Author: dbasch

Those of us who work in software live in a world of lean practices. We are encouraged to prototype, fail fast and iterate. We have seen software-based companies go from an idea in a kid’s brain to a billion dollar business in the time it would have taken him to get a college degree. Of course, those are the outliers on the positive side. For every extremely successful software project there are a large number of failed ones that we’ll never hear about.

There are also projects that managed to survive only because they had the backing of an already successful company, flush with cash. Microsoft Word for Windows could be a good example. Not many people know the story of what would become one of the most widely used software products ever. I learned about it from a case study for my Software Project Management class in 1997, what follows is my summary (original here, or Google it).

In September of 1984 Bill Gates wanted a word processor that would run on Windows (being developed at the time). He gave the project to John Hunt, Andrew Hermann and Lee Arthurs. Greg Slyngstad (who would later become the program manager for the project) said:

Gates put three real hotshots on the project. Hunt, who had single-handedly written the first version of PC Word, became the project manager. Arthurs, who had a Ph.D. in psychology, was responsible for user interface and documentation. Hermann had been at Wang and was supposed to know the word proces­sor business inside and out.

The project was codenamed Cashmere, and it was scheduled to take a year or less. At this point you can probably guess that this did not happen. The scope for the project turned out to be too ambitious. At the end of the first year, all the team had to show for their efforts were some design papers. The design included features such as email, spreadsheet capabilities, document protection, and much more. Hunt left the project in the summer of ’86. Slyngstad came on board, along with Doug Kurtz (lead developer for the DOS version of Word), and other MS stars. The new team decided to throw away all the work done to date, and start from the Word for Macintosh codebase. The project was renamed to Opus, and was staffed mostly with new hires.

The next year went by as the team wrote a new spec for the product. Soon it was 1988, and the team was under extreme pressure to deliver. One development manager put it this way:

Opus got into a mode that I call “Infinite Defects,” When you put a lot of schedule pressure on developers, they tend to do the minimum amount of work necessary on a feature. When it works well enough to demonstrate, they consider it done and the feature is checked off on the schedule. The inevitable bugs months later are seen as unrelated. Even worse, by the time the bugs are discovered, the developers can’t remember their code so it takes them a lot longer to fix. Furthermore, the schedule is thrown off because that feature was supposed to be finished.

To make a long story short, the project was deemed “code complete” in late ’88, but it was full of bugs. It took one full year to stabilize it enough for release. The release date was November 30, 1989. This is more than five years after the start date, and four years behind schedule. Needless to say, this project taught Microsoft a number of valuable lessons. Their software development process improved tremendously over the next decade. A blue screen of death here and there is nothing compared to the above 🙂

You’d think the software industry as a whole has improved enough that schedules no longer stretch by 5x. If you work in software, you know it still happens. Why? Hint: not because of the explanation given in what was the Quora Answer of the Day a few weeks ago. If only it were that simple. A much better argument was made (in 1986!) by Fred Brooks: No Silver Bullet – Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering.”

Today is InDay at LinkedIn. We are encouraged to spend one day each month learning, inspiring others, and sharing knowledge with the community. I’ve been at LinkedIn for four months now, and this day gives me the perfect excuse to write a post about two things I love about this place: open source code and big data.

In Silicon Valley we have this notion of the entrepreneur as the lone hero. A risk taker who shoots for the moon and aims to knock the ball out of the park. A visionary, a dreamer, a jack-of-all-trades. In another time he would have been a discoverer of new continents, a warrior, an inventor, a heretic. I could keep the clichés going but I’ll save some for another post.

Some people believe that carrying out a large software project is like building a bridge. You look at your past projects and use the data to estimate the time and resources needed. This view has been debunked decades ago; this analogy was frequently seen as an aspiration for the future when I did my Master in Software Engineering at Carnegie Mellon in the late nineties.

In Silicon Valley many people treat the concept that “ideas are worthless, it’s all about execution” as gospel. This thought is supported, among others, by Paul Graham [sorry, he’s an easy target because his essays have so much low-hanging fruit]. He says:

Actually, startup ideas are not million dollar ideas, and here’s an experiment you can try to prove it: just try to sell one. Nothing evolves faster than markets. The fact that there’s no market for startup ideas suggests there’s no demand. Which means, in the narrow sense of the word, that startup ideas are worthless.

Patent number 5771354. He got it in 1998, back in the relatively early days of the internet. And the way IV explained the patent to us, Chris Crawford invented something that we all do all the time now. He figured out a way to upgrade the software on your home computer over the internet. So in other words, when you turn on your computer and a little box pops up and says, click here to upgrade to the newest version of iTunes, that was Chris Crawford’s idea.

 

 Intellectual Ventures goes around to companies and says, hey, you want to protect yourself from lawsuits? We own tons of patents. Make a deal with us. Our patents will not only cover everything you’re doing in your business, no one will dare sue you.

You are in a room full of roulette tables. Someone gives you one chip and tells you to bet it on a number. Here’s the twist: all tables pay 36 to 1, but not all wheels have the same number of pockets. Some are standard, with the typical 0 to 36 numbering. You see one that has 500 numbers. Screw that one. One has 30 and a sign disclosing that it’s biased, only they won’t tell you how. Hmmm.

I like Sarah Lacy’s writing. She’s funny, entertaining, and also a hard worker. Her pieces usually make it clear that she spends ample time researching the topics at hand. I wouldn’t go as far to say she’s my favorite tech reporter (today that distinction would go to Kara Swisher), but I was very happy this morning to learn of the launch of her new site, PandoDaily.

It’s interesting that a tech news site raised venture funding from a very impressive list of investors. To me, this means that it must be an extremely ambitious enterprise. They are aiming to build something much bigger than Techcrunch. Some of the funds and investors on the list won’t write you a check if you’re not swinging for the fences. This makes sense; If I were in Sarah Lacy and Michael Arrington’s place, I’d be out to create a larger megaphone than the Huffington Post just to one-up Arianna Huffington. Given their recent history that could be a powerful motivation, and it will be fun to watch how this develops.

There is one problem with taking money from an array of investors who collectively have a stake in a significant chunk of the Silicon Valley ecosystem: the obvious conflicts of interest that will arise. Gawker shares their opinion on the difference between PandoDaily and what Techcrunch used to be:

Lacy, in contrast, will spend a lot more time covering her owners. At least she’s “unashamed” about that, as she put it. And points to the longtime Valley reporter for knowing how to appeal to tech titans’ vanity. Ever since the changing of the guard at TechCrunch, they’ve longed for a more deeply intertwined publication that will cover the Valley with the fervor of a supplicant. Lacy just sold them one. It’s not clear if the seventeen different stakeholders will be able to effectively block stories they don’t like. But then it’s not clear they’ll even need to.

To which Lacy responds:

We’re being up front about who invested in us; it’s up to the readers to decide how much that conflict bothers them. 

Right off the bat, critical readers will see that one of their first articles is a PR piece for a sister portfolio company, Wealthfront. This startup provides wealth management for people who recently made some money and don’t know much about investing. I checked out the service and it looks useful. However, I do believe that in the interest of reporting fairness Lacy should have mentioned other options besides Wealthfront. There must be some competitors out there, right? A quick Google search brings up Covestor and Collective2.

I strongly believe that the first thing anyone who makes some money should do is educate him / herself. When I first sold some Inktomi stock in 1999, I immediately bought a copy of Burton Malkiel’s A Random Walk Down Wall Street. I read it as fast as I could to prepare for the incoming zombie invasion. I wouldn’t rule out using the services of a firm like Wealthfront, but only after having learned the basics. Paul Buchheit explains all this very eloquently in a from post almost two years ago, titled “What do do with your millions.”

Reading PandoDaily will be an exercise in critical thinking and agenda detection. This is a good training ground for a critical reader, because connecting the dots should be relatively easy. Everyone has an agenda but not everyone discloses it… and that includes me. Hint: brains.

I just finished reading Paul Graham’s latest essay, Schlep Blindness. I could say many things about it, but I’ll get straight to the point. Graham talks about having the realization that creating a business involves lots of unpleasant and tedious work. He makes it sound like he just invented faster-than-light travel, even though every person who ever ran a successful business can tell you this. You don’t even need to have started a company. My grandmother burned this into my brain when I was five years old. Chores are necessary but not fun. If it were easy everyone would do it. Yawn.

How do you overcome schlep blindness? Frankly, the most valuable antidote to schlep blindness is probably ignorance. Most successful founders would probably say that if they’d known when they were starting their company about the obstacles they’d have to overcome, they might never have started it. Maybe that’s one reason the most successful startups of all so often have young founders.