I’ve been distracted in the past week trying to get a new start-up off the ground so I’ve not been posting much. This caught my eye today though.

Sun To Shed Up To 2,500 Jobs In Strategic Move

What I find interesting is that this layoff did not result from Sun needing to cut costs due to the economy (ok, maybe there was a bit of that) but primarily because their open source strategy is helping them reduce their cost of sales. If the software is free, more people use it and some of those people become paying customers. It tips the sales funnel on its end.

The enterprise software space is due for a change.

This email from Bill Gates to some of his employees has been making the rounds on the web but I think the message he is sending here is spot on. Senior management everywhere should take the time to “eat their own dogfood” and try their products - especially if they are online.

I’m constantly amazed by the number of executives who have never put themselves in the shoes of their customers and actually tried to use their products. Way to go Bill!

Thanks to seattlepi.com for the lead on this.

—- Original Message —-

From: Bill Gates
Sent: Wednesday, January 15, 2003 10:05 AM
To: Jim Allchin
Cc: Chris Jones (WINDOWS); Bharat Shah (NT); Joe Peterson; Will Poole; Brian Valentine; Anoop Gupta (RESEARCH)
Subject: Windows Usability Systematic degradation flame

I am quite disappointed at how Windows Usability has been going backwards and the program management groups don’t drive usability issues.

Let me give you my experience from yesterday.

I decided to download (Moviemaker) and buy the Digital Plus pack … so I went to Microsoft.com. They have a download place so I went there.

The first 5 times I used the site it timed out while trying to bring up the download page. Then after an 8 second delay I got it to come up.

This site is so slow it is unusable.

It wasn’t in the top 5 so I expanded the other 45.

These 45 names are totally confusing. These names make stuff like: C:\Documents and Settings\billg\My Documents\My Pictures seem clear.

They are not filtered by the system … and so many of the things are strange.

I tried scoping to Media stuff. Still no moviemaker. I typed in movie. Nothing. I typed in movie maker. Nothing.

So I gave up and sent mail to Amir saying - where is this Moviemaker download? Does it exist?

So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated.

They told me to go to the main page search button and type movie maker (not moviemaker!).

I tried that. The site was pathetically slow but after 6 seconds of waiting up it came.

I thought for sure now I would see a button to just go do the download.

In fact it is more like a puzzle that you get to solve. It told me to go to Windows Update and do a bunch of incantations.

This struck me as completely odd. Why should I have to go somewhere else and do a scan to download moviemaker?

So I went to Windows update. Windows Update decides I need to download a bunch of controls. (Not) just once but multiple times where I get to see weird dialog boxes.

Doesn’t Windows update know some key to talk to Windows?

Then I did the scan. This took quite some time and I was told it was critical for me to download 17megs of stuff.

This is after I was told we were doing delta patches to things but instead just to get 6 things that are labeled in the SCARIEST possible way I had to download 17meg.

So I did the download. That part was fast. Then it wanted to do an install. This took 6 minutes and the machine was so slow I couldn’t use it for anything else during this time.

What the heck is going on during those 6 minutes? That is crazy. This is after the download was finished.

Then it told me to reboot my machine. Why should I do that? I reboot every night — why should I reboot at that time?

So I did the reboot because it INSISTED on it. Of course that meant completely getting rid of all my Outlook state.

So I got back up and running and went to Windows Update again. I forgot why I was in Windows Update at all since all I wanted was to get Moviemaker.

So I went back to Microsoft.com and looked at the instructions. I have to click on a folder called WindowsXP. Why should I do that? Windows Update knows I am on Windows XP.

What does it mean to have to click on that folder? So I get a bunch of confusing stuff but sure enough one of them is Moviemaker.

So I do the download. The download is fast but the Install takes many minutes. Amazing how slow this thing is.

At some point I get told I need to go get Windows Media Series 9 to download.

So I decide I will go do that. This time I get dialogs saying things like “Open” or “Save”. No guidance in the instructions which to do. I have no clue which to do.

The download is fast and the install takes 7 minutes for this thing.

So now I think I am going to have Moviemaker. I go to my add/remove programs place to make sure it is there.

It is not there.

What is there? The following garbage is there. Microsoft Autoupdate Exclusive test package, Microsoft Autoupdate Reboot test package, Microsoft Autoupdate testpackage1. Microsoft AUtoupdate testpackage2, Microsoft Autoupdate Test package3.

Someone decided to trash the one part of Windows that was usable? The file system is no longer usable. The registry is not usable. This program listing was one sane place but now it is all crapped up.

But that is just the start of the crap. Later I have listed things like Windows XP Hotfix see Q329048 for more information. What is Q329048? Why are these series of patches listed here? Some of the patches just things like Q810655 instead of saying see Q329048 for more information.

What an absolute mess.

Moviemaker is just not there at all.

So I give up on Moviemaker and decide to download the Digital Plus Package.

I get told I need to go enter a bunch of information about myself.

I enter it all in and because it decides I have mistyped something I have to try again. Of course it has cleared out most of what I typed.

I try (typing) the right stuff in 5 times and it just keeps clearing things out for me to type them in again.

So after more than an hour of craziness and making my programs list garbage and being scared and seeing that Microsoft.com is a terrible website I haven’t run Moviemaker and I haven’t got the plus package.

The lack of attention to usability represented by these experiences blows my mind. I thought we had reached a low with Windows Network places or the messages I get when I try to use 802.11. (don’t you just love that root certificate message?)

When I really get to use the stuff I am sure I will have more feedback.

I do a lot of consulting in the financial services space and I had occasion last week to listen to a number of firms talk about fraud and fraud detection at a mini-conference. Then today I spotted a Wired blog entry talking about a fairly major ATM fraud action against Citibank where some hackers apparently got a hold of compromised ATM pins and went on a cash withdrawal spree.

Now that the new iPhone has GPS (not that many other phones haven’t had this service for awhile but I pay attention to the features of the one in my pocket), I was thinking that location aware mobile phones might offer a rather unique mechanism for banks and credit card companies to reduce fraud. Since your phone knows where you are, it would be able to tell your financial institution’s computers your location every say, 15 minutes, and they could use that information to figure out whether the credit card charge or ATM withdrawal that just occurred (or is in progress) is within a reasonable distance from where you happen to be. If not, treat it as likely fraud.

Now this opens up some interesting privacy issues but our banks know so much about us already, for your average law abiding citizen is their location history more important than protecting themselves against fraud? Even better if the bank’s systems only recorded your location just before and after a transaction and discarded everything else.

Alternatively, your bank’s computers could tell your phone in real time whenever a transaction occurred on your account and the GPS coordinates where it happened. Then you could quickly check to make sure it was where you (or your spouse) happened to be.

Lots of things would need to be figured out to make this work but those that protect our money should likely be able to confirm that it is in fact being spent by us and not someone else. Especially since they seem to have trouble protecting themselves from hackers sometimes.

Wired has a great article demonstrating how broken the US government is right now. $17 billion is subsidies for big oil and they managed to scrape together $30 million to help support the development of viable plug in hybrids.

It is absolutely ridiculous. The government needs to view the goal to move off expensive, disappearing oil as a new “moon race” and for once dump some serious money into it. Of course most of it will be wasted, but the 10% that is not will likely result in some amazing technological breakthroughs that might make a difference. Our options are electric cars and hydrogen and we should be pumping billions into both programs on an annual basis.

Oh yeah, how about a proper program to invest in public transit. Now that would be something I’d vote for.

I’m generally a fan of Wikis. They allow a wide audience to contribute their knowledge in an easy to consume way. That being said, Wired Magazine needs to give up on their “How-To” wiki as it is really lame.

I often wonder what will happen as robots become more common in our daily lives and they start to interact with our kids and pets. I can only imagine the battles that will ensue.

Perhaps something like this.

Current TV has an interview up with Stephen Hawking that was done as part of a Discovery News segment.

I love that he says that he hopes there is intelligent life in space as he’s never found any here on Earth. The man is brilliant.

As a confirmed iPhone addict, I was clicking refresh merrily yesterday on three or four major gadget blogs during the Apple Developer Conference keynote to see what amazing new stuff the iPhone 2.0 was going to come with.

On the whole, I cannot wait to get my hands on one - even just for the 3G service as EDGE is painful at the best of times. So I’ll be ordering one (hopefully online as I hate standing in lines) on July 11 just like a lot of other people.

I love my Apple products but generally hate AT&T so that is the only downside to what has become my favorite gadget. The fact that they are going to make me sign up for a new plan to upgrade is annoying enough, but the fact that they are going to raise my rates and steal all my rollover minutes is worse. Maybe they’ll improve the wireless coverage at 24th and Park in New York City as right now it sucks. Verizon, no problem but AT&T nada.

Cyndy Aleo-Carreira over at Profy says it well. Love ya Apple but AT&T is like the creepy uncle who everyone wishes would just skip Christmas all together. I’m hoping playing MonkeyBall while sitting on the runway, in coach, sipping my $5 bottle of water and waiting for my damn plane to take off is worth it.

Michael Arrington is a member of the cult as well.

I have a love-hate relationship with Wikipedia. On one hand it is a great resource just chuck full of seemingly accurate information. On the other hand it has become so prominent in Google rankings that its pages normally hold the first or second slot on any single word search. This, in my opinion runs the risk of drowning out other great sources of information as there is a certain bias towards clicking the first result returned by Google. Plus everyone automatically links to Wikipedia so it is a self fulfilling prophecy. In 10 years the web will consist of social networking sites and Wikipedia (!).

I also have an issue as some of the major pages are edited by editors/dictators who rarely let anything get added to the page and control links out like they are gold (which they are due to the PR of Wikipedia pages - but still). It is almost as if Wikipedia is becoming no better than any other Encyclopedia as for the large majority of topics it is essentially a closed system.

That is why I love sites like the Uncyclopedia. It is nice to see someone poke fun at Big Brother.

Although I haven’t done as good a job as articulating it as Profy in the post “How Web 2.0 is Killing Software Development“, I totally agree with the premise put forth in her writing. It is time for the engineers, computer scientists and information architects to take back software development.

While on one hand the ease of putting up a website has led to a wide range of interesting new gadgets, it really hasn’t led to much real innovation. I see startups every day that have put up poorly designed, poorly architected and completely unusable sites that won’t scale and have to be held together with duct tape (Twitter anyone?).

This is not software engineering. Scaling is not something you add later but rather something you build into the application from the beginning. Usability isn’t something to deal with post A round but a key part of the design - from version 0.5. Systems should not be in Beta for their entire life.

Software is the only place where engineers throw together things, toss them at the wall and see what sticks. It is a shame we all cannot learn from our peers who design physical machines, bridges, buildings and other systems that are never in “Beta”. Or for that matter, from the folks who build telecommunication systems, banking systems, trading systems and other mission critical applications that, while they still suffer from the challenges of software engineering, are intended to be stable from day one.

Maybe it is time for online development to grow up.