There’s a rumor going around that Salesforce.com is switching all of its 4000 employees over to Macs. If so, this will be the first high profile complete Windows to Mac enterprise defection that I’ve heard of recently (I’m sure there are others, but they haven’t been high profile or big enough to catch my attention.)
For several months, I’ve been suggesting that when larger (great than 2,500 employee) companies start defecting en masse (e.g. the entire company) to Macs, it will signal another potential tectonic shift (and opportunity) in the software business.
Unless you are a browser centric company, it’s still really challenging to fully integrate Windows and Macs in one environment. It can be done (we do it – even at a 12 person company) but it’s grody and the Mac users are always on the short end of things. This isn’t new – it’s been going on since the last real attempted foray into the Mac into enterprise in the late 1980’s.
But the pressure on Microsoft and the market dynamics, especially among younger users, seems different to me this time. I’ve tried to switch to a Mac several times and given up each time because of application integration – in my case Exchange (mail, shared calendar, and tasks), SharePoint, and my cell phone integration with Exchange. I’ve tried a bunch of different approaches – none of them really worked short of dumping the Microsoft apps and switching to something different which I’m not willing to do – yet.
Some of my daily world is comfortably cross-platform (Firefox, Skype, Trillian, and all the NewsGator stuff I use) and does the "right thing" synchronizing data in the cloud. But enough isn’t that I just can’t seem to make the switch.
Apple’s finally licensing Microsoft’s ActiveSync and incorporating it into the iPhone will probably get me to switch to an iPhone (from my Tmobile Dash) – assuming the Exchange integration is complete (mail + calendar + address book + tasks). If Entourage 2008 had an equivalent level of integration with Exchange (or the Apple mail / calendar / contact apps incorporated ActiveSync) I’d try again on the Mac.
Yes – I know I can use Fusion or Parallels – I’ve tried – they just aren’t satisfying enough. I also know we can throw out all of our Microsoft stuff and switch over to Google Apps or something else – we’ve got to much of an infrastructure investment – even at 12 people – to bother with that at this point (imagine if we were 4,000 people!)
But – it feels like another wave is about to break on us and the chance of a broad change will once again be in our (and Microsoft’s) face. Microsoft can play offense or defense here – all of the Live Mesh stuff from last week is offense and I’m glad to see it from my friends in Redmond.
I think all of this tension, pressure, and change is good because I want to see (and participate) in more innovation. More, more, more. Of course, this won’t really matter much next week since it’s likely going to be all about Microsoft and Yahoo.
As April 15th looms again (it seems to come every year), all the same old articles appear about taxes, budgets, deficits, government spending, and the inequities in the universe. This year, Ben Casnocha sent me a link to an article from the LA Times titled Tax and spend with a twist with a note saying "I think you expressed a similar sentiment awhile back."
Indeed I did. I dutifully pay my taxes every year, yet I feel helpless when I think about how the government spends my tax receipts (and all the other tax receipts they get – which appears to be about $1.2 trillion this year according to the LA Times article.) Yeah, I know I can vote (I do) and I can get involved in influencing my little corner of the universe (I try), but I don’t feel like I have any impact on how any of this money gets wasted spent.
A college friend mentioned the idea to me 20+ years ago that everyone should get a line item allocation when they paid their taxes. His idea was that you’d essentially create your own spending plan for your taxes and the government would have to honor it.
While I love the "vote my taxes" idea, Adams and Hamilton wouldn’t like this very much since it shifts a lot of power back to the individual. So, how about an intermediate step – a category allocation that the government has to publish in aggregate. Everyone gets to allocate their taxes across 20 categories when they pay their taxes. The IRS aggregates all this information anonymously and publishes the macro data.
Step one would be to get this information out there. Let’s show our politicians how "the country" thinks about how our tax dollars are spent. Guns? Butter? Or maybe education.
Happy day before tax day.
Last week was Google App Engine announcement and brouhaha. This week is deeper analysis and understanding of Google App Engine. I spent some time last week trying to understand this better, read a bunch of stuff, and spent some time having a top secret special meeting that I can’t talk about with some of my friends at Microsoft where this was discussed.
Following are three interesting things for you this morning (all courtesy of my friend Scott Moody) if you are interested in learning more:
1. The Google App Engine Q&A – an in-depth blogger-created FAQ that provides great links to other blog posts on the topic and summarizes various opinions and known facts.
2. Google App Engine for developers – Nial Kennedy’s overview from his meeting with the App Engine team leads.
3. A high level comparison (via email) from Scott Moody where he compares App Engine and Amazon EC2. Since Scott doesn’t keep a blog, following is the pertinent text from his email.
Google hides infrastructure from AppEngine users. AE programmers never (and, in fact, aren’t allowed to) think about database scaling and configuration, load balancing , fail-over, etc. In theory, the complexity of writing a highly scalable app completely disappears.
With EC2, you still have to set-up load balancers, configure multiple replicated database servers, implement scalability hacks if things grow too fast (such as distributed caching of data via memcached), keep distros and apps up-to-date, etc. Bottom Line: EC2-based companies still require sys admins, AppEngine companies don’t. That will certainly change as more companies begin offering EC2 server management services.
Google provides a non-relational datastore and that’s the only datastore available (no traditional file system, no relational databases). With EC2, people generally use MySQL or Postgresql. Amazon offers a non-relational datastore called SimpleDB, but it’s a bit *too* simple. For example, it does not support sorting of results sets. Huh? That makes it non-workable in my opinion. There’s also an issue with using EC2 virtual machines for your database servers — Amazon says that when a virtual machine crashes, all the data managed by it disappears, so virtual machine crash = hard drive crash.
With EC2, programmers can use any (non-Microsoft) language to develop their apps. AppEngine users must code in Python. Also, Google does not support sockets at this time. All cross-app communication must be done via HTTP.
At *this* moment in time, it would be difficult to move apps off of AppEngine. Doing that in EC2 is trivial. This, to me, is the biggest issue, as I believe it could make startups less-interesting from an acquisition perspective by anyone other than Google. This will most likely change as people develop compatibility layers. However, Google has yet to provide any information about how to migrate data from their datastore the best I can tell. If you have a substantial amount of data, you can’t just write code to dump it because they will only let any request run for a short period before they terminate it.
Some people are complaining about Google having access to their source code. I don’t see this as an issue. I’d rather have it be stored at Google than at some small hosting company.
One final nice little thing in AppEngine’s favor: Websites that store less than 500MB of data and get roughly 5MM pageviews per month or less can use AppEngine for free. The downside is that Google has yet to say what they’ll charge if apps go over that quota, but I have to believe that it will be reasonable. Right now, you’re prevented from going above the free-level quotas.
If you are into this and have other good links, please leave a comment with them.
Today’s NY Times has a clearly written article describing what’s really going on with Auction Rate Securities titled It’s a Long, Cold, Cashless Siege. There’s a lot of confusion going around about what ARS are and how they work so it’s nice to finally see "the simple stories" appearing. If you are curious about how these things really work or if you are interested in another straightforward story, Fred Wilson has one of the best first person accounts up on his blog titled Our Run In With Auction Rates And What It Taught Me About Markets.
When the auctions first started failing a few months ago, a close friend mentioned to me that he had most of his liquid cash tied up in ARS. For him, it was a good news / bad news story as he needed access to the cash, but was able to borrow against it at a much lower interest rate that his ARS reset to (in almost all cases, if the auctions fail, the interest rates get reset higher – sometimes much higher.) So – while he’s now borrowing against his own money (er … ok) he’s at least making some points on the spread.
I hadn’t ever heard of ARS so I sent a note to the firm that manages my bond portfolio and asked "do we have any ARS." It turns out that we only had one – a Denver International Airport bond that reset to an interest rate 150% higher than it was previously paying. The amount of cash tied up didn’t impact me so I was / am perfectly happy to get the higher interest rate while the bond is illiquid.
A couple of days later I got a note from Silicon Valley Bank – where a number of our portfolio companies bank – announcing that they don’t have any auction rate security exposure with any of their clients. It hadn’t occurred to me that our portfolio companies might have any of their money tied up with ARS since our default investment policy for portfolio companies is "keep your money in 100% liquid things like money market and treasuries." So I sent out a note to a couple of banks to check. Simultaneously, I heard from one of our companies (not one that I was on the board of) that they did have a bunch of their money in ARS’s. This prompted me to dig in a little deeper, especially with that particular bank.
Since most of the companies I’m on the board of bank at either SVB or Square 1, my investigation was easy. Square 1 – like SVB – has no ARS exposure so all of those companies were fine. I had one company that banked at the same place that our other portfolio company did (which it turns out – had half of their cash tied up in an ARS – unbeknownst to them since the bank has provided it as part of the "as safe as cash" investment opportunities.) A couple of days and several emails and a phone call later, I determined that (a) the company I was on the board of had no exposure, and (b) the bank was trying hard to convince people that there was no issue, yet they were doing it by dodging the direct question until you asked them verbally.
In the middle of all of this, a TechCrunch article came out titled 20% Of Valley Startups Can’t Get To Their Cash. While this alarmed me at first, it didn’t tie with the results of my investigation into our portfolio. Either my companies are all brilliant at cash management (unlikely), I’m incredibly lucky (possibly), or most of our companies bank with folks that didn’t get tangled up in ARSs (true – SVB and Square 1.)
My personal cash in the ARS is still in it (the auction hasn’t restarted) and I’m happily getting 150% of the interest payment I was getting before. The bond doesn’t come due until 2010 (and I usually hold individual bonds through to maturity) so check back in a couple of years to see if this has worked its way through the system.
Return Path has 50 open positions in Colorado, New York, and Europe. The specific job page has detailed descriptions – all applications / resumes go to jobs@returnpath.net. Who said email is dead?
Marc Andreesen has a scathing but brilliant post up today titled Congratulations, you’re paying Jimmy Cayne’s marijuana bills! I love Marc’s analysis of what Bear Stearns would have been worth if the Federal Government hadn’t backstopped the deal with a $29 billion loan.
The US taxpayer is loaning Bear Stearns and JP Morgan Chase, Bear Stearns’ acquirer, $29 billion — just revised from $30 billion, simultaneous with JP Morgan Chase raising its acquisition price for Bear Stearns to $10/share from $2.
Without that $29 billion of taxpayer money, Jimmy Cayne’s stock would be worth $0/share, and if you multiply that by 5.66 million shares, the total would be $0.
The $29 billion taxpayer loan is almost certain to lose money as it is being used to backstop stinky assets on the Bear Stearns balance sheet — the same assets whose plummeting fall in value catalyzed Bear Stearns’ effective bankruptcy.
It is virtually certain that taxpayers are going to take some loss on that $29 billion loan.
When we do, we will have the immense satisfaction of knowing that the first $61.3 million of those losses represent a direct cash transfer from US taxpayers to Jimmy Cayne.
It will be interesting if Cayne comes to this same conclusion and gives the $61m back to the government after some of the $29 billion (say – the first $61m) gets vaporized.
Time to actually figure out the real job board thing on this blog since I’m now posting job notices a couple of times a week (feel free to comment if you provide these things and I’ll try them out and pick one.) There has been plenty of response to the job postings so I assume those of you that don’t care are just filtering them out and those of you that do are appreciating them!
Rally Software is actively recruiting sales people. On Thursday April 17th from 5:30pm – 7:30pm they are having a Sales Recruiting – Speed Interviewing event. It’s happening at Bacaro at 921 Pearl Street in Boulder.
Over the past few years, Rally has grown to be one of the largest and fastest growing software companies in Boulder. They recently passed 100 people on their way to 150 at the end of this year. I’ve worked with them from the beginning – it’s an awesome team that is just crushing it. Send cfields@rallydev.com a note if you are a sales hunter who wants to join a winner.
P.S. Hey mom – notice that I used "who" correctly this time instead of "that." Special bonus points.
As I was reading through my RSS feeds this morning, I came across Graeme Thickins reposting of the Google 2007 Annual Letter (this year written by Larry Page.) It a good one – written in plain, straightforward English. Worth a careful read for anyone that interacts with The Google.
The guys at Slice of Lime are looking to add a Boulder-based PHP Web Developer to their team. If you fit the bill and are looking for a great gig, send Kevin Menzie a note.