Pattern Finder

Interesting Interviews with Engineers

The Crazy Engineers web site has a section entitled "Small Talk," where they post interviews with engineers of all flavors: software engineers, structural engineers, car designers, aircraft designers, etc.

Here are some interesting talks with software engineers:

• Paul Buchheit, who worked on Gmail, Adsense, FriendFeed, and invented Google's "Don't be evil" motto
• Mahesh Murthy, who dropped out of engineering school and did early site design work for Yahoo! and Amazon.com
• Clayton Stark, VP of Engineering at Flock, a company building a "social web browser."
• Florian von Kurnatowski, Director of Product Management at Scalix, an e-mail/calendar app based on HP's old OpenMail product.
• Bjarne Stroustrup, the inventor of C++

John Chambers, Then (1987) and Now (2007)

I got to see John Chambers give a keynote address at Salesforce.com's Dreamforce convention and it brought back memories. I hadn't seen John in person for about 20 years. Back in those dark ages we both worked at Wang Laboratories: John was Senior VP of Sales for Wang's Central Region and I was a product manager of operating systems and utilities. (For those without long enough memories, Wang was a minicomputer company that was a 1980's version of Google, in the sense that it grew as fast as Google and was known for making easy-to-use systems.)

John was a wunderkind even at Wang: his territories consistently outperformed all others and he got results without being a tyrant. I dealt with him from time to time on product questions, but I especially remember an entire day when I was locked up in a room with him and a major customer hashing out a new sales contract. This Chicago-based customer was looking for major product improvements--John was there to make the sale and I was there to make sure we didn't commit to anything developmentally impossible. (Difficult was OK; impossible was not). He started out with, "So tell us what we need to do to make you happy"--and it was a negotiation roller coaster from there. We'd take a break every couple of hours, and I remember saying to him at one point, "Geez, John, you've got us right up to the edge. I was about to cry 'foul' on that supported users demand but you pulled back just at the right moment." John smiled and said in his West Virginia accent, "Don't worry Guy, I'm a lawyer--I know how far I can go." I also remember him telling me, "We don't need to get them to sign today--that will be too far a leap that they may regret later. We just need to get them to the next stage." In short, I knew I was in the presence of a master 20 years ago, and it was a pleasure to watch him work the crowd yesterday.

He came out on stage to great applause, and then began to tell his (and Cisco's vision) of the future: command and control is out--collaboration and communication is in. It was not all 50,000 foot stuff, either. He had concrete examples of how Cisco was using web conferencing to make decisions faster. But the best part was when he went into preacher mode. After about three minutes at the podium, he walked down the steps and into the audience. Given the shaky images on the video monitors, you could tell the camera people were thinking, "What the...?" He then spent the next hour walking back and forth within the audience, making eye contact with individual audience members and making his points forcefully with no script. A bravura performance that attendees were still marveling over hours later. John Chambers was great 20 years ago, and he's even better today.

A Short, Personal History of the WAA Standards

While getting caught up on my blog reading, I saw that Avinash Kaushik noted that the fourth version of the standards document of the Web Analytics Association was now available. It was fun to read the document and see how it's evolved, since I was there when it was born.

Three years ago, Jason Burby and I were appointed Co-Chairs of the Standards Committee, given a blank sheet of paper, and told, "Go figure it out." One of my hot buttons was to infuse the standards with a framework, so that it wasn't just a list of definitions, but also a way of looking at the problem. That way, if a company felt they needed a metric that wasn't listed, there was a framework they could use to create their own. Jason and I wrote that there were three types of web analytics metrics: counts, ratios, and key performance indicators (KPIs). We also noted that a metric can apply to three different universes: aggregate (total site traffic), segmented (a subset of site traffic), and individual (a single site visitor).

Jason and I sent the initial document around, and then the fireworks began. I remember civil but heated discussions with folks such as Eric Peterson about the difference between counts and KPIs; weren't we over complicating things; etc., but Jason and I held our ground. With that battle won, the Standards Committee started defining terms, a slow and arduous process. I then had to step down as Co-Chair when I joined Burton Group in February 2006. (To ensure analyst impartiality, Burton Group won't let its analysts serve on standards making committees).

So it was with some trepidation that I opened the latest version of the standards document, worried that the framework contribution was no longer there. Happily, the framework wording remains, but with the addition of a metric type called "dimension." Also happily, the terms have evolved quite a bit. Here's the November 2005 definition of "Unique Visitors" and the August 2007 definition:

Stellent, Are You There?

The Stellent Web site (www.stellent.com) was down this weekend and is still down as of this morning.  Should we read something sinister into this, or did someone just forget to reboot the server or not pay their DNS bill?

When I was at Aberdeen Group, we vanished off the Web one day.  We didn't cotton on instantly, but by the afternoon of that Monday we started getting calls from clients asking, "Why isn't your Web site up?"  Since the server was humming along just fine, we couldn't figure out what they were talking about.  And when you connected to our Web server via its IP address, it was clearly up.

However, our Domain Name Service records had vanished.  So when someone typed www.aberdeen.com, they were never forwarded to our Web server.  It turns out that our DNS provider had suddenly decided that we hadn't paid our bill, even though we had the cancelled check (that they had cashed) and the resulting deposit record.  Even faxing those documents to them didn't help.  However, as an analyst firm, we had a trick up our sleeve.  We started calling newspapers with the story, and when the company got bombarded with calls from reporters, it suddenly decided to be a lot more customer-centric.  Even though they fixed the problem the following day, it still took the good part of that day for the revised DNS records to cascade through the system.  So Aberdeen Group was offline for most of two days due to a third-party clerical screw-up.

Just one more thing to worry about in this online world.