Jay talked at length about steps Atlassian had taken to keep the company innovative. I particularly like #3 on their list of core values, not to mention the statement (apparently from their head of HR) that HR policies are largely BS.

Much of his talk was focused on concepts like “20% Time”, which is very similar to Google’s program by the same name i.e. 20% of an employees time can be spent working on whatever they like. He also talked about other initiatives such as “Lab Week”. During a lab week, an entire team comes together in the style of mad scientists to solve a particular problem. During the week, the entire team wears lab coats.

It’s easy to look at these kind of initiatives and make fun of them. At best, they seem like goofy gimmicks that simply aren’t sustainable in a “real” company, especially not if there is actual work to be done.

At lunch, I happened to be sat across from Vivek Wadhwa. I am a huge fan of his work, and usually find myself vigorously nodding in agreement with everything he writes. His studies on the real nature of entrepreneurship, women in tech and emerging markets (three separate areas, not one big paper) are pragmatic, thought provoking and insightful. The subject of Lab Week came up, and Vivek made a comment regarding whether or not Lab Week (and having folks run around in lab coats) was actually useful or just silly.

You might think my curmudgeonly self would be in the “damn young kids and their silliness” camp, but I’m not.

A number of years ago I had the pleasure of working with a highly creative team at Hasbro Toys. We were working on a new project and they invited several of us to join them in their brainstorming session. We camped out in a room full of whiteboards, large paper pads on easels, tape and a secret weapon: an enormous bucket of Hubba Bubba (full sugar, of course).

At first I assumed it was just a toy-company-being-wacky thing. But as the two day brainstorming session progressed, I started to see that it was an act of genius.

Brainstorming is hard to do right. You often need to cover a lot of ground. You need to bravely explore avenues that may seem foolish at first. You need everyone to forget the preconceived ideas and answers they arrived with, and everyone needs to contribute. Successful brainstorming requires a change in attitude.

Enter Hubba Bubba.

1. If you’re used to corporate meetings, it completely throws you off-guard to be presented with a giant bucket of gum.
2. It is really hard to monopolize a conversation when you have a mouthful of gum.
3. It is much harder to remain formal and guarded when everyone else has a mouthful of gum.
4. Chewing gum makes you thirsty. Everyone has to stop to drink water/soda/whatever, and that means everyone also has to hit the bathroom. This provides natural breaks for every participant, no matter how much they want to be heard.

The net result is that nobody monopolizes the conversation. Ideas flow freely and get kicked around until the right answers present themselves.

And from apparent silliness, magic is born.

I’ve repeated the Hubba Bubba process many times and it has always delivered results.

I suspect the same is true of many of the seemingly gimmicky ideas like Lab Week. You wear a lab coat to work and you feel different. Feeling different can change how you think and influence the way you approach a problem. A different approach yields a different answer, and that’s where true innovation often happens.

The conference is attended by some very smart and influential people (present company excluded), from senior execs to talented developers, press and VCs.

Defrag is organized by the talented Eric Norlin and his equally talented wife Kim. Eric gets startups and every year I’ve attended Defrag (3 now) he does one thing that I think is great: he gives a startup a shot at the brass ring.

How to connect with people at a conference when you don’t know them but have common interests is a poorly solved problem. This year, Eric gave Zerista a shot at solving it.

And boy, did they suck. There’s a big suck and then a bunch of smaller quibbly sucks that you could argue may just be me. But the big one is a doozy.

I arrived in Denver on Tuesday night (November 16th) and got an email asking me to sign up for Zerista:

So I signed up and started creating my profile. When I tried to add a photo, the system belched. I tried a few more times and got nowhere. I’m running a Mac and Chrome browser. Its not exactly an unusual combination but I have seen problems on some sites, so I fired up Firefox. Different error message but the same end result: no ability to upload a photo. On a scale of 1 to 10, being able to have an easy way to recognize someone you’ve never met (like a photo) ranks at least a 12, so I was keen to solve this.

Investigative hat on, I took a look at the Zerista site and they mention that “Zerista Pro is a Mobile and Desktop Event Planner that turns your event into an interactive mobile experience for all stakeholders”.

Aha! Perhaps I can use their mobile app.

Err no. Neither my Nexus One nor my Galaxy tablet can see anything other than a hobbled mobile UI that doesn’t let you edit information at all.

But it’s not as though attendees at Defrag would have smartphones and want to edit things from them

<sigh>

But then another idea hits me. This is a startup. This conference is a big deal for them. They are probably all working 24/7. Yes, it’s 11pm at night (Colorado time) but why not send an email to their support team! I’d never bother with a mainstream product because we all know how that works out, but good startups (and Eric knows what those look like) are all over customer support.

So I did. Short and simple as you see below. I used to run a Customer Support department, so I tried to provide at least a minimum amount of useful information and a clear subject.

After sending that, I went to bed. Defrag started at 8am on the 17th and I was on East Coast time, so I was up early.

I checked my email, but there was no response. Not even an autoresponder saying “We got your email”.

Hmm.

The 17th came and went. I checked the mobile app a few times, but it seemed no one was really using it and the vast majority of attendees didn’t have a completed profile or profile picture. The 18th came and went too. Defrag is only a two day conference, so by 5pm or so on the 18th it was over.

Still no email.

I got up early on Friday, 11/19, to take my flight home. Still no email.

Caught up with my email late last night when I finally got home.

Still nothing.

This morning (Saturday) I got up late to see not one but two emails:

Uhhh, what? I already registered. I logged in several times during the conference. Why are you sending me this now? As I look at this more closely, it seems Redmine is perhaps their support ticket system, so this is perhaps a login for problem tracking, not my account login?

Way to go, clarity.

This email was followed by an even more splendid one:

So yes, I got a message that simply regurgitated the email I had sent 3+ days earlier. You’ll also see the heartwarming “NON BILLABLE” notice in the subject line.

Now I already had the impression that they didn’t give a shit about my business, but at least now I know it’s because I’ve been identified as some kind of freeloader by their system.

You’ll also see that it shows the issue as “New”, which after 3+ days I would argue with, and the priority as “Normal”. Since the conference ended two days ago, I’d recommend they change that to “Low”, or “Ooops”, or “My Bad”.

Seriously? WTF! I couldn’t help but respond, since no-one else seems to be updating my case:

Let me be clear: this is in no way a criticism of Eric. This is 100% a criticism of Zerista and their management team.

If you can’t handle simple tasks like responding to urgent support emails, you don’t deserve anyone’s business, let alone mine.

The key with this device, like the iPad and the super-sized Smartphones that are coming out now, is what you intend to use it for. And for me, it has a lot of promise. The phrase “for me” occurs a lot in this post because that really is the critical point. The Galaxy has had some very mixed reviews, and frankly it reminds me of the negative reviews many netbooks get. This is not a desktop/laptop replacement, but for certain use cases, it works very very well.

My primary phone is trusty Nexus One. I’m all-cloud these days, so Google has my contacts, email etc, and Google Maps has replaced whatever little sense of direction I had. As a phone, it’s great. As a “mobile companion” to keep me organized, also great. I don’t play much music on it, but it’s an okay media player (although better at photos and video). And yes, it’s nice to have a pocket device that runs flash.

But there are some issues. Battery life is a constant concern. Emails are generally kept short and I don’t author documents. Just too much like hard work.

And for me, that’s where the Samsung shines. As a portable “more than a phone, less than a laptop” device. Yes, I know that’s what the iPad is supposed to be. But for me, the iPad is a little on the large size. The Samsung isn’t pocket sized (unless you have ungodly big pockets), but it is pretty light and small compared to the iPad. I wouldn’t leave the iPad in the car unless I put it in the trunk, but the Galaxy is small enough to fit in a glove compartment or side pocket. It also weighs less than a pound, so it is much more like carrying a notepad (yes, a paper one).

Aesthetically there’s not much to say. It’s a black rectangle with rounded corners. Yay. 7” screen, front and rear facing cameras (but no Skype support for video calls yet), stupid Apple-esque connector, and volume/power buttons. It’s also running Samsung’s Android UI, which is a bit of a mixed bag, but overall has some nice touches. The device runs Android 2.2, supports Flash out of the box and has built in 3G.

The Android status tray has been modified to include easy switches for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, Silent mode and Orientation lock. The latter is especially handy as you don’t need to fumble around for a physical switch to lock the device in portrait or landscape. There’s also a brightness control, although the auto mode does a decent job.

The screen is very bright and clear. Good color and decent readability under most lighting conditions.

But back to what I use it for… Yesterday I was on a 4 hour flight that happened to have in-flight wi-fi. I was able to take care of a bunch of emails, send some urgent SMSs via Google Voice, author a couple of Word docs, sketch out a Powerpoint, remote log in to my webhosting company and set up a test Drupal server (not a fan, but that’s another post), all while listening to music.

The flight was packed full and the guy next to me was trying to do the duck-typing thing on his laptop (elbows in, repetitive strain injury at the ready). Before his Thinkpad had even finished booting, I was already finishing some tasks. When we had to put our toys away, I still had 60%+ of battery left.

Apps are generally responsive. I haven’t had many issues with the browser. My only app-related issue is how much pre-installed junk is on the device. I really wish manufacturers wouldn’t do this. Or at least let me uninstall the cr*p I really don’t want. It seems the good old days of Desktop Bloatware are back with a vengeance.

There are some rough edges. The auto-correct doesn’t always recognize password fields, which can make typing in passwords a nightmare. Not to mention that your password appears big and bold in the suggested word panel as you type. There aren’t many good tablet apps yet, although some apps already look good (like Angry Birds). We really need an equivalent of Mujinote for this device. Also, with such a big screen, the text size is simply way too big in many apps. For example, in Gmail, you can shrink the size of the message text, but not the list of messages in your inbox. You could fit a lot more readable stuff on the screen if the font size was smaller.

I also really wish Samsung hadn’t gone the Apple route of proprietary flimsy connector and sealed battery. I don’t care about replacing the battery, but I do care about recovering from a completely locked up device. The latter hasn’t happened yet, but I’m not sure how you recover if it does.

But all in all, for me, it’s a handy device that means I take my laptop to even fewer places, and that’s a win in my book.

A few days in, I’ve actually changed my mind somewhat. I still don’t love the device, but the things that bother me aren’t entirely the things I expected.

As everyone else on the planet has already said, it is a spectacular device for browsing media. The screen is great and a good size for photos or video. The lack of buttons and other clutter makes it very easy to use and both my kids like it. As a Netflix fan, I’ve found it to be a decent way to watch a movie and so far it’s the first Apple device I’ve owned in a long time that doesn’t seem to have any wi-fi issues.

It has sold me on both the potential of tablets and their advantages. In many ways it feels like a true cloud device.

But like I said, there are some problems.

I’ll skip all the stuff about SD card support etc. It’s a problem and who knows if Apple will fix it or not.

But there are some other issues too.

A big issue for me is that I’m perpetually in fear of dropping the thing and it feels as though it wouldn’t survive a 2’ drop to the floor. When you have a device that gets warm enough to make your hands sweat, I’m just not sure I want such a smooth finish on all sides.

The iPad is also damn uncomfortable to hold for an extended period of time. For some reason, I am inclined to hold it in portrait mode like a traditional book. My wife does the same thing. But you simply can’t do that for very long unless you have wrists of steel. The iPad is heavy for its size and it doesn’t let you forget that.

Steve Jobs recently blasted 7” tablets as useless, but I’m not convinced. The smaller size and lower weight may just be the perfect combination.

I’m also surprised at how lame many of the iPad apps are. Most of the apps that are labelled as “optimized for iPad” are simply badly scaled, not redesigned. The “2X” button that scales apps automatically also makes most things pretty ugly. The Facebook app looks atrocious — so much so that I went back to the web interface. Given how many iPads have sold and the higher price iPad apps command, I find it odd that developers aren’t doing better at this.

But I think my biggest overall gripe is the dependency on the iTunes desktop app. For some reason, I don’t mind it so much on the iPhone. But on the iPad, iTunes is rapidly becoming the overbearing parental figure that follows you around and has to get in the way of everything you want to do “for your own good”. The iPad feels like a real computing device, not a phone (even though that line is completely blurred), and the dependency on iTunes and a connection to a desktop/laptop is incredibly frustrating.

At times, the iPad feels like a true cloud device, but iTunes kills that baby-sized dream before it can crawl. You switch it on for the first time and have to connect to iTunes on your desktop. You take new pictures, you have to connect to iTunes on your desktop. You want new music, connect to iTunes on your desktop (unless you want to buy all your CD’s again). You want to back everything up, grab your cable… And iTunes itself just feels clunkier each time I use it. When I’m searching for apps, I don’t want to see music or video results. And vice versa. The iTunes app feels like a bunch of pieces that are poorly slopped together, and given Apple’s dedication to the user experience, I am quite sure they could do better.

The App Store app on the phone isn’t much better. It drives me nuts that when I choose something for download, I am automatically kicked out of the app store and returned to the iPad/iPhone’s home page. I was busy buying things — why did you kick me out?

There are lots of reasons why Apple are fighting the cloud, but I suspect the main one is their perception of control. If you don’t think they are fighting it, just take a look and see what the default Apple advice is for synchronizing your Google Contacts. Guess what? They recommend you sync via iTunes. That way, any time you update your contacts, you have to run home and sync two devices — your desktop iTunes machine and then your iPad. But if you head on over to Google, you’ll find that you can actually sync Google Contacts and Google Calendars without so much as looking at a USB cable. For calendars, you can use CalendarDAV or MS Exchange, and Contacts will sync quite happily with the MS Exchange option too. Now I can update or add a contact on my Android phone and the iPad address book app will be updated within minutes. No iTunes required. Same goes for my calendar.

I love the way Apple can sometimes step back and re-imagine how things should be. When they are right, they are brilliant. But iTunes is a sickly dog that needs to be put down. Or at least genetically mutated into some kind of never-before-seen leash-free über-canine that can rule the world. If they don’t make that leap, sooner or later they will get left behind.

To cut right to it, my first impressions are pretty favorable but with some big caveats.

I chose the Sony box over the Logitech because with two young kids in the house, the idea of a full and dainty looking keyboard as the remote just struck me as a bad idea. I really could care less about the Blu-Ray player part (sorry Sony) but I’m not in the market for a new TV.

So let’s begin at the beginning…

Getting Started
Setup was easy. The hardest part was navigating the insane cablenest that lives behind my TV, but other than that it was straightforward. One of the things I really like about Google TV is that it is designed to complement the cable box you already have, not replace it. This is a critical differentiator between Google TV and Apple TV in my opinion, and it allows some interesting functionality. More on that in a moment.

Connect the HDMI out from your cable box to the input on the Sony box. Connect the HDMI out from the Sony box to your TV. Plug in the IR blaster (so the Google TV box can control the cable box) and connect the power. Then you’re off and away. I went through the usual collection of steps to get things set up — optimize the display size, set up the wi-fi connection etc. Then the box told me there was a software update and began automatically downloading it. Several minutes and a reboot later, I was back at the setup screen.

Unfortunately, the update wiped everything I had set up so far, so I had to repeat all the steps I’d already completed. Doh.

There were a few more steps, such as adding my zip code and cable provider, at which point Google TV downloaded the list of available channels automatically.

And then it was batteries in the remote and up, up and away.

The Remote
When I first saw the remote for the Sony, like many other folks I thought it was nutty. It looked cumbersome, clunky and poorly conceived. In reality, it’s really not bad. The device is the same width as a playstation controller, so it fits in the hand quite well. The left hand side has an up/down/left/right/select control that works well for navigating menus etc. The top right has a touchpad kind of thing surrounded by some control keys (activate the Google TV box, picture in picture, menu and go back). Below all that is a qwerty keyboard that’s not at all bad to type with. Overall it’s pretty solid and I think it will survive some toddler chewing, dropping and general abuse. Given it’s relatively small size, it is much better suited to my living room than a full keyboard like the one that comes with the Logitech Revue.

Using The Box
Getting in to using the box itself, it’s quite interesting. The magic of the passthrough HDMI becomes obvious pretty quickly. When you’re exploring menus etc, you can still see the live TV feed in the background (the menus are transparent). When you’re in an application like Twitter or the browser, it’s full screen by default. I have an HDTV, but it’s a few years old and nothing special. However, Text/graphics rendering is good and very readable on every web site/app I’ve tried.

There’s also a picture-in-picture mode, so you can see live TV in a small window while you’re browsing the web etc.

The search is nifty too. Any time you search for something, the box automatically searches the live TV guide and the internet for matching items. Very slick. So for example, searching for “House” brings up a cable show called “House Training” that airs on Saturday, “House” the TV series and “Full House” the tv series, as well as a “search the web” option that would broaden the search. So yes, it really is integrated and it searches the channel guide for your collection of cable channels, as well as everywhere else.

Choosing “House” the series takes you to Hulu-like screen where you can see episodes that are downloadable, purchasable or upcoming on regular TV. Picking the TV option pops up a dialog box to set a DVR recording or switch immediately to the right channel.

It’s hard to convey how well done this is. It is very, very smooth. With some caveats (see below).

Design-wise, I’m ambivalent about the Sony box. It’s like a clunky game console with odd aesthetics, neither one thing (cool and small like Apple TV) or another (odd but interesting like the Boxee box). It’s not a standard form factor and it’s shiny white, so it sticks out like an oddly sized sore thumb. I’m sure part of the form factor is due to the blu-ray drive, but as I said at the beginning, that wasn’t something I was looking for.

The Applications
The box comes with some default apps, but frankly they are a mixed bag. I’m holding my criticisms until the end, but some of the apps are dogs. Yes, I’m looking at you, Netflix. The box comes with a Netflix app, but you can only watch items you’ve already added to your “Watch Instantly” queue. Thanks to the built in Chrome browser, I can do that from the TV too, but it’s a lame workaround for a crummy app. I’m a big fan of Netflix, but they blew it with this one.

The CNBC Real-time app is a great indicator of where this is headed. You get a very nice live video feed with additional data and the ability to play archived clips all within a single app. It looks polished and actually seems useful.

The gallery app is identical to the Android gallery since Android 2.1. Not a surprise since that’s what the Google TV box is running. It works and works well.

Pandora also works well as far as I can see — it was easy to set up and just does its thing.

The other app I’ve played with extensively is the Chrome browser. Again, it’s well done, seems stable and just plain works. It also supports Flash out of the box, so you really can browse the web without any big holes in the experience. HD YouTube clips look great — I can finally watch Annoying Orange on the big screen. All of the sites I’ve visited so far have looked good. There are a couple of minor caveats, but see below for the details there.

There’s also a Twitter client. It’s nothing special, but it works just fine.

And Now For The Bad Stuff

You quickly find some missing pieces and rough edges, but most of them will be easy fixes that I expect to see roll out quickly.

Here are some of the biggies…

The price. This is an expensive box and the current selection of apps don’t justify the price. Obviously I’m paying an early-adopter premium, but the price needs to be well under $200 for this to make sense for most people. The price and the functionality will doubtless change quickly.

Some of the shinier features that were part of the hype are still missing. You can’t install apps, there’s no marketplace access (coming in 2011) and the connectivity to Android phones isn’t available yet. This should all be resolved soon, but I’m ready now!

The setup had a few bumps — it was pretty annoying to have gone so far through setup only to have to repeat everything from scratch after the update. I understand why, but it was a poor start.

The whole keypad/remote is a near miss. They’ve obviously worked hard to combine elements of a desktop keyboard with a typical Android phone virtual keyboard, but there are some real holes.

For example, there’s no kind of predictive text if you’re typing and that gets very old very quickly. Not sure why this was omitted when it’s part of Android and would really help.

Selecting text is messy. You can’t really do it with the mouse/touchpad control as there’s no way to select and drag (you are either selecting or dragging and can’t do both). You can hold down the shift key and use the left hand control to select text, and Ctrl-C will copy whatever is highlighted. However, this would all be much easier with a trackball similar to the one seen on the Nexus One and the select/copy/paste mechanism that is already part of Android. Again, this seems like an obvious omission that would help smooth the experience if it had been left in.

My other keypad gripe is that the Shift key doesn’t latch. What I mean by that is that you have to hold the shift key while you press the letter you want capitalized. This is the norm for a desktop/laptop, but on almost any mobile device ever, you press shift, let go, and the shift key will stay selected until you press the letter you want. It really would be far easier if they’d gone down this path. As it is, holding shift and pressing a key just reminds you how small the keyboard is, and it feels fiddly.

My last complaints in this area are more of a text entry issue than a keypad issue. When you enter a password on most Android devices (and others too), you see the character you typed for a second before it becomes an asterisk. That is _really_ helpful in making sure you typed in the right password. And finally, the software does not automatically capitalize the first character you type, which is also an unnecessary pain.

There are also some inconsistencies and shortcomings in the UI and its functionality. For example, if you happen to use a DISH networks DVR, you can integrate everything right down to the Google TV box knowing what shows you have recorded and including them when you search. It sounds slick. But if you have a DVR that’s not a DISH device, you get nothing. The picture in picture button is also funky. Seems you can only go from live TV to picture in picture — if you are in a Google TV app the button does nothing. I would really like to be browsing the web and then pull up live TV in a window, but right now you can’t do that. You have to switch to live TV, select picture in picture, then fire up the browser. It’s just clunky and rather ruins an otherwise brilliant feature.

As I mentioned, the apps are a very mixed bag. Netflix is by far the worst and I hope they fix it soon. One of the bright spots is the Chrome browser, but there’s no menu bar. This gives the impression that there’s no way to actually type in a URL — you are stuck with searching and clicking the results. After more fiddling around, it turned out that pressing the search button on the remote brings up the URL box, so you can actually just type in any address you choose. However, it’s pretty hidden.

In Conclusion
I think Google TV compares well with other set top box offerings, especially for a v1.0 product. You can clearly see the potential in the direction they are taking and I buy that it is the way of the future. There are some annoying rough edges, but all in all it is quite smooth and parts of it are simply remarkable.

However, Google TV cannot reach its full potential until they let the developers do their thing. This box needs apps, experimentation and an army of people with crazy ideas messing around with it. The sooner Google makes that possible, the better their chances of success will be.

While I enjoyed his direct (and very accurate) description of RTP and its shortcomings, the more thought provoking article was a discussion on Techcrunch about entrepreneurial exits. He digs in to whether entrepreneurs should be chasing billion dollar exits or cash out “small” with a paltry $50MM exit or so.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the world of Venture Capital, the quick summary is that a small exit doesn’t really work for traditional VC investors. They have to push for a big exit to offset losses from the investments that fail.

One part of the article particularly caught my attention:

“If you’re a founder and own 50% of your startup, a $30 million acquisition can be life-changing. With a $15 million payout, you go from poverty to riches. You’re set for life: you can afford to send the kids to the best schools, buy a multi-million dollar house on the hills, live a great lifestyle, and personally fund your next startup (or you can become a “super angel”). The difference to you between $15 million and $150 million (if you go for the billion-dollar exit) is small—the extra millions really won’t change your world that much more.”

I imagine that quite a few people find that absurd. How can $150MM not be dramatically more life changing than $15MM?

The answer stems from the many levels of what is most easily called F**K You Money (FYM).

FYM is shorthand for a lot of things. It implies being able to buy what you want, when you want, living the lifestyle you want and doing as you please. It’s a goal of many entrepreneurs, at least in terms of the perceived freedom it brings. But what qualifies as FYM is very dependent on circumstances, and that is definitely something worth thinking about.

My first brush with FYM was when I was 17 or so and was headhunted to work at Radioshack. Okay, headhunted is a little strong. I had a buddy who worked there who was leaving. His boss had met me a couple of times, asked for an intro and offered me the job on the spot. For a kid in High School, Radioshack was the big time. They paid more than any other nerd-oriented retail outlet for part time staff. As I recall I was making $4 or $5 an hour. Within a few months I had banked a few thousand dollars. I bought a bunch of music gear (including something similar to one of these) and had enough money left over to fund my first year beer tab at University. I had FYM and it was good.

Now of course, when you are 17, your expenses are pretty low (thanks Mum & Dad) and so are your expectations for what constitutes living the proverbial high life. But to this day, I’m not sure I’ve ever felt I had as much disposable income as I seemed to have back then.

My second brush with FYM happened when a company I worked for was sold. I was a senior executive, owned a tiny bit of the company and got a payout. It certainly wasn’t a million dollar payout (not even close), but for a young-ish single guy, it was a good chunk of change. It was also a couple of hundred times more money than my previous FYM experience. I had no debt, a shiny new car and was paying almost no rent. I could eat out any time I liked and there was always a large amount of my paycheck left over at the end of the month. I went to a four star hotel in Hawaii for a couple of weeks just because I could. Life was good.

Now that I have kids, debt and a generally more complicated life (not a complaint – I wouldn’t give up being a husband to my awesome wife or a Dad to my kids for any amount of money), the threshold for FYM is a whole lot higher. I’m guessing it would need to be 20-30 times higher than my previous FYM experience to be sustainable.

And that’s exactly what Vivek was getting at.

If you made $15MM from the sale of your company, you could buy a nice house for cash, get a pretty nice car, pay off all your debts and live comfortably off the interest from fairly low-risk investments.

Compared to life before $15MM, this will be a radically different experience. If your lifestyle is based on a more or less normal salary and more or less normal level of expenses, a whole new world will open up. Sounds like FYM to me.

But what if you went from normal to $150MM? Well, expenses always manage to somehow stay in line with available income. So you’d probably buy an even bigger house, maybe get a splendid but silly car or two and so on. But your life would not be materially different from the $15MM scenario.

Now consider a third case. Imagine you’re already in the $15MM lifestyle bracket. Does a $15MM exit make a material difference in your life? Probably not. If your expenses have expanded to fill the $15MM lifestyle, you’ll need a 10x bump to see a significant difference.

At the end of the day, I suppose it is really very similar to company revenue versus size. If you are a startup with revenues of $2-3MM, a $15MM deal is huge. If you’re a $150MM company, $15MM is nice, but not world changing. If you’re a $1B company, $15MM is almost irrelevant. It’s all about moving that corporate needle.

So when you’re daydreaming of your fantastic entrepreneurial exit and joining the cult of FYM, remember that just enough is often more than enough. And enjoy it when you get there…

Case in point, this past week saw a slew of reports and commentary on Android accounting for one quarter of all mobile web traffic (see this search for some of the results). This follows some rather silly back and forth between Apple and Google on the actual number of handset activations (see this Computerworld article for a good example). Jobs felt it necessary to belittle Android’s numbers, Google responded and the whole thing became something of a lesson int the Streisand Effect. I would imagine Mr. Jobs wasn’t looking to provide additional publicity on Android’s growth.

But for once, I have a little bit of sympathy for Apple. Following the aforementioned web traffic reports, there have been a variety of headlines about Android trouncing Apple’s numbers… Android web share is up. Apple web share is down… Android wins… Apple loses… Road to death… Lost their edge… Blah blah blah.

I, for one, am a little tired of sensationalistic journalism based on flimsy (or non-existent) facts.

So is Apple really on the down and out? No. The numbers we are talking about are the share of web browsing done from a mobile device i.e. a single, static pie. Anyone that made it through 8th grade maths probably remembers that all the pieces of the pie have to add up to 100%. If Android is growing (which it clearly is), its percentage of the whole pie will grow, unless everyone else grows at exactly the same rate. And if everything has to add up to 100%, that means some other folks will see a corresponding decrease in their overall traffic share.

Duh.

So what this really says is that the number of Android devices is increasing faster than the number of iPhones. And that gets right back to sloppy journalism, failing to compare apples to oranges (no pun intended).

To get an idea of how misleading the comparison can be, look at desktop/laptop web browsing. Nine out of ten machines browsing the web are PC’s, not Macs. Aww. Poor Mac. Poor Apple. Will they live?

But wait, let’s look at sales volume by manufacturer rather than by OS… #1 is Dell, #2 is HP and #3? Why, it’s poor little Apple.

Apple’s iPhone product line is essentially a single device from a single manufacturer. Android is an OS with devices from many manufacturers. If Android wasn’t getting to market on many more devices, Google would be doing something wrong.

Furthermore, at this point in time, I don’t think there is a single Android handset manufacturer shipping more units than Apple.

And just in case you were still feeling sorry for Apple, there’s always this little nugget…

In Q2, 2010, Apple had about 3% of the worldwide market for mobile phones. They also had 48% of the profit. No, that’s not a typo. A company with just 3% of the market (by volume of devices sold) captured nearly half the worldwide profit. They made more than twice the profit made by Nokia, and Nokia has 38% of the market. See the full report here.

So Nokia manufactures and sells 12 phones for every iPhone Apple sells. They support 12 customers for every Apple customer. On a day to day basis they do twelve times as much work, and they do it for less than half the money Apple makes.

So don’t believe the bullshit. Apple are doing fine, thank you very much. And so is Android. There’s a lot of fight left in both camps, and deciding the “winner” isn’t just about a simplistic pie chart based on traffic, which is relatively meaningless at the best of times. Certainly not worth going to war over…

Like I said at the start of my Episode I post, as an entrepreneur, you are naturally very optimistic. One of the interesting results of this is that you spend 99.9999% of your efforts focused on everything related to when things go right. You’ll sweat scaling, customer development, feature sets, bug testing, social media, adequate coffee and pizza… The list is endless.

But the one thing you probably won’t sweat over is optimizing processes for when things go wrong.

And yes, here lies an oft-trod path to madness. Welcome to Episode II of Clusterfrak to the Darkside…

Here’s an example that happens to be a huge pet peeve of mine. I want to cancel your service. How hard are you going to make it for me to do so?

I have seen smart people that I respect actively defend the “hide it and they won’t come” version of service cancellation. You know exactly what I mean. You can upgrade, sidegrade, recommend or otherwise engage with the fine minutiae of any aspect of a product except one.

“To cancel your account, please call…”

This is bullshit.

It is built on the premise that if you make it hard to cancel, a customer won’t cancel. That’s the underlying assumption. If you can make them call, you can talk them out of it and avoid losing a customer.

NEWSFLASH: if a customer wants to cancel, it’s because the DON’T WANT YOUR PRODUCT. It may be for a dumb reason. It may be for a good reason. It doesn’t matter. If they want to cancel and you get in their way, you’ll make them angrier than they were already.

“But what if they don’t understand and we actually do what they want, they’re just using it wrong?” I hear you cry.

Well, I never said you shouldn’t find out why someone wants to cancel. I just saying don’t put roadblocks between you and them if they want to cancel.

Put yourself in your customer’s shoes. Think of the last product you paid money for that pissed you off. Did you cancel the service and/or get your money back? I bet yes. Did you have to fight to cancel it? If yes, did that make you happier about the company you were dealing with? I’m guessing no.

Exhibit A: Shortly after I moved to the US, I recall trying to buy my first car and stopping in at a Mitsubishi dealership. The sales guy asked if I wanted to talk numbers and I said I wasn’t ready to buy but would like to know what the numbers would look like. I was then ushered in to a room in the back while they did their thing. He brought the numbers, and his manager, and asked if I was ready to buy. I said no. Lots of paper shuffling, big markers circling all the key points of the ever-so-amazing deal I was getting and increasing rhetoric about wasting his time. And then, (and I’m not kidding) two other guys turned up and stood in front of the door blocking my exit while the manager proceeded to rant about what a great deal he was giving me. Needless to say, I left. I have never visited a Mitsubishi dealership since.

Exhibit B: I signed up for a VisualLink “Learn Spanish” CD-ROM a number of years ago (please note: the company may have changed its policies since then). It was a standard subscription deal with some kind of intro period. The discs were arriving way faster than I was able to get through them, so I tried to cancel. The only option was to call, and when I called the wait times were enormous and then the operative put me on hold. It took multiple calls before everything was taken care of. In this case I actually liked the product, it just wasn’t right for me at that point in time. But I’ll never spend money with them again.

Exhibit C: I recently canceled my AT&T service. Even though I had already ported my number, it still took three calls. On the first call, the guy refused to let me cancel. He pointed out that we were in a “good” coverage area, based on AT&T’s map. He suggested I ditch the iPhone on the account for a different phone with better reception (yes, I swear he did). He refused to put a supervisor on the phone. I hung up. The second call, we got repeatedly cut off due to AT&T’s shitty service. Oh, the irony. Then the battery in the phone died, so I had to call again. On the third call, I explained that I did not want to talk to a “Retention Specialist” (that’s what they actually call their cancellation department — a big clue, no less) and that nothing would prevent me from canceling the account. The CS person I spoke with was one of the few humans at AT&T. She politely informed me that the hold times were currently very long for the cancelation department and proceeded to take care of the cancelation. She was professional and apologetic, and I was done in about 5 minutes. While that didn’t go terribly far in offsetting the general abuse I experienced at the hands of AT&T, it’s definitely the best ending of the three examples I’ve talked about here.

So when you launch your Next Big Thing, spare a moment’s thought for the unhappy customer. If they’re not happy, make it easy to cancel. Ask for feedback when they do. Follow up with them gently, and respect when they ask to be left alone.

Don’t fall in to the classic sales trap of a NO being a YES waiting to happen. It’s BS. And it’s a swift road to the darkside…

I’ll perhaps talk about ways to optimize customer service in another post…

Hmm. Should perhaps have started on Episode IV, because we all know how Episode I turned out… Moving swiftly along. Welcome to what may be a series of posts. Only time will tell.

I had several product experiences in the past week that coalesced into the theme of this post.

As an entrepreneur, you are naturally very optimistic. If you weren’t, you’d pack up and go home, because as we all know, more than half of all new businesses fail within five years.

But to even have a chance at success, your shiny new business needs to be built on an honest promise… something better, cooler, faster, cheaper… Take your pick, but it has to genuinely do something and do it well.

Otherwise, you’re on the path of ClusterFrak to the darkside [insert dramatic music]…

It can start innocently enough, with what seems to be a good idea. Let me start with Exhibit A — a wire closet shelf remarkably similar to this one. It’s a shelf. For a closet. Passes the sniff test as your basic good idea. It’s affordable, shelf shaped and, according to the package, it doesn’t need many tools to install.

But wait until you get to the final stages of installing the darn thing. It has 3 brackets that go from the front of the shelf to the wall. They clip on at the front and attach to the wall using a funky little nail and plastic clip combo device. Except that the hole in the bracket is larger than the nail head, so the brackets won’t stay in place.

Doh.

So a few sloppy/easy decisions in the design process led to a product that is basically unusable without some customer intervention (in the form of washers and drywall-friendly screws). Given the price of the shelf, I would guess most customers suck it up rather than return it, but it’s a shittily executed product.

Exhibit B – a book I’ve been trying to read on the history of Samsung and Sony. Again, it’s a nice idea: Korean electronics upstart slays mighty Japanese empire. Should be a good read, and before I got in to it, I was expecting a good discussion of how Sony was the cause of their own demise by (a) being utterly unresponsive to market changes and (b) insisting on creating proprietary systems rather than participating in open standards (which is really just another face of point (a) in the big scheme of things). And how conversely, Samsung was pretty nimble, watched consumer trends (like Plasma TV) and focused on customer value.

I think it’s pretty clear that Sony lost ground starting with Betamax. Why did VHS win? Because it was cheap and easy to license. Did Sony learn their lesson? No. They followed it with Minidisc, Memory Stick and many other proprietary products. They charged premium prices for reasonable quality products (mostly) that locked you in to the Sony way of doing things. And unlike Apple, it wasn’t a seamless experience and it wasn’t usually on the cutting edge of design or functionality.

In contrast, Samsung kept it simple. They focused on products that the market wanted at prices people wanted to pay. I still remember the first time I bought a Samsung TV instead of a Sony Trinitron. I got a bigger TV for less money and the picture was almost as good. I had a brief pang of regret for abandoning my lovely 21” trinitron TV, but instantly felt good about the 26” Samsung that replaced it for about half the price.

But not twenty pages in to the book, the author utterly blows it. His conclusion: Sony lost because management didn’t execute on strategy. What?! So who sets the strategy? Do they have some kind of Burning Bush spitting out Stone Tablets that Management blindly followed for 30 years? It’s a cheap get out that destroys what should have been a good piece of analysis. It could have been doubly relevant given that Sony appears to be turning a corner both in profitability and its adoption of more open standards.

So again, sloppy/easy decisions led to a product that is useless. And unlike the shelf, there’s no easy fix for the book.

So Rule One in avoiding the ClusterFrak to the Dark Side is:

        Don’t be lazy. Don’t take shortcuts. Keep your product honest and do the work you need to do to get it built*.

* No, that doesn’t invalidate minimum viable product and agile development, just laziness and poor judgement.

p.s. Zero points for guessing the source of the quote.

I’ve been itching to make the switch for a while, but my better half uses an iPhone and the jailbreaking thing has always seemed rather convoluted.

First things first, for those that don’t know…

Jailbreaking is the process of eliminating Apple’s almighty control over your iPhone. Once jailbroken, you can make all kinds of changes that Apple won’t allow and install all kinds of applications Apple won’t approve.

Carrier Unlock is the process of eliminating AT&T’s unholy grip on your iPhone. Once unlocked, it will run on any GSM-based network. In the US, that means T-Mobile. If you ever travel abroad, it means more or less any carrier in the world except parts of China.

Simply put, you cannot do a Carrier Unlock unless the iPhone has been jailbroken.

Fair enough. Oh, and I’m going to say upfront:

a) Back up your iPhone before you try this
b) Be afraid as things can go wrong
c) Be patient for the same reason
d) If you’re not up for google-whacking to get answers, don’t try this at home

and last but not least:

no, I can’t help you if you get stuck!

Anyway, on with the fun. The model I’m working with is a late model iPhone 3GS. The phrase “late model” is key. When you look at the Serial Number (listed under Settings -> General -> About) you’ll see it starts with 5 digits followed by a letter. The last two digits before the letter are the week of manufacture. If it is a number bigger than about 40 (opinion varies slightly) it is a late model device. The bad news is that jailbreaking a late model device can be messy as Apple changed the device’s firmware in an attempt to thwart the hackers.

My first successful jailbreak was using blackra1n (ooh, sounds very Hackers, doesn’t it). This is a simple enough app — you download it to your Mac/PC, plug in your iPhone and run the app. The phone reboots to a rather un-Appley boot screen and seconds later you’re jailbroken.

There is however, a caveat. If you have a late model device, you end up with what is called a “tethered jailbreak”. This is cunning hacker-eze for “not the dream you were looking for”. If you ever have to reboot your iPhone, it has to be connected to a computer with Blackra!n in order to boot. If your battery dies, or the phone crashes, and you don’t have a laptop/desktop handy, you’re stuck without a phone.

However, Blackra1n does install Cydia, which is rather handy. Imagine Steve Jobs has a stoner/hacker/anti-the-man brother (or sister) that creates their own version of the iTunes app store, and you have a good idea of what Cydia is. It contains all kinds of useful goodies that can be installed, from settings to carrier unlocks to applications Apple won’t approve.

So after a tethered boot, I fired up Cydia and installed Ultrasn0w, which is a carrier unlock from the infamous DEV-TEAM (the folks behind much of the iPhone hackery that goes on).

Once you’ve done that, you’re free as a bird. Grab a paper clip and stick it in the tiny hole next to the headphone jack to pop out your old SIM card (a tiny card with a chip about half the size of a stamp that tells the network what your number is) and drop in the new one. You’re now free from AT&T!

Well, almost.

You need to set up some network settings for data access, switch on data roaming and then set up your MMS settings if you want to send photos with texts. T-Mobile are pretty helpful over the phone, but the MMS stuff is a bit tricky. More on that in a minute.

So everything more or less worked, but the jailbreak was tethered. And sure enough a couple of times the phone ran out of battery and had to be re-connected to my laptop.

So ever the adventurer with a fondness for technological screwups, I decided to try something new. I restored the iPhone 3GS to its original state and then updated to the shiny new OS 4.0.1 from Apple.

Since I had backed everything up first (you did do that, right?), restoring all of my apps and photos was easy. Just hit the Sync button in iTunes and leave the phone alone for a while.

Minor bump in the road: when you do a full restore, the phone needs to be activated. This REQUIRES an AT&T SIM card and AT&T service. Fortunately I haven’t shut mine off yet, so a quick SIM swap and a reboot and all was well.

Probably best to switch on wi-fi and connect to a network at this point.

The next step relies on a rather nasty security bug discovered in Adobe’s PDF file format. I won’t bore you with the details, but by simply visiting a website you can Jailbreak your iPhone running iOS 4. Again, the website is http://www.jailbreakme.com.

Just fire up Safari on your iPhone and go to the Jailbreakme.com site. Slide the button and it will start the process. It was all very easy and only took a few minutes to complete.

Better still, it is an untethered jailbreak. No more rushing for the laptop after a reboot.

The jailbreak installed Cydia, so once it had completed, I simply downloaded the Ultrasn0w package again and swapped SIM cards. Happily unlocked and running on T-Mobile.

But you’re not done yet. Two things left to do.

1. Fix data access to T-Mobile’s network
2. Set up MMS

The data access stuff is easy. Go to Settings -> General -> Network and switch on Data Roaming. Then select Cellular Data Network and next to where it says APN type in epc.tmobile.com. That’s all you need to do.

Bear in mind that you will not be able to get 3G speeds on T-Mobile. They use a different frequency to AT&T so it simply won’t work.

Now MMS is a bit tricky and I had to try a bunch of things to make it work. I’m not sure if all of these steps are necessary or not… I was able to pretty quickly get the iPhone to send MMS messages, but every time it tried to receive a message, it produced an error stating that the media content wasn’t included and implying that the incoming file was too big.

The combination that seemed to work for me was as follows.

Go here:

http://modmyi.com/forums/t-mobile/656651-t-mobile-usa-carrier-bundles-bluetooth-internet-mms-tethering-2g-3g-3gs-4-a.html

Scroll down until you see the following link:

DOWNLOAD T-Mobile US iOS4 1.1.1 IPCC

Click the link, download the zip file and unzip it. In the list of unzipped files, you’ll see a README.txt file. Read this carefully. I installed the ipcc file for T-Mobile Prepaid.

After doing everything the README says and rebooting, I could send MMS without a problem, but receiving was still broken.

The last step is to go here:

http://modmyi.com/forums/general/719997-media-content-not-included-help.html#post5353764

and read post #3.

Fire up Cydia on your iPhone, select Manage -> Sources -> Edit -> Add and type in:

htttp://beta.leimobile.com/repo

Then hit Done and select the LEIMobile Repo from the list. Scroll down until you see T-Mobile 4.0 MMS Fix, select it and install it.

One more reboot and you are done.

It’s not for the faint-hearted, but freedom from AT&T is a beautiful thing…

P.s. Please note that the security hole that Jailbreakme.com uses is a doozy. I cannot imagine it will be very long before Apple updates iOS to block it as it is a very real security risk. But I’m equally sure that the crafty hackers will figure out a way to break whatever they come up with.