dotcom madness

The dotcom boom is now getting on for ten years ago. Here’s a list of some of the crazier acquisitions and cash burning that took place:

Boo.com set itself up as an online clothing retail site and burned its way through $135 million in 18 months before being liquidated.

Geocities.com purchased by Yahoo in January 1999 for $3.57 billion in stock. In 2009 Yahoo shut the service down in almost every country after failing to make anything useful or profitable out of it.

lastminute.com floated on the LSE in March 2000 with shares priced at 380p. The shares rose initially but within two weeks dropped to 270p. A year later they were trading at under 80p. Five years later the company still hadn’t made a profit and was sold to Sabre Holdings.

Lycos bought by a subsidiary of Telefonica (owns o2 in the UK!) for $12.5 billion in May 2000. In August 2004 they sold it on for $95m. That’s a loss of over $3 billion for each year they owned it.

It really was a crazy time - a lot of people got rich but a lot must have lost their shirts!

John Sculley interviewed by Cult of Mac

Cult of Mac has a fascinating and surprisingly open interview with John Sculley who was Apple CEO from 1983 to 1993. He was originally brought in because the board felt that Jobs was too young to run the company. It's a very long interview so here's a few highlights:

The one that Steve admired was Sony. We used to go visit Akio Morita and he had really the same kind of high-end standards that Steve did and respect for beautiful products. I remember Akio Morita gave Steve and me each one of the first  Sony Walkmans. 

Slightly amusing in the modern-day context of the iPod. Now an example of Steve Jobs perfectionism:

The Apple logo was multicolor because the Apple II was the first color computer. No one else could do color, so that’s why they put the color blocks into the logo. If you wanted to print the logo in a magazine ad or on a package you could print it with four colors but Steve being Steve insisted on six colors. So whenever the Apple logo was printed, it was always printed in six colors. It added another 30 to 40 percent to the cost of everything, but that’s what Steve wanted. That’s what we always did. He was a perfectionist even from the early days.

And a snippet about the relationship between Apple and ARM:

The Newton actually saved Apple from going bankrupt. Most people don’t realize in order to build Newton, we had to build a new generation microprocessor. We joined together with  Olivetti and a man named  Herman Hauser, who had started Acorn computer over in the U.K. out of Cambridge university... ...when Apple got into desperate financial situation, it sold its interest in ARM for $800 million. 

Sculley on his experiences at Pepsi:

One of the things that fascinated him: I described to him that there’s not much difference between a Pepsi and a Coke, but we were outsold 9 to 1. Our job was to convince people that Pepsi was a big enough decision that they ought to pay attention to it, and eventually switch. 

The rest of the article is here

Amusing sports headlines

It seems the world of sport and certain forenames and surnames throws up some interesting combinations:

Stoner on pole for Australian GP - crikey that's some achievement. I would not like to be riding a bike that quick while laughing and trying to find something to eat.

Tired Gay succumbs to Dix in 200 meters - surely Reuters were in on the joke, how could they not be?

Please post any more you have in the comments!

Digg fail

Digg released their iPhone app in March 2010. I installed it and started using it soon after, and really liked it. It was perfect for killing time – you know what it’s like when you’re on public transport or waiting for an appointment, and a read of a quick story is just what you need. Digg is ideal because you get a nice selection of popular stories that the users submit.

A couple of months ago the app flatlined. It crashed on startup. After a few weeks of disappointment I reported the issue to Digg. They said they were aware of the issue and pointed me to a page on their site. Apparently an API update that Digg put out broke their own iPhone app. How on earth could they get into a situation like that?

It’s now mid-October and the iPhone app is still broken. You can’t try the old uninstall/install trick because it’s been removed from the App Store. A third party offers a premium Digg client but he has had to place disclaimers on the description page for the app pointing out that the Digg API changes are causing issues in his app too.

Since it’s a Web 2.0 organisation I’ll use Web 2.0 terminology: digg = epic fail!!!

Top 5 Wired articles

1) The Web is dead. Long live the internet - a really interesting analysis of our changing habits in relation to Internet usage. A key point being made is that the web - thought to be universal - is being replaced in some cases by native apps running on smartphones and tablets. The internet is still the delivery mechanism for the data that drives these apps of course, but the front ends are returning to native client instead of web. I found this fascinating as it exactly mirrors how my usage of the internet has changed since owning an iPhone. In some cases (i.e. eBay) I find the smartphone app preferable to the full blown web site.

2) Push! Kiss your browser goodbye! - Ties in nicely with (1). This article from March 1997 also tries to argue that the web is dead, but this time the successor was to be push technology. Anyone who remembers the hype around this, and names like PointCast will know that this was a short-lived attempt to make the web easier to use, and quicker to mine information from. The question is, although the article turned out to be completely wrong, is it somehow proved a little more correct now that we have smartphone and tablet native apps for accessing the web?

3) Morass of Molasses Mucks Up Boston - a fascinating account of a disaster that took place in 1919 in a neighborhood of Boston. At first you might well chuckle at the idea of a torrent of thick syrup running through the streets (I did) but eventually it becomes clear that this was a deadly event - around twelve people died.

4) ‘Comets’ Debut Trans-Atlantic Jet Age and Boeing 707 Makes First Flight - two separate articles that recount the very beginning of jet-powered passenger flights, telling the story of the early success of the British DeHavilland Comet which later lost ground to the Boeing competitor due to smaller capacity and a string of metal-fatigue related crashes.

5) Love Canal Calamity Surfaces - another disaster account, although you can probably get a chuckle out of the place name. This has to be one of the most shocking cases of gross negligence ever comitted: a local authority buys a site containing massive pollution from toxic chemicals and decides to build a school on top of it. To make matters worse, a residential area grew up around the school. The business that originally owned the land warned how serious the pollution situation was and sold the land for $1, but the new owners still continued to build on the land without any form of proper cleanup. How this was ever allowed to happen is a mystery to me when you look at the effects on the people who lived there - before the place was condemned and evacuated.

Linux on the desktop

PC World has reignited the debate about desktop Linux, arguing that it's dead. They are careful to point out that this doesn't mean Linux as a whole is dead - we have Android phones and servers to thank for that.

Over the years I've tried desktop Linux a few times. The first time was in 1996 and it was torturous. In 2003 I gave Fedora a go and that was much better but the lack of software options proved an issue at the time. In the last year I've installed Ubuntu on a dual-core laptop and tried to live with it. The laptop install was made necessary because it was given to me with Windows XP pre-installed. When I ran Windows Update it installed SP3 which broke wifi networking. After digging around it turns out updated drivers are required for SP3 and the manufacturer (Broadcom) hasn't released any.

So Ubuntu 9 (later 10) was installed in an attempt to get a usable machine for surfing the web and some occasional gaming - without having to shell out for a Windows license. First impressions were excellent. The UI could be tweaked to suit my preferences - I don't like the dual bars across the top and bottom of the screen you often get with Gnome - and the Package Manager worked like an app store - only free! It really is impressive how close the OS comes to being a viable modern desktop OS. Only one issue ruined the experience but it proved to be a show stopper. When resuming from sleep, the display was corrupted forcing a reboot. In my attempts to fix this I had to try and use Grub 2 to set kernel parameters. After hours of wasted time trying to understand how Grub 2 worked I gave up, this insane boot manager ruins what was becoming a usable desktop OS.

Maybe it's best to stick with Windows and OS X for the time being. Disappointing as Linux looks on the verge of a breakthrough.

Eric Schmidt talks about American political system

Ars Technica is reporting that Google CEO Eric Schmidt has made some interesting comments about the American political system. It confirms what many of us have thought for some time - that democracy in Washington is something of an illusion, and large corporations have a very strong influence on the Government decision-making process.The hypocricy is of course that Google has it's own lobbying operation, clearly it feels compelled to be a player in the game that it wants no part of.

Microsoft are in a similar position at the moment - they are campaigning alongside the EFF for reform of the US patent system to make it easier to invalidate bad software patents. At the same time they are following their rivals down the path of building up a stockpile of patents, and sending out increasingly threatening messages towards Android handset manufacturers.

Looking past the hypocricy of their actions, I think it overall it's a good thing that these guys have enough of a conscience to highlight the issues of political corruption and a screwed up patent system. Although they are participating in the behaviour they criticise, realistically they have no alternative. A corporation has a responsibility to it's shareholders to maintain a profit and defend itself against competitors. Nothing less will be accepted. The behaviour is caused by the broken system they operate in, not the cause of it.

Meanwhile Apple has been a big loser in the patent world this week, very well summed up by Thom over at OSnews. How the hell can sliding album covers around be worth $600 million?

Software design matters: Apple capitalises on NextStep in a big way

It's well known that Apple have had an amazing resurgence over the last ten years. In 1997 before the return of Steve Jobs, the company was nearly dead. The Macintosh hardware strategy had caused them real problems, and MacOS desperately needed replacing. Apple knew this and tried to develop a replacement - the Copland project - but this took years and ended in failure, bogged down by the requirement of full backwards compatibility with the legacy MacOS.

When Steve Jobs arrived back at Apple, he brought with him a secret weapon - NextStep. Famously, this is the OS that Tim Berners Lee used to develop the World Wide Web. It's a Unix-like OS but with a microkernel rather than monolithic kernel of Linux and many other Unix variants. The upper layers of the OS are written using object oriented principles and design patterns. Applications are developed in Objective-C, with built-in support for message passing. Available to all applications are cleanly separated libraries to help out with common tasks. These libraries are known as kits. If this sounds familiar it's because it is exactly the architecture of Mac OS X today, which is essentially a reskinned version of NextStep. An example of a well known kit is WebKit which Safari is built on top of.

In recent years Apple has been massively successful at creating or reinventing certain device classes such as the tablet or smartphone. Their success is largely because they tailor the user interface very well to suit the hardware and usage profile of the device, made possible by an investment in software architecture. Use of OO principles and design patterns such as Model-View-Controller means applications can be quickly redeveloped for new devices while sharing the same underlying code. This removes the maintenance issues of duplicate code.

Compare this to Microsoft. Their OS platform was heavily optimised to run on the limited PC hardware of the 1990's. Although this was an achievement, it came at the cost of clean design. For example, optimising load times was often the primary reason for grouping code into the same DLL, rather than because of the functions they perform. They had a dependency nightmare.

When Microsoft introduced tablet computers a full eight years before Apple's iPad launched, they used an OS that was almost unchanged from desktop Windows. They were probably well aware that a small Start button program launcher and window controls are not ideal for small touchscreen devices, but the architecture of Windows made it very difficult to make changes in a maintanabe way.

This is an often-overlooked and very important reason why Apple has jumped so far ahead of Microsoft in the market for new devices.

Note: Microsoft have recently been working very hard on untangling the Windows codebase, and the changes are already in Vista and Windows 7. These changes are already delivering significant architectural improvements to the Windows Server product line.

Liberty City rice rocket

As one of countless examples of the amazing levels of detail crafted into Grand Theft Auto IV, today I boosted a really interesting car I hadn't seen before in nearly two years of playing. From the front it looked exactly like my late-model IS200, with the black-backed headlights. But the carbon fibre bonnet had a huge air scoop, and the car was a coupé rather than a saloon. Most interestingly, a dump valve could clearly be heard, and the car was very quick. Barrelling down the straights caused motion blur to kick in and the camera to automatically shift angles.

I picked the car up nearly destroyed after attacking it and damaging it heavily during a Ballad of Gay Tony drug mission. A lick of paint was definitely required, and was well worth the wait!