mult.ifario.us

Matthieu tagged me, so here are five things that you probably didn't know:

• I spent the first few years of my life living out in the sticks in southwest Washington where we had a half-mile gravel driveway and a quarter-acre vegetable garden. We moved to the city after a huge fir tree smashed the mobile home we were living in.
• I've been in two bands in my life, a one funk-ish band (1989) that made an EP in a dinky studio in Milwaukee, OR, and a rap band (1990) called "MC Extra Cheese and DJ PRB", where I was the sampler and mixer master.
• I don't need much sleep, although I seem to feel better if I sleep either more than seven hours or less than four and get a ten minute nap in the afternoon in either case.
• My first Java program was a 3,000-line hand-written parser that turned a narrative document in the file format of an ancient version of WordPerfect for DOS into XML. It worked great...
• I have always been slower multiplying either 6×9 or 7×8 than other combinations of digits.

And because I can, I'll tag Bob McWhirter, Dan, Brian, Crazy Bob, and Jeff.

After reading various glowing reviews, the wife and I decided to splurge and make reservations at the Herbfarm for my birthday. The meal had some moments, but it was a rare disappointment compared to our other fine dining experiences.

The first blemish appeared right at the start of the meal where the proprietors introduced the kitchen staff — at length and ad nauseum — followed by an explanation of how to find their gift shop, that the stemware on the table was available for purchase, all about the bed and breakfast suites, and on and on and on, oh and did they mention how to find the gift shop... The only thing not explicitly for sale were the waitstaff, although I have to admit that we didn't ask. We've eaten at plenty of good restaurants run by reputedly great chefs, but the informercial cum dinner theatre was out of place and uncalled for to the point that we wondered if we'd accidentally signed up for some kind of timeshare sales pitch. A port flight served on a piece of paper explaining the different vintages included the price in large type on one corner, continuing the evening's Minnie Pearl theme...

The other two things that stuck out like a sore thumb were a couple of the courses. Partridge served with one course was dry, and a crème brûlée served as part of dessert was a drink instead of a custard. That was the first partridge that I've had, so maybe they're all dry (then why eat them...?); but the unset crème brûlé is unforgivable. Whoever prepared it would have been able to tell that the custard wasn't set when they took it out of the oven or when they caramelized the sugar for the crust.

At least I always have good company.

I've been bushwhacking my way through some Java code and came across the following block of code in a test class:

int count = 0;
for(Long id : results){
  switch (count++) {
    case 0:
      Assert.assertEquals(2L, id);
      break;
    case 1:
      Assert.assertEquals(3L, id);
      break;
    }
}

which has to be one of the oddest bits of Java code that I've laid eyes on. It's not quite a WTF, but it's close. It is definitely the only time that I've seen a switch clause with side-effects. The original author intended simply:

assert results.size() == 2;
assert results.contains(2L);
assert results.contains(3L);

Especially in a test case, it's acceptable (if not desireable!) to be explicit even at the expense of some brevity.

I got a decent score on the electronic version of the VCAT:

For what it's worth, I've enjoyed the coaching and advising work that I've done with fellow entrepreneurs, and it's satisfying if not therapeutic to help people avoid the pitfalls and pratfalls that I'm more familiar with than I'd like to be. While a non-empty subset of the people I respect have MBAs (e.g., Steve) and I benefited greatly from some of them as experts and advisors, I can't imagine anyone without their CEO stripes really knowing how to build and run a company.

For context, see my earlier post on Yahoo, Amazon, Google and the effectiveness of "stepping on the gas" with R&D.

Marc Gerstein over at SeekingAlpha has some comments from a similar perspective (ratios between engineering expense and revenue), although he draws a different conclusion about Amazon:

For Amazon.com (AMZN), analysts have focused investor worries on the monies being spent to draw in customers. They're right to hone in on the spending levels, but they've been overly alarmist on the worry bit. Heavy spending on marketing and technology has worked for Amazon.

I maintain that the interesting proposition for Amazon (Yahoo, EBay, Google, etc.) is not how effective engineering spend was in the past but rather how effective it will be in the future.

Every so often, I try to run a shell script and get the otherwise unhelpful:

: bad interpreter: No such file or directory

It always takes me a few minutes to remember that this is from MS-DOS line endings, and this is the message that there's no interpreter named /bin/bash^M. The Emacs quickie to clean out the line endings is:

C-x [ENTER] f unix

From the commandline,

cat -v file

will show the ^M, and

cat filename | tr -d '\r' > newfile

will remove them.

I spent some time in the jungle, so it was interesting to read the Yahoo! "peanut butter" memo for an inside glimpse of another one of the Internet behemoths, draw a few unfounded conclusions, and make some comparisons. (The obligatory disclaimer here is that even when I did work for Amazon, I didn't speak for them, and I certainly don't do so now.)

A quick digression on peanut butter. I ate plenty of peanut butter growing up, although it was always Adam's. Jif, Skippy, and their ilk were rightfully regarded with some disdain because of the non-food substances (e.g., "fully hydrogenated vegetable oil") that they contain, but real peanut butter is generally good stuff food-wise: healthy oils, calorie-dense, high in protein.

My first observation about the letter was that reading it was a bit like a dog eating peanut butter. An SVP at an Internet major should be able to pound a diamond into dust in a few sentences. While a problem list is good fuel for an off-site or brainstorming session, information flows up the chain and direction flows down; put another way, there were a lot of nouns but not a lot of verbs in the memo.

My second observation was that I don't really think that Yahoo's doing so badly, even if the letter's factual in every respect. (See, e.g., this commentary for a "street-oriented" perspective.) I like to look at a metric that I'll call business-effectiveness of engineering ("BEE"), and it's computed as:

       1-(revenue(t)/revenue(t-Delta))
B(t) = -------------------------------
          1-(cost(t)/cost(t-Delta))

for some time range Delta, e.g., a year or other financial reporting period. Taking the numbers from SEC filings by Google, Amazon, and Yahoo:

The 3Q2006 number is computed versus the 3Q2005 number. I've pulled numbers from the financial roll-ups in the 2005 10-K (AMZN, GOOG, YHOO) and 3Q2006 10-Q filings (AMZN, GOOG, YHOO). (I should add eBay to the list, but maybe later; for comparison, their BEE for 3Q2006 is 0.91. Salesforce.com has a 3Q2006 BEE of 0.82.)

The numbers suggest that Yahoo's and Amazon's core business models, vis à vis their ability to execute in terms technology and engineering, are essentially at end of life, since it costs $0.50 of engineering labor to buy $1.00 of revenue. (Yahoo is profitable and could afford to spend significantly on growth if the raw materials (i.e., smart people) are available in sufficient supply; Amazon has less fiscal wiggle room.) This shouldn't be surprising — it takes a lot of software to run a big Internet business, and there's a pretty good chance that not all of it was written by top-notch folks working under clean-room conditions... That said, Amazon is trying to leverage its core expertise in operating its server fleet (and they are very good at it) into new lines of business (S3, EC2, etc.), and all three have been rolling-up customers, partners, or players in their respective spaces: Amazon is consolidating online retail, Yahoo is consolidating social and personal software, and Google is consolidating the on-line advertising business.

The prescription for Yahoo seems simple enough:

• Consolidate. Keep the peanuts and salt but flush any fillers that accumulated after the last bust.
• Avoid a money fight with Google by innovating from within, strategic investing, or grabbing properties early. (Not buying YouTube was a miss; knowing that video sharing was hot and not already having or owning a hunk of a parallel property is a bigger miss.)
• Ensure that offerings are readily identifiable and usable by regular folks. Having two photo sharing services isn't a sin, but having any difficult to use, locate, or understand services is.
• Use social context (rather than keyword inference) to target advertising.

As for just how to do it, since I'm not an SVP at Yahoo, I'm not on the hook for that part...