http://wabisabilabi.blogspot.com/2007/05/when-vendors-get-nuts.html

“When vendors get nuts”

I’m not sure I deserve the shout-out from Kelly G, but I appreciate it!

To address one point in the post, though, you have to step back a minute and remember that those McAfee posts are probably made by one of their devs.  They’re human and, while it’s been over 13 years since I’ve been anywhere near there, they probably wish that the company was unnecessary as much as we did back then.

We (meaning I) always used to dream (not fear!) that Microsoft would destroy the anti-virus business by actually implementing a good file and disk security system in DOS…only in nightmares did we imagine that it’d be 2007 and this crap would still be around.  I lay most of the blame at Microsoft’s door, for some fundamental design failures (too-easy blending of data and code), but it’s also possible we didn’t do enough to evangelize TO the OS vendors.

Still, shareholders be damned; for the people in the trenches of anti-virus work, what many REALLY wanted is the world to be a better place, so our software wasn’t necessary.

It was often quite exciting work, and I freely admit I made a small bundle out of it (not anywhere near as much as some, and I got screwed by the IRS in the end!), but there was always that thought of, ‘I wish these twits would stop writing this crap.’

Every single time you talk to a customer (which even devs did back then) it was driven home once more how much heartache viruses caused people.

What I wouldn’t give to take every person who wants to write a virus because they think it’s ‘cool’, to sit on a customer support line for a few hours, talking to people who’ve been hurt by viruses. 

I’ve never (before or after) been exactly a law-abiding citizen online, but after my experience at McAfee I had a very strong aversion to building things that can cause pain to others.

There are people who build viruses because they’re paid to, and there’s nothing really to be done about that, and there are people who don’t care about anybody because of psychological issues…
If you just think it’s cool, though…just imagine someone you cared about, losing all their data, because of what you’re doing.  Find a better hobby.

–  Morgan Schweers

I’m in New York.

Glen Cove, my home town, to be precise. Even more precisely, I’m staying at a mansion converted to a hotel that is one block away from the high school I graduated from.

I still remember the structure of Glen Cove (despite having never driven here), but most of the details are new… It’s a strange feeling coming back after about 14 years.

Anyhow, I’m off to show my wife around my old stomping grounds…
– Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

(Sorry, technical difficulties…pictures will have to be included later!)

So my wife and I are in the midst of a grand adventure, driving across the top of the country. Starting from Seattle, heading to New York, puttering around there for a few days, and heading home.

We left on Saturday, around 1pm, after saying good bye to our good friends who are watching our house and cat (whom we also said goodbye to). First, a stop at a local drugstore to pick up a chotsky to act as our talisman for the trip. We then started for the eastern half of Washington, with the fervent hope that we could get out of the state before the end of the day…

Cresting the Snoqualmie pass, there was a traffic advisory for just a few miles ahead…an accident had left a mess of traffic behind. A mess that mostly involved putting the car into Park, while still on the freeway (but by a beautiful lake!), and just waiting.

That seemed to clear up entirely all at once, without much of the slow growing back to speed that normal traffic jams get, so about an hour later we were moving at a decent clip again, and once again hopeful (although less so) that we’d make it out of the state.

At one point along the way, we saw a sign for ‘Wild Horses Monument’, and decided to take a breather and check it out. It was also a lookout point, which gave a beautiful view of the valley below. The main point of the monument, however, was a metal sculpture set up on the top of a nearby hill (with a very steep climb up to it) of a herd of horses along the hilltop, silhouetted against the sky. It’s very evocative, and worth a stop, although we decided it wasn’t worth climbing up to also…

Washington is a truly exquisite state, and the forests and lakes gave way to rolling farmland, and some neat traveler-friendly features. For example, for about 14 miles, someone decided to put signs on the fence beside the freeway, every odd while, with the name of the crops that were being grown at that particular point. Peas, Field and Sweet Corn, Potatoes, Wheat, and even Peppermint flew by.

And then things turned ugly. In the back half of WA, we found a small town, whose city name in the ubiquitous green freeway signs, read simply, ‘George’. A few groans later, and we had reached this annoyingly named town… There, they had a business named ‘Valley Forge Fruits’, and ‘Martha’s Inn’, and the home of the Half-Ton Cherry Pie. *sigh*

We started punning (*I* started punning, I should say, despite physical threats against me, and it dragged out my wife’s competitive nature to respond with puns), and that brought us through a lot of the remainder of the state…

After reaching Spokane, and realizing that indeed, we would make it out of state (albeit barely), we made the decision to end in Couer d’Alene, ID. The small panhandle of Idaho was our stopping point for the first day.

Driving down the main street, the first thing we saw were a pair of Very Large feathers, like from a seagull, but scaled up to truck size. Confused, but dutifully camera-happy, we caught one of them in the camera, and moved on…

Also in Couer d’Alene was the large burger-hoisting Paul Bunyan cutout, which we dutifully took pictures in front of, and Melissa got an onion rings from the associated Paul Bunyan Famous Hamburger. (Mini-review: ‘Greasy and tasty as onion rings should be.‘)

Back to our hotel, across the street for some Outback (and a photo with the outsized alligator in front), and back to the hotel to crash…

Oh, and I finished about 1/2 of The Hobbit over the course of the day, another purchase in the drug store we started from.

All in all a good first day; out of the state, and the speed limit started being 75, which didn’t really change my driving, but more merely legitimized my normal speed.

Sunday was all about the Future Pot Roasts of America.

– Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

A concerned user recently asked me how I was doing in the aftermath of the issue with eBay sales of JBidwatcher, specifically:

You seemed pretty depressed about it in your post to the website.

I was.

There was a really bad week there, while I was dealing with all of it, back and forth, and just feeling like crap. I got a lot of user feedback, from a LOT of people, that reminded me, as the concerned user put it, not to let the few jerks make me give up.

I took some time to work on other projects, and I’ve been fiddling with the next major rev of JBidwatcher, mostly cleaning up the code, improving the source layout, fixing small things that nobody else will likely ever see, and writing silly features just for the fun of it. (Like making the internal webserver take ‘events’ to be posted to the various subsystems, so you can add an item, do a bid, or even tell it to fire off a sound effect through a REST-ish interface. You could theoretically ‘script’ JBidwatcher through that.)

I’ve also mostly moved the code base of JBidwatcher to Java 1.5 (mmmm, tasty generics!), since 1.6 is now out. I’ve also been experimenting with including ‘Derby’, an embeddable (in the ‘ship with program’ sense) tiny SQL-based database, so that JBidwatcher’s memory usage doesn’t grow at the same rate as the number of auctions. Also so that it can offload completed auctions, so they’re not kept in memory anymore at all. Yet another thing I’ve been playing with is including a scripting language (something simple) which would get run on certain events, which would allow for making some of the complex rules people have requested as features. I’ve also written up an FAQ I need to publish on the site. (The first question addresses my inability to answer emails consistently, in fact!)

Anyway, all told I (and work!) have been keeping myself busy, albeit quiet. It all helps me get past the issue with the people selling JBidwatcher. Future versions will probably not be open source, however. I may expose the source, or open certain sections, but almost all open source licenses explicitly allow what those folks were doing, and I’ve determined that it’s beyond what I’m comfortable with. One of the things people repeatedly said in private emails was that the open source nature of JBidwatcher was not critical to their appreciation of JBidwatcher. This means I’ll need to extricate myself from Sourceforge in various ways, and cover my own purchase of IntelliJ IDEA, but I think donations will have covered that.

I don’t want to charge for JBidwatcher; I prefer people using it and deciding for themselves what it’s worth to them. Plus, because it’s scraping eBay, I feel bad about asking for money for something that could break the next day. So I expect the program will continue to be no cost. I’m thrilled to get donations, of course, but I don’t build JBidwatcher to make money; I have a day job for that.

At the same time I’m working on building other projects so my morale won’t get torpedoed so badly when someone messes with the sole project I’ve been working on.

One of the other projects I’m working on are a health tracking tool (weight, blood pressure, hours slept, water drank, steps taken, foods eaten with nutrition information, and more stuff like that, with pretty graphs and sparklines (my weight trend: )). The other major one is a comprehensive multi-user outliner tool. Both are entirely web based applications, unlike JBidwatcher, and both are in Ruby on Rails.

I’m sorry that I haven’t been dedicating more time to JBidwatcher, but it’s been fundamentally working okay recently, and I needed to blow off steam by doing cool new stuff. So I’ve been letting it percolate, and rekindling my coding passion by working on other interesting problems.

That’s the status as of now; I hope that this sheds some light on my thought processes, and what I see in the future for JBidwatcher. One important thing to take away is that YES, there is a future for JBidwatcher.

Thank you, every one, who wrote me, donated, or just thought well of me during all this. I appreciate it a great deal more than I can express.

– Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

I’ll pass along a piece of advice for anyone looking to start a company, from someone (me) who’s been through several startups.  (McAfee Associates and PayPal being two very notable, very successful, and very different, ones, in different decades.)  The advice is useless ever since 1994 because the ‘free money’ vibe of the VCs has infused the business world and made it hard to follow, but it’s free advice anyway, and worth whatcha pay for it. 

If you’re going to start a company, be profitable FIRST, before you ever talk to VCs.  If you don’t NEED their money, but you’re on one of the beautiful adoption curves, they’ll fight each other to be the one who gets the right to give you money.  Sure, you don’t need it, but if spent right, it can (1) pay for the dog’n'pony ‘going public’ show, and (2) move you one or two rungs up the doubling curve.

The funny thing to me is that people take the money out of the get-go, to move them up 1-2 rungs when the power curve is low, boosting them from 1000 users to 4000 users.  What they should (in my oh-so-not-humble opinion) do is grow slower for a little while, then take the money when jumping the power curve would mean the difference between 250,000 users and 1 million users AND you’re not dependent on the VCs for your existence.

This means growing slower at the start, only growing as fast as you can afford to, keeping yourself as close to cash-neutral as you can, and always being one cost-cutting exercise from being profitable.  It’s not the preferred method for a class of folk who were raised and bred on tales of overnight millionaires, and ‘get big fast’ (which only works for a very SMALL subset of companies) but it’s the way to build a sustainable, exit-strategy-free business.  (Exit-strategy-free meaning you don’t NEED one, not that you don’t HAVE one.)

I saw it done at McAfee Associates, and we completely dominated the conversation with the VCs.  It wasn’t a request for money, it was a bidding war on the part of some top-notch firms, and that was in 1992, before the first bubble even started to be blown.  We were chugging in about $10Mil/year as I recall, and spending less than a quarter of that.  I don’t believe that company was EVER unprofitable, from the quarter it was founded.

McAfee Associates took the company from “the three Fs” (family, friends, and fools) to profitable without really going through the intervening step of angels or venture capitals.  (Now, for what it’s worth, some of those 3Fs were…understandably upset that they didn’t see any return when the company made it big, but that’s just part of the darker side of the history of McAfee Associates, and not directly relevant to the point I’m making.)

Now McAfee Associate’s distribution model was nearly free (distributed by BBS), advertising was ‘make a good product and get people to talk about it and show its use off’, the product was…well, you could joke that it was viral.   People used it, found it was useful and necessary, and handed it to other people who probably needed it.  The product was free and fully functional, but every run it put up a message, basically that ‘if you’re using this in a company, educational institution, or government organization, you must purchase a license’.  End users paid the registration fee sometimes, which was a nice base source of income, but companies leapt to license.  Mostly because their employees were using the software, needed the software, and were handing it around inside the company.  Someone would point out the license issue, and the company would call us to pony up.  We never had to call anyone to sell the software, it sold itself, and our users sold it for us.  Most people wouldn’t imagine it, but companies really are decently minded when it comes to dealing with other companies.  Or at least so afraid of lawsuits that they’re willing to be decent citizens.  Sometimes a big company would use their size to pressure us to give them a discount, which we were happy to do, because it was nearly free money anyway.  Our overhead was fixed, we didn’t advertise, we told them to download themselves a copy each quarter, or if they paid enough we’d send them a floppy once a quarter.
What’s changed in the world since then?  Well, a lot, but I’ll put forward that mainly the scale has changed.  Free distribution through BBSes reached a large percentage of the computer using population back then.  Distribution through the Internet reaches a HUGE percentage of the computer-using population now.  If you make a good product, people can talk much more widely about it with blogs.  Companies are still looking to be good citizens, primarily, and there are a LOT more of them out there.  Oh, and you probably don’t have to mail them a floppy each quarter, no matter how much they pay.
So the one of the biggest things I’d suggest to ‘start profitable’ is to target your product at corporations, but make it attractive to end-users as well, so they’ll bring it into the company.  As Willie Sutton didn’t say but is said to have said, when asked about why he robbed banks, “That’s where the money is.”

–  Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

So I’m very, very much looking forward to Gnomedex, coming up at the end of this month. I went last year, and it was really cool. I went to the Seattle MindCamp, which was intense, a lot of fun, and tiring. I met good people at both, although the MindCamp folks were more…relaxed, I think. The knowledge sharing was much more peer-to-peer at MindCamp, and I really reveled in it.

Gnomedex is looking to be even more interesting than the last one, with the addition of Senator John Edwards as keynote speaker. I don’t expect much from him in particular, but the added attention it’ll give the conference should be interesting.

More than anything else, I’m looking for the little moments, like last year when I watched the JotLive Wiki updates stuff happening as the guys debugged it while sitting in the back row of the conference. In retrospect, it presaged the Google Spreadsheets interactive/shared updating. The big presentations on stage generally came to nothing. The little moments, and the side discussions are where the action was, and I expect that to be true this time as well.

Plus I get to show off my new house to some friends who are coming into town for the conference!

I need to get my act together, get some software updates out there, and psych myself up for the conference. I’m not a big name guy, so my contributions tend towards having useful pieces of technology to show off and play with.

On a more depressing note, my mother asked for money again, which coincides with the start of my paying mortgage payments, NOT a good time for this. However, I think I may re-release JBidwatcher with the affiliate program enabled again, and funnel the money from it to help her out. I could simply sell the program, but without being able to use the eBay API I can’t promise users it’ll be consistently functional, and that seems like a sucky thing to do to paying customers. At the same time, the program drives revenue to eBay, so it should be of value to them.
This is yet another place that I can get some help at Gnomedex, not so much directly for my mother, but to get an idea of ways that people have monetized their passions outside of work, in order to get an extra income when necessary.

My goal at this years Gnomedex is to keep my ears open; to hear the rumblings of what will make next years tech news, when writ larger. I need to keep in mind the small conversations, and imagine them happening in the halls at Google, or Microsoft, and imagine what they’d do with them…

So many people probably think that Gnomedex will be all about Podcasting, and VLogging. I think that’s just the cover story. The medium(s) are not the message. I think it’s about new ideas, new directions, smart people, and listening carefully to what people are showing off.

Yes, a dozen video hosting sites are making history, and providing all sorts of interesting value, as well as amusing video. Yes, podcasts are so mainstream they’re available on iTunes Music Store, CBS has turned over its incredibly valuable properties into $1.99 iPod Videos, and Suicide Girls post iPod Video-compatible introductions. Perhaps the abundance of new video sources will push out the television, and eventually replace it. This actually interests me less, because it’s a Big Media world.
I’m more interested in what people are saying, rather than how they are saying it. I don’t so much care about the media they use, I care about the ideas they’re getting across.

I probably won’t vlog, I’m not photogenic enough. I don’t really podcast, for the same reason, nobody wants to hear my ideas interspersed with ‘umm’, and such. If anyone is interested at all, they want the thoughts filtered, cleaned up, parsed, and posted, so they can be searched, summarized, stored, and (most often) skipped.

If there’s any serious value out there, in interesting but HARD technology, it’d be in automatically extracting the text of a voice discussion, describing the scene in a video, etc., so it’s searchable using text search engines. This is a Hard Problem, but it would suddenly make the world of VLogs, Podcasts, and even TV and movies, all searchable, indexable, and accessible to everyone.

There’s a world-changing technology, if ever there was one.

See? I’m already getting my mind into the mode for the Gnomedex…

– Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

“…and if you don’t stop and look around you might miss it.”

– Ferris Bueller, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off

This is a purely personal blog entry, so if you’re looking for technical info (especially on eBay’s latest breakage), that’ll have to wait until my next entry.

However, I want to thank all my JBidwatcher users who emailed me to congratulate me on my wedding. I’m so amazingly glad to have produced and supported something such that people wish me well in the other areas of my life. The well-wishes were overwhelming, and made me incredibly grateful for the folks who use JBidwatcher. I am a lucky man, in so many different ways. Thank you.

I’m married now, as of January 28th, 2006. The wedding itself was excellent. We should be getting the official pictures soon, but the day had started out (like many days this January in Seattle) pouring rain. Around noon that day, though, the skies started to clear up. By the time our ceremony rolled around (sunset), the skies were dramatic, gorgeous, and we had a perfect view of them over the water from our ceremony site. The reception was excellent, delicious food, and having my friends there with me kept the stress level just low enough that I could really relax and enjoy the night. For our honeymoon, we went to DisneyWorld (stayed at the Wilderness Lodge) for 5 days, then on the Disney Cruise for 6 days. We were incredibly happy with our decision to put our honeymoon in the hands of Disney, the whole experience was magical, and made it incredibly easy for both of us to focus on each other, and relax from the stress of setting up a wedding entirely ourselves.

On return, I’ve had to re-focus on work a lot, as taking a bit more than 3 weeks off to get married and have a good honeymoon ended up putting my projects in a little bit of danger. However, recently we’ve started seriously looking for a house, and cleaning up our credit in preparation for taking out a mortgage. What with everything that’s been going on, and the everyday things I have to do, it’s been a while since I’ve been able to sit back, take stock, and think about where I’ve been. It’s been an incredible ride, but you have to pause to fix the moments in your memory, or they drift away with the morning fog, and that would be a terrible loss.

I have some pictures I took on our honeymoon, and I’ll put those up eventually, but they are scenes, flashes, images, not the whole, the experience. They are best used to trigger memories, not as memories themselves. They are, in fact, mostly meaningless without context. A reflection of my photography skill, perhaps, but me being part of those memories, I can’t imagine how I would be both outside, looking in, and also have actually enjoyed those moments at the same time.
I’ll be writing more about my technical projects (reflected in the blog), and JBidwatcher as I get time, as those are things I want to focus on for the immediate future.

The mortgage and house-buying process may get some coverage also, as it’s one of the most complex things I’ve had to do in a long time, and uncomfortable for someone used to purely living within their means up until now.

I’ve forgotten how nice it is to try to focus my thoughts, to put together a blog entry. I’m not a prolific blogger like Scoble, or any of the poli-blogs, so I find my writing tries (emphasis on the ‘tries’) to convey more, to make up for the lack of regular updating.

In any case, I am now happily, ecstatically, wonderfully married. That’s enough for now.
Everything else will come in time.

– Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!