Wabewalker

Chrome-Plated Usability

2009-07-16T17:16:53Z

I’m annoyed but not surprised about the multiple geekgasms bubbling through the digerati about Google’s pre-pre-announcement of their new operating system, Chrome OS. As I’ve said before, there is nothing a blogger likes more than a tech company catfight, and pitting Microsoft against Google is a classic.

Still, I’m betting on Microsoft to win this in the long run. Not because I think Google don’t have the technical skill; they do, of course. What they lack is the technical vision to pull it off. The whole premise of Chrome OS is that there is enough functionality on the ol’ Interweb to eliminate the need for local applications. Yeah, right: ask Steve Jobs how well “web apps are a sweet solution” worked out for iPhone 1.0.

Hell, I’d be willing to bet that Chrome will never see the light of day outside of the Googleplex. The powers that be will quietly knife the baby rather than release something that will be a mockery of usability. Just using gOS — supposedly based on Google’s own internal distro — is painful: all the glitz of the Macintosh experience without the ease of use. (The idea of “Spray-on Usability” runs rampant throughout it.) In the second half of 2010, a few blogs will post “Whatever happened to Chrome OS?” but that will be it.

Google’s up to something, all right; but radically redefining the idea of an operating system is not it. Maybe they’re trying to kill the netbook market with something that will leave a bad taste in everyone’s mouth.

Wanted: One Chief Executive Asshole

2009-06-25T06:56:26Z

Dan Lyons:

Cook is a great manager, a whiz when it comes to managing supply chains and keeping the trains running on time. He is vital to Apple. Jobs cannot do what he does. But neither can Cook do what Jobs does. The fact is, Apple needs both of them. Forgive me for the analogy I am about to make — but if you’ve seen the latest Star Trek movie, then you might understand how Cook and Jobs work together. Cook is Spock: low-key, cerebral, methodical. He’s the Apollonian counterpart to Kirk, the Dionysian hothead. Kirk is impulsive—but nobody would deny that he, not Spock, should be captain of the ship.

(via Daring Fireball)

No advice for the heir to the throne from me: if anything, my suggestions for products are things not to do. I’m a technophile, a nerd: but unlike my fellow geeks, I am sufficiently self-aware of my detachment from mainstream society to realize that anything I do would appeal to a very narrow subset of the population. (That’s a pretty good razor right there: a nerd realizes he is out-of-touch with reality; a geek doesn’t.)

No, I want to look at the article itself.

Lyons pretty much has said what others were scared to admit. What I found odd about his article was that he danced around his thesis without explicitly stating it: Apple is doomed without Jobs at the helm. Granted, he has always been a Cassandra as far as Apple is concerned, but this time he has a valid point. I can think of only four possible scenarios that can happen after Steve Jobs leaves the CEO seat: two good, one iffy, and one disastrous.

Apple hires from within. This is the most plausible: Tim Cook is practically CEO right now in everything but name. It would be the least disruptive choice.
Unfortunately, as Lyons pointed out, Tim Cook is not a visionary. He is, however, the one that the board of directors and institutional stockholders find most comfortable: soft-spoken, hard-working, and rational. That’s the problem with the current suite of CxOs at Apple: they have reached their position by compromise and concession.
Let’s face it: Jobs wouldn’t even be CEO if he hadn’t founded the company. People like him end up bitter and alone at the bottom of the pile — I speak from experience. When you are that arrogant, the only way you get to the top is to start there.
Prognosis: stasis or slow decline.
Apple hires from without. This could happen even if Tim Cook takes the CEO position: one disastrous quarter and the institutional investors start panicking.
This would kill off Apple’s lead the fastest. There are no executives out there with the kind of artistic vision the position requires (sorry, Ellison — apes do read philosophy, they just don’t understand it). Any outsider taking the position would inevitably try to change the company’s style. Any change to the working environment would lead to a mass exodus of talent.
Prognosis: a quick trip back to the quagmire of the ’90s.
Jobs anoints a successor, and it is a creative outsider. This would be the most radical action possible: the one that would cause a panic amongst the prosaic industrial investors, mass defections from the current executive stable, and the one that would be the most likely to keep the company at the forefront of the industry.
The problem is that there really aren’t any creative outsiders out there. Anyone who is notable and talented is stuck to the surface of Bubble 2.0 and shows no indication of leaving.
Prognosis: stormy weather ahead, but ultimately a continuation of Apple’s status as a vanguard of consumer technology.
The CEO position is filled via a “reverse takeover” like what happened with NeXT. This could happen if Apple starts to slip and Cook decides that the only way to regain mindshare is to snap up a hot young company. The problem is that the current collection of hot young companies are led by people with less fiscal sense than a teenager with her father’s stolen credit card at the shopping mall during a fashion blowout. Say what you want, but Jobs has never entered a market without having an idea of how to make a business out of it.
Of course, this could lead to another “dynamic duo” like the relationship of Jobs and Cook as described by Lyons (really, Dan: Star Trek? Of all the “buddy movies” to pick…). But people are funny creatures: when they get kicked down the corporate totem pole, they start looking for other opportunities. Cook (or someone like him) would have to retain the CEO title but be boss in name only.
Prognosis: good, but only if the reverse takeover results in an executive cadre that supports its leader fanatically.

What Lyons is trying to say is that Apple needs to continue its success post-Jobs with another Steve Jobs. Best of luck with that. The problem with trying to find another is that the search requires the kind of radical thinking that only Jobs seems to have.

But hey, you have my résumé. Feel free to call.

Logical Killing… Yep

2009-06-21T03:20:47Z

I normally hate these things, but this one caught my fancy and the result met my approval:

Google Ads That Showed Up During a Recent Conversation About A Friend’s Life

2009-06-07T07:28:10Z

Pretty much sums up the entire conversation, actually.

Safari 4 Beta: one nice, one eh, one rant

2009-02-25T02:10:23Z

First thoughts on the Safari 4 Beta:

Top Sites/Coverflow History. Very nice. This feature is very similar to the one that debuted in OmniWeb a while back. I almost considered paying for OmniWeb for that feature alone, but that they had forked WebKit to maintain otherwise private APIs made me very nervous about long-term support. This’ll probably be a stake in the heart of OmniWeb.
Tabs in Title Bar. Eh, I can take it or leave it. At first I hated it, because I thought it would really confuse new users. The title bar is the name of the document being viewed or edited, period. But then I realized that the whole concept of tabs blew that metaphor straight out of the water: it introduces multiple documents into a single window. Mac users may laugh at the concept of MDI, but it looks more and more like applications are returning to that model.

How I would have preferred it: The Mac UI already has a metaphor for manipulating multiple documents at the system level: it is called the Dock. If it were me, I would have changed the tab bar to a dock-like entity, supporting hiding, magnification, and positioning on the window. Either that, or toss the Dock in 10.6 and replace it with a global application tab bar under the systemwide menu. Keep things consistent. (I don’t know why I bother: Apple engineers are bound and determined to pimpify the UI to Vista levels of unusability.)
WebKit and Nitro. <rant>Somebody please tell me why, after four releases, Safari/WebKit won’t support the CSS2 “quotes” property that has been in the spec since 1998. That’s right, a whole bloody decade ago. I realize corporate pressure means that WebKit extensions that enhance the iPhone and Dashboard come first, but really. Less time dealing with Acid3 corner cases and more time on basic functionality, please?</rant>

How I would have preferred it: Actually working. (If I could get WebKit to build on my machine, I’d fix it myself. But the Makefile assumes all paths are sans whitespace and I’m loathe to rename my drives.)

Addendum: Called it. OmniWeb is now free (and abandonware).

Yahoo!

2008-12-13T00:37:45Z

I’m out as of Wednesday. (Take the subject of this note any way you want.)

The company is desperate enough to avoid bad press that they’re willing to part with two extra months’ of salary per employee if we keep quiet about the internal goings-on. That’s something I can live with. As far as I am concerned, this will be the last time I ever mention Yahoo again.

Because if you’re not allowed to say something not nice, you might as well say nothing at all.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss

2008-11-18T06:03:50Z

Jerry is out. Whoo.

Excuse me for not having an orgasm. This is non-news for two reasons: 1) it was expected; and 2) it will change nothing.

Jerry is the Herbert Hoover of Yahoo: he is not responsible for the collapse, but he did little to prevent it. His policies at the end were pretty much “status quo, only ever so much more so.” The company was psychotic from the Semel years, and will pretty much remain so until the rest of the Semelites ablate.

But before Yahoo can recover, it has to show humility. It has to accept that it is not, and has never been, a technology company. Nor is it a media company. It is a distributor, a syndicate, of content from both users and professional publishers. Semel couldn’t accept the fact that he wasn’t an entertainment mogul; Yang couldn’t accept the fact that he wasn’t an engineering genius.

It’s funny how some companies maintain the original personalities of their founders long after the founders have faded into the background. Google was founded by two computer science student based on a data mining algorithm they developed at Stanford; today, Google still thinks in terms of solving problems via engineering. Yahoo was formed by two students who gathered an inexplicable following for their web page of links to content they neither produced nor owned; today, Yahoo is best at managing content and maintaining a community. Microsoft, well… avarice is what best describes them: claw your way to the top via acquisitions and outright theft.

People fear Google, and rightfully so. They see another Microsoft on the horizon: a company that will so dominate the landscape that innovation will all but cease, as it did in the early ’90s. The thing that bothers me is, why put your faith in a company that has shown time and time again that it is not to be trusted? There are far safer ways to keep Google in check than to give Microsoft a ten-year extension to its monopoly.

IF Comp 2008 Complete

2008-11-17T23:19:26Z

What started out pathetic ended pretty well. Three games were close enough to perfect to earn the coveted “10” score:

Magic: A parlour magician with PTSD battles killer bunnies.
Nightfall: London has been evacuated. Figure out why and stop a disaster.
Violet: Try to avoid distractions while you write your thesis. (A lot better than what its premise suggests.)

Links and notes:

IF Comp 2008 Reviews

IF Comp 2008 Update

2008-11-10T01:17:26Z

The furries have invaded. I repeat, the furries have invaded. Last year, elf slash; this year, werewolf sex.

The Sucking Sound You Hear

2008-11-07T00:10:16Z

…is the freetards on Slashdot latched onto Stallman’s dick. Seriously, skinning? Not a killer feature. It’s fun for about three minutes after you download the Lost-themed skin, install it for LOLs, then find it unusable and revert to the default. Always use the Mom test: would your mom be willing to use the feature without assistance from you? I didn’t think so either.

In any case, bundled and free beats out downloadable and free every time. Just ask Netscape.

Apparently, someone else agrees with me. Best response ever:

I'm sorry, I can't hear you over the sound of my awesome Barack Obama Firefox theme.

Lack of Knowledgeability? You’re Soaking in It

2008-11-06T21:32:39Z

The embedded clip in this story is hysterical: the Fox reporters use every possible euphemism for “stupid” without actually saying Sara Palin is. “Looking at 2012”? Riiiiiight.

It’s a bad time to be a Neo-Con.

I feel their pain: I supported Jerry Yang at the beginning; now I think he’s a coward. I’m willing to admit to bad judgement. Why can’t they?

Decker Quote on Yahoo!/Google Deal Failure

2008-11-05T20:51:23Z

(As usual, I do not speak for Yahoo!)

Sue Decker:

Yahoo! continually optimizes its algorithmic and sponsored search, and we have, in 2008 alone, developed and launched hundreds of improvements all designed to enhance search quality…

“Hundreds of improvements” is always a bad sign: it implies that: a) the original design was poor; or b) each improvement is a rapid response to a corner case, which in turn weakens the overall structure; or both. Painting over cracks does not eliminate the cracks; it only makes it more surprising when everything collapses.

Ultimately, this decision will be the end of Yahoo! as an independent entity. The Justice Department’s tacit anti-trust policy for the last eight years has been one of establishing lopsided duopolies. Internally, the JD assumed (incorrectly) that Microsoft was the only US business that could keep Google in check. As long as Ballmer remains in charge, Microsoft cannot even keep itself in check.

Selling to Microsoft is not the only option open to Jerry Yang et al. If he were really courageous, he could try to greenmail the Justice Department itself: simply state that if the government does not subsidize Yahoo!, Yahoo! will shut down its search operations and tell its users to go to Google. As I have said countless times before: Yahoo! is not in the business of competing with Google; Yahoo! is in the business of making money. Yang has to remind the Justice Department that it is their job, not his, to keep monopolies under control.

Further Reflections on the Haunt

2008-10-26T05:27:17Z

I take back my original criticism of “The Slaughterhouse” as being weak sauce. Of all the mazes, it's the one that still spooks me over a week later. Why?

It was the first maze that Knott’s Halloween Haunt has done that had a living (well, animatronic) victim.

Almost all of the characters in the mazes can be broken down into two groups: living monsters and dead victims. There are corpses galore and gore aplenty, but you don't see anybody in the process of being murdered. It all happened in the past. Even “Quarantine” showed only the consequences of insanity, not the insanity itself.

“The Slaughterhouse” was different. For the first time in my memory, they had a victim screaming for help as he was barbequed alive. It changed the maze-goers from simple crime-scene voyeurs to callous, indifferent accessories to mayhem. We visitors went from horror-movie patrons to pedestrians who ignore the bleeding man on the curb.

I’m sure it was intentional, possibly an experiment to test the limits of what the public will find acceptable. The big question: will that thrashing victim be a prop next year, or will too many people be as disturbed by it as I was?

IF Comp 2008

2008-10-25T05:51:01Z

So, yeah. IF Comp 2008. Lookin’ bad, lookin’ real bad.

Why do I do this to myself every year?

Knott’s Halloween Haunt Report

2008-10-20T18:48:29Z

Getting into the park on time made a ton of difference: no lines for the first hour. Next time Paul shows up late, I’m not waiting. Lost my ponytail band on “Ghostrider.” “Silver Bullet” still rocks: barrel rolls for the WIN.

“Lore of the Vampire” is gone, replaced by “The Labyrinth.” No giant Minotaur at the end, which is what I was expecting (there was a boss monster, but he was non-descript). “The Underground” is now “Club Blood,” so the hot cage dancers are now part of a vampire rave. “Blood Bayou” has been converted into “The Slaughterhouse” (serving human B-B-Q) which was lame -- but then, I’ll always remember nearly wetting myself when the guy popped out of the outhouse with the chainsaw. “Clown College,” “The Asylum,” “Axe Murder Manor,” and “Lost Vegas” are still around. So is “Alien Annihilation,” which I still do not understand. Is anyone stupid enough to pay $5 for a Lazer Tag gun? There was also a corn-maze, but it was pathetic; less said of it, the better.

Finally saw what they did with the Calico Mine Ride: “Black Widow’s Cavern.” Not too bad, but nowhere near the complexity of “Lair of the Underworld” with its magnificent dragon sculpture at the end. “Pyromaniax” is still the log ride, but I didn’t expect it to have improved since last year so we skipped it.

In retrospect, I realized that the more interesting mazes are the ones that are enclosed. The open-air mazes — or even those in the south-end warehouses — lack the claustrophobic atmosphere of the others. Part of the appeal of “The Underground” was looking up and seeing light filtering through a manhole cover or a sewer grate. You could almost believe you were in the sewers of a post-apocalyptic radioactive Los Angeles.

“Grudge 2” is gone, but that was expected. The new movie-tie-in maze is for “Quarantine,” which looks like a remake of “Warning Sign”: infection turns people into psychopathic killers, who wipe each other out.

Saw “The Hanging.” Like George W. Bush (eventually) found out, it is impossible to do physical harm to a concept. Seriously, executing higher gas prices? Dumb. They should have killed Paris Hilton, or Bristol Palin, or somebody. Saw “Fangs!” — a vampire comedy revue, of course. Not the best half-hour of my life, but it was at least air-conditioned. Still, the comedy show hasn’t been the same since Elvira left. Missed “The Torture King and Miss Electra,” but that show never changes.

Things notably missing: the half-man who has been there since 2000. He disappeared with “The Underground.” He was great, kept up the patter until the park closed; I would have thought that he would have been moved somewhere else. I didn’t see the witch or the wolfman, either. The wolfman usually prowls outside of Ghostrider and the witch is near the entrance to the swings.

In other news, twisted my ankle unloading the car. I have it packed in ice, and should be back on my feet by the end of the day.

QotW

2008-10-01T19:26:45Z

I view Daniel Eran Dilger the same way I view Robert Darnton: an excellent historian when reporting facts, but so obsessed with his thesis that he performs ridiculous analyses. Still, Dilger can turn a phrase quite nicely when expressing common sense that everyone else is conveniently ignoring:

Successful platforms are built on profit incentives for third party developers, not interesting technology demos or promises of developer freedom.

— “Five More iPhone Myths”

(See also Dziuba’s Razor.)

How to Pollute Your Company’s Talent Pool

2008-10-01T01:16:14Z

So, you are a small start-up company, or a large corporation, and you want to make sure you have crappy developers? Here’s the secret: don’t enforce any documentation policies. Soon you too can auger into the eternal pit of darkness!

Managers weaken documentation policies.
Developers skip writing documentation.
Lack of good documentation makes new employees upset.
New employees flee at first opportunity.
Managers panic at attrition rate.
Managers try to make developers happy by removing unpleasant chores.
Managers weaken documentation policies…

Welcome to mediocrity!

The Quotes Keep Coming

2008-09-22T20:32:56Z

“No one cares what kind of computer Eva Longoria uses to self-google.”

Today’s Word of the Day

2008-09-22T18:09:34Z

Dziuba’s Ra•zor |ˌdʒubəz ˈreɪzər| The principle that one should never underestimate the disparity between developer excitement and user apathy. Compare with Second System Effect.

QotW

2008-09-22T17:55:26Z

Ted is in rare form:

As a result of this upbringing, programming with the OpenSocial API feels a bit like being bukkaked with tolerance and understanding.

— Ted Dziuba

Clarifications

2008-09-09T19:30:39Z

OK, so grid computing is no longer hip, but cloud computing is? Fine. I’m cool with that because I make no claim to being the overlord of technorati fashion. But as a technical person, I feel the need to point out that there is a fundamental difference between grid computing and cloud computing.

Grid computing: Using a lot of computers in parallel to achieve an easily decomposable task.
Cloud computing: Using a lot of computers that you do not own to achieve a task. Equally, providing the hardware and infrastructure to allow others to perform cloud computing.

Got the difference? Using EC2 to launch your online social network for left-handed goldfish fanciers? Cloud computing. Using GMail because you don’t want to lug your laptop across the country? Cloud computing. Using Hadoop on a private cluster to estimate word probability in documents? Grid computing, no matter how unsexy you think it sounds.

Sorry, nameless SVP: you’re in charge of grid computing at Yahoo even if it does not look good on your pathetic résumé. If you can’t tell the difference, you should be fucking glad you have a job at all because I would have canned your ass long ago.

Personally, I’d rather work with grid computing than cloud computing. I’ve found that a technology only becomes useful after the initial hype has faded. But that’s just me: substance over style.

I’m a Mac, and You’re Not Funny

2008-09-07T06:11:49Z

OK, so the Crispin Porter + Bogusky bomb has been dropped, and we’ve all been exposed to the acting brilliance of Bill Gates enhanced by 300 million dollars. Aside from the obligatory censure from the MacMacs and the laudations from their Windows counterparts, the outright hostility shown to this ad caught me completely by surprise.

The excuses from the Microsoft exponents range from “It’s part of a larger campaign which will make sense once in context” to “It’s Seinfeld! It’s not supposed to be about anything!” Neither of these sound right to me, and the criticism piled on the apologists confirms that the majority of the technorati share my opinion.

I hate to sound immodest (wait, no I don’t) but I know exactly why Microsoft’s commercial failed with the general populace while Apple’s became a part of the cultural landscape almost immediately. All you need to do is listen to the first spoken lines of each:

Justin Long: I’m a Mac.
John Hodgman: And I’m a PC.

Compare that to:

Jerry Seinfeld: Discount shoes, why pay more? Bill Gates!

Did you catch that? It is very subtle, but as with most subtle things, it has a devastating effect on what follows.

In short, Apple is trying to sell a product; Microsoft is trying to sell a person. Apple identifies up front that you are supposed to be thinking about a Macintosh; Microsoft is less than clear what their intent is. That’s a dangerous approach to take, because it is very easy to alienate your target audience. I cannot put it more succinctly than Dave Barry:

Another type of advertising that people detest is the Mystery Commercial, in which there is no earthly way to tell what product is being advertised. These commercials usually consist of many apparently random images flashing rapidly past on the screen, and then, at the end, you see a Nike swoosh, or the IBM logo, or Mr. Whipple.

Nobody likes to be tricked, and the Microsoft commercial does just that. Granted, by context most people would know it is a commercial, but it reeks of forced viral marketing which never works. Sure, there’s an initial flurry of discussion and ineffectual essays (like this one) but the dialogue quickly dies. You cannot make something memetic by fiat, something which Microsoft has tried again and again. Remember “People-Ready”?

The only thing I can hope is that this inevitable marketing failure puts a stake through the heart of the Cluetrain crowd. There is only one true way to tell your customers that you respect them: not through blogs, nor cute videos, nor online web hunts, but through useful quality products. No amount of marketing in the world can hide shoddy craftsmanship forever. And P. T. Barnum agrees with me.

I’ll end this with my favorite rant from Steve Jobs:

But after [achieving a monopoly], the product people aren’t the ones that drive the company forward anymore. It’s the marketing guys or the ones who expand the business into Latin America or whatever. Because what’s the point of focusing on making the product even better when the only company you can take business from is yourself?

So a different group of people start to move up. And who usually ends up running the show? The sales guy. John Akers at IBM is the consummate example. Then one day, the monopoly expires for whatever reason. But by then the best product people have left, or they’re no longer listened to. And so the company goes through this tumultuous time, and it either survives or it doesn’t.

Look at Microsoft — who’s running Microsoft? Right, the sales guy. Case closed.

(For the record: I hate the “I’m a Mac” commercials; but I realize that I’m not the target audience. Apple has already sold me and my ilk a product; they no longer have to please us.)

P.S.: There’s another problem with trying to equate Microsoft with Bill Gates. Bill Gates has decided to devote the remainder of his life to philanthropy. Do you really want to symbolically represent your company with someone who no longer wants to work there?

Heck of a job, Georgie

2008-08-31T16:33:14Z

Bush, Cheney to skip GOP convention because of Gustav

Uh, no. You’re skipping the GOP convention because your approval rating is in the toilet. Using Hurricane Gustav as an excuse is pure chutzpah considering how you and your cronies mishandled Katrina.

Warning: Extreme Geekery, Proceed With Caution

2008-07-17T05:09:55Z

I have found a replacement for the late, lamented Fake Steve Jobs:

Linux Hater’s Blog

Excessive swearing, but charming in its anger; and dead-on, especially describing design problems that could have been fixed years ago had egos not been in the way.

Today’s Word of the Day

2008-07-07T21:13:57Z

G•o•F•i•tis |ˈdʒiˈoʊˈɛfˈaɪd1s| noun The bloating of code resulting from the irresponsible application of design patterns for patterns’ sake.
Example: His use of a Factory object for a basic container class that has no subclasses is resulting in terminal GoFitis.