Amelio is a smart and impressive man, and he’s known for leading the team that developed the first commercial CCD sensors while working for Fairchild Semiconductor. He later became CEO of another chip manufacturer, National Semiconductor, where he was instrumental in restructuring the company and helping it to regain profitability. Amelio was there to give us confidence after Apple had been pretty bruised under John Sculley and Michael Spindler.

It wasn’t an encouraging visit.

I remember Amelio going on and on about the past problems at Apple, and how he was going to fix them. Click here for an Apple video of ‘the speech.’ He had a long list of fixes, but what was lacking was a coherent, compelling vision. He was going to do ‘something’ about the clones, finally replace System 7, and settle down all the politics and warfare between Apple divisions.

I had some specific questions, but he dodged them. It wasn’t convincing, and I wondered if Apple was going to pull itself out of what seemed a certain death spiral. After killing Copland and failing to make a deal for the BeOS, Amelio invested in NeXT and brought Steve Jobs back to Apple. At the end, Amelio got Apple back to making a small profit, after years of losing millions. It was a tiny victory, but certainly not a turn-around.

Amelio was finally ousted from Apple in July 1997 via a boardroom coup engineered by Jobs. The rest is history.

As someone who was there, I don’t think Amelio has gotten credit for what he did, only blame for what he couldn’t. So a few quick words in defense of Amelio might be in order.

Michael Spindler left behind an exceptionally broken company that was bleeding from all pores. Product quality sucked. Morale sucked. Inter-division fights and politics had many company operations almost at a standstill. The company proceeded to lose over a billion dollars in a quarter, which even today is a lot of money.

He fixed a lot of things. He staunched most of the flowing red ink. He restructured QA. He re-arranged the product lines away from Spindler’s ongoing disasters.

He stabilized the patient. He kept it alive until they cold transport the patient to a medical team that could patch it up properly. Without Amelio, Apple would not have lasted long enough to allow Steve to figure out how to turn it around.

One of the things he did was NOT buy Gassee’s company, Be. The general consensus on the inside of Apple at the time was Gassee felt Apple had no other options and got greedy on the pricing. True? I wasn’t there. But the expectation among all of us was that Be and Gassee was coming, and then all of a sudden it was off, and then all of a sudden, it was Steve. And the rest was history. It went against the common thinking of the time, and it can’t have been an easy decision to bring back a company founder and someone who clearly could make a play for control of the company (and ultimately did). It took some serious guts to make that call, and Amelio did it.

Now, there were things Amelio couldn’t do. He was a numbers guy. He tried to connect to the geeks and couldn’t. they never seemed to warm to him, and so he struggled to motivate and work on morale. He wasn’t really a product innovator; the national semiconductor background is as a jellybean semiconductor company where product generations are tied to fairly discrete improvements. The product like didn’t catch on fire as much as it used to, but it still didn’t inspire. He fought organizational intransigence but didn’t seem willing to put heads on stakes; he wanted to convince people to follow him instead of realizing that sometimes, you have to not give them the option of saying no, and killing them if they don’t obey.

That wasn’t a problem for Steve. And it was necessary; a few public beheadings in front of IL1, where division heads who played the “I outlasted the last two CEOs, I can ignore you until you’re gone” game suddenly went away, and all of the other people who were putting their own priorities ahead of Apple either straightened up or ran for the exits.

Steve was the reconstructive surgeon in Tokyo who did the reconstructive surgery and made the patient healthy and pretty again, but Amelio was the guy in the Mash tent near enemy lines who kept them alive long enough to get there. (and if I want to stretch this analogy into silliness, that would make Mike Spindler north korea, not Microsoft. IMHO. but I won’t go there).

So while Steve did a transformation on the company that I still marvel at (even as I watched it happening from the inside), that was possible because of the foundation that was laid before he returned, and that foundation was laid by Gil Amelio. And generally, he doesn’t get much credit for that. Mostly because he’s not Steve, and Steve is a hard act to follow (or precede).

And then there’s that great unanswerable question: what if they had bought Be instead of NeXT and brought in Gassee instead of Jobs? What would Apple be today? Or would it just be a memory of what once was?

If you really want to understand the impact of Steve Jobs on society, try to conceive of what our society would look like today if he had never been returned to Apple and never took it back over. Imagine a world without Apple, not just the products it ships, but the products it’s forced everyone else to innovate to keep up….

This world would be a much different place, and it’s hard to see many scenarios where it would be better off without him.

Today’s Shared Links for August 25, 2011

Thanks, Steve.

I happened to be having coffee today with an old friend today, someone who’d worked with me back at Apple. I got the news on Steve as I left the parking lot just after we’d broken up the party.

I’ve been pondering Steve and his impact on my life since. My direct interactions with him were quite limited; I almost ran over him once outside of Infinite Loop 1 as I was coming in for a meeting and he popped into the street without really looking, Jon Rubenstein and Eddy Cue in tow. He almost returned the favor once as he drove in to work as I was in the same crosswalk headed to yet another meeting on the loop. I spent a number of afternoons in his board room on the fourth floor in customer and vendor meetings, especially when open source companies like Zend were part of the discussion, because early on, I was one of the noisy ones about those technologies. He was never at those meetings, but his presence was.

I remember standing in IL1 one day when Fred Forsyth popped out of the stairwell and hurried out onto the street, and I realized he was using the stairs to avoid ending up in an elevator with Steve. He wasn’t alone. Steve could be — was — tried to be at times — a very intimidating person. His saving grace was that he held himself to the same standards he expected of others. Too few leaders do that.

Mostly, I’ve been sitting back and realizing just want an impact the man has had on my life. not JUST my years at Apple, but all across my life. The Apple II was the first computer I used instead of peeked. I bought an early Mac — a 512K — and later put a massive ten gig hard drive on it via the floppy port, and upgrading it to a huge 2 megabytes of RAM. I never thought I’d fill that drive up.

I did, of course, and many drives since. I’ve spent some time tonight trying to think about how many Macs I’ve owned over the years, and in all honesty, I can’t. My time at Apple spanned the Mac II to the Mac Pro, an just stop for a second to think about how much these computers changed and how much power they gained in that time — and despite that and all of the enhancements added to the system over that time, someone familiar with a Mac Pro would find a Mac II usable, and vice versa. they’re both recognizably Macs.

One of the things that drove me in the last years at Apple was that I was in a situation where I could create things that allowed a company that was reshaping society the ability to do so; how often do you have the opportunity to “move the needle” in a meaningful way?

Steve moved that needle almost routinely. His “one more thing” became a cliche; underneath that cliche those one more things have transformed the world we live in.

I am who I am today in large part because of Steve. Not directly, but through the companies he founded and the products he built and the technologies he fostered; even more importantly, because of the people he brought in and mentored who turned into people that mentored me. Because of the thinking and attitudes he promoted and inoculated that became part of what I’ve become.

What makes me melancholy today is that this is clearly the end of an era. Pundits will now start proclaiming this the end of apple, of course, because that’s what pundits do. Eventually they’ll be right, too, because nothing lasts forever. But while there is nobody at Apple who can be Steve, the most important thing he did at Apple was build a team of people who each understand what is needed so that collectively they can carry on what Steve did. None of them alone is Steve; collectively, they have been taught to understand the how and why of Steve, and so I think Apple is going to be fine.

What makes me happy today is something even more important — that Steve chose to walk away on his terms, with his shield and not on it. He’s smart enough to pull back before life does it for him.

Here’s hoping he continue to enjoy his life on his terms without the pressures of trying to run a company like Apple, and be a person like Steve in that goldfish bowl he’s lived in. Now is his opportunity to just be Steve, be with his family and friends, and enjoy life on his terms. I do hope we as a society gives him that opportunity and doesn’t try to peek and peer more than he wishes us to.

So thanks, Steve. I’m the person I am because of you, what you did, the opportunities you created, and the attitudes and expectations you baked into those around you.

When I left Apple, I had a stack of pictures of mine printed, and I wrote up thank you notes to a bunch of people who’d been influences in my time there. the first one I did and delivered was to Steve. No idea if he got it or kept it; doesn’t matter, either. But it was important to me at the time to say thanks to a bunch of folks, and he was at the front of that line.

Tonight, I say thanks again, because you can never say it too many times.

Today’s Shared Links for August 24, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for August 23, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for August 22, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for August 21, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for August 20, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for August 19, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for August 18, 2011

Best Science Fiction Redux

Today’s Shared Links for August 17, 2011

Arrivals and Departures

I was going to make part of this blog entry my Wednesday in review, but then I got some other info, and things changed a bit…

But here’s a nice arrival: Matt Levine has started a blog. That name is probably not familiar even to most Sharks fans, but he has a long history in the San Jose sports market, he was employee #2 with the Sharks and their first Vice President of Business Operations. He was involved in almost every early key decision and hired many of the early staffers for the Sharks that built that operation and made it one of the great businesses in hockey (and in pro sports, for that matter). You can also, I believe, thank him — or blame him — for the color Teal.

There’s an amazing amount of knowledge and history of how pro sports here in the Bay Area became what it is today locked up in Matt’s brain (and much of it because Matt helped make it happen), and now he’s going to talk about it. If you’re at all interested in sports in the Bay Area, you should check it out.

Matt was one of the early contacts we had at the Sharks back when we were running the mailing lists; he always made time for us; he helped us with access and information when we needed it; we did occasional favors for him and the Sharks in return, and he and the team were very supportive of our efforts to try to foster an online fan enclave at a time when those things were new and nobody quite knew what that meant (and at one point, our research indicated that about 1 season ticket in 11 was controlled by a mailing list member, so it was to everyone’s benefit to work together to help share information).

One of the first people Matt hired in was Ken Arnold, who was the PR department and managed things like the program books and other marketing, PR and communications duties. He was another person we worked with a lot early on over at the Sharks. It’s sad to note that there was a restructuring on the business side of the organization today, and one of those laid off was Ken. Laurie and I both remember the day we wandered over to the Sharks offices to show Ken this fascinating new thing — something called a browser — and to talk about these strange things called web pages and how a team like the Sharks could interact with the fans on this internet thing with them. That was in (I think) 1994 or so, just after the Sharks moved into their offices in the bowels of the San Jose Arena, and the Sharks were the first team in the NHL with a web site — only fitting for a team lodged deeply in Silicon Valley. Ken has been a driving force of the Sharks online presence in recent years and really gets the whole “new media” thing.

It’s sad to see one of the really early builders of the organization move on; that’s life in pro sports and the valley, unfortunately. I don’t know what Ken’s plans are (if any), but I wish him godspeed and thank him for everything he’s done for us over the years. (and there are very few PR or MarComm groups that wouldn’t be a hell of a lot better with Ken in them here in the Valley; if you can survive and not burn out doing that in pro sports, high tech is going to be slow and boring in comparison; if you’re looking for that kind of person, I can probably make connections (or you can likely do so through the Sharks).

Most of the cutbacks the Sharks (okay, technically Silicon Valley Sports and Entertainment, which runs the non-hockey parts of the business) come from them shutting down a small side operation that did fulfillment of custom logos on various artifacts from T-shirts and hats to glassware; I think that business grew from the time when the Sharks were fostering light dates via secondary sports like Roller Hockey (remember the Rhinos?) and Indoor Soccer. Since they needed that ability for those teams, it got expanded as a general business and handled creation and manufacturing of these items for organizations and events around the valley (I MAY be wrong, but I believe some of the San Francisco Spiders merchandise was source through them). According to Dave Pollak of the Mercury News, nobody on the hockey side was downsized, but with the ones that were (Kent Russell, VP of sales and marketing being the only other name mentioned and another long time, early Sharks staffer that we maybe met once or twice) some long time Sharks history is now gone. Maybe not names most sharks fans would recognize, but names and people who made being a Sharks fan something enjoyable.

The other interesting note in Pollak’s column today is that the Sharks ownership have more or less decided not to replace Greg Jamison, who retired last year. Instead of bringing on a new CEO, the organizations are being run by the ownership group, with Doug Wilson on the hockey side and Malcolm Bordelon on the SVSE/business side reporting directly into the owners. Since I felt from day one that Bordelon was heir presumptive to replace Jamison, this doesn’t surprise me and I think it’s a reasonable (non-)decision; don’t forget that Wilson was heavily involved in the business aspects of the NHL Players Association after retiring and before coming on board with the Sharks, and an exceptionally savvy guy. In practice, I think this is a good move, and seems to give Wilson a little more (deserved) autonomy, and removes a layer or management from the organization, which I like. Most important, the right people (Wilson and Bordelon) are in the positions of authority, and that I fully agree with and support, however the structure is laid out.

Today’s Shared Links for August 16, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for August 15, 2011

T-Cells

Steve, Please Buy Us A Carrier!

Steve, Please Buy Us A Carrier! | Monday Note:

The idea came up during a “what if” conversation with my wife Brigitte, while walking along University Avenue in Palo Alto. What should Apple do with its almost beyond comprehension $76B in cash? The COO of the Gassée family is creative and practical, an abstract painter turned “lumber VAR”–she builds or rebuilds houses in Palo Alto. She’s not enthralled by technology and takes a utilitarian view of computers, phones, navigation systems, tablets…an attitude that provides a useful counterpoint to my sometimes overly-enthusiastic embrace of anything that computes. She immediately nixes a big acquisition that could dilute Apple’s culture, an aspect of the company that’s integrally important to Steve. She has no interest in financial engineering and concludes that Apple will continue to make small acquisitions that pose few cultural challenges–but small buyouts won’t solve the cash “problem”. What to do with all that money? As we chat, we walk by the wireless carrier stores: T-Mobile, a couple AT&T retailers (one is shutting down), Verizon and, next to the Apple Store, Sprint, a big store with a bored sales staff that easily outnumbers the customers. “Why doesn’t Jobs buy a carrier?” she asks, “He’d easily do a better job than these people….”

I was amused to see that Jean-Louis has also thought of the “Apple buys a carrier” idea. Good to see I’m not the only one seeing this as a fun speculation.

Still, I don’t see this as likely to happen. Although I must admit I find this recently issued patent intriguing in this context. Gassee has some interesting perspective on all of this, though; worth a read.

(hat tip: Technologizer)

Today’s Shared Links for August 14, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for August 13, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for August 12, 2011

more than you possibly want to know about RSS feeds…

Okay, I think I have the RSS feeds figured out. Maybe.

Here is what I’ve found out about why (some) folks are magically seeing partial RSS feeds from my blog all of a sudden, when I’ve told it to distribute full ones.

It turns out an RSS feed has two data components embedded, a <description> and and <content:encoded>. If you enable full RSS feeds, the full data goes into <content:encoded> but the description continues to be the wordpress excerpt, which if you don’t flag an explicit excerpt, is 50 words.

It also turns out some feed setups (firefox, evidently) use the <description>. Others use <content:encoded>. Google Reader seems to use <description> when you’re viewing a feed for subscribing, but the <content:encoded> for reading, so it does both, confusing the hell out of things until you figure this all out. It took some serious geeing into the raw feed data and some inspired googling to understand this (sigh).

So, it is perfectly possible to be pushing a full RSS feed and having people seeing a partial feed depending on their reader type. and yes, googling this shows I am not the first person to trip over this.

Lots of poking and prodding of the feed make it clear the full feed IS in there. As well as a truncated <description>. This is a feature, not a bug.

My solution: there is a wordpress plugin called “Excerpt Length” which lets you set the excerpt length (duh). I installed that, and set it to 3000. If I get THAT wordy in one post, you will thank me for truncating it. So now the <description> has the full text in it, unless I specifically choose to write an excerpt, which I rarely do. So this should work for everyone, at the cost of a larger RSS feed file.

Why did this suddenly start showing up on upgrading to the new look and feel? I don’t know. but my best guess is that the RSS files are being distributed with a different mime-type than the old one; probably actually following the standards, where the old one probably didn’t.

I could be wrong. Since this seems to fix things, I’m not really motivated to dig into the gory details. My testing shows it seems to be fine now. you?

chuq (more geeky fun for a friday than I’d planned for!)

Back in the house!

Canon 100 400mmIS

I’m happy to say that my lens is back from summer camp with the nice people at Canon’s repair depot. I haven’t had a chance to shoot with it yet, but I’m going to do so this weekend to test it out.

For those that have never had to have a lens repaired, the process is simple. It starts here, where you can create a repair request and log it into the system. You then ship the lens to them with the paperwork. When they receive it, they’ll inspect it and send you and estimate. You approve it and give them a credit card, they fix it and ship it back Fedex 2nd day.

One thing I’ve come to terms with is that to get the shots I want to get, I can’t always baby my camera gear. That doesn’t mean I toss it around or abuse it for no reason, but there is going to be some wear and tear over time. Plus, I’m a klutz, and I have been known to drop things once in a while. Or drop myself and use the camera as a cushion to soften the fall.

The fact is, the 100-400 has seen a lot of service; it’s over six years old, and in that time I’ve upgraded through four camera bodies (my original Rebel, the Rebel XT, my 30D, and now my 7D; I still carry the 7D and 30D as my second body). it’s been pretty flawless over that time, and I use it for as much as 90% of my photography, depending on what I’m doing. I figured it was it was due for a tuneup about this time last year but didn’t get around to it, but after I kinda dropped it on the Yosemite trip, I knew it needed to be looked at.

I was right; the repair cost me more than I’d hoped, but less than I feared — about $350 total, for a $1500ish lens after six years I can’t complain. Beyond general cleaning and refocusing, there was damage to the zoom mechanism and some parts in that assembly needed to be replaced, and that had knocked the len elements a bit out of alignment, which is why I saw some softness in it at some magnifications on the last shoot I did.

I’ve tested the zoom mechanism and it’s operating flawlessly now. I’ll take it out this weekend and do some test shots with it, then bring it home and pixel peep those, and then run it through the LensAlign and see if I need to adjust the micro focus (digression: for those interested in learning about the LensAlign or want a good practical guide to using it, check out the discussion of it on Arthur Morris’ blog; I’ll probably talk more about it after I run my lenses through).

Overall I’d rate the Canon repair process about a B+; the weak spot is that once you get past the estimate and approve the repair, you don’t get any estimated time for repair or status updates — the Canon web site says they try to return a lens in about seven days (but put a bunch of disclaimers on that); in my case, the time from approving the estimate to getting the notification the repair was finished was about 2 and a half weeks, and I was getting nervous enough I was about to start pinging them for a status update when they shipped it back. I’d really love to see them give some better visibility and set expectations based on how busy their techs are — even if they were to report the average hold time for the lenses currently being shipped back to others it’d be a nice step forward.

But other than that? The lens came back packed well enough to survive being dropped from a plane, which impressed me. It is definitely a lot cleaner than it was when it left, so they clearly took some time on it. Proof is in the pudding on how sharp the shots are when I hook it up to the 7D, but the process and the systems around the repair all seem very professional and straightforward. The biggest worry was putting the lens in a box and shipping it off to an unknown facility that first time, tracking numbers or no.

But now that I’ve done that once, I won’t worry about that as much. Not that I plan on making this a habit, mind you. But in reality, some preventive maintenance on the hardware probably isn’t a bad idea once in a while…

Today’s Shared Links for August 11, 2011

The coming pro sports economic crash

Unsold Premium Seating is Becoming a Structural Problem | The Business of Sports:

Unsold premium seating inventory is a rising problem in the sports industry. It is becoming more and more common to turn on the television for a game, only to see dark suites and swaths of empty club seats in the background. Most teams have approached this issue as a sales problem… making more sales calls, offering more creative discounts, etc. In my opinion however, this is not a sales problem, this is a structural problem. During the sports facility building boom that lasted from the early 1990’s to the mid 2000’s, most professional sports teams drastically ramped up their inventories of luxury suites and club seats. Prior to the building boom, the vast majority of seating revenues for sports teams were generated from general admission tickets, but now seating products focused on corporations and high-income individuals can account for as much as 25% of a franchise’s locally-generated income.

This is an interesting look at a growing problem. it’s hard to tune into a broadcast with some teams without noticing the wide swath of empty seats masquerading as fans — seats that were actually sold to corporations, but which they didn’t bother using. And now, as the economy turns, it looks like those seats are starting to turn into unsold (and expensive) inventory.

Not a surprise to me. I wrote about this back in 2007 after the Wall Street Journal did a piece on it. These kind of structural rejiggerings within stadiums and arenas were happening four years ago. Even then, if you looked, you could tell that some teams were getting increasingly desperate (or greedy) about pushing revenues by pushing high margin (um, luxury or service-enhanced) seating options.

Arena design and sports financing are kind of hobbies for Laurie and myself, going back to the days when Laurie’s masters thesis involved helping the San Jose Giants get their stadium upgrades financed. We visited the Portland Rose Garden shortly after it was built, and found the design and ambience really sad and disappointing (and to be honest, that building has been a disappointment from a revenue standpoint); we did the same the year after Key Arena was rehabilitated for the Sonics, and look how well that worked out — it’s basically an empty building with a lot of unpaid bonds and a team that now lives in another state.

And I can’t say I’m surprised. The redesign up there was — arrogant. It was one of the early buildings to build in a cloistered mezzanine floor for luxury seats, taking secondary seats and hitting them with magic fairy dust to get premier pricing out of them. The Rose Garden does the same thing, and we sat in them one night and ended up sneaking out (easier said than done given all of the locked doors “protecting” us from the common fans) and finding empty seats down on the main level.

There’s been a massive growth in revenue in pro sports over the last 30 years; the change in economics has been stunning. Much of this has been driven by television, but teams have gotten very scientific about understanding demand for seats and have spent a lot of time and energy trying to drive pricing to the maximum possible price, and for a number of years, this has worked.

For all the cries by the fan with “normal” paychecks that tickets have gotten to expensive, the reality is that these tickets were still being sold. If it’s sold, it’s not too expensive (whether you’re canibalizing your future sales is another question; whether you’re allowing future generations access to become fans is a good question — given owners tend to turn teams over to new owners before they have to worry about that, do they care? they should, but do they?). of course, only an idiot would believe this kind of pricing growth would continue indefinitely, and it’s pretty clear, especially with the recession and the economic downturn, that the glory days are done and that revenue is going to at best stagnated.

This is especially true given the massive changes going on in the TV industry; I believe TV revenues have peaked, or are close to it, and it’s unclear that the alternate video distribution methods that are starting to spring up will equal the numbers leagues are getting out of CBS, NBC and ABC; the networks are trying to figure this out (see NBC’s big move into regionals and repackaging of Versus, for instance), but I sure wouldn’t want to build an economic model for a team or league that assumes continued growth. Sorry, athletes who presume 10% raises every year coming out of college.

Buildings that aren’t flexible about reconfiguration are in trouble (I’m looking at you, Portland and Anaheim). Compare that to places like San Jose, where they were smart enough not to overbuild (keeping the building smaller and more intimate — they could have built a 20,000 seater, and didn’t — but more importantly, not overbuilding luxury boxes or building inflexible premium seating. Vancouver’s building is very similar, so if demand drops, they can change their pricing structure without massive pain.

To me, San Jose’s building is a model of how the future looks; in the last few years, they moved by adding the party pavilions; they’re premium seating is not driven by in-arena cloistering but by using a club area where access is manageable; that allows them to grow of shrink the luxury seating areas if they absolutely need to. Beyond that, they never got overly greedy on pricing, and have worked hard at keeping areas in the arena affordable and available day of game so that parents still can take kids to a game without a mortgage. They clearly left some potential revenue on the table — but they also hedged their bets and aren’t as exposed to the economic downturn, and haven’t gutted their future fan base at the expense of maximizing revenue today. That kind of long-term future thinking is unfortunately fairly rare in many areas of pro sports (but NHL hockey seems, because it never got so addicted to the needs of network TV revenues, not as greedy as other sports and more forward thinking).

The next five years are going to be fascinating. Painful for some teams and leagues, but fascinating. Here in the bay area, if you’re a building and finance geek, ti’s an absolute circus — we have the 49ers who absolutely botched the Hunters Point project and now are trying their damnedest to screw up the Santa Clara stadium. You have Al Davis and the city of Oakland. You have Lew Wolff, who was handed a deal in Fremont and botched it, because deep down inside he always wanted the team in San Jose. Oakland has some weird new plan to revitalize the coliseum area and magically turn it into Downtown Disney, but I’m paying no attention to that because it has zero chance of happening. Ditto any time San Francisco pops up to say they’re still in the game for, well, pretty much anything. The Oakland arena refurbish for the Warriors wasn’t as disastrous as the Key arena rehab was for Seattle, but it was far from a success (the only building with that footprint where it seems to have gone okay was Phoenix; all of those cookie cutters just need to be torn down, they do nothing well).

So while the Giants succeeded massively with their park despite everything san francisco could do to screw them up, and San Jose’s Sharks are solid if not printing money, the A’s need a park desperately, the Raiders need a park desperately, the Warriors need — god knows, but what they have hasn’t worked. the Kings up in Sacramento are in a building that’s not even AAA worthy any more, and, oh, who cares? answer: nobody.

So we have four teams in a six team market that have arena/stadium problems. The 49ers will figure out a way to not screw up the Santa Clara deal, but I expect continuing amusement watching them try. I also think that at some point the NFL will broker a deal for that stadium to be shared with the Raiders the way the New York stadium is, because there simply isn’t money available to build two NFL caliber stadiums in this region any more. So that’s two of the teams. (IMHO, the gating item on getting the Raiders do join into the 9er stadium deal is Al Davis. and the 49ers dislike of the idea of dealing with him; if Al Davis weren’t in the way, this would likely be a no-brainer).

The warriors have a relatively new building with a mediocre redo, but new owners. Hopefully, they’ll help. the old ones never impressed me. By all that’s sane, the Kings should move to Anaheim already, except I think the NBA really wants the Clippers there and are waiting for an owner that’s sane. So I nominate the Kings as the first Las Vegas team, although I’m not sure they can outdraw the Rebels. (more likely, Kansas City).

And the A’s? Rule 1: ignore anything Oakland says, they are incapable of making it happen. Lew Wolff I just can’t figure. Smart real estate guy who had what I thought was a no-brainer project in Fremont and gave up on it way too easily. I still don’t understand why, and I followed it fairly closely. My best guess is deep down inside he always wanted the team in San jose (but wanted the land in Fremont to develop, and needed the Fremont project to get those permits). And the San Jose stuff?

Dear everyone who thinks the A’s are coming to San Jose (especially you, Mr. Purdy): ain’t gonna happen. Not the way this is being done.

The A’s have been waiting for Selig for what, two years now? On this territorial issue, silence speaks volume: a lack of answer is an answer. if Selig had any intention of letting this happen, it would have happened.

And here’s what the unspoken elephant in this sitting room really is: Wolff wants to get territorial rights to San Jose without paying the Giants what the Giants want for it (I’m guessing at least $50 million, probably $80. if I’m the Giants, my asking price is $100m and then we negotiate). The Giants have no intention of giving it up for free. Wolff has played the San Jose folks and public pressure to try to convince Selig to give him the territory for free, or to set a lower price for it.

Seligs silence, I think, is really saying he’ll approve the deal, at a price both teams agree to. If he were to publicly say no, it’d kill any move to San Jose and then he has a REAL issue with the A’s and a lousy stadium and no options. But he won’t cut Wolff a sweetheart deal here. So he sits back and says nothing and waits for Wolff to go to the Giants and bargain. And Wolff doesn’t want to pay market price. And so we sit.

So I declare the san jose deal dead, unless someone has a spare $80 million to give Wolff to pay for the territory he’s unwilling to buy. If I were selig? I’d do exactly what seems to be happening, which is leaving these two teams to work out a market value and not mucking around with the territory rules. I can’t decide if the city of san jose really is naive? or if playing naive is part of the plan. I don’t think it matters, enough time has gone on to realize if it was a plan, it didn’t work. So, sir Wolff, either open the pocket book, or go back and figure out how to unscrew up the fremont deal. Or sell the team and cut your losses — because honestly, I think Wolff was more interested in the real estate than the team from the start, and in this current economic climate, I can’t see that he can make the real estate work any time soon, either.

So my current view of the A’s is “screwed, basically”, and I bet if major league baseball went to Wolff privately and whispered the word “contraction”, he’d sign the paperwork so fast you’d hear the sonic boom. And I don’t think I’d blame him.

Because really, the A’s can’t stay in their current stadium, they can’t fix it up until they get rid of the Raiders (and 99% of oakland city government and most of the populace); there really isn’t a place they can move to, there’s no convenient empty stadium they can threaten to head to to get a deal for a building. The best option might be BC place, and given the CFL schedule, that really sucks, too. So there really isn’t a good solution here.

(actually, my favorite solution was always a stadium out in the pleasanton area, on the bart line, given how strongly the A’s core attendance demographic ties to the BART line. the big weakness of the fremont proposal was that it didn’t deal with that aspect).

Or maybe this will all magically work out. In this economic crisis? I doubt it. But it’s going to be fun to watch, as long as you aren’t financially tied to it. If you are? my sympathies.

Because the only thing I know is true is that the golden days of pro sports are ending, and anyone who expects the next ten years of economics to look like the last 15 is going to be seriously disappointed. (and that’s not a bad thing, in the greater scheme of things…)

Today’s Shared Links for August 10, 2011

Wednesday’s in Review: City of Ruins by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

City of Ruins is Kris Rusch’s sequel to Diving Into the Wreck, which I reviewed back in June. It carries forward the story of from Diving into the Wreck, with the Boss now running an organization committed to acquiring as much of the stealth technology as it can to keep it out of the hands of the Empire and maintain the balance of power. There’s are reports that seem to indicate there might be stealth technology on a planet instead of in deep space, and while the Boss is skeptical, she pulls a team together to go and investigate.

To say “it’s complicated” is an understatement. The planetary government has secrets it would rather not be discovered. The Boss and her team make discoveries that include stealth technology, but definitely not the kind of find they were expecting. Rusch weaves in a completely independent plot line, except it’s really not, and I don’t want to say more than that because it’d be a spoiler. There’s a major earthquake, a first contact sequence, one heck of a chase scene with a “nick of time” escape, and what you end up with is a really fun, high energy romp.

The reader (and the Boss) also take big leaps forward in the understanding of the stealth technology and the ancient history that these derelict ships came from, and the history of how things got to this point in time becomes much clearer.

She also does something I love, and which happens all too rarely in series books — she brings this book to a perfectly satisfactory ending while at the same time clearly setting up the structure for future books and showing hints of where this series is going to go in the future. Too often authors fall too much in love with the overarching story arc and forget to tell the series as a set of solid independent stories, but Rusch avoids that trap. Both City of Ruins and Diving into the Wreck are in depending stories within a larger story, rather than extended chapters.

Oh, and Rusch leaves a subtle but clear sign that uber-loner Boss is going to find her reality complicated even more than expected in future books by a personal relationship. How Rusch handles that should be fascinating….

These books are fun, high energy action adventure science fiction. You don’t need to think too hard, but they don’t fall apart if you poke at them and consider what’s going on underneath the chase scenes. Solid entertainment and well worth your time to grab a copy and spend an evening with them. For best results, read them in sequence, but both books do stand alone if you choose not to.

Highly recommended.

Today’s Shared Links for August 9, 2011

about that logo….

New logo

So, one of my loyal readers had this comment on the new logo:

Please forgive me for saying it, but I’m not a big fan of the logo.

Consider yourself forgiven. I mean, seriously. I spent literally minutes on the logo (seriously). It continues my tradition of silly logos that aren’t intended to be more than something that looks like I put it together on the fly (which I did).

The logo on the previous generation of the site (which I will allow to fade into eternity, where it belongs) was intended to invoke the early days of the web when photoshop was new and bevels were state of the art. it was intended to be somewhere between kitschy and annoying, and when I got email from a friend 30 minutes after launching that said “Dude! did you ship with the placeholder instead of your real logo?” I knew I’d succeeded.

This one’s moved a little further along the evolutionary path where things are now rounded instead of edge beveled. I use three fonts here (bickham script pro, Book Antiqua, and our dear old friend, zapf dingbats), because I wanted the script but bounded by something a little stronger and with some character. The dingbat is actually one i used typographically in my printed copies of OtherRealms back in the 80′s, and so actually has a quiet historical significance only I care about. and besides, without it, the logo seemed unbalanced and needed — something. so why not?

And that pretty much defines the design between the logo? “Why not?” — it’s harmless, and to some degree, it’s designed to revel in my not being a serious graphic designer. Which is what I like.

So if you don’t like it, I guess I succeeded again. Which is fine. about all I can guarantee is that next time I redesign the site, I’ll change the logo again, and if I ever get serious, I’ll have it designed by a real designer. But I’m not in any hurry about that….

Today’s Shared Links for August 8, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for August 7, 2011

Introducing the updated Chuqui.com

I’m happy to announce the updated chuqui.com. the new blog look and feel is now live. Please wander on by and let me know what you think.

Last year for my birthday I completely revamped the blog with a new look and feel after years of benign neglect. At that time, I had some idea of what I wanted but was still thinking through a lot of things, and WordPress (the software that lies underneath) had released version 3, but a lot of the support tools and themes were still figuring out how to take advantage of and support the 3.0 capabilities.

I’ve been experimenting with things over the last year, trying to decide what my focus should be and what tweaks work and which ones don’t. One big push when I updated the blog last year was looking for ways to encourage people to explore the site and see what other content was here, trying to break the bounce-glance-bounce behavior you see among many people. The new site both improved how long people stayed on the site and how many pages they viewed per visit, so I feel that was a success.

I came to think the blog still looked somewhat disorganized and cluttered, though, so in June, I decided to do it again and take what I’ve learned in the last year and see if I could make it better.

My focus this time was on cleaning up the navigation and really tightening a lot of the secondary material, simplifying the sidebars and making everything a lot easier to find. I also wanted to improve the typography and make the blog more readable. I also wanted to improve how the photography looked on the page.

Once again I did the redesign using a commercial them (in this case, Dandelion) I bought through Themeforest. I would love to build a theme absolutely from scratch exactly the way I want — but I really don’t want to invest 200 hours or so doing so, not when I can pay $35 for the first 90% of the job and spend 15 hours customizing and designing around that base. It took me about two weeks to decide on Dandelion as the new theme, and I’m quite happy with the result. It’s very solid, the markup looks good (better than my previous theme) and it worked as advertised and I ended up not needing to go into the guts of the theme at all to fix things. I really like the jquery integration which gives me some nice options I plan on experimenting with.

I think I’ve succeeded at improving the site, but time (and you) will tell. What really matters is what you think? Wander by, look around, and let me know what you like and what you don’t like….

Today’s Shared Links for August 5, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for August 4, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for August 3, 2011

Half Dome; The Magnificent and the Brutal

Today’s Shared Links for August 2, 2011

Price isn’t the point

Today’s Shared Links for August 1, 2011

Every Hockey Site Needs A Goalie Expert
Don’t get burned!
✚ We Just Want to Read
Another one of those great Hollywood stories
Different Kinds of Writing and Different Reasons to Write
Connections Continued: On Social Media and Photography

Laurie talking goalies

I’m happy to note that Laurie’s back and writing about hockey again (finally!), and her first column over at Kukla’s Corner is now live. She’s going to be talking goalies, which if you remember the old Sharks list was one of her specialties. I’ve been encouraging her to get back in the pundit game for a while, and I’m damn glad to see she’s doing this, and those of you who know her ought to wander by Kukla’s and say hi.

chuq (this must mean hockey season is approaching…)

$80 billion dollars is a lot of money….

Apple’s $76.2 billion cash hoard: Six frivolous ways to spend it | TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog:

One thing that staggers the mind is the amount of money Apple has on hand. During last Tuesday’s 3Q earnings call, it was announced that the company has US$76.2 billion cash on hand — actually a combination of cash, short-term investments, and other items that would take an accountant to sort out. While Apple CEO Steve Jobs has publicly stated that “we do feel that there are one or more strategic opportunities in the future” as the reason to have all that money on hand, I thought it would be more fun to think about ways to spend $76.2 billion on frivolous things.

Fun article, but Apple doesn’t buy things frivilously. I’ve felt for a while Apple’s cash position had a larger purpose, that larger purpose being that Apple has plans to buy something really, really big — when the time is right.

What thing?

Think a bit about how Apple has succeeded. It’s succeeded by taking an industry and finding a way to disrupt it; to change the rules such that the industry leaders are weakened and Apple’s position is strong. It did this in computers by taking an industry that was rife with beige boxes and marketing messages around gigahertz and megabytes and convincing consumers it really was about style and looks and getting things done; a computer to use, not a computer to geek, and one that won’t clash in the living room.

Ditto music; it’s hard to remember now, but iTunes and the whole online music thing was a big experiment and risk. But Apple is now the dominant player in music sales not because they took on Tower and Wal-Mart directly, but because they disrupted the industry and shifted consumer demand into areas Apple could sell to where the existing players couldn’t tread. By the time the industry reacted, Apple had taken the business away.

If Apple learned nothing else from the Mike Spindler era, it was that standing up to a 800 pound gorilla and expecting to beat it going head to head is a stupid idea. the real profit is in changing the game, disrupting an industry such that the current leaders can’t compete soon enough to keep Apple from taking a chunk of it away.

So if you want to see where Apple is looking to future growth and new endeavours, look both at what it’s strong at (consumer electronics, large back-end infrastructures, style and finish and design, and strong customer support) and then consider what industries might be vulnerable to Apple deciding to come in and take off a hunk in an Apple way.

What industry has a strong consumer component, significant technology needs, huge back end infrastructures and low customer service rankings? Our friends, the wireless carriers (and secondarily our other friends, our ISPs that feed broadband into our houses).

The problem with taking on carriers is they have all sorts of built in chokepoints: it’s a brutally expensive industry to get into, and even if you have the cash, you have the problem of acquiring frequency spectrums (licensed by the US goverment) and cell tower permits (licensed by local governments full of NIMBY no-sayers), and it would take years to build out a network — all the while, the other carriers would ahve time to see you coming and get ready for the fight. You also need a massive back end infrastructure to manage provisioning, billing, customer service and things like email and the like. And you need to build up the technology to replace existing carriers SIM cards and the inherent lock-in of devices they cause.

But what if you’re Apple? And you have iCloud, a back end infrastructure already designed to support millions of iPhones and iPads? And you have iPhones and iPads, meaning you don’t need to worry about a handset manufacturer leaking your plans to the other carriers. And you have, oh, $80 billion dollars IN CASH hanging around getting bored?

The SIM lockout issue is a problem, unless you’ve developed your own (which rumors have surfaced that Apple is working on). The other entrance chokepoints — spectrum and cell tower placement?

Apple has $80 billion in cash. Sprint’s market cap is about $16 billion (roughly). Clearwire’s is under a billion. Apple could buy a carrier tomorrow — basically out of petty cash — at a good market bump over the stock value so that Wall Street smiles on the deal. Given Apple isn’t currently in that market, anti-trust issues should be minimal. Given financing is more or less “we’ll write you a check”, they won’t need to spend months building up the financing package — they could decide to do this and get the deal closed in 180 days. maybe 90. So fast no other carrier could even issue a press release complaining about it much less try to shift its business to compete against it.

But if Apple were to just walk into this business and act like another carrier? It won’t bother. It doesn’t just want to be “Sprint as Apple”, it’d be “Sprint as leverage to take over the industry” because that’s what Apple does best. So it won’t just buy a carrier to act like a carrier, will it?

Imagine this scenario. Apple announces a deal to buy Sprint (and for the hell of it, Clearwire). It announces that you will be able to buy iPhones with an Apple custom SIM in them, either on contract/subsidized, or off contract and unlocked. If you want to just buy a sim and put it in some other phone, Apple will sell you service, happily, month to month, pre-paid. whatever works. They add provisioning and account management for this to iCloud. Going to Europe? log in, buy a block of minutes in the countries you’ll be visiting, and Apple acts as the wholesaler for it. (goodbye, evil overseas roaming rates). Make buying minutes as easy as buying the new Coldplay album. if you want subsidized phones and bundles, cool. If you want to pay by the minute or pre-pay. cool. Lots of data? really cool.

Sprint would give them the spectrum to prevent carriers from freezing them out by refusing to let them buy minutes off of the other networks, making them a player in the business. There’s no need for Apple to use that spectrum the way sprint did, they can reshape the business away from the “locked in phone long contract” model endemic in the US in favor the european model. They don’t even care if it’s an iPhone or another model – just plug in the SIM and they’ll sell you network (of course, if you buy an iPhone, they make even more money).

Apple could walk in, buy sprint, disrupt the entire wireless industry and if they do it right, grab a huge chunk before any other carrier could react to the changes. And do it for $30 billion or so, leaving them another $50billion in the bank for investment in the infrastructure or to buy other toys.

If this is such a good idea, why hasn’t Apple done it already? First, they’ve needed to build out the iCloud infrastructure, and that’s still ongoing. That North Carolina datacenter has plenty of cycles, but they need to get the software in place and get it ready for the provisioning. Lion/IO5/iCloud are the first pieces that make this possible. They’d have to get all of the infrastructure pieces ready, though.

Second reason they haven’t? It makes no sense to make a move into being a carrier now, at the tail end of the “3G era”. The real 4G (not the faux-G being marketed right now) is just rolling out. My guess would be Apple would do this when it could make a national 4G presence and not worry about a 3G legacy customer base, and put all of its investment in building out and upgrading the 4G network. Even though the first true 4G phones are hitting the market, 4G networking is still not quite ready for prime time in enough cities; but in six months? 9 months? it’s coming. If I were Apple, I’d wait until 4G was reasonably well rolled out and then make a move like this. Not before. but definitely, 2012 is a sweet spot for being rolled out without allowing the other carriers to get entrenched in 4G.

If Apple were to do this right, there’s a huge opportunity to disrupt another industry and make a huge amount of money out of the disruption. Even if Apple maintains most of the existing carrier model — simply having a company with working web sites and billing that’s not byzantine and networks that work would be a huge competitive advantage (and Apple, if nothing else, would not tolerate mediocre networks with its name on it).

But there’s one other opportunity for disruption this would create. Remember I keep mentioning Clearwire? they’re a big piece of Sprint’s 4G buildout strategy, but this is also a “last mile” wireless broadband network strategy as well. Think about one of Apple’s big risks in it’s shift to the cloud — it’s ISPs and the growing shift towards data caps and “managing” network traffic.

So what if Apple not only went into the carrier business, but leveraged that to go into the wireless ISP business? Offered you 4 megabits down for half the price of Comcast, using 4G wireless and with no data caps? You think that might put a dent or two in the copper ISP plans to go to tiered (and increasingly expensive) usage based pricing plans?

Hmm.

do I think this is likely? Absolutely not. This isn’t rumor, this is just raw speculation, based on a few nights talking with friends over some really nice bottles of wine, and a few random intersting rumorlets about Mama Fruit. And, frankly, a wish for a wireless carrier that didn’t make me feel like an enemy, or at best a number. If you look at the wireless carrier industry, it’s ripe for a disruption — but doing so would be exceptionally difficult and expensive. Not many companies could do it, because not many companies have both the technology background, consumer experience, and capital available to make the investments to walk in and deal with the roadblocks in the way.

Apple, and it’s $80 billion dollar war chest, iCloud infrastructure and consumer savvy, seems to be the one company that could do it. If it chose to. And even if it took a $50 billion dollar total investment (more than twice what sprint is currently worth) — it still have a huge cash hoard to do things with.

So, no, I don’t think this is likely. But it’d be fun to watch the screaming if they try it, and I wouldn’t bet against them succeeding. And if nothing else, it’s a fun speculation to try to work out the details and see if it still makes sense when there isn’t a Barolo involved.

(have fun, don’t think too hard…)

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