Yep, that's what the founders want, all right. Whether they will be able to get it, over the long haul, is another story.
I read the Letter from the Founders as their attempt to push back on all the forces that are pushing them in the maximize-profit direction. Which is all well and good -- but those forces aren't going away. They're inherent in being a public company, and no amount of good intentions changes that.
Their voting scheme and other non-traditional governance elements are all indications that they're hoping they can "rig the system" so that those forces won't affect Google the way they have affected every other public company. Will it work? Who knows? But I'm not encouraged by decisions like this one. If the VCs are running the show now, and doing all the typical stupid VC things -- sell intrusive ads! give away webmail! etc. -- they may see it as a small price to pay to let the founders write high-minded letters about how they refuse to be "evil". Who cares, as long as you're the one making the business decisions?
"I mean, yeah, Profitability is somewhat of a mandatory thing (duh!) and there isn't alot of "paying" to google for it's services outside of advertising."
This is what happens to companies when they go public.
Profitability is indeed a mandatory thing for any business. As we know from Google's IPO filing, though, the text-only ads were already quite profitable.
So why change? Because for a public company, just being "profitable" isn't enough -- they now have an obligation to maximize profit.
In a private business, you can make the decision that "we could probably make more money in the short term by accepting graphical ads, but that's just not our style." In a public company you don't get to make those decisions any more -- if you try to, the shareholders throw you out and replace you with a clueless Haaaahvahd MBA with Executive-Style Hair who is more than happy to run the business into the ground to hit a quarterly revenue target.
Google's founders have attempted to mitigate this somewhat in their filing by giving themselves, essentially, super-shareholder status -- their shares carry ten times the voting weight of an average shareholder's. But that's a defensive measure; it doesn't change the fact that the underlying dynamics of the company have changed. The founders are reacting to direction from outside, now. It will be interesting to see what other "great ideas" the outsiders have up their sleeves...
Re:Reading this post was taxing in itself
on
The Confusion
·
· Score: 3, Funny
I think you took "drop everything" a little too literally.
I know we're still in Afghanistan. But, our effort there has been hamstrung by the need to divert troops and materiel to Iraq. The result has been that we've settled for outcomes in Afghanistan -- rough stability in Kabul, and rule by the whim of local warlords everywhere else -- that are a far cry from what we originally wanted when we went in. (And for the most part, nobody cares, because attention is, as you mention, focused on Iraq.)
The fact that Afghanistan is the mess that it still is should have been one of the things arguing against opening a war of choice against Iraq. Trying to stabilize a country as historically fragmented as Afghanistan is a Big Job. When you're right in the middle of it, it's probably not the best time to go snipe hunting.
Yeah, I had the exact same thought that day. I always expected the Big Hit to come if they got their hands on a loose nuke. One of the few comforts of the days after 9/11 was that it seemed like that they had tipped their hand too early -- that now we would go after them with Extreme Prejudice and grind al Qaeda into dust before they ever got that chance.
Of course, that was all before we decided to drop everything and go after Saddam Hussein... now we've given them a nice breather to start working on finding that loose nuke again. (sigh)
Yes, definitely - Pilgrim does an excellent job taking Gmail apart from an accessibility standpoint. I especially liked this observation:
Furthermore, the most innovative feature of Gmail--the global keyboard shortcuts--appears to have been designed by vi users (j moves down, k moves up, and we are expected to memorize multi-key sequences for navigation).
Wow, a Web application with keyboard shortcuts as intuitive and general-public friendly as vi??? Sign me up!:-)
I hear where you're coming from, but you're not looking at the big picture.
It's not about paying these guys for doing the right thing, necessarily. It's about making a statement that there is a constituency out there that cares about issues like PATRIOT, that is watching how they vote, and that is willing to put its money where its mouth is. These fifteen Republicans just provide a convenient way to express that -- a vehicle for our message. They give us an excuse to show the rest of the politicians that we are out here and what we can do.
My goal when I launched this campaign was to get 2,000 people to give 15 dollars each. Ambitious? Sure. But there's way more people upset about this issue just reading this article alone. If 2,000 people can pull together and put in some spare change, that will get their attention a heck of a lot quicker than a nicely worded letter will.
So how much have you given to a Democratic candidate this year, then? To the DNC? Hopefully it's a lot:-)
The bigger issue is that this sort of fundraising goes on in Washington all the time. The only difference is that it isn't being done by ordinary people -- it's being done by interest groups and lobbies, who bundle contributions together for candidates who support their positions, regardless of their party label.
How do I know that? That's what I used to do for a living. I helped manage one of those political action committees; my job was to maintain a giant spreadsheet tracking every member of Congress, and how they voted on the issues we cared about. If the votes lined up the right way, the PAC contribution for that cycle flowed. If they didn't, it didn't. You would probably be surprised at how much more effective that approach is at getting policies you like adopted than just going by party label. And the fact that the pols knew we were watching those votes meant we got access, and our voices got heard, all through the process -- which I presume is something we would have liked to have on things like this PATRIOT extension.
The big revolution that services like PayDemocracy has enabled is that citizens can now self-organize the same kind of campaigns that special interest groups -- like the one that used to pay my salary -- have used to push their agenda for decades. If enough citizens can show enough commitment, it gets us a seat at the table. Right now we don't have that. I encourage you to give to the DNC, or to one or more of the Democratic candidates of your choice -- like I said in my original post, I'm a Democrat -- but that's not incompatible with helping the occasional Republican who's willing to cross the aisle.
When this first went through Congress, I got so frustrated by the lack of any way to take direct action that I decided to do something about it myself. So, I launched the "$15 for the Fifteen" campaign to fight back:
When the House voted on the measure, fifteen House Republicans broke from their party to vote against the bill, specifically because of their concerns about the stealthily inserted PATRIOT language. I'm a Democrat, but I thought that kind of principled stand was what we needed more of, not less -- and I thought it was a shame that the most likely outcome for these guys would be a world of hurt, since the House GOP leadership (especially Majority Leader Tom "The Hammer" DeLay) is famous for demanding loyalty above all else.
That's what "$15 for the Fifteen" is all about. It's a chance for people who want to express their opposition to this PATRIOT expansion to do so in the way politicians pay the most attention to -- in cash:-)
The idea is that you put fifteen dollars into the campaign fund -- one dollar for each of those Republicans who voted the right way -- and when the campaign ends, the total funds raised will be split equally between all fifteen of them, and each one will get a letter with his share explaining that this money comes from citizens who want to thank him for doing the Right Thing on this bill. It's not general support, it's support on this issue -- which means your $15 doesn't disappear into some non-profit's general fund.
(I should mention that it wouldn't be possible to run a campaign like this without PayDemocracy, a great service that I used to put it together. I have no affiliation with them, and I'm not getting a penny of your contribution.)
If you want to do something concrete to send a message to the politicians that there are people out there who are watching them on this issue, and that will support them if they do the right thing, come join me -- it doesn't take many $15 contributions before we have a serious chunk of change, and that will really get their attention. It's less than the cost of a CD, and it's a first step towards making sure that things like this don't happen again. Not too bad for $15, don't you think?
Not only are they wireless -- the only security measure they have in place is the long-cracked standard 802.11b Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP).
Wardrivers, start your engines!
I live in Northern Virginia, just next door to where they tried out the WINVote machines, and like a lot of people I wrote about why they were a bad idea before the election. Unfortunately the Fairfax County government wasn't paying attention to any of us, and now they're finding out what happens when you put blind faith in computers...
Yes, because I'm certain that if you live in North Korea or "Afghanistan (Taliban controlled areas)" your primary concern is how to get your hands on a fast, standards-compliant browser!:-)
You can't get a Visor from Handspring now, and you haven't been able to for a long time. All their organizer-only devices have been discontinued, from the original Visor up to the recent Treo 90. The only way Handspring will sell you a Visor is if you buy a reconditioned unit from them.
My guess is that PalmOne will continue this level of support for the Visor, but I strongly doubt that they'll start the production lines rolling again, especially when the bare-bones Zire and upcoming Zire 21 models are there for people who want a low-cost, monochrome organizer.
Innovation is a funny thing. There's only so much of it that can happen at any one time. That's because there are two finite resources required for it to happen: attention and money. In other words, someone needs to care enough about something to spend time thinking about ways to do it better, and then someone needs to care enough about those new ideas to pay to turn them into realities.
The reason there has been practically no innovation on the desktop in the last ten years has been because that span of time -- ten years -- coincides precisely with the span of time the Internet has been in the public consciousness. Ever since Mosaic hit in '93 the vast majority of money and attention that's available in the world has been focused on the Net -- making it better, faster, more reliable and able to support more complex applications. That hasn't left a lot of those resources to support innovations on the desktop -- and that's not necessarily a bad thing.
The first computer I ever connected to the Net, I connected in 1993. It was a 486SX/25 with 8MB of RAM and a whopping 200MB (yes, MB) hard drive. It ran Windows (version 3.1), Office, and some games.
Today I have a Duron 1200 with 512MB of RAM and an 80GB hard drive. It runs Windows (2000), Office, and some games... and a whole boatload of applications (Web browser, graphical IMAP mail client, IM programs, P2P, etc.) that I could not even have imagined in 1992. And, generally speaking, I'm happy with that -- those things are more useful to me than all the things we thought were going to be huge back in 1993 (immersive VR, CD-ROM encyclopedias, etc.) would have been.
So, in short, there's been plenty of innovation -- it's just been in a different direction than you (or I) were expecting.
If the same mentality of "efficiency is everything" that was necessary during the days of limited hardware power was voluntarily adopted today... well... imagine Windows XP starting up in one second (and not crashing). Imagine being able to swap cool new games on floppy disks. Imagine most games being distributed on Mini CDs, even those with lots of videos and speech, since a full (650-700MB) CD would be overkill for them.
Yes, and imagine those games costing $200 a pop and taking ten years on average to develop!
The reason they don't is because higher-level languages and abstraction layers like DirectX allow efficiencies in development that you couldn't get writing to the bare hardware in Assembly. There's a tradeoff in performance -- it costs more cycles to do something through an abstraction layer than to do it directly -- but we accept that because large software projects would quickly become unmanagably complex if we didn't.
And the cost? Think about this. Today the average game costs ~$50. Ten years ago, the average game cost about... ~$50. Heck, fifteen years ago the average game cost about $50. That's fifteen years in which the cost of a computer game has held steady despite inflation -- which means the real cost of those games has been steadily dropping. Think the game industry could have pulled that off if they were still sweating every last byte? No way.
Re:Reputations of people, specifically teachers
on
NYT On Online Reputations
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I can testify from experience that what you describe is exactly the way this sort of thing goes down.
Back in 1995, I was a clueless undergraduate at a university that shall remain nameless. I was helping the student government get its office LAN issues straightened out, and when word got around that I knew my way around a computer they volunteered me to be the one to process the data from those very surveys you mention.
Now, being as it was 1995 and this Web thing was still new and shiny, I had the bright idea that instead of publishing a book with the results, like they did every year (at great expense), they should put up a Web site and let people generate reports from a database instead. After tracking down a few other students who knew way more about the Web than I did, we hacked it all together and launched the puppy in short order -- the first time, as far as we could find out, that any university had provided such data through the Web (anyone have any earlier examples?). A technical triumph.
Not, however, a political one. The faculty union went through the roof when they discovered that anybody on the planet could look up the rating of a given faculty member. They demanded that the site be completely taken down, and that disciplinary action be taken against me and my merry band of miscreant geeks.
In the end, we managed to negotiate a compromise -- the site would be blocked by IP to anyone not on the campus network, and we would get away with a stern talking-to for having the temerity to do something innovative. After I left the project, though, the faculty leaned on the student government types hard enough to convince them to abandon the project altogether.
That experience was what convinced me that I wanted to make a career using Web technologies; I figured that anything that frightened complacent incompetents *that much* was something worth being a part of:-)
The real question here is: what makes Mozilla more appealing than Opera? That it's free and open source? Big - fucking - deal.
Let me see if I have this straight -- you have two products that are functionally equivalent, but one is free and open source, and the other costs money and is closed... and the free/open source thing doesn't matter?
Seems to me that the costs money/closed product should be the one having to justify why it's better -- not the other way around.
Thankfully Bobby Desktop doesn't "expire" or require renewal to keep working, so I can still use my old Bobby 4.0.1 and, as you mention, just be out the $99. However, my impression of Watchfire is sufficiently low after all this that I'm inclined to go shell out for Cynthia Says or some other alternative just for the pleasure of scrubbing all traces of Watchfire from my PC:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Yep, that's what the founders want, all right. Whether they will be able to get it, over the long haul, is another story.
I read the Letter from the Founders as their attempt to push back on all the forces that are pushing them in the maximize-profit direction. Which is all well and good -- but those forces aren't going away. They're inherent in being a public company, and no amount of good intentions changes that.
Their voting scheme and other non-traditional governance elements are all indications that they're hoping they can "rig the system" so that those forces won't affect Google the way they have affected every other public company. Will it work? Who knows? But I'm not encouraged by decisions like this one. If the VCs are running the show now, and doing all the typical stupid VC things -- sell intrusive ads! give away webmail! etc. -- they may see it as a small price to pay to let the founders write high-minded letters about how they refuse to be "evil". Who cares, as long as you're the one making the business decisions?
"I mean, yeah, Profitability is somewhat of a mandatory thing (duh!) and there isn't alot of "paying" to google for it's services outside of advertising."
This is what happens to companies when they go public.
Profitability is indeed a mandatory thing for any business. As we know from Google's IPO filing, though, the text-only ads were already quite profitable.
So why change? Because for a public company, just being "profitable" isn't enough -- they now have an obligation to maximize profit.
In a private business, you can make the decision that "we could probably make more money in the short term by accepting graphical ads, but that's just not our style." In a public company you don't get to make those decisions any more -- if you try to, the shareholders throw you out and replace you with a clueless Haaaahvahd MBA with Executive-Style Hair who is more than happy to run the business into the ground to hit a quarterly revenue target.
Google's founders have attempted to mitigate this somewhat in their filing by giving themselves, essentially, super-shareholder status -- their shares carry ten times the voting weight of an average shareholder's. But that's a defensive measure; it doesn't change the fact that the underlying dynamics of the company have changed. The founders are reacting to direction from outside, now. It will be interesting to see what other "great ideas" the outsiders have up their sleeves...
OK --
Book long. Plot confusing.
That dumbed down enough? :-)
I think you took "drop everything" a little too literally.
I know we're still in Afghanistan. But, our effort there has been hamstrung by the need to divert troops and materiel to Iraq. The result has been that we've settled for outcomes in Afghanistan -- rough stability in Kabul, and rule by the whim of local warlords everywhere else -- that are a far cry from what we originally wanted when we went in. (And for the most part, nobody cares, because attention is, as you mention, focused on Iraq.)
The fact that Afghanistan is the mess that it still is should have been one of the things arguing against opening a war of choice against Iraq. Trying to stabilize a country as historically fragmented as Afghanistan is a Big Job. When you're right in the middle of it, it's probably not the best time to go snipe hunting.
Yeah, I had the exact same thought that day. I always expected the Big Hit to come if they got their hands on a loose nuke. One of the few comforts of the days after 9/11 was that it seemed like that they had tipped their hand too early -- that now we would go after them with Extreme Prejudice and grind al Qaeda into dust before they ever got that chance.
Of course, that was all before we decided to drop everything and go after Saddam Hussein... now we've given them a nice breather to start working on finding that loose nuke again. (sigh)
AmEx just canceled their disposable number service (called "Private Payments"). Ticks me off, because it was one of the reasons I got my AmEx card in the first place...
Allow me to introduce you to TypeKey...
I dunno, I can think of one... ;-)
That's not momentum, it's "Joementum"!
I hear where you're coming from, but you're not looking at the big picture. It's not about paying these guys for doing the right thing, necessarily. It's about making a statement that there is a constituency out there that cares about issues like PATRIOT, that is watching how they vote, and that is willing to put its money where its mouth is. These fifteen Republicans just provide a convenient way to express that -- a vehicle for our message. They give us an excuse to show the rest of the politicians that we are out here and what we can do. My goal when I launched this campaign was to get 2,000 people to give 15 dollars each. Ambitious? Sure. But there's way more people upset about this issue just reading this article alone. If 2,000 people can pull together and put in some spare change, that will get their attention a heck of a lot quicker than a nicely worded letter will.
So how much have you given to a Democratic candidate this year, then? To the DNC? Hopefully it's a lot :-)
The bigger issue is that this sort of fundraising goes on in Washington all the time. The only difference is that it isn't being done by ordinary people -- it's being done by interest groups and lobbies, who bundle contributions together for candidates who support their positions, regardless of their party label.
How do I know that? That's what I used to do for a living. I helped manage one of those political action committees; my job was to maintain a giant spreadsheet tracking every member of Congress, and how they voted on the issues we cared about. If the votes lined up the right way, the PAC contribution for that cycle flowed. If they didn't, it didn't. You would probably be surprised at how much more effective that approach is at getting policies you like adopted than just going by party label. And the fact that the pols knew we were watching those votes meant we got access, and our voices got heard, all through the process -- which I presume is something we would have liked to have on things like this PATRIOT extension.
The big revolution that services like PayDemocracy has enabled is that citizens can now self-organize the same kind of campaigns that special interest groups -- like the one that used to pay my salary -- have used to push their agenda for decades. If enough citizens can show enough commitment, it gets us a seat at the table. Right now we don't have that. I encourage you to give to the DNC, or to one or more of the Democratic candidates of your choice -- like I said in my original post, I'm a Democrat -- but that's not incompatible with helping the occasional Republican who's willing to cross the aisle.
$15 for the Fifteen
When the House voted on the measure, fifteen House Republicans broke from their party to vote against the bill, specifically because of their concerns about the stealthily inserted PATRIOT language. I'm a Democrat, but I thought that kind of principled stand was what we needed more of, not less -- and I thought it was a shame that the most likely outcome for these guys would be a world of hurt, since the House GOP leadership (especially Majority Leader Tom "The Hammer" DeLay) is famous for demanding loyalty above all else.
That's what "$15 for the Fifteen" is all about. It's a chance for people who want to express their opposition to this PATRIOT expansion to do so in the way politicians pay the most attention to -- in cash :-)
The idea is that you put fifteen dollars into the campaign fund -- one dollar for each of those Republicans who voted the right way -- and when the campaign ends, the total funds raised will be split equally between all fifteen of them, and each one will get a letter with his share explaining that this money comes from citizens who want to thank him for doing the Right Thing on this bill. It's not general support, it's support on this issue -- which means your $15 doesn't disappear into some non-profit's general fund.
(I should mention that it wouldn't be possible to run a campaign like this without PayDemocracy, a great service that I used to put it together. I have no affiliation with them, and I'm not getting a penny of your contribution.)
If you want to do something concrete to send a message to the politicians that there are people out there who are watching them on this issue, and that will support them if they do the right thing, come join me -- it doesn't take many $15 contributions before we have a serious chunk of change, and that will really get their attention. It's less than the cost of a CD, and it's a first step towards making sure that things like this don't happen again. Not too bad for $15, don't you think?
Not only are they wireless -- the only security measure they have in place is the long-cracked standard 802.11b Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP).
Wardrivers, start your engines!
I live in Northern Virginia, just next door to where they tried out the WINVote machines, and like a lot of people I wrote about why they were a bad idea before the election. Unfortunately the Fairfax County government wasn't paying attention to any of us, and now they're finding out what happens when you put blind faith in computers...
Everybody knows you need to trace the edges of the LCD with a green marker to get true "audiophile" sound quality. Sheesh.
Ooh! Looks like this is the one from the scene where Vader auditions to be the lead singer of Journey...
Yes, because I'm certain that if you live in North Korea or "Afghanistan (Taliban controlled areas)" your primary concern is how to get your hands on a fast, standards-compliant browser! :-)
They're predicting how many employees they'll have left in three years :-)
You can't get a Visor from Handspring now, and you haven't been able to for a long time. All their organizer-only devices have been discontinued, from the original Visor up to the recent Treo 90. The only way Handspring will sell you a Visor is if you buy a reconditioned unit from them.
My guess is that PalmOne will continue this level of support for the Visor, but I strongly doubt that they'll start the production lines rolling again, especially when the bare-bones Zire and upcoming Zire 21 models are there for people who want a low-cost, monochrome organizer.
Innovation is a funny thing. There's only so much of it that can happen at any one time. That's because there are two finite resources required for it to happen: attention and money. In other words, someone needs to care enough about something to spend time thinking about ways to do it better, and then someone needs to care enough about those new ideas to pay to turn them into realities.
The reason there has been practically no innovation on the desktop in the last ten years has been because that span of time -- ten years -- coincides precisely with the span of time the Internet has been in the public consciousness. Ever since Mosaic hit in '93 the vast majority of money and attention that's available in the world has been focused on the Net -- making it better, faster, more reliable and able to support more complex applications. That hasn't left a lot of those resources to support innovations on the desktop -- and that's not necessarily a bad thing.
The first computer I ever connected to the Net, I connected in 1993. It was a 486SX/25 with 8MB of RAM and a whopping 200MB (yes, MB) hard drive. It ran Windows (version 3.1), Office, and some games.
Today I have a Duron 1200 with 512MB of RAM and an 80GB hard drive. It runs Windows (2000), Office, and some games... and a whole boatload of applications (Web browser, graphical IMAP mail client, IM programs, P2P, etc.) that I could not even have imagined in 1992. And, generally speaking, I'm happy with that -- those things are more useful to me than all the things we thought were going to be huge back in 1993 (immersive VR, CD-ROM encyclopedias, etc.) would have been.
So, in short, there's been plenty of innovation -- it's just been in a different direction than you (or I) were expecting.
Yes, and imagine those games costing $200 a pop and taking ten years on average to develop!
The reason they don't is because higher-level languages and abstraction layers like DirectX allow efficiencies in development that you couldn't get writing to the bare hardware in Assembly. There's a tradeoff in performance -- it costs more cycles to do something through an abstraction layer than to do it directly -- but we accept that because large software projects would quickly become unmanagably complex if we didn't.
And the cost? Think about this. Today the average game costs ~$50. Ten years ago, the average game cost about... ~$50. Heck, fifteen years ago the average game cost about $50. That's fifteen years in which the cost of a computer game has held steady despite inflation -- which means the real cost of those games has been steadily dropping. Think the game industry could have pulled that off if they were still sweating every last byte? No way.
I can testify from experience that what you describe is exactly the way this sort of thing goes down.
Back in 1995, I was a clueless undergraduate at a university that shall remain nameless. I was helping the student government get its office LAN issues straightened out, and when word got around that I knew my way around a computer they volunteered me to be the one to process the data from those very surveys you mention.
Now, being as it was 1995 and this Web thing was still new and shiny, I had the bright idea that instead of publishing a book with the results, like they did every year (at great expense), they should put up a Web site and let people generate reports from a database instead. After tracking down a few other students who knew way more about the Web than I did, we hacked it all together and launched the puppy in short order -- the first time, as far as we could find out, that any university had provided such data through the Web (anyone have any earlier examples?). A technical triumph.
Not, however, a political one. The faculty union went through the roof when they discovered that anybody on the planet could look up the rating of a given faculty member. They demanded that the site be completely taken down, and that disciplinary action be taken against me and my merry band of miscreant geeks.
In the end, we managed to negotiate a compromise -- the site would be blocked by IP to anyone not on the campus network, and we would get away with a stern talking-to for having the temerity to do something innovative. After I left the project, though, the faculty leaned on the student government types hard enough to convince them to abandon the project altogether.
That experience was what convinced me that I wanted to make a career using Web technologies; I figured that anything that frightened complacent incompetents *that much* was something worth being a part of :-)
Let me see if I have this straight -- you have two products that are functionally equivalent, but one is free and open source, and the other costs money and is closed... and the free/open source thing doesn't matter?
Seems to me that the costs money/closed product should be the one having to justify why it's better -- not the other way around.
Thankfully Bobby Desktop doesn't "expire" or require renewal to keep working, so I can still use my old Bobby 4.0.1 and, as you mention, just be out the $99. However, my impression of Watchfire is sufficiently low after all this that I'm inclined to go shell out for Cynthia Says or some other alternative just for the pleasure of scrubbing all traces of Watchfire from my PC :-)