Quite simply – everyone is paid to love Google.

Bloggers love Google because it pays their bills. AdSense makes it easy for anyone to set up a blog and make money.

Corporate websites love Google for the same reason. AdSense is a huge business.

Know-it-alls love Google because they get paid for surfing the web.

Shopping Sites love Google because they’re subsidizing purchases.

Investors love Google because their stock is up 560% in 2 years.

Employees love Google because they get free lunch.

Mountain View and San Francisco residents love Google because their internet access is now free.

Everyone else one loves Google because all their products are free. Why should I buy a copy of Outlook, Word or Excel? I get comparable functionality on Google for free. That saves me a lot of money, especially if I used to pay for these software or services before.

Even if all of your products except one has failed to gain significant marketshare, it only matters that you have one mega cash cow to fund it all. For Microsoft, this is Windows and Office, but even they don’t run the rest of their businesses without a model that makes money.

So the question is: when competition heats up and you’re expected to keep growing at 80% a year, how long can you afford to pay everyone to like you?

Update: The Google Myth Pops

Yesterday was the day we had signed up for a Segway tour of the Los Gatos creek trail. South Bay Segway is a tiny little operation in the back section of an industrial building. We almost missed it. As we drove up there were only two Segways parked in the doorway, indicating that we were the only two people on today’s tour. Anne was thrilled. Unfortunately all the tour models were all the older Segways. All their new i2 models were all at the Tech Museum in San Jose where they just started doing tours as well.

After meeting the guides and paying, we watched an amusing instructional video of what to do and what NOT to do. I
recognized half the video as being shot in the millyards of Manchester, NH, home of the Segway and my hometown.

We signed our waivers, got on our Segways and practiced a bit. It took about 5 minutes on the devices before we felt pretty comfortable on them. Remembering which way to twist the handlebar grip to turn was the hardest part.

With our guide, we cruised down the sidewalk a few blocks before we entered the Los Gatos Creek trail. We went for a while with the slowest key first (max 6 mph), then got to switch to the intermediate key (8 mph). To keep you from going too fast, the Segway pulls back on you. They advise you in the video to not lean over the front of the handlebars when it does this. In any case, it’s annoying when you want to go faster than you’re allowed.

Our tour lasted about two and a half hours and we went about 10 miles. We took a few breaks including one for our guide to do a demo for someone who was interested in a future tour.

At one of our breaks our guide told us a few things about the business. While dealerships make $1000 per Segway sold, most can’t survive on just selling them. Tours make more money and some dealerships only do tours. The famous picture of George W. Bush falling off one was because no one told him how to turn it on. When it’s off, it doesn’t self-balance and there’s no way you can balance on it yourself.

We really enjoyed the tour. It was a different way to see the trail we’ve been on many times before and was neat to ride such a futuristic device. Neither of us even came close to falling off.

For sure, an easy way to attract a lot of attention to yourself is to ride around town on a Segway. Most people looked curiously and smiled. Kids were amazed. A few snarky people made comments about how this was not a way to burn calories.

In general the guys on bikes were the rudest. They complained about motorized vehicles even though all the bikes were going twice as fast as we were and seemed much more like a hazard than us. You can stop a Segway a lot easier than a bike. I guess some people don’t like progress. South Bay Segway actually had to get permission from the town to use the trail. A meeting was held and no one complained. One more friendly guy on a recumbent bike asked if Woz was with us. 🙂

Some more random observations:

• It was more tiring on my feet than I expected. The trail was a bit bumpy in places and you’re standing up the whole time.
• It’s amazing what a good job it does on keeping the platform and you level, even when going up and down steep hills.
• We took it off pavement and onto grass and loose gravel. It performed fine in both cases.

Because we weren’t able to ride the a new i2 model for the tour, we went over to the Tech Museum today and give one a spin. The big difference is that you pull the handlebar from side to side to turn rather than twisting the handlebar grip. While it’s more intuitive and follows more naturally with the lean of your body, it’s a bit dizzying. The wireless infokey was cool though and the alarm is enough of a upgrade to convince me that the i2 is the only model worth getting.

I’m still undecided about whether to actually buy one. It’s still very cool, but in the end, it’s just another mode of transportation. A very cool, very fun method of nerdy transportation.

The other day someone asked me if I had written anything Python. My response was a quick “no”. I’ve invested a lot of time in Perl and PHP (and to some extent Java) and I’d have to have a really good reason to learn Yet Another Programming Language. CPAN and Pear are rich API libraries and any newcomer would have to rebuild all that stuff and I’d have to learn it all over again. This also made me feel very old and curmudgeonly.

This morning I came upon the latest Joel on Software article reviewing the book Beyond Java. The article directly answered my question about why Ruby or Python is better. The article got me curious, I went over to Safari Online to see if they had it. They did and I started reading. In three or four hours I got through the whole thing, the first time I’ve read an entire book online.

The author might as well have titled the book, “Java, Schmava – Ruby’s Where it’s At” and I expect this marks the last book he’ll write concerning Java. The rest will be about Ruby. The book confirmed my feelings that Java has gotten way complicated over the years – far beyond the simple servlets I used to write.

That said, I was impressed with the introduction of Ruby and what it can do. Recently I’ve found that my willingness to build web apps is tempered by my dread of building get another form to edit data in a database. It’s tedious and boring. I wrote a framework in PHP that discovers database schemas and creates objects for me, eliminating the need to write SQL most of the time, but that only goes so far. Ruby on Rails seems to have solved the database abstraction problem and the web interface problem.

Personally, I’d like to be able to settle on one programming language. Since every browser in the world supports JavaScript, it’s clear that language isn’t going anywhere, so it might as well be JavaScript. Unfortunately it hasn’t caught on in servers, despite support in IIS. It just drives me crazy keeping syntax straight while flipping back and forth between editors in Perl, PHP and JavaScript.

I’ve got a little tool I’ve been putting off writing and this book helped convince me that I should write it in Ruby. We’ll see how it goes.

Ever since the Segway came out, it has been the subject of many geeky lunchtime conversations. They were always just too cool.

Now I’m actually considering buying one. I would mostly use it to get back and forth to work. I live only 1.5 miles away, but it takes too long to walk and it seems silly to drive. Today I tried biking to work. It took only a little longer to bike (10 minutes) vs driving (7 minutes) so time is not a consideration.

What I don’t like about the bike is that it’s just slightly too large of a vehicle. You need to store it somewhere at either end. You’re not supposed to ride on the sidewalk, but it’s way too scary to ride in the lanes crossing the “intersection of death” at 101, 237 & Mathlilda. I’m also not looking forward to the day when I get a flat tire. With a Segway, I’d be able to legally and justifibly ride on the sidewalk.

The new Segways just came out and they have some cool new stuff. For one, you turn by leaning, just like you accelerated and decelerated before by leaning. I found the twisting of the grip unintuitive when I rode one a few years ago. It has a new wireless key device and a security alarm.

It certainly wouldn’t save me money vs. driving. A Segway is over $5,000. If I drive 3 miles a day and pay $3.00/gallon, I’ll save approximately $100 in gas plus whatever 675 miles is in terms of maintenance over a year. It’s better for the environment I suppose, but then again, I’m not sure 3 miles is going to make a difference over people driving in each day from San Francisco.

Neither a bike nor Segway would be great in the rain. The Segway would probably be better in cold and hot weather. I’d be going slower in cold weather, so there’s be less of a wind chill, and in hot weather I wouldn’t work up a sweat.

South Bay Segway in Campbell offers 2.5 hour tours of the Los Gatos Creek trail for $75. I’m thinking about taking one of those to see if I like it. Anne thinks it might be enough time to “get it out of my system”. Perhaps.

It might just be too geeky, even in Silicon Valley. I’m not sure I want to be known as “the Segway Guy” at work or deal with people who want rides all the time. Still, I think the technology is damn cool, and I lust for cool technology. That coolness always wears off after a while though and you’re left with the practicalities of if and how it improves your life.

Would a Segway improve my life by $5,000 worth? Would something else that costs $5,000 make me happier? I don’t know. Do you?

Following up on my post about “The best worst day ever“, a few people were curious what the meeting was about that changed the course of the day.

I can now say that the meeting was with my current boss (as of a few months ago), my previous boss, and their boss. It turns out that I was nominated and had won a recognition called the Yahoo! Superstar award for 2006.

My first reaction was surprise, then suspicion. “What did I do?” I asked. The answer seemed a lot like just what I considered to be doing what I was assigned to do. That, and building of a little website I had whipped up that helps people across the company track projects. In reality I created it to remove tedium from my job.

The “congrats” package was a (p?)leather notebook folio with a superstar logo on the front. Never mind the fact that I don’t use paper much anymore in meetings (just my laptop), but I can’t imagine broadcasting the award by toting around that binder. It screamed: “Do you know you’re in a meeting with a Superstar??” Inside was a note from Terry Semel about winning, a small note from the founders, Jerry and David, a Yahoo! pen and details on the award dinner on October 2.

Winning this award is actually a BIG DEAL. They give it to about 12 individual employees each year, and about 4 teams. Obviously the individual awards are harder to get in a company of 11,000 people.

Besides the lovely stationery set, the award dinner, and an undisclosed but “significant” cash prize, there’s a video. A frightening, tremendously embarrassing, internally-produced video which usually involves a cutout of the winner’s head pasted onto other people’s bodies. This cutout head is posed to do things that are intended to embody the accomplishments of the winner. Even more terrifying is that they go around and interview the people you work with and get them to talk about you for the video. This video is premiered at the next quarterly all-hands meeting where 1,000+ Yahoos gather in the cafeteria a few hours after the quarter’s earnings are announced the public. The meeting is also webcast to all Yahoo! offices worldwide. Hopefully it will be a good quarter and everyone will be too interested in watching the stock price rise in after-hours trading to pay attention my video.

I brought the stationery set home and left it on the kitchen table. When Anne came home I didn’t mention it. Eventually she got curious and opened it, read it and realized what it was. She was impressed. I asked her if she was as surprised as I was. She was not. “I tell you that you do great things AT WORK all the time” she said. Clearly I wasn’t even nominated for a household superstar award this year. 🙂

It was nice to have someone close to share it with, since I still felt too awkward about it to tell anyone. The meeting was about a month ago and since they had to ship the packets to people around the world and notify them, it would be two weeks before the winners were made public internally. During that time some of the managers knew, but my team and the others I work with did not.

I slept poorly the night after I found out, my mind racing with the implications, honor and pressure that the award would bring. Whenever a problem arose in the next few days I felt like a fraud. If I was a REAL superstar, I wouldn’t have this problem or I should be able to solve it instantly. As the reality of the award settled, I came to resolve with myself that maybe I did some “super” things based on some particular situations and people wanted to recognize me for that, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have my faults and shortcomings. It certainly did make me feel more insecure about them though.

When two weeks passed and the winners were posted on the internal website, it was interesting to see who found out and when. I got a few IMs right away, some emails and a few congrats in the halls. Random people I haven’t worked with in years came out of the woodwork to send their wishes. It was weird for sure and frankly a little bit annoying to be reminded that I was chosen (and expected) to be special, even when I didn’t feel that way. It was fortunate that I was at our Santa Monica offices that day, laying low and out of the paths of many of the people I work with most often.

Later I came to find out some of back-story. The whole award process began few months earlier when the company solicited all its employees for nominations. After several weeks, the nominations are tallied and a short list is created. Managers of the nominated write up a longer justifications and that gets circulated. After that there are several rounds where the list is shortened at higher and higher levels of the company, all the way up to the CEO. To think that the highest executives of the company sat in a room and debated the merit of what I did over the last year is nerve racking. I’m sure most of them had never even heard of me before.

They also do random reference checks within the company, to make sure there aren’t pockets of people who hate you or have information that you did something that could be embarrassing to the company, like creeping out some interns. Apparently I passed that litmus test.

I found out that, during the nomination process, my team began campaigning for me, soliciting nominations from everyone they could. This is incredibly flattering, especially when many of these people were those who I ordered to work on several consecutive weekends last spring when we were pushing to get Yahoo! Tech out the door. I was especially happy for them that I won; it would have been crushing to hear that they went to all that effort for nothing.

I’m more thankful that I was completely oblivious to all this as it was happening. I really did not want to know that behind closed doors, executives were lobbying for (and against) me as I progressed up the levels.

I mentioned the award to my parents a few nights later. It took them a little while to understand that it was a big deal. When I told them about the dinner, my Dad immediately sent me a dress shirt from his store to wear. Apparently Anne agreed that I had nothing that looked acceptable for such an event.

This week was the award dinner and ceremony, held at Spago in Palo Alto. I’m guessing this would be the only time that I’ll ever go to Spago, so it was nice that it was free. As soon as I stepped on the purple carpet, the internal PR chick (really, that’s what she calls herself) accosted me with a camera and microphone. Having seen these interviews played in the videos in years past I knew it was coming. I had even thought of a few witty things to say.

I said none of them. What came out was a torrent of clichés and deflections. I said stuff like “I was just focusing on getting the job done” and “it was a real team effort”. I had suddenly become the winning pitcher in every post-game interview I’ve ever seen, never saying anything interesting or revealing.

After the official blackmail photo/formal winner photo shoot, the next hour was spent socializing with other winners and executives. I’m sure the net worth of that room exceeded 5 billion dollars, mostly in Yahoo! Stock. It was probably the only time in my life that a CEO like Terry Semel would seek ME out in a crowded room and introduce himself. We chatted briefly about the projects I had worked on and then he moved on to talk with other winners.

A bunch of people asked if I had kids. It seemed assuring to them that I didn’t. Apparently I would have to be ridiculously under-rested or guilty of child neglect to have put the work in to win this award while trying to raise kids.

The ceremony ran though dinner. The food was tasty, but not the most amazing meal I’ve had in my life. The desert was good and the ice cream had a purple Yahoo! cake decoration on top.

I was unsure if the embarrassing video would be played here or not. Apparently they don’t make them until afterwards, fully armed with incriminating video footage.

The executives took turns introducing each of the winners in their departments and talking glowingly of their accomplishments. I was almost the last. My great grand-boss got up and talked about me for a few minutes and then brought me up.

They say at the beginning that winners are not required to give an acceptance speech, but everyone had before me, so I did, trying a few of the witty things I didn’t say on the purple carpet. Based on the crowd’s reaction, they weren’t nearly as witty as I thought, but I don’t think I embarrassed myself either. Some of the other speeches were quite eloquent and funny. I was happy to have at least spouted out some coherent English and didn’t fall over while juggling the glass trophy, envelope and microphone they handed me.

After the event finished, we looked around and wondered what to do next. My great great grand-boss (who I have never met) appeared to congratulate me. I talked a bit with Jerry, David and other winners. Then we waited 15 minutes in the valet line only to find that our car was parked on the street 50 feet away.

As we drove home, what struck me most is how the company became much more personal that night. I saw executives settings far less official than I am used to. I saw a lot of ordinary people who did some amazing things while they happened to be at work.

You could trace a lot of Yahoo’s most significant accomplishments over the last year to those people sitting in the room. They affected the lives of thousands of employees and millions of users.

For a moment I allowed myself to relish in that and think about what a cool job I have. I think I will always feel that way about my time at Yahoo! – except perhaps that 5 minutes after my embarrassing video is shown next week.

My parents, sister and her husband got me a cool gadget for my birthday – a Slingbox. The slingbox is basically a cable TV to streaming internet video converter. You hook it up to your cable TV connection and your home network. Then from any other computer in your network or even from the internet you can watch your cable TV.

When I first heard of this device, I didn’t think it was very useful. Why would I want to watch my TV on my computer? Well, I still don’t. I DO want to watch somebody’s else’s TV, namely my parents’. You see in New Hampshire, all the Red Sox games are on TV and they’re free (given you have cable). I currently pay $15/month to watch Red Sox games on MLB.TV.

So here’s the solution: a Slingbox installed at my parents’ house, connected through their DSL modem. Wherever I am, I can connect and watch the Red Sox. Awesome.

Installation was pretty simple. My Dad plugged it in and got it going. All I really had to do was remotely configure his router to allow me to connect to it from the outside.

While the video rate is about the same (~400kb/sec), the quality of the picture is not quite as good as MLB. That’s easily made up for by unobtrusive SlingPlayer screen and an end to the endlessly repetitive commercials on MLB.TV. I also get to always hear the Boston announcers, which of course of I prefer. I like the docking feature that makes the video player stick to the side of your screen and doesn’t allow other windows to end up on top of it.

The player software is pretty slick. You can do everything remotely, including upgrading the firmware. My parents don’t seem to notice any problems with their network connection either. While I don’t need it yet, I’d like to see a Mac OS X version of the Player, and perhaps even one for PalmOS. It would be cool to at least listen to the audio on my Treo.

I can’t imagine watching anything other than Red Sox games on it, though I suppose I could watch TV 3 hours ahead if I wanted to. It’s definitely a cool gift. Now it’s time to cancel my MLB.TV subscription. 😀

I was reading something from a blogger just now about them starting a big new job. Some slightly clipped excerpts:

It starts off with “Hi, everyone! Okay, I’ve been waiting to exhale for some time now…and I finally have!!! Last night was my one week anniversary…and the good news is, I’m still employed! (I think)”

Then goes into detail on the on the first day. “For the first time in a long time I actually had the sensation that my heart was going to actually penetrate my chest and [land] in front of me…it was beating THAT HARD.”

At the end of day one: “[My friends] had a martini waiting for me when I arrived at 7:30. I’m not a big drinker, but I have to say, that really hit the spot. There was a little dancing and merriment (whatever that means) before I had to [leave for a trip] the next morning. (Good thing they cut me off after one martini!) Another crazy, surreal kind of day.”

So, what do you think? High schooler? Fresh intern? Ditzy girl fresh out of college?
Nope. She’s no Dan Rather for sure.

Today was a horrible day. It was also the greatest day I’ve had in a long time.

The first thing I did when I got into work is start writing a post-mortem report for a outage yesterday – always a great way to start a day. While I was writing it, a different outage occurred. The next few hours were spent following up on yesterday’s outage and gathering info on today’s outage. Lunch was consumed during an informative technical presentation while I checked my email. Then it was back to dealing with today’s outage and writing the post-mortem report for that. Two in one day is a record for me.

Then my day turned around completely. A guy I’ve been trying to hire for a critical position accepted. A solution for a important problem that I have been pestered about constantly and we’ve been working on for weeks suddenly appeared. I got some great tickets for a Giants game. Then I had a quick meeting that turned out to be something amazing and unexpected.

Then it was back to an interview, trying to get other people to help us meet our deadlines, post-mortem followups and general running around. I went home more exhausted than usual.

Still, it was the best worst day ever.

1. Popup ads. I’m paying $15 a month. Why should I be subjected to
pop-up ads? They seem to be specifically designed to work around popup
blockers.

2. The same Tom Petty ad over and over again during commercial breaks.
It’s driving me crazy to hear the same clip 20 times per game.

3. Video that plays automatically on certain pages. It’s not considered
nice to play video with sound when someone’s not expecting it,
especially when they may be using it an office environment.

4. The MLB player is absolutely huge, without offering much
functionality. How about adding who’s up at bat, strikes and outs
instead of just the scoreboard? I can close the scoreboard and news
ticker, but I don’t see the point of doing so.

Not that I’ll be using it for much longer. Schilling and Papelbon are now injured too. Clearly, God is a Yankees fan.