The Wall Street Journal has an article entitled The Men Who Came To Dinner, and What They Said About Email which contains the following excerpt

"Email is one of the liveliest niches in tech right now. Google, Microsoft and Yahoo all view it as a key to winning new customers and making money off current ones. And so they are innovating with new email programs and services all the time. Since all three companies' email teams are in my neck of the woods, I thought it would be fun to have the heads of each team come over one night for dinner and conversation. The three companies were good sports and agreed, in part because I said I wasn't interested in a shouting match.

As it happened, Google's Paul Buchheit, 29 years old; Kevin Doerr, 39, of Microsoft (no relation to the venture capitalist) and Ethan Diamond, 34, of Yahoo were all on their best behavior. Whatever they may say about their competitors at work, at my table they were gracious and complimentary. Gentle teasing was about as far as they would go.

The evening began with even the Microsoft and Yahoo delegates agreeing that much of the current excitement in the email world can be traced back to last year's debut of Mr. Buchheit's Gmail. The program had a fast user interface with a fresh new look, along with a then-remarkable gigabyte of free storage.

Mr. Buchheit said he started working on Gmail after observing that other email programs were getting worse, not better. Microsoft's Mr. Doerr said that at his company, Gmail was a thunderbolt. "You guys woke us up," he told Mr. Buchheit. Yahoo's Mr. Diamond, then at a startup with its own hot, new email program, said Gmail was the final impetus that Yahoo needed to buy his company.

Mr. Buchheit responded with a victory lap. "We were trying to make the email experience better for our users," he said. "We ended up making it better for yours, too."

The evening wasn't all a Gmail love-in, though. The Microsoft and Yahoo representatives said their many millions of users might not accept some of Gmail's departures from email norms, such as the way the program groups messages into "conversations." The two men also razzed Mr. Buchheit a bit, saying that it had been easy for Google to promise a lot of storage to its users because it carefully controlled how many users Gmail would have by requiring an invitation to get an account."

As someone who has to build services which compete with Google's the last statement in the above excerpt resonates with me. I tend to think that in a number of their products such as GMail, Google Talk and even Google Pack, the folks at Google are practising the lessons learned from articles such as Joel Spolsky's Fire & Motion. In the article Joel Spolsky argues that large companies like Microsoft tend to create technological imperatives that force competitors to respond and keep up thus preventing them from focusing on new features.

Examples of Google practising Fire & Motion are somewhat different from what Joel Spolsky describes in his article but the ideas are similar.  Google tends to create initiatives that are either much more expensive for their competitors than them to provide (e.g. giving users gigabytes of storage space for email but limiting sign ups on the service) or would be detrimental to their market share to compete with (e.g. allowing non-Google clients to access the Google Talk servers). I've had co-workers joke that for every dollar Google spends on some of its efforts, its competitors are forced to spend five to ten dollars. Here is a back of the envelope calculation that illustrates this point.

Email ServiceEstimated Number of UsersInbox SizeTotal Storage provided
GMail 5 million2.5GB12.5 petabytes
Yahoo! Mail219 million
1GB
219 petabytes
HotMail221 million
0.25 GB
55.25 petabytes

Of course, these numbers are off because they are based on estimates. Also I think the Hotmail numbers should be somewhat lower since I haven't confirmed that we've rolled out the 250MB inbox to every market. The point should still be clear though, Google has forced its competitors such as Microsoft and Yahoo! to spend orders of magnitude more money on storage which distracts them from competing with Google in the places where it is strong. More importantly its competitors have to provide from 10 to 20 times the total amount of storage Google is providing just to be competitive. 

This is often the dilemma when competing with Google. On the one hand, you have customers who rightly point out that Google is more generous but on the other the fact is that it costs us a whole lot more to do the things Google does since we have a whole lot more users than they do. The cool things about this is that it forces to be very imaginative about how we are competitive in the market place and challenges are always fun.  


 

Categories: Life in the B0rg Cube

January 6, 2006
@ 07:10 PM

It's a new year so it's time to make some more promises to myself which I'll likely break in a few weeks. This time I thought it would help if I wrote them up in public so I'd be better motivated to actually achieve them.

  1. Learn a New Programming Language: When I was in school, I got to explore a new programming language every couple of months. I used C, C++, Java, Smalltalk, JavaScript and Lisp while in school. In recent years I've been programming exclusively in C# although I've started toying with JavaScript again due to the AJAX hype. I've decided that I want to learn a dynamic programming language like Python or Ruby. Given that the .NET Framework now has IronPython, I suspect Python is what I'll end up picking up. Since we plan to greatly improve the plugin story for RSS Bandit, I may get some practical experience by building new plugins for RSS Bandit using IronPython.

  2. Write More Articles: Looking back on various articles I've written it's clear that since joining MSN and getting a new girlfriend my output has reduced. I only wrote two articles last year compared to a minimum of five or six in previous years. I've already tried to start on the right foot by promising an article on my Seattle Movie Finder page for the O'Reilly Network. My big goal is to update my C# From a Java Developer's Perspective article to account for Whidbey (C# 2.0) and Tiger (Java 5.0). The article still gets thousands of hits a month even though its over four years old.

  3. Come Up With New Career Goals: When I was in school, my dream was to become a well-known technology guru like Don Box or Scott Meyers then get paid consulting gigs to be the hero that comes in to fix peoples problems and tell them how to build their software. Since then, I've seen a lot of the people who I once idolized end up working in the b0rg cube. In conversations with Don Box, he's mentioned that the life isn't as glamorous as I assumed.

    It's coming on my fourth year at Microsoft and I'm not clear what my long term career goals are anymore. I love my current job; I get the build cool stuff that impacts millions of people and work with a bunch of smart people. However I don't have a clear idea of where this leads. In recent months I've gotten pings from recruiters from AMZN and GOOG, which I've discounted but the funny thing is if I was looking to leave I probably couldn't articulate what I was looking for to a recruiter.

    The only thing I am sure of is that I'm not going to get my MBA after all. My main motivation for getting it was "to do it now before it got too late" but that's enough of a motivator to put in the effort since I don't know what I'd do with it once I got it. 

    It's going to be time for my mid-year review and discussion with my boss in a couple of weeks. I hope I have a clearer idea where I want to go by then.

  4. Piss of Less People with my Writing: Whatever. I've already gotten two angry emails from different folks at work about stuff I've written online and it isn't even the first week of the year. Maybe next year. ;)


 

Categories: Ramblings

January 6, 2006
@ 05:53 PM

Every couple of weeks while I'm at Microsoft I hear co-workers or executives say stuff that makes me wonder whether we are stuck in a time warp. My current pet peeve  is when I hear someone use the term Software as a Service or even worse the abbreviation "SaaS" to describe Web-based. There are people here who are so disconnected from the real world that to them Web-based software is some hot, new thing that deserves it's own magical new buzzword. Seriously, if you go around saying stuff like "Software as a Service" in 2006 then you are fricking dinosaur.

Another example of the kind of dinosaur mentality I'm ranting against is linked from a post on Robert Scoble's blog entitled Flickr’ing an unusual Mix06 meeting. In that post he links to the following image

At some meeting about a new Web conference coming out of Microsoft, one of the insightful ideas on the white board is "The Web is inevitable and her to stay". Is this 1996? That would have been insightful a decade ago, now it just makes us seem over the hill. Competitors like Google and Yahoo! are already thinking about the next level (e.g. making deals with network service providers to increase the quality of the user experience when visiting their sites, making heavy bets on the mobile Web, and bridging the gap between the Web and television in concrete ways) yet here we are finally admitting that maybe wishing that the Web will go away isn't a winning strategy.

Sometimes it feels like I work in dinosaur country.


 

Categories: Life in the B0rg Cube

January 4, 2006
@ 10:10 PM

From the E! Online article Back to the "Futurama"? we learn

Following the hugely successful resurrection of Family Guy, Fox execs are reportedly in talks to bring Futurama back from the dead.

The studio has begun talks to revive the Emmy-winning animated series and produce a limited number of new episodes, thanks to a resurgence in the show's popularity on DVD and in reruns, Variety reports.

Reps for 20th Century Fox have declined to comment on the news, but Variety says initial negotiations have begun.

If revived, it's unclear exactly which network would air the new episodes. While Fox housed the original series, the show found new life once reruns began showing on the Cartoon Network. Comedy Central subsequently snapped up the off-air rights and will exclusively air the repeats beginning in 2008.

The brainchild of Simpsons mastermind Matt Groening and writer David X. Cohen, Futurama debuted on Fox in March 1999. The series revolved around Fry, a pizza delivery boy, who is accidentally frozen for a thousand years. He wakes up in the year 3000 and befriends sassy one-eyed pilot Leela and the cranky robot Bender, who both work for an intergalactic delivery service run by a distant nephew of Fry's.

After five seasons and three Emmys, including the 2002 prize for Best Animated Series, Futurama was shuttered in August 2003.

Should the show make its way back to the airwaves, it would follow in the footsteps of another Fox cult 'toon, Family Guy.

The latter show was brought back in 2004 thanks to robust rerun ratings and staggeringly high DVD sales--the show ranks as the fourth-biggest TV series seller ever. Since its comeback, Fox has produced two more seasons and the direct-to-DVD movie Stewie Griffin: The Untold Story.

First Family Guy, now Futurama. I can only hope that Cartoon Network borrows a leaf from Fox and brings back Samurai Jack.
 

January 4, 2006
@ 07:56 PM

Via Miguel De Icaza I found the post Fear is the mind killer from the Jesus General blog. It states

Our Leader hasn't caught Osama bin Laden, but he's doing a bang up job rounding up brown people.

From the documentary, Persons of Interest:

SYED ALI

"Syed Ali was a partner in a successful securities firm prior to September 11th. Following an unrelated business dispute, one of his partners told the FBI Syed was a terrorist. The authorities stormed his house and found, among other things, a visitor's pass to the World Trade Center and his son's flight simulator video game. Syed was held on Rikers Island for 100 days. He lost his business; family and friends became scared off by the terror allegations. The government dropped all terrorist charges against Syed Ali. He now operates a limousine franchise. Previously a homemaker, his wife, Deliliah, found work as a legal secretary and hospital clerk."

NABIL AYESH

"Nabil is originally from Palestine. He was arrested on September 11 2001 while stopped at a traffic light in Philadelphia. "Where are you from?" Nabil remembers the officer asking him. "Israel," Nabil answered. The officer asked Nabil if he was Israeli or Arabic. "I said I'm Arabic, and they said you're under arrest." Nabil was detained for one year and seventeen days. He was never charged with anything. His wife and children were all deported back to Palestine. After he was released Nabil got a working permit and a job as a contractor. "I am trying to get my life back together," he said, "But it's hard. It was hard for me in jail. Now my main concern is my family." Nabil was re-arrested in April 2003 when police in Syracuse, NY pulled over a speeding car in which he was a passenger. He was held in a Batavia, NY jail and then deported to the West Bank, where he was reunited with his wife and four children."

MATEEN BUTT

"Mateen Butt, 26, came to the United States from Pakistan when he was nine years old. He lives in Valley Stream, New York and was working as a telecommunications analyst on Sept. 11. On Sept. 18 2002, ten officers surrounded Mateen's house at 6 a.m. and took him away in shackles. He was told he was being detained because of an application for a work visa he filed when he wad 16 years old. Mateen was interrogated and asked whether he was a Muslim and attended a Mosque, but he refused to answer. He was detained in both Middlesex and Bergen County. Mateen's experience in prison affected him dramatically. He has become much more religious and no longer feels safe here in the United States. "I don't feel free any more," he said, "I don't have the same feeling." Mateen's mother, Naz, has sold her Subway sandwich shop and the family plans to return to Karachi, Pakistan, a land Mateen has not known since he was a child."

There are a couple more profiles on the site which detail some of the people's whose lives have been changed by being part of the collateral damage in the United States's "War on Terror". Of course, they could have had it worse.

When I read blog posts like Shelley Powers They're Back or Robert Scoble's Microsoft takes down Chinese blogger (my opinions on that), I wonder why I tend to see American bloggers writing angry missives about perceived injustices in faraway lands but never about the oppression by government in their own countries. I guess it's all a case of Luke 6:41 in action.


 

Categories: Current Affairs

January 3, 2006
@ 07:31 PM

It's another year, which means it's soon going to be time to figure out which conferences I'll be attending over the next few months. So far, three conferences have come up on my radar and I suspect I'll attend at least two of them. The conferences in order of my likelihood of attending them are

  1. VSLive: A conference for Visual Studio developers. I'll likely be there with other folks from MSN Windows Live to talk about the various APIs we provide and perhaps give hints or details on some of our upcoming API plans.

  2. ETech: I attended this conference last year and found it extremely valuable. There were developers from small and large Web companies talking about technical issues they had faced while delivering services on the Web as well as announcing cool new offerings. The list of speakers is great; Danah Boyd, Joel Spolsky, Kathy Sierra, Sam Ruby, Jon Udell, Simon Willison and Ray Ozzie. I don't plan to miss this one. 

  3. MIX: This is a Microsoft conference that will focus on our hip, Web-based offerings like IE7, Windows Media, Windows Live!, as well as "Atlas", Microsoft’s new AJAX framework. Given that I'll already have lost a week of work by attending ETech and I won't really be learning anything I can't find on internal websites by attending the conference, I'll probably miss this one. Of course, if my workload is light and/or I'm told I'll be speaking I might end up attending.

If you'll be at any of these conferences and would like to meet up to shoot the breeze about mindless geekery, holla at me. Also what other interesting Web geek conferences are out there?


 

Categories: Technology

A number of people have written posts about Microsoft's poor stock performance over the past week but there are two posts I thought were interesting enough to share on my blog.

In his post 7 years ago Omar Shahine writes

I started working at Microsoft. Just as a data point, the “strike price” for my first option grant was $31.7250. Today, the stock is trading around $26. At 7 years, there are two notable events:

  • You start to accrue 4 weeks of vacation per year
  • Your first stock option grant expires

So long option grant #1, I barely knew you :-). What are the chances the stock will shoot up 5 bucks in the next few hours so I can sell my grant?

On a more serious note, has the company really done so little in the last 7 years that the stock price warrants being down 19%? Will 2006 be the year MSFT rebounds? I sure hope so.

Anyway, it’s been a great 7 years. I look forward to the next few! Microsoft has been great to me over the years.

From a response by Andrew Leckey in the letters page of the Orlando Sentinel we get the item Shift to Internet impacts Microsoft stock which states

Q: I really expected more from my shares of Microsoft Corp. Has tech left it behind?

K.T., via the Internet

A: Microsoft rolled out its hot-selling Xbox 360 video-game console worldwide months ahead of rival Sony's next-generation PlayStation 3.

It is developing an online classified ad service to compete with the popular Craigslist. And it is entering the high-end supercomputer market with a version of Windows that ties together computers in a high-speed network.

But even though Chairman Bill Gates is the world's richest man and the firm has an unparalleled financial record and a mountain of cash, Microsoft gets no respect.

It is now frequently considered a value stock rather than a growth stock, a lumbering tech giant attracting investors with a relatively modest share price.

Microsoft stock fell 2 percent in 2005, following a drop of 2 percent in 2004 and a gain of 6 percent in 2003. Compare that to skyrocketing Google Inc. or Microsoft's own track record for 1996 through 2002, when its shares jumped nearly 400 percent.

Its highly profitable, industry-dominant Windows and Office software account for about 60 percent of its revenue, with an additional 25 percent coming from software for enterprise servers. New software products are continually being introduced.

The corporate vision is to expand beyond all that via the Xbox, Windows Mobile, Windows Media Center and IPTV platform to become the center of the digital home.

Because Microsoft shares look inexpensive in light of the potential to accomplish that, the Wall Street consensus recommendation is midway between "strong buy" and "buy," according to Thomson Financial. That consists of 14 "strong buys," 16 "buys," four "holds" and one "strong sell."

The biggest challenge, termed a "sea change" by Gates, is an industrywide shift to Internet-based software and services for everything from word processing to photo storage. This could make its conventional software packages less relevant.

Earnings are expected to increase 14 percent in fiscal 2006, which ends in June, the same estimate as for the application software industry.

I feel the same way as Omar does. You don't have to do the math and figure out my option grant from when I was hired four years ago to tell that it is underwater. However working at Microsoft has been great this past four years (wow, that long?) and I look forward to the next few years building social software for MSN Windows Live. It is interesting that Andrew Leckey feels that our biggest challenge Web-based software, it's definitely going to be an interesting year. 


 

January 1, 2006
@ 07:57 PM

Reading the blogs of Tim Berners-Lee and Jon Udell this morning, I was struck by how clear it is that the Javascript platform within the browser is somewhat immature and incomplete.

In his post Links on the Semantic Web Tim Berners-Lee writes

To play with semantic web links, I made a toy semantic web browser, Tabulator. Toy, because it is hacked up in Javascript
....
Here is the current snag, though. Firefox security does not allow a script from a given domain to access data from any other domain, unless the scripts are signed, or made into an extension. And looking for script signing tools (for OS X?) led me to dead ends. So if anyone knows how to do that, let me know. Untill I find a fix for that, the power of following links -- which is that they can potentially go anywhere -- is alas not evident!

In his post Predictions for 2006 Jon Udell writes

June 15: Browser local storage

An Alchemy application, though, always works with a genuine local data model that it stores as sets of XML fragments and navigates in a relational style. Bosworth's hunch is that a Web-style thin client, driven by a rich data model intelligently synchronized with the services cloud, could do most of what we really need -- both offline and online.
That's from a column entitled Thin client, rich data. The next turn of the AJAX crank has to involve an intelligent local data store. It's been on my wishlist forever, but Mozilla CTO Brendan Eich told me to expect results in 2006, so I do.

Almost everyone who has attempted building an AJAX application has hit the issues mentioned by Jon Udell and Tim Berners-Lee in their posts. Everytime I mess around with AJAX I can't help thinking how much more interesting the applications could be if I could offload the data aggregation/integration to the client browser instead of doing it on the server. I've thought the same about offline storage, why can't I store richer information than just cookie data on the local client in a cross-platform manner?

It's hard to get wrapped up in the AJAX hype when such fundamental holes exist in the functionality provided by modern web browsers. I hope Jon Udell is right and the Mozilla folks plan to fix some of the more fundamental problems with building AJAX applications on the Web today. 


 

Categories: Web Development

Kurt Cagle has a post entitled Open Standards and Organic Foods which begins

A question was posed to me recently concerning exactly what I meant when I talked about open standards, and how they differed from open source. In reviewing some of my previous postings, one of the things that I realized was that while I had offered up a number of definitions in passing, there really wasn't any single, stock answer that I or others had seen for what exactly open standards mean. Moreover, a lot of people tend to look at open standards with a somewhat jaundiced eye, as if it was simply one more marketing label in a field that is already way oversaturated with marketing buzzwords - they didn't understand why open standards were important, or they didn't understand the distinction between open source and open standards.

The software industry is now full of buzzwords and buzz phrases that are so ambiguous that if you ask five people what they mean you are likely to get ten different definitions. The problem this causes is that people often talk past each other even if they use the same words or even worse miscommunication occurs due to basic assumptions about the conversation which are incorrect. Examples of such ambiguous buzz phrases include; web 2.0, service oriented architecture and standards.

Some people I've talked to about this are surprised that I add 'standards' to this list. However the definition of what constitutes a 'standard' is in the eye of the beholder. About a year and a half ago, I wrote a blog post entitled Are Standards in the Software Industry a Chimera? which stated 

The word "standard' when it comes to software and computer technology is usually meaningless. Is something standard if it produced by a standards body but has no conformance tests (e.g. SQL)? What if it has conformance testing requirements but is owned by a single entity (e.g. Java)? What if it is just widely supported with no formal body behind it (e.g. RSS)?

For every one of the technologies mentioned above (RSS, Java, and SQL) you'll find people who will argue that they are standards and people who will argue that they aren't. SQL is produced by a standards body and has a number of formal specifications but since there is no conformance requirements most database vendors have embraced and extended it. It is difficult to write non-trivial SQL queries that will work across Microsoft's SQL Server, MySQL, Oracle's databases and IBM's DB2. The Java programming language and platform is supported by a number of vendors and has rigid conformance tests which make the statement "write once, run anywhere" true for the most part, however it is a proprietary technology primarily controlled by Sun Microsystems. Content syndication using RSS 0.9x/RSS 2.0 feeds is the most popular web service on the planet but the specifications were primarily authored and controlled by a single individual and have no formal standards body or corporation backing them till this day. In each case, the technology is 'standard' enough for there to be thriving markets around them with multiple vendors providing customers with valuable services.

From a customer perspective, standards are a means to an end and in this case the goal of standards is to prevent vendor lock-in. As long as users can choose between multiple RSS readers or developers can choose between multiple Java implementations, there is enough standardization for them. Where things become contentious is that there are multiple ways to get to the same solution (lack of lock-in).

"Open standards" are even more ambiguous since [as an industry] we don't even have a clear idea of what constitutes a standard. I read through Kurt Cagle's post and he never actually ends up defining "Open Standard" beyond providing analogies and rationales for why he believes in them. An interesting statement that Kurt makes in his post is the following

I suspect that in many ways the open standards movement is, at its core, a reaction to the rather virulent degenerate capitalism that exists today, in which a person can profit far out of proportion to the amount of work that they do, usually at the expense of many others who lose disproportionately to their work load.

The notion of 'profitting in proportion to your work' is pretty bogus and foreign to capitalism. Capitalism is all about the value of your work to others not how much work you put in. A minor league baseball player doesn't work an order of magnitude less than a major league baseball player yet he makes that much less. A multiplatinum recording artist doesn't work an order of magnitude harder than local bands trying to get big but makes that much more. It may not sound fair but that's capitalism. In recent centuries humans have experimented with other socio-economic movements that are more 'fair' but so far capitalism is what has stuck. </digression>

Anyway, my point is that buzz phrases like "standards", "service oriented architecture" and "web 2.0" have such diluted and ambiguous definitions to be effectively meaningless in technical discourse. People who've been in the industry for a while eventually learn to filter out these phrases [and often the people speaking them as well] when engaged in technical discourse. If you are a technical person you probably should be more explicit about what you mean by using phrases such as "freely implementable and patent unencumbered", "SOAP-based web services" and "AJAX powered website" in place of the aforementioned buzz phrases. Oh, and if they don't match up to what you mean when you use those statements then that just proves my point about the ambiguity of these buzz phrases.


 

Categories: Technology

I've been surprised by how often movies with similar themes end up being released at roughly the same time by Hollywood studios. Since it takes several months to shoot a movie this means that somewhere along the line some Hollywood exec hears about a rival studio producing a movie and decides to produce a movie with a similar theme. Some examples that come to mind are

I'm sure there are dozens of examples like this from across the years. What I wonder is whether I'm right that Hollywood execs just have a "follow the leader" mentality and decide that if a competitor is shooting a disaster movie for summer of next year that sounds like a hit then they need to shoot one as well. Or is there some more sophisticated reasoning at work?


 

Categories: Ramblings