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November 5th, 2009
01:55 pm - How bad is Broadstripe?
It's pretty hard for me to imagine how they could be worse.
1) They overbilled me by $120 because they "lost" the automatic payment from last month, so they automatically billed me double this month, all while changing their billing system such that they can't figure out where the old money went.
2) The Internet service went down yesterday morning, and tech support claims they can't understand what's wrong, and need to send a service technician to look at the modem--which they can't do for another week. A week without Internet??? Are you kidding me???
3) The submit button on their website's contact us form doesn't work. Ha, ha... I'm sure that's no accident.
I never thought I could imagine a company worse than Comcast, but Broadstripe is clearly a mickey mouse operation.
I understand they are filing for bankruptcy. No surprise there. The big downside is that our building cannot change cable providers while the bankruptcy protection is in effect.
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October 28th, 2009
09:07 pm - Phils take game 1
It's hard to know which of these three guys to love the most: Chase Utley provided the only offense on the field until the much-vaunted Yankees bullpen fell apart. Cliff Lee not only pitched like a god, he demonstrated incomparable style in his defensive play. Asked about his confidence, "Oh, yeah, I'm confident." Asked about his cool: "Yeah, I've always been that way." Charlie Manuel is the most human person in baseball: did you watch his press conference? Baseball inclines some observers to deep nuance, to tortuous feats of intellectualization. Charlie Manuel brings it all back to earth. Asked about Utley's headspace, and his "hands", Manuel replied: "Yeah, Chase had a good night." He added: "He has pretty good balance and rhythm right now, he kinda pushes from here, you know, and yeah, he can hit the ball when he does that."
Folks who have given the Yankees the slam dunk win, need to be wondering what the hell happened here.
Now, any given baseball team can win on any given day. The only team to shut the Yankees out at home this year were the Nationals, so let's not get ahead of ourselves.
But if nothing else goes right, Game 1 was a thing of beauty.
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August 7th, 2009
08:10 pm - A Great Vacation
This is how I know I'm not like other people. I'm just wrapping up a really great vacation.
You know what I did on my vacation?
I spent hours and hours cleaning and treating my domicile to combat a bed bug infestation that was underway. (I'll write up the full details of this at some point--for now I'm offering daily updates in twitter (http://twitter.com/bluejack).) And I worked on cranking out a new issue of the Internet Review of Science Fiction.
Send me to the beach, and by the time I'm back I'm exhausted, and ready to go back to work just as a relief from all the pressure of "having fun."
But leave me at home with a couple of projects, and I'm a happy man.
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June 25th, 2009
09:24 am - Just when I thought I'd never have to think about my old ISP again...
On Thu, Jun 25, 2009 at 6:00 AM, Mark Wallace<mwallace@drizzle.com> wrote:
> We would like to take this opportunity to once again thank you for choosing
> Drizzle as your Internet Service Provider. We understand that you often get
> advertisements from other companies with special deals that can sound
> appealing but actually cost you more in the long run. Questions about how
> our service offerings compare or feedback about how we can improve your
> experience are welcome and appreciated anytime.
Hi Mark, Sure, I've got some feedback for you.
1) I'm no longer a client of yours, so I would appreciate you not sending me
any more of these.
2) You screwed me out of $500 so I think your company stinks, and I tell
everyone I know.
-b
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June 20th, 2009
11:16 am - rapid software development
In the past 10 years there has been an absolutely amazing proliferation of rapid development tools and practices that have transformed software development in general and internet development in particular. One that has had the buzz for a while now is Ruby on Rails. You're probably familiar with it.
Lately, I've heard much buzz about a RoR alternative: merb. Merb and Rails are expected to merge in an upcoming release. Merb advertises high performance and a lightweight framework. I have to say, one of the things that has never pleased me about RoR is the extent of the scaffolding. I've never used it in a high-performance environment myself, simply because of its reputation, but performance improvements are always welcome.
That said, I can spin up a new rails application in about 20 minutes. I have now spent the equivalent of three days spread over the past few weeks attempting to get merb to work for me. The problem appears to be that no linux system I have access to--not the latest Ubuntu, not the CentOS I have access to, and not a smattering of not-quite-latest Ubuntus can actually deliver me a working set of packages. On some hosts I can't run 'merb-gen' without collapsing in a fit of stack traces. In others I can get the skeleton built, but attempting to use any orm (datamapper or active record) result in similar catastrophic errors.
Moreover, the whole thing began with many false starts as just about every merb tutorial I can find on the web is woefully out of date, offering procedures that simply don't work. Apparently merb has changed its commandline options on several occasions.
You know, it's just not rapid development if you can't get started.
Reluctantly, I will return to rails for my prototyping work.
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May 20th, 2009
07:22 am - Things Wolfram Alpha can't calculate
Nobody can deny the success of the Wolfram Alpha hype machine, and I've heard first hand accounts of how awesome the product can be when you have a question that it was designed to answer. However, this "Computational Knowledge Engine" is falling short of my more mundane, practical needs.
For example, can it "compute" when the next bus will arrive? No. Nor can it give me a timetable. Can it "compute" the postage required to send a first class letter to Canada? Apparently not. It does, however know about both Seattle (although not Seattle Metro), and Canada.
I'm not being snarky: I think they've done an amazing job in the domain of structured data, but here's the rub. If you can't predict whether or not they will be able to answer your question, then there's very little value in going there. I could have saved myself some steps and gone straight to the USPS web site (unweildy and annoying as it is), or similarly gone straight to the Seattle Metro site (which is actually pretty awesome anyway).
Now, if the alternative is sitting down with pile of census documents and plotting my own graph of population trends of major U.S. cities, then sure, Wolfram Alpha is a hell of a product. I expect we will see a new citation style for Wolfram Alpha showing up in academic papers any day now. But for every day needs?
Meh.
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May 19th, 2009
07:24 am - Screwed by Drizzle
I could have gone with some larger internet outfit, but instead I thought I'd keep it local, and go with a local ISP that I had had a good relationship with in the past.
This was for the old IROSF offices, now closed.
Unfortunately, this turned out not to be in my benefit, and I'd just like to encourage all of you who might be thinking about getting DSL to go with a different provider.
What happened was, when I set it up the account -- oh about five years ago -- I set it up to pay Drizzle annually. Every year my credit card would be dinged. On closing down the office -- and the DSL, I didn't even think about the annual date. I figured it would be months away and I'd just bite the bullet. I shut down QWest service but got distracted before shutting down Drizzle, not even thinking there might be any urgency about it.
A few days later, when I did call them to turn it off, it turned out that I had missed the annual deadline by 2 days. They have a "no refunds" policy, the woman told me, but she would run it past the company president. A few weeks later I received a curt email -- not even from Drizzle, from a company called "IPNS" saying, and I'll quote the whole email:
"Our customer support team personnel has replied to your support request #1514
per Jim, company policy is, no refunds.
We hope this response has sufficiently answered your questions. If not, please do not send another email. Instead, reply to this email or login to your account for a complete archive of all your support request and responses."
They provided a link to the ticket, also at this ipns address, which I could not view without logging in, but of course I don't know who IPNS is. For all I know this is a phishing expedition. I cautiously respond asking them who they are and what this is in reference to, fully expecting to be added to yet another spammer database.
Nope, it's Drizzle. They explain, as if I'm an idiot, that it's about my refund request. This time, however, the email does actually come from Drizzle accounting.
So, in conclusion, this experience could hardly be worse, and is a disappointing end to what was previously a perfectly satisfactory business relationship with a local business. Now I can only encourage people to avoid Drizzle from the get go, and if opportunity arises to switch companies, do so.
In lieu of all that, put your annual billing date in giant red letters near your computer.
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April 20th, 2009
11:59 am - Oracle about to own MySQL... or is that 'pwn'?
Rumor has it that Oracle's acquisition of Sun is less of a concern for anti-trust regulators than the IBM acquisition. This is presumably because Sun is big into hardware, as is IBM. However, a technology close to the hearts of many in Internet technology is MySQL. And the number one reason to use MySQL is that it isn't Oracle.
(The number two reason to use it is that it also isn't Postgres, although many Postgres users will tell you the number one reason to use Postgres is that it is the best database software bar none, the most sql compliant, etc. etc. I have found it difficult to love Postgres, however, and would generally choose MySQL.)
So, Oracle acquires Sun; it gets Java, it gets a whole bunch of hardware assets that might well be considered toxic (and many imagine that the hardware divisions will move quickly to Oracle ally, HP). And it gets control over the real heart of the number one competitor to its core product. That sounds a little monopolistic to me.
Moreover, it is part of a pattern: Oracle has previously acquired the berkeley database project and the InnoDB project, which are two of the three core engines for the MySQL db framework.
The big numbers at the bottom of the balance sheet are almost certainly dominated by Sun's hardware business, and the acquisition of a dominant technology resource in Java, but this acquisition quietly completes a trifecta that could change the life of database developers, and the economics of database technologies.
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April 13th, 2009
08:40 pm - Palin v. McCain
In the aftermath of Obama's victory, pundits have occasionally wondered whether Sarah Palin might be the future of the Republican Party. She's attractive, she reads a script well, she's ruthlessly political, and while she may be woefully undereducated, she's by no means stupid. She represents a dramatic change from the rich-white-guy image and that change, rumor has it, energized the Republican party.
Personally, I doubt it. If Palin is the future of the Republican party, the Republican party doesn't have much future.
The politics of destruction will never go out of style, but the recent Bush administration has so thoroughly demonstrated the drawbacks of undemocratic leadership in a democratic society that it seems unlikely we will see that strategy as a winning paradigm for at least a decade or two.
More importantly, however, Obama has demonstrated that the traditional battle lines of Democrat v. Republican and liberal v. conservative no longer have the motivating power they once did. This is perhaps because they just don't make much sense, and they have not made much sense since the Kennedy era. Obama tapped into the desire for centrist leadership that unifies rather than divides and solves problems rather than scores brownie points with narrow demographics.
But the first person I have seen articulating a coherent political philosophy, and a philosophy that genuinely points toward a viable, positive future of the Republican party is... I don't quite believe I'm saying this... McCain. No, not sell-out John: his daughter. Meghan McCain.
Now, I don't know for sure if she wrote this herself, but her recent piece A Gayer GOP is not just a sensible political rationale for being more inclusive, it's actually a coherent articulation of conservative philosophy and why that philosophy should be inclusive.
I'm not Republican, and there are very few conservative views that I have much sympathy for. On many levels from the practice of patently manipulative and hypocritical politics to the simple conclusion that even the most noble of conservative principles are simply unworkable, I just don't think conservative ideals and principles are the right choice at the national level. However, the country would be better off with an opposition party that is working on good ideas for the betterment of the country, rather than a party dedicated to the destruction of the majority party. What I've read of the younger McCain so far suggests that hers might be such a voice, and if the Republican party is ever going to contribute to the positive rebuilding of America, I hope it does so with a vision like hers.
Occasionally I have flippantly said that I hope Palin is the future of the party because that means the party will be marginalized for several administrations. But I don't believe that. I believe that a coherent, constructive, challenging voice from the right will bring forth coherent, constructive, and challenging change from the left.
In a competition of good ideas, the best will usually succeed, and where the best don't succeed, the second-best won't be bad. But in a vacuum of ideas, anything can succeed: and no matter who is in power or how well intentioned they might be, that scares me more than anything.
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March 23rd, 2009
10:10 pm - My Volcano
Ok, ok, it's not *my* volcano. I've thought about it that way, though, because I'm the only one I know with the slightest interest in a relatively remote Alaskan mountain that's been rumbling signs of an eruption for several weeks.
Despite the warnings from geologists that they still considered an eruption to be the most likely scenario, I had somewhat given up on it when seismic activity began to subside to only occasional tremors. But, after I stopped getting tweets on my cell phone, *and* during the weekend when I don't keep an eye on twitter as much, of course it blew.
This prompted my own tweet, and some entertaining responses to my tweet-driven facebook status:
Bluejack: Dammit. I stopped watching my volcano, and now it erupted! http://www.avo.alaska.edu/activity/Redoubt.php
Bridget Coila: Don't you just hate when that happens...
Miki Garrison: It was waiting for you to look away, they always do. :p
Luke McGuff: Just like a watched pot never boils, a watched volcano...
Bruno Gridley: Frankly, you're lucky to even have your own volcano.
So, I'm keeping an eye on the tweets from the Alaskan Volcano Observatory over the course of the day, when this one goes out:
"congrats @poinea, @Dalvorn joined #TCOT and credited you with recruiting them! Everyone please welcome @Dalvorn!"
Not at all in keeping: #TCOT, by the way, stands for "Top Conservatives On Twitter." I have to assume the official twitterer got his accounts crossed. What baffles me isn't that someone slipped up and sent the wrong tweet to the wrong account. What baffles me is there are any conservatives at all in the volcano observatory, after Bobby Jindal's high profile dissing of the enterprise.
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March 18th, 2009
10:10 pm - Something broke my web browsers...
Two things happened over the past several days:
1) I undertook a spring cleaning of my hard drive, freeing up 45G of space previously occupied by thousands of archived photos, video, files, and obsolete applications.
2) I received a Windows update.
I should confess that I undertook the spring cleaning because my almost-2-year-old Vista machine has been becoming increasingly erratic. (Among the new errata, which preceded both these events: when I hook up an external monitor to the laptop, not only does it not recognize the monitor, but I have to go through an identical sequence of steps twice -- twice! -- to transfer display to the external monitor. The first sequence does absolutely nothing, although it reports happily. The second time it succeeds. Fun!)
I did the Spring cleaning over the weekend. Today I received Windows update KB955706 "Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Express Edition Service Pack 3" -- Not what you'd normally call the smoking gun. However, in the press, today is *also* the day that Internet Explorer 8 was released.
And the problem is: both FireFox and Chrome completely stopped working on my computer after this update. Coincidence? I would have to conclude it is, because I just don't believe Microsoft is stupid enough to release an update that breaks their main rivals (if Chrome even counts as a main rival).
Chrome will simply not start. FireFox crashes on (wait for it) attempting to load gmail.
I cannot quite believe this is a conspiracy; I feel I really ought to attribute it to my spring cleaning having pulled or reverted some library that FireFox and Chrome were using. Uninstalling and reinstalling Chrome worked, I'm still struggling with FireFox as I write.
But still. Part of me has to wonder. Part of me has to consider that for far too long I have accepted that while Microsoft is the evil empire, Windows is also the platform for an absolutely enormous amount of freeware, open source development, and grassroots innovation. All those latter things are good: but with the only cost being frustration, fury, and loss of hair, I could totally switch to Linux. I use linux all the time; I myself am almost exclusively a linux software developer (in server technologies, distributed applications, and other things that you mostly interact with via command line or http; never XWindows). So why do I scorn this alternative to the Evil Empire. (And before you Mac suckers get on your high horses again, let me say yes I have a Mac which I use for work, and yes it's tolerable, and no I don't think the Exiled Fascist Prince is any better than the Evil Empire.)
Ok, and I can already see the comments. "But today's linux won't make you tear your hair out the way last year's did." Listen up Penguins. I've heard that every year since 1997, and every time I need to try to optimize my screen resolution on Ubuntu for some widescreen format, or process Canon proprietary image format images, or edit proprietary video formats off my camcorder, or use that brain-tangler (but aptly named) Gimp image processing tool, or take even minimal advantage of power saving features on a laptop, I lose another inch of hairline. And if I hadn't been born with a *lot* of hair, that would mean I should be totally bald by now. As it is, I just don't look so much like a wookie any more.
Finally: between this entry, some previous discussions, and a number of twitter sourced conversations, I really should create a blog along the lines of "How can it be 2009 and every single OS still sucks?!?!"
(So conclusion: Chrome is a known problem with a known workaround, while FireFox 3 is a frequently reported problem with no known workaround. I guess I can't pin it on Microsoft, just on the fact that Microsoft has crappy library dependency tracking and code isolation. And that's a surprise?)
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March 7th, 2009
08:34 pm - Beware. Extra geeky.
I really should have separate blogs for separate subjects, I think. This is totally unrelated to anything most people who occasionally read this blog have any interest in, I'm sure.
But I need to vent.
I have a hunch that there's a single, evil mind behind three of the most venerable tools in the GNU family: Make, Flex, and Bison. (Curse you, Richard Stallman!) Certainly, all three of them share this in common:
* They have lots of documentation, none of which ever answers the question you're trying to find.
* They require the brain to think non-linearly, and to make non-obvious leaps of faith.
Since these are programming tools we're talking about, you will need to make a lot of non-obvious leaps of faith that result in very obvious thumps on the ground before you finally happen upon the correct answer.
In particular, I am currently trying to build something using Flex and Bison (AKA, lex and yacc), which involves using the "start condition" feature. These are poorly explained in the documentation, and do not provide get-you-going examples. Worst of all, the examples they do provide do not demonstrate the correct mechanism for marrying Flex, Bison, and start conditions.
So, I spent three hours attempting to figure out how to parse and pass a quoted string containing escape characters from flex to bison.
By the time I got it figured out, I had resorted to all sorts of hideous global variables to maintain state across multiple regular expression matches within the various rules of the start condition.
Lex and yacc are widely regarded as the tools to use when writing a compiler, but they feel like the kind of gruesomely hackish software a junior high school student might use to throw together a tetris demo. Obviously, a fiendishly clever kid, but I'm afraid we just can't give you more than a C, for this one. Maybe a C++.
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March 6th, 2009
10:00 am - Star Trek -1
Ok, when a franchise resorts to prequels, it may very well be the last sign of total creative stagnation, but I gotta admit, this trailer fires me up.
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March 1st, 2009
01:14 pm - Vernor Vinge Does Not Yet Admit There Are Laws of Physics
This video at the end of this post (rather choppy in its editing and distracted in its focus, unfortunately), has been making the rounds under the headline "Moore's Law Won't Create the Singularity on its Own." (Eg, here.) Actually, Vernor Vinge is continuing to assert his expectation of a "Singularity" style event or process in "the near historical future," and attributes fully half of the rationale to Moore's law. So, misleding headline.
For readers who aren't familiar with the concept (are there any left?) the "singularity" describes a mechanism of intelligence generationally increasing itself, using increased intelligence to also decrease cycle time, leading to a spiralling increase in intelligence which shortly becomes theoretically infinite. The term references the gravitational well of a black hole, also called a singularity.
The basic theory (originally articulated in a clever little paper in 1993, which is available here) is simple. If you're smart enough to increase your own intelligence, whether using computational support or biological enhancement, then you can use the increased intelligence to further increase intelligence. The feedback loop reinforces itself to infinity.
In fiction, this is usually imagined as a combination of computer software and hardware that iteratively redesigns itself, each version reaching for godlike intelligence. (Ken McLeod and Charlie Stross have popularized (though they themselves did not coin) the phrase "The Rapture of the Nerds" to describe this singularity).
While some kind of intelligence, or sentience, or sapience that transcends our own is practically inevitable, the actual spiralling off to infinity has an inherent problem: physics.
Material science continues to make amazing advances in miniaturization which inherently leads to faster, more powerful processors, higher density data storage, and a general infrastructure that would lend itself to wild advances in "intelligence." However, these advances are limited. There will come a point when quantum physics prevents traditional circuits from getting any smaller (we're pretty close to this boundary now). There will come a point when laws of thermodynamics prevent processors from getting any faster. Science fiction writers imagine quantum computing as "the answer" but for a variety of reasons, that's even less likely to actually solve issues of scale or performance for anything other than a few very specific (although world-threatening in their own right) tasks.
I suspect there are other limitations as well. It's a well understood process of human development that actual human intelligence only begins to form as the brain *reduces* its complexity and interconnectedness. Simply throwing more and faster hardware at the problem actually makes it worse. (Perhaps like throwing more software developers at a slipping project.)
Do I think that we are the theoretical maximum of possible intelligence? Of course not, that would be absurd.
Do I think that there is a prospect of increasing our own human intelligence dramatically or creating something that is more intelligent than we are? Absolutely.
But I resist the term Singularity and the imagined consequences because I firmly believe that the problem is harder than imagined, and there are constraints of physics and logical optimization of networks that will affect a hard cap on what is possible.
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February 28th, 2009
10:05 am - Nothing Made in America
Some years ago, my ex and I made an effort to buy things made in America. It was a challenge. Getting the best price was impossible, and getting adequate quality was a major part of the difficulty.
Now it's flat out impossible. I'm not talking about price or quality. I'm talking about availability of anything.
I just got back from buying a new pen. My choices for gel/rollerball were Korea or Japan, which was a welcome change of pace, because in other recent expeditions I haven't been able to find anything made anywhere other than China. There were some ballpoints, available in bulk, made in Mexico, but I don't care for ballpoints.
The last thing Mo and I were able to find that was made in America was a baby gate to keep the dogs out of the upstairs. It's a big ugly chunk of plastic that does nothing to inspire pride in American design or manufacturing, but I guess I shouldn't have such high expectations out of a baby gate. The alternatives (not made in America) were no better.
Is it sensible to hope for a resurgence of American manufacturing? Perhaps the global economy makes that ideal obsolete. Perhaps a future in which Americans excel at design, invention, at pioneering technology and other creative efforts, and in which the manufacturing of goods is delegated to other parts of the world is perfectly reasonable. If we are entering an era of peace, global prosperity, and the balance between the start-up and conglomerate, perhaps "Made in America" is not just archaic, but completely beside the point.
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February 23rd, 2009
12:43 pm - Wanted: Tweetsaver
So I follow about 100 people; some friends, some funny folks, a bunch of people in my industry. More scrolls by than I can ever keep up with, but I do poke on links that go by and find a bunch of interesting stuff. Something went by the other day that I wanted to write a little essay about. But now I can't remember what it was. I'm pretty sure I bookmarked it, but that was on a different machine.
I'm all about living independantly of hardware: google (and the rest of the cloud) is my os. Don't save anything locally for the most part.
So, instead of writing a cool response to some intriguing web page I'm just going to put out a call for a service that allows you to bookmark intriguing tweets as they pass and access them from any interface later.
Or does that already exist?
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February 11th, 2009
09:20 am - Red Rocket Station
IROSF now has a best friend!
Marti created Red Rocket Station to create a dynamic place for conversation about science fiction (literature, culture, etc.). We've been looking at ways to make IROSF more useful and inviting, but at the end of the day, the Internet Review of Science Fiction is a traditionally edited publication, with all the benefits and drawbacks that go along with that. We are still bouncing around ideas to move IROSF in a direction that supports a broader ecology of content mechanisms while remaining true to the vision of "creating a forum for the serious exploration of the literature of the fantastic."
However, Red Rocket Station has a broader mission: to support the broader community of authors, editors, readers, and fans by encouraging conversation, organization, coordination. This could be reviews, discussions, live interviews in the chat room, planning amongst convention goers, live reporting from conventions, blogging, photo journals from science fiction events... the whole works.
Personally, I'm a little leary of the term "social networking" -- it's not really about networking. It's about sharing. Sharing our experiences of books, films, games, events, conventions, the whole works.
So if you're into Science Fiction or Fantasy, check out Red Rocket Station, and help it grow. As with any of these things, the more cool people are participating the better it gets.
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February 3rd, 2009
09:34 am - Criminal Minds meets Hemmingway?
Author and Playwright A. E. Hotchner is in the news (found via Evri). The A. stands for Aaron, which gives him the same name as the character "Aaron 'Hotch' Hotchner" in the Criminal Minds cop show. Coincidence? Or homage of some sort?
The real-world author trained and practiced (briefly) as a lawyer, and worked as a military journalist before going into the arts. That's not quite close enough to be seen as a real-world inspiration for the character, but the suggestion of some causal relationship lingers.
None of the Criminal Minds fan pages or wikis that I found mention A. E. Hotchner.
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February 1st, 2009
08:08 am - Entrepreneurial Spirit
Twitter Abstract: "Entrepreneurial Spirit: Idea First, or Company First? Vision more interesting than revenue model."
From Fred Wilson by way of Tim O'Reilly I read this article, amusingly entitled "When Talking About Business Models, Remember that Profits Equal Revenues Minus Costs." Wilson makes some points about business efficiency that should be obvious but tend to get obscured by the hype-first style of business leadership.
He uses Twitter, Google, Facebook, Digg, and Craigslist as examples.
Twitter and Craigslist are examples of "doing a lot with a little." Each under 30 employees, these two companies are amazingly efficient.
Facebook and (with caveats) Google he uses as examples of what I might call doing a lot with a lot. As for Digg, I read that as doing a little with a lot.
From a financial perspective--and Wilson is a VC so that's his thing--I agree completely. However, I don't think the interesting thing here is the financials. From an entrepreneur's perspective, financials are that extremely important stuff that you hire someone else to worry about. You worry about your ability to deliver something that people really want, and in some cases "revenues" is the best measure of that.
Wilson's examples point to something more interesting than financial models. I don't think Twitter and Craigslist "do a lot with a little"--so I'm not sure I stay with Wilson at his conclusion.
Instead, I think these are examples of "doing a little that does a lot." Both are minimalist approaches, exceptions to the feature-fat web 2.whatever. Both are simple. Both are obvious. Both are tools for actual human behavior (although twitter's usefulness takes a little longer to sink in). Google's original search service meets the same criteria, and while it may be the ad revenues that have elevated it to wild profitability, it was the search service that won people's hearts first. You can see Digg this way as well, although based on Wilson's analysis, I too would question their business model.
So, let's look at two motivating spirits that might be seen to inspire the entrepreneurial spirit:- Take a product idea and make it fly;
- Take a business model and build a corporation
In the first category, I see Twitter, Digg, Google's founding search, Craigslist, and thousands upon thousands of products that didn't fly. (Also, from previous generations, PayPal, EBay, Apple.)
Some companies (e.g. Craigslist) build on their success by keeping it simple. Others (e.g. Google) use their success to initiate new entrepreneurial initiatives.
In the second category, I see Facebook. (And also, from earlier eras, Amazon, Microsoft.)
First and foremost, Facebook is not a new product. When it was first introduced I remember the rolling eyes. "We need another social networking site? And we need it why?" We had Tribe, Orkut, MySpace, and lord knows what else. But the Facebook founders saw an opportunity based on the stumbles, and the failures of these services, and they stepped in, and they succeeded.
Corporations may benefit from being wildly overcapitalized (it seems like no matter how many turds Microsoft poops out the door, they continue on solid financial footing), but most corporations exist on slimmer margins because they are using all available resources to grow. One of Amazon's early mantras was "Get Big Fast." By rapidly introducing and innovating features, by expanding product lines, by experimenting with multiple revenue paradigms, Amazon showed very early on that they weren't trying to be the best bookstore on the web, they were trying to be the biggest retailer on the web. And that was the beginning of their corporate ambition.
One of the other mantras at Amazon was "Throw a bunch of stuff against the wall and see what sticks." This again points to the differences in entrepreneurial spirit.
Some entrepreneurs start with a vision of a product. They want to make that specific thing successful. Every resources is lasered in on that outcome. Everyone knows that most entrepreneurial efforts fail, but to these entrepreneurs, the company is the vessel for the idea, and if the idea fails then there is no company.
Other entrepreneurs start with an ambition for a company. They want to make the company successful, and the shotgun approach has more chance of success. Many particular features or products may fail, but all it takes is one success. In their early years, these are better seen as ecologies of entrepreneurs than anything else.
Conclusion: Wilson's article is interesting, but for me it points to the difference in entrepreneurial spirit rather than in business model. More personally, it makes me wonder which kind of start up I work for. As I contemplate it, I'm not actually sure. (Which may mean I don't understand my company as well as I should, or that I should beware the fallacy of the false dichotomy.)
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January 31st, 2009
08:18 am - Science Fiction Magazines in trouble
Everyone knows that publishing is a tough business to succeed in.
There's an old joke:
- "How do you make a small fortune in publishing?"
- "Start with a large fortune."
It's not at all surprising that in a depression-level financial situation, things that might be called luxury items would be feeling the hurt the most. However, there's also an argument that inexpensive entertainment can pick up a little in such a climate: people need the respite.
The worst news has been in the short fiction world: Fantasy & Science Fiction, one of the "big three", is dropping to a bi-monthly schedule. All the big three have experienced a gradual decline in subscription rates, but F&SF, established 1949, is the first to cut back. Even worse: Realms of Fantasy is closing completely. RoF is widely considered "Fourth" of the big three--not quite the same historical cachet, but the only full glossy with newstand distribution.
Of course, a few months ago, we had to close Æon, primarily for financial reasons.
Also in the news: citing financial concerns, Wheatland Press, a well-respected small press publisher is going on hiatus. In the annals of publishing, "going on hiatus" means "regretfully shutting down" more often than not.
At IROSF we're still open and publishing monthly, but so far our initial efforts to establish a cash-flow-neutral position have not succeeded. Internally, we've debated the merits of going to a subscription model. Subscription models on the Internet do not have a successful track record, although there are exceptions; but so far donations and advertising are not covering the costs. So we are brainstorming ideas to reduce costs.
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