Tall, for short

An Arc

2012-01-15T10:55:00.000-08:00

The current debacle about Google introducing itss Google slanted Search Plus Your World (SPYW, presumably pronounced "Spew") is just one more step Google takes along it's arc.

What's 'the arc', you ask?

It comes from a discussion I had with Charles Fitzgerald a while back, observing that certain successful tech companies follow an arc. It's a little richer than a timeline of newness & excitement through to jaded boredom. It goes something like this.

Found company based on a great idea and great execution.
As important, be lucky enough to be in the right place, at the right time, with the right backing & connections, to take off quickly.
Exploit an economic trend (some dramatically reducing price curve) and get products to a receptive audience.
Grow (as a company - # people) rapidly - introducing interesting management expansion problems (how do we scale? who do we hire? how do we retain our 'culture'
Make a ton of money and become successful
Keep on doing 'the right thing' for customers.
Make a few enemies
Make more money and get a lot of customers.
Become dominant in a market - expand into other markets, and make more enemies. Still mostly doing the right thing for customers.
Be threatened by a new trend that may be disruptive
Re-engineering your entire business to focus on the disruption, and in doing so not recognize that you just screwed your customers.
Leverage an existing dominant product position to gain traction against the disruption.
Government involvement and scrutiny
Competitors cry foul
Lawyers

In the above scenario you can insert Microsoft (Windows/Office + "Internet Tidal Wave" + Internet Explorer) or Google (Search + "Everything is Social" + SPYW).

Interestingly Google's arc is half the time period of Microsofts. I'm assuming Facebook's will be half the time period of Google's.

Perhaps we should just rename this "Fitzgerald's law" and see if it sticks?

Well wishes to my dad, and free shoes for you

2010-01-06T08:32:00.000-08:00

This is going to be about knees. I'll also give you a chance for some free shoes. But mainly about knees.

My dad is in hospital today, having knee replacement surgery. The surgery is happening in the UK, so like as not he's out by now, and I hope it's all gone well. He's only seventy-cough, and there are likely a few reasons why he needs knee replacements now. At University he was an excellent middle distance runner - used to train with Roger Bannister in his heyday, and could run the mile with the best of them. In those days, running shoe technology wasn't too advanced, and I recall him complaining on a number of occasions about how the streets of Sheffield were not kind to his achilles.

My dad returned to running in his retirement, and was doing some impressively quick times in his late sixties. He really enjoyed it - also enjoyed the new shoe technology that had come along in the 80's, which gave him much more cushioning. Unfortunately about a year ago, his kneee gave way while walking along a path. Various trips to the doctors and MRI's later, and the long and the short of it is that he's knees are shot and he needs replacement surgery. Given my dad's athletic history, this is hard for him, and I hope he can get back being active in some way or other after a speedy recovery. Knees are important.

I'll get to the free shoes in a moment. I need to talk about my knees next.

I have a bit of a different journey than my dad. I was 'less than athletic' at school. Overweight and would make up any excuse not to exercise. I finally started regular exercise when I was 17 and ran (mainly to decompress) regularly during University. My first marathon was when I was 21 - took me 5 hours and 35 minutes, and wasn't kind to my knees (by mile 16) or my hips (by mile 22) and had me hobbling for weeks afterwards. Given that I'm 6'7" and (was) overweight, I can only imagine the kind of pressure put on my joints at every step.

I keep on discovering that there's things we seem to do naturally that we actually need to learn. Like breathing. Or, in this case, running. In the last few years I've become a big fan of 'minimalist' running - it's been a struggle to re-learn how I run, so that I'm not jolting shock all the way through my joints, but instead, treading more softly, with greater cadence. Whether it's barefoot running, or (my preference for longer distances) in Newton running shoes, lighter and running properly is the way to go. A friend of mine referred me to Newtons, and their lightweight design, but more importantly their ability to cause you to run correctly, without striking down on your heels.

I promise I'll get to the free shoes shortly.

So with a new (and I'll admit, goofy) style of running, I now run marathons 106 minutes faster than when I was 21 - with no pain while running, and (apart from needing a little calf massage) only 1-2 days recovery, with no joint pain. I won't run distances over 8 miles in anything other than my Newtons, and am so thankful (for my knees) that my running is now so low impact.

The evidence is building for the harm big, spongy, badly supporting running shoes can do to you. I've spoken to a few people (when they ask about my garish colored shoes) about how great the Newtons are, and I keep on wincing when I hear the argument "Yes, I've heard great things about them, but I run a lot and go through a number of pairs of my Nike's, and the Newtons are really ($175) expensive."

Don't even get me started on how if you're 'going through' your running shoes, maybe that means lots of impact. Grrr.

So, in the hope that I can help at least one person to not have to go through what my father's going through today, I'd like to give you a pair of Newton running shoes. No more excuses.

Here's how it'll work. Using the power of the interwebs, I'll randomly pick someone (US or UK resident - mailing from anywhere different gets complicated) out of the next 100 twitter followers I get (I being 'tallmike'), contact you, and we'll go from there. Regular distance runners using non-minimalist shoes only please - we don't want these to languish in the garage now, do we? Oh - and this isn't some lame way to get followers - beyond tweets about my running & occasionally about my Google products, I'm fairly busy and don't say much, and feel free to unfollow as you wish. For any lawyers out there, this is not sponsored by Newton in anyway, and I'm doing this solely to give you a new pair of running shoes, as provided by Newton, in your size/style. I make no claims as to whether they will help you as they've helped me - so much of this is up to you. If you go out, fall over or otherwise injure yourself, that'd be what we call "your problem". You'll need to figure out your style (neutral or stable), and would likely be best if you took video of you running to figure it out right. If you live in Seattle/San Francisco or the UK, I reserve to the right to deliver in person. If you live in Seattle, these guys have been really nice to me, and have the technology to do the video thing.

Phew. That's enough for now. Here's to wishing my dad a speedy recovery, and hoping you start 2010 with a plan to run differently. Me? I'm off to work out what else we're doing wrong and I should re-learn - oh, and run a little more.

Ahead of the curve

2009-03-10T13:47:00.001-07:00

(disclaimer : while I work for Google, none of this post should in any way be seen as representing Google, it's people or projects. Bah - like I have that kind of influence :-) ).

The folks over at google.org have an excellent tool called Google Flu Trends. The approach is essentially to use the frequency and volume of the things that people search for to indicate activity, to spot a trend. The idea is that data from doctors and the CDC are trailing indicators, whereas aggregate search data shows on the leading edge - people search for "flu symptoms" when they're first getting sick.

It turns out that there's a Google service, called trends, where you can try this out for yourself, in other domains. So for example, if you check for 'recession' you'll see that, while there was a couple of blips mid-to-late 2007, Jan 2008 was the real starting point. Similarly with 'foreclosure' or 'credit crunch'. The trick is to think of a search term that people might use, that's unique enough to be a helpful indicator. So "realtor" isn't that good for house sales, but "home inspection' is pretty interesting. Doesn't seem like the property market is recovering any time soon. Another interesting 'worry' indicator might be "FDIC insured" - be nice to see that settle down to a low steady state.

Becoming a bank

2008-11-11T17:05:00.000-08:00

Following Amex's surprise news today, I've decided to become a bank too. I think it's probably simplest in the long run, and I'm looking forward to the kind of financial protection the FED can offer me.

Portland Marathon 2008

2008-10-06T08:04:00.000-07:00

After a week of feeling under the weather, I elected to ignore the Dr. and head to Portland anyway. Beautiful city, but definitely felt like an early night after the long drive and comatose inducing (but most excellent!) pasta from Ristorante Roma, which was fortunately jut a few blocks from the hotel. Woke early and joined the crush for the start, and at 7am we were off.
Highlights for me:

Inspiring to see the wheelchair racers.
Managed just over a 2hr half-marathon time, despite the weather which started raining.
Saw Dave on the back-stretch around the mile 8/10 mark - hope you had a good run Dave!
The bad weather meant that the awe inspiring view of St. Johns Bridge, and the long haul uphill to see it was pretty masked - probably a good thing!
My pace slowed down a lot in the second half, but I managed to keep going the entire way, despite the best attempts of runners who real need turn signals and brake lights, and the muppets who decided that handing out beer was a good idea. Any other time guys...
Great to run to music!

Not super happy with the 4:25 finish time, but given how under the weather I was feeling in the run up, it's all good.

Special thanks to Mr. Mercury, Mr. Van Halen, Mr. Jagger and many others who provided inspiration along the way.

IANAE

2008-09-22T05:00:00.000-07:00

OK, so I'm not an economist, so please bear with me while I walk through this.

The story so far...
Poor loans were given to a number of potentially bad lenders, based on inadequate (earnings, credit-worthiness) or false assumptions (house prices will always increase). Mortgage brokers were compensated for loan origination. Bankers received their fees upfront. Mortgages were packaged into a variety of instruments (SIVs, CDOs etc) and resold (at some profit each time).
Now the foreclosures are hitting and the repayments aren't being made, the value of these instruments is falling and the current holders (large investment banks) are in trouble.

Rather than try and understand the scope of what's happening, and getting into the honest truth, the financial markets are 'on the run' responding to 'sentiment and belief' with events unfolding in 'real-time' and bank's values (as determined by share price) fluctuating wildly. This is viewed as a Bad Thing(tm) undermining the viability of the market.

Well I'm sorry, but it doesn't seem that the market has done much to be transparent or align incentives to be trusted in. I look a lot at alignment of incentives in my work, and I can't see how the current proposed $700b bailout, or anything else the Fed is doing, is creating any sort of alignment.

Given $700b to play with to solve the liquidity crisis (that's the real problem, right? That's what we should learn from Japan in the '90s that if we just fix the banks with money, they'll keep it) I'd rather the government set up another state sponsored Fannie/Freddie-alike (call it the Realitie) which underwrites reasonable loans. Reasonable equals fully disclosed, low risk etc. Something that won't break and is visible to the public so it won't be corrupted. So if you've actually kept up with your starter mortgage payments and now are getting squeezed by triple rates, you can re-mortgage. Or if you never should have had a mortgage in the first place, and still can't find those W-2s, you're out of luck.

Regardless of how this settles out, can we have some accountability? Can we have mortgage brokers receiving a small slice of each payment, not upfront fees? Can we have those responsible for this mess held accountable, rather than the taxpayers? Can we have full declaration of the riskiness of each mortgage, with legal action possible for misrepresentation?

Sorry, shouldn't speak for legal action. After all, IANAL either.

Hot Train of Thought

2008-09-10T12:52:00.000-07:00

After reading Brent's blog on a recent cycle ride, my eye was caught by another blog post of his.

Which then got me to more thinking and conducting an experiment. Google's spelling correction/suggestion function ("Did you mean?...) is often really handy, but it seems to tragically lack a sense of humour. Apart from (what used to appear for) "French Military Victories" that is. Anyway, doing a Google search for "Hot Grill on Grill Action" (Snorg t's have this marvelous shirt, you see), produces an odd suggestion. Remove the word "Hot" and you get an entirely different suggestion. Windows Live is (fortunately) without additional commentary.

Who knew hotness was so important?

Perceptions of Trust

2008-07-13T00:48:00.000-07:00

It's so easy to see trust as being a very clear issue. Either you're trusted, or your not; you're worthy of trust, or your not. However a couple of articles read just today (I'm on UK time for a day or so, so 'today' is a relative term :- ), put an interesting perspective on "Trust" (with a capital "T") around privacy.

First up is the UK's Sunday Telegraph, in which news of Google's Street View vans taking pictures have Jenny McCartney up in arms. Interestingly, Jenny takes the tack less focused on invasion of physical privacy (those street view chaps do some wonderful things with obscuring license plates and faces, even with groupies) and more focused on fundamental questions of Google and privacy around actions (tracking and so forth).

Next is the Washington Post with an article on the Viacom suit against Google, essentially attempting to assert that, even though Viacom has demanded something that many agree oversteps the mark, the concern is with Google giving up this information.

The thing about privacy and trust is that they don't exist in a technical vacuum. I understand (probaby better than most) the lengths that most internet companies go to to protect their customers privacy, and live up to the spirit and letter of their customer privacy agreements. From logs anonymization, to internal processes to safeguard data management and visibility, it's a complex world. In addition to the technical challenges though, there's social and economic challenges too. For many years, Apple Macs and Windows PC were technical very similar when it came to their exposure to viruses. From browsers that allowed access to all forms of internet contnet, to running code from various sources, they both did basically the same thing, but the Mac was perceived as being more trustworthy, as there were far fewer viruses (if any) hitting it. *Could* more viruses have hit the Mac? Absolutely. It was just a lesser target having lower market share in the marketplace, as well as having fewer malicious code writers who actually *wanted* to attack it - unlike Microsoft who's managed to create both a large market and significant animosity.

I think it's useful to track these sort of discussions, as often (as has been shown recently in financial regulation) situations can change without really anything different happening 'under the covers'.

Talk to me...

2008-03-05T13:20:00.000-08:00

Those clever chaps over in Google Talk land have created the Google chatback - a way to chat with people who aren't in your buddy list. It's pretty nifty - I've added one for me below. See what you think!

Mike

A brand new day

2007-06-12T08:38:00.000-07:00

It seems appropriate to make my first post on a beautiful, sunny day in Kirkland. It's going to be a beautiful day, and I may know at the end of it whether I'm going to be a homeowner again, or not. It also seems appropriate to migrate from my old blog, to my new. Time for change.