In addition, while the JVC stereo the previous owner installed has a USB port, I use it for a memory card for music. Lastly, the cig lighter socket in these cars is “always on”.

For these reasons I decided to do a little mod: Adding a 2 port USB power socket. This post explains how I did it and the parts I used.

Here’s the final result:

To start, I went to Amazon.com and bought 4 different cigarette lighter USB power adapters. I wanted to find one that had two plugs, supported Apple’s proprietary USB charging protocol, and would fit well behind one of the blank plates BMW provided on either side of the radio. Amazon’s amazing return policy meant that, as long as I didn’t damage them, I could return the ones I didn’t use.

After carefully pulling all 4 apart, I found that the PowerGen Dual USB 3.1A 15w High Output Car Charger had the following favorable characteristics:

• Up to 3.1A output.
• Red LED.
• A short circuit board. Some of the others had boards that were almost 2 inches long.
• A USB plug design that would adapt easily to a different bezel (in this case the BMW blank dash plate).

Disassembly of the power adapter was simple: just pry the plastic apart and the innards pop out.

See how the USB connectors hang over the edge of the circuit board? Turns out they extend almost exactly the same as the thickness of the blank plate!  (The blank plate in this picture is a spare that has a hole dilled in it for an alarm LED).

To cut the right sized rectangular holes in the blank plate I needed to use the faceplate from the USB adapter as a template. The USB connectors already fit the original faceplate tightly, but I wanted to make sure the new holes were very-slightly undersized to create an even better mechanical connection.

I used a pair of small Vise-Grips to hold the faceplate in place on the back side of the blank plate (I had to cut the sides of the original faceplate a bit to make it fit) and then drilled a pilot hole in the center of each rectangular opening. I then used a very small flat file to carefully expand the pilot hole and create the new rectangular holes in the blank plate.

I de-soldered the old ground wire and positive wire (spring in the above picture) from the circuit board and soldered in new wires of appropriate length. I then used a hot glue gun to further secure the electronics to the blank plate.

Remember, because I made the holes slightly undersized (10ths of a mm) the USB connectors fit really tightly providing a good mechanical connection.

From here it was a simple matter of attaching some plug connectors to the wires on my adapter and their siblings in the dash (which I had previously exposed behind the right hand side plate when installing my Valentine One radar detector hard-mount). I plugged it in and snapped the plate into place.

I have it wired to the same circuit as the radio so that it is only on when the ignition is on. You’ll note that the red LED does a nice job of providing a little illumination of the sockets (that matches BMW’s instrument colors). The hot glue helps diffuse the light a little which is a nice touch.

Hope this helps others.

APRIL 1, 2013 – SEATTLE, WA – Building on the massive success of the Amazon Kindle Fire, Charlie Kindel today is announcing that he has taken on a full-time role at the software and retail giant to build the Amazon Kindle Charlie™. The Amazon Kindle Charlie™ will be Amazon’s entry into the hotly contested home server market.

“I was really enjoying working with startups, and really didn’t expect to be working at one of the giants again,” said Charlie Kindel, who successfully built several defunct or soon to be defunct products while at Microsoft and in two startups, “but Amazon presented me with an opportunity to build a bold and audacious new business that I simply couldn’t pass up. The fact that it’s a home server and will be named after me was just icing on the cake.”

Charlie will still be involved in the Seattle startup community as an angel investor, mentor, and speaker, but his level of engagement will obviously be reduced.

“Amazon’s vision is to be Earth’s most customer-centric company. I’ve long been a huge fan, and I’m jazzed about the idea of working in an environment where the first principle is to start with the customer and work backwards” said Charlie. “I get to build a new team in going after a totally new area for Amazon. I’m particularly excited about all hiring I need to do for cloud and mobile developers and testers, program managers, and product managers.”

According to Charlie, the Amazon Kindle Charlie™ home server will be available in the market about the same time people start spelling Kindel correctly.

In related news, Charlie announced today that he will be stepping down as CEO of BizLogr, Inc, the startup he founded that created the wildly successful www.MileLogr.com. The current CTO will take over reigns as CEO. A search has started for a replacement CTO.

For press-inquiries please email. If you are interested in joining Charlie’s new team at Amazon you can email him at kindelc @ amazon.com.

“Put the customer first, have a plan, create a shared mission, get early victories, remove process, and make it fun.” – me, yesterday.

This was the formula my cohorts that built the Windows Phone app platform used. It worked. This is what the small team that created www.milelogr.com did.

“No battle was ever won according to plan, but no battle was ever won without one.”  – Dwight D. Eisenhower

It shocks me how resistant many entrepreneurs are to writing down a plan. It’s like they’ve been beaten down by the “VCs never read business plans, so don’t write one” tripe. Or maybe they were burned by the dense, unapproachable 100 page plans as babies (when they worked at BigCos).

Here’s the secret to planning: The shorter your plan the better.

But always have a WRITTEN DOWN plan.

Elon Musk had a plan for Telsa Motors. In 2006 he wrote a blog post and disclosed the plan as:

1. Build sports car
2. Use that money to build an affordable car
3. Use that money to build an even more affordable car
4. While doing above, also provide zero emission electric power generation options

The power of such a concisely written plan cannot be underestimated.

The plan for the Windows Phone 7 Application Platform, including the developer experience, fit on a single page. Yes, we had a 30+ page document that discussed all sorts of ideas and details, but the plan itself, the thing that served as our North Star fit on a single page. It concisely described all the things good plans cover:

• Your purpose (some call this the mission)
• How you’ll behave (your principles or tenets)
• What’s important and what’s not (your framework for making tradeoffs, aka priorities)
• Who’s responsible for what, and who’s not
• When you’ll do things, and in what order

Our one page plan was the North Star that 100s of people across 4 Microsoft divisions marched towards over the 18 months we had dedicated to the project. As we headed north we ended up going a bit west and maybe a bit east, but we never went south. And that is why a plan is so important.

Have one. And make it as concise as you possibly can.

I’ve written a post dedicated to a great framework for planning: The 5Ps: Achieving Focus in Any Endeavor.

One of my favorite truisms is

“People don’t buy things, people are sold things.”

Businesses buy products differently than consumers. But, just like consumers, they only really buy things that are sold to them:

“Businesses don’t buy things, businesses are sold things.”

How do businesses buy things differently? I love this answer by Steve Jobs from an interview he did in 2010 (emphasis mine):

“What I love about the consumer market, that I always hated about the enterprise market, is that we come up with a product, we try to tell everybody about it, and every person votes for themselves. They go ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ and if enough of them say ‘yes,’ we get to come to work tomorrow. That’s how it works. It’s really simple. With the enterprise market, it’s not so simple. The people that use the products don’t decide for themselves, and the people that make those decisions sometimes are confused. We love just trying to make the best products in the world for people and having them tell us by how they vote with their wallets whether we’re on track or not.” – Steve Jobs, June 1, 2010

A commenter on my Why Nobody Can Copy Apple post did a great job of explaining this in more detail:

“The problem is that the business…are attempting to maximize their profit, so they want to buy bulk, cheap product that fulfills all of the criteria they come up with. And these criteria they come up with are universally profit-driven or simply stupid. They want X features, Y functionality, because they need to do aX and aY with the product. They don’t care about bX and bY, which in this case are the entire experience of the product, because it’s not something that is quantitated in the corporate machine.”

Organizations that build product for businesses must SELL in a way that is compatible with the way the business BUYS. The organization, say Microsoft’s Interactive Entertainment Business (IEB), or Microsoft’s Business Division (MBD), needs a sales motion that fits the customer.

IEB, which makes Xbox, has a sales motion centered around allowing the end-user viscerally engage with the product at retail (fed by ‘air cover’ marketing and advertising) . In MBS’s case, selling, say Microsoft SharePoint, the sales motion is about having an army of Microsoft sales people (literally tens of thousands of employees are salespeople) call on CIOs and other “business decision makers” to convince them the speeds & feeds of the product address some pain point.

These sales motions and the sales force behind them are radically different.

Another of my favorite truisms is

“Ideas are worthless. Execution is everything. But getting people to pay for something is MORE everything.”

To be successful (profitable), an organization that builds something must be driven by how the product is sold. The product managers, designers, engineers, testers, and middle-managers all end up being highly influenced by the sales motion.

Therefore, in an organization focused on the consumer, every single person is attuned to the motion of sales. Which is a consumer focused motion (typically online or retail). If they are asked to focus on business customers at the same time, they lose focus. And a loss of focus creates mediocre products. Likewise, a business product organization that also has to sell to consumers will suffer a lack of focus.

Microsoft has done an admirable job in setting up IEB to be mostly consumer focused. This is why the Xbox and related products are pretty damn good. But IEB’s products are not as consistently excellent because they depend on other parts of Microsoft that are not as consumer focused.

Windows? Not so much. And the reason, at the end of the day is the bifurcation of focus between business customers and consumer customers.

Comments encouraged. Keep ‘em clean.

If only.

WORA was, is, and always will be, a fallacy. WORA reminds me of the mole in whack-a-mole. It just keeps popping up and the realities of competing platform vendors keep whacking it back down. What drives me crazy is not the “Run Anywhere” part that most people throw out and replace with something else (like “Optimize Everywhere” , “Suck Everywhere”,  “Test Everywhere”, or “Outsource the optimization“).

It is the “Write once…” part that’s the most dangerous. We all wish the world was rainbows and unicorns, and “Write once…” implies that there is a world where you can actually write an app once and it will run on all devices. But this is precisely the fantasy that the platform vendors will never allow to become reality. Stop asking for it.

“Mobile fragmentation is going to get significantly worse over the next few years. While this fragmentation will be bad for end users in some cases, it will be particularly bad for developers.”
– Me on LockerGnome, Oct 22, 2012

HTML5 is awesome in many ways. If applied judiciously, it can be a great technology and tool. As a tool, it can absolutely be used to reduce the amount of platform specific code you have to write.  But it is not a starting place. Starting with HTML5 is the most customer unfriendly thing a developer can do.

“We start with the customer and we work backward” – Jeff Bezos

“… you gotta start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology.” – Steve Jobs

Like many ‘solutions’ in our industry the “Hey, write it once in in HTML5 and it will run anywhere” story didn’t actually start with the end-user customer. It started with idealistic thoughts about technology. It was then turned into snake oil for developers.

Not only is  the “build a mobile app that hosts a web view that contains HTML5″ approach bass-ackwards, it is a recipe for execution disaster. Yes, there are examples of teams that have built great apps using this technique, but if you actually look at what they did, they focused on their experience first and then made the technology work. What happens when the shop starts with “we gotta use HTML5 running in a UIWebView” is initial euphoria over productivity, followed by incredible pain doing the final 20%.

The problem is each major platform has its own UI model, its own model for how a web view is hosted, its own HTML rendering engine, and its own JavaScript engine. These  inter-platform differences mean that not only is the platform-specific code unique, but the interactions between that code and the code running within the web view becomes device specific. And to make matters worse intra-platform fragmentation, particularly on the platform with the largest number of users, Android, is so bad that this “Write Once..” approach provides no help.

I blame James Gosling. He foisted Java on us and as a result Sun coined the term Write Once Run Anywhere. (Joking!)

Developers really want to believe it is possible to “Write once…”.  They also really want to believe that more threads will help. But we all know they just make the problems worse. Just as we’ve all grown to accept that starting with “make it multi-threaded” is evil, we need to accept “Write once…” is evil.

There is no “Write once…”. I wish there were. I know you wish there were too. But I wish my daughter had a baby unicorn to ride too.

There is, however, “Focus on creating the best possible user experience on each device and try to get as much code re-use as you can along the way.”

Focus on the experience, try to get code re-use.

Not as catchy, but far, far, more realistic. And helpful.

Edit: February 22, 2013 – Shortened title to make it less inflammatory.

It happened today! We have monies!

It is time for a serious glass of champagne!

We got some great press on the launch too.  Todd Bishop of Geekwire wrote:

The service, called MileLogr, works in conjunction with Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Apple calendars, creating a detailed mileage report based on the location of meetings as noted in each user’s calendar.  One of the big selling points is that it works retroactively, pulling the information from a calendar even if you weren’t specifically tracking your mileage last year.

And Nick Wingfield of the New York Times wrote:

…it had the smarts to calculate the length of a trip even if I didn’t give it an address. For example, I set up a recurring weekly meeting at Microsoft, without supplying the company’s location in Redmond, Wash., about 20 miles from where I live in Seattle. It figured out on its own where Microsoft was located by doing a search of online mapping services. (The chief executive of BizLogr, the company behind MileLogr, is Charlie Kindel, a former longer time Microsoft manager and a respected blogger on technology.)

An awesome launch! Now it’s time to iterate, iterate  and iterate and please thousands of customers like the early ones!

If you forgot to track your mileage last year MileLogr can save you thousands by figuring out where you drove from your calendar. Check it out at www.milelogr.com.

Tim Cook refers to integration and a great team as unique Apple advantages (but also note the references to magic and belief.)

Apple’s products are unique not on their feature merits, but because of the way they are conceived, designed, built, sourced, manufactured, shipped, marketed, sold, opened, held, and used. This is integration taken to the extreme and it would be difficult for any company to replicate.

It’s a better explanation but it is still hard to understand why nobody copies this approach. Integration is something that can take a long time, but it is possible with a Herculean effort. A few companies are starting to make moves in that direction (e.g. Microsoft.) But efforts are half-hearted. There is no “move the Earth” panic to become an integrated company from Samsung, Google or Microsoft.

I completely agree with all this: Replicating Apple’s vertical integration is a hard problem, but not an intractable one for the Microsoft & Google’s of the world.

I assert there’s something else that makes Apple is unique amongst its (asymmetric) competitors (e.g. Google, MS, Samsung):

It only focuses on one customer: The Consumer.

In my experience, the behaviors and culture of an organization (large or small) that focuses on the Consumer as a customer is diametrically incompatible with the behaviors and culture of an organization that focuses on Business as a customer.

I feel strongly that this is a key reason Microsoft’s products are often good, but not excellent; the consumer ones and the business ones. This is why Google will never be able to beat Apple at Apple’s game: Google’s customer focus is split between the advertiser and consumer.

The behaviors of organization, which are really driven by the attitudes, actions, priorities of the people, define what the organization produces. The behaviors required to delight the consumer are simply at odds with the behaviors required to delight businesses. You cannot do both simultaneously in a single organization and be excellent.

• I’ve written a follow-on post: Businesses Buy Differently
• A related post: Wanna Compete with Apple? Focus on Experiences

In the ’50s my father & grandfather came across about a dozen slot machines that had been unearthed from a building excavation in Chicago. Out of the pile, they were able to restore a couple of them.

I remember my grandfather’s at their house in Grand Rapids. It was a nickel based unit and he always had a jar of nickels next to it.

We had a $.25 based machine. When I was a kid, my dad gave me the job of keeping it running. This basically entailed removing jammed coins that one of my older sister’s had forced into it and occasionally oiling things.

Last spring when my mom passed away, I finally took possession of the machine. It had been sitting in storage for about 5 years. It required a deep cleaning, but otherwise is still in great shape.

I present to you an amazing piece of mechanical workmanship, a “1929 Ode D Jennings Dutch Boy Quarter Play slot machine”:

More photos here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ckindel/sets/72157629446309168/

When I was building home networking for Windows at Microsoft, I learned getting a team to a focused plan, and getting the team members to stick to the plan, was hard. I also learned that it was possible and that a tool like the 5Ps could really help.

But, in retrospect, I also learned I had made it much harder than it needed to be. I’m an idea guy. Ideas come to me a mile a minute. At that point in my career I didn’t realize how disruptive it was to my team that I was spouting these ideas to the team while they were executing on the current plan. In my head, I was just talking about potentialities for the future; by telling the team about all the cool things we could do in the future, I was showing “vision”.

What I found out later, when talking to people who had been on that team, was they viewed me as a “randomizer” they needed to control. In other words, the team spent time and energy MANAGING THE MANAGER. I forced them, regularly, to say “No” to ME.

If you are a leader of an early-stage venture, you need to figure out a way to “vent” your ideas that has NO impact on your team. Here are some tactics I’ve used and seen others use that might help you do this.

Use the “Mountains To Climb” Metaphor

A mountain climbing team sees a series of mountains in a mountain range. They aspire to climb them all. But they known they can only successfully climb one mountain at a time. As they climb the first mountain they can see the other mountains in the range. The view inspires them. As they approach the summit, gaining altitude, the view of the other peaks gets even more beautiful. This motivates them even more to complete the current climb.

A product team sees a long term vision for the product and starts marching towards it. If it is just one monolithic vision they will likely fail to accomplish it. To succeed the leadership should break the vision down into 3 or 4 smaller components, and say “Think of each of these as a mountain in a mountain range. Our goal is to conquer the entire range (that’s our vision). We’ve picked this mountain here as the first to climb. We can climb the others once we’ve summited this one.” 

Of course, prioritization is critical here (which component of the vision is the one that should be tackled first?). Great leaders are great at driving this prioritization.

Early on, help your team understand this metaphor, and use it consistently. Whenever you catch yourself saying “Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if we…” or “I’ve got an idea!”, go ahead and share the idea, but couch it with “Of course, this is part of our next mountain climb, not the current one.”

Put Future Planning Events in the Schedule

In the “Plan” part of the 5Ps, the schedule is always a top-down schedule. It starts with the end-date (the top) and works backwards to today. A great tactic for allowing potentially disruptive ideas to be aired, but not be disruptive is to ensure that the plan explicitly has a place for “Future Planning Events” where you get the team together to organize thoughts about the future.

For example, I’ve scheduled a 2 hour “Future Planning” meeting about 6 weeks into an 10 week project. At the start of the project I told the team “Anytime you have a new idea that does not fit within the principles and priorities of our current project, write them down. Know that on March 14th we have a planning event scheduled where, as a team, we’ll discuss them all.”

Then, whenever I had a new idea up during the project, I would do the following:

• Ask myself “How does this idea fit within the principles & priorities for the current project?”. If you’ve done a good job getting buy-in on the principles & priorities the answer should be clear. 90% of the time, if there’s any ambiguity the answer will be “it does not fit.”
• If it didn’t fit, I’d tell myself “Great idea. Add it to the list of ideas we’re going to discuss at the planning event on March 14th.”
• If it did fit, double-check that it fits. It likely doesn’t.

This technique provides a nice pressure relief valve. Of course this is valuable to the other “idea-people” on the team as well (anyone can bring the ideas they’ve bottled up to the Future Planning meeting). I’ve found it works well, but only if you have good buy in on the project’s principles & priorities.

Define Principles On Focus and Live Them

A project’s principles define how the team acts during the project. A well-functioning team knows the principles and lives them day-to-day. They are non-negotiable rules for behavior.

There exist projects where “peanut buttering” make sense; where doing a lot of little things “just good enough” is the path to success. I, personally, don’t ever want to be associated with projects like that, but there are valid reasons for them.

In every project I’ve been involved in, where I was proud of the result, the team lived by a principle of “doing a few things really, really well”. To this end, I always push for the following to be a core principle of the endeavor:

We will do a few things and do them very, very well; we are better off not having a capability than doing it poorly. There are always future versions.

Getting a team to buy into this principle will require you, as the leader, to also buy into it. If you are living this principle, then every time YOU have a new idea you will, naturally, by default, ask yourself the question “Does this idea help us do the few things we’ve already decided to do better?”.  If the answer is no, then put the idea aside.

The secret to great leadership is being able to focus on what is important and ignore what is not important. Great leaders are excellent at training their teams to stick to decisions; to say No when they should be focused on executing on a plan. Often times, a leader is also an “idea person”. Dysfunctional teams often refer to this kind of leader as a “Randomizer”.

Hopefully this post will help you avoid being a randomizer. Don’t be the manager that the team has to manage.

Please share your thoughts below.

Related posts on leadership, focus, and decision making:

• 90% of the Decisions you make Don’t Matter
• The 5 Ps: Achieving Focus in Any Endeavor
• Be Either an App or a Platform, Not Both
• Be as Excellent at Saying No as Saying Yes

MCE Controller is an open source Windows app intended to be used by non-developers. This means it has an installer, online documentation, and requires a discussion forum for support for end users.

GitHub never really provided great support for this kind of project. For example, there is no forum/discussion feature (although some claim you can use their bug/issue tracker for this). GitHub used to support the ability to host downloadable files such as installers, but a few weeks ago they removed that support.

So MCE Controller has been moved to CodePlex which has nice support for all these things.

In the process I’ve created an updated release, Version 1.8.1, that includes links to the new resources as well as a few bug fixes.

• MCE Controller homepage on CodePlex (source, downloads, docs, discussions, issues)
• Other posts on MCE Controller.

MCE Controller is an open source application I built for my home control system. It makes it easy to integrate Windows PCs with other devices and control systems. Any device that can send strings over TCP/IP or (now!) a serial port can now send commands to a PC running MCE Controller.

For example, sending ‘up’ causes the equivalent of an up-arrow keystroke. Or sending ‘screensaver’ causes the Windows screen saver to kick in on the target PC.

You can simulate mouse, keyboard, and Media Center remote control input. You can start applications, change windows’ z-orders, and even invoke Windows system functions (e.g. shutdown, standby or hibernate). MCE Controller is extensible as well, allowing you to define your own commands.

Enjoy!

MCE Controller Links:

• Read more and download MCE Controller
• MCE Controller support and discussion forum

I decided to talk about focus, a topic dear to my heart. The title of the talk is “Be as Excellent at Saying No as Saying Yes”. 

Below the video of my talk captured by TechSparks. It is just over 6 minutes long.

I’m currently writing a longish post on what I learned in Jordan. Be looking for it.

Related posts on focus and decision making:

• The 5 Ps: Achieving Focus in Any Endeavor
• 90% of the Decisions You Make Don’t Matter

I wrote a guest post for the Huffington Post on Dec 7, 2012. You can read the full post here, but here’s the TL;DR:

• If the Middle East can stay relatively stable for just 10-15 more years, entrepreneurship will have a major long-term positive impact on the social-economic future of the region.
• As the Middle East grows as a source of commerce and technology for the rest of the world, Arab women entrepreneurs will be the region’s most powerful and differentiated asset.
• I previously did not understand what “Arabia” meant. I, like most Westerners, thought the Arab world was defined by a combination of geography and religion. I now understand how important the Arabic language is to what it means to be an Arab.
• There is very little adoption of electronic payment systems in Jordan and other Middle Eastern countries. Changing the structural and cultural barriers to using electronic payments will cause more economic growth in the region than any other factor.

I like to get people’s attention by asserting “apps are dead”. I do this because it causes people to pause and think about what “apps” really are. After Apple started the app explosion in 2008 most apps were primarily client-side code. Today, however, it is almost impossible to find an app that does not rely on at least some Internet based service. In fact the apps most people use most of the time are almost all server-side code. The client-side code is there to project the experience on to one of many devices the user may have.

I also believe “apps are dead” because the end-user value proposition is no longer based on some piece of code a user buys in an app store on their device, but an entire experience they choose to use that spans all of their devices.  These experiences are powered by Internet (aka cloud) services. Examples of what I mean by experiences are Pandora, Kindle, Xbox LIVE, Netflix, Facebook, Gmail, and even The Walking Dead. All of these “apps” are available on all my devices and are curated over time.

Experiences are the new app.

Building great experiences requires the brand that is building them to be excellent at some core competency. For example, the people at American Idol need to be excellent at producing TV shows, identifying artists, managing Steven Tyler, and other things related to the entertainment industry. But to extend their experience beyond the TV (which they do) they also need to deliver excellent client-side code for a myriad of devices that connects to stable, secure, and scalable, Internet scale services.

In talking with brands and developers building these types of experiences three things are clear:

1. They want to focus on their core competencies.
2. Dealing with cross-platform mobile client development is their biggest challenge.
3. Building Internet scale services is their second biggest challenge.

I’ve written extensively on why I think solutions like Xamarin’s can really help ease the pain of cross-platform mobile development (and why I think HTML5 and WORA is a fallacy).

This post is focused on the third problem: The challenge of building Internet scale services.

In the past two years this trend away from “apps” has led to a bunch of new products intended to make it easier for brands, agencies, and developers to build  experiences. These new products range from Amazon’s AWS which provides what people call IaaS, or Infrastructure as a Service, to Heroku, which provides PaaS, or Platform as a Service. I see a place for all of these offerings (although there’s going to be some serious consolidation in the next few years given the number of these offerings that exist today).

The existing IaaS and PaaS offerings all make it easier for you, as a brand or developer, to write code that runs on the server.

I’m a huge fan of the newest type of “aaS” product, that is designed to enable you to power your experiences by not having to write ANY code on the server. These products are known as “BaaS” or Backend as a Service offerings. I’m a huge fan because my experience building the Windows Phone application platform, and engaging with all of the brands, publishers, and developers building apps made me realize the pain.

BaaS solutions are pain killers for brands and publishers and “It’s far easier to sell a pain killer than a vitamin.”

This is why I am an advisor and investor in one of the leading BaaS providers:  The Buddy Platform. 

Most BaaS providers provide low-level constructs in their service. I found the diagram below that illustrates the low-level kind of thinking these providers embody:

The Buddy Platform is unique amongst the BaaS providers in two primary ways:

1. Buddy provides a set of scenario based APIs.  Instead of just providing low-level primitives like collections and entities, Buddy also provides high-level constructs focused on the scenarios most mobile experiences need. 
2. The scenario based approach enables Buddy to track API usage with high “semantic knowledge”. This enables Buddy to provide amazingly powerful real-time analytic information about the experience, and the users who use the experience.

Buddy’s APIs are built around the scenarios in this poster: 

To illustrate the concept of “scenario-based” consider Pictures.  Instead of just providing a blob store with search and indexing, which is what other BaaS providers do, Buddy provides high-level constructs for photo albums and image filters. With Buddy, it is a trivial exercise to build an Instagram clone.

Another example is the Game API which, instead of just providing the developer with raw table/collections APIs, provides facilities for tracking players and scores. It includes player ranking semantics, boards, and supports tracking in-game state on a per-user basis.

Brands building experiences today are clueless about how and where users are using their apps. They would love to know how many mobile users are using the app in a coffee shop versus a bar, for example. They are hungry for the data, but building the back-end systems that collect it and synthesize it is out of their reach. Buddy’s scenario-based approach provides deep analytic information about a brand’s customers.

The Buddy Platform provides a complete back-end-as-a-service without writing a single line of server side code. Publishers get Internet scale performance and scalability without having to buy any servers. The scenario based APIs allow the service to provide the incredibly valuable analytic data that would require an entire team to build.

Today, Buddy launched a new component of the Buddy Platform: Commerce as a Service.

Everyone and their brother is trying to build in-app commerce solutions. In particular, doing in-app commerce in Facebook apps and games is huge right now (and a pain in the butt). Buddy’s new “Commerce as a Service” solution makes it ridiculously easy to build a Facebook app or game that supports purchasing things within the experience.

Publishers can now manage inventory outside of the app, and generate rich user insight via a robust analytics platform cross-referenced with purchase history. Using the Buddy Developer Portal the publisher manages a database of goods listings with prices and item metadata. “Store APIs” are provided to pull store inventory in real-time. These new APIs combine with the other Buddy APIs to optimize inventory, offer targeted promotions and cross reference purchase history against other information such as user demographics, social engagement, geo-location and other in-app activities.

An end-to-end user experience is a cohesive combination of devices, people, brands, channels, services, and content that improves over time.

For years people (BigCos, startups, investors, and users) have viewed the “app” as the center of the universe. And in the heyday of the Apple App Store this made sense.  But the proliferation of mobile platforms and the desire of brands to reach the largest number of customers means that, now days, this is flawed thinking. The new centerpiece of the consumer computing value proposition is the end-to-end user experience, and that user experience must be available on multiple platforms and is powered by cloud services.

IaaS, SaaS, and BaaS providers hold a unique, valuable, position in the industry right now. I’ve been extremely impressed with the Buddy team and their ability to build what I think is a unique pain killer for publishers and brands. They are on a roll with landing Nokia and regularly improving their offering with things like the new Commerce as a Service API.

Related posts:

• Experience = Stuff / Time
• Brand is a Critical Part of the End-to-End Experience
• Wanna Compete with Apple? Focus on Experiences
• Apps Must Be Cross Platform

What are your thoughts? Comment below.

It has been almost a year since I gave up trying to be frugal about hosting my blog and handed over hosting to WP Engine. I’ve been completely satisfied with the service since then.

Forever, I hosted my own blog, first on my own home-built static HTML system and then on .TEXT. Eventually I moved to WordPress. I ran WordPress on a Windows Server box at home and on a Linux VM on AWS. It was always fun (in a sadistic sort of way) keeping things running, but I quickly grew tired of the tasks involved.

Last December I had a series of spectacular failures caused by posts I wrote getting TechMeme’d, Fireballed, and Slashdotted (do people even read Slashdot anymore?). In case you don’t know getting Fireballed means John Gruber links to your blog. Whenever he does so, the target will get hit with 10s of thousands of hits within minutes.

Someone pointed me at the guys at WP Engine and they helped me move my blog to their platform.

Since then I’ve been Fireballed several more times and performance has stayed fantastic. Where, before, I knew I had been Fireballed because some kind friend would call or text me telling me my blog was down. Now, the only way I can tell is by looking at the spikes in usage in the JetPack stats package WP Engine provides.

I’ve noticed my blog being down once in the past year, and it turns out it was a general Pacific Northwest Internet failure and had nothing to do with WP Engine. Their support system was super responsive and they helped me identify the problem quickly (which resolved itself). I also run with confidence knowing WP Engine is backing things up for me.

There are tons of blogging technologies and platforms out there. You can certainly do it for far cheaper than you can with WP Engine. You might even be able to do it better (I’m not sure how, but it’s possible). I stopped treating running a blog like a toy to play with a long time ago; now I just want it to work, even under load.

I’m a happy customer, and happy to pay a premium for the WP Engine service.

Disclaimer: I was partially motivated to write this post because WP Engine has an affiliates program. At the end of the day, I would never recommend any product or service if I didn’t really believe in.

So I’ve been pretty disappointed that there is no version of Windows Live Writer that works on Surface.

@AlexBream just made me aware that Word 2013 has a “Blog Template” that appears to work well. I’m composing this with Word 2013 on my Surface to see how well it works.

Pros:

• Full Word editor.
  
• Posts can be round tripped to my WordPress based blog. I was able to publish a first draft of this as a “draft” and then open it from my blog to continue editing. This is a great thing about Writer that I use frequently because I’m often using different computers andmlike to treat the copy stored on my blog as ‘truth’.
  
• I was expecting to see the typical horrific HTML Word normally generates (with all that mso: crud), but was pleased to see the tool emits only the bare minimum. It does however, put style information that it shouldn’t (see below).
  
• Images pasted in get uploaded automatically.
  

Cons:

• Not WYSIWYG. No local theme. This sucks as it is one of the best things about Writer: It brings down your blog’s theme and presents an editor that is WYSIWYG. With Word the font I am looking at as I type this is Times New Roman and the margins are as though I have an 8.5″ piece of paper to work with.
  
• Not only does it not pull down my theme and use that, but it embeds font styling in the uploaded HTML. Note this post is in the wrong font? Lame. Super lame.
  
• Copy & paste is a critical task in writing blog posts. Surface/Win8′s text selection and copy/paste system is sub-optimal, especially using touch. Keyboard shortcuts help as does the mouse pad on the Surface Touch Cover. This is not a Word vs. Writer issue, really, but an overall Surface problem. A native (Metro!) Writer app could help.
  
• Categories do not appear to sync (and I can’t actually see what categories I’ve selected…rendering bug?). Actually, the whole Category feature appears completely broken to me.
  
• Slow – Word on ARM is a dog. For example, dragging the screen shot to the right around was a painful experience. 2-3 seconds between each drag operation before I could re-engage.
  

I’m not impressed and until I find a better tool, won’t be using Surface to do any blog posts…

We’ve all dreamt of the day when natural user interface (NUI) systems were “real”. For example, in 1984 I built, as a high school project a system that allowed my school to do a mock Presidential election…by voting via speech. I wish I could find the specs on the voice recognition card I used for the Apple ][ (or even the code I wrote <sad face>), but suffice to say the promise was big, the results…not so much.

I sincerely believe (again?) that we are finally, really, truly, on the cusp of a NUI explosion. We’ve seen massive improvements in the real-world usage of touch (iPhone), voice (Siri), and computer vision (Kinect) the the last few years. I think this is just the beginning. 

There will be huge strides made in voice and touch based input, but in my view, the area where our world will be rocked the most is in computer vision. Cameras are everywhere. They are dirt cheap. They can see things we can’t. And as amazing as the tech in Kinect is at decoding all those signals, interpreting them, and figuring out your body’s intent is, you haven’t seen anything yet.

I had the chance to visit Israel in 2011. I met with several companies in the computer vision space and visited several of the top Israeli university research groups working on computer vision. I was under NDA so I can’t discuss details, but I’m sure you are aware that Israel has been leading the way in computer vision technology.

I found it amusing the Creepy Cameraman story and this story on a new Microsoft patent came across my feed at about the same time.  I also recently upgraded the CCTV system in my house from analog cameras circa 2002 to modern IP based digital cameras (I use a GeoVision based CCTV DVR system that is functional but very haphazardly implemented).

These modern cameras all record 1080p in real time with audio. The software I have is just OK, but is nowhere near state of the art.

Another example: sports cameras such as GoPro and Countour. Next time you are a bike event, out on the lake, or skiing notice how many people are wearing these cams. The quality is fantastic and they are getting dirt cheap.

Remember, that due to networks, we have the ability to combine camera inputs from multiple sources, meaning that future computer vision systems will not be integrated as Kinect is today.

Some scenarios where I see breakthroughs coming:

• Detecting and tracking people’s emotional state. Imagine your TV being able to sense whether you are happy, scared, sad, or mad and adjusting the content to either amplify that state or change it. This could be used for good (making a game even more immersive) or bad (adjusting advertising).
• Predicting intent. By understanding ‘normal’ behavior games, user interfaces, and other systems will be able to predict what you are going to do, before you do it.
• Tele-presence. Kinect shows how easy (ha!) it currently is to allow a computer to, in real-time, build a 3D model of human bodies and do intelligent things (control a game). We also know its easy (ha!) to map photorealistic imagery on 3D models with Google/Bing/Apple Maps.  Combine these technologies and it’s not a stretch to see Princess Lea floating in front of R2D2.
• Augmented Reality. The work Google is doing on Glasses is a great example. I can imagine combining my the three other examples above with not only a head mounted camera, but also a more direct input into the human vision system (a tiny monitor you wear like glasses is actually pretty lame; I’m much more excited about research going on regarding directly inserting imagery into the brain).

Most importantly, I think, is the impact these breakthroughs will have on mobile. I joke that I think “Mobile is Dead”. What I really mean is that I think mobile is now ubiquitous and everywhere and that it’s high time we stop thinking about it as some discrete ‘space’.

What do you think? What scenarios do you see coming? What are the risks to society and industry?

It makes quickly logging in easy, especially if you use strong passwords and you use a touch screen. And given Windows 8 pretty much requires you to link your Windows login to your Microsoft account you should use a strong password!

However, don’t be confused: Windows 8 Picture Password is not really secure and can easily be hacked. A picture is worth a 1000 words from our DELL XPS ONE 27:

It is pretty clear that the gesture to unlock is to draw a smiley face on Benny.

Of course on a non-touch screen where you’d use the mouse to draw the gestures this wouldn’t happen.

Cool feature, but understand the limitations.

@ckindel We have committed not to install bloatware on our XPS systems with Win8. I’ll email you details on what’s pre-installed.

— Mary Fad (@MaryFadAtDell) November 1, 2012

The full of her email is below:

Charlie – I wanted to get back to you on your concerns about 
purchasing the XPS One 27 on dell.com vs. at a Microsoft 
store. With the introduction of Windows 8, particularly on 
our XPS systems, we have committed to a very clean software 
pre-install that does not include any bloatware. I’ve provided 
a list of the pre-installed Apps/Tiles below. I hope you’ll 
agree that they are not bloatware, but please feel free to 
reach out or follow up with me to discuss.

Thanks,

Mary

Dell Preloaded MSFT Apps
• Photo Gallery
• Movie Maker
Dell Preloaded Apps
• Office Trial (30-day)
• Windows 8 Getting Started Tile
• My Dell & Dell Backup & Recovery
• Dell Shop S&P App
• Amazon, Kindle
• Amazon Taskbar App
• Retail Registration
• Cirrus
Dell Hardware Enablement
• Skype for Metro
• CyberLink Media Suite
• NetReady Metro App (digital delivery)

In case you aren’t aware, Microsoft Signature is a program (in the US) where Microsoft selects OEM PCs and resells them with a Windows install that is tuned by Microsoft for optimal performance. Microsoft removes all ‘crap ware’ and ‘bloat ware’ and provides some pretty background images.  They sell these PCs via the Microsoft Store (both online and retail).

At some point some OEMs (I don’t recall which ones; I thought it was DELL, but I think that’s wrong) would sell Microsoft Signature PCs themselves.

A few years ago I vowed to never buy another OEM PC without Signature.

This program was created by Microsoft a few years ago in an effort to demonstrate that PC’s didn’t have to be slow to boot, have dozens of stickers on them, and full of useless software that interfered with the core usability of the PC.

It’s a good move by DELL to support, effectively, Signature on their premium line of PCs (XPS). However, you’ll note, that non-XPS DELL PCs don’t get this treatment.  DELL still makes a bunch of money by pre-installing crap and bloat on most of their PCs.

I have to wonder how much an impact Surface had on this. As you know, the primary goal (IMO) of Surface is to be a “North Star” from Microsoft on how PCs should be built and sold. Is DELL on the right path? We’ll see.

FWIW, we have found the DELL XPS ONE 27 to be a really, really, great machine. It is a 27” touch screen all-in-one computer that sits in our kitchen and is my wife’s primary computer (her new Surface is her secondary).  The screen, at 2650×1440, is gorgeous.  With Windows 8 pre-installed it is very fast with a Core i7 processor and 8GB of RAM. The touchscreen has great responsiveness and can be titled almost horizontal, making it great for situations where you are standing above the device (e.g. on a kitchen counter).  It has a fan, but it is nearly silent.

Like most PCs, even Signature, this machine suffers with needing a slew of updates right away. It took hours to get through all the Windows Update reboots and so forth; including a few times when the PC wedged/hung while trying to access Windows Update.  This continues to be a huge thorn in the side of PCs (and the Mac, by the way, is not immune to this; they require updating out of the box too!). Since being updated it has run flawlessly.

The only real nit we have is the keyboard. For some reason my wife simply cannot type on it without the spacebar not firing. I didn’t have this problem but it drove her nuts so we just used her old keyboard which is a Microsoft Wedge (which she, for some reason loves).

Ironically, I think Windows 8 works even better on a device like this than on the Surface!  This is primarily because Windows 8’s second (or 1st depending on your perspective) personality is not neutered.  That is, the old-school Windows desktop and legacy apps work completely as expected on a full-PC like this whereas on the Surface only a subset of Office (no Outlook) works and interacting with the old UI is difficult with touch.

On a side note related to touch-screen-all-in-one PCs.  I was completely prepared to buy a 27” iMac for my wife, but only if it had a touchscreen.  No way would I buy a $1500-2000 device without a touchscreen these days. Apple has, ironically, missed the boat on this one.

This is the “Featured” view, which means Verizon decides what devices appear at the top of the page.

In about three weeks, if there aren’t a few Live Tiles a the top of the page then the canary is dead.

http://ceklog.kindel.com/category/passions/books/

This has me thinking about a potential app idea and I’d love to hear from YOU about how you keep track, document, list, and share the books YOU read.

I’m sure the vast majority of people don’t care to keep track.  But some, like me, do.  If you are one of of those, please let me know in comments below how you do it…and how you’d like to do it.

(Note, as of right now, the post on LockerGnome does not have my byline. They are working on fixing that).

“Mobile fragmentation is going to get significantly worse over the next few years. While this fragmentation will be bad for end users in some cases, it will be particularly bad for developers.”
                – Charlie Kindel, LockerGnome, Oct 22, 2012

The TL;DR is:

• Mobile fragmentation exists across five axes (UI, Device, OS, Marketplace, & Services).
• Fragmentation along these axes within platforms is bad and getting worse.
• Fragmentation across platforms is getting even worse.
• Devs will suffer, but in the end it is really a positive thing because it’s a sign of competition and innovation and proves “Software is Eating the World”.

Head on over to LockerGnome and join the discussion in the comments.

Exasperated, I wrote a post¹ describing just how idiotic a concept that would be. I showed that even if Microsoft was serious about Surface being a real business, it could never sell it for $199 this fall. I promised to wear a Kasey Keller like mullet to Build if I was wrong.

In that post, I asserted that

I think it is far more likely that Microsoft will sell the Surface for $599. They’ll sell every one they make at that price and earn a respectable 20% margin (maybe 3 million in 12 months; maybe). And in so doing, will support the broader ecosystem that is required to keep the existing Windows business profitable by shipping 350 million PCs next year.

It turns out the Surface with a cover is $599. Without, it’s $499. I had done my back-of-the-envelope math assuming it did not include a cover. Thus I was very, very wrong when I said Microsoft will “earn a respectable 20% margin”.

The $499 price means Microsoft will not make any real margin² on the Surface.

They may make some profits on the cover, assuming the cover isn’t ridiculously expensive to make (it might be). But even then there is no way the amount Microsoft will make will come close to the $85 they are reportedly charging OEMs for Windows RT licenses.

Worse, every Surface that sells is one less non-Surface Windows RT unit that sells meaning Microsoft not only doesn’t get the $85 from the Surface sale (they’ve priced it so close to wholesale there’s no margin in it) they won’t get $85 from the OEM.

Surface is a North star product for the Windows business. It is not a “Microsoft business” (Microsoft businesses generate $5B+ a year in PROFIT). The Windows business makes $11.4B in PROFIT every year. This profit margin is under pressure from the price of a Windows license being forced down. Surface makes this worse and provides no path to recouping that profit via other means.

I don’t know how MS plans on generating more profit with Windows. But I’m really sure it is NOT Surface.

¹A $199 Surface? I Will Wear a Mullet

²Retail Pricing, Markup, and Margins

Here’s the ad:

Microsoft’s first real TV spot for the Surface

Funny item #1:

Multiple people asked me if, at 13 seconds in, I had a little cameo:

No, that’s not me. I know people think we all look alike though.

Funny, but not so funny (for MS), item #2:

We’re watching the Flordia State v. Miami football game (I hate both teams, not sure why I was watching it). The commercial (“Movement”) comes on…

After it’s over:

My wife:

“We should have gotten that keyboard for Christine’s iPad instead of the one we got.”

(Christine’s our daughter, we got her one of the Logitech iPad keyboards).

Listen, my wife has been around a lot of technology for a long time. She’s always just put up with it (and me). She calls it as she sees it.

She thought it was a good commercial. She had no idea what it was for. She seriously thought it was for an iPad accessory. 

This is not her fault.

This is Microsoft’s fault.

Windows 8, Windows RT, and Surface are massively confusing. This is a mess for Microsoft.

Up until now, my writing on the mobile ecosystem has been focused on smartphones, because their adoption and sales dominated. Given the season of the tablet has started, I need to make some points about how tablets relate.

Even though we use the term “mobile” to describe scenarios involving both phones and tablets, before I go further, get this through your head:

Phones are not tablets and tablets are not phones.

The market and business dynamics of phones are fundamentally and significantly different than those of tablets. Why?  Because phones require a voice service, either pre-paid, or as subscription to be useful. Thus the primary channel for phones is carriers. This is more true in the US than the rest of the world, but it still generally holds. Phones are generally subsidized by the carrier and that subsidy is made up over the life of a (typically 2 year) contract.

Tablets are useful without a voice connection. Some tablets are sold with embedded cellular data connectivity, and a subsidy, but the vast majority do not include anything but WiFi connectivity. Thus the primary channels for tablets are retail and online, not carriers.

If you follow me to this point, you’ll agree the taxonomy picture above is phone specific. It includes Carriers but not other channels where devices are purchased by end users.

When I first wrote my piece explaining how fragmentation of Android was good for Android but bad for Google I almost included Services as a specific market-side. However, at that time, service fragmentation was mostly just theory and I felt it would add complexity not required to make my point. Since that time Amazon has demonstrated how serious it is about building a competitor to Google’s app store and Apple kicked Google Maps out of bed. 

These examples and more mean we are going to see a significant amount of platform fragmentation along the services axis in the next year. I plan on writing my thoughts on why and how, thus I need to add Services as a key side of the taxonomy.

Here’s the updated taxonomy that changes “Carriers” to “Channels” and adds “Services”:

The Six Primary Sides of the Mobile Ecosystem

The mobile ecosystem is a multi-sided market where each side gives and receives value from other sides. The six primary sides of the mobile ecosystem include:

End Users: Own the disposable income. Idealistically they drive the ecosystem; realistically they are slaves to marketing and advertising.  Examples: Me and you.

Channels: Own the sale of the device and/or service to the End User. Own billing. Own Sales. In the case of carriers, own the physical pipe. Because the money flows through them, they, effectively, are the primary owners of the customer relationship. They also are often directly responsible for the majority of the marketing. Examples: Verizon, Amazon.com, Best Buy, Apple Stores, iTunes, Windows Store.

Device Manufacturers: Own the hardware. Own the industrial design. They hate not owning the customer relationship. But their HW bias (and manufacturing capex structure) prevent them from breaking out of this (there are no proof points of large hardware manufacturers becoming successful software companies).  Examples: Samsung, Apple, Nokia, Microsoft (for Surface).

OS providers: Own the core of the customer experience. Think they own most real innovation. They hate not owning the customer. In some cases, their core business models (search, desktop/server OS, office, …), means they are at the mercy of some middleman between them and the customer. Examples: Apple (iOS), Google (Android), Microsoft (Windows).

Services: Own key components of the customer experience. Tend to be sticky. Examples: Apple Maps, Google Search, Xbox LIVE, Kindle Fire App Store.

3rd Party Developers: Deliver the most of the end-user benefit.  Actually own most of the real innovation. They target platforms which have the greatest promise of ‘eyeballs’. Some care deeply about monetization features of the platform; others care more about distribution. They despise the inter- and intra-platform fragmentation that exists.

This fall starts the season of the tablet. Between Apple’s rumored iPad mini, Microsoft’s Surface, the new Kindle Fires, new offerings from Samsung and other Android device manufacturers, and the coming onslaught of $100 tablets we are on the cusp of an explosion in the tablet space. 

It’s important that we have a common framework for understanding the dynamics of this ecosystem. I can’t control what taxonomy and lexicon YOU use, but I can try to be clear and consistent with mine. Hence this post.

Would love to know your thoughts…

I did an informal poll on Twitter. I asked:

HiveMind Poll: Answer Yes/No: When someone says “mobile” (as in mobile industry) that includes tablets.

— Charlie Kindel (@ckindel) October 18, 2012

The vast majority of respondents said “Yes”.

I don’t much care either way, I just want to be consistent. Therefore, based on this little poll:

From here on out, if I use the term “mobile” I mean a user, business, or developer scenario where the primary device is not tethered to mains power.

Thus a scenario involving a smartphone, a tablet, a laptop, a netbook, an computer embedded in the dashboard of a car, a connected camera, or a device like a Fitbit is “mobile”.

Of course, this means we can also imply “Mobile” is everything but desktop computing, data-centers, cloud, and television.

(For the record, I’m making this statement because I’m working on a set of posts where I don’t want to have to argue about this. I figure if I write a post that defines what I mean I can just reference it).

Update:  More here

• Taxonomy of the Mobile Ecosystem
• Fragmentation of Mobile

Discuss…

MileLogr is a Calendar App that Creates Mileage Logs.

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The new update incorporates the following new features:

• Now supports Outlook.com (Hotmail/Live) based calendars in addition to Exchange/Office365 and Google calendars.
• For calendar systems that support it, MileLogr now uses OAuth for authentication meaning users do not have to provide their usernames & passwords to connect.

Lower your taxes.

Do less work.

Reduce risk.

Give www.milelogr.com a try and let us know what you think.

Google bought the Titanic. And they bought it when it was already underwater. – @parislemon

This is cute (and true), not the right analogy because it makes people think Google bought Motorola for Motorola’s business. They did not.

Google paid $12.5B to become a patent-superpower like Apple and Microsoft. They had failed in getting the Nortel patents (or were thwarted, depending on your perspective) and panicked.

They are now dealing with the fallout of that impetuous decision.

Yes, Google bought the Titantic. And, yes, it was already underwater when they did so.

I suspect they now view that $12.5B as a sunk cost. Pun intended.

MSFT to NOK: Agree! Let’s make it happen.

NOK to VZW: Do the 920 for launch!

VZW to NOK: Well, ok. Maybe.

MSFT to VZW: Do WP8!

VZW to MSFT: One word: Kin.

MSFT to NOK: Hey, Elop, beg them please!

NOK to MSFT: Ok, working on it…

Meanwhile.

MSFT/NOK to ATT: Do the 920 at launch.

ATT: Sure. We’re in. Let’s do it.  But we can’t spend much on marketing.

MSFT/NOK to ATT: What would it take for you to spend more?

ATT: How about an exclusive?

MSFT/NOK to ATT: Can’t really do that. Need to support all carriers. What else?

Meanwhile…

NOK to MSFT: VZW is dragging their feet. I think they hate you.

MSFT to NOK: Yea, they’ve always hated us. Fuck.

NOK to MSFT: Maybe we should give ATT a 3 month exclusive. It’s clear VZW is not committed. Better to have one committed carrier than two who aren’t really committed.

MSFT: Agree. Let’s do that.

Meanwhile…

It’s September. No surprise that my FB stream is full of Sr. Microsoft people announcing they are leaving the company.

— Charlie Kindel (@ckindel) September 28, 2012

I tweeted about a bunch of senior MS people announcing their departures from Microsoft on Facebook and got a bunch of questions from my followers about why this happens.  Figured it was worth sharing my opinion on why.

There are four reasons:

1. The general stock plan is set up so that stock is granted September 1. Stock grants vest over 4 years (the vesting schedule has changed over the years) and this means that large amounts of stock vest September 1.
2. Annual bonuses are paid on September 15.
3. The annual reviews are done and you are told “your numbers” sometime between late-August and September 15 (because you’ll see the results in your September 15 paystub). See my post “Got a 4? You Were Just Fired from Microsoft” for my thoughts on this.
4. For consumer-facing products, fall is when products ship. This is due to a desire to get products into market for the holiday shopping season. When a product ships (e.g. Windows 8) everyone on the team who’s been head’s down over the summer lifts their heads and looks around for “What’s next?”.

The combination of these factors means that you will see a lot of people leave Microsoft in the fall (as I did).

Is it a good thing or a bad thing that these people are leaving?

From Microsoft’s perspective it can be both. Microsoft uses two terms to describe departures from the company:  Good Attrition and Bad Attrition.

Good attrition means Microsoft felt the person leaving was no longer providing the desired value or there was an expectation they would not provide value in the future. Usually, but not always, this person would have gotten a 4 or 5 on their most recent annual reviews. Microsoft (like most companies) is not very good at forcing people out (it’s actually very hard to get fired from Microsoft).

Bad attrition means Microsoft valued the employee and is bummed they are leaving.

Senior managers are expected to drive 5-10% attrition (which is why the stack rank system sets the quota for 5s at 7%), but there’s actually no positive feedback loop to incent them to do it. I think a stack-rank system is appropriate for a large company; but this point was one my biggest gripes when I was a manager at Microsoft.  The Microsoft system actually incents managers of high-performing teams to try to keep poor-performers around. Worse it provides an anti-incentive for firing them (if you have a high-performing team, you are not given credit for people you ‘managed out’ earlier in the year).

Of course, whether it’s good attrition or bad attrition is in the eye of the beholder. Frankly, when I see people like Bob Muglia leaving (he left last September) I see it as very, very bad attrition. Like the worst ever. Some of the recent announcements I’ve seen on my Facebook timeline made me think “Wow, that sucks for MS; that will leave a big hole.”

But there are some where I say “Its about time….I hope I don’t run into that person in some startup I’m involved in!”.  Clearly good attrition.

I suspect most large companies have similar cycles. Microsoft’s is centered around it’s fiscal-year which starts July 1.

I still think Amazon would be stupid to build a phone. But I no longer believe they won’t do it. Within the next 6 months Amazon will go big with their own Android based smartphone.

And when they do, it will be the moment that everybody else realizes that Google lost control of Android ages ago.

“Google has already lost control of Android and has zero chance of regaining control.”
–me, January 14, 2012

“We treat Android like Linux, and so it’s a base operating system layer.”
-Jeff Bezos, September 6, 2012

In my post titled “Fragmentation Is Not The End of Android” I explained how to think about mobile platform fragmentation by breaking the problem down along the 5 axes where a platform can be fragmented. Then I gave examples of how fragmentation along any of these 5 axis, can impact the participants in the mobile ecosystem.

In that post, I focused mostly on discussing the OS Providers. I included commentary on Apple, Google, and Microsoft highlighting their asymmetric competitive nature, but focused on Google and why it had lost control of Android, and how, I believe, it will never regain control.

I explained how none of the tactics Google might try will work; the proverbial camel’s nose is under the tent and Google will never regain control of Android.

I ended that post with this:

Oh, and if after reading the above tome, you still don’t agree. Consider this article  about television. Remember, Android is not just about mobile…

Why? Because at the time that post was written, the Tablet Wars had not really begun, and most people were focused on the Smartphone Wars.

Originally, I was skeptical about how serious Amazon was about becoming either an OS Provider or Device Manufacturer. I (still) believe they can accomplish their business goals by providing their shopping & reading experiences on ALL devices, but Mr. Bezos & Co. appear to disagree with me and it is now clear they are diving head-long into selling their own devices, running their own OS, directly to consumers.

Amazon is directly competing with Google now on all of the “axes of fragmentation” of the mobile platform known as Android:

• User Interface – The Kindle (and whatever Amazon’s smartphone is called) throw out Google’s UI look and feel and replace it with one unique to Amazon.
• Device – Amazon is now, effectively, a device manufacturer.
• Operating System – As Jeff Bezos points out “We treat Android like Linux…”.
• Marketplace – This is Amazon’s core competency. No need for Play here.
• Service – Fire up a Kindle and try to find any evidence of a Google service.

Other than some leakage of the Android brand within 3rd party apps, Amazon is doing all it can to keep its users from knowing their devices run Android.

In writing this, I am assuming Amazon will be at least moderately successful with both their tablets and phones. If that assumption holds true, then there is no turning back for Android.

“Google has already lost control of Android and has zero chance of regaining control.”
–me, January 14, 2012 and again today.

Paying developers to target your platform is a sign of desperation. Doing so means developers have no skin in the game. A platform where developers do not have skin in the game is artificially propped up and will not succeed in the long run.

The Windows Phone 7 team was in a very, very desperate situation. I was quoted in the NY Times:

Charlie Kindel…compared the pain caused by starting over to the predicament of Aron Ralston, the hiker who amputated his own arm in 2003 after it was it pinned under a boulder in the Utah desert.

“This boulder comprised of Apple and Blackberry rolled on our arm,” said Mr. Kindel, who left Microsoft last summer. “Microsoft sat there for three or four years struggling to get out.”

We were willing to do just about anything to get apps on to the platform. And we did just about anything.

Alec Saunders, who runs BlackBerry’s developer evangelism, understands this rule as well as anyone else on the planet. He & I worked together on Windows in the late ‘90s. I’m sure he knows paying developers to target BlackBerry 10 is a bad idea.  BlackBerry is that desperate. So he’s effectively paying $10K per app that gets written. Bad idea. But he has no choice.

I’ve discussed platforms here many times. The word platform is one of the most misused terms in our industry. Here is what I mean when I discuss platforms:

A Platform is a cohesive combination of technology and marketing that provides the means for a multi-sided market to operate in a virtuous cycle.

This, of course begs the question of what a virtuous platform cycle is:

A virtuous platform cycle exists in a multi-sided market when each side of the market both gives and receives positive value from the other sides.

So much positive value is exchanged, with low friction, that the cycle grows and grows, like a snowball rolling down hill.

The more sides to the market that exist, the more complex the system and the harder it is for the cycle to start. However, once started, a market with many sides will accelerate faster.

Examples of successful platforms we’ve seen and are currently seeing:

• IBM System/360
• Windows (big Windows, not Windows Mobile/Phone)
• The iPhone
• Amazon.com shopping
• Google Search

In each of these cases, and other examples I’m sure you can come up with, there was a multi-sided market, and, at least for a while, a virtuous cycle existed because one vendor created a platform with the characteristics required to allow the sides of the market exchange value efficiently.

I think the example most people understand is Windows. The market sides were (are): Windows, Intel, OEMs (e.g. Compaq, DELL), IHVs (e.g. ATI, SoundBlaster), ISVs (e.g. Lotus, Adobe, Office), retailers & channel (e.g. Egghead), and of course, end users.

The ISVs of today are the app developers. For Windows to continue to be a platform that enables a virtuous cycle (and therefore to generate the historical profits it has in the past) there must be an efficient and natural exchange of value between app developers and the other sides of the market.

Apple accomplished this with the iPhone: It enabled app developers to very efficiently provide value to end users (one side of the market) and in return receive value from end users via payments.  Apple provided value to developers (a marketplace). Developers provided value to Apple (non-native functionality). Because of luck, tactics, and great marketing, Apple ended up creating a virtuous platform cycle around the iPhone platform. And they didn’t have to pay for apps.

Those developers were motivated by other things to get started. The promise of an efficient marketplace, the chance to do something cool and different, and the promise of lots of users are all examples. They also weren’t really doing anything else. There was no other efficient market where they could participate and profit before the AppStore. Once they got started their investment in time and resources meant they had skin in the game. Thus they continued, and are less likely to move to other platforms.

Now, let’s talk about Windows 8. As of right now there are 2,000 apps in the Windows Store according to Win8Update. The goal Microsoft has for launch (in about a month) is ‘5 digits’.

Microsoft got those apps using the following tactics:

Microsoft Employee Moonlighting

Allow Microsoft employees to build apps in their spare time (we used this to great success with Windows Phone 7; I can’t tell you the percentage of early apps that were built by employees but it was more than you probably think).

Promise Windows 8 Will Do Very Well

This is actually a pretty easy sell. As Steve Ballmer was quoted as saying yesterday

“There will be customers coming and looking for apps. That I can assure you,” he said. “If 400 million PCs get sold in a year, at least two-thirds get sold in the Windows market. That’s 250 odd million, plus whatever we get in the consumer upgrades.”

Even if Windows 8 is a failure, it will sell hundreds of millions of copies in the next 12-24 months. Heck, there are already 16 million devices running the preview versions of Windows 8. “That’s more than the number of iPad 1s Apple sold!”

If it weren’t for already having resources tied up focusing on iOS (and to a lesser extent) Android, just about any sane developer would jump at this opportunity.

Talk About The Tools

Microsoft’s Visual Studio tools are really quite good, especially for building against Microsoft platforms. Developers who have built substantial apps for iOS using Xcode and then built for either Windows Phone 7 or Windows 8 with Visual Studio have told me they are more than twice as productive. You can find all sorts of articles like this as well.

The “sell” from a Microsoft evangelist to a (non-Microsoft employee) developer is thus:

“Don’t be late to the party. Within just a few months there will be 10s if not 100s of millions of people looking at the Windows 8 Store for something to buy. Yes, I know you are busy, but Visual Studio is so good that it will take you far less time than you expect to move your app to Win8.”

Will this be enough to get 10,000+ apps by October 26? I don’t think so.

Of course, the numbers of apps in the store is not the most important metric. What apps and their quality is far more important. But Windows 8 is going to struggle there too. Big brands and names are focused on iOS and Android; and are already reaching sufficient eyeballs today via those channels. The lure of future eyeballs on Windows 8 is not strong enough to cause them to shift budgets and move developers off of their iOS and Android projects.

So far, according to my sources, Steven Sinfosky who runs the Windows Division at Microsoft has steadfastly refused to pay for Windows 8 apps to be developed. I have not agreed with much of what Steven has done, but on this point he’s got his principles right.

However, as I predicted last Spring, it is highly likely things are about to change and Microsoft is going to start directly incenting developers to build apps with cash. If I’m right, and we start to see clear evidence that Microsoft is paying for apps then Windows is in even more trouble than most of us already believe.

If I’m wrong, and Steve & Steven keep the checkbook in their pocket then my assertion is they have confidence in the long-term.

Time will tell.

Let me know your thoughts below.

Here’s my workflow.

I am posting this for two reasons:

1. It’s complex enough that regularly forget how to do it. I rely on random Bing searches to remind myself. This way it’s all in one place.
2. I’m not sure I’m doing it right, or if there’s an easier way. If people provide comments I’ll update the workflow accordingly.

Machine Setup

The first thing is to get the machine setup. These days, because MileLogr is an ASP.NET app, I do most dev within Windows.  Once you are past machine setup the rest of the workflow is basically the same.  I use the tools outlined in my post on Coping with the OSS Command Line on Windows to make my Windows workflow work.

In short I install & configure Chocolatey (a Windows tool/package manager that makes installing all this stuff super-easy) and then, in turn use that for installing all the stuff below, from a elevated cmd.exe.  Someday I’ll write a cmd script that does this, but for now I just type each command, e.g.:

C:\>cinst sublimetext2

I do this for each of the following:

• git, ruby, node.js, & python – Your standard OSS tools.
• posh-git – A set of PowerShell scripts which provide Git/PowerShell integration.
• Sublime Text 2 – The best text editor ever. As a bonus, it is easy to get out of.
• ConEmu – A really great Windows console. Super flexible. Blows cmd.exe away and is on par with iTerm2 for the Mac.

Of course, I also have Visual Studio and ReSharper installed.

Once all of the above is installed and configured I use a PowerShell prompt within ConEmu; I rarely ever go back to cmd.exe.

A big part of setting up a machine is dealing with SSH keys. I use both github and bitbucket.org so I need multiple SSH keys.

Generate a RSA SSH key

C:\Users\charlie\.ssh> ssh-keygen -t rsa
Generating public/private rsa key pair.
Enter file in which to save the key (/c/Users/charlie/.ssh/id_rsa): foo
Enter passphrase (empty for no passphrase):
Enter same passphrase again:
Your identification has been saved in foo.
Your public key has been saved in foo.pub.
The key fingerprint is:
...

Take the resulting foo.pub file and add its contents to your SSH keys on github or bitbucket.

Add each key to ssh

C:\Users\charlie\.ssh> ssh-add .\foo
Enter passphrase for .\foo:
Identity added: .\foo (.\foo)

Setup .ssh/config

To support multiple git hosts (e.g. github, bitbucket, Azure Web Sites, etc…) on a single machine use a .ssh/config file. Here’s mine (with foo added):

C:\Users\charlie\.ssh> type .\config
Host          tig
HostName       github.com
User           git
PreferredAuthentications publickey
IdentityFile ~/.ssh/tig_rsa
Host          heroku
HostName       heroku.com
User           git
PreferredAuthentications publickey
IdentityFile ~/.ssh/heroku_rsa
Host          sourceforge
HostName       sourceforge.net
User           git
PreferredAuthentications publickey
IdentityFile ~/.ssh/sourceforge_rsa
Host          wpengine
HostName       git.wpengine.com
User           git
PreferredAuthentications publickey
IdentityFile ~/.ssh/wpengine
Host          bitbucket
HostName       bitbucket.org
User           git
PreferredAuthentications publickey
IdentityFile ~/.ssh/bizlogr
Host          foo
HostName       github.com
User           git
PreferredAuthentications publickey
IdentityFile ~/.ssh/foo

Cloning a repo

To use git with the foo credentials, replace the hostname in the git clone command with the Host from the .ssh/config file above.

E.g. Assuming I added the foo.pub public key to my github account (tig), to create a clone of tig/jOdometer, github says to use this:

git clone git@github.com:foo/jOdometer.git

Instead, to ensure the right SSH connection is used, I would do this:

git clone git@foo:tig/jOdometer.git

Don’t forget to setup ssh-agent so you don’t have to enter your pass phrases each time you run a command.

Syncing a Branch

The general workflow Stefan and I are using for MileLogr is derived from this post:

http://nvie.com/posts/a-successful-git-branching-model/

This means that whenever I’m doing any work on MileLogr I’m doing it in a feature branch.  Our model is feature branches are generally per-developer and, if I weren’t trying to sync between two machines I probably would just keep them local (although making them remote has the benefit of providing backup).

Note we follow this guys advice and have two categories of branches: public & private. Public branches have a history that is “immutable, atomic, and easy to follow.”  Private branches are disposable and malleable. Master and develop are public.  Feature branches are private.

http://sandofsky.com/blog/git-workflow.html

Here’s the workflow.  Desktop is my desktop that I’m currently working on, where I’ve made changes I want available on my laptop.

Create feature branch

Let’s say I’m making some changes for a feature called demo. Below I create the feature branch and made a change to an existing file:

On my Desktop:

E:\code\milelogr [master]> git checkout -b demo
Switched to a new branch 'demo'
E:\code\milelogr [demo]> subl .\MileLogr\Views\_ViewStart.cshtml
E:\code\milelogr [demo]>
E:\code\milelogr [demo +0 ~1 -0]>

(Note, see how my prompt shows my git status? That’s posh-git at work. Love it!)

Committing and pushing work in progress

Now, let’s say I’m in the middle of hacking away and I need to run. But I want to be able to pick up where I left off on my laptop. I need to commit these changes and push them to a remote so I can pull them down to my laptop:

E:\code\milelogr [demo +0 ~1 -0]> git add MileLogr/Views/_ViewStart.cshtml
E:\code\milelogr [demo +0 ~1 -0]> git commit -m "work in progress"
[demo 5d1fcd1] work in progress
1 file changed, 1 insertion(+)
E:\code\milelogr [demo]> git push origin demo
Counting objects: 9, done.
Delta compression using up to 4 threads.
Compressing objects: 100% (5/5), done.
Writing objects: 100% (5/5), 442 bytes, done.
Total 5 (delta 3), reused 0 (delta 0)
remote: bb/acl: bogus is allowed. accepted payload.
To git@bitbucket.org:bogus/milelogr.git
* [new branch]      demo –> demo
E:\code\milelogr [demo]>

Now, if you look on the remote (in my case on bitbucket.org) you’ll see the repo now has a new branch named demo.

Pulling a private branch

On the laptop, it’s now easy to pull this branch down.

On Laptop (note different path):

C:\Users\Charlie\code\milelogr [master]> git pull
remote: Counting objects: 9, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (5/5), done.
remote: Total 5 (delta 3), reused 0 (delta 0)
Unpacking objects: 100% (5/5), done.
From bitbucket:bogus/milelogr
* [new branch]      demo       -> origin/demo
Already up-to-date.
C:\Users\Charlie\code\milelogr [master]> git checkout demo
Branch demo set up to track remote branch demo from origin.
Switched to a new branch 'demo'
C:\Users\Charlie\code\milelogr [demo]> 

I can make changes on the laptop and when I’m done I can commit and push them by specifying the remote origin with the branch:

C:\Users\Charlie\code\milelogr [demo +0 ~1 -0]> git add MileLogr/Views/_ViewStart.cshtml
C:\Users\Charlie\code\milelogr [demo +0 ~1 -0]> git commit -m "more work in progress" 
C:\Users\Charlie\code\milelogr [demo]> git push

I could setup tracking for a branch with

git branch --set-upstream demo origin/demo

and then subsequent git pull operations would just work. Or I can just

On Desktop:

E:\code\milelogr [demo]> git pull origin demo 

Integrating feature into develop

When it’s time to integrate this feature branch (demo) into our develop branch I’ll do this:

E:\code\milelogr [demo]> git checkout develop
Branch develop set up to track remote branch develop from origin.
Switched to a new branch 'develop'
E:\code\milelogr [develop]> git merge demo
…
Merge made by the 'recursive' strategy.

Note that I did NOT use  git merge –no-ff demo in the above example. Since we treat our public branches (develop and master) as ‘pure’, we do NOT want to fast-forward history when merging.  Instead we will always ‘clean up’ a feature branch’s history before merging (see this post for why).

I can then delete the feature branch (locally):

E:\code\milelogr [develop]> git branch -d demo
Deleted branch demo (was 303c53f).

If we’re really done with that demo feature branch we need to delete it from the remote too:

E:\code\milelogr [develop]> git push origin :demo
remote: bb/acl: bogus is allowed. accepted payload.
To git@bitbucket.org:bogus/milelogr.git
- [deleted]         demo

Finally, we push the develop branch to the remote:

E:\code\milelogr [develop]> git push origin develop
Counting objects: 1, done.
Writing objects: 100% (1/1), 231 bytes, done.
Total 1 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0)
remote: bb/acl: bogus is allowed. accepted payload.
To git@bitbucket.org:bogus/milelogr.git
    46a5f06..298561f  develop –> develop

Hope this helps others.

Comments and suggestions on improving this workflow welcome below.

I try to write blog post whenever I encounter truly great customer service. I think it’s important to call out companies who clearly get it; those who provide Shockingly Great Customer Service.

I have owned Eye-Fi cards since they came out. Last year I highlighted them in my annual gadget gift guide.

Wi-Fi should be built into every camera. But it’s not. With Eye-Fi we simply ensure the camera is turned on after taking pictures: within minutes all of the photos are on the computer ready for processing.

Yesterday morning I broke the write protect tab off the Eye-Fi Pro|X2 card.

I sent an email to support@eye.fi saying

I own 3 eye-fi cards.  My Pro x2 8GB+Wi-Fi card’s write protect switch has broken off and the card is now stuck in read-only mode.

Can I get this replaced?

Almost immediately I got a request back asking me for proof of purchase to verify it was still under warranty. I sent them a screenshot from Amazon.com’s order history page. I had purchased the card in 2010 and the Eye-Fi warranty is for 12 months. I figured I was out of luck.

This morning I got the following response:

I would like to replace your defective Eye-Fi card.

I had hoped Eye-Fi would take care of me. One could argue that the design of the write-protect switch is not the greatest. Given the way most companies treat customers I was skeptical.

Eye-Fi has proven to me that they provide Shockingly Great Customer Service. Not only do their products kick-ass but so does their support.

Buy one of their products with confidence:

The 2008 MRI is even worse, but I can’t get the stupid Java based viewer to work (anyone know how to open “Amicas Viewer” files?).

I’ve struggled with my back “going out” since about 1997. In 2008 it was at its worst. Every 3-4 months I would have another incident where I’d do something like reach down to tie my shoe and WHAM! I’d spend the next 3-4 weeks being next to useless to my family and in excruciating pain. When this happened I generally looked like this guy:

I spent a lot of time on my back with ice packs. I ate ibuprofen like is was candy, and Soma/Carisoprodol was a good friend. While I had multiple spinal injections of steroids which helped a lot, the disc damage was never enough for my doctor to say “You need surgery!”. Than God.

I’m an active guy. I live for skiing. And I ski HARD. I am addicted to playing soccer. I suck, but when healthy I’ll play 4 times a week. This is me, heli-skiing in Valdez Alaska.

About 6 years ago, while at a party with my wife, I met Rick Emerson. Rick is a trainer at Athletic Training Institute in Redmond. Rick was learning a new treatment called Muscle Activation Technique (MAT) and over the years, as he’s become exceptionally gifted in applying it I’ve become 100% convinced that it works. It is flipping amazing.

Here’s the general idea:

• The human body has about 640 different muscles. Some big, some small. They are not independent but work together in as complex system.
• For any number of reasons sometimes some of these muscles “go offline”. They “stop firing”. Stress, trauma, or overuse can case this to happen.
• When one muscle goes offline others try to compensate. The compensating muscles don’t have the right alignment and cause the skeleton to get out of whack, putting excessive stress on joints.
• A skeleton that’s out of alignment combined with muscles that are offline is a recipe for disaster. At extreme ranges of motion or under hard force (e.g. reacting to an unseen mogul on the ski slope) can result in a blown knee or burst disc in the back.
• The key, then is to identify what muscles are “offline” and do something to turn them back on.
• This, is what MAT is: Identify what muscles are offline and then use several techniques to get them to wake up. If successful (and in my experience it is SHOCKING how well it works) then the body gets back in alignment.

My back, because of regular weekly MAT sessions with Rick and despite playing soccer 4 times a week and skiing hard, has been completely pain and spasm free for over two years.

Last Wednesday I went wake boarding with a friend. I pushed hard, riding switch and trying to jump the wake toe-side.  I never fell, but I was working really hard and really torqueing my upper torso.  Afterwards I felt fine.

The next morning I woke up, again feeling fine. However, after sitting at my desk for a few hours doing work I got up and reached down to pick up a bag; before my hand even touched it I felt my back “go”. If you’ve ever had your back go out you know the feeling. F**k!

If this had happened to me 4 or 5 years ago it would have meant that I would be flat on my back for a week and basically useless in all thing for another 2 or 3 weeks. With MAT I was able to play soccer this morning, play well, and be completely pain free.

MAT testing involves the trainer having you try to push against his/her hands in various positions. For example, I’ll lie on my back, and Rick will elevate my right foot, pull it outward and say “I’m going to push down and in, you resist”. If I can resist his downward push, whatever muscle he’s testing is “on”.  If my leg collapses (and it’s really wild when it does!) then he knows what muscle is “off”. 

When the trainer determines what muscle is offline, he/she will typically try to “activate” it with direct palpation (massaging with some force) of the point where the muscle is attached to the bone (sometimes this hurts like hell, but it’s a good pain). 

The trainer then tests again, and 99% of the time I am able to resist his force. The muscle is now online.

I picked this example (right leg up and out, pushing down and in), because it is shocking (to me anyway) what muscle this is testing. In my case the muscle Rick palpates is on my LEFT SHOULDER. This just reinforces how complex and interconnected the body is.

This incident with my back was a result of the muscles in my upper torso being stressed by the wakeboarding. Rick treated me, not by trying to ‘fix my back’, but by identifying which of these muscles was pissed off and offline and activating them. Once activated, the other muscles (e.g. in my hips) stopped having to compensate, my body realigned, and the stress from my lower back was removed. Ta-da!

MAT was invented by Greg Roskop in Denver (it is rumored that one of the reasons Payton Manning choose the Broncos is because of Greg and MAT). While the official MAT website at www.muscleactivation.com is just about the worst, Flash infested, hard to navigate, ugly website on the Internet, some of his “disciples” have done a far better job explaining it.  For example www.muscleactivation.ca is great.  I highly recommend you read this article for an overview:

What is Muscle Activation Techniques

There are bunch of videos on YouTube that show it off.  This one represents well:

Here in the Seattle area, the premier place for this kind of treatment is ATI in Redmond. There are 5 or 6 trainers there who are all trained in MAT (to varying levels).  The sensei is Erik Schwenn who has the MAT Master Level certification. Rick, my trainer, Kirk, and Terry are all certified as MAT Specialists. And there are a few more.  I regularly see local pro athletes in there. It is a great place that has, and I don’t say this lightly, changed my life.

I’m not writing this because I think ATI needs more business. I don’t know if they do or not. I’m writing it because I am such a huge fan of MAT that I want others to be able to take advantage of it. The (horrible) official MAT website has a list of all MAT specialists so you can look one up wherever you live.

One sucky thing about ATI is they don’t accept insurance. I know that in other cities there are places where MAT is applied that do. For me, I can’t imagine many things I’d rather spend money on.

“All the big guys have potential energy. They are objects with mass at altitude. Apple, Microsoft, and Google’s altitude comes primarily from their massive profits. Facebook’s altitude results from having lots of eyeballs in their social graph. There are other things that contribute to their altitude that are important like owning lots of credit card numbers.

I think a strong business model that is generating large profit margins and huge earnings (not revenue, but profit) means the ‘object’ has an aerodynamic shape and control surfaces. As these objects  (Apple, Microsoft, Google for example) fall, and they use their potential energy, they fall in a controlled manner. They can have direction and purpose. This gives me confidence.

On the other hand, Facebook is like a brick. Yes there is potential energy. But as it uses that potential energy it just falls straight down. Maybe it will sprout wings and be directed, but right now it’s just a big ugly brick falling…

This is why I would never invest in Facebook and I don’t like investing my time in startups that are all about gaining eyeballs without a clear path to profit.  Yes, there is potential there, but it’s just too uncontrolled.”

I’d love to know what you think of it this analogy. Does it fly (pun intended)?

Coal miners used to take canaries down into the mines to detect deadly gasses. If the canary suddenly dropped dead it was a warning to the miners they were about to die too. The canary in the coal mine for Windows Phone is the sales force responsible for selling Windows Phone at retail.

This is a copy of a guest post I wrote for GeekWire. View the original here.

My day-after-Christmas blog post last year, titled “Windows Phone is Superior, Why Hasn’t it Taken Off?”, was hastily written (on the beach) as a response to a Hackernews comment that galled me.

I must have hit a nerve because not only did the reaction to that post cause my blog to come crashing down, it made the top of Techmeme for almost 2 full days. Once the nice folks at WPEngine had my blog running on something more solid than my home server that post had over 70,000 views.

I was trying to articulate that Windows Phone 7, while a really, really, good product, had entered an exceedingly complex multi-sided market where the parties responsible for SELLING it were not incented to do so.

Consumers do not buy things. 

Consumers are sold things.

Broad marketing, including advertising and grass-roots evangelism, have a huge impact on what consumers end up buying. I discuss this in my post on brands. Like it or not, the masses are very much influenced by what they are told via brands, brand marketing, and advertising.

In retail, the term assortment is used to describe how much of a product is available, in what varieties, and how prominently it is displayed. For example, a well-assorted potato chip product sits on an end cap near the store entry, with lots of inventory visible, in several sizes. A weakly assorted product can be found on the rear wall, with one variety visible, and is crowded out by competing products. Retailers don’t assort products because they like them; they assort products because the purveyors of those products pay more than the other guy to have them assorted.

A human salesperson, acting 1:1 with a customer is an extremely powerful force. In the mobile phone space, particularly in the US, phones are purchased from carriers. It is the retail sales people (RSPs in industry jargon) in the carriers’ stores who interact with the people who wish to buy a new phone. More often than not, the final decision on what phone to buy is made based on what the RSP is pushing.

It does not matter how good a product is; if it is not marketed, assorted, and SOLD, consumers will not buy it. They WILL buy the alternative they’ve heard more about, is highlighted in the store, and is being pushed on them by a salesperson. Remember Betamax?

We are on the cusp of the launch of Windows Phone 8. Much has changed since Windows Phone 7 launched in the fall of 2010:

• Microsoft has released several upgrades to Windows Phone 7, fixing most of the shortcomings of that v1 product.
• The Windows Phone Marketplace has grown to include over 100,000 applications and games.
• Windows Phone 7 has gone global; now available basically worldwide including in China.
• Microsoft inked a strategic deal with Nokia, giving Microsoft the deeply committed hardware partner it lacked at WP7 launch. Nokia has released WP7 devices that people seem to think are damn nice.
• The Windows Phone user experience has moved to the forefront of industry consciousness by becoming the core of the much hyped Windows 8 “Metro” look & feel.
• Apple has won a patent lawsuit with Samsung; potentially driving Samsung to tighten its ties with Microsoft and loosening its ties with Google.

While much has changed, some things have stayed the same:

• The carriers still hate and distrust the OS providers in general and Microsoft in particular (I’m quite sure Verizon remembers Kin).
• Apple’s products are easy to explain, well marketed and thus highly desired, and easy for RSPs to sell. Apple continues to have no problem getting carriers to do a great job of assorting iPhones.
• Apple continues to provide an alternative channel for the iPhone with its Apple Stores.
• The Android device manufacturers (with Google’s help) continue to pour money into media advertising and incenting carriers to assort Android phones.
• Consumers like to feel like they have choice. Two strong options provide choice; it is not clear a third option is needed.
• Most people (and that includes RSPs because they are people too) still have an iPhone or Android device in their pocket while out on a date.

Windows Phone 8 looks great. Its features and capabilities are far better than Windows Phone 7 (and you know I already think WP7 was a “superior” product). It has a well-designed look and feel that enables it to stand out. It has all the features the competition has and also some innovative capabilities they don’t.

The hardware we’ve seen so far looks compelling. Moving to the Windows NT kernel from the Windows CE kernel has enabled Microsoft and the device manufacturers to support more powerful hardware. Nokia, which did an amazing “v1” job with the original Lumia series, should be able to outdo even itself with these new designs. Samsung appears to have put at least a few people from the “A” team on the case with the ATIV S.

You can assume, as I do, that the WP8 devices will be fantastic. Or, you can assume I’m just a Microsoft shill and the WP8 devices are crap. Either way, at the end of the day the question is:

Will Windows Phone 8 devices sell in sufficiently large numbers to make Microsoft a strong force in the smartphone space and keep Nokia in business?

I don’t know.

I don’t know how much money Microsoft, Nokia, Samsung, HTC, and the others are pouring into the carriers for co-marketing. I don’t know what sweet strategic deals Microsoft has negotiated with ATT, Verizon, Vodafone, and Telstra to get them to be incented to ensure these phones are well assorted in the carriers’ stores. I don’t know what kind of training and incentives are being given directly to RSPs.

And you don’t know either.

But I do know the way you can tell if it is working or not is to go to the carrier’s stores once WP8 phones are actually available and ask the RSPs what phone you should buy. Heck, even handicap them by saying “I hear Windows Phone is great. Help me pick one out.”

If they steer you to a WP8 device then the air is clear. The canary is happily chirping. Coal mining can continue. Sales will skyrocket.

If they steer you to an iPhone or Android device then I’m sorry, but that’s the equivalent of the canary lying feet up in the bottom of the cage.

If you want to leave a comment, I suggest you do it over on the GeekWire original. There’s quite a healthy discussion over there:

GeekWire Comment Thread for this Post

“More than two years after the introduction of the iPad, Samsung appears to be very confident in the tablet market and is shooting for margins that exceed Apple’s iPad levels.”

- Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 Has Bigger Profit Margin Than iPad, Aug 27, 2012

MSRP stands for Manufacturers Suggested Retail Price. It is the price a manufacturer of a product sets for what a product should sell for in the retail channel, without a subsidy.

Any subsidy (such as a recurring subscription) is then generally applied after the fact. For example an iPhone at ATT has a MSRP of $599. But with a 2-year service agreement you pay $199. The other $400 is the subsidy that ATT attempts to recoup over your 2-year’s of paying through the nose every month.

A rule of thumb for figuring out an MSRP of consumer electronics is to take bill of materials (BOM) cost (what it cost to manufacture the product) and multiplying by something between 1.5 to 3.0. If there is a middleman involved (e.g. the product is first sold to a wholesaler who then resells it to the retailer; which is true of most consumer electronics) the multiplier tends to be higher.  If the product is sold direct to the consumer the multiplier tends to be lower.

Some luxury products have higher margins (and thus a higher multiplier).  Cut-rate products have a lower multiplier.

For example:

A 16GB WiFi iPad with a BOM of $316 has a MSRP of $499. That’s a 1.5x multiplier. Apple’s vertically oriented supply chain, where they own everything from hardware design to manufacturing to distribution to inventory management to retail sales to after sale support allows them to extract up to 32% gross margin from this ($160)

A Samsung tablet with roughly equivalent specs to the iPad will fare differently.

The Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 has a BOM of $260. The delta between Samsung’s BOM and Apples BOM comes from two sources: Apple using generally higher-quality materials and Samsung’s massive scale as an semiconductor manufacturer. The MSRP of a Note 10.1 is $499.

Tom’s article suggests that the delta between $260 and $499 means Samsung’s margins will be higher. But this completely and naively ignores the fact that Samsung has to pay someone else to sell the product.

Samsung does not control their retail channel. The Galaxy Note 10.1 is predominantly sold through other retailers who, as a rule of thumb, generally extract a 30-40% markup. 

This is where Tom’s article falls down so badly. It ignores the cost of wholesale markup which Samsung cannot control because it does not own the retail channel.  Apple on the other hand does own the retail channel and thus has a wholesale markup of 0%.

Oh, and don’t suggest “But Samsung has an online store!” True, the tiny percentage of tablets Samsung sells directly to consumer command a higher margin (0% wholesale markup). But it is a tiny percentage.  For Apple the opposite is true: Other retailers sell only a tiny percentage of Apple’s products compared to those sold in Apple’s retail and online stores. And, due to the popularity of Apple’s products I am confident that those retailers beg Apple to be able to assort iPads (and thus get a far less than 30-40% wholesale markup).

But I was completely serious that I think the idea of Microsoft selling the 10” Surface with a MSRP of $199 is completely ludicrous.

Someone tweeted back that instead I should promise to grow a mullet instead. I’m not quite sure I’m capable of growing a mullet anymore, but if I were, I’d take that bet.

(I just wrote another post on retail pricing; if you are not sure what MSRP is and how it relates to products that are sold with a subsidy or subscription you might want to read it first).

There is one possible scenario where consumers may be able to pay $199 and walk out of a Microsoft Store this fall with a Surface: If Microsoft has built a subscription based offering that includes XBox LIVE Gold, Xbox Music Pass (the new equivalent of the Zune Pass), 20GB of SkyDrive storage, and some sort of Office offering that provided the equivalent of Office Home and Student.  This hypothetical offering would require a term of 2 years.  

Microsoft would never lower prices across the board, so I’m going to assume they would keep the service prices the same. Thus the bundled subscription would be be $300/year or $25/month subscription.

A Surface will cost Microsoft about $400 to manufacture (the iPad’s BOM is estimated to be about $350 and Apple has far more experience with supply chain management and managing BOM costs, so I think this is a perfectly reasonable assumption).

A Windows RT license is $85. Thus, excluding other sales and marketing costs, the real cost to Microsoft for each Surface is $485.

Therefore a subsidized price of a Surface of $199 would mean that Microsoft would be spending about $286 in customer acquisition cost (CAC). 

The lifetime value of the customer (LTV) would be $600. 

Assuming there are no other costs (ahem!) this would be $364 per Surface in Microsoft’s pocket after 2 years. It is impossible to estimate accurately what Microsoft’s COGs are for each of the components of the above subscription bundle, but consider the license fees MS pays for content in the Zune Pass means it probably barely breaks even, you can throw out that $120. For the others assume a generous 30% gross margin and the total profit would be $19. 

Just for fun, compare that to the estimated 23 to 32 percent gross margin Apple makes on each iPad.

These back of the envelope calculations mean to me that it’s possible that Microsoft could do a $199 Surface with a 2 year $25/month subscription.

I actually believe this is where Microsoft is going long term (see all my posts & discussions of Experience = Stuff / Time). And I hope Microsoft is actually ready to do this.

But I doubt they are. I just don’t think they are ready.

I think it is far more likely that Microsoft will sell the Surface for $599. They’ll sell every one they make at that price and earn a respectable 20% margin (maybe 3 million in 12 months; maybe). And in so doing, will support the broader ecosystem that is required to keep the existing Windows business profitable by shipping 350 million PCs next year.

Ok, so I’ve granted that a $199+$700 subscription is possible.

Now let me illustrate why a pure $199 MSRP is just about the most stupid suggestion anyone could make:

The current Windows business model is very profitable. PROFITABLE.  Not just big revenue but PROFIT. As in $11.4 BILLON in FY12. Do you understand the difference between revenue and profit? Steve Ballmer does.

I don’t know what the current per PC Windows license is. I know what it was about 8 years ago when I was in the Windows business. I don’t think I can disclose that number due to confidentiality. But we can back into something reasonable by assuming what OEMs pay is ‘wholesale’ and use the generally accepted wholesale->retail price multiplier of 40%. Windows 7 Premium’s MSRP is $199 thus the wholesale price is probably about $80. Probably a good proxy for what OEMs pay.

8 years ago that price was a LOT higher. 15 years ago it was even higher.

Linux (and Android) had a horrific effect on the Windows business model by forcing this price erosion. Why? Because those products were free and they enabled OEMs to negotiate a lower price on Windows with Microsoft. Moores law and the resulting plummeting cost of hardware didn’t help either. SteveB knows there is nothing he can do to STOP this erosion. It will eventually approach $0. But he would be insane to accelerate this erosion. In fact, Microsoft shareholders expect him to do whatever he can to slow it.

Undercutting the Windows partners who will make 99.99914% of the PCs that ship next year will do NOTHING for Microsoft’s business but accelerate the price erosion of Windows eradicating the $11B in profit it generates.

So just stop. Stop suggesting it. You sound like an idiot when you do.

However, if I’m wrong. And Steve Ballmer turns out to be a complete moron by selling Surface for a $199 MSRP I will wear a mullet wig to the //build conference.

Please discuss…

(Updated: I had the XBox LIVE Gold subscription at $100/year.  It’s $50/year.)

While I’ve written about the content and I talk about the topic with consulting clients regularly, this was the first time I had given this particular talk in public. I thought it would go over well, and I sensed it did.

If you missed the talk, the raw video can be found on ustream and the slides on slideshare.

Below is the video which was produced using the cool bootstrapped Seattle startup 9slides (makes it super easy to produce videos that go along with a set of slides).

If you would like me to give this talk, or any of my others, at your event, please contact me.

If you don’t (or for some reason can’t) view the 9slides version go here for the raw video:

Video on ustream

Much of what I discuss I have written about here on my blog.  Here are some of those posts:

• A Mouse and Keyboard Don’t Make a Hardware Company
• Apps Must Be Cross Platform
• Windows Phone is Superior; Why Hasn’t it Taken Off?
• Google Will Abandon Android
• Fragmentation Is Not The End of Android
• Experience = Stuff / Time
• Brand is a Critical Part of the End-to-End Experience
• Wanna Compete with Apple? Focus on Experiences

A lot of my assertions are just that: assertions. They are opinions based on my experience working in the industry, talking with others, and reading of the tea-leaves.  I would love to hear your reaction. Please use comments below to let me know what you think.

This post is for those Microsoft employees who are not happy with their review…

That September 15 date is what motivates managers to finally get busy delivering the bad news to employees who didn’t fare so well in stack ranking. As an employee you get ranked as one of the following:

1 You walk on water. We love you. We want to love you long time. Here’s an absurd amount of stock, an up-to 100% bonus, and a huge pat on the back. If we’re not promoting you right now, it’s probably because we just promoted you; we’ll get to it again RSN.

2 Stud/Studette! You are awesome in our eyes and we wish everyone else was just like you. You also get a nice healthy stock grant, a bonus that will make your spouse grin ear-to-ear, and a raise. Please, please, please continue what you’ve been doing.

3 Thank you. You did a fine job. We’d love to keep you around as you are clearly an asset to the company. Keep up the great work! Oh, and if you just do a bit more you could get a “2” next time. But also be careful because you were also close to getting a “4”.

4 I know it stings to hear this, but we are telling you Microsoft really doesn’t care about you anymore and would be just as happy having you work somewhere else. Yea, yea, you might still get a bonus, and there might be small raise involved, but promotion? Forget about it. And stock? Why would we give stock to someone who’s likely not going to be here next year? Ok, ok, maybe you can climb out of this hole over the next year. If you want to try, we’ll let you.

5 Don’t let the door hit you on the butt on the way out. We’d fire you, but that’s just so messy. It’s far easier for us to make you feel unwanted and hope you leave.

Back in the day, the rating scale at Microsoft was inverted and had decimal points (5.0 was best; 1.0 was worst). NO ONE got a 1.0 and a 2.0 was exceedingly rare. 5.0s were given only to those who truly walked on water. A 3.0 was equivalent of a “4” and a 2.5 was a “5”.  I got a 3.0 once. Stung like hell. I was still relatively junior and had a phenomenal support network of mentors (you know who you are; thank you) and was able to ‘turn my career around’ and quickly get a few more “3.5” – “4.5” scores to suppress that all damaging “3.0”. It wasn’t easy.

While the new “5, 4, 3, 2, 1” scale is different, the tiers and messages that go along with them are the same. If you got a “4” this time you are generally in a world of hurt, especially at the higher levels (Level 64+). If you are a Level 64+ with a “4” you have the following options:

1. If you know (for sure!) that your manager (and his/her peers) really, really like you and then absolutely kick ass in FY13. Work. Your. Ass. Off. If, by next Marchyou are not getting clear signals that you are on track for a “2” or “3”, polish that résumé and start looking elsewhere…
2. Take the message to heart that your current organization would be happier hiring someone else in your place. Seek out other roles in the Company and find a new home. This will only really work if you have a strong network and there are people in other groups in the company who really, really already know you and have faith in you. Consider this: Why would a hiring manager hire someone with a “4” when there are other candidates (external!) who don’t have such a black mark?
3. Join another company. You are likely not an idiot. In fact, you are likely quite skilled and capable in whatever job it is you like to do. Software developers are in huge demand, especially those with proven experience. Amazon and Google are hiring like crazy. I know of a bunch of startups that are looking for senior software developers (especially those that are .NET savvy!).

If you are a lower level than L64, don’t sweat it as much. Just buckle down and do more, faster, smarter. But do understand more than one “4” in a row and it’s game over for you at Microsoft.

Did you notice I said “software developer” above? This advice is really targeted at people who are good at and love actually writing software. It somewhat applies to program managers, product managers, and so forth, but hey, we work in the SOFTWARE industry. The only clear-cut jobs are for those who actually write the shit. Everyone else just helps. Frankly, in my experience, it is just harder for higher-level non-technical people.

I want to make clear that this post is in no way intended to be an indictment of Microsoft’s review system or how it compensates its employees. While I do have some pretty harsh feelings about how Microsoft is run, I have no experience being responsible for defining and executing a review and compensation system for a $74B company with 100,000 employees. I doubt you do either. This post is not about Microsoft. It is about Microsoft employees who got less than stellar reviews.

If you got a 4 this time around you need to ask yourself this one, very hard-core question, and you have to be completely intellectually honest with yourself:

Did you deserve it?

As you think about that question, consider the following:

• Microsoft’s compensation package is phenomenally good.Base salary plus bonus plus stock plus fantastic healthcare (even with last year’s changes) plus facilities plus plus plus.  You are extraordinarily well paid. Especially in this economy.
• How hard do you actually work? Do the people around you read Hackernews multiple times a day like you do? Do they go home at 9pm while you check out at 5? Do they sorta/kinda finish things, or do they nailthem? What about you?
• Are you really in the right job? Are you doing what makes you happy? Are you a Red/Yellow in a Blue job?  Or a Blue in a Green job? (You know what I’m talking about).
• Did you actively sell yourself? Hello, if at the level you are at, you have not learned It’s All Politicsthen you are naive and doomed. Do know your manager’s peers opinion of you? What did you do for THEM? If you scoff at this, stop reading now; nothing I write will help you.
• Are you motivated by the right things?At any big company it is hard to avoid a plateau without managing people, and taking on all that goes along with that. This is particularly true at Microsoft. Do you want “more scope and responsibility” because you’ll be paid more or because it is your passion? If it’s about the money (or “becoming Partner”), then recognize that you set yourself up for this, and maybe you’re not so good at it. Would you rather be writing code? Then find a job where you can actually do that!
• Are you thinking about your Career Trajectory wrong? Most people are.
• My Job Decision Matrix tool might help you sort some of these things out.  I know it has helped others.

If, after considering the above, you really, really believe you deserved a better rating and that the system (or manager or someone  else) is at fault then…that sucks. I’m sorry. I personally witnessed people getting undeserved ratings, so I know it can happen. If you got screwed, you likely have even more motivation to seek out a job elsewhere. Everything above applies.

In the majority of the cases, though, I think you’ll find people got what they actually deserved. If, after soul-searching, you recognize you could have done better or you are not in the right job, then do something about it. There is no magic-bullet; it usually involves hard work and tough decisions.

Either way, all is not lost. As I mentioned above, there are lots of great jobs available out there. The startup world is full of them. You’ll have to scale back your expectations on cash-flow and benefits though. Big time. But you might end up being happier.

Or, you can fight on and continue to earn the great package Microsoft provides. But remember, it’s your choice.

As usual, keep the comments coming, but keep ‘em nice.

http://ceklog.kindel.com/2012/08/28/my-the-future-of-mobile-talk-videoslides/

I will be presenting my thoughts on the future of mobile this Tuesday, August 28, 2012, from 6:00pm to 7:30pm at Thinkspace in Redmond.

If you’ve read my blog you know I have some pretty strong thoughts about how the mobile industry actually works. My goal for Tuesday is to drill into some of those ideas further.  In my experience most industry watchers are seriously myopic in their view of what is really going on. 

My goal with my talk is to help people understand the deeper structure of the mobile ecosystem and what is really going on between Apple, Google, Samsung, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, the carriers, developers, and consumers.

I hope you’ll be there!

I believe there is still space available.  You can register for the event here:  http://www.eventbrite.com/event/3941870240

The primary mission of those of us helping to drive Seattle Angel Conferences is:

“To grow the angel community in greater Seattle by creating an open environment where any accredited investor can participate in the investment of new startups.”

We know there are a lot of potential angel investors in Seattle who can’t even spell “Angel Investing”. We want to create an environment where noob angel investors can “dip their toes in the water” and get involved in a relatively low-risk manner.

Here’s how it works:

The Investors

• We shoot for recruiting around 40 investors from the Seattle area to participate. Ideally these are “new, never done angel investing” investors, but we welcome anyone as long as they are an accredited investor.
• Each investor commits $5000 + a service fee.
• Over 8-10 weeks leading up to the conference date, the investors meet regularly to learn about angel investing, due-diligence, term-sheets, deal flow, and so-forth. This is done via events as well as actually digging into due-diligence in the startups that are participating.
• The money (($5000 + fee) * number of investors) gets put into a newly formed LLC and an LLC manager is selected. That LLC manages the investment moving forward.  40 investors means a $200k investment in a startup.
• For the first conference in May we had 20 investors (and thus invested $100k).

The Startups

• We recruit 100 or so early stage (seed stage) startups to participate.
• The startups can be in any industry. Illumagear, the winner of the first Seattle Angel Conference had a construction gear product.
• The startups go through a screening process (where the investors do due-diligence) over the same 8-10 week period.  The startups will meet with the group of investors several times.  Through this they get valuable feedback and practice in doing their pitches.
• The top 5 or 6 startups are selected to participate in the Conference.
• We believe in investing in the Seattle area so we have a rule that participating startups must be headquartered within a day’s drive from the city of Seattle.

The Event

• At the event (December 13, 2012) the top 5 or 6 startups will get up on stage and give one final pitch for their company in front of an audience of several hundred people (we had ~150 or so in May).
• Food & drinks are served and attendees will hear keynote speaker.
• Anyone can attend the event: investors, entrepreneurs, media, etc… Everyone is welcome.
• We charge for attendance; we run the program to break even. The more attendees we get, the more money goes into ensuring the event is high quality.
• We are actively seeking event sponsors as well. If you are interested in having your company get great visibility please contact John Sechrest.
• After the startups do their final pitches, the investors get into a back-room and decided which one of the finalists wins the big check. It’s kinda like American Idol. And a lot of fun.

Join in the fun.  If you have ever considered investing in early stage startups but didn’t know how to get started, or were scared because it seemed too risky, the Seattle Angel Conference is for you. One way of thinking of it is you get real hand’s on training on how to be an angel investor for just $5K.

We are providing early bird registration now through Sept 15th.  Get signed up early and save. Entrepreneurs register Here. Angel investors register here.

The entrepreneur registration deadline is October 15.

Microsoft does not really want to build & sell hardware. Surface is akin to Google’s Nexus; a ‘north star’ product intended to lead OEMs in the right direction.

“With Surface we wanted to make sure that no stone is left unturned, in terms of really showing Windows 8 in its most innovative form. With Windows 8 you can get a tablet and a PC in a single package, and I think Surface probably proves that as well as anything. Our goal is not to compete with hardware partners. The bulk of our Windows volume is going to come from our hardware partners.”  – Steve Ballmer, Forbes, July 18, 2012

I repeat: Microsoft is not, and never will be, a hardware company.

First, Xbox, while finally turning a profit, is a shining example of how far Microsoft needs to go to truly be excellent at hardware supply chain management. The RROD debacle cost MS many billions of dollars and I don’t think they’ve learned their lesson.

I know some of the people who drove the Xbox360 hardware design and supply chain management. They are now war scarred and seasoned experts. They are the type of people you want working on the next big thing. None of them even knew about Surface until it was announced. Typical Microsoft organizational silos. (New info shows my sources may or may not have been correct. Removed this because I’d rather debate the core issue.)

Designing and building hardware is easy. That is, easy relative to SELLING hardware. Retail, hardware supply chain management, inventory management, support, etc… are huge endeavors that Microsoft has very little capability for. If you have not actually tried to build and sell a hardware product you cannot really understand just how challenging it is. The DNA of Microsoft is that of a software company. Zune proved this. The ZuneHD was (and is) a fantastic piece of integrated hardware & software. But Microsoft’s execution in selling it was bush league.

Second, a tiny, tiny percentage of Microsoft’s profits come from direct sales of products to consumers. Like less than 5%. In order for MS to seriously get into the hardware business it would need a model that enabled something close to the +40% gross profit margins Apple is seeing from its vertically oriented model. It would take a decade or more of radical change for Microsoft to make such a change, and while MS has demonstrated it can turn the ship (more like a fleet) before, I simply do not think this is a direction it can go.

I do not believe Microsoft will try to compete with Apple on Apple’s terms (vertically integrated, high-margin hardware with up-front payment and a walled garden). I believe Microsoft will try to end-around Apple by continuing with a predominantly horizontal play, enabling annuity revenue streams from connected experiencesdelivered across all of a user’s devices, regardless of whether they run Windows or not (including Apple’s devices).

We will see more hardware from Microsoft. I still wouldn’t be surprised to see a Microsoft designed & built Windows Phone 8 device this fall. There will be new generations of Xbox hardware too. And mice & keyboards. But these things are but grains of rice in a grain silo.

Maybe there are a few Robert Scobles out there who still believe that a significant number of successful apps in the future will be unique to any one client platform.

Connected experiences across all devices is where the growth is and it would be insane for anyone, from a major brand to an early-stage startup to believe they don’t have to build for at least iPhone, iPad, Android phones, Android tablets, and Windows 8 tablets.

Developers at agencies, big brands, and startups, are all saying to me:

“We have to do cross-platform. It sucks. I want to poke my eyes out. But we have to do it.”

The way I see it, mobile developers have three alternatives:

1. Believe in the Write-once, run-anywhere pixie-dust and end up creating slow-performing, shitty user interface with lowest-common-denominator approaches such as HTML5.
2. Spend a crazy amount of duplicated effort going completely native on each platform.
3. Be smart and use an approach that combines native UI with a cross-platform technology for non-UI components.

I wonder if my bias came through in that list?  Just in case it didn’t, let me drill in a bit more:

WRITE ONCE, RUN ANYWHERE (WORA)

Here’s the deal. Nobody actually wants WORA. Nobody.

Platform providers don’t want WORA

I designed the <OBJECT> tag (sorry!). In working with the The World Wide Web Consortium, I saw first hand the positioning. Each company said they wanted an HTML standard across all browsers, but each of them wanted their browser to be unique and better.

Today, the world is a better place because HTML5 exists. I love the capabilities it provides as I’m building MileLogr. Cross-browser compatibility is orders of magnitude better than it ever has been.  But do not think, for one moment, HTML5 is going to EVER lead to WORA Nirvana.

Consider this: You can basically give Apple credit for creating HTML5 with their work on webkit. However, HTML5 is not in Apple’s best interest and they are obviously dragging their feet with compatibility and performance.

Why? Because websites that run as apps break Apple’s strangle-hold on their walled garden.

Platform providers say they want WORA, but they don’t mean it. This will always be true.

Customers don’t want WORA

Facebook gave “write-once, run anywhere” an honest try. But in the end, their customers rebelled and forced them to rewrite their HTML5 based iOS app as a native app. Customers notice poor performance and they notice when apps don’t ‘feel native.’

Today less than 10 percent of Android phones support the latest released version of Android. This is more than months after “Ice Cream Sandwich” shipped. The latest version of the Android operating system lets you build ‘ok’ Android apps using HTML5 because the browser engine in Ice Cream Sandwich is fairly modern. What percentage of Android phones will support REALLY good HTML5 apps 12 months from now? I think 15 percent would be super aggressive.

That means that 85 percent of Android customers can’t run such an app. Customers love that! Not.

Developers don’t want WORA

Ok, fine. They do. They really do. But only if it lets them also take advantage of unique platform capabilities. Oops.

In an extremely ironic twist of fate, Microsoft might end up being the biggest proponent of HTML5.

The Windows 8 “Metro” app model allows for multiple ways of building apps: Using HTML + Javascript (HTML5) or XAML + C# (cough, Silverlight). But the UI code you write in your HTML based Metro apps is hardly useable on any other platform because the Metro UI model is so different. Is that what developers want?

I picked on HTML5 here because it’s really the only technology out there today that anyone ever suggests might enable WORA. I’m all ears if you think there’s something else; I’ll happily pick on it too.

Going Native

This is just math. Given infinite resources there is no debate that building clients using native APIs will result in the highest quality user experience on each platform.

Who’s got infinite resources though? Facebook, I guess. Microsoft appears to be doing a bit of this (the iOS version of SkyDrive and Bing appear to be completely native).

For the rest of us, the math simply doesn’t make sense. A typical high-quality app on iPhone, Android, WP7, or Windows 8 (I’m just talking client code here) will run $50-100k per-client platform. That’s serious coin for a small company or typical brand campaign.

Mixed Model (Native UI + Cross-platform Core)

I obviously think this is the way to go. For a Mixed Model app you still have to have some expertise with each platform’s UI APIs and you still write a lot of platform-specific code. But you use a cross-platform technology that allows for the lion’s share of your “core” code to be shared.  The UI is “native” and the guts are “cross-platform.”

Ideally we’d call this model “Hybrid – Native UI” and the inverse “Hybrid – Lowest Common Denominator UI” but last year the hype machine firmly established that the term “Hybrid App” means “slow, mostly compatible, non-native HTML5 UI packaged as a platform specific app.”

This is what PhoneGap does. This is not what I am talking about.

I herby coin the new hype-term: Mixed Model Mobile Apps.

There are currently several alternatives (that I’ve found) for creating Mixed Modelmobile apps

• Mono (C#)
• Javascript

Xamarin’s Mono tools are fairly complete and widely used. In my own experience using them, and talking with other developers they work really well.

There are quite a few popular iOS and Android apps that are built with Xamarin’s tools including Rdio. The tools and technology is mature and vetted.  Performance is great (particularly because your UI is native) and reports of the amount of code sharing illustrate my point about developer efficacy. The following blog posts give some insight:

• iCurcuit: ~80% code re-use across iOS, Mac, and WP7.
• TouchDraw: ~60-70% code re-use across iOS and MacOS.

I’ve yet to find a professional grade Javascript solution that really does what Mono does, but it should be theoretically possible to build a tool chain that lets you write most of your lower level (model, view model, controller) code in Javascript and keep your UI (view) code using the native platform. Given how ubiquitous Javascript has become I’m sure you’ll see some comments below around solutions out there that do this.

Conclusion

Both the dream of being able to focus on a single client platform and the dream of being able to write-once-run-anywhere are just that. Dreams.

If you want to reach the largest audience with a quality experience, you must target all popular client platforms. The UI models of those client platforms are so different from each other that a last-common-denominator approach will not provide the quality customers expect. Going fully native on each client platform is prohibitively expensive.

The solution is to take a hybrid approach: Mixed Model.

I started writing this post before Xamarin announced they had received $12 million in Series A financing. I think the fact that they are now so well funded makes the case for using Mono even stronger. What do you think?

TL;DR

• Apple’s insane profitability has the other big guys jealous and freaked out.
• None are stupid enough to try to compete with Apple on Apple’s terms.
• The way to beat Apple is to redefine the game by making apps irrelevant and by making mobile just a piece of the equation.
• The “Experience = Stuff / Time” model is a great way break the conversation down to really understand what is going to happen.

In 1999 I had an epiphany that the future of consumer products would be connected. I then spent the next 12 years of my Microsoft career trying to drive that vision.

No matter what product I was working on, moving the connected experiences ball forward was always in the back of my head. Over time, I created a thought model for how this new, connected world, would be different than before. I’d joke that John Gage of Sun actually had it right when he said “The network is the computer”. But that pithy quote is not rich enough to fully describe the vision.

This is how I came up with “Experiences are Stuff over Time”:

An end-to-end user experience is a cohesive combination of devices, people, brands, channels, services, and content that improves over time.

(You really should read that post)

Over time I became increasingly frustrated that the industry at large (and Microsoft) was moving too slowly. For example, the bet on TCP/IP as the basis for all networking was supposed to ensure there was a common lingua franca for all devices. But every company’s desire to own vertical integration meant standards like UPnP became fragmented and neutered. The underlying complexity of TCP/IP didn’t help. It’s crazy that in 2012 it is still so difficult to get a home network working reliably all the time.

I believe, however, that we are now on the cusp of this finally changing.

And ironically enough it is Apple’s phenomenal success in both defining “Apps” and “Mobile” through their deep vertical integration that is going to cause this sea change.

Why? Because Apple’s shockingly insane profitability will cause the big competitors (Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon) to compete, and they will not try to compete on Apple’s terms. They are smarter than that, and they’ve all read Art of War.

In the Art of War, Sun Tzu teaches combatants to avoid direct confrontation and instead to create opportunities from the relative weaknesses of the enemy. Apple is so strong right now that any competitor would be criminally stupid to attempt to try to compete directly. Competing directly with Apple would mean building a vertically integrated ecosystem where the components of the end-to-end user experience is provided almost exclusively by one company. From channels (e.g. retail), to people (only those with Apple products), to devices (all the way to the silicon), and even content (apps exclusive to Apple devices), Apple’s strength comes from this vertical integration.

But this leads to where Apple is potentially weak:  End-to-end experiences where the components are heterogeneous within (e.g. multiple device manufacturers) and across (e.g. one company provides a service and another provides content).

I’ve articulated that I think the right way to think about consumer products is from the consumer’s perspective, and that Experiences = Stuff / Time works as a thought model. Consumers want and love cohesive end-to-end experiences across all of their devices, involving many people, via multiple channels, powered by a range of services, and full of content. Go read my post on it again.

Apple has nailed cohesiveness by removing complexity from the equation through vertical integration in devices, people, brands, channels, and services to differing degrees:

• Devices – Particularly for iOS, Apple has complete vertical integration. Lesser so for Mac (still relies on Intel).
• People – Deep vertical integration. Most Apple Experiences are exclusive to people in the Apple ecosystem.
• Brands – Couldn’t be more deeply integrated.
• Channels – Deep integration, but some leverage of other channels. Primary: iTunes, apple.com, and the Apple stores. Secondary: iPads at Walmart and iPhones at ATT stores.
• Services – Most Apple successes are in areas where they are the most deeply integrated with their own services. iTunes. Siri. iMessage.
• Content – The one place Apple has chosen to support broad heterogeneity; mostly because content is the most diverse component of any experience.

This deep vertical integration has worked well for Apple. But it also provides limits (not everyone wants or has only Apple devices).

Both Google & Microsoft demonstrated recently that they are not willing to try to compete directly with Apple. If Google really wanted to go directly after Apple’s model they would not have delivered the Nexus 7 as a zero-margin, cut-rate tablet co-branded with Asus. They would have, as I previously suggested they would, created a new consumer brand all their own.

If Microsoft really wanted to go directly after Apple, the Surface would not be “just a design point”, but would be the only WinRT device on the market.

What both companies are clearly doing instead is building a range of services that are available across a wide range of devices. This is the new battle ground between Microsoft and Google (and to some extent Amazon & Facebook) is on delivering end-user value across any device, integrated with multiple services, combining powerful brands, and pulling from the best content sources all sold through multiple channels.

(That’s just another way of saying “Experience = Stuff over Time”, by the way).

This new battleground is not about apps.  It is not about mobile. It is not about tablets. It is about Experiences.

And I love watching it unfold.

Let me know your thoughts with a comment below.

By all measures the conference, as Bob Crimmins told me after the event, goes in the “Win Column”.  We had a terrific turnout, selling out the event. The room was full of energy and buzz. The participating companies all kicked-butt in their presentations. The food was excellent.

And most importantly we introduced a bunch of new people to angel investing, making the Seattle startup community stronger, which was our primary goal.

Curt Woodward at Xconomy Seattle did a great write up of the event and the winner, so I won’t bother recapping here.

But I do want to say this:

John Sechrest deserves the lion’s share of kudos for the success of this event.

John was the one who networked the concept around the Seattle area, starting last fall. John was the one who recruited others (including me) to volunteer to help out. John was the one who ran all of our meetings, including setting up logistics, ordering pizza & beer.  John was the one who setup the website. John was the one who got sponsors and found the venue.

John did all of this because he had a vision and he had passion for making a positive change to the Seattle startup community.

Thank you John. Well done. You drove us to “ship our MVP” and now it’s time to start building the next Seattle Angel Conference! 

Maybe now that we’ve proven it works in Seattle we can actually get some of the existing Seattle based entrepreneur and angel organizations to partner on it….

Tweeting this survey to my ~8500 followers on Twitter (I had to beg a few times) resulted in 120 responses over about 24 hours. This is probably not a great representation of the broad Google Calendar user base, but for my purposes it will work great.

I promised my followers I would post the results and here they are:

First, I made the question on whether people use Google Calendar a required question.  Clearly the people who responded use Google Calendar:

One of my biggest questions was whether people used the multiple calendar support in Google Calendar.  They do:

And, I hypothesized that they use it just as I use calendar item categories in Exchange.  For the most part, they do:

Interestingly, from verbatim comments left by respondents, I learned that another reason people use multiple calendars in Google Calendar is to enable sharing calendars with others. Not something I had considered (and not really important for what I’m working on, but interesting anyway).

I also wanted to get a read on what “clients” people used to access Google Calendar. Not surprisingly GMail in the browser dominates, and iOS and Android are very popular. The bias in my twitter following (lots of Microsoft fans) led to a nice spike for Windows Phone 7.

This was not meant to be a scientific study. I’m building a lean startup and need to make quick decisions on what to build and when. I had no data and after spending 10 minutes creating an online survey and bugging my twitter followers I got SOME data…

Enough data to made several decisions and move on.  Clearly these are not ”10%” decisions.

I’ll leave the survey up and check it every once and a while. If a lot of people respond and the data changes significantly I’ll update this post and tweet about it.

We would like to ask for your help to spread the word about this project and invite you to the event.

As I’ve written previously, a primary mission of the Seattle Angel Conference is to help people learn about the Angel investing process by engaging in a group based angel investment process.

We have 19 investors contributing. At the final event on May 31st, each of the finalists will present and the investors will vote on which of the finalists will receive the aggregate investment (roughly $100K).

Out of the 26 startups that applied this year, we are now down to the six finalists:

Homeschool Snowboarding

www.homeschoolsnowboarding.com – @HMSCHL

Homeschool creates the most durable highly breathable snowboard outerwear available. Keeping you warm and dry from the inside out.

Illumagear

www.illumagear.com – @illumagear

A safety company working to impact the construction market by illuminating those who work and  recreate in low light environments.

Stockbox Grocers

www.stockboxgrocers.com – @stockboxgrocers

Stockbox Grocers improves access to fresh produce and  grocery staples in urban food deserts to promote healthy  and thriving communities.

Buddy Platform

www.buddy.com – @buddyplatform

Buddy provides a cloud services backend for app developers on any OS platform, and incredibly high fidelity analytics for app publishers.

Apptentive

www.apptentive.com – @apptentive

GetSatisfaction + Salesforce.com for app developers. In less than 15 minutes, developers can get better ratings & direct customer relationships.

Empower.me

www.empower.me – @BryanStarbuck

We are a B2C startup in the TechEd space for parents and their students in high school and middle school.

We view the Seattle Angel Conference as a long term investment in the Seattle startup community and you can still get involved in the following ways:

• Join us at the gala event on May 31^st. It is going to be a lot of fun with great speakers and pitches from the startups.

  You can register for the event on Eventbrite here.

• If you are an accredited investor you can still join the investor pool. Contact John Sechrest if you are interested.
• Check out the websites of our finalists and learn more about them.
• Spread the word on Twitter: @nwangelconf (some example tweets below)
• Like us on Facebook (www.facebook.com/SeattleAngelConference)

Hope to see you there!

(Cool! GeekWire published this as a guest post!)

The Job Decision Matrix is one of those tools where you get enormous benefit from the exercise of using the tool as well as the result the tool generates.

The goal the Job Decision Matrix is to identify what is actually important to you at a particular point in your career. Gaining clarity on what is important to you will help you identify new job opportunities, avoid wasting time on job opportunities that are not right for you, and to make a job decision with conviction.

The three goals of the Job Decision Matrix

• Identify new job opportunities
• Avoid wasting yours and others’ time.
• Make job decisions with conviction.

If you have not already done so, take a moment to read You Are Thinking About Your Career Trajectory Wrong. Once you view your career trajectory as a non-linear progression akin to a series of inter-planetary space missions you will realize that your perspective changes over time. At each stage of your career the things you care about will be different.

When I was graduating from University of Arizona (Go Cats!) I couldn’t even spell “family”. The concept of caring about feeding a family was simply irrelevant to me. All I really cared about was the technical domain (GUI applications) I’d be working in and the stage of the company (established, but not big). Later in my career I was married with children. Suddenly feeding a family was something I cared deeplyabout.

As you work through your Job Decision Matrix recognize that you should focus on what is important to you NOW, not what you imagine might be important to you in the future, or what you used to care about. (This goes along with another career belief I have: you should change jobs at least every 3 years; but that’s a topic for another day).

Buckets

Buckets are simply groupings of similar things that you can stack-rank.It seems like most people end up with something like 6 to 8 buckets.

In my experience helping others with this tool, buckets are very personal. Everybody has their own perspective on life.  There are some that resonate with most people though, such as: “Company Size/Stage”, “Location”, and “Money”.

Let’s use a fictional character to illustrate. Ralph is right out of a masters degree in Comp Sci and looking for his first real job. He hooked up with his high-school girlfriend in college and is already married. He believes he wants to be a professional software developer.  His wife has family in Seattle and she really loves it here. They currently live near downtown Seattle. They don’t have kids yet and love to travel. Ralph’s wife has a job and makes an OK amount of coin.

Here’s what the top-left portion of Ralph’s Job Decision Matrix might look like:

Ralph’s not an entrepreneur. He really just wants to start his career off with a solid job.  So he’s identified that getting a job with an established company is the most important thing for him right now.  Company Size is his most important bucket, and within that bucket Big Company comes first.

Ralph’s smart enough to know he won’t be happy unless his wife is happy; living in Seattle is super important. He’d prefer not to have to commute to the Eastside (what we call the suburbs here), so he stack-ranks Seattle (Downtown) above an Eastside job, but push-come to shove, he’d take a job on the Eastside. And if a really great job came up in Portland they’d take it.

Because Ralph’s wife works, Ralph has the luxury of being able to prioritize what he works on, the Technical Domain, above money. As you can see, he’s a back-end kind of guy, but if he found a job building mobile apps he’d seriously consider it.

This example is a good start. I encourage people to have 6 or 7 buckets though because there a few buckets I find people don’t normally think about that prove helpful. More on these other buckets below.

Stack-Ranking

Order your buckets from left to right. The buckets on the left should be more important to you than those to the right. If you can’t decide if one bucket is more important to you than another don’t worry about it. Move on. But ponder it in the shower tomorrow morning and come back and re-order if you’ve gotten clarity. The key thing is to really try to decide which bucket is MOST important and which is LEAST important.

For me, right now, Company Stage is the bucket that is most important for me. Technical Domain is least important.

Within each buckets make sure the items are ORDERED by what is most important to you. The thing you care most about right now should be at the top and the thing you care least about should be at the bottom.

Tools for the Tool

I used to use an Excel spreadsheet for this tool. Each bucket was a column. Now I use a Trello board where I have List for each bucket and each item is a Card.

You can find my current Job Decision Matrix on this Trello Board:

CEK Job Description Matrix (on Trello)

This really is my own personal Job Decision Matrix. I updated it as I wrote this post. I may have changed it again since this post was written. Hopefully it can provide a real-world example. But, do not read too much into it as it is MY matrix and only I really understand it (I reserve the right to call you an idiot if you attempt to extract some deep meaning from it).

The nice thing about Trello is it makes moving things around super easy. If it doesn’t feel right to have “Money” to the left of “People” simply drag & drop it.  And items within the buckets can be ordered likewise. You can also attach notes to Cards which can be useful.

I run Trello full screen so I can see all of my buckets in one view. I find visualizing it this way is helpful.

More Buckets

To further illustrate here are some more examples taken from my own personal matrix. I’m taking the time to include these because I want you to explore some buckets you may not have thought about.

The upper-left of my matrix looks like this:

Company Size / Stage

I’m at a place in my career where the most important thing is to focus on startups. That’s why I left Microsoft; I want to spend the next 5-7 years living & breathing startups.  Clearly the things in the top-left of my matrix better be startup related or I’m not really being clear in my thinking. But I’m somewhat flexible in what stage the startup is in.  Ideally I’d be starting my own company (which is what I’m doing). If there was an opportunity to join a funded startup I would consider it.  I put “Large Companies” last in this bucket only to illustrate these lists must be prioritized.  The LAST thing I want to do right now is work for a large company.

Customer

I have always cared deeply what customer I’m focused on. I know I am not happy in jobs where I have to think about certain customers. I’ve served IT Pros, but, frankly, their problems bore me to death. Thus my customer bucket is ranked pretty highly (3rd) and I have a stack-ranked list of customer types I care about/want to serve. Right now consumer end-users are at the top of that list, but I do love building products for developers too. It is OK for you to not like a particular customer segment. It is NOT ok for you to hate your job because you can’t find empathy for your customer.

People

I’m regularly surprised when a mentee hasn’t thought about what kind of people he/she wants to work with. I’ve had points in my career where the previous “space mission” was so fraught with a-holes and soul-sucking ladder climbers that my most important bucket was “People” and the very top item in the People bucket was “Work with people I know & trust”.

Right now my “People” bucket has (in order) “work with new people”, “work with experienced entrepreneurs”, “work with non-MS affiliated people”, “work with people I know & trust”.  In other words, I’m willing to take some risks on who I work with right now because it’s more important that I “un-learn Microsoft” than to “feel safe”.  Being around people I’ve worked with for 21 years will not help me grow.

Stripes

I love this one. I have Chris Phillips, the best manager I ever had to thank for this concept.

As you go through your career you earn stripes. Like sergeant stripes or merit badges. Stripes are the things you are able to say “I really, actually, proved that I could do that.”  You can get a stripe multiple-times. Some people love getting the same stripe over and over. I am wired such that I want as many stripes as I can possibly get.

You only get a stripe for FINISHING. Don’t cheat yourself by claiming a stripe where you didn’t really achieve it.

What stripes are on your radar for this phase of your career? Have you hired someone? Have you fired someone? Have you created an open source project that others have voluntarily contributed to?

At Microsoft I sought funding for a startup: Windows Home Server. I was successful in getting that startup funded. That’s a pretty cool stripe that not many others can claim. I also claim a stripe for turning that startup into a brand new business at Microsoft (a very rare thing indeed). But I’ve never done it in the real world (Microsoft is not the real world). So at the top of my “Stripe” bucket now is “Seek & get seed funding in the real world”.

I’ve also never sold a company. I sure would love to have the experience of doing so though. Which is why it’s in my stripe bucket; stack-ranked below getting funding (duh, logical).

Role

Very much related to Stripes is the Role bucket. Role is literally what role you want to play within the organization. For example, do you want to be an individual contributor or a lead?

In my case, being focused on startups, I care about having a role where I’m driving the technical and product direction for the company. This is important to me. So I have “Founder (CTO)” listed first. But I’ve decided that ensuring I can pay for my kid’s college, the people I work with, the customer I’m focused on, the location where I live/work, and the company stage are all more important that being a Founder/CTO. Having that kind of clarity is super liberating! It means that if an opportunity came along that met those other criteria I would be happy even if it wasn’t at CTO type role!

Some people care about titles. That’s OK (it can be important to be given a title because, like it or not, titles impact people’s perception). I can’t imagine ever having a Title bucket that is anywhere near the left side of my matrix, but I do know other people who would. To each his or her own.

Money

I encourage people to have a “money” bucket. Items in that bucket might be things like “get rich”, “maintain”, “slow growth”. Decide what is important to you in terms of your financial situation and stack-rank/prioritize (e.g. What is MOST important to you RIGHT NOW in your career).

Do not forget to factor your spouse or significant other into your thinking here!

Summary

If you are seeking a new job, then I highly recommend you give the Job Decision Matrix a try. Even if you are not actively seeking a new “space mission” in your career right now, you can use the Job Decision Matrix to gain clarity on what is important to you.

The tool is pretty simple.  Create a matrix where the columns are a stack-ranked set of related things you care about (Buckets). The rows are stack-ranked things you care about.

When you are looking a job descriptions use your Job Decision Matrix to select interesting jobs and to filter out ones you shouldn’t waste time on.

When you have been offered a choice in jobs use the Job Decision Matrix to help you decide which one to take.

Over the years I’ve shared the Job Decision Matrix tool with dozens of mentees and have gotten the feedback that it was super-useful. An email from some random dude asking me for career advice (ha!) incented me to actually write this tool down for the first time. I hope you find it useful and would love to see some conversation about it in comments.