In news which should surprise absolutely nobody, Google - I mean, Alphabet - have killed their ridiculous "Project Ara" modular phone.

Here’s why this was a stupid idea from the beginning. Description from the Project ARA homepage:

The Ara frame is built with durable latches and connectors to keep modules secured. Ara modules are designed around standards, allowing them to work with new generations of frames and new form factors.

All of that means bulk - increased size and weight. Also, you’re still going to be constrained by what can fit on that chassis; there would be a spot where you could fit a camera, but if you want a bigger camera or don’t want a camera at all, this architecture doesn’t help you. It also sounds fragile, with many points of failure. These modules could easily become dislodged in your pocket, so you pull your phone out to take a picture and realise that you need to reconnect the camera module to the phone, but now the OS doesn’t recognise it, so you have to do a hard reboot - and now the sun has set or the child has run off, and you have a handful of modules and nobody to throw them at.

The real problem, though, is the goal of this project. The only attraction of modular systems is if you are going to upgrade components piecemeal: instead of buying an entire new phone every 18 months or whatever your replacement cycle is, you can judiciously upgrade just the screen or add a fingerprint reader or an NFC antenna, or so the theory goes.

In practice, nobody wants to do that. First of all, even on desktop systems where the bulk and weight are less of a factor, the market has moved decisively towards fully integrated all-in-one systems. People have voted with their pocketbooks for integrated convenience over flexible modularity. And that's in static desktop applications. When we’re talking about something people carry around all day, bulk and weight are an even bigger factor.

Secondly, most upgrades require many systems to be upgraded at once - at which point you might as well just buy a new phone anyway. This isn’t PC gaming, where you can get measurable benefits from upgrading your video card. Mobile phone hardware is still evolving far more rapidly than desktop hardware, and the benefits of full integration far outweigh the benefits of modularity.

We used to talk about the notion of a Personal Area Network, back when meaningful computing power was too heavy to hold in one hand. The idea was that you would carry a PC in a backpack, and a screen in your hand, an earpiece in your ear, maybe something like Google Glass, and so on. By the time the tech would have been there to enable that vision, it was already obsolete, because you can hold more computing power than you can use in the palm of your hand.

We may get back to that vision if wearables take off in a meaningful way, but the idea of modularising the phone itself was a pointless detour.

What it is, is typical Google - I mean Alphabet. Announce some random blue-sky project, let nerds everywhere geek out on how it could work without ever considering whether it should be done in the first place, and then kill it off once it hits the real world. The annoying thing is that Google actually gets credit for doing this over and over again, instead of ridicule for not thinking things through. Yes yes, fail fast and let a thousand flowers bloom and all that, but some adult oversight in the planning phases would not go amiss.

I forget who initially suggested the position of VP of Nope, but I think Google needs one. The idea is that this is an exec, senior enough that they have to be taken seriously, who just sits in the back of the room, and when someone proposes something obviously idiotic, they just clear their throat and say "nope". Their salary would be very well earned.

UPDATE: Just noticed that John Gruber pointed out back in 2014 that the emperor had no clothes, and before that in 2013:

you’d still be throwing out old components on a regular basis, and the march of progress is such that it won’t take long until your base board is outdated too.

Exactly.

Images from the Project ARA homepage while it lasts.

This from @benthompson’s morning letter is true and obvious. Yet, lots in media think people don’t really want video pic.twitter.com/dp8lPs9SsX

— Jay Yarow (@jyarow) August 29, 2016

Here's why video doesn't work as a general delivery mechanism for content. So far, it has taken me about twenty five minutes to watch about ten minutes of this video. I also had to find headphones and plug them in, and I had to be somewhere I had the bandwidth and leisure to single-task in this way. None of these are givens.

On the other hand, I can consume (or at least skim) text very rapidly. If I just need to get the gist of a topic or answer one question, text is far and away the most efficient way to do it. There is very little as depressing as finding that the only documentation of how to do something is a twelve-minute out-of-focus howto video, filmed on somebody’s cellphone, narrated in a soporific and near-inaudible drone, and of which I care about precisely five seconds.

If someone sends me a piece of text that looks interesting but that I don’t have time to look at right now, I can easily file it for later. All of my text gets saved to one place - in my case, to Instapaper - and I know that when I open Instapaper, I will have a queue of interesting articles, stories, or whatever to read at my leisure.

Video doesn’t work that way. Sure, both YouTube and Vimeo allow me to save something for later, but only for their own platform, so now I have to remember where I saw something to be able to retrieve it. And that doesn’t even account for media sites like the BBC that insist on reinventing the wheel and using their own video platform¹.

Also, no service I know of allows video to be saved offline², so I still have to be online to see my queue of videos that I saved for later. No watching in the plane for me! That’s unfortunate because it’s one of the places where I can really power through my Instapaper queue.

(me, trying to consume some Branded Content)

That’s not to say I don’t watch video - I do. One of the reasons I own an Apple TV, and have done since the Apple TV 2, is to watch YouTube. There is a ton of high-quality content out there. I’m a car nut, so I have subscriptions to channels like Petrolicious, The Smoking Tire, and Jay Leno’s Garage. The thing is, though, I treat these like watching TV: on the couch, often with a beer in hand, and with a reasonable hope of not being interrupted.

Speaking of interruptions, let’s talk about ads. I have complained before about intrusive video ads interrupting me when I’m reading - but what about intrusive video ads interrupting me when I’m trying to watch video?

Most videos these days have a pre-roll ad - those ads that you can (usually) skip after five seconds³ to get to what you actually wanted to watch. In the context of the ten-minutes-plus duration of the sorts of videos I choose to watch, that’s a minor annoyance at most. On the other hand, if I click on a link from some random site, so with low investment, and the first thing I see is a thirty-second unskippable ad? I’m out of there.

Advertising in text on the other hand can be⁴ pretty subtle, and if I see something in the sidebar that looks interesting out of the corner of my eye, I can finish what I’m doing and get back to it. In "snackable" social media formats like Twitter or Facebook, ads are even less intrusive, scrolling by in your timeline. I have followed sponsored links from both, whereas I have never interacted in any way with a video ad, except to close it.

In summary

I truly hope that the current predictions of "video everywhere!!1!eleventy" are just the latest helium-infused bout of hype. The noisy, single-threaded future that Facebook et al want to usher us into is not somewhere I want to live. And that goes double for AR - if you think I don’t like the bandwidth requirements and the need for headphones of flat video, imagine if you will the hatred I feel for goggles and clogging my downstream pipe for minutes on end for some show-off animation. No, thank you.

Image by Uğur Gürcüoğlu via Unsplash

There has been a long battle between advertisers and people who just want to browse the web without ambush videos jumping out at them or overlays taking over their screen. For a while, mobile was spared the worst excesses of badvertising, to the point that people were actually concerned about Facebook’s ability to monetise on mobile¹.

Unfortunately, mobile platforms have now achieved full advertising parity with desktops. Worse, because the screens are smaller, and much of the ad tech still assumes a desktop browser by default, the mobile experience is often worse than the desktop one. For instance, what on the desktop would be a popup or an overlay turns into a complete browser hijack on mobile.

For this reason, and for the performance improvements, I run an ad blocker on my phone. I continue to endure ads on my desktop browsers, because no matter how annoying they are, I realise that it’s currently pretty much the only way journalists on the web get paid.

The problem is that some publishers are pushing back. I followed a link to Forbes on mobile, and got hit with this message, demanding that I whitelist Forbes or else.

How user-hostile is this? I see no benefit whatsoever in logging into Forbes, and given Forbes’ history of serving malware-laced ads, they are the last outlet I would consider whitelisting.

The reason users are up in arms over advertising on the web is its intrusive nature. We all fully realise that advertising is needed to pay for the content we enjoy. However, that does not constitute unlimited permission to assault our eyeballs (and our ears!) and spy on our behaviour.

Ad blockers by and large operate by blocking the big advertising networks. When a user sends a strong signal that they do not like those networks or their behaviours, the correct approach for a news outlet would be to default to display advertising without tracking. This should be a familiar model; it’s how print advertising works. Put an image in the sidebar, or even in the body of the text; that’s not a problem. Hide a video that pops out and starts playing at full volume? Plant cookies on my system that follow me all around the web, not just on the Forbes site? That’s a problem - that I resolve by blocking the source of the video and the cookie.

Publishers that align themselves too closely with the advertising networks are playing a dangerous game. They are already dangerously dependent on those networks for such profits as they can eke out, but those profits are dependent on their continued ability to attract viewers.

If people see a Forbes link and click past it, because they can’t be bothered with dealing with the mess that is the Forbes site, the money spigot will dry up very quickly.

Image by Dmitri Popov via Unsplash

It’s long been obvious that other phone¹ manufacturers largely follow Apple’s lead. Phones used to look like all sorts of things, but now they all look like iPhones.

This is part of Apple’s modus operandi: they are never the first into a particular field, but they do tend to refine it, if not define it outright. They didn’t make the first personal computer, but they did make the one that influenced all the others. They didn’t make the first MP3 player, but can you even name one apart from the iPod? In the same way, they didn’t make the first mobile phone or even the first smartphone - but they refined both form and function in a way that instantly made everything else obsolete.

Some manufacturers of Android handsets at least make an effort to differentiate themselves, but most are pretty shameless, even copying advertising and packaging. However, most of the time they do at least go to the effort of tracing over Apple’s designs onto their own paper. Now Samsung has just given up, and submitted a patent application (for removable watch bands) which actually includes Apple’s own drawings of an Apple Watch!

This sort of thing goes on all the time - seriously, there are entire blogs just dedicated to documenting instances of Samsung shamelessly copying Apple.

Things have finally got to the point that a group of eminent designers has filed an amicus curiae brief documenting and explaining the negative impacts of this practice.

Well done to them, and I hope it helps. I don’t wish Samsung any ill, but the Android world needs its own identity. By all means copy ideas from Apple - every desktop GUI around (and many that are dead) follow conventions first set by Apple in the original Lisa and Macintosh². The execution of the idea needs to be original, though.

I’m not saying there need to be gimmicks; if that sort of thing were useful, we’d all be using Windows phones, with those Live Tiles and dockable apps. I just wish there were more recognition that Apple makes choices for reasons, and others may wish to make different choices for different reasons.

Since my last post rehashing ancient IT industry history seemed to go over well, here’s another one.

In that previous post, I used the story of the HP acquisition of Mercury and its rumoured impending spin-off as a cautionary tale about handling acquisitions correctly. There is never any lack of "fantasy M&A" going on in this industry, but one of the longest-running figures is Apple.

I’ve actually been a Mac user long enough that I can remember when the rumour of the week would be, not about whom Apple should buy, but about who was going to buy Apple. Would it be Dell? Would it be Sony? Would it be Silicon Graphics? Would it be Sun? Would it be IBM?

Twenty years later, that catalogue is ridiculous on the face of it. Only one of those companies even still meets the two core criteria, namely a) existence, and b) being a PC manufacturer. However, in the mid-90s, things were not at all rosy at Apple, and management was getting desperate. How desperate? They approved a programme that licensed the MacOS to other manufacturers, who could then make and sell their own fully-legal and -compatible MacOS computers.

As it happened, I had a front-row seat for all of this. In the mid-90s I was still in high school, but given that in Italy high school is a morning-only affair, I took on an afternoon job at the local Apple reseller. Unbeknownst to me, they had also just signed up to be the Italian reseller for UMAX, one of those MacOS clone makers (also known as SuperMac in the US).

UMAX had already been around for a while, and had made a name for themselves with a range of scanners that went from consumer-grade to very definitely pro-grade. The most expensive machine I dealt with was a $25k A3 flat-bed scanner with 9600 dpi optical resolution. Photographers and other graphic artists from all over Italy were already dealing with this company, so the value proposition of a cheaper Mac for their work was pretty obvious.

Where things got exciting was when performance of the UMAX machines started to overtake that of contemporary Macs. This was in the days of the Motorola/IBM PowerPC CPU, and Mac performance was already starting to suffer compared to contemporary Intel chips. Therefore, when UMAX brought to market a dual-604e motherboard, available with not one but two screaming-fast 200 MHz CPUs, this was big news - not least because they not only undercut the price of the equivalent PowerMac 9600, but beat it to market as well.

(Embarrassingly, I blew up the very first one of those machines to come to Italy. It had a power supply with a physical switch to change from 115v US-style power to the full-strength 230v juice we enjoy in Europe. I did check the switch before plugging in the cable, but BANG! Turned out, the switch was not properly connected on the inside of the PSU… Luckily, all that had blown was the power supply itself, not the irreplaceable motherboard, and we got it swapped out in double-quick time and nobody ever found out… until now.)

Anyway, this was all great fun for me, still in high school and all, and everyone was doing very well out of the arrangement - except for Apple. The licensing fee for MacOS that they were receiving did not even come close to replacing the profit they missed out on from all the lost sales of Apple hardware¹. As soon as Steve Jobs returned to Apple, he killed the programme. UMAX was the last of the cloners to fall, managing to secure the only license to ship MacOS 8 (everyone else’s licenses ended with System 7²), but the writing was on the wall. UMAX switched to making Wintel PCs - a market they since exited, reverting to their core strength of imaging products.

Today, a handful of dedicated people still build "hackintosh" computers from commodity parts, and then try to force OS X³ to run on them, with varying degrees of success. However, there is no officially sanctioned way of running OS X on any hardware not sold by Apple.

So, given this history and the results for Apple, why exactly do people feel the need to advise Apple to license iOS? Both the Macalope and Nick Heer of Pixel Envy have already done the hard work of eviscerating this wrong-headedness, but I couldn’t resist getting my own blow in.

First of all, iOS runs on its own system-on-a-chip (SoC) - currently, the A9 and A9X. Sure, this is based on the industry-standard ARMv8 architecture, but with substantial refinements added by Apple, which they would presumably be even more reluctant to license than iOS itself.

So let’s say Samsung or whoever either licenses the SoC design, or builds their own (not a trivial exercise in itself), install iOS, and sell the resulting device as the iGalaxy. Where are they going to position this frankenphone? It can’t be priced above Apple’s own offerings unless it brings something novel to the table.

What could that be? Maybe some device that spans the gap between Android and iOS? Well, here too, history can be our guide.

Back in my UMAX days, we did sell one very popular accessory. Basically it was a full-length PCI card with an entire x86 chipset and its own Intel CPU on it. Seriously, this thing was the biggest expansion board I have ever seen - the full width of the motherboard, so wide that it had a special support bracket in the case to prevent it sagging under its own weight. It also had its own CPU fan, of course, so it took up a fair amount of vertical space too. This allowed owners to run Windows on Intel side by side with MacOS on PowerPC, sharing a graphics card and input devices. Mind-blowing stuff in the mid-Nineties!

So in that vein, could a cloner conceivably sell a handset that could run Android apps natively side-by-side with iOS ones? Frankly, I doubt it. These days, it’s easier to emulate another platform, or just carry two phones. Maybe a few developers would be interested, but the market would be tiny.

It used to be the case that if you wanted a large phone (I refuse to call it a "phablet") you had to go with Android, because iPhones came in one size only. These days, Apple sells phones in a variety of sizes, from the small iPhone SE, through the standard iPhone, up to the iPhone Plus - so I can’t see the form factor being enough of a draw for people to go with a third-party device.

The only variable that’s left is price. Any iOS clone manufacturer would have to substantially undercut Apple’s cheapest devices to get sales. To do this, they would cut corners. By giving the device less RAM, or a non-Retina display, or less storage, or whatever, the cloners could lower the price point enough to get the initial sale - but Apple would be stuck with the horrible customer satisfaction issues from running on this below-par hardware.

That last point is particularly problematic because Apple’s entire business model is predicated upon taking, not the whole of the smartphone market, but the most profitable slice of it. One important consequence of this is that iOS is also the most profitable market for developers, because iOS users by definition have money to spend on apps. This is a virtuous circle for Apple, as the richer app ecosystem draws more users, which draws more development, and so on.⁴

If users - many of them first-time users, who are tempted into trying iOS by new low-cost clone devices - have a terrible experience, never buy apps, and replace their iOS device with an Android one as soon as they get the chance, that virtuous cycle turns vicious fast.

And that’s not even getting into the strategy tax Apple would be paying on other decisions. To cite another rumour that’s doing the rounds, could Apple drop the headphone jack from their own devices if there were cloners still manufacturing iOS devices that featured it? Maybe they could - but the decision would be much more fraught.

Bottom line, there is no iOS license fee that the cloners would pay that would also compensate Apple for both lost sales of their own hardware and for the wider market impact.

Apple tried this once, and it nearly killed them.

Can we please stop bringing up this idiotic idea now?⁵

This is an interesting time in the enterprise software market. The shift to the cloud is causing massive disruption, with storied old names struggling to reinvent themselves, and scrappy startups taking over the world.

One interesting story is that HP Enterprise, or HPE - one of the units that old HP split itself into - is looking into selling off some of its software assets. I am especially interested in one of these, namely Mercury, because I worked there for several years.

To recap, Mercury (née Mercury Interactive) was a leader in automated software testing. Its products covered functional testing (XRunner, WinRunner, QuickTest Professional), load testing (LoadRunner), and test management (TestDirector, later renamed to QualityCenter).

Basically what these tools let you do is to record a user interacting with an application, and then parameterise the recording - i.e. turn it into a little programme that you can replay, so that you can select different menu options and make sure that they all work, or simulate ten thousand users all hitting the app simultaneously and make sure it doesn’t fall down, or whatever.

LoadRunner in particular was the default standard at the time, dominating its market segment. I worked on the functional test products, but because of language coverage, I had at least basic familiarity with the whole product set.

Out Of The Blue

In 2006, Mercury was trying to bridge that difficult chasm from $1B to $2B in revenue, but was caught up in a wider stock option backdating scandal. As its founder was exiled and the stock price cratered, HP swooped in and bought up the whole shop in a fire sale.

UPDATE: Christopher Lochhead interviewed Dr Giora Yaron on his excellent Legends & Losers podcast about this history. Dr Yaron was on the board of Mercury at the time, while Chris himself was the CMO there. It was fascinating to hear the inside account of what happened during that tumultuous time.

What happened after that is fairly typical of such acquisitions. Despite some big talk and high expectations, I think it is fair to say that the Mercury products languished within HP - or at the very least failed to evolve with any urgency.

After The Acquisition

This is unfortunately a pattern with technology acquisitions. There is often a honeymoon period, where increased funding enables delivery of long-awaited functionality, but the releases after that get hollowed out into maintenance releases, and even those start coming further and further apart, frustrating customers and insiders alike.

In the case of HP and Mercury, the slow-down was particularly unfortunate because the acquisition came just as enterprise application development was moving from proprietary protocols and GUIs to web applications talking HTTP. Mercury’s powerful and extremely customisable products were arguably overkill for simpler web applications, and a new generation of tools was beginning to emerge that was dedicated for that purpose. Given its singular focus on testing, and based on what I know of the company culture pre-acquisition, I am quite certain that an independent Mercury would have addressed the challenge head on and remade itself for that new world. After all, Mercury was fully aware of web applications, offering services that would simulate user access from locations around the world to have a continuous view on sites’ performance as experienced around the world.

Unfortunately, that’s not what happened under HP stewardship. The Mercury products languished in the Software group, which itself represented only around 2% of HP revenues. As often happens in such cases, much of the original talent left, creating a flourishing "alumni" network. I was part of that diaspora, so I can’t talk about the quality of their replacements, but there was certainly a discontinuity, and the Mercury tools never recovered their previous dominance.

Looking On The Bright Side

None of this is to say that the acquisition was not a success by its own lights. HP still uses the Mercury technology in all sorts of places. Many enterprise HP customers did not move to the new technologies with any urgency, and therefore continued to have a business need for Mercury’s powerful tools. This means that the products still throw off enough stable and predictable revenue to make a private equity purchase potentially attractive

HP also adopted the Mercury notion of Business Technology Optimization, or BTO. This acted as a framework for many of HP’s other software initiatives, although it seems to have been abandoned more recently.

The failure of this acquisition is a failure of potential. What might an independent Mercury have become if the M2B project had been successful in taking it to $2B in revenue and beyond? What might Mercury have built in the world of the web and the cloud? As is often the case with these acquisitions, there is no way to know.

We do know roughly what the conditions are under which acquisitions succeed or fail. Arguably, the Mercury acquisition was more successful than most in no small part because HP kept the Mercury R&D centre in Israel, somewhat isolated from the rest of the company. This enabled the ex-Mercury staff to keep some sense of their own distinct identity, and keep developing their technology even after the acquisition.

There is an alternative view: that while isolation and even benign neglect may allow for survival of the startup within the acquiring company, they will not build true success. That requires a deeper integration of the startup's mentality into the acquiring company’s culture. Very few company cultures have the strength to be able to integrate a challenging outside vision without triggering an immune reaction of sorts.

The only way to integrate acquired companies - their technology and their culture - successfully, is to have strong executive guidance over a period of years. This has been a long-time failing at HP, to the despair of its longer-serving employees. In the absence of that guidance, benign neglect is maybe all that can be hoped for.

Following on from my earlier Dream Garage post, there were several conversations along the lines of "you missed out on this, and that, and what about the other thing…" These are all fun, and it’s all fantasy anyway - but I just wanted to share the ones that just barely didn’t make the cut.

Jaguar XK120

Top of the list of cars that almost made it into the top ten is this beauty. In the end, I felt it did not make sense to have both the Morgan and the Jaaaag. With the big cat being a classic, it’s just less practical than the Morgan, which is thoroughly modern - at least underneath.

I was lucky enough to be able to borrow an XK120 that looked almost exactly like this one for my wedding day, though, and it was the second most beautiful sight I saw that day. The engine sounded wonderful, and was still very strong. What let it down was the brakes, or the complete absence thereof. I was absolutely terrified that I was going to wrap an extremely expensive car that did not belong to me around something! In the end all went well, and I have one more amazing memory from a wonderful day.

If I can ever figure out a way to justify it to myself, I would love to own one - but I’d upgrade the brakes before driving it anywhere!

AMG Rote Sau

The whole Lotus, "simplify and add lightness" thing is all very well, but what I really like is a big bruiser that actually has too much power, even if that means it struggles to put it all down. The Rote Sau (Red Pig) was the motorsport evolution of Mercedes-Benz’ already pretty fast 300SEL 6.3, and it is utterly bonkers.

They are getting pretty rare, so the sensible option might be to start with a stock 300SEL and do a "restomod" version. I’d be after a street car anyway, not a racer, so I’d plan on losing all the racing stickers - although I’d keep those outsize front lights. If I went that route, I'd probably also delete the roll cage and give it a more street-friendly interior.

Caterham

Or then again, maybe I do buy into the Lotus-lightweight thing? The way to do that nowadays is to get Caterham’s up-to-date interpretation of the Lotus 7, add a full-faced helmet so you don’t get a mouthful of insects, and then enjoy the amazing handling. The power-to-weight ratio of 520bhp per tonne on the R500 is nothing to sneeze at, either.

Alfaholics GTA-R

Every car lover should own an Alfa Romeo, at least once. I’m okay on that front, as I have owned and loved both a 156 2.5 V6, and a 147 Blackline. How could I not have an Alfa in my dream garage, though?

This may look like a classic, but it’s actually been thoroughly updated, so it’s about as practical as old Alfas get. I might want a bit of a body kit on mine, though - just slightly rolled arches and a front lip spoiler, something like that. Nobody seems to do exactly what I want, though, which is why it didn’t make the cut.

Lancia Stratos

As long as we’re talking about classic Italian marques that have had their history shamelessly destroyed under Fiat ownership (ahem), we can’t forget Lancia. Much as I’d love an S4 or 037 Stradale, if you’re going to go, you have to go big. Lancia Stratos it is, with classic Alitalia livery, and maybe even Sandro Munari’s name (all hail) emblazoned on the side.

This is one case where I would actually want an original car, so that I could take it up the hill at my local historic hill-climb, the Vernasca Silver Flag.

TVR Tuscan¹

Just go ahead and file this one under "scary". Depending on which generation it is, you’re looking at anywhere between 350 and 440 bhp, a fibreglass body, and no ABS, traction control, airbags - or much of anything else. On top of that, all the controls were insanely positioned, to the point that nobody could ever get in, and once they had been shown how, could not get out again.

When I was working in the UK, a colleague had a yellow one of these monsters. You could hear him coming from a mile off - but he was always the slowest thing on the road, because it had a nasty habit of spinning up the rear wheels in third and even fourth if provoked. Taught you respect, it did.

Shelby Cobra

Talking of scary cars…

This one didn’t make the cut into the top ten because I felt that I couldn’t have two Shelbys, and between the two of them, I slightly prefer the looks of the Daytona Coupe. It doesn’t help that the Daytona is also that little bit more practical, what with its effete concessions like, I don’t know, a roof.

Still love the look of these, though, and if the dream garage did expand, I would definitely add one.

Lincoln Continental (Mobsteel)

Forget about all that lightness nonsense with the Caterham up there - we’re back to the big stuff! Mobsteel are a Detroit crew, and appropriately, they only work on classic Detroit iron. The idea is big, comfortable rides, done for cruising and the occasional burnout. I might go for slightly less flashy rims than in this picture, and I’m still torn between hard and soft tops, so that indecision is why this one didn’t make it higher up the list.

Lamborghini Espada

This is definitely a Marmite car, and I freely admit it's an odd choice as the first Lambo in the collection - but I love the looks of the big thing, and it's actually far more competent on the road than a more mainstream classic like the Miura. It does share a designer with the Miura, Marcello Gandini, and the V12 is from the same Giotto Bizzarrini lineage too. It's a car that lets you share the Lambo experience with your friends.

I also really think that scene at the beginning of The Italian Job should have featured an Espada rather than a Miura. It just suits the character of Roger Beckermann far better.

And all the rest

I didn’t forget about supercars! It’s just that I cannot decide which one I would want, and it seemed silly just to make a huge list. Here are some of the ones that I was considering, before I realised the problem:

• Lamborghini Murcielago/Diablo SV (open-gate shifter FTW)
• any Koenigsegg
• Pagani Zonda/Huayra
• Noble M600
• McLaren F1/P1
• Ford GT (2005 version)
• Porsche Carrera GT
• Ferrari F40/288 GTO
• I don’t particularly care for the Enzo - but I’d definitely have a Maserati MC12…

Realistically, these all overlap with each other. Sure, they have their differences and blah blah blah, but I don’t see much point in just having a row of supercars in the garage; you’d never drive any one of them enough to get to know it properly, so you’d only be depriving someone else of the chance to own or at least see them.

I already picked the Bugatti EB110 as my ultimate supercar, and I stand by that. If I were fortunate enough to be looking at more supercars, I’d probably just join one of those fractional-ownership clubs to scratch the occasional urge to check out something different.

In the same vein, I would love a Porsche 911 993 GT2, or a 964 Leichtbau, and I even have an unreasonable lust for some sort of RWB 911 - but I already chose my ultimate 911, so it would seem greedy to add more.

Finally I might add something silly like a Citroën Méhari for a beach house, or a ridiculous project like, oh, a Hayabusa-engined classic Fiat 500 - but that sort of thing is more spur-of-the-moment than stuff of dreams, as far as I’m concerned.

I suspect this is an ongoing topic…

Further thoughts on yesterday’s post, prompted by some of the conversations about it

I realised that in yesterday’s post I implied that the key difference was between different markets; that in some markets, a full-on enterprise sales push is required, while in others you can rely on word of mouth to allow good products to emerge.

I do believe that there are macro divisions like that, but even within a more circumscribed group of products, you can still see big differences that are driven at least in part by sales activity.

Let's talk about cloud.

The conventional wisdom is that Amazon’s AWS dominates because of under-the-radar adoption by developers. In this view, teams who wish to move faster than corporate IT’s procurement and delivery cycles use their company credit cards to get resources directly from AWS and release their code directly to the cloud. By the time the suits realise this has happened, the developers have enough users on their side that it’s easier just to let them keep on doing what they’re doing.

There is a fair amount of truth to this story, and I have seen it play out more or less in this way many times. What is neglected in this simple scenario is the other cloud vendors. There was a while back there when it wasn’t obvious that AWS was going to be the big winner. Google Compute Engine seemed like a much better bet; developers already had a high comfort level with using Google services. In addition, AWS initially offered bare-metal systems, while GCE had a full-stack PaaS. Conventional wisdom was that developers would prefer the way a PaaS abstracts away all the messy details of the infrastructure.

Of course it didn’t work out that way. Today GCE is an also-ran in this market, and even that only thanks to a pivot in its strategy. AWS dominates, but right behind them and growing fast we see Microsoft’s Azure.

Data from Synergy Research Group

And look who’s right behind Microsoft: IBM! Microsoft and IBM of course have huge traditional sales forces - but what some commentators seem to miss is that the bulk of AWS’ success is driven by its own big enterprise and channel sales force. A developer getting a dozen AMIs on the company AmEx might get usage off the ground, but it doesn’t drive much volume growth. Getting an enterprise contract for several thousand machines, plus a bunch of ancillary services? Now we’re talking.

Also note who’s missing from this list - anything driven by OpenStack. There are as many opinions on OpenStack technology as there are people working on it - which seems to be part of the problem. The one thing that seems clear is that it has not (yet?) achieved widespread adoption. I am seeing some interest on the SDN/NFV side, but most of those projects are still exploratory, so it remains to be seen how that market shakes out - especially with competition from commercial offerings from Cisco and VMware ramping up.

A good sales force won’t be able to push a terrible product, not least because sales people will jump ship in order to have a better product to sell, which makes their job easier. However, a good sales force can make the difference between a good product emerging from the churn, or not.

Underestimate sales at your peril.

Image by Jan Schulz via Unsplash

This blog is called Find The Thread because it started out as an overflow from Twitter, and so it’s not always obvious what connects one post to another, without the context of the social stream. That said, one recurring theme is me getting all defensive when somebody says something nasty about the business I’m in - and this post is no exception.

What set me off this time is a piece entitled Selling software to big companies is a 'baroque tribal ritual bloodletting,’ says investor. The "investor" in the title is Martin Casado, who can be presumed to know what he is talking about:

In 2007, Casado cofounded networking startup Nicira, which raised $41.82 million in venture funding before VMware gobbled it up in 2012 for $1.26 billion.

At VMware, Nicira's networking-virtualization technology became a $600 million business, before Casado left for Andreessen Horowitz just a few months ago.

Now Business Insider is of course quoting the most inflammatory statement in the title to drive traffic - which is fair enough. Also, I don’t think Martin Casado is wrong as such. What I suspect he is doing is generalising too much from his own experience.

The Nicira technology that Martin Casado developed is deep infrastructure, hidden way behind the curtain of IT. It’s Software-Defined Networking, basically virtualising networking equipment in the same way we have become used to doing with compute infrastructure. This sort of development is well suited to certain approaches to development and adoption. To quote myself:

[Developers] wanted a tool that would perform a specific, often quite technical, task for them, and assembled a band of like-minded enthusiasts to work on the project in their off-hours.

This is great when the outcome of the project is something like the Linux kernel, which is safely hidden away from users who might cut themselves on its sharp edges. Problems start to occur when the band of hackers try to build something closer to the everyday surface that people see and use.

That describes Nicira - or Martin Casado’s example in the BI article, Mesosphere - to a T. People are trying to get something done, something quite specific that is an evolution of a well-understood domain. People in that position will indeed go looking proactively for a tool to achieve that specific thing.

So far, so good. The problem is that certain types of problem are exciting and trendy to work on. Others… not so much. When is the last time you saw a popular open-source CRM system, or ITIL-compliant service desk?

That’s why makers of less trendy software have to actually, y’know, go out and sell.

What's so horrible about selling enterprise software? Well, when a big software company like Microsoft, Cisco, or even VMware wants to sell a product, they have to go through "a very baroque procurement process," Casado says.

They have to romance third-party service resellers and consultants into offering their products, who then in turn wine and dine their customers' CIOs and IT departments, taking them to expensive dinners and out to the golf course.

The whole process can take months, if not years, and it hinges just as much on salesmanship and professional contacts as it does on the products themselves. The big tech titans have gotten very good at it, to the point where it's difficult for any kind of new startup to get a seat at the table in deals of any substantial size.

"I would say all of these large companies, their strength is selling to that sales channel," Casado says. "I've always thought that was the most difficult thing for enterprise startups."

This description of the process is exaggerated (especially the wining and dining bit - the days of big deals closed at the golf course are all but gone), but not fundamentally untrue. The point is, this is the channel that exists to get tools that are necessary but perhaps not as exciting as SDN to their customers.

VMware itself did not start out as the VMware colossus that we know today. Back in 1998, they were definitely a like-minded band of hackers. Even by the time I became a user in the early 2000s, compute virtualisation was definitely A Thing, but far from a standard. Now, the technology, the market, and the company have all grown and matured, and so the approach that made sense fifteen years ago is no longer appropriate.

A cynic might even suggest that, having sold Nicira at the height of the excitement around SDN, Martin Casado is holding everyone else to an impossibly high standard because he does not recognise or admit the unique advantages which he had.

Car Analogy

I like cars, so let me try a car analogy here.

If you’re running Tesla¹, you do not have an easy job by any means - but you are at least selling into a recognised market. People already buy cars, so you sell a category of product that people already understand. You still have a lot of work to do in clarifying the differences and maximising the positives, but a lot of the interest is self-propelled: people are thinking of getting a new car, hear about this Tesla company, and add it to the list of possible cars they might want to consider.

If instead you are trying to get a flying-car company off the ground², you are facing a much tougher battle. Nobody is looking to buy a flying car; they are thinking in terms of either a traditional car, or an aircraft. This means that you have to create a new interest where before there was not even awareness of the possibility, then nurture that interest into excitement and eventually (one hopes) a sale. You can’t just sit back and wait for people to Google you; everyone is at their local car dealership, on the Tesla website, or (for the 1%) playing golf with their Gulfstream sales rep.

So what do you do? You hire sales people, you develop a sales channel, and you accept the added time and expense of all this as part of the cost of getting your product out there.

And meanwhile, ignore the snark of the Tesla¹ people, who can sit back and let the Google searches roll in.

Bottom Line

VMware Exec Martin Casado Joins Andreessen Horowitz https://t.co/scr45089oa < What are the consequences of all deep thinkers being at VCs?

— Dominic 🇪🇺🇺🇦🏳️‍🌈 (@dwellington) February 24, 2016

I have nothing but respect for Martin Casado and his technical achievements. SDN is upending network architectures everywhere. However, many of the companies doing those SDN implementations at scale are the same network operators as before. Their procurement processes are the controlling factor, more than any supposed lag by vendors.

The enterprise sales process is the way it is for a reason. There are a number of ways to disrupt and shortcut the more cumbersome parts of that process. However, doing so successfully requires a customer base that is equally ready to participate in that process. If you are selling to customers who buy that way, good for you - but don’t try to generalise your findings too quickly to other areas.

Image by Dmitri Popov via Unsplash

Dear users: It’s not easy, being on the vendor side. Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that you work for a reputable, non-scammy vendor. Let’s also take it as a given that you have done your homework, so you are not spamming people indiscriminately, but trying to reach people whom you genuinely believe to have a need for your product.

How do you go about reaching those people?

Totally unsolicted vendor spam of the day - Telesoft.

— Lesley Carhart (@hacks4pancakes) May 31, 2016

Most people are understandably very reluctant to publish their contact details everywhere, because less principled sales people have already saturated their tolerance for randos showing up in their inbox out of the blue. This means that there is a (justifiably) high barrier to getting their attention.

There is also something of a tragedy of the commons effect, as all the vendors converge on those people who have been less diligent about scrubbing their personal details off the Internet.

"I found your info on LinkedIn and wanted to reach out."

/me lights fuse

Sorry, you were saying? pic.twitter.com/0Ov5NX4bCC

— Dave Lewis 🇺🇦 (@gattaca) June 7, 2016

Here’s the deal: when I contact someone, it’s because I genuinely believe that they might have a need for what I’m selling. It’s a pretty niche market - which is why it makes sense to hire human sales people to build and maintain a small number of customer relationships in the first place. This means I take the time to do my homework, and my approach is specific as I can make it based on public information.

If I’m working on selling into BigCorp and I get a number for Alice or Bob who work there, my first step is not to pick up the phone. Rather, I go off to research what they do at BigCorp, what they personally care about, and so on. I use all of this to build a pitch that might go something like this:

Hi, sorry to contact you uninvited, but I know you are working on A, B, and C as part of an initiative at BigCorp. I have worked with other companies in your position such as WidgetTicklers, who were able to complete their own similar project under budget and ahead of schedule. They did this thanks to key capabilities enabled by our technology: …

You get the idea: it’s not a form letter I’m blasting out, it’s carefully targeted and as specific as I can make it with information at hand.

Hello, I am total stranger. With your deep background, you would do very well to make me money. When is good time to review my plan?

— -- (@cshl1) June 14, 2016

So what’s the problem? The problem is that the hit rate on doing this is still terrible. It's not mis-targeting, because often when I do finally manage to make contact by some other means, it turns out that I was right, there really was a need - but that was the wrong channel to connect with the person.

Here’s my question: what is a good way to contact you? Assume I have something you want, but not something that would show up in your normal reading. Maybe it’s launched since the last time you went looking for this sort of thing. I’ve done the prep work of identifying a potential interest you might have for this product; how should I bring it to your attention?

Because seriously, this stuff is great, and everyone needs to know about it - not just because I get paid (that too, of course!), but because I think it can really help a whole bunch of people. That’s the definition of win-win.

Image by Anton Repponen via Unsplash