What's In Peter's Head http://www.pchristensen.com/blog Peter Christensen's Blog Wed, 01 Jul 2009 11:13:58 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8 en hourly 1 Bootstrapping: Weapons of Mass Reconstruction http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/articles/bootstrapping-weapons-of-mass-reconstruction/ http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/articles/bootstrapping-weapons-of-mass-reconstruction/#comments Wed, 01 Jul 2009 11:13:58 +0000 Peter http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/?p=308 I’m a Hacker News-style entrepreneur with a family situation that precludes seeking investment or working full time.  This has caused me to seek out a wide variety of resources as I learn about entrepreneurship.  One of the writers I regularly read Sramana Mitra.  The writing in her regular column is usually not that applicable to me; it’s more aimed at macroeconomic-scale Big Entrepreneurship.  I read it anyway because it’s inspiring, hopeful writing and although it’s not applicable to my situation now, who knows where I’ll be in 5 or 10 or 20 years.

Having said that, I was very excited to hear about her new book “Bootstrapping: Weapons of Mass Reconstruction”.  It’s a book full of interviews with entrepreneurs who have successfully bootstrapped their companies from a kitchen table to millions of dollars of revenue or an acquisition.  I like this kind of book because it goes into more detail than a typical blog post or article, and the interview style is more human than the usual business book third-person style.  So I went into the book with high hopes, and those high hopes were met (with a caveat).

My favorite interview of the whole book was the first one, was with Greg Gianforte.  I’d read Greg’s bootstrapping book Bootstrapping Your Business: Start And Grow a Successful Company With Almost No Money before and heard him talk – he’s an engaging, funny speaker and writer and I’d recommend him to anyone.  I also felt a stronger connection to his story because he was more of a software entrepreneur like me (well, like I’d like to be).

The interviews in the rest of the book were every bit as lively and entertaining, but most of the founders were in media, advertising, or content, not specifically software.  For someone who was interested in one of these areas, this book is a gold mine of experience and insight.  I ended up reading them because the writing and the characters were interesting, but the stories didn’t seem as personally relevant to me.

One more thing, despite the word “Bootstrapping” in the title, most of the companies either self funded or bootstrapped a prototype together enough to get angel or VC investment.  So it’s bootstrapping in the sense of product before investment, not strict bootstrapping in the sense of avoiding all investment.  Not a problem, just a clarification.

All in all, this book is every bit as good as Founders at Work, albeit with less well known companies and a media/content/advertising focus.  It’s a good read for anyone interested in entrepreneurship and would be a priceless reference to anyone in those fields.

]]> http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/articles/bootstrapping-weapons-of-mass-reconstruction/feed/ 1 Internet Business Mastery QuickTip Index http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/articles/internet-business-mastery-quicktip-index/ http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/articles/internet-business-mastery-quicktip-index/#comments Thu, 06 Nov 2008 15:27:23 +0000 Peter http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/?p=297 I just finished listening to all the back episodes of the podcast Internet Business Mastery. Since it’s an old show (started in October 2005) it has been fun to watch the hosts Sterling and Jay evolve in fast-forward. They started out with a lot of enthusiasm but didn’t seem quite sure what they wanted the podcast to be. Over time, they gained more polish, experience, and confidence and narrowed their focus. The production value of their show improved and they really started to implement their ideas in their own businesses and lives.

It actually a great sales pitch to compare the early episodes where they say “This is what we want to do” to the most recent episodes where they say “This is what we did and how it worked.” Anyone can say “Start and Internet business and you can travel the world,” but it’s a lot more credible to hear “We’re moving to Buenos Aires for 6 months just because we can.”

The podcast is pretty inspiring and somewhat informational. The free stuff is mainly good for little tips and inspiration. I haven’t bought their seminar, coaching course, or membership site access but I’m sure it’s much more helpful and thorough inside the pay-wall. For someone interested in meatier content about information marketing, I’d definitely recommend them.

One word of warning. If you’re reading my blog, you’re probably from the build-a-startup-and-make-it-so-good-that-it-becomes-popular-by-word-of-mouth school. If that’s the case, the focus mostly on marketing can sound a little slimy, a litte pushy, a little marketerese. While I certainly don’t advocate marketing at the expense of product quality, most developers are so terrible at and distrustful of it that any little bits they pick up will help. Things like using an email list, developing a sale over multiple contacts, etc. It’s okay to add value to your offering by marketing it. Wiser people than me have made this point. Sterling and Jay are a pleasant, non-threatening introduction to a lot of marketing concepts and I recommend them.

Two (very small) beefs. First, because they do a lot of affiliate marketing, they want you to click through their site and so they don’t tell you the name of the company or product they’re pluggig. You HAVE to go to their website to click. Second, their website isn’t very organized (it’s just a big pile of WordPress entries), so it’s not easy to find the link you’re looking for. Plus some of their links are wrong and most of the older ones are broken. So rather than complain, I compiled this list of all the shows, recommendations, and links for every episode. I did prune out broken links and time-sensitive things as well. You’re welcome!

[NOTE: Episodes 1-31 are no longer available for download.  They will be sold later on CD with transcripts.]

NOTE: All links open in a new tab/window.

Episode 1 – Getting Started: 9 Things Every Internet Business Entrepreneur Needs
10/14/2005

Episode 2 – The Magic of Controlling Your Time
10/24/2005

Episode 3 – Empire Building: How to Design Your Business Model
11/7/2005

Episode 4 – No episode 4 (Sterling? Jay?)

Episode 5 – Establishing Your First Income Stream, Part 2
11/29/2005

  • links are broken

Episode 6 – Establishing Your First Income Stream, Part 3
12/13/2005

Episode 7 – Establishing Your First Income Stream, Part 4
12/20/2005

Episode 7b – Quick Update and a Resource Recommendation
1/12/2006

  • 7 Tips for Creating an Ebook that Will Generate Profit – link is broken

Episode 8 – 7 Tips for Easily Writing an e-book that Generates Profit
1/17/2006

Episode 9 – The Dangers of eBay: An Insider Look Into Why You Shouldn’t Depend on eBay as a Primary Source of Income
2/9/2006

Episode 10 – Common Fears of Going into Biz on Your Own and How We Overcame Them!
2/28/2006

Episode 10b – Quick Update with some Business Recommendations
3/16/2006

Episode 11 – Listener Questions Answered
4/13/2006

  • no links

Episode 12 – 10 Traits of a Successful Internet Entrepreneur Pt 1
6/5/2006

Episode 13 – 10 Traits of a Successful Internet Entrepreneur Pt 2
6/14/2006

Episode 14 – THE Best Thing to Sell Online
7/11/2006

  • no links

Episode 15 – THE Best Thing to Sell Online Part 2
7/26/2006

Episode 16 – Protecting Your Assets with a Business Entity
8/17/2006

  • no links

Episode 17 – Why Most People Who Call Themselves Entrepreneurs, Really Are Not
9/7/2006

Episode 18 – 6 Tips to Help Entrepreneurs Work ON Their Businesses and Not IN Them
9/27/2006

Episode 19 – The #1 Purpose of Your Web Site (even above selling products)
11/2/2006

Episode 20 – Interview with Business Attorney Darius Barazandeh on Starting Your Internet Business LLC
11/15/2006

Episode 21 – Interview with Business Attorney Darius Barazandeh on Starting Your Internet Business LLC Pt2
12/9/2006

Episode 21b – A Gift for Our Listeners (plus Internet Business Gift Guide)
12/16/2006

  • This is it’s own link list

Episode 22 – 5 Email List Building Tips That Will More Than Triple Your Email Opt-ins
1/13/2007

Episode 23 – Information Marketing 2.0
2/7/2007

  • no links

Episode 24 – The 7 Pillars of Internet Marketing 2.0 Part 1
2/24/2007

Episode 25 – 7 Pillars of Information Marketing 2.0 Pt 2
3/15/2007

Episode 26 – The Secret Mindset Needed to Get Started as an Internet Business Master
4/10/2007

Episode 27 – The 4-Hour Workweek
5/19/2007

Episode 28 – How to Generate Leads, Develop Customer Relationships and Drive Sales with Information Marketing 2.0
6/12/2007

Episode 29 – 7 Web 2.0 Internet Business Secrets Exposed
7/6/2007

Episode 30 – Insider Secrets for Writing Compelling Copy with Brian Clark of Copyblogger.com
7/28/2007

Episode 31 – How We Created Two Webinars that Generated nearly $100,000 in Sales?
10/26/2007

Episode 32 – 5 Ways to Use Recorded Content to Continually Make Money and Drive Traffic
11/9/2007

Episode 33 – Interview with Tim Ferriss, author of The Four-Hour Workweek
12/2/2007

Episode 34 – 5 Characteristics of the Ideal Web 2.0 Web Site (and how you can launch one in a matter of hours)
12/19/2007

Episode 35 – The Secret to Making Online Marketing and Sales Easy (or Is Web 2.0 Overrated?)
1/21/2008

Episode 36 – Success Stories from the Internet Business Mastery Community
1/31/2008

Episode 36b – 5 tips for Increasing Affiliate Sales for any Affiliate Product
2/4/2008

Episode 37 – Interview with Legendary Internet Entrepreneur, Yanik Silver – Plus, go to Dinner with US!
2/28/2008

  • CrazyEgg – great site tracking software

Episode 38 – What You Need to Know to Start Outsourcing Your Business (and Your Personal Life) with Virtual Assistants
3/13/2008

Episode 39 – What Does Money Mean to You?
3/27/2008

Episode 40 – What is the Tipping Point Between Thinking & Learning About Internet Business and Actual Success in Internet Business?
4/24/2008

Episode 41 – 7 Tips For Creating Your Own Killer Website Design
5/8/2008

Episode 42 – Insider Secrets of Email Marketing with Tom Kulzer, CEO of Aweber (GetYourEmailList.com)
5/22/2008

Episode 43 – The #1 Asset That You Can Acquire for Your Business
6/3/2008

Episode 44 – The 3 Pillars of Designing Your Ultimate Internet Lifestyle
6/26/2008

Episode 45 – In These Uncertain Times, How Do You Find True Security?
7/10/2008

  • aMember.com – recommended membership and subscription management software

Episode 46 – How to Trigger Unprecedented Success in your Lifestyle and Business
8/13/2008

Episode 47 – How to Create a Compelling Tagline for your Web Site that will Attract your Ideal Customer
8/28/2008

Episode 48 – Acquiring the Lifestyle of Your Dreams
9/18/2008

Episode 49 – Time Travel with the Iconoclasts of the 9-5: Four Things that We Would Do Differently if We Could Start Over Again
10/2/2008

Episode 50 – The Ultimate Recession Survival Guide
10/16/2008

Episode 51 – The 7 Reasons Why People DON’T Succeed in Internet Business and How You Can Avoid Every Single One, Part 1
10/30/2008

]]> http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/articles/internet-business-mastery-quicktip-index/feed/ 6 Announcing My Startup: GeekStack http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/articles/announcing-my-startup-geekstack/ http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/articles/announcing-my-startup-geekstack/#comments Wed, 22 Oct 2008 11:20:28 +0000 Peter http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/?p=295 Are you in the mood for vaporware?  An exciting idea?  More of me talking?  Then head over to my new startup GeekStack!

There’s a lot more info there (really, the home page is a wall of words) but the pitch is: “Collectible trading cards with the people, events, and achievements that our world is built on.”  I have a first blog post up, called “Why Would A Software Geek Make A Physical Product?” which gives some more background and a sample of the writing style I’ll use (although if you’re reading this, you probably know how I write).

I have a lot of the ideas about how it will work but there are questions that still need to be answered.  Check it out and take the chance to give me some feedback and help shape the development of the GeekStack.

]]> http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/articles/announcing-my-startup-geekstack/feed/ 0 Freemium Isn’t A Business Model, It’s A Marketing And Trust Strategy http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/articles/freemium-isnt-a-business-model-its-a-marketing-and-trust-strategy/ http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/articles/freemium-isnt-a-business-model-its-a-marketing-and-trust-strategy/#comments Fri, 17 Oct 2008 16:05:55 +0000 Peter http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/?p=289 I’ve chimed in once or twice on the free vs. paid debate, and I’m firmly in the camp that you should charge customers money.  You get money, they show some commitment, the expectation that comes with their money means you have an incentive to produce higher quality, and it gives you the funds and resources to sustain your business.  Better yet, if they pay you repeatedly, you have predictable revenue and a baseline to measure the effectiveness of business-growing activities like marketing and advertising.  So there’s the full disclosure of my preferences.Grain of Salt

Now you should definitely take my opinion with a grain of salt.  I’ve neither succeeded at a paid business nor failed with a freemium business.  I have never actually started or run a business.  But I am good at listening to lots of people and figuring out who’s telling the truth, who has an agenda, and what assumptions lie behind what people are saying.  And now I’ll apply that skill to Mark Evans’ latest post Freemium is Not a Business Model.

[For those who don't know, "freemium" is where you have a trial or limited version of your product that still does enough to provide some value, and a premium version with more features or capacity or X that some fraction of people will pay for.  The hope is that you make enough money off the premium customers to support the many free ones.]

Mark’s point is that many Web2.0 companies are using freemium as an excuse not to make something valuable.  It’s not a long article, and this quote sums it up pretty well:

For consumer-focused companies, however, freemium is fool’s gold…and, most important, it’s not a business model to create a viable and vibrant company.

Your business model might be to make something good enough that people will use it for free, get a big audience, then sell your company.  But then you’re not really creating a product customers, you’re creating a product on spec to sell to another business.  If you know beforehand that that’s what you’re doing (Paul Graham recommends this approach), it’s fine; just don’t fool yourself into thinking that your users are actually your customers.

I don’t think that giving things away is inherently bad, but it has to be put in context.  The point of giving your product away is to make impressions on potential customers.  There’s another name for this: marketing.  If someone is ever going to buy your product, they have to a) know about it, and b) trust it.

People who don’t know something exists will never buy or use it.  Period.  It’s exactly the same as how people never buy things that don’t exist.  If a potential customer doesn’t know about your product, then to them it doesn’t exist.  Giving the product away lets people use it, and others can see people using it, users tell other people about it, etc.  Those impressions are the same or better than the ones you have to pay for in advertising, hence the appeal of the free sample.

When people use your product, they can tell if they like it and want more.  For instance, there are a million different calorie tracker websites and programs out there.  It’s not a hard programming problem, it’s a data (why isn’t the food I just ate in here?) and interface (this takes too long, forget about it) problem.  Those are things you can’t determine from a sales website, and definitely not from the claims the seller makes.  So I went for a couple years before I found a situation where I trusted one enough to try it.  I got a recommendation for Gyminee from someone I respected, and since it was free, I gave it a try.  I found it easy enough to use, with a combination of fairly good food database and extremely easy to use interface, so I’ve stuck with it and recommended it to a few people.  There is a Pro version that offers things like meal and workout planning that I’m not currently interested in.  But if I do get more serious about my fitness and nutrition, there’s about a 99% chance that I’ll keep using Gyminee and about a 1% chance I’ll switch.  Letting me use the free features turned a single impression into a potential customer.  (plus it made me happy enough to plug it to everyone here)

Is it worth it to Gyminee to have me?  Is this a success (because I use and recommend it) or a failure (because I haven’t paid them anything) of freemium?  We can’t tell! Without knowing their expenses and conversion rates, we can’t say whether this is good or not.  Let’s play with some numbers and see.

Here are some wild guesses about their business:

  • Monthly hosting: $70 for a month for a 1GB slice from Slicehost
  • Startup living for 3 people in Hunstville, AL: $3,600/mo
  • Office, internet, etc: $1,300

This would give them roughly $5,000/month expenses.  Gyminee Pro costs $5/mo, payable in 3 month chunks.  So they would need 1,000 Pro customers to break even.  If they convert 2% of signups into Pro accounts, they would need 50,000 registered users.  If they have $50,000 in funding/savings/etc, then they have 10 months to get to that point.

What does this mean?  Nothing!  Even in this simplified model of their business, it’s a complex multivariate relationship.  If they’re not where they want to be, they can do lots of things to improve it:

  • raise more money
  • reduce their expenses
  • raise prices for Pro accounts
  • create another set of features for a more expensive “Arnold”-level account
  • sell either the meal OR workout planning as a sub-Pro account
  • create more leads and registered users
  • improve their sales process so they improve the percentages in their customer pipeline

You know what’s even better?  They can do ALL of these things, within the limits of their time and resource constraints.  For instance, since it seems like a young product, most of their costs have been related to designing and building the site.  That is a fairly fixed cost that is already spent, so their best bet now is probably to get more and more customers to reduce the per-user cost of that upfront design work.  Once your product is mature enough to be competitive, sales becomes more important.  This is not some inherent quality of sales – when engineering makes the product better, sales becomes a relative weakness.  When your sales grow fast and you enter new markets and people become used to your product, engineering becomes a relative weakness and that’s a good time to improve your product.  You can improve your overall position by improving whatever is weakest in your business.

So if freemium isn’t when you should use freemium or not.  These are the questions to ask:

  1. Are there enough people willing to pay for my product to support my business goals?
  2. Is there a subset of features of this product that’s enticing enough to stand on its own?
  3. What percentage of my paying market will be satisfied with that subset and decide not to pay?
  4. Based on my customer pipeline, what is my customer acquisition cost?
  5. What is my cost to support each free user?

So if (revenue lost in #3 + (#5 * # of users)) < (#4 * # of paying customers), then you should consider freemium.

Done? NO!  This is not a one time calculation!  You have to periodically reevaluate each of those to determine if that relationship still holds.  So any changes you make should be temporary, so you can test the effects and decide if it is worth it to continue that change.  It’s up to you to decide whether it’s fool’s gold or real gold.

Fool\'s or Real Gold?

Fortunately, there is a good place where we can see this in action – the iPhone App Store.  It’s the one redeeming quality of all the mercilessly annoying whining about price changes in the comments: you get a record of different prices at different times.  I’ve seen lots of examples where a company has lowered the price, made a lot of sales, shown up on the “What’s Hot” list, become popular, and then raised the price again.  Sometimes, like for AirSharing and MotoChaser, where they have a free or low introductory price, then raise it.  This serves two purposes: getting a feel for demand at different prices, and getting some free publicity.

Follow any discussion board for entrepreneurs, and there will be articles and conversations about pricing strategy every week.  The reason people say it’s an art, not a science, is because the optimal pricing strategy is different for every business, and it changes as the business changes as well.  Consider options, make informed guesses, and experiment until you find what works for you.

Or you could do like me, and work on creating free content that you have to pay to use.  It’ll make sense soon – subscribe to stay tuned!

UPDATE:  Dries Buytaert at Acquia and Mollom wrote a similar article about he uses a combination of freemium and open source to not only drive business but get valuable development contributions.  Thanks Dries!

]]> http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/articles/freemium-isnt-a-business-model-its-a-marketing-and-trust-strategy/feed/ 5 Chrome, the Google Docs-mobile http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/articles/chrome-gdocs-msoffice/ http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/articles/chrome-gdocs-msoffice/#comments Fri, 03 Oct 2008 19:05:24 +0000 Peter http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/?p=286 A few weeks ago, Google Chrome was released with much fanfare, press, celebration, comic books, and praise (with the usual skepticism and contrarian views thrown in for good measure).  People wondered if Google was getting into a browser war, an OS war, a land war in Asia, whatever.  I kept waiting, kept waiting, kept waiting until finally … oops, no finally, just more waiting.  No one pointed out the biggest strategic benefit of Google Chrome.

First, some background.  Google makes a lot of money.  Like, they didn’t have enough bathtubs in the Googleplex to put all the money in.  They were going to build swimming pools to put their cash in but all of the pool contractors in the Bay Area were already committed, so they’re working on damming and draining part of the San Francisco Bay to make a pit big enough to put all of the coins, bills, doubloons, and gems that those little blue text ads deliver to Mountain View.  Meanwhile, Larry and Sergey are impatiently waiting to fulfill their dream of swimming through it like Scrooge McDuck.

So Google = Money = Good.  But they make ALL (like 99+%) of it from advertising, about 2/3 from search ads and 1/3 from contextual ads on other websites.  So although they completely own this market, making more money than all of their competitors combined and more than anyone imagined was possible, this single-source-of-revenue thing scares the crap out of a lot of people (just ask anyone who has lost a job).  That’s the only criticism of Google as a business that has any real substance.

What are the biggest, juiciest targets for a behemoth that needs another revenue source?  Let’s look at the cash cows in the computer industry and how attractive they would be to Google:

  • Hardware: a total non-starter.  While Google might run the best data centers in the world, it is also one of their major competitive advantages, both in cost and performance.  Selling or sharing it is out of the question.  Other fields like PCs or servers are too low margin compared to their current business.  Besides, hardware involves atoms, and Google has no experience with atoms.
  • Operating Systems:  Sure, Apple and Microsoft make a ton of money and high margins off of their OS products, but they also have decades of accumulated advantage, installed base, and brand equity.  And they got to build those things back when people PAID for new operating systems.
  • Office Software:  Someone at Google is at least as smart as me because they went through the same process of elimination and ended up here.  So they’ve built and bought their way into Google Docs, which does enough of what people expect in an office suite that it is considered a plausible alternative to MS Office.

They built it, some businesses have adopted it, but they’re not making billions of dollars off of it.  Why not?  Let’s ask Joel.  His Strategy Letter III is probably the most important business lesson that people don’t get.

The only strategy in getting people to switch to your product is to eliminate barriers…Think of these barriers as an obstacle course that people have to run before you can count them as your customers. If you start out with a field of 1000 runners, about half of them will trip on the tires; half of the survivors won’t be strong enough to jump the wall; half of those survivors will fall off the rope ladder into the mud, and so on, until only 1 or 2 people actually overcome all the hurdles. With 8 or 9 barriers, everybody will have one non-negotiable deal killer. This calculus means that eliminating barriers to switching is the most important thing you have to do if you want to take over an existing market, because eliminating just one barrier will likely double your sales. Eliminate two barriers, and you’ll double your sales again.

(Incidentally, he used Excel as his example, pointing to the last time a smart aggressive software company with one revenue stream was looking to diversify.  Maybe office software is just more usurpable than operating systems.)

Google is facing a whole different set of barriers to adoption than Microsoft faced when attacking Lotus 123.  What are some of the barriers to adoption facing Google Docs?

  1. Storage space is limited.
  2. MS Office has office has more features.
  3. It’s slower than installed apps.
  4. It can only be used when online.
  5. People are used to opening programs, not websites to work on documents.
  6. IT Departments won’t upgrade their browsers beyond IE negative three.
  7. [UPDATED] Some companies will NOT store their docs online – they only want them on their own machines/network (government, confidential, corporate secrets, etc)

Pre-Chrome, it looked like only #1 and sort-of #2 could be solved.  Google, home of the original 1GB email account, isn’t afraid to offer more space when their products are mature.  They have great developer resources to add whatever features are necessary, but the JavaScript foundation put a cap on the kinds of features that could be delivered with acceptable performance.  The rest just seemed out of reach.

How does Chrome change this?

  • The V8 JavaScript engine greatly improves the performance, basically solving #2 and #3.  Coupled with the size and bloat of MS Office, Google Docs on Chrome is pretty comparable for speed.  Also, now Google can control the entire stack between the OS and the office apps (browser, renderer, JS engine, software, etc) so they can optimize in ways that they couldn’t do on other browsers.  Both Google Docs in Chrome and MS Excel take 1-2 seconds to open on my computer, while Firefox 3 took about 4 seconds and went through several ugly partial rendering states.
  • Google Gears is pre-installed, which should speed up adoption of Gears and solve #4.
  • The “Create Application Shortcuts” feature means that you get a nice desktop link that gives you an applicationesque window with either the list of all your docs or a specific doc, which can also be easily synced for offline access.  Take a look:
  • Google Docs vs MS Excel iconsBye bye, #5.
  • And last but not least, the $50 billion question, what about #6?  Imagine a version of Chrome with a different installer that a) included an IT controlled whitelist, b) automatically ran the offline setup after installing, and c) created appropriate shortcuts.  This means it can be centrally installed, restricted from general browsing, and treated like an installed app.  IE6 or 7’s role isn’t changed.  That would get the seal of approval of many more IT departments because of the greater control they would have over it vs a standard browser app.
  • [UPDATED] If there was an option to store documents offline only, that would solve #7.  This would negate one of Google Docs’ biggest strengths (collaboration) but giving companies that option just might be worth $50B.

So in one move, Google addressed all but one of the strongest obstacles to Google Docs, paving the way for a much bigger, more profitable expansion and the coveted second revenue source.  Can you think of any other obstacles to the wider adoption of Google Docs that Google needs to address?

[UPDATES: Thanks for the suggestion Evan!]

]]> http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/articles/chrome-gdocs-msoffice/feed/ 3 Programming Celebrities http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/articles/programming-celebrities/ http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/articles/programming-celebrities/#comments Tue, 30 Sep 2008 19:18:56 +0000 Peter http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/?p=66 A few months ago, my wife went on a kick where we watched the first few seasons of the TV show Dallas, rented on DVD from Blockbuster Online. If you watch 2-3 episodes a day of anything, you can’t but help become a little obsessed. So when we heard there was going to be a movie remake of Dallas, we immediately critiqued all of their casting decisions and came up with out own more accurate cast for the movie.  We spent weeks debating the pros and cons of each potential casting choice, scoured IMDB like Nike at a Brooklyn playground, and came up with the perfect cast.  (note to self:  If you ever spend that much time on anything, WRITE IT DOWN!).

Now I don’t actually care about a single mainstream celebrity, not one bit.  I’m pretty up to speed on their lives due to the gossip magazines my wife leaves around the house (any reading material is acceptable in the restroom) but unless there was a complete debacle like at the end of Miss Congeniality, I would never actually seek out celebrity news.

I don’t care about celebrities, but I had a roaring good time casting Dallas, so I decided to try the same exercise with media I do care about: nerdy programming blogs!  I have my own set of celebrities that are huge in their own sphere but who are COMPLETELY INVISIBLE to normal people.  A normal person, like my wife, would have no idea who any of these people are. So as my gift to everyone who needs any easy way to explain the personality and influence of a programming blogger, I present this mapping of real world celebrities to programming blogosphere celebrities:

Caveats:

  1. The ages are hard to match up, because the blogosphere is less than a decade old, while movies have been around forever. For instance, Joel Spolsky is about the oldest on the list in Blog Years, but he’s not that old in real years.  So for reference, 2000-2008 in Internet years is roughly equivalent to 1940-2007 in Hollywood years. The view of celebrities is my personal 2008 view of them, not their contemporary impressions.
  2. I know you are going to say “WHAT?!?!? How can you compare X’s writing to Y’s movies?” Well, if I told you that there was a new movie coming out starring Y, what would be your reaction? Would you run out and pre-order tickets? Would you IMDB it? Would you be interested but wait for DVD? Would you just shrug and wait to see if it gets popular? Now imagine you see a link to a new post by X on Reddit. Do you click through? Do you bookmark it for later? Does it not matter because you already subscribe to their feed? Do you skip it? That’s the main criterion I used to compare.

So without further ado, here’s the tentative list – I welcome suggestion, debate, and comments.

Scott Hanselman: Jeremy Piven – not a leading man but extremely capable and will make anything he touches better. Funny, versatile, confident in his role at the edge of the spotlight, lives in a city outside the focus of the industry (Portland/Chicago).

Alternates: Seth Green

Scott Hanselman Jeremy Piven Seth Green

Joel Spolsky: Michael Caine -Actively producing since the dawn of time, quality consistent throughout career, impressive longevity. Anyone could learn from them.

Alternates: Jack Lemon

Joel Spolsky Michael Caine Jack Lemmon

Paul Graham: George Clooney – An undisputed star that people either love or hate.  Aggravates some people because of his politics ($15K to dropout of college/liberal political activism).

Alternates: Sean Penn

Paul Graham George Clooney Sean Penn

Carl Franklin: Jerry Bruckheimer – Makes big hits, big productions, strong emphasis on production values and making quality enhance experience, looked down on by “snooty types” (non-Windows people, art-house movie fans) but quite sophisticated when you take a closer look, undisputed leader in their niche.

Alternates: Michael Bay, Jack Black (humor, music)

Carl Franklin Michael Bay Jack Black

Peter Norvig: Clint Eastwood – Long and continuing careers with jaw-dropping resumes that inspire reverence in their respective industries.

Alternates: Robert Redford

Peter Norvig Clint Eastwood Robert Redford

David Heinemeier Hansson: Tom Cruise – Started out as a Golden Boy, a hero, a huge star, and quickly gained power and influence.  Has retained star power despite controversy and overexposure.

Alternates: Mel Gibson

David Heinemeier Hansson Tom Cruise Mel Gibson

Jeff Atwood: Hugh Grant – lots and lots of posts/movies, overall good quality work, generally enjoyable if a little repetitive.

Alternates: Jude Law

Jeff Atwood Hugh Grant Jude Law

Phil Haack: Kevin James – a top-shelf “that guy”, under-the-radar funny, not a big star but clearly happy with his stature.

Alternates: Vince Vaughn

Phil Haack Kevin James Vince Vaughn

Reg Braithwaite: Laurence Fishburne – Excellent performance without being flashy. Just look at their work and try to find someone as consistently high quality.

Alternate: Morgan Freeman

Reg Braithwaite Laurence Fishburne

(note: If you think I picked these two actors because they’re black, you’re welcome to name two actors who consistently perform at such a high level.  They’re my two favorite actors on this whole list and I hate the fact that it’s 2008 and I still have to give disclaimers like this).

Steve Yegge: Robin Williams – Always entertaining, definitely crazy, hilarious but not just about humor, performance improved by controlled substances (wine/cocaine)

Alternate: Jim Carrey

Steve Yegge Robin Williams

Non-Programmers worth including:

Seth Godin: Yoda – Wise, a little odd looking, and what he says sounds just crazy enough to make sense.

Seth Godin Yoda

Tim Ferris: Peter Jackson – An outsider who took their industry by storm.  You may not like his methods but you can’t deny his impact.

Tim Ferriss Peter Jackson

Who did I miss? Do you disagree? Leave your comments below. If this turns out to be popular, I might move it to it’s own page.

]]> http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/articles/programming-celebrities/feed/ 5 The GoogleCam Has Covered A Lot of Miles http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/articles/the-googlecam-has-covered-a-lot-of-miles/ http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/articles/the-googlecam-has-covered-a-lot-of-miles/#comments Thu, 03 Jul 2008 22:22:13 +0000 Peter http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/?p=280 I’m a fan of the Fail Blog, and the recent Sign Design Fail included a Google Maps StreetView link to Concord, NC, a suburb of Charlotte. They have streetview there? Apparently. I zoomed out to the entire USA and they have covered a TON of cities, many more than I would have suspected in the limited time it has been out. Apparently their data integration process is pretty streamlined to handle all that.

(click for bigness)

]]> http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/articles/the-googlecam-has-covered-a-lot-of-miles/feed/ 0 Hey Language Snobs: Don’t Pinch Pennies http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/articles/hey-language-snobs-dont-pinch-pennies/ http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/articles/hey-language-snobs-dont-pinch-pennies/#comments Wed, 04 Jun 2008 15:57:04 +0000 Peter http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/?p=271 Programming language snobs are penny pinchers. That’s a tough sentence to write for some that just finished holding a workshop to help people learn Lisp of all languages. Why would I make such a bold, inflammatory statement? (No, not to troll. Most of the criticisms in this article are aimed at myself, based on my own actions over the last few years.) I had an unpleasant realization after listening to two excellent talks that developed this idea planted in my head by Raganwald with this post he quoted a few months ago:

“…you can count the number of games written in a purely functional style on one hand. Is it that language tinkerers are less concerned about writing real applications? That they know you can solve any problem with focused grunt work, but it’s not interesting to them? That the spark and newness of a different language is its own reward? Either way, the BASIC programmers win when it comes down to getting projects finished.”

—James Hague, Slumming with BASIC Programmers

The gist of the post is that uber-languages like Lisp, Erlang, Ruby, and even C are worlds ahead of BASIC, but somehow a group of Neanderthals put down their clubs and wiped away their drool long enough to write a slew of various and impressive computer games using BASIC. OK, he didn’t say that, his exact words were “…largely written by people with minimal programming background.” I was just translating for the language snobs out there. But then, mid-gloat, he hits them, you (even me) with that damning quote above about getting projects finished.

Ouch. I was looking back at what I’ve produced over the last few years (both personally and professionally) and the list is pretty short. Maybe it’s a byproduct of too much school, or not being able to take things apart as a kid, but I tend to default to waterfall mode. Research, plan, gather as much knowledge as possible to build a mental model so complete that the perfect solution will fly from my fingertips like a glorious winged Viking ship sailing off to enjoy another toasty Greenland winter. Alas, I usually just end up learning enough useful knowledge about a subject to write and converse about it but not enough to work with it. Hence my dusty portfolio.

Take my involvement with Lisp, for instance. I’ve become a slightly respected name in the (admittedly small) Lisp community because of what I’ve written about history, Emacs and SLIME, how to learn Lisp, how to setup an environment, access documentation, and the right mindset for developing in Lisp. Heck, I even organized a workshop to help other people learn Lisp! Notice all the working software on that list? [Cricket, cricket, cricket...]. What does all that have in common? It’s all preparation for the day when I’m going to write all this great software in Lisp. Oops.

So why, when I’ve been using C# and .Net at work for 5 years now, am I so worried about having the perfect Lisp environment and knowledge of how to use it? So that when I finally get around to writing something, I will be able to do it quickly because of all the power at my disposal. That’s right, I don’t have a lot of time to spend, so I’m very, very, very gradually building up my ability to write software quickly. That certainly makes more sense than writing a little software at a time, right?

Where was I? Oh yeah, OOPSLA.

OOPSLA

The ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Object Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications (OOPSLA) is one of the premier conferences on software development, and despite the title, doesn’t have much to do with object-oriented programming anymore. Twenty years or so when it started, OO was hot, cutting edge stuff, and as time marched on, the conference people decided that rather than stick with objects, they would stick with the hot, cutting edge. For the highly regarded 2007 conference, they recorded their keynote speeches and made a podcast out of them. What outstanding marketing! (The Singularity Summit did this too.) I was interested in OOPSLA because of what Dan W. and others had written about it, but getting to hear the actual speeches put this year’s conference in Nashville at the top of my wishlist.

[Note: if anyone is looking for a way to feel really good about themselves, why not sponsor my trip to OOPSLA 2008? No, really, please! I promise to take pretty pictures and write lots about it.]

Two of those keynotes made a huge impression on me, to the point where I’m scared what will happen if I listen to the 5 remaining talks. First, in Second Life: The World’s Biggest Programming Environment (download 40.5 MB mp3), two Second Life employees gave a similar argument to Hague’s above. They started out by trashing the Second Life scripting language (LSL) and sharing details of its sordid past. For instance, all scripts have to run in a 16K virtual machine. This virtual machine was written in one week, replacing the first version that was written in one night. There is no IDE, no debugging, no tracing – all editing happens in-world. Most appealing language features are missing, and the language isn’t even pretty. Bleak, huh? Well, there are hundreds of thousands (millions?) of people writing scripts in LSL, with over 2 million simultaneous scripted objects and over 2.5 billion lines of code in this terrible language. Why do people put up with it?

Because the payoff is so rewarding – there is a whole world full of animated objects scripted by participants. People love to write in it since there’s immediate, tangible feedback for doing so – you literally change the world your character lives in!

The second talk was by Kathy Sierra, called (no surprise) Creating Passionate Users (download 38 MB mp3). I’m a confessed Kathy Sierra fan, so I looked forward to getting reacquainted with old Kathy. Her remarks enlightened and expanded the points made by the Second Life people – people want high bandwidth experiences, they want feedback, they want their effort to produce results! Why was that such a revelation to me? I mean, I got it, but I didn’t get it until I heard her say it. There are so many examples of this principle:

  • people use PHP because it’s installed on every web host in the multiverse, so they don’t have to muck around much with deployment
  • people use Ruby on Rails because they can make a blog in 15 minutes
  • people use Agile because they always have working software and can see changes immediately
  • people don’t use Lisp because there’s no easy download
  • and people use BASIC and LSL because they want to get stuff done

That brings me to the two parts of my inflammatory title:

Language Snobs

Language Snobs stress the superiority of one programming language over others. Some languages are extremely guilty of this (Lisp, SmallTalk, Python, Ruby, Scala, Haskell, etc) while others aren’t (Java, C#, VB, BASIC, PHP, Perl, C, etc). The snob languages talk about why they’re so great, and the other languages just point to what has been written in them as proof that they’re great (or at least good enough). Granted, this definition isn’t perfect; Lisp has everything on my Lisp Companies page to brag about, but it seems small in comparison to the hot air that gets circulated (including by me) in its favor. I think Ruby is crossing over into the non-snob category, based on the massive popularity of Rails and all of the sites written in it.

The important point is that the language snobs aren’t wrong! There is no denying that abstractions are useful, that more powerful tools help, and that a sharp, well-trained mind can accomplish things that a simple one can’t. The dearth of machine language and assembly written nowadays is proof of that. But the language snobs are working in the realm of what’s theoretically possible, what can be accomplished in the best possible conditions. This could be in small startups founded on the best principles, or on large companies like Google and ITA that have kept that environment as they’ve grown. But most people and most business don’t operate anywhere near that theoretical maximum, so the bulk of the software gets written by the competent mean, by the bulge in the middle of the standard distribution. Language snobs are also working in the future, since advanced topics tend to trickle down over time (hence the rebranding of OOPSLA).

Penny Pinchers

A penny pincher is someone who is frugal, who “knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing”. Language snobs know what languages are most powerful, so they are loath to use anything less than the best. They don’t want to endure the cost of code duplication, cut-and-paste, reading un-refactored code, leaky abstractions, etc. Everything has to be perfect, and when you add up those little bits of perfection, you get something great.

But life, business, and software are full of trade-offs. If you can accept a little imperfection here, some cruft there, and sloppy duplication there, they you can hire from a bigger pool of employees, deploy to a wider range of platforms, hit more markets more frequently. The key point that the penny pinchers miss is that while using inferior tools has a cost associated with it, so does not using those tools. The important thing is to Always Be Shipping.

Wasabi

It’s not only language snobs that are guilty of penny pinching. A classic example of the non-snob language fans pinching was in reaction to Fog Creek’s Wasabi programming language. For anyone who missed it, here’s the first mention:

FogBugz is written in Wasabi, a very advanced, functional-programming dialect of Basic with closures and lambdas and Rails-like active records that can be compiled down to VBScript, JavaScript, PHP4 or PHP5. Wasabi is a private, in-house language written by one of our best developers that is optimized specifically for developing FogBugz; the Wasabi compiler itself is written in C#.

This simple comment set off a crazed irrational firestorm of criticism, cataloged here. People even thought it was a joke! These people were pinching pennies because they didn’t realize that writing a compiler where you control both the input and the output isn’t that hard if you have smart people working for you. Joel wrote a response to the Wasabi firestorm explaining all this:

Since we are not blub programmers, we like closures, active records, lambdas, embedded SQL a la LINQ, etc. etc. and so those are the kinds of features we put into Wasabi…

Most people don’t realize that writing a compiler like this is only about 2 months work for one talented person who read the Dragon book. Since the compiler only has one body of code to compile, it is much easier to write. It doesn’t have to be a general-purpose compiler. It doesn’t have a math library, for example…

And we have the ability to add any feature to the language that we want easily… this is the same power Paul Graham talks about in On Lisp, the power to invent new language features that suit your exact application domain. Lisp does this through a mechanism called macros…

He also explains the very sound business reason for it, balancing the cost of developing the Wasabi language and compiler (smaller than people think) against the support cost of setting client servers up with .Net, Mono, or PHP on Windows (larger than people think) and the lost opportunity cost of people that won’t even consider buying your product because they don’t support your language (MUCH larger than people think). 37signals at least acknowledges this foregone opportunity, but 37signals has WAY more business savvy than people give them credit for. And despite the bashing Joel gets for writing “a crappy bug-tracking program for stupid windows programmers” or something like that, he has managed to increase his revenue by 17x since September 2003. There’s a very important lesson to be learned from two very successful companies – make balanced strategic decisions, but make sure you understand the consequences of doing so.

Conclusion

It turns out that this wasn’t much about languages at all; languages was just the topic that springboarded the idea. The real message is about people, passion, results, business, and most importantly, balance. If you find yourself focusing too much on one single aspect of your product or your business, there had better be a good reason. If you love your language because you can mold it (Lisp), or because strict functionality and a strong typing system prevent errors (Haskell, OCaml), those features had better be extremely important to the problem you’re trying to solve. If you’re running a software business and all you do is code, you’d better be getting your first version ready to release as soon as possible. All successful companies are balanced companies. If you’re too focused on one area, you’re guilty of premature optimization and unless you are ready to make some painful adjustments, you should get comfy on your local maximum.

———————————-

UPDATE: Joel and Jeff at the stackoverflow podcast had a strikingly similar discussion in Episode #8.  Joel said that for the niche tools (that’s how he characterized what I called “snob languages”), there are two reactions to the pain that the limitations (documentation, fewer programmers, less mature tools, etc) cause: admitting that your platform just isn’t that good yet, or convincing yourself that your platform is so good that it’s worth the pain because it makes you so much more productive.  Choosing the first option causes jarring cognitive dissonance whereas the second choice feels good, so these niche languages and platforms have vocal, fanatic followers who have convinced themselves that they are using the Good Lord’s Own tools.  If you’re using a snob language but still think you’re rational and open-minded, listen to it or read the transcript (not finished yet but will be soon).  It’s between 6:57 and 16:56.

]]> http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/articles/hey-language-snobs-dont-pinch-pennies/feed/ 25 Recap of Intro to Lisp Workshop http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/articles/recap-of-intro-to-lisp-workshop/ http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/articles/recap-of-intro-to-lisp-workshop/#comments Tue, 03 Jun 2008 17:37:03 +0000 Peter http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/?p=270 Thanks to everyone who attended or helped with the Chicago Lisp User Group’s Intro to Lisp Workshop! We had a great turnout (41 people!), a great facility (thanks to IIT’s Institute of Design), food and prizes (thanks to Obtiva), plus there was some Lisp too! This page will (eventually) contain links to all of the information about the workshop, but since most of it isn’t written or produced yet, this will at least give an idea of what to look forward to. All of the presentations were videotaped and those videos will eventually be online. There is also a big stack of feedback forms waiting to be collated, and some of that feedback will be put online.

Attendee Statistics – a breakdown of the programming languages and OS of choice, as well as a geographic breakdown of where attendees came from.

Funniest Comment – someone’s IM status was set to “Developing a speech impediment…”

Presentations

  • Setting up a Lisp Development Environment – this actually didn’t end up being much of a presentation, since the setup documents for Linux, OSX, and Windows ended up being so thorough that most people didn’t need to troubleshoot.
  • Lisp Basics and Idioms (by Peter Christensen) – my intro talk that covered the history, concepts, and paradigms of Lisp. The goal was to give a big picture and proper mindset for development in Lisp.
  • Macros (by Craig Luddington and Eli Naeher) – an interactive talk on macros, showing basics of macro development, macro examination in SLIME, and a survey of some of the built-in macros of Common Lisp.
  • Chat Server Development Demo (by John Quigley) – John started with a quiz-show style review where he tested two unwitting volunteers on their understanding of Lisps execution and development model. After that, he demoed a chat server that he wrote in about 250 lines of Lisp. Due to technical difficulties and time constraints, he wasn’t able to do the live updates, but we were proud to have several minutes of open chat on the server where no one cursed (I think the worst comment was “turd”). John has promised a demo of it at one of our meetings.

Beautiful Code: Leading Programmers Explain How They Think (Theory in Practice (O'Reilly))

Programming in Haskell

Practical Common Lisp

Book Raffle Winners

Congratulations to Luke Orland, Janet Kirsch, and (should have written down the third name) who won the following books in our registration raffle.

Gift-bag DVDs

Grant Rettke took the initiative to put together a “gift bag” DVD full of resources for people looking to learn more about Lisp development. The complete list is very long, but here is a summary:

We’re looking to make an updated version of this DVD, including the materials from the workshop. Please let me know if you’d be interested one – if there is a lot of interest, we might make another batch and mail them out for a small fee.

After-Party

After the workshop, a dozen or so people walked down to Elephant & Castle Pub and Restaurant. I didn’t go since I had a house full of beautiful women waiting for me (my wife and daughters ;-) .

Sponsors

Special thanks to Kevin Taylor of Obtiva for sponsoring the food, drinks, gift DVDs, and the Practical Common Lisp prize book! Obtiva does on-site or outsourced development, and provides training in leading edge technologies.

]]> http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/articles/recap-of-intro-to-lisp-workshop/feed/ 2 “Lisp Basics and Idioms” Presentation from Intro to Lisp Workshop http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/articles/lisp-basics-and-idioms-presentation-from-intro-to-lisp-workshop/ http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/articles/lisp-basics-and-idioms-presentation-from-intro-to-lisp-workshop/#comments Sun, 01 Jun 2008 00:01:19 +0000 Peter http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/?p=263 This is an HTML version of the slides from my “Lisp Basics and Idioms” presentation at the Chicago Lisp User Group’s Intro to Lisp Workshop. It’s also videotaped but it will take a while to transfer it to digital, edit it, etc. It was a good presentation (IMHO) worth waiting for, but here’s the sneak peek (with links!).

If you want to look at the .ppt, you can download it here, but it’s pretty bare (or ugly, depending on how charitable you are), it doesn’t have as much info as the version below (no links, fewer references), and it is missing all of the good verbal ad-libbing I did when presenting. But hey, I’m not complaining if you want to see it!

***Lisp Basics and Idioms***

Lisp Is Old

Lisp Is New

Lisp Is A Family of Languages

  • Common Lisp: ANSI Standard written in the 80s caused languages to coalesce, then implementations to flourish
  • Scheme: A conceptually cleaner variant with a smaller specification
  • Proprietary: LispWorks, Allegro
  • Open Source: SBCL, CLisp
  • Others: compile to C, run on JVM, etc

Lisp Is Functional, But Not Strictly

  • Functional is the most natural to write
  • Can make sequential blocks, either explicitly or in constructs
  • Can make and change values if needed
  • Can build and incorporate new paradigms as necessary, i.e. CLOS
  • Lisp is strongly typed, dynamic typed

Lisp Has Lots of Parentheses

  • “Lisp has all the visual appeal of oatmeal with fingernail clippings mixed in.” -Larry Wall
  • Used to group expressions
  • Makes syntax simple and consistent
  • Most forms are (function args*)

But the Parentheses Aren’t a Big Deal

  • “Parentheses? What parentheses? I haven’t noticed any parentheses since my first month of Lisp programming. I like to ask people who complain about parentheses in Lisp if they are bothered by all the spaces between words in a newspaper” – Ken Tilton
  • Editors indent automatically
  • Emacs commands to balance and close parens
  • Paredit (Emacs library) lets you manipulate sexps directly

Lisp Uses Symbols

  • Like variables but better
  • Like pointers but less dangerous
  • Assign a name to a value
  • Values can be lots of things – numbers, strings, functions, lists, other data structures

Lisp Has First Class Functions

  • Easy to define
    • (defun hello-world () (format t “hello, world”))
  • Can be passed as parameters
  • Can be returned as values from other functions
  • Anonymous functions too!

Lisp Has Flexible Parameters

  • Parameters can be optional, with defaults
    • (defun foo (a &optional b) (list a b))
    • (defun foo2 (a &optional (b 10)) (list a b))
  • Parameter lists can be variable length
    • (defun + (&rest numbers) …)
  • Keyword parameters
    • (defun foo3 (&key a b) …)

Lisp Uses Pairs

Lisp Uses Lists

  • “It is better to have 100 functions operate on one data structure than to have 10 functions operate on 10 data structures.” – Alan J. Perlis
  • Tons of functions for manipulating lists
  • Useful for recursive definitions
  • Lists aren’t perfect so…

Lisp Has More Than Just Lists

  • Collections
  • Vectors – fixed size sequences
  • Arrays – can be multidimensional, resizable
  • Sequence functions on collections – COUNT, FIND, POSITION, REMOVE, SUBSTITUTE, etc
  • This is one place where syntax would help
  • (aref a 5) instead of a[5]

Lisp Does Lots More

Lisp Has Lots of Free Online Resources

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