Pattern Finder

Book: "The Box"

Initially, the title of this book--"The Box"--leaves you hanging: "Hmm, is this about product packaging? Is it about some Claus Oldenburg sculpture that I don't know about?". However, it all becomes clear when you read its subtitle: "How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger." Written by Marc Levinson in 2006, the book went on to become a minor classic, being short-listed for the 2006 Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the year and winning the 2007 Anderson Medal from the Society for Nautical Research.

It argues that the creation of the standardized shipping container played a major role in driving down global shipping costs and increasing shipping speed--or, as The Economist puts it, "Without the container, there would be no globalization." And, by the end of the book, you're absolutely convinced that that's true. By drawing on a variety of disciplines--economics, business history, maritime history, and regional planning--and peppering the story with biographical vignettes, Levinson offers a highly readable account of how shipping containers have made $7 T-shirts from China a commonplace thing.

The catalyst for this change was a maverick named Malcolm McLean, a trucking company owner who won business by monitoring and cutting costs, a rarity in a business run more by rule of thumb in the 1940's and 50's. McLean Trucking was the first major trucking company to use diesel engines in its trucks; to keep insurance costs and repair bills to a minimum, the company had senior drivers train new drivers, and if the new driver made it through the first year without an accident, the senior driver received a bonus of one month's salary.

In the early 1950's, McLean was worried that his coastal trucking business would suffer from competition from shipping lines, so he put in motion a plan to buy his own ships and set up terminals that would quickly transfer truck trailers to and from the ships. However, it was easier said than done: such tight integration between trucking companies and shipping lines was in direct violation of the Interstate Commerce Commission's rules at the time. Nevertheless, McLean soldiered on, using a variety of legal machinations to get around the ICC rules and depending on an up-and-coming banker (Walter Wriston, who eventually went on to run Citibank) to loan him money.

Attending Vignette Analyst Day

I'm attending the Vignette Analyst Day today. Annually, Vignette invites IT industry analysts to Boston (the center of the IT industry analyst universe) and collectively brings them up to date by giving them a dog and pony show (a combination of product demos, PowerPoint presentations, and glad handing).

I've been attending these for awhile (here's a post from the 2005 version), and they're interesting for two reasons. First, Vignette personnel vanish and new people turn up to take their place with nary a word, so it's always fun to figure out who's missing in action based on last year's agenda. (Last year I think it was the longtime VP of Sales that had vanished without a trace.) Second, Vignette's Analyst Day is typically heavy with customer testimonials, and that's great. Most vendors cram an analyst day full with PowerPoint presentations from their own team, ultimately taking an entire day to impart information that you could glean from their web site in 20 minutes. However, customers talk about the things the web site or the vendor PowerPoints never mention--e.g., why they bought the product, what they find aggravating about it, and what business problem they're trying to solve. Oftentimes, they use the product in ways or for reasons that you'd never think of or the vendor never mentions. I get similar insights from talking with Burton Group clients; however, the more customer stories the better. Analysts always run the risk of drinking too much vendor Kool-Aid, and customer stories dilute the syrupy mix, reminding you that the real world is never as sweet--and sometimes much more bitter--than the datasheets make it out to be.

XML Power: DAISY XML Add-In for Microsoft Word

Microsoft has announced the availability of a Microsoft Word add-in  (Word 2007, Word 2003, Word XP) for saving OOXML-based Word documents as "DAISY XML." It's available for free at http://www.openxmlcommunity.org/daisy/.

DAISY (Digital Access Information SYstem) XML is the foundation for supporting digital talking books. It works by linking sections within an XML file to points within a corresponding digital audio file. By using special devices or by installing special software on PCs, users who are blind or have poor vision can jump to specific sections in the audio stream or skip over footnotes altogether. This is an improvement over having to listen to the audio serially.

While the Word add-in is OOXML-based, there are ODF initiatives for generating accessibilty-friendly documents. The DAISY Pipeline (as described by DAISY; as described by (SourceForge) is an open source project for performing DAISY-related transformations (including ODF to DTBook). In addition, the ODF Accessibility Guidelines offer an ODF-based foundation for generating accessible documents. However, these two initiatives are developer-focused, giving programmers tools that help them create products that will generate accessible documents. Today's Word add-in cuts to the chase, giving end users with disabilities something they can use today.

Whether ODF- or OOXML-based, such products and initiatives highlight the value of XML over binary formats. Because XML teases out the underlying structure of a document, it makes jumping from section to section or object to object easier than it was in binary formats (which are inclined to treat a document as a serial, undifferentiated thing). Put another way, XML embeds more intelligence within documents, and that's a good thing.

Microsoft/Yahoo!: Remember Microsoft/Intuit?

With the news that Microsoft walked away from buying Yahoo!, everybody and his brother is offering commentary, with some doing it more than once. The New York Times wrote four articles about it:

• Google, From Stirrer to Spoiler, Ends Microsoft's Yahoo Search
• Yahoo Chief Says Microsoft Was the Stubborn One
• Now in Play: AOL, Facebook, and Many Others
• Microhoo, We Hardly Knew Ye

The Wall Street Journal went to town as well:

• Giving Up on Yahoo, Microsoft Rethinks Its Internet Options
• Deal or No Deal, Ballmer Needs to Turn Weakness Into Strength
• Yahoo Holders Turn Up Heat After Microsoft Deal Talks Fail
• Past Shows Microsoft Is Only Jilted for Moment

Microsoft should walk away from deals more often. It hasn't gotten this level of coverage in non-industry media in years, while Google frequently bathes in the Technology section spotlight (e.g., my blog post of September 13, 2007).

The comments on the "Microsoft Walks On By - Yahoo!" post on the Mini-Microsoft blog make for interesting reading, since many are from Microsoft employees. While the majority express relief at the news, there's a wide variation in what to do next: from reorganizing MSN ("What's Steve's big plan to clean out the rot and turn MSN around?"), to fixing Microsoft's image problem (What kills me is how hated Microsoft really is."), to getting back to writing software ("Forget advertising, let's get back to SOFTWARE.").

In glancing through this diverse commentary, I haven't seen anyone mention the aborted Microsoft/Intuit merger a decade and a half ago. Microsoft Money was getting lambasted by Quicken, and so Microsoft said, "OK, if we can't beat 'em, we'll join 'em," agreeing to buy Intuit in October 1994 for $1.5 billion in Microsoft shares. However, the deal unraveled under anti-trust scrutiny and Microsoft paid Intuit a termination fee of $46.25 million to walk away.

I would not be surprised if we now see a replay of that episode here. With its ability to buy its way into a market blocked, Microsoft went back and fixed Money, to the point where in feature bakeoffs it's typically considered either slightly better or slightly worse than Quicken from year to year. If Microsoft did the same here--if it took even a chunk of the $44 billion it was going to use to buy Yahoo! and applied it to basic block and tackle improvements--it could improve from being a distant number three. However, to do so it cannot mimic Google--it must be significantly better than Google in some areas--to get people to try it. That's why Google became pre-eminent in the first place--it was so much better than the incumbent at the time (Alta Vista).

For example, because of its software and services strategy, Microsoft could mine what users do on their PCs (with appropriate permissions from the user, of course) and use that information to give context to web searches (e.g., realizing that user A is a banker, the system would return "automated teller machines" results to an "ATM" query and  "asynchronous transfer mode" results to a network engineer). This is a capability that would be difficult for either Google or Yahoo! to counter and would give better search results. So while Microsoft is currently down, it's not necessarily out.

Book: "Revolution in the Valley"

About two years ago I read Andy Hertzfeld's book, Revolution in the Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made, and I recently riffled through it again. It's a collection of stories about the early days at Apple Computer--in other words, the world before Apple had cool stores and before the company lopped "Computer" off of its official name.

The book started out as a set of posts on www.folklore.org--and in fact you can still read the book online if you want to--but I must admit I find it easier to take a book to bed than a laptop. It's a lot of fun--the book captures the everyday chaos in a fast-growing computer company--and helps explain that not all business success is predicated on well-trained employees following a vetted business plan. Passion, knowledge, serendipity, long hours, and luck all play a part.

Following are some of my favorite stories:

• Shut Up!: The first demo of the Macintosh for Microsoft (July 1981)
• Software Wizard: The Mac group gets business cards (March 1982)
• Do It: User testing sometimes has surprising results (June 1982)
• Inside Macintosh: Developer documentation was crucial to our success (June 1982)
• Creative Think: A seminar with Alan Kay (July 1982)
• You Guys Are in Big Trouble: We receive Steve's permission to dismantle the onerous burglar alarm (August 1982)
• 1984: The famous 1984 commercial is nearly canceled (September 1983)
• It Sure Is Great to Get Out of That Bag!: We need a demo for the intro (January 1984)

Free Web Analytics: Google, Microsoft, and Now Yahoo! Offer It

On Wednesday, April 9, 2008, Yahoo! announced that it was buying IndexTools, a web analytics vendor. On the following Tuesday, Dennis Mortensen, the COO of IndexTools, announced on his blog that, "Yahoo! currently intends to provide the IndexTools Web Analytics service FREE of charge to clients and partners who accept the standard Yahoo! agreement."

In other words, at this point, three large vendors--Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo!--now offer web analytics packages for free. Furthermore, they are not watered down versions, but functional products that any small- and medium-size business (SMB) would die for:

• Google (Google Analytics): Executive dashboard, custom reporting, map-based reports, search engine marketing cost analysis, landing page optimization, user segmentation, scenario analysis, and detailed help.
• Microsoft (Microsoft adCenter Analytics [currently in beta]): Summary reports, custom reporting, campaign reporting, user segmentation, and scenario analysis. 
• Yahoo! (IndexTools): Executive dashboards, path analysis, custom and comparative reporting, workflow, search engine marketing cost analysis, campaign management, user segmentation, merchandise reporting, scenario analysis, and detailed help.

If you're an SMB and don't analyze how visitors behave on your website--how long they stay, where they come from, what pages do they bail from--then I'd encourage you to look at all three, pick the one you like, and use it.

If you work in a large enterprise, you probably use a different package, but investing twenty minutes in reading the Microsoft blog, the Yahoo! datasheet, and watching the Google video is a great way to get a mini-tutorial in web analytics. This is especially true if you've heard the web analytics term bandied about and either don't know much about it or are trying to figure out if you can do more with what you have.

If you're a Burton Group client, I'd encourage you to read two Collaboration and Content Strategies reports I've written on web analytics:

• The Current "Suite Spot" of Web Analytics (Market Landscape, 23 pages)
• Avoiding the Data Pitfalls of Web Analytics (Technology & Standards, 26 pages)

RIA/SaaS: Dealing with the Internet Version of the Keystroke Interrupt

James Fallows makes an interesting point in his "Another step toward the online 'cloud computing' life" post:

Web-based computing has a small disadvantage: working with an online program like, say, Writely (now Google Docs) is slower than using one based on your own machine, since info must constantly go back and forth from a remote server.

In other words, there's a certain value in client/server computing--now considered passe--since the client can perform work locally without always going back to the server. This value add has been true for years, and remains true now. At this point we've been through four generations of client/server architecture (that I know of--there may be more). The first is shrouded in arcane minicomputer history, the second is well-known, the third has been around for several years, and the fourth is happening as we speak.

The first began in the late 1970's, when Wang Laboratories was the equivalent of a dot.com wonder, growing at 100% a year and challenging the incumbent at the time, IBM, within the office market. Its success was due to the combination of a great product (word processor) and a smart architecture (client/server, although no one called it that at the time). Each Wang workstation contained a Zilog Z80 chip, which did a lot of the graphics work required when displaying and editing a document. For example, inserting a character would cause the following characters to move one position to the right, and therefore sometimes cause a word to jump to the next line. Because the Z80 did much of the work, the workstation talked to the server after only every tenth keystroke or so.

This smart design was Wang's secret weapon. For example, although DEC eventually got into the office market, all Wang had to do to beat it in a competitive situation was to suggest to the prospect that it run a test under a heavy workload. Having forty secretaries concurrently pound out memos would bring a VAX to its knees, because every keystroke was a CPU interrupt. On a Wang VS minicomputer, due to the Z80 doing much of the work, 200 typing secretaries was a typical and easily handled workload. Unlike the VAX, the Wang system didn't have a dumb terminal as a front end--it had a smart terminal.

All Google Apps Docs Can Now Be Viewed Offline

On Friday, The Official Google Docs Blog announced that all Google doc types (documents, spreadsheets, and presentations) can now be viewed offline. At this time, users can also edit word processing documents; that additional capability will be added over time for spreadsheets and presentations. The post also included a pointer to more information about Google Docs Offline: Overview: What is Google Docs Offline?

Of course, viewing and editing documents offline has been a capability of software for years. It's nice to see Google go retro and add some software flavor to its solution.

Book: "Dreaming in Code"

Dreaming in Code is one of those books about the ups and downs of a software project. Tracy Kidder's The Soul of a New Machine (1981) created the genre, and in my view it has never been equaled. Scott Rosenberg is an equally gifted writer--his explanation of Python and its place in the programming universe (pages 70-79) is masterful--but he picked a dud project.

Dreaming in Code is  about building a new personal information manager code-named Chandler. Famous folks in the programming community turn up in the story from time to time--Mitch Kapor (creator of Lotus 1-2-3), Andy Hertzfeld (an early Mac programmer), and Lou Montulli (co-founder of Netscape)--but their experience and contacts were still not enough to make Chandler a success.

Design began in the spring of 2002. With the powerful Lotus Agenda as a historical rev 1.0 (however, Microsoft's Outlook cleaned its clock in the marketplace), Chandler was going to be a new rev 2.0. Besides helping users manage their e-mails, appointments, contacts, tasks, and notes in a very hyperlinking kind of way, Chandler would be cross-platform, running on the Windows, Mac, and Linux OSs. However, the project never really got off the ground, and it was scaled back in January of this year.

So if you want to get a feel for what's it's like to work on a struggling software project, read Dreaming in Code. It's interesting, but depressing.

CCS Has an Opening

Yes, we're looking for an analyst to join our Collaboration and Content Strategies (CCS) practice at Burton Group. The job posting is on the Careers page on the Burton Group web site; since the company currently has several openings--yes, we're growing--you'll need to scroll down a bit.

Some background. Burton Group is an IT analyst firm; we write reports and consult on IT issues such as security, identity, networking, data center operations, and programming. CCS, the practice I work in, covers collaboration, communications, and content.

Although Burton Group doesn't have as high a profile as Gartner Group and Forrester Research, it is the ninth largest IT analyst firm (according to Outsell), and we should climb up one or two more rungs this year. If you're worried about being a third-party marketing arm for vendors, don't. Burton Group is atypical in that the vast majority of our business comes from enterprises; only a small part of our business comes from vendors (15%). To put this into perspective, some analyst firms get 90% of their revenue from vendors; a typical percentage is in the 30% range. We don't hire analysts out of college; typically, our analysts have worked many years in the business by working in IT, by being product managers, and by being analysts at other firms. I, for example, have done all three.

If you want to be an analyst (at Burton Group, anyway) you need to:

• Know your stuff
• Write well
• Have opinions that you can back up

If you think you have the right stuff, apply by sending your resume to Lynn Ward at lward@burtongroup.com.