Friday May 25, 2007

Buying an ARC

Can't wait for the next book by your favorite author to come out? There's a semi-secret way to get your hands on a copy before everyone else.

I've mentioned before that I'm a huge fan of Rick Riordan's Tres Navarre mystery novels. The next one, Rebel Island, is scheduled to come out on August 28. Publishing is an excruciatingly slow business. I know from Rick's blog that he delivered the manuscript to his editor nearly a year ago, and yet I still have to wait for three more months. Arrgh! I've got a hunch that the reason may be that Rick is even more well-known as an author of bestselling children's books, so it may be that the publisher was avoiding publishing too close to the release of one of them.

 However, I have a way of getting around this this delay. Publishers often produce "advance reading copies," or ARCs, and distribute them to reviewers and book stores in advance of publication in order to build buzz for the book. These may not be as slickly bound and decorated as the final product, but true fans like me don't care. The text is what counts!

ARCs aren't supposed to be sold, but there is an active gray market for them on eBay. Late last week I scored an ARC of Rebel Island for $10.25, including shipping. Hee-hee! Since I am helping build buzz for the book myself, I've got a hunch that the publisher's "prohibition" on reselling ARCs is more of a nudge-nudge-wink-wink ban, and that they actively hope they'll circulate. A rabid fan like me will buy the true first edition for my collection when it comes out anyway, so my conscience is clear.

Wednesday May 23, 2007

Marriage of computer science and origami

What happens when one of the world's great origami practitioners decides to go a step further with the help of a computer? Check this out. Almost unbelievably, there are no cuts, only folds.

Tuesday May 22, 2007

Moore's law for disk drives

I have been thinking about upgrading the disk drive on my experimental Solaris laptop, a Dell Inspiron 1100. I called up the same Friendly Local Vietnamese Reseller where I bought my 40-gig drive 16 months ago. Their price for that 40-gig drive in December, 2005, was  $78. Their price today for an 80-gig drive? $78. 

Wednesday May 16, 2007

Diary of a startup - lessons learned

I drove out to Orange County last week to inspect the startup's new offices. They were pretty impressive, on the fifth floor of a newer highrise. They're definitely planning for future growth -- most of the desks were unoccupied. "Monty," the CIO, showed me around. The hardware is up and running, and it hasn't been moved to their co-location center yet, so I got to see it whirring away. I guess computers haven't been visually impressive since the days of big iron -- today they are just a few slim boxes sitting in a rack that you could wheel into the elevator -- but they do retain an undeniable elegance, a sense that they are the embodiment of an enormous amount of intellectual effort.

Monty and his team have done a terrific job integrating everything in a very short time: HP boxes, Cisco routers, VMware virtualization, Windows operating systems and database, BEA middleware, specialized off-the-shelf mortgage applications. They should be funding their first loan this week, only a few days beyond their original four-month schedule.

There are some key lessons that can be drawn from watching the way this startup came together, lessons both for Sun and for prospective entrepreneurs. Naturally, these are only one man's opinion.

The first is that we are in an era of intense specialization. Monty pulled together both hardware and software from many different vendors, choosing what he saw as best of breed every time. A corollary for a multi-line vendor like Sun is that to appeal to this type of buyer, you have to be among the best in every product line that you hope to sell. If you aren't, you're going to get cherry-picked. Pros like Monty don't set much store by one-stop shopping. The reason is obvious: startups are so inherently risky that their IT crews will do anything they can to mitigate risk, and the best way to do so is to buy what you perceive as the best.

The second lesson is that open source software without a vendor behind it has a huge handicap. Monty thought about using Xen for virtualization, but he went with VMware in the end because it was more expedient, and less risky.

The third lesson is that you can outsource just about everything. Their data center is outsourced. Their HR is outsourced. Their CRM is outsourced. Four of their developers are consultants in India. Their loan docs are scanned into the system by a couple of guys who were sent over by their imaging outsourcer. The ability to outsource so much allows a startup to be up and running in a very short time, and to conserve capital by paying at the point of use. To me, the lesson for Sun is that the data center outsourcing business deserves some serious study. If we can do a Black Box so well, why not a Black Building?

The fourth lesson is that the hypervisor is the new operating system. Both VMware and Xen run on bare metal. All of the startup's applications run in separate instances of Windows, but they all run on the same HP box running VMware, not HP-UX. Sun's support of Solaris on VMware and Xen couldn't have come at a better time. IT theorists make much of the idea that cost-saving server consolidation is behind the explosion in virtualization, but my hunch is that the real reason, at least for a startup, is risk mitigation again. You don't wan't the crash of one application to bring down the whole system.

The fifth lesson is that big ticket IT gear is still sold by human beings, not bought from a catalog. Sun tried hard to get Monty's business, but HP tried just a bit harder. Again, I think that risk mitigation is at the heart of this. Monty wound up buying the hardware through an HP channel partner, and one reason was that the channel partner offered some very valuable consulting services that helped ensure the project's success.

The sixth lesson is that speed is critical. Every day without income burns another tranche of the startup's limited capital, and if you burn through too much of it, you're finished. Running out of capital is the biggest risk of all. Monty made some choices based on what could be up and running quickly, and products and vendors that couldn't deliver results quickly were cast aside.  

In the end, it's all about risk. The startup that controls risk effectively will have a better chance of survival, and the vendor that can speedily provide the products and services that mitigate risk will have the best chance at selling to this type of customer.

Sunday May 13, 2007

SeeBeyond serendipity

You never know what you get when you buy a company. Sun bought SeeBeyond to get an integration system, and it turns out that one of the best things they got, without knowing it at the time, was something that had nothing to do with integration: the F3 graphics scripting language, now known as JavaFX Script. Just announced at JavaOne, it is a whole new direction for Sun, competing directly with Flash and Silverlight.

F3 was originally developed by SeeBeyond's own Chris Oliver and the small group he headed, including Ricardo Rocha, and it's a tribute to both SeeBeyond and Sun that they were willing to stick with the project when another company might have written it off. It's great to be part of an outfit that is willing to take a chance on seemingly crazy ideas, and to keep supporting the people who dream them up, even when some of them fail.

More prosaically, Sun took a chance with its recent half price sale, which had the unintended bad effect of alienating our channel partners. But Sun recovered quickly, soothed the channel, Jonathan apologized, and life went on without recriminations. To my mind, Sun's encouragement of risk-taking ideas is one of its greatest strengths.