Category Archives: Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Bay Area

Risk Aversion | Cap Watkins:

Was having an interesting conversation this morning with Om and Hunter about the recent firing of Richard Williamson from Apple over the Maps debacle. Hunter posed a question that, in hindsight, seems like such an obvious one to ask:

How does that make rest of co feel? Enforces ‘only ship quality’ or makes people risk averse?

It depends greatly on why he was fired. We don’t know for sure, since we aren’t there, but was he fired because the maps software was seriously flawed?

Or was he fired because he lied to his bosses about the quality of the maps software, or misled them about the status?

I’m willing to bet, from my time working at Mama Fruit and dealing with Eddy and his teams, that the latter has a big part to do with this firing. 

If you think about the reality of shipping something like IOS and the Maps software, it’s tightly integrated with the entire OS, so it’s not the sort of thing you can simply decide to not ship and stick the Google Maps back in. This isn’t the podcasts app, it’s a key, low-level part of the operating system. So if you think of this beast from a view of project management, the “go/no-go” on including maps was a year or so ago (or further), and after that, the train has left the station. If you don’t ship the maps stuff, it means you don’t ship IOS6. And if you don’t ship IOS6, it means you aren’t shipping iPhone 5. (the whole “why they had no choice but to ship Maps as they were” would be its own blog post…)

And that’s really bad. 

So you’re shipping. After that, it becomes a question of how you manage the situation. Do you keep everyone aware of the problems and work with all of the involved teams (marketing, etc) to set the right expectations? Or do you tell everyone it’s going to be great, craft a demo that avoids the problems and makes it all look perfect, and hope to god you get the bugs wrangled before anyone finds them?

One of the mis-steps of the IOS6 announcement to me in light of how Maps turned out in reality was the disconnect between how Apple sold it to us, and how it really worked day 1. That mistake was completely avoidable. Apple could have positioned the Maps software in a very different but positive way, acknlowedged the flaws and that they needed the users to help them identify and fix things — turn this into almost a game, give away store coupons for being the first to find problems. And said up front that there were going to be hiccups, but that in the long-term, this switch made the birthing pains worth it and everyone would benefit in time. 

The situation could have been completely defused. Instead, they way oversold Maps as awesome, and set themselves up for the face plant. 

Why? I kept going back to my view that if Apple management knew they were going to have to ship a buggy maps app, they wouldn’t have bugled how wonderful it was. But what if the real problems were hidden from them? What if the maps team hid the real problems? Crafted great demos and told everyone things were fine?

Then the rest of the teams wouldn’t know they were stepping on a landmine until it went off. 

And if you’re responsible for managing that fiasco up to your management and to the other teams relying on you? 

Well, you deserve your walking papers. 

Not saying that’s what happened here, but — it sure seems like a reasonable scenario based on my time there. And it sure seems a lot more rational than Apple knowing the Maps stuff was going to suck Day 1 and still selling the hell out of it at the announcement. I keep thinking that if Tim Cook knew the tool was going to be iffy on initial ship, he would have handled the announcement differently. 

So perhaps he didn’t know. And perhaps now, some heads are going on up pikes. Not for the software being bad, but for hiding it from the bosses…

And to tie that back to the original question, if he was fired for misleading the company about the quality of Maps, then frankly, most of Apple is probably cheering this (probably quietly). That’d be a good thing and a strong message to be sent through the company.

Sometimes, software doesn’t come together as fast or as well as you hope (I know, most of you are going “duh!” right now). That’s something that we all understand, and we can deal with in some way or another. Like, oh, not making it the focal point of the announcement keynote. 

But lying about it or hiding the problems so those you work with get sideswiped?

If there’s one thing bosses and co-workers hate, it’s unpleasant surprises. 

HP’s Smartphone Announcement ‘Soul Crushing,’ Says Matthew McNulty | TPM Idea Lab:

But Matthew McNulty, the former senior director of the HP Enyo team, Enyo being the successor to webOS, said he would be surprised if HP used webOS for its new smartphone since many engineers have left the company, including McNulty who departed HP for Google in May.

However, if he still worked at HP, McNulty said the announcement from Whitman would have been devastating.

Matt’s right, and I think he speaks fairly for most webOS/Palm people, current and former.

But I think we need to be careful about trashing Meg here. 

We have to remember that Palm (the company) was a bit of a cluster — and the first phone shipped when it had to, not when it was ready to ship. And Palm was running out of money. And then HP stepped in and turned Palm into a much better funded cluster, and HP really did try to help Palm be successful. Except HP then got sidetracked into its own series of clusters, whether it was Mark Hurd (who along with Shane Robison were the primary supporters behind buying and funding Palm) being forced out over his choice of dinner companions, or HP hiring Leo (WHAT WERE THEY THINKING? OMG, WHO THOUGHT THAT WAS A GOOD IDEA?) and Leo trying to blow up any part of HP he didn’t understand, which was big parts of the company. 

So when Meg was brought in, her primary function was as a field surgeon, trying to keep the patient alive long enough to get to the hospital. Massive damage was done to HP and to webOS, and most of the webOS damage was almost of the “innocent bystander at a drive by shooting” type as a side effect of Leo’s attack on the PC division. 

Meg could have just written webOS off and shut it all down as a damaged investment not worth fixing. Given how many much bigger and strategic problems she had at HP when they brought her in, nobody would have blinked at that. But she brought in Marc Andreesen to help her figure out what to do, and they committed even more funding to give it a third life as an open source technology. Whatever you think about Leo, HP and how badly they screwed up things with webOS and Palm, it needs to be remembered that at least a couple of toes were shot off by Palm itself with it’s own gun before Leo pulled out the Uzi.

And in all honesty, Meg has done a rather amazing job of giving WebOS another chance, and has been honest about it. She could have used the “there are just too many bigger problems I need to deal with” excuse and shut it down cold. She could have put it on life support, or funded it just enough to let it fail and then said “I tried”. She could have just stuck it in a closet and quietly killed it a few months later when things quieted down. But she put an honest effort and honest levels of funding into giving it a shot, and she deserves full credit for that. 

And to the credit of the folks sticking it out with webOS (unlike myself, who ran like a rat off the ship when I had a chance to without any regrets…) they seem to be doing what they need to do, and I’ve been really impressed with the results so far. So maybe, just maybe, what Meg set in place will succeed. I’m sure rooting for it. And she deserves credit for that. Given how badly Leo screwed everything up, I’m frankly amazed how much progress she’s made at HP so far. Still a long, hard path for the company as a whole before it’s fixed, if it ever is, but IMHO, it’s in good hands. 

No huge essay on the outcome of the Apple/Samsung trial, but a few bullet points I thought I’d write down for your amusement…

• Apple spent 5 years and a lot of resources inventing the original iPhone. It’s hard to think back to what life was in mobile phones at the time, but it was, more or less, a device like a Samsung Blackjack. Which was a decent and boring phone.
• Samsung spent literally weeks grabbing pieces of Apple’s design and technology and stuffing it into their phones. The people attacking Apple and saying this decision stifles innovation don’t understand what ‘innovation’ means.
• For the record, I think the current patent system is broken. But until everyone comes up with a consensus of how to fix it and get that consensus implemented, those are the rules.
• There’s a segment of the geek population that has a strong opinion of “if we don’t like the rules, we’ll complain and ignore them”. If you think the rules are broken, fight to get them changed and fixed. Don’t just whine. Many companies, from Napster to now Samsung, have ignored the rules and ended up paying for it the hard way.
• My views of the patent system being broken, I believe Apple deserves some protection from what Samsung did. If you make it legal and acceptable for a company to grab innovative ideas that quickly and that easily, where is the incentive to keep innovating?
• Which parts of what Apple did deserve protection and for how long, I don’t pretend to know where the lines get drawn. I do hope this decision catalyzes that discussion and pushes patent reform forward. (I’m not holding my breath. I also believe we need trademark and copyright reform. I’m not holding my breath there, either — but the continuing of extension of copyright and loss of material falling into the public domain is another aspect of this same big problem).
• Samsung’s best attack on appeal is through prior art, which I think the jury mostly ignored. And I do believe on appeal some (but not all) of this judgement will be set back. And should.

My bottom line: Apple deserved to win this case, but I’d like to see the win ultimately narrowed and tied to some key intellectual property innovations. Samsung deserved to lose, and their lawyers need to have a long, loud talk with company executives loosely titled “what the hell were you thinking saying those things in writing, anyway?” They were so blantant at how they ripped off Apple that it’s hard to have any sympathy for them, even given my belief the current patent system is pretty damn broken.

Day4 – How we screwed (almost) the whole Apple community:

It is somewhat disturbing at times when the bandwagon takes of and speeds up, without people being critical. People stand up for situations that may never have happened, and spin on it which ultimately results in that it will be trated as facts, or a faktoid.

We wanted to test this, how easy is it to spread disinformation?

Apple is the world’s largest company, so they can take a few knocks. The community around Apple is often very active, especially before an upcoming Keynote where it is expected that the company will introduce new products. In September is one, and everyone expects the iPhone 5 to be announced. Rumors are flowing about the phone, its appearance, its features, its materials and so on. We found this was a fitting goal for our test.

One afternoon we sketched out a screw in our 3D program, a very strange screw where the head was neither a star, tracks, pentalobe or whatever, but a unique form, also very impractical. We rendered the image, put it in an email, sent it to ourselves, took a picture of the screen with the mail and anonymously uploaded the image to the forum Reddit with the text ”A friend took a photo a while ago at that fruit company, they are obviously even creating their own screws ”.

Then we waited …

Nice hack. I admit I looked at the screw, decided it was probably a plant, and sat back to watch the show. I wasn’t disappointed. (why did I think it was a plant? The screwhead seemed both too complex and at the same time easily circumventable. It’d take the folks who build the tools for the self-fixers almost no time to work around the hack, but the screw itself would be both expensive to manufacture and not reliable in the real world. IMHO)

Not the first time this has happened. Won’t be the last. a lot of the sites who depend on page views to drive ad revenue frankly do not care if it’s accurate or not; they just like having stuff out there they can stuff ads on. Their fan base breaks down into two groups: the folks who don’t take this crap very seriously, and the folks who take it all way too seriously. Either way, accuracy isn’t high on the list of values people demand of the sites. A few of the sites are actually pretty good, but many are simply in it for the page views and don’t care. 

Back when I was with Mama Fruit, they took the rumor sites a lot more seriously than they do now. I think Apple’s come to terms with the reality that this stuff is to some degree or another going to leak, and trying to suppress it only spreads it further, so for the most part I think they try to ignore most of it and not encourage people to pay attention, which is a strategy I always suggested back in the day. Takedown notices merely focussed attention on rumors and gave them free publicity. 

I also used to suggest that a way to counteract the rumor sites was through an active disinformation campaign; hit the rumor sites where it could potentially hurt with the audience you’re trying to convince to stop paying attention to them by giving the rumor sites information proven to be wrong enough that their audience writes them off. A campaigned of designed but incorrect rumors laid down on the rumor sites could create enough havoc that even the rumor sites wouldn’t know which leaks and leakers to pay attention to. At the very least, you could make their lives a bit of hell for a while and sit back and enjoy watching them twitch… 

No, I never got Apple to take that idea seriously. There have been times in the last few years where I’ve wondered if they finally picked up on this idea (I still wonder about the “Apple is building their own TVs” rumor setup, since it’s a perfect thing to catch people’s attention and get them arguing over while Apple goes off and does something completely different — and notice how the rumors in this space have now shifted away from the TV back to set top boxes and content? Hmm.)

I probably shouldn’t admit this, but what the heck. Once I tweaked a couple of web pages I managed. Nothing major, just a couple of “inadvertent” links to pages that didn’t exist that were commented out. Very ambiguous stuff, just to see what happened. And like these folks, then I sat back and watched the show. 

See, even then I knew there were rumor sites scraping as much of Apple as they could looking for changed pages and mistakes like this. It didn’t take long, and it hit some of the rumor sites. We got told to fix the pages, the links got pulled, and things settled down again, although every so often for a few months after that, some site or another would speculate on what those links were for. (hint: they were for making you wonder what they were for!). 

And yeah, I got yelled at for doing it…. But it was more than worth it, just to watch people hyperventilate over it. Sometimes, it’s worth a kick in the pants to see the show…. 

(and I can still say that I know the truth about mammals.org, and you don’t… neener. And no, don’t bother asking…).

In which Gruber and Moltz miss the point – Frabjous Dei:

it’s about what Cory Doctorow calls the war on general purpose computation (video.) Doctorow makes a compelling case that copy protection, DRM, the DCMA, SOPA, PIPA and ACTA are not battles that have been fought and won but skirmishes in a war whose endgame makes it actually illegal to own a completely programmable piece of general-purpose computing hardware.

A great illumination of the position that keeps me from supporting the EFF when actually agree with them on the core issue. 

The first problem is this: if this were to actually happen, as long as the “typical consumer” could actually do what they want with their devices, they wouldn’t care about the details because what consumers care about is doing things, not theoretical arguments like this. Because of this, they’re taking a position that’s very hard to convince most people to get terribly worried about, because it doesn’t significantly impact them. 

But really, the problem I have with this argument is this: it’s the same argument the NRA uses to justify fighting bans on assault weapons and “cop killer” bullets, because, you know, once the cops have confiscated everyone’s Uzi’s, they’ll start bashing down doors to come take their hunting rifles and that pistol kept handy for burglars. It’s just so obvious that once they’re given permission to take on any such restriction, it’s only a matter of time before it’s all gone. 

It is also the same argument the government uses to keep tight restrictions on Marijuana and other so-called “gateway” drugs: if we relax our restrictions on pot, next thing you know you’ll have armies of crack-high teenagers tearing apart your cities. 

These kind of positions are absurdist positions, and it’s a great way to marginalize yourself out of the greater debates where more moderate thinkers work to find some middle ground that everyone can put up with. Absolutist positions ultimately lose when people get tired of dealing with them and work around the roadblocks or replace them with more malleable decision makers. IMHO the NRA has done itself no favors by taking a hard position on assault rifles, and the EFF is doing the same to itself with it’s own no-compromise positioning. 

(via Daring Fireball)

Pre to postmortem: the inside story of the death of Palm and webOS | The Verge:

Thirty-one.

That’s the number of months it took Palm, Inc. to go from the darling of International CES 2009 to a mere shadow of itself, a nearly anonymous division inside the HP machine without a hardware program and without the confidence of its owners. Thirty-one months is just barely longer than a typical American mobile phone contract.

Understanding exactly how Palm could drive itself into irrelevance in such a short period of time will forever be a subject of Valley lore. There are parts of the story that are simply lost, viewpoints and perspectives that have been rendered extinct either through entrenched politicking or an employee base that has long since given up hope and dispersed for greener pastures. What we do know, though, is enough to tell a tale of warring factions, questionable decisions, and strategic churn, interspersed by flashes of brilliance and a core team that fought very hard at times to keep the dream alive.

The following is an account of Palm’s ascent prior to the launch of the Pre, the subsequent decline, and eventual end, assembled through interviews with a number of current and former employees.

Interesting and well-written piece on Palm and webOS by Chris Ziegler at the Verge. I didn’t contribute to it, and while I’d say it’s not 100% accurate as I know things, it’s well-researched and it’s a fair and pretty accurate history of what went down. 

Definitely recommended as a read for those still interested in this circus. 

In retrospect, I think a few key things killed what I still think was a legitimate shot at doing something special:

• A corporate naiveté that the carriers were our partners. In fact, they were just our customers, and were completely behind us only until they found other things to be partners with (“android”). That said, I think both AT&T and Verizon treated us reasonably and most of the damage was in fact self-inflicted.
• The first phone, the Pre, was not ready for prime time, hardware or software. 
• I argued at the time, and I still feel strongly that I was right, that the decision to move forward with webOS 2.0 and the “Pre2″ was a mistake, and that we needed to put phones aside and get a tablet out (and get a good tablet out) while the market was open to it. It was decided (I was told by Bradley) that it was important to stay in the market and we needed to keep our carriers happy with us, so they went forward. By the time we actually shipped the Pre2 and webOS 2.0 (long, redacted whimpering sigh of explanation about that death march belongs here, but no…) it was way late and nobody cared, and it pushed the tablet work out even later, so that by the time it came out, nobody really cared. 
• The first tablet was pretty good. Nobody cared. It was priced the same as an iPad, which was insanely stupid. It killed the product; you can’t go up against the iPad with pricing parity and a a lesser product. If you can’t compete on feature and quality, compete on price. We did neither. Why? I don’t know. It could have been a re-entry into the market; it turned into a literal firesale, a viking funeral.
• I think we under-scoped how much work was needed to get to first ship; first ship was therefore not what it needed to be. That dug a hole we never climbed out of.

For all of the criticism of the HP purchase, I’m still convinced that (a) it was our best shot, and (b) HP did everything it could to do right by us. That it didn’t work was at least partly because Palm was pretty broken even at that point (and never got fixed) and partly because HP needed to be capable of things that HP at it’s size simply wasn’t capable of. But it tried. Meg is trying to fix the latter, and I wish her nothing but luck. 

That said, of the rumors I heard about the sale, all indications were that all of the other serious offers were IP/Asset sales, not “continuing operations” sales — i.e., it was patents and technologies, not the engineering team and marketing. I was enthusiastically trying to get out of the company when the word came down it was HP and they wanted things to continue, because i was convinced the patents were going to HTC or Samsung and the rest was going out the side door into recycling. So criticize HP if you want, but any other buyer would have meant the end of webOS even sooner. The only other potential suitor at that time who might have kept webOS intact was Amazon, at the time looking for an alternative to Android, and I believe our burn rate was too high for their tastes; it wasn’t purchasing webOS, it was keeping it moving forward after that killed that possibility. 

We shipped too soon. We shipped too late. We marketed badly. Our quality was marginal. By the time we shipped decent stuff (Pre3, Touchpad), the market window had closed. Nice try, didn’t work.

But damn, it was worth a shot. If we’d executed better, we had the opportunity. we just didn’t do a good enough job of grabbing the brass ring when it was within reach.