Klatte's Law

I was just listening to the 6/30 episode of TWiT (yes, I am way behind in my podcasts - blame my audible.com addiction).

This is the episode where they talk about Bill Gates' retirement and the contributions he made to the world and the industry. Their conclusion was that his biggest contribution was a strategy based on an understanding of Moore's Law. The thesis is that he understood that if you release something as soon as it will run (even if it runs badly), Moore's Law will bail you out shortly and that is more efficient than trying to make something that runs tight in the first place. I agree that this strategy was a huge part of the success of Microsoft and it was clearly both the correct strategy in hindsight and a forseeably correct strategy given Moore's Law.

But I think that strategy is failing now and I think that this is a huge part of the reason why Vista is tanking. It doesn't have much to do with why Vista is not of interest to me (that is more around DRM and a closed mentality), but I think it is a big part of the greater market failure.

Why is the strategy failing? I have to introduce a concept for a minute here and for the purposes of this article, let's call it "Klatte's Law". Klatte's Law states that at any moment in time, a user's computational needs can be represented as a gently sloping linear increase. This will stagger up as the user discovers whole new categories of computational need (i.e. if someone who just does word processing starts doing video editing, there will be an enormous jump, but both before and after the jump it is a gentle slope).

Klatte's Law applies to mass market computing, but not to specialized niches like high performance computing.

If you were to plot a zoomed in view of Moore's Law plotted with Klatte's Law, it might look something like this:



The strategy of ignoring tight code in favor of the depending upon Moore's Law works as long as you are to the left of the intersection of Moore's Law and Klatte's Law, but it starts to break down as you approach the intersection and fails completely to the right of the intersection.

Fundamentally, I think that the market as a whole is currently to the right of this intersection. This could change at some point if a killer app comes out that requires tons of computational power (but this killer app will not be an operating system). You can depend on Moore's Law to bail you out if you think you have that killer app, or if you are so far to the left of the intersection that the user already wants to upgrade their system.

But if you do not have a killer app and if the user is satisfied with their current system, you are toast.

"What do you mean I need a quad core machine with twice as much ram to run Vista well? My core2 duo machine does everything I need just fine!"

Microsoft understands Moore's Law, but they don't understand Klatte's Law at all.

David

Winner's Laws

A while back Alan Schoonmaker had an article in CardPlayer Magazine (Winners Are Brutally Realistic: Part II) in which he discusses his concept of four Winner's Laws.

These laws are brilliantly universal and I wanted to share them you. They are:

1. Admit that you overestimate your abilities and other virtues.
2. Admit that you have some unrealistic expectations
3. Get an objective assessment of yourself.
4. Select your games very carefully

Aren't they great?

I suppose that to be truly universal you have to restate the last one. Maybe something like:

• Select the opportunity that maximizes your expectation

Or maybe that is still too gambler-speak. How about:

• Select the opportunity that is most likely to produce either short or long term benefits.

For everything that I have excelled at I have (knowingly or unknowingly) followed these rules. For everything that I have not done as well at I haven't.

1. Admit that you overestimate your abilities and other virtues.

• Confident people are generally winners and expect to be winners, but confident people are insanely likely to be guilty of overestimating how good they are.
• If you overestimate how good you are you won't improve. You won't even try to improve. Pretty soon you will suck.

2. Admit that you have some unrealistic expectations

• You are a confident person. You expect to do well. But some of your expectations are ridiculous. Admit it. You aren't going to win the Nobel prize or cure cancer. You also aren't going to get a glowing review followed by a promotion every year.

3. Get an objective assessment of yourself

• You overestimate your abilities and you have unrealistic expectations. How can you possibly be objective about yourself? You can't. Find someone who can.

4. Select the opportunity that is most likely to produce either short or long term benefits

• Opportunities come and go. If you choose the one that is convenient, or the one that is most "fun", you are probably costing yourself.
• Either choose opportunities that have demonstrable immediate benefit (e.g. the job that pays better) or the opportunities that can have long term pay-offs (e.g. the project that will force you to learn something new that you expect to be useful in the future).

Hope you liked these.

David

The Lure of iTunes

If you had asked me two days ago whether I buy a lot of stuff on iTunes, I would have said, "Some, but not too much. I'd rather buy the CD so that I own a higher quality copy. But I like it for the ability to explore and find new music."

Well, I would have been lying apparently. I installed doubleTwist to mess around with and I was astonished when it started "liberating" my iTunes music. Not because of the liberation - I was obviously expecting that. But because of the number of bloody songs there were to liberate. 854, not including the 245 iTunes Plus selections. Sheesh.

Score one for iTunes and a marvelous store interface. It totally sucked me in.

Ironically, the ability to liberate the music (without burning/ripping) actually makes the store more attractive. I may need therapy.

David

Spiraling Economy

The US economy appears to be in a deep spiral. I seriously wish that I had some capital to invest right now - bargains are starting to abound in the stock market. I also seriously hope that I don't get downsized until after a rebound of some kind.

I wonder what the reason is for the particularly bad hit that Las Vegas is taking from the mortgage foreclosure debacle? Was it particularly bad lending practices in the area? Or is it just that the Las Vegas economy is only good when people have spare money to gamble with? Or both? In any case, this might be a great time to pick up some deals in Las Vegas real estate.

David

Google Sets, Text Mining, and Enterprise 2.0

I was browsing on Google Labs as I do from time to time to see what the alpha-geeks are up to.

I had never looked at Google Sets before and when I looked at it this time I almost immediately dismissed it as useless. I mean who cares if I can create sets of things? But then I had the idea to type in some bands that I like to see what happened (the starting set was peaches, shiny toy guns, dresden dolls, goldfrapp, and the knife).

It instantly popped up with a long list of bands many of which I know and like and some that I have never heard of. It's the ones that I had never heard of that got me thinking.

This is exactly the kind of problem that pharmaceutical scientists are trying to solve every day. They have a bunch of things that they know are related and they want to find the other things that are related that they don't know about. But the text mining tools that they use to do it are very expensive and painful to use.

This set interface is so simple. So intuitive.

I imagine that the algorithm that Google Sets is using is some kind of basic co-occurance test, so there are lots of tools out there that are more sophisticated. On the other hand I didn't get any hits for sharpening stones, so it has to be at least a little more than that.

If everything inside the pharmaceutical firewall (or better inside+outside) could be indexed into a tool like this would it be useful? Yes, I think so.

It seems like a big problem, but it is a tiny problem compared with the one that Google has apparently already solved.

David

Printer Economics

My venerable HP Deskjet 500 has finally died. I have had it since the early 90's I think. It was only the second printer I ever owned after my old Epson LX-80 dot matrix printer (which would probably still work just fine, actually, but whose output was no longer acceptable - even in the bad old days of the early 90's).

By died I don't mean that there is anything major wrong with it. The thing is a tank (like all things HP used to be). By died, I mean that little things have started to go wrong and it is most likely not worth the trouble and expense to fix it. The sheet lifter doesn't always work on the first try and for some reason the ink cartridges are clogging with depressing regularity.

I have two other printers. An Epson Stylus Photo R2400, which is completely brilliant for photography, but isn't really a general purpose printer, and some generic POS from Lexmark that I got for free when I bought my last computer, which is, umm, temperamental and very slow for basic printing.

The kind of stuff that I tend to print these days is very different from when I bought my old Deskjet. I want to print google maps and web content. Things that are mixed color and black and white. I want the color bits to look reasonable and the black print to be perfect. The only kind of printer that really meets this need is a color laser printer.

So I started looking at low end color laser printers to see if I could afford them yet, and lo and behold, I can. I settled on the HP Color Laserjet 2600n, which when I ordered it had a $100 instant rebate in effect, making the total 299.99. Less than half of what I paid for my Deskjet 500 way back when.

The cartridges that come with this printer are full new cartridges (not the crippled "teaser" cartridges that some manufacturers try to slip you) that should print around 2500 pages (mixed duty) before they need to be replaced.

Now here is where it gets funny. A set of replacement cartridges costs $323.96. That's right, more than the printer. So this printer is disposable. I can't believe that I live in a world where color laser printers are disposable.

The total cost for this printer works out to about 12 cents per page, which isn't bad.

I feel really sad for the environment, though. This kind of economic model is criminally stupid. Is there anything that isn't disposable anymore?

David

Enterprise 2.0

I have worked in informatics for the same giant multi-national pharmaceutical company for the last 6 or 7 years. In that time I have come to take it for granted that the corporation is highly resistant to change, that experimenting with new technologies is not generally seen as a high value activity* (or at least there are enormous barriers), and that technologies and conveniences I have come to take for granted outside the firewall are simply not going to exist inside the firewall.

Web 2.0 is one of those things I take for granted doesn't exist. What blogs there are inside the corporation are announced via email (!), don't have advertised RSS feeds (!), aren't generally searchable (!), and if you can find the hidden RSS feed it is often out of sync with the blog (!) and the RSS alert comes long after the email alert (!). I don't even know where to start with how craptastic that is. As an application architect I have often thought of exposing useful alerts and information as RSS or Atom, but the masses have tightly controlled desktops with no RSS reader, so really, what's the point? One of the applications that I work on at the moment has a huge mashup of RSS feeds as one of its key features, but everything remotely "web 2.0ish" about it is carefully hidden from view, so as not to frighten the poor user.

Well, one aspect about working for a giant corporation is that there are always things going on that I would be interested in if only I knew about them.

It turns out there is a fairly large underground web 2.0 movement that I had no idea existed. Simon Revell and Jason Marshall are colleagues of mine from across the pond and they are leading the charge. Yay!

There are tons of challenges though. I don't think critical mass will ever be reached if we don't have RSS readers on LOTS of desktops, means of exploring the blogs that exist (by searching, by directories with page rank ability, whatever), important feeds that carry extremely useful or critical information (whether from applications or individuals doesn't matter), means of searching blogs, including the ability to search for blogs that LINK to my blog (Joel has a long discussion about why this is better than blog comments here and here), good blogging software that supports not only individual blogs, but group blogs (and that doesn't require reams of paperwork to get started), and good mashup software that works inside the firewall (e.g. yahoo pipes).

David

* I am talking about large scale experimentation. Individual experimentation is, in many circumstances including my own, encouraged. Very large scale experimentation is required, though, to try out any kind of social software.

Manager Tools

A friend of mine recently blogged about the Manager Tools podcast, so I decided to check it out. The topics looked interesting so I set up iTunes to download the entire history of podcasts (that were available in iTunes - only the last year or so) and went to bed. What can I say? I have a long commute and sometimes I am starved for things to occupy the time in a constructive way. I can't quite remember how I managed before iPods and podcasts and platinum subscriptions to audible.com, but I am sure it must have involved banging my head with blunt instruments or something.

Anyway, I have been listening to the 'casts all week and, well, they are awesome. I don't really have the experience to endorse the content, but it all seems on target. I DO have the experience to endorse the presentation style and the topics covered, though, and they are great. I actually listened to two guys talk about how to insinuate yourself into a conversation circle at a social gathering for 29 minutes and 40 seconds and enjoyed it. I learned something. And I am almost anxious to attempt to apply the lessons. Me. A bona fide introverted INTP computer geek and pocket protector wearing scientist. Well, OK, maybe I have broken myself of the pocket protector habit, but the rest is true. Ask anyone.

So if you are a manager, or you want to be a manager some day, or you have a manager, you should go check these guys out.

Careers and Business Quality

I am reading The Tao of Warren Buffett by Mary Buffett and David Clark. It is basically a book of very short pithy statements that Warren has made with about half a page of commentary and interpretation. It hasn't changed my life, or anything, but I am enjoying it.

Saying number 28 is, "Managing your career is like investing - the degree of difficulty does not count. So you can save yourself money and pain by getting on the right train."

The commentary is basically that if you work for a wonderful company (great economics, great management, consistently great return on capital) then good things will happen. If not, then not.

I have never ever thought of career planning in terms like that before, but it absolutely makes sense. The pharmaceutical industry used to have great economics. The question is, does it still? Lately I think we are keeping our great returns with acquisitions and write-offs and cost cutting and other things that don't really have much to do with effectively growing an invested dollar. I mean they aren't unrelated, but they aren't really long term strategies. Can the pharmaceutical economics recover? If big pharma manages to break the mold of the blockbuster small molecule, will the FDA change fast enough for it to matter?

In a company with poor economics, "...raises will be few and long between, and there is greater risk of losing your job because management will always be under pressure to cut costs." Does that sound familiar to anyone?