Today, I bought a new (smaller) TV for our bedroom, replacing one that we have had for 8 or 9 years. On impulse, while picking out the TV at Costco, I also picked up a Roku 2 kit (Roku 2, HDMI cable, 2 month subscription to HuluPlus). I figured it would be interesting to see the comparison. Once home, I set up the new TV, hooked up the Roku 2 to it, and started the Roku 2 setup process. I got it talking to my in-home LAN (dual-band 802.11N router), and it signaled successful connection all the way out to the internet. It then told me that an update was available and gave me no other option than to download that update. Not a problem, I thought — always want the latest software.

Sigh. The Roku was never able to download the upgrade, and — this is critical — gave me no option to proceed to use the device without the upgrade. I made half a dozen attempts (all with the same failure, Code 011, unable to connect to Roku server), went to roku.com/support and had a nice chat with Jane, who suggested I reconfigure my router with explicit DNS addresses and then reboot my network. Did so — same problem.  She opined that the Roku server might be having troubles, or that it might be some other unspecified error.

Just to make sure there wasn’t some specific problem with the actual physical location of the Roku 2, I went out to the living room, unplugged my Apple TV, brought it into the bedroom, and plugged it in sitting right where the Roku 2 had been. Worked like a charm. I then went to Amazon and ordered a second Apple TV unit (scheduled to be delivered Saturday morning for just $3.99 in shipping, even though I ordered it Thursday evening — Amazon Prime is just brilliant).

I will probably hang onto the Roku 2 unit and in fact will likely connect it to the living room TV (along with the new Apple TV unit). Assuming that I can get it to update itself and let me use it, I’d like to see what it offers that’s different and/or better than Apple TV. But having had a fair amount of contact with Steve Jobs back during his NeXT days, I know that one of his product mantras was, “It just works.”

The Apple TV, like so many Apple consumer products, just works. And that’s why Apple wins.

[UPDATED 12/19/2011] Of course, having written that firm statement, I am now having problems with my Apple TV units. In the meantime, I did finally get the Roku 2 to register the day after I wrote this post, and it is working fine even though my Apple TV is not. Sigh…

A few years later — in 1982 — my close friend Wayne Holder hired me into his nascent software company, Oasis Systems, in part to help with his existing and planned word processing utilities (The Word Plus, Punctuation + Style), but mostly to develop computer games. And we did, developing Sundog: Frozen Legacy on the Apple II, a game for which I still get e-mails (and which Wayne is even now working on resurrecting for modern platforms). In January 1984, a few months before Sundog shipped, we were invited by Guy Kawasaki to come up to Apple to see a preview of the Mac and to talk about what software we could port to the Mac. Through my connections with computer stores in San Diego, I was able to get a personal loan of a Mac for a few days at home prior to the official announcement in Cupertino later that month, which Wayne and I attended as well. That was my first time seeing Steve Jobs in person, and it remains a memorable highlight of my professional life.

When the Mac shipped a few days later, I went down to the one computer store in San Diego that I knew would be getting machines from Apple. I took $3000 in cash with me and managed to convince the store owner — a friend — to let me have one of the three Macs he had to sell. Through a connection with Phil Lemmons — editor-in-chief at BYTE — I ended up writing the official BYTE review of the 128K Macintosh (August 1984 issue). By the end of 1984, I was writing full-time for BYTE, including on-going coverage of the Macintosh, particularly once my BYTE column started in mid-1985. After a few years of writing for BYTE, I switched to writing for Macworld magazine. Steve was now long-gone from Apple, and Apple was having some of its own problems going forward.

But in late 1987, I was contacted by Addison-Wesley. They were interested in having me write a book about Steve Jobs’ new project at NeXT. Folks at NeXT had apparently suggested me to Addison-Wesley, probably due to my writing at BYTE and Macworld. I leapt at the opportunity, particularly since in coincided with our family moving from Utah to just outside Santa Cruz (where I would be doing technical writing for Borland on a consulting basis). Once there, I found myself invited to visit NeXT HQ on Deer Creek Road, sit in on meetings, and attend the 0.3 NeXTstep Dev Camp. And, yes, that meant getting actual face time with Steve Jobs as well — not a lot, but this was a man whose creations had been impacting my personal and professional life for over a decade at this point.

The writing of the book dragged out as I waited to get my hands on an actual NeXT cube, which finally happened (if I recall correctly) at the end of 1988 or early 1989. I wrote the first several drafts of the book on that NeXT cube itself. The book came out in the fall of 1989; it remains the single most successful book I’ve ever written, due to the intense interest in NeXT itself, more than any particular writing skills or technical insight on my part.

The following year, I found myself working with a world-class typographer (Mike Parker) and graphic designer (Vic Spindler) to create a design-oriented desktop publishing system. I was doing all the software prototyping on my NeXT cube, and we made the decision to make the NeXT our first target platform. For five years — 1990 to 1995 — I served as chief architect and CTO at Pages Software Inc, where we developed Pages by Pages and then WebPages, while spending nearly two years just trying to raise venture funding. We closed on funding at the start of 1992 and shipped our first version of Pages in early 1994. We quickly sold all that we were going to in the all-too-small NeXTstep market. My frustrations at seeing larger firm try to leverage off of NeXT’s incredible innovations led to an op-ed piece in the November 1994 issue of BYTE, “Whither NextStep?” The day that issue came out was the last time that Steve Jobs and I spoke — he called me from the back of a car somewhere to ask me what the hell I was doing writing that. I said, telling the truth. Pages would close its door the next year, unable to secure additional funding to move its technology to Windows.

When Steve engineered his brilliant reverse takeover of Apple — getting Apple to buy NeXT for $400 million, then slowly moving himself into the CEO seat — I was not optimistic. I still had unconditional praise for the NextStep technology, but I was dubious about Steve’s ability to sell technology to markets and to compete with Microsoft.

Boy, was I wrong. I was not only wrong about his abilities at Apple, I was wrong in my BYTE article about NextStep being on a downward slope. NextStep, of course, was the foundation of Mac OS X, and Steve transformed Apple into the most-admired, most-imitated, and most-valuable company in the world. And I was tickled that, when Apple brought out its own word processor, it was named “Pages”. Steve had always liked that name when we were developing (and shipping) our own product years before; glad he was able to use it.

To quote John Perry Barlow over on FB, “The world is suddenly a less interesting place.” ..bruce w..

[1] The first was an HP-67 card-reading programmable calculator.

[Cross-posted from And Still I Persist]

I’ve joined Google fairly recently after spending nearly a decade at MSFT, and I’m having to unlearn a ton of things I’ve learned at MSFT.

First, I had to unlearn that my opinion doesn’t mean shit. Engineers do, in fact, run Google, and I’m an engineer. A LOT depends on engineers here. Barely anything depends on the management or PMs. The comfortable, asphyxating bureaucracy of Microsoft simply does not exist. It is up to you to define the direction, and execute on it. If you’re good, you will also get other people to execute on it, by means of which you will establish yourself as a leader.

Second, I had to unlearn that my teammates are plotting something behind my back. As far as I can tell a few months in, they aren’t. Or they’re so skilled at it that I don’t see the plot (which after 10 years at MSFT is unlikely). They’re just building a product.

Third, there’s no “jihad” against anyone. Not even Microsoft. People are discouraged from thinking in those terms. No one is trying to “kill the fucking Microsoft”. No one is throwing chairs or calling Ballmer a pussy. People just build their products and services the best they can.

Fourth, there are very few people who can say “no” without motivating their answer with data. The first answer you will hear from anyone (including Legal!) is “yes”. It’s not blind acceptance or anarchy either, it is expected that you will motivate your changes, with data, if necessary. Want to change the way Google runs ads? If your change makes sense and you can demonstrate it, it will be accepted. Search? The same. This one is particularly hard to unlearn – after burying so many great (or at least I thought they were great) ideas because they weren’t _politically_ feasible, sometimes within the same extended team.

And so on and so forth. I wasn’t a bad performer at MS by any means (left the company 5 levels up from where I joined), and as a matter of fact I admire bits and pieces of Microsoft to this day, but Google made me realize just how miserable I was there. I don’t yet feel Google is the ideal place for me either, but one thing is clear – it’s much easier to breathe here, if you know what I mean.

When I wrote The Art of ‘Ware back in 1994, I came away from it with a greater appreciation of why Microsoft had achieved the success that it had. It appears that Microsoft has lost its way. ..bruce..

Two disappointed believers,
Two people playing the game.
Negotiations and love songs
Are often mistaken for one and the same.

– “Train in the Distance”, Paul Simon

I used to have arguments with Carol Teasley, one of my mentors, regarding software development methodologies. She contended that there were no really good or effective methodologies, because if there were, everyone would use them and they would work. I, in turn, contended that there were several effective methodologies, but that they were just badly applied for the most part.

Then while watching the movie “A Beautiful Mind” (about Nobel Laureate John Forbes Nash, a brilliant mathematician who struggled with schizophrenia), I was struck by the sequence that represented (not entirely accurately) some of his insights about game theory and multi-player equilibrium points. It occurred to me that software development within a typical corporate/government organization is really an instance of multi-player game theory, with several general classes of players. The real issue in organizational software development is not the development methodology being used. That methodology, at best, is necessary but not sufficient for a successful project; it may actually be irrelevant, and at worst it may be a hindrance.

The real issue is the game that’s being played.

Organizational software development, I believe, can be thought of as an n-player game, where each set of players has voiced and unvoiced (and possibly even unconscious) goals, many of which are incompatible with those of one or more other players.

At the most abstract level, the fundamental division is among IT developers (Geeks), upper management (Suits), and end-users (Users). Put very roughly, the Geeks work as if they’re playing Halo, the Suits work as if they’re playing poker, and the Users are just trying to balance their checkbooks. The result is that the three groups mostly baffle and frustrate one another; they can’t even agree on what game they’re playing, much less what constitutes winning.

Adding to the problem is that each group has generally negative perceptions of the other two, which in turn shape the games. For example, Geeks tend see Suits as “marketing weasels” who make impossible promises (to Users) or demands (of the Geeks) that the Geeks can’t possibly meet. Geeks look upon Users with a mixture of condescension and dismissal, though that elevates to horror and dismay if the Geeks have to directly provide tech support to the Users.

Suits tend to see Geeks as overgrown, naive, but possibly bright children who never actually deliver anything. They tend to see Users as annoying sheep, except when the Users control the purse-strings, at which point the most far-fetched User demand is seen (and portrayed by the Suit) as eminently possible.

The Users tend to see Geeks as irascible wizards who may or may not deliver the magic necessary to make their own lives easier. They tend to see Suits as corrupt nobles who hold not just power but also the wizards’ collective leashes.

Now, these are of course blatant and gross oversimplifications, but ones with a foundation in reality; were it not so, the Dilbert comic strip would have died a quiet death long since.

My next set of posts will look a bit closer at these abstract classes (Geek, Suit, User) and then will look at some of the real-world patterns (internal development, external development, and so on).

These factors govern the success of the company: Tao; the economy; the marketplace; leadership; management.

Tao means running the company so that all the employees share the same vision of success.¹

“Tao” (literally, “the Way”) is probably the most difficult concept — and task — introduced in this book. Why? Because it is hard to achieve success for a diverse group of people, and the more people involved, the harder it gets. Universal stock options help, but they are not by themselves sufficient.

It is also difficult because there is a moral element involved. For Tao to be achieved there has to be an outstanding level of reciprocal dedication, loyalty, and trust between the employees of the company at all levels. This does not mean that employees are not accountable to their managers or vice versa; quite the contrary. But there is a Taoist paradox at the heart of this: the manager must focus on the needs of the employee, while the employee must focus on the needs of the company. This is a powerful situation, since each acts as the other’s advocate, each helps the other to succeed, and each (in theory, at least) trusts the intentions of the other.

It breaks down, of course, if that mutual advocacy isn’t there. When both manager and employee place the needs of the company as paramount, the stage is set for burnout, declining quality of results, and turnover. When both place the needs of the employee as paramount, then the company suffers and, eventually, so does the employee. And the last situation — where the manager places the needs of the company first, while the employee places his or her needs first — is the classic adversarial management-vs.-labor relationship that has been the source of tremendous conflict, inefficiency, fraud, violence, corruption, waste, and suffering since the start of the Industrial Revolution.

Does Tao guarantee success? No. Does lack of Tao guarantee failure? No. But as market forces continue to dismantle or reorganize the large corporate structures that have dominated the last century (and the mentalities that go with them), firms that seek to achieve and maintain Tao will have a decided advantage.

The economy means buying and selling, lending and borrowing, growth and decay.

Technology-based industries go through waves of prosperity that aren’t always related to the nation or global economy. This still fuels the basic dream of a small group of developers making a fortune, even though cost to market has risen tremendously, and the technical economy now tracks the national economy more closely. Even so, new opportunities can turn things upside down; witness the mad, intense scramble into the original dot.com boom (and bust), as well as the current “Web 2.0″ boomlet.

The economic aspect of product development has to do with cash flow for the company itself: how much money (or credit) is on hand, what monthly “burn rate” of resources is, what additional sources exist, what additional expenses are required or anticipated, what the bottom line is each and every month, and how well future income and expenses can be predicted.

New companies typically must raise sufficient capital to complete an initial product and then successfully bring it to market. That capital may be from sweat equity, personal savings, contract work, advance royalties, private investment, corporate partnerships, or venture firms. Each of these sources has its advantages and its costs; failure to understand these trade-offs can lead a bright young company to the point where it carries the heavy burden of development and marketing without much in the way of rewards.

The marketplace means time to market, ease of development, potential demand, customer requirements, competition, and return on investment.

Success depends on how quickly and cheaply you can bring to market a product that people are willing to buy in sufficient quantities. This means you’ve got to understand both what it is you’re trying to build and who is going to choose to spend their money on it instead of on something else, including equivalent products from other firms. Beyond that, you have to be able to sell your products for a price at which you can make a profit — not just pay back what you spent coming to market, but actually show a return on that original investment. And you have to do this in an arena filled with companies that are better staffed, better funded, better known than yours.

Leadership means the qualities of wisdom, integrity, humanity, vision, and fairness.

Wisdom means knowing the right thing to do, and the right reason for doing it. Integrity represents the ethical and moral dimensions of business that are sometimes neglected in executive offices, particularly those of sales and marketing. Humanity involves remembering that every decision made affects people’s lives — including those in competing firms. Vision is the quality of seeing beyond the next quarter’s results and into the future. Fairness mixes compassion, justice, and evenhandedness appropriately.

These qualities are uncommon, and are seldom found in equal and sufficient proportions in a single person. But that does not excuse their absence, nor does it relieve us of the effort to achieve them. They must reside in those who lead the company, and they must be expected of employees at all levels.

Management means organization, communication, acquisition of resources, and budgeting.

Many start-ups are run by technical or visionary individuals who do not fully understand or appreciate the role of management in a successful company. This can lead to failure to recognize or reward contributions, exhaustion of resources, inefficient use of time, and even legal problems. Management skills should be as important in a company, division, or product group as technical skills.

Every CEO will have heard of these five factors, but success depends upon truly understanding them.

When you examine companies for success or failure, you will usually find that the successful ones understand and deal with all five factors — Tao, the economy, the marketplace, leadership, and management — while the unsuccessful ones have misunderstood or neglected one or more of these factors.

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1 Compare Suntzu pingfa (Chapter 1, “Calculations”): Therefore, go through it by means of five factors; compare them by means of calculation, and determine their statuses: one, Way, two, Heaven, three, Ground, four, General, five, Law.

The Way is what causes the people to have the same thinking as their superiors; they may be given death, or they may be given life, but there is no fear of danger and betrayal.

Heaven is dark and light, cold and hot, and the seasonal constraints.

Ground is high and low, far and near, obstructed and easy, wide and narrow, and dangerous and safe.

General is wisdom, credibility, benevolence, courage, and discipline.

Law is organization, the chain of command, logistics, and the control of expenses.

All these five no general has not heard;

one who knows them is victorious, one who does not know them is not victorious. (Sonshi online translation)

• Sun Tzu (Chapter 2, ‘Doing Battle’, Sonshi.com translation): When weapons are blunted, and ardor dampened, strength exhausted, and resources depleted, the neighboring rulers will take advantage of these complications. Then even the wisest of counsels would not be able to avert the consequences that must ensue.
• The Art of ‘Ware (Chapter 2, ‘Supporting Development’, 1995 edition): When your developers are burned out, your technology aging, your resources diminished, and your advantages gone, then others will take advantage of your weaknesses and cut into your market. Even expensive consultants and new CEOs won’t be able to turn things around.

I have recently done a draft revision of the book, though I have more work to do before publication. But you are free to browse the HTML version at the link just give, or download a printable PDF version of the current draft. Feedback and comments are always welcome. ..bruce..