Ever since I started teaching my 15 year old neighbor Ruby (and learning it simultaneously), I keep running into people who ask “why don’t you just learn / teach PHP?”  When I was up in Seattle, I met with Scott Collison who is running a neat company called Ohloh whose goal is to “map the open source world by collecting objective information on open source projects.”  Neat.

Robin Luckey at Ohloh was about to release an article titled PHP Eats Rails for Breakfast.  Before you devolve into the standard flame war with the “PHP is a language; Rails is a framework; you are an idiot” rhetoric, the article is really about PHP vs. Ruby vs. Python vs. Perl.  And – the data (and results) that Ohloh and Robin have put together are fascinating.  Following are the key graphs from the article.

PHP dominates the new lines of code and only PHP and Ruby are on a steady curve upward.  Yeah – I know that “number of lines of code” is not a great measure, but none of these languages are overly verbose so it’s an interesting proxy metric.

Active developers tells a different story.  While PHP is growing a little relative to the others, they all seem to have a relatively flat curve.  The well known shortage of Ruby developers is reinforced by this data, as well as the next graph.

This was the chart I found really interesting.  Ruby is clearly the trendy new language.  Given normal supply / demand lags, you’d expect that this is a leading indicator of a significant uptick for Ruby on the other two charts in 2007.  My conclusion is different than Robin’s – while PHP appears to be dominant today, the rapid growth in new projects in Ruby indicates that it is currently positioned as “the language of the next wave of applications.”  This is consistent with what I’m hearing and seeing from many new startups.

While I like TLAs, I much prefer short descriptive words.  I’ve been living in the world of “sync” for a long time, dating back to when – as an early Lotus Notes user – I discovered the joy of “replication.”  While Amy and I never had any replicants running around our house, I have always been infatuated with the notion of one copy of my data being available to me anywhere I happen to me with it always automagically being kept in “sync.” 

In the last few years, I’ve gotten sync working nicely with things other than email.  My Firefox bookmarks/cookies/history is now synced (thanks Google), my RSS stuff is now synced (thanks NewsGator), my files will soon be synced (thanks Tilana), my contact data is sort of synced (um – thanks Plaxo?), all my social networks are – er – wait a sec.  I like working on a desktop so I’ve got them scattered all over the place and – for the most part – whenever I sit down at one it works like all the others.  Except for all that new data I’m generating out there on the web in all those nifty new web applications that TechCrunch reviews every day that I feel compelled to create a user name and password for (wait – what about my password data – why isn’t that synced?)  Shit – maybe it doesn’t work so well.

I was in a meeting the other day where we were talking about two different data modalities whose instantiations are spreading like tribbles.  There are all kinds of fancy names for them – I like to think of them as “slurp” (as in my system can slurp in data from anywhere) and “spew” (as in my system can spew out data to anywhere).  Yeah – I know API’s and Web Services enable all this stuff – and that’s nothing new, but my dad understands slurp and spew a lot better.

The second order issues with slurp and spew are brutal.  Thanks – now I’ve got copies of my data everywhere.  But – unlike sync – when I change something on one system – the receiver needs to know what to do with it.  While sync might solve that, then everyone has to sync with everything and that won’t work.  Or – someone has to come up with a universal sync format – and that won’t ever happen.  Or – everyone just has to trust someone who then has to build a 100% uptime / 100% secure / 100% transparent system.  Yeah right.

A couple of companies that I’m an investor in are doing really clever things with slurp and spew.  I like those words – maybe they’ll stick.

Dan Bricklin was recently an expert witness in the Hyperion vs. Outlooksoft case that was tried in the US District Court in Marshall, TX.  Outlooksoft (the defendant) won – and Dan’s testimony was critical to invalidating the Hyperion patent.

Dan has two excellent essays up about this – his experience in the case and his general thoughts on Patent Litigation circa 2006.  Dan is a remarkably clear thinker and excellent writer (as well as general software wizard and hugely nice guy) – if you are interested in software patents, these two essays are a must read.

With all the focus and discussion around stuff like the Google – YouTube deal it’s easy to forget that there are lots of entrepreneurs out there working really hard to grow their businesses.  The culture of the tech industry has caused us to think in “monthly” and “quarterly” performance and – whether you think it’s good or bad – it is.  Q3 just ended so it’s a convenient time to look at some other macro indicators (e.g. how did private companies perform in Q3) to see how healthy the tech business is.

While I don’t struggle too much with the absolute quarterly performance of private companies, I’m very interested in quarterly performance relative to the company’s plan.  Q1 is usually pretty easy to make since the forecasts are brand new – if a company misses their Q1, something is fundamentally wrong.  Q2 is harder – but as long as there is some positive activity – it’s usually achievable.

Q3 is the tough one.  Most annual plans assume a solid revenue ramp that becomes difficult “to fake” by Q3.  You’ve either got it, or you don’t. 

Now – making a quarter isn’t necessarily just about the top line. Among other things, I measure companies on revenue, gross margin, opex, EBITDA, net income, and cash.  You can underperform on the top line, but deliver better gross margins than expected, manage your opex, and beat your EBITDA / NI number.  This will qualify – in my book – as “making plan.”  I know way too many people that only focus on revenue – when a company makes its revenue number, blows everything else, they think it’s doing well (sometimes it is, usually it isn’t.)  The converse happens more frequently – a company misses their top line but – in my book – “makes plan” yet other investors around the table freak out.

I went through my direct portfolio (companies I sit on the board of) and several other companies that I’m close to (and used to be on the board of) to see how they did for the quarter based on my definition.  For companies with $500k / quarter or greater or revenue, 9 of 11 made the quarter.  This is significantly better than any Q3 that I can remember which is both a positive indicator of the leadership teams’ forecasting ability as well as the general health of the areas I invest in.  In addition, several of these companies are having a strong October, which means they didn’t drain their pipeline to “make Q3.”  For now, I’m optimistic about the balance of the year.

I love working with Seth – he always challenges my brain.  If you are “paying attention” and want to hear a great rant on the last year and how Seth sees it, check out his post Spying on Transparency.

I was in a meeting today in Redmond when someone mentioned something about Passport and Live ID.  It reminded me of something that happened a few weeks ago that I meant to write about, but forgot.

A few weeks ago, I was in a meeting at one of my portfolio companies using the CEO’s computer when I did something that caused a password request box to appear on some random website that I had surfed to.  I turned to the CEO and asked “what’s your password that everyone knows.” He laughed and said it out loud, which I then used to log in successfully to the random website.  I then turned to the person next to the CEO and said “What’s your password that everyone knows?”  He looked shocked and said “I don’t have one.”  I responded with “c’mon – of course you do.”  “Nope, he replied smugly.”  I then asked if his girlfriend knew any of his passwords.  His smug look disappeared – he had figured out which of his passwords everyone knew.

Do you have a password that everyone knows?  In our wonderful world of security, online identity, online storage, and hundreds of theoretically unique and secure systems that each of us use every week, do you ever wonder how secure you really are?

Ironically – the CEO’s password that everyone knows happens to be the same as the password of his previous business partner – that everyone knows.  Time to change a few passwords.

My partner Ryan McIntyre has another thoughtful post up about the “power in the data center problem.”

I felt like that wonderful Robin Williams character when I fired up FeedDemon this morning and saw the flood of patent posts from Jim Moore and then bounced around Google Groups for the Irregulars list and saw more commentary on the IBM Patent announcement.  Eventually, I noticed that Jim had taken me to task for cheerleading the IBM announcement without providing any critical analysis (I think I got classified by Jim as a “smart liberal” who – when “ultimately IBMs motives and plans will be revealed” – will “look like [a] fool.” Oops – I don’t think my mother will be proud of me when this occurs.)

I like Jim a lot, respect his thinking, and enjoy all of our interactions.  I slowly read through his flurry of posts (keep ‘em coming Jim) starting with his bash on the IBM announcement, his history of software patents in context, his short assertion about property rights, and his assertion that an innovator needs to be protected from having his or her ideas stolen during negotiation.

There’s a ton of stuff here that ironically highlights the point I was trying to make in the first place.  Our software patent system is completely screwed up.  I’m not focused on the first order effect – I’m focused on the second order effect – which is that as a result of the dysfunction, it’s actually a drag on innovation, not a protector of innovation. 

Now – I don’t necessarily believe that IBM’s approach is “the right approach.”  I’m cheering IBM for being public about trying to create change.  I’m not naive about IBM’s motivation for this – they are not altruistic – their goal is improvement in economic value for their shareholders in the long term.  However, I also don’t agree with Jim’s viewpoint that the patent system protects “the little guy” against “the big guy” and the reason folks like IBM want change is to gain an advantage over the little guy. 

Finally – I want to state the core of my problem with patents.  I think the US Patent System is great.  I love the notion of property rights for an inventor.  My problem is with how this gets applied to software (and – more importantly – what gets classified as non-obvious invention in the context of software.)  Unfortunately – in my experience – the vast majority of the software patents I’ve been exposed to simply do not pass the test of “non-obviousness” or are invalidated by prior art (the most annoying and entertaining ones are those that stuff I was involved in creating in my first company in the 1980’s actually invalidate.)  I made this point in my original “Abolish Software Patents” post.

I remember a speech from Ted Leonsis in the mid 1990’s where he said “online is going to be Microsoft’s Vietnam.”  Patents are becoming the software industry’s Vietman and I expect it’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better.

As I’ve written before, I’m a huge critic of the existing patent process, especially as it applies to software patents. Today, the NY Times has an article up describing how IBM will begin putting its patent filings online for public review. This is a huge positive step by IBM and shows real leadership in addressing our completely screwed up patent system.

IBM collaborated over the summer with a group of 50 experts from outside IBM to come up with a new approach to protecting intellectual property. The result of this effort is summarized in the report Building a New IP Marketplace. This is superb and exciting stuff. Since our government can’t seem to make any progress with this, I hope they’ll at least follow the leadership of some major industrial companies that while ultimately acting in their own self-interest (as they should) recognize that they get more economic benefit long term by fixing the underlying dysfunction.