Category: business

Here is a cool article about the top 10 geek business myths. Here is my favorite one:

Myth #3: Someone will steal your idea if you don’t protect it.

Reality: No one gives a damn about your idea until you actually succeed and by then it’s too late. Even on the off chance that you do manage to stumble across someone who is as excited about your idea as you are, if they have any brains they will join you rather than try to beat you. (And if they don’t have any brains then it doesn’t matter what they do.)

This also applies to newbie science fiction writers, who are concerned about someone lifting their brilliant high concept ideas. Great, you’ve got a cool idea. That plus a year spent writing 100,000 words equals a novel. People that think the idea is a thing worth protecting don’t seem to understand that 99.44% of the value is in the execution. There are very few ideas so compelling and world changing that just knowing it changes the game. In fact, sometimes you see people with a great idea rolling out an execution so crappy that it kills the idea and someone later has to rehabilitate the value of the original premise.

I’ve decided that anytime the phrase “our call is important to us” is uttered to me, unless a live human being is actually speaking it to me, I am going to interpret it as antagonistic bullshit that is self-evidently a lie. If my call actually was more important than keeping call center headcount down, I wouldn’t be listening to your recording in the first place. Do what you have to, but don’t lie to me so transparently as if I don’t understand what is going on. It makes me madder hearing that phrase from a recording than nothing at all.

It’s a big ad, my god it’s big!

This thought occurred to me the other day, as the sales of the stuff packages have led to a little buildup of money in my Paypal account that I have not yet converted to actual folding money. How much money sits in the Paypal system in steady state? They charge for some of their services, but I wonder how much money they make from the interest on the float of the cash that sits in their system before you take it out. If you have 10 million users that have an average of $100 sitting in their accounts, that’s a billion dollars. Now you are starting to talk about real money, kids.

Here’s an interesting post from Mark Cuban (whose blog I have just started reading regularly.) He wants to compile statistics on how file-sharing has affected industries to test the RIAA’s claims that it has hurt their business. He points out that DVDs, photographs and video games have all seen their sales go way up. He then points out:

The RIAA claims that sales of the top 100 CDs sold 195mm units in 1999, materially above the 154mm units sold in 2004. Which leads to a question. Are sales down due to filesharing, or have RIAA members just lost marketshare ?

I contend RIAA sales are down because they lost marketshare. There are more CDs being self published or released by non RIAA members than ever before. Sales from websites, concerts and car trunks are taking away sales from traditional labels. Access and awareness of that music has exploded through webradio, websites, p2p, satellite radio and tours

Right on Mark Cuban! What kind of knucklehead uses those stats anyway – the top 100 CDs have seen their sales go down? That is indistinguishable from just changing the mix away from blockbuster sellers. These folks are book-cooking, number-fudging, disingenuous bastards with their math, and no statistic they trot out should ever be taken at face value. If they tell me that the day is 24 hours long, I want to see the raw data before I’ll believe it.

Cuban is right when he says they are incorrect to claim that the RIAA is the music business. They have no way of knowing how many CDs were sold, just how many they sold through Soundscan. All those CDs that Michelle Malone and Michelle Shocked sell through their websites, those don’t get added in. All the CDs I’m selling for the Gentle Readers, they don’t know about that. All the sales happening in ways other than reporting retailers, those are off the radar. Don’t believe them when they say it is raining, that’s just them pissing away their business.

Earlier this week, I recieved this email:

Dear David,

Thank you for your recent priceline.com Hotel purchase. Now that you’re back, we’d love to hear about your stay at the Rickeys, A Hyatt Hotel in Palo Alto.

We’ve put together a very brief survey that will only take about 2 minutes of your time to complete. Your feedback will be used to ensure the quality of future hotel stays for you and other priceline.com customers. Click on the button below to take our quick survey now!

Thank you for your participation,
The priceline Hotel Team

I don’t know about y’all, but I’ve pretty much hit the end of my line with this sort of thing. First, none of these things is ever as quick as they say. If they say 2 minutes, you’d be lucky for 5. But more importantly, why do I give a shit? Filling out web surveys is slightly less appealing to me than a trip to the dentist. I’ve stopped getting subscriptions to computer magazines when the only cost was filling one out every 6 months. I don’t like them. Appealing to me that my effort will “ensure the quality of future hotel stays for you and other priceline.com customers” is a losing strategy. That’s baseline. Should the service stop being quality, I stop using you. Helping that happen is your job, not mine.

If you are waiting for me to feel so altruistic that I’ll be delighted to give Priceline my time for free, set the alarm for a quarter past hell-frozen-over. If you want to draw on my good time, bribe me for god’s sake! Make it worth my time. Obviously if I used Priceline to get this hotel room, I’m already a cheap bastard, so maybe I don’t feel like doing your work unpaid. Give me a coupon for a download at the iTunes music store or an Audible download or a Fictionwise ebook. You don’t have to bribe me with a lot, but do something. Otherwise, your appeal goes straight to the bin.

In my reasonably recent past, I had a job I hated. I was far from the only person who hated this job – pretty much every coworker did too. One of those people asked me today, “are we the watercooler gang?” Sadly, I think we were.

We spent a lot of time complaining about how bad things were, but we did better than that. We spent a fair amount of time – sometimes disobeying direct orders not to – building tools and infrastructure to not just stomp the fire but effect a lasting change that would solve this problem not once, but always forevermore. We create build automation when the situation presented to us was “If you want your stuff to go into this version of the product, move your compiled binaries to this folder.” We found we couldn’t live like that, and we pitched fits but more than that we built real solutions to those problems. Slowly, they moved the company from a garage operation to an actual business that could do things like match versions of the released product to the source that built it, standard everyday stuff that should be there in a grown up operation but wasn’t.

If I had it to do all over again, I’m not sure I would. We did an awful lot of complaining, spent a lot of time and energy and emotion raging against the machine. Demonstrably, the company was better off for us having done it but were we? I don’t know. Neither I nor any of my coworkers feel like we ever were or ever will be paid back for the pieces of ourselves that we put into that place. I think my heuristic moving forward is that when presented with thse sorts of problems and after proposing solutions, does the management and structure of the company fight the solution? If so, maybe you shouldn’t put a lot of yourself into this fight. The failure of the joint is a done deal, and you are merely prolonging the inevitable by helping them limp along better. Perhaps it is better to let the situation get worse, such that either they don’t fight your solution or the people fighting it get fired (as did happen at this company eventually.) It is hard, though, for motivated people who want to make things better to sit by and allow them to fester. I do know that the complaining didn’t really help, even though it seemed like a necessary thing to do or else suffering an embolism every day. I wish I had taken all that fire and energy and turned it into something that mattered, though.

We still talk about writing a business book based on the amazing example in how to do nearly everything wrong in an organization. It really was quite amazing. When the VCs gave the company money, I was surprised and frankly disappointed in their shoddy due diligence. My recommendation would have been to keep their cash in their pockets, because this bet ain’t ever paying off. Said book would be a case study for how to take a good idea in a business space with a booming market and a group of smart, motivated developers and parlay that into nothing. My proposed title: “How to Fuck Up a Wet Dream Without Hardly Trying: Case Studies in Destroying Start Ups ”

Just in time for my leaving the company, Orbitz put out a little press release about the seatmap work I did for them. Pretty cool, no? When I first saw this, I thought it was some kind of reportage until I realized it was something Orbitz paid to put on the PR newswire. I do like the headline they have on it – “The End of the Middle Seat Blues”. It was a relatively straightforward thing to do technically, but it seems to have really rocked the world of folks within the company. It’s nice to have done some work that excites people.

Sometimes Dilbert really creeps me out by ceasing to be a comic strip and becoming a documentary of previous jobs I have had.

Here’s what my friend and sometimes programming partner Darin has learned about work from a bad job we have both suffered through together. There is a lot of bitter wisdom in this very short post, all of it learned the hard way.

Today’s Dilbert hits hard. “Never listen to your customers. They were dumb enough to buy your product, so they have no credibility.”

Here’s a story that I really don’t understand. Monsanto, which makes the hormones frequently given to milk cows, is suing a Maine dairy for labeling their milk “hormone free”.

The label, used by Oakhurst Dairy in Portland, states: “Our farmers’ pledge: no artificial growth hormones.” Monsanto sued Oakhurst in July, saying its label implies the dairy’s milk is somehow better than milk from cows treated with recombinant bovine somatotropin , or rBST, a hormone sold by the company under the brand name Posilac. About 17 percent of dairy farmers use rBST, injecting 32 percent of all cows in the United States, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Call me stupid, but I don’t see how labeling milk “hormone free” when it is from cows who were given no hormones is actionable. Monsanto isn’t arguing the truth of the claim, just that this implies their hormones are bad. The article says the dairy might settle. I’m no lawyer, but it seems like they might have stood a good chance of prevailing. This strikes me as petulant on Monsanto’s part. They sell their hormones to a lot of dairies in the country, and they want to even prohibit the ones that don’t use hormones from using that as a differentiator. That doesn’t seem right to me. Are they going to sue farmers that label produce “pesticide free” as well?

First, a CNET commentary about IT jobs going offshore entitled “Where did my IT job go?” Next, comes a post from Jeremy Zawodny wondering why CFO jobs aren’t outsourced to India and China? It’s a mostly clerical position. If you can save 70% of the price of a $80K programmer and think that’s just great, how about saving 70 or 80% of of a $700K or $2M CFO? If the labor pool over there is so fucking great, let’s do it! CEO’s, ship your CFO jobs to India! Let’s get a short-term gain in shareholder value and pop champagne! It will be just like when you fire the rank and file, except firing this one guy is like 15 of us! How efficient for everyone.

Here’s a post from Incipient Thoughts on management Panzaism, or the belief that real problems don’t exist and how it cycles with Quixotism. Haven’t we all been in these workplaces?

In another post by Esther Derby, she points to this article in Industry Week by John Brandt about unhappy companies. Here is one of his ways he thinks unhappy companies are all alike:

A belief that employees are dangerous and lazy.

Unhappy companies invariably believe that their employees are out to sabotage the business, and they manage accordingly. All decisions — whether on strategy or coffee for the break room — have to be signed by three layers of management. What unhappy companies fail to understand is that if you treat people as if they’re worthless long enough, eventually they’ll either believe you (and behave accordingly) or they’ll spend all their energy trying to build a paper case that you’re wrong. Either way, your customers (and you) lose. ŽÂŽ 

Yowch, I’ve worked in a number of places like this, like practically everyone. There is a lot of wisdom in his observation above about treating people as if they are worthless.