

Besides, now that I have an airplane that I can fly myself anywhere on the west coast in 4 hours, I don't need the LA, Oakland, Salt Lake City, etc, flights as much anymore.

July 11, 2005

Technology- Humor Books

Saw a link to a funny set of humor books on ActiveX and Java- what a strange thing...

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