Dave Jenkins

Posit: All software becomes commoditized over time.  Either the original developing company reduces its price point to maintain market share or extend into ubiquity (MSWindows), goes freeware to maintain format hegemony (Adobe PDF), or more often– gets reverse engineered and released into the wild by those communists in the Open Source community.

Posit: The online user community has swung from corporate-driven top-down groups (slashdot, classmates, espn.com) to individualistic spewing (blogs), to childish connected networks (friendster, myspace, facebook) to now swinging back somewhere in the middle of all three: new corporate startups using grass roots networking to tie together individuals within their tribes with a more complex purpose than just zombie biting and superpoking each other.

Posit: This evolution is the result of the combination of those two points: facebook-like social networking software is now commodised and freely available.  People will no longer blog in their separate spaces, but will collectively blog within their tribe.

Just today I signed up for another social network: www.planetetail.com — a network limited to ecommerce professionals with only one apparent rule: no job postings (not sure why, but okay).  Last week I signed up for www.geni.com — a social network with all my in-laws, sisters and their extended families.  Literally, my blood, my tribe.  It is no longer enough to just be a random collection of people, it now must be a social network with some purpose.  Ironically, this may actually hold some value for MySpace if they took a draconian step: kick off every person who doesn’t play in a band.   That network was supposed to be a place for indie rockstars to get their message out.  But just like MTV, it soon became cursed with tweens, hangers-on, and the dredges that read gossip magazines.  If MySpace kicked them all of, and required people to submit just one original MP3 recording of their band/song/rap/whatever to get back on, the site could retake the high ground, and become the network of musicians.

At a recent conference in Las Vegas, everyone was yaking on and on about social networking and tapping into “web 2.0″ (which shows you how far behind the marketing people are).  There were plenty of vendors there to try and sell me such packages, but every last one of them suffered from three fatal flaws:

1. These software services wanted money– a lot of money– stupid corporate big software-like numbers.  Nope.
2. No one could explain to me what/how it would work, other than to simply try and stick something on at the bottom of every page with all the other suckerfish.
3. Online communities hate corporations (just like someone else I know) telling them what to do and how to think.  If anything, the only real communities come up by themselves with two 15 year-old kids hacking things together in a basement somewhere.

I’ve got a couple of ideas myself cooking up on some network sites.  Now, thanks to Drupal and the other freeware packages out there, I can build my social network concepts with just two turntables and a microphone.

Well, I told ya so.  The iPhone isn’t doing so well in Japan, and has an uphill climb ahead of it.  As reported in a poll conducted by the Nikkei Business, 59% of respondents had “no intention to buy”, and another 26% had “no interest.”  That left 2.5% who intend to buy, and another 13% who may think about it.

Apple just doesn’t have the juice in Tokyo– almost everything there is either clearly wabi-sabi and traditional, or slick-plastic-wonderland-emotive.  This goes for cars, buildings, magazines, shows, and even the girls in Harajuku.  The iPhone’s sex appeal that is so compelling to clunky plaid-shirted Americans is just another plastometallic toy to the Japanese.  Even at that, the iPhone comes up short in functionality– no terrestrial TV, poor kanji anticipation, and an underdeveloped app market.  Japan, like Europe, has fierce competition amongst calling plans and contracts; they don’t have the Faustian vendor plans like in the United States, so iPhone’s lock in with Softbank is a big turn off.

I don’t have an iPhone.  I think I want one, but at the same time, I find myself using a cellphone less and less.

Meh.

(thanks to Gen Kanai and Joi Ito for the photo)

An old college roommate once took a job somewhere in the South, where Dixie was certain to rise again.  He sent us a postcard showing a statue of some confederate general on his steed, sword raised defiantly about to charge into glory.  The only thing my friend wrote on the back was “The War was over long before it began“.

It was one of the most cryptic, and yet compelling messages I’ve had.  It left the whole war– and by extension– his contemporary experiences up for interpretation.

To this day, whenever I meet my friend (once every few months or years now), my first statement is “The war was over long before it began”.  I am not sure he even remembers the postcard at this point, but invariably I am then treated fantastic insight in to the current war (local, state, national, ethical, economic– you name it) or core philosophical challenge that lays before Western Civilization.   Mind you, this isn’t the Wolf Blitzer tripe about what Obama vaguely promises or who McCain’s brother slept with or all that shit (the masses can read People or Time or Teen Beat for that).  No, my friend is much more concerned for the complete and utter lack of advanced discourse,  attainable rhetoric, or salient policy toward anything real.  This time, the war was for the remaining scraps of liberal democracy– and no one seems to really care if it slips out of our fingers.  I am left with the impression that we are working on a millennial scale– my friend mentioned that 600 years of The Enlightenment was at risk.  The war was over long before it began (sure– but which side?).

I promised myself I wouldn’t delve into mindless political opinion on this site– I just liked the phrase, and the internal struggle that it triggers in the heads of all of us– our jobs (or lack of them), the landlord, that fuck-up of a middle manager in your office, the middle east (Gulf War II, Gulf War I, 6-Day War, Suez Crisis, Lawrence and the boys, or the crusades led by St Louis– take your pick), or just the jealousy of those who make a fortune off of writing blogs.

The war was over long before it began.  Discuss amongst yourselves.

We all get attachments from vendors via email: proposals, MSAs, SOWs, NDAs, Ammendments, Contracts, etc.  Some people leave these attached to their email– trusting that the email server won’t go boots up.  Some people download attachments to their desktop, which soon fills up the entire screen (unless you can arrange them in a nice pattern).  The real type-a nutjobs create a separate folder for each set, which we all know we should do, but we’re too busy to spend the 15 seconds.

I fall in the second category– everything goes onto my desktop until I clean it up every Friday afternoon.  The problem I have is that it requires me to open each file and read the first paragraph to know which vendor sent me the doc.  Why?  BECAUSE EVERYONE ALWAYS SENDS ATTACHMENTS WITH REDUNDANT OR NON-DESCRIPTIVE TITLES, DAMMIT.  I work at Brown Shoe.  I know that,  the vendor knows that.  Why, for hell’s sake, does the vendor from Google or Akamai or Accenture or IBM or Pete’s Bait Shop always send me a document titled “brown shoe.doc”?   It doesn’t tell me anything, other than to remind me where I work (Thanks, genius!).  I know why: because on their file system inside Salesforce or whatever, they have organized things nice and tidy, they have a doc for Brown Shoe, for GM, for Budweiser, and for the Department of Corrections (”doc.doc”).  They’re not thinking about me, the customer.  They’re only worried about brownie points for cleanliness inside their own sales department.

Please, please, please: if you’re going to send me something, title it well: “Akamai 2008 Proposal.doc”, “Google NDA.doc”, “PetesBait Price List.xls”.

I won’t even get started on the fact that these should be coming over in an ODF-compliant format…

So, we’ve all disparaged Waterfall software development as overly cumbersome and simply undoable in today’s go-go world.  Agile came along and promised to tighten everything up, but in reality most people just say the words ‘agile’ and they really mean ‘cram waterfall methods into 2 week segments’.  (”Manifesto“? Really? The last guys to use that word didn’t do so well.)
Here is my new proposal for software and project management: The Fractal Method.

The Fractal Method will take 3-5 core principles and apply them at all levels.  Just as a fractal equation takes 3-5 variables in some algorithm and applies them at any scale (kilometer or millimeter level), the Fractal Method for project method will take 3-5 core principals and apply them at large application development as well as small tasks.  This seems stupidly simple, but that’s one of my first suggestions for ‘Core Principles’: keep things stupidly simple.

To implement The Fractal Method, make sure of the following:

1. Get all the business people and developers in a room and tell them that we’re all going to follow the Fractal Method.
2. Explain that the method means that we’re all signing on to 5 core principles, and we’re going to decide them right now.
3. Make sure the Core Principles are short and simple enough to be memorized by EVERYONE
4. Play a game so that everyone begins to memorize them.
5. Go sing some Karaoke together, because everything will be great from now on

Anything beyond this, in my opinion, is hand-waving and/or bullshit project management fluff.  PMs make decent money, and for some reason it’s all too tempting for a PM to schmooze the bosses with fancy methods and drawings and charts to show that they’re worth all that money, when I would much rather pay them to actually get shit done.

With that, here are my Core Principles (if we were to deploy the Fractal Method):

1. Keep things stupidly simple.  Call bullshit on complex proposals and passive-voice responses
2. Write everything down in a common area.  Wikis are nice.  So are white boards in the hallway
3. Divide by 3. Divide each task into 3 subtasks until each item is less than 1 day’s worth of work
4. 20 Minutes. Meetings are never longer than 20 minutes.  If you didn’t decide everything, that’s okay, because you can meet again later, but 20 minutes was enough to give people things to do between now and the next meeting.
5. Results win. Results are worth more than estimations or plans

There ya go.  I think I’ll start writing a book.

The Average American moves every 7 years. Some people stay in one place their whole lives, which means that some of us move every three or four years or more. Within that group, some of us skip between countries. I admit to that wanderlust. I admit that I get antsy if I am in the same town for more than 4 years. As a result, I’ve got bank accounts in 5 cities across three countries. I’ve got IRA accounts from three different vendors from former employers. Yes– consolidation would probably be a good idea, but it’s nice to have that account ready to go in a foreign country when the shit finally hits the fan here in the Twighlight’s Last Gleaming.

Mint.com was made for this. It has a pretty easy interface and some cool juju on the backend to assure security. It downloads the current transaction records from your bank accounts, credit cards, investment portfolios, and savings all into one online screen. Moreover, it provides the fun Charts-n-Graphs on your spending habits that made Quicken so entertaining. This is no less secure than when Quicken accesses your accounts. In fact, it’s much more secure: the transactional records are only going one way, and between mint.com and your bank. With Quicken, those transactions are going from the bank to your half-assed ISP, to your wifi antenna in your basement, and to your windows-pc, where you’ve likely got a virus, a root-kit, and a keylogger installed by the Russian mob– not to mention the teenage neighbor who sniffed your WEP key last year and uses your network to share bit-torrents of Nelly videos.

Mint.com: thumbs up!

If you’ve read any of my previous posts (all 12 of you, according to my stats), you know that I’m hip to the Open Source. you also know that i work inside a large company where the only open source is a recently installed MediaWiki, but everything else comes from Redmond.

In that context, I’ve had at least 6 people come up to me at work asking for my take on the Microsoft bid for Yahoo. In short: meh. Do I think Open Source is doomed at Yahoo? No. Do I think that Ballmer will make sweeping changes at Yahoo to have them tear out their BSD machines for IIS? No. Will Yahoo see talent drain out the backdoor? No more than is currently happening.

If anything, I see Yahoo infecting Microsoft much more than Microsoft dictating terms to Yahoo, much like Hong Kong is affecting the PRC after Beijing retook the colony. Just because MS is the one forking over the moolah, that doesn’t mean they want to dictate terms, it means they want to get something for their money: ad revenue, dynamic online channels, and perhaps (ZOMGWTFBBQ) some street cred with the online and open source market in that they might be able to show that even MS can own some datacenters with BSD and perl and php and apache and not muck things up. I’m willing to give them a shot.

Let’s remember what we all have been praying for: the end of the Windows Hegemony. It may actually be closer than we anticipated, and it may be a lot more peaceful than we thought (or ‘’hoped'’ in our bloodlust). At this point, MS is a big fat company that realizes they cannot develop the way they had for the last 15 years. Vista is the last hurrah. MS execs have said as much, and told us where they want to go. For once, I actually believe them. MS is a big fat wallet that needs to get the best ROI for investors– that’s what the stock market is all about. Yahoo may bring some new juice to the bar, and it will be up to MS to either do something good with it, leave it alone, or fuck it up. Either way, the knowledge transfer will be going from San Mateo to Redmond, not the other way.

In short, lighten up, Francis.

BONUS: The Economist thinks the deal is a steal for investors, and they use the Ballmer dance-monkey-dance video as their evidence.

Often I hear that people are getting swamped with the number of applications running around inside the corporate network. There’s the web ecommerce stuff, the wholesale management system, the warehouse management system, the retail POS, some half-assed portal intranet, the EDI talking to the ancient vendors, and all the EDI translators in between. If you squint, you can see the green-screen NCRs and AS400s in the back of the room still chugging away (on coal-fired 220v converters, no doubt). It becomes a zoo very quickly. The longer things are around, the harder this gets.

So, what’s an IT department to do? I know– let’s get an ERP. An ERP will solve everything! Order system out of whack? ERP! Warehouse management out-dated? ERP! Need closer control over your financial data? You bet! ERP!!

I am going to write an ERP, and I am going to name it “Jeebus 5.0″. I named it that for the all-encompasing, sin-forgiving, cause-every-little-ting-gonna-be-alright mission that an ERP will provide for a company. I will give it the 5.0 number because, in general, IT people like nice stable platforms, and shit is usually pretty stable by version 5, right? We’ve all seen companies with no ERP at all, and those who are considering an ERP, those who’ve blundered their way into one, and those who went hog-wild on an ERP, to the point where you needed to go through PeopleSoft just to find the cafeteria. My personal opinion could be boiled down to the following touchpoints:

• An ERP is like any large mammal: safe as long as it has a leash and/or cage that limits the overall range
• ERP stands for ‘Enterprise Resource Planning”, which usually centers around the finances and inventory control. Keep it there (see the first point) and not much further
• If you have a better app to run your website or to run the wiki, then keep the better app– don’t throw it into the ERP just for giggles (beware of sexy ERP saleswomen in low-cut red dresses promising their ERP will do everything)
• An ERP can control the core finances and inventory of a company, but it had better talk nicely with all these other apps that are worth keeping around. “Talk nicely” means something open and free, not .vbs or proprietary codes specific to a single vendor.

So, with those guidelines in place, I’ll start laying out my Db schema this weekend. Look for updates at http://jeebus.sourceforge.net

Someone I know is writing a book titled So You’re on Facebook, Now What? From what I can tell, it centers on how to build a commercial profile on facebook, and how to increase your visibility. Hmmm… I admit to having some doubts about this. We all make money on the stupid Intarweb in some way or another, but it seems to me that the social networks are like parties that progress through stages:

• stage 1: not many people - this might be lame
• stage 2: okay, some people are showing up - let’s stick around and see what happens
• stage 3: wow– there’s some cool people here, and i’m a little drunk. Fun!
• stage 4: rager! holy shit! look how many people are here! We can do anything! (let’s steal ketchup from the fridge and throw it into the street!!!)
• stage 5: waaay too many people. The cops are gonna show up, and people are pushing and shoving, and i can’t hear anything you’re saying right now. This is lame.

MySpace progressed through to stage 5 rather quickly. Facebook is somewhere in stage 4. The problem I have with this book is the purposeful, driven, crass commercial intention of it. Just like that party, imagine the college friend of yours who comes through the crowds and pushes the Red Bull stickers and is trying to get you to buy pre-paid long distance cards. Meh– dork alert. Once the businesses are actively pushing their agendas on the crowd, the sponteneity, the fun interaction, the conversation, the party, begins it’s messy end. The cool kids head for a different darker smokey club, and the only ones left are the hucksters all trying to sell each other something.

I’ve already started to kill all the goofy apps from my facebook. I only check the thing once every 4 days or so now (down from my temp addiction of 2x/day last month). It’s nice to keep a line out to my old friends, and the moment I let it get past that, it’s no better than reality TV or mindless webtrash.

My advice? Be very very careful how you sell your shit on facebook– you may do more damage to your brand than you think.  If the social network angle makes sense (some sort of friend interaction like wish lists or music tastes), maybe.  If you’re just blabbing to the masses, get out.

Well, the bubble has popped. For the record, this is the third real estate bubble I’ve seen– Tokyo in 1988, Seoul in 2004, and now all of the USA in 2007. Funny thing about bubbles, they’re so apparently obvious in hindsight, or even in the middle of them, but The Fever takes over, and no one wants to hear anything bad. For me, a big sign was the show “Flip This House”, which essentially showed idiots in SoCal who would buy cheesebox shitholes, redo the kitchen, and make $200K in 6 weeks. I say ‘idiots’ because most of them really were that– preoccupied with paint and tile selections rather than improving the structural integrity or usable space of these homes.

Dilettantes. Middle-class schnooks with some disposable money chasing the big payoff but not enough patience nor smarts to really pull it off. They’re not the suckers down at the Cash-n-Go, and they’re not the rational thinkers at Morgan Stanley, they’re in-between. They know someone really rich, and think that they are just as smart (but they’re not). They work, and they probably save, but not enough. They invest, but regret those investments because they didn’t buy Google.

The Dilettantes come in waves. They were multi-level marketers in the 80s, day-traders in the late 90s, and web developers soon after. The Dilettante Economy revolves around, provides the toolsets for, and celebrates the rare winners (just like a Casino billboard on the freeway that promises you Freedom) within this demographic. Shows like “Flip This House” and “Property Ladder” fed on this, just as Countrywide Loans and all those other loose finance companies made real dollars enabling all this poor behaviour. Before this wave, eTrade, Charles Schwab, and Ameritrade made their mark with fees from the day-traders, and NuSkin, Avon, and Amway before then. Hell, I could trace this economy all the way back to Levi Strauss: the California Gold Rush of 1849 brought a lot of dilettantes, but it was ole’ Levi who got rich by selling them blue jeans sewn from the surplus sailing canvas torn from the ships rotting in San Fransisco Bay.

The New York Times picked this up (and actually did some interviews, unlike my cheap rants here):

“That is an income Randy Haddadin would have welcomed. Mr. Haddadin, 38, moved to Miami Beach in December 2003 from Washington, after leaving a job in information technology. He promptly got his real estate license.
[…]
Mr. Haddadin is now weighing his options. He might seek a job in information technology again, or perhaps help a friend open an Italian restaurant in Miami Beach, while selling real estate on the side.”

In other words, this guy jumped on the IT thing when that was hip, burned out when his skillz weren’t enough, then hawked property. I hope his pesto sauce actually has some punch behind it, because he sure sounds like a Dilettante to me.

So, now that the Dilettantes can no longer feed on each other and the suckers below them, now that the interest-only floating-rate NINJA loans are gone, what is the next big thing?

My guess: debt collection and repo men. I am working on my ‘How to Succeed at Finance Recovery’ kit right now. It goes on sale next month for $499.