jr conlin's ink stained banana

Kent may be right that things like this bother me because i still care, but Holy Mother of Alta Vista, this article is delusional. For those who prize their sanity, or don't want to have people wander by and ask why your jaw is on the floor, said article explains why Yahoo! (after killing off it's search engine and replacing it with Microsoft's Bing) is still a search engine.

Allow me to quote probably the most logically offensive bit of it.

As these companies become more successful, and as technology matures, many building blocks of these products are outsourced – even some of the most critical components.

Take a look at Boeing or Airbus aircrafts. They outsource their engines to Rolls Royce, United Technologies, and GE. But, does that mean that Boeing and Airbus are no longer airline manufacturers?

Uhm, not quite the same, dude. You see, Boeing and Airbus make these things called "airplanes" Those require these other things called "engines", which can also power things like helicopters, some cars and the occasional school bus. Boeing and Airbus do not call themselves Engine manufacturers (i'll note that a bit of using a search engine shows that Boeing used to build engines). Likewise, to follow more of your examples, HTC does not bill itself as a broadband chip manufacturer.

In short, Yahoo! proclaiming that they are a search engine at this point is a bit like saying i am a search engine because i know how to look up things on Google. No, Mr. Seth (and whatever marketing droid forced you to write up that post) you are a customer of search, a user of search, a reseller of search.

i know search engines. i used to work for a search engine. You, sir, are no longer a search engine.

(P.S. So very, very glad i left.)

A few days ago, i needed to get out of the office for a bit and grab some lunch. Feeling a bit cranky, i dropped by a greek themed greasy spoon that is run by a Korean gentleman and two guys from (i believe) Ecuador called "Gus's" . The place is scary as hell to look at, but serves fantastic gyros (off a wheel), and then grilled so it's all crunchy on the outside, moist on the inside. My kinda joint, really.

Seeing how it's located within a spanner's toss of a large number of car repair joints and serves tasty high calorie , it's a favorite spot for a number of mechanics as well. And where there's mechanics, there's going to be front-office folks. It was no surprise, then, that i heard one senior individual telling his new associate "It's about customer service. We're not in the car repair industry, we're not…"

i don't know what his meaningful insight was at that point because i realized that no matter what he said, he was wrong. i should have asked "What company do you work for? i'd like to make sure i avoid dealing with it."

A decade before, i probably would have bought into the whole "We're not in the [publicly stated and identified commercial interest] business…" crap as well. The world was pretty much full of it, and i'm sure i spread my share of "insightful" misinformation as well. There were plenty of examples citing Taco Bell as not being in the food industry, but in transportation, or Marriott not being in the hotel business, but in real estate. It's true, those companies are in those interests. One could even note that Taco Bell became significantly more profitable when it switched to filling their burritos with large bore caulk guns. There's just one problem. Taco Bell sucks as a restaurant.

Nobody who is sober, has more than $20 for the month, and gives a crap about what they shove down their gullet looks forward to eating at Taco Bell if there are better alternatives available. Hell, there are dozens of little taqueria's in our area, and even a pretty decent white guy taco joint that blows the doors off Taco Bell for less money. How many folks would go there still if they doubled their prices?

One thing i've learned from working at the new company is that you do best when you do your job. Netflix is about letting you watch movies. Period. You can get them in a number of ways, and we're rolling out new stuff all the time, but each item still boils down to "giving you something to watch". That's why Netflix doesn't do games or sporting events or pizza delivery because none of those are movies. Know what happens when you do your job? You get pretty damn good at it. It becomes your one focus and everything else you do supports that. Sure, we've got great customer service, because we want to make sure you can watch movies. We've got a sophisticated hub based inventory system, because we want to make sure you can watch movies. There's lots of things we could say we're in the business of, but we're not. Those aren't our job. Everyone at the company knows that.

Look at other successful businesses and you'll see the same thing. French Laundry, what many consider to be the top restaurant in the US, serves top quality food to guests. Southwest Airlines is about getting people from one airport to another for a reasonable cost. Heck, even the most successful components of large companies, Flickr and YouTube, still focus on doing pretty much one thing. When companies try to do everything, they usually start hitting problems.

Just do the damn job people expect and a lot of other issues resolve themselves, mostly because you realize they're not important. If you're not working for the task your company has set out to solve, leave now, because either your bosses will realize they're making a mistake, or the company will fail.

i wish to note that i have no direct association with Paul Graham. i only know of his work through discussion and observation of his code with Yahoo! Shopping (and the after effects of it), so i harbor little opinion about him. i read his recent post about how Yahoo! failed with interest, and for what it's worth, it does contain a number of things that are true. Mostly, these relate to the issues around the "easy money" that was had and the poor decisions that resulted.

i'll note that he also touched on the "media centric" issue. It's very to say that was a mistake because the past decade has shown very clearly the error, but at the time, it would be impossible to do so. Google was interested in only being a search engine and filling a niche that was poorly supported. i'll note that they didn't turn profitable until some time later when they discovered they could sell ads out of it, but i digress.

i do draw some issue with the latter half of his post, where he basically becomes highly dismissive of the engineering resources that Yahoo! had. To that end, i wish to remind the world of a few things. One of which is that he wrote the Y!Shopping cart in eLisp, which he proudly notes:

We wrote our software in a weird AI language, with a bizarre syntax full of parentheses. For years it had annoyed me to hear Lisp described that way. But now it worked to our advantage. In business, there is nothing more valuable than a technical advantage your competitors don't understand. In business, as in war, surprise is worth as much as force.

No, that's not a business advantage, that's job security. A proper business has these nifty protocols and procedures to generally keep folks from viewing fiscally sensitive code like shopping carts. Yahoo! had those. He wrote in Lisp because it was his pet language. Unfortunately, not that many developers at the time knew lisp, nor do many know it now. This means that while he was quite proficient in it, it was very difficult to fill his role once he left, a little over eleven years ago.

i won't say that the replacement code was more elegant or efficient than what Mr. Graham designed, but it was far easier to understand, work with and expand to meet the ever growing demand. i know that very little time was wasted in completely striping out his code and replacing it so that new features and scaling support could be added.

That took some fairly smart folks. People Mr. Graham thinks very little of.

While i do not claim to have the level of intellect as Mr. Graham, i do know that any organization of sufficient size will have a wide range of developers. Indeed, you want a wide range of developers because not everyone wants to do things like support log parsing mechanisms. i also recognize the fact that when Mr. Graham left Yahoo at the close of the last millennium, there wasn't quite as strong a "hacker" culture as later developed.

So yes, please do read his treatise on why he believes Yahoo! failed, and understand that he does note with great clarity a number of business decisions that time has served to highlight. Also, please note, that at the time of his meeting with Jerry Yang, Mr. Yang was not the CEO, or COO of the company, but merely one of the founders who had quickly determined that his own inexperience would be disastrous in the role of lead business decision maker. Of course Jerry wasn't interested in the technology being offered, other people had already made the decision to acquire it. Jerry's interest was at a more personal level.

For a while now, i've been… less than happy. i've been cranky, frustrated, and generally annoyed by damn near everything.

Part of that annoyance has been that list of things i was going to do this year. The same list i've yet to do anything with. That's why i've decided to take a simpler tact.

From now on, every day, i'm going to do something creative.

It could be anything. i could write (since i've not done that in years), draw (same), code up something not work related, build something, basically do something that causes something new to come into the world. i may share some of it, i may not, but dammit, enough just being a sponge.

i tend to be a little wound up about privacy and Net Neutrality, and a lot of folks don't care. Considering my last post was kind of railing on about how we geeks have failed to make this a topic that folks care about, let me try and paint a few pictures.

Privacy:
There are several rather famous quotes:
"There's no way to rule innocent men." That little gem comes courtesy of the philosopher Ayn Rand. Her thought was that innocent men have little to fear from their government. It continues: "The only power government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws." Regardless of what you may think about her ideas, a number of folks in powerful positions consider themselves acolytes of her teachings.

Another i'd like to bring up is the following: "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, i will find something in them which will hang him." Cardinal Richelieu made that proclamation based on the fact that innocent words can take on different meanings depending on the context they're placed in.

So, am i setting up some horrible strawman to point out how the Government will use that information to send you off to Gitmo? No, i'm not. Well, not directly at least.

Why those two quotes resonate is that you need to consider something when you're posting up various bits of your privacy on-line. When you offer up information, you lose control over it. You may have some idea how it's going to be used immediately, but you don't know how it will be used in the future. It could be used by ad agencies, insurance companies, scammers, spammers, and tourism bureaus, all without your knowledge or permission. It's often up to you to retroactively demand that they stop using your information, but that means you have to discover them using it, and by that point, it's probably too late.

That picture of you on the beach could well become the new face (kinda) of Xiao/Kline Hemorrhoid Creme (quite popular in Bangladesh) and you may never know.

As for government actions, in the US you (currently) can't be charged with a crime for something that's not yet declared illegal, but that doesn't mean that you couldn't be denied a visa to a given country because of some activity they discovered. Plus, with all the content being generated, this would most likely be done via matching algorithms and those never make mistakes or report false positives. This is why spam was eliminated years ago because mail filters were just that good. (Sorry, involuntary irony muscle twitch.)

Net Neutrality:
Believe it or not, this is also a "control" issue. Let's say that Net Neutrality fails and that you're reduced to using a few companies to do things like blog, tweet, post pictures and videos, etc. Now let's say that for reasons that don't matter, your account is disabled.

Now what do you do?

You're excommunicated from the web. You are a non-citizen. You potentially no longer have access to your financial records, friends information, personal history, or anything else you've placed into the hands of people who no longer like you. Baby pictures? Gone. Personal documents? Gone.

Mind you, this already happens. Services shut down, often without warning, taking whatever "contributed" content with it. It's one of the reasons that i have my own domains. If my ISP goes away, i have a monthly backup of everything on the site. (that reminds me, i really need to fix that rsync script). Since i own my own site, i don't have to worry about the administrator of "unitedheroes.net" or "jrconlin.com" ever deciding to kick me off. (Granted, i'm temporarily boned if my hosting provider boots me off, but i can just start up somewhere else.)

i use other services like Flickr and Twitter, but if those were to go away tomorrow, it's not terribly difficult for me to replace them. Plus, since i started giving out my own "tiny" service, i don't have to worry about what happens if those links break.

So, yeah. This stuff is kinda important to me, and it's why i try to make sure folks at least think about what they're doing when they use these services.