Essays

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I don't mean to disparage Yahoo. They had some good hackers, and the top management were real butt-kickers. For a big company, they were exceptional. But they were still only about a tenth as productive as a small startup. No big company can do much better than that. What's scary about Microsoft is that a company so big can develop software at all. They're like a mountain that can walk.

Don't be intimidated. You can do as much that Microsoft can't as they can do that you can't. And no one can stop you. You don't have to ask anyone's permission to develop Web-based applications. You don't have to do licensing deals, or get shelf space in retail stores, or grovel to have your application bundled with the OS. You can deliver software right to the browser, and no one can get between you and potential users without preventing them from browsing the Web.

You may not believe it, but I promise you, Microsoft is scared of you. The complacent middle managers may not be, but Bill is, because he was you once, back in 1975, the last time a new way of delivering software appeared.

Notes

[1] Realizing that much of the money is in the services, companies building lightweight clients have usually tried to combine the hardware with an online service. This approach has not worked well, partly because you need two different kinds of companies to build consumer electronics and to run an online service, and partly because users hate the idea. Giving away the razor and making money on the blades may work for Gillette, but a razor is much smaller commitment than a Web terminal. Cell phone handset makers are satisfied to sell hardware without trying to capture the service revenue as well. That should probably be the model for Internet clients too. If someone just sold a nice-looking little box with a Web browser that you could use to connect through any ISP, every technophobe in the country would buy one.

[2] Security always depends more on not screwing up than any design decision, but the nature of server-based software will make developers pay more attention to not screwing up. Compromising a server could cause such damage that ASPs (that want to stay in business) are likely to be careful about security.

[3] In 1995, when we started Viaweb, Java applets were supposed to be the technology everyone was going to use to develop server-based applications. Applets seemed to us an old-fashioned idea. Download programs to run on the client? Simpler just to go all the way and run the programs on the server. We wasted little time on applets, but countless other startups must have been lured into this tar pit. Few can have escaped alive, or Microsoft could not have gotten away with dropping Java in the most recent version of Explorer.

[4] This point is due to Trevor Blackwell, who adds "the cost of writing software goes up more than linearly with its size. Perhaps this is mainly due to fixing old bugs, and the cost can be more linear if all bugs are found quickly."

[5] The hardest kind of bug to find may be a variant of compound bug where one bug happens to compensate for another. When you fix one bug, the other becomes visible. But it will seem as if the fix is at fault, since that was the last thing you changed.

[6] Within Viaweb we once had a contest to describe the worst thing about our software. Two customer support people tied for first prize with entries I still shiver to recall. We fixed both problems immediately.

[7] Robert Morris wrote the ordering system, which shoppers used to place orders. Trevor Blackwell wrote the image generator and the manager, which merchants used to retrieve orders, view statistics, and configure domain names etc. I wrote the editor, which merchants used to build their sites. The ordering system and image generator were written in C and C++, the manager mostly in Perl, and the editor in Lisp.

[8] Price discrimination is so pervasive (how often have you heard a retailer claim that their buying power meant lower prices for you?) that I was surprised to find it was outlawed in the U.S. by the Robinson-Patman Act of 1936. This law does not appear to be vigorously enforced.

[9] In No Logo, Naomi Klein says that clothing brands favored by "urban youth" do not try too hard to prevent shoplifting because in their target market the shoplifters are also the fashion leaders.

[10] Companies often wonder what to outsource and what not to. One possible answer: outsource any job that's not directly exposed to competitive pressure, because outsourcing it will thereby expose it to competitive pressure.


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