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Nothing like Biographies

I just picked up Roosevelt by Conrad Black.   It is a bit daunting at over a 1000 pages and I am only 15 pages in, but it looks good.  I think there is more to learn about life by reading biographies than just about anything else (that you can read).

In any event, reading is so much better for you than TV, movies, or the Radio.

Friday March 4, 2005

Stuck with the iPod – Warts and All

By Henry Burgess © Copyright 2005, All Rights Reserved

Disclaimer: These are my thoughts and opinions and because I must rely on my memory, which I admit is poor, and may be closer to fiction than truth.  I share them more as a way to vent than anything else.  Perhaps they will entertain some.

 – my wife gave me a 40GB iPod as a gift.  It’s a slick little package and can only be described as cool.  Yet, like much of what Apple software the iPod software stinks.  Case in point: recently we were driving along listening to randomly selected songs from the iPod in the car.  I use an adapter that plugs into the cigarette lighter and the cassette player.  Mostly I have Jazz selections but there are some Elvis tracks.  We hit one and my wife asked me to play some more Elvis.  Well, I could not get the iPod to go out of random selection mode nor, in fact, to go back to the menu.

I don’t download music, I do rip CD that I buy and keep them in WMA-lossless format with the hope that as formats change I can always get back the original data and encode in the new format.  Well, Apple, being Apple does not love WMA.  What a shame.

Which brings me to a story (at my age you consider every story to be wisdom that must be passed on before you die):

in my Office – Years ago (I joined Microsoft in 1980 and retired recently) I was working on a windowing system for XENIX which was server based (my opinion being that that was more secure and I wanted drawing commands to be in a kind of tagged ASCII format).  I was developing this on a SUN 68000 based system that we was running XENIX (I did the kernel port for this system as my first job at Microsoft).  I think it was about 7PM when who should appear at my office but Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.  Bill introduced me to the impeccably dressed Steve and asked me to explain what I was working on.

Well, I explained the client/server architecture of my window system and the ASCII encoded tags that drove it via pipes.  Then (why I don’t know) I explained a quirk of the memory mapped display on that system that allowed me to speed up the bitblt using read-modify-write.  Before we could get to “the good part” Steve stormed out saying “we have done this all before”.  Bill just shrugged.  My opinion of Steve dropped.  I had explained my work to Bill a few days earlier and in typical fashion he had asked penetrating questions.

A few years later my opinion was crystallized by a visit to Apple.  IBM had introduced a PC networking solution that was based on broadband cabling.  I was pushing for Ethernet and my team was developing a product that was similar to the IBM one.  The purpose of my visit to Apple was to see if we could cooperate and get Apple hardware working with our networking.  First I visited the Macintosh group, it as much like Microsoft but with more Lego toys to play with and one or more Macs on every desk.  People were having fun but were lukewarm to the compatible network idea.  In the afternoon I visited the Apple-II group and found them to be bright group of people, yet they had to share access to one or to computers.  I found this surprising at a hardware company.  They explained that Steve was partial to the Macintosh group.   I had another meeting with “management”.

My trip report was a sad one.  I was sure that we could cooperate on a technical level and our best chance was with the Macintosh group.  However I felt there was no hope on the business side where I detected a level of arrogance I had not encountered when talking at the hardware and software level.  The management team reminded me of the brush off from Steve Jobs I had experienced earlier.

All of which brings me back the iPod.  It has a wonderful feel.  But what is it about not being able to replace the battery?  I think it’s symptomatic of the Apple way which is doubtless the Steve Jobs way.  It falls short of greatness, in my opinion.

he Microsoft of today could not produce an iPod.  Even though there are people there who could design as nice a form-factor box and a slick interface; and even get some hardware manufacture to bang them out in China.  Some fool would require the thing to run Windows or Windows CE or some such.  It would end up as something with 2 gigabytes of software and no room for songs.  Why?

Here is how a product might be conceived at Microsoft today.  A visionary person with drive might build a prototype.  There is an amazing prototyping capability in Microsoft Research they would fiddle, and hack, and invent and you would have a prototype that stored 100 GB and ran for 48 hours and was half the size of an iPod.  Amazing work would be done in human interfaces that made accessing songs and play lists breathtakingly simple and intuitive. A demo would be presented to Bill Gates who would be blown away and say “cool” a dozen times and “we have to do this”.  The demo group might say they think the product could be out in year or less.

Sadly, at this same demo, there would be a couple of executives.  These executives did not get to be where they are by producing great software or taking great risks.  One would say “where does this fit in with Longhorn?”  Another would say “we should make this fit in with our MSN music plans”.  At this critical juncture, where Microsoft could easily afford to spin out an enterprising group to make it happen just like a venture capitalist might do, the group will be folded into some large and ponderous organization headed by someone with an even larger ego and salary.  At this point two things can happen; the manager that gets this project will decide that managing 100 people is more interesting than managing 10 people and grow the project so that he can be a “big” manager with a big salary; or the project will be come “part of” some other project and eventually dwindle.  In either case it will be rescheduled to three years out so it can coincide with a shipment of Windows.

Now, if the project lives through all that the shipping version will weigh 2 pounds have a batter life of 1 hour and come with a DVD player to install “Longhorn Embedded – Music Player Edition”.

y Saddest moment at Microsoft in the 20+ years that I worked there came after a meeting with Bill Gates.  He pulled me aside and said: “Why is it that I can’t get people to do what I say?”  My regret is that I treated that golden moment as a comment rather than a question.  So, I guess I am stuck with the iPod warts and all.

Monday January 31, 2005

I was able to get a good result on the door using a stripper and then sanding for a while.  I then put on a cherry stain and several coats of polyurethane.  The Dell XPS Gen 3 is working nicely, of course Dell promptly came out with a Gen 4.

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