02.06.06
Posted in Technology trends at 6:08 pm by ducky
There has been a lot of buzz in the past few years about Web services: XML, WDSL, REST, SOAP, WDFL, that I just don’t find very exciting. People seem to think that Life Will Be Better when everybody and their sister provides access to their data (aka web services) with {insert your favorite format and transport layer}, and you’ll get interesting combinations of data.
I admit, there is a really good example of combining two different services: Housing Maps is an absolutely brilliant combination of craigslist and Google Maps. However, I don’t think we are going to see a lot of Web-based mashups like that. Housingmaps.com is particularly interesting because there are so few mashups like it!
There is little economic incentive to provide a service that other people can mash up. It costs money to provide data, and there aren’t very many ways to recoup the cost of publishing data:
- Sell advertisements on the page where you display the data (e.g. Google)
- Charge for access to the information (e.g. a subscription charge)
- Reduce the costs of providing your core business (e.g. a SOAP order-taking app is cheaper than a human entering data)
- Get the taxpayer to pay for it (e.g. NOAA providing weather information)
Very few of these lead to more data becoming available for mashup.
- If party A provides the data and party B displays it on a web page, party A bears the cost and party B gets the advertising revenue. No incentive for A.
- If party A charges a subscription and party B displays it, then party B is then effectively giving away access to party A’s information, which is not in party A’s interest (unless the data is so valuable to B that B is willing for A to charge by the access). (Party B gets the advertising revenue, goodwill, and/or publicity, not party A.)
- There is lots and lots of room for businesses to streamline their transactions with other companies, but little reason for businesses to make that information generally available. Walmart might insist that Pepsi set up a WDFL system for Walmart so they can order sodapop more easily, but I really doubt that Pepsi wants to take orders for sodapop from me. Walmart might insist that Coke set up a system where Walmart can get pricing on Coke products, but I bet Coke doesn’t want Pepsi to be able to access Coke’s prices.
- There is quite a lot of really good information that governments and non-profits/NGOs provide, I grant you that. The U.S. Census Bureau, for example, has a lot of really juicy data. However, I haven’t noticed goverments making a point of expanding their services lately. Kind of the reverse. Furthermore, even government offices like publicity, so I think they’d still rather you looked at their Web pages instead of someone else’s.
Looking around, I don’t see a whole lot of commercial entities making data available for free. Google Maps and craigslist do, it’s true. (I’m not really sure why.) Google has a search API that they let people use if they register and only for 1000 searches per day. (I suspect that those are “free samples” to get people hooked, and that they are hoping to later get people to pay money for additional searches.)
There is a very small amount of publicly available data in WDSL form. It is small enough that the services available just don’t lend themselves to interesting mashups. I just don’t see value in combining golf handicapping, northern Ireland holiday calendar, and Canadian geocoding services.
Note that even the cool housingmaps.com mashup doesn’t use WDSL or SOAP or any of the acronyms-du-jour. As best as I can tell, housingmaps.com gets the craigslist information by scraping HTML; Google Maps has its own API.
It would be really cool if there were all kinds of web services that were freely available for anybody to mash up. But I’m not holding my breath.
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10.13.05
Posted in Email, Technology trends at 9:16 pm by ducky
Two months ago, I wrote an essay on why I thought GMail could seriously impact Microsoft’s Outlook/Exchange business by bundling a (so far non-existent) calendar and Gmail into their search appliance.
I had another idea for how the Google bundle could be superior to Outlook/Exchange.
Gmail — in its current Web service incarnation — has ads along the side of the pages. Presumably, a corporation would get annoyed if they paid good money for a network appliance and they still had to look at ads. So the appliance version of Gmail should lose the ads…. or should they?
Google is good at figuring out which text items are related to which other text items. So what if they (automatically) figured out what things inside your company were related to which other things at your company and displayed them? Scenario: You get an email message from your colleague David Jones about purchasing floss recyclamators for the Cobra project. When you read the message, you see various links in the sidebar:
- David Jones’ home page
- the Cobra project home page
- a page listing your company’s approved floss recyclamator vendors
- a page on this week’s cafeteria menu
- Mabel Garcia’s home page
David’s page, the Cobra page, and the vendors page all make sense to you. (The cafeteria menu is odd, but you shrug it off. Even Google makes mistakes.) But you’ve never heard of this Mabel Garcia person and have no idea why she showed up on your list. You click on her home page, and you find that she’s a new hire, and her resume shows that she spent ten years working at Floss Recycling Incorporated. Hot diggity! You can sure use some of her expertise!
If Google could do that, I could imagine people abandoning Outlook/Exchange in droves.
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08.13.05
Posted in Email, Technology trends at 9:13 pm by ducky
If I were Microsoft, I would be afraid of Google. Very, very afraid. Just as Netscape was unable to compete with free products, I don’t think that expensive Microsoft can go head-to-head over the long-term with Google’s “free” services. Microsoft won’t go bankrupt, but I do think Google will significantly eat into their margins.
Outlook is very, very vulnerable. In all of the interviewing I did about email habits, I never found anybody who was passionate about it, nobody who said, “I used to use Brand X, and Outlook is soooooooooooooooo much better!” People used Outlook because that’s what their company told them to use, and companies used Outlook because it’s calendaring system, while not something people were enthusiastic about, was better than anything else from the Information Technology Department’s standpoint.
However, even the IT department didn’t much like Outlook. Exchange (the server component) was a royal pain to maintain, and it was a nightmare to back up. Outlook stores all its information in one big .pst file. Thus if today you get one piece of email, you have to back up not just today’s mail, but all of your saved email messages, all your filters, all your Views, all your Options. This means that the IT department has to put disk quotas on their users’ email — even though the cost of disk space is in the vicinity of US$1 per gig. This places quite a high productivity hit on their users, since they must periodically go through their email and triage their messages.
Gmail is really nice. It doesn’t have every feature in the book and its address book is pretty pitiful, but they got two of the most basic things really right: the users don’t have to periodically delete their messages, and they are absolved from having to decide which folder to file the message in. One big fat button that says Archive, and boom, that message is out of their face.
If Google does shared calendaring, Outlook is suddenly very vulnerable. The Google calendar needs to have enough access control to allow/disallow particular Google users to add/modify/delete events, have repeating events, and to send reminders when things are due. It doesn’t need to do anything fancy like delegation, it just needs to work. (If they do want to make it better than Outlook, there are quite a few things they could do to make it better. OSAF has an exhaustive list of calendar features, but I’d be delighted just if I could have a “home” timezone on the left and an “away” timezone on the right.)
Before you argue that companies won’t like giving all their private data to Google, let me point out that Google already sells a Web search appliance. It shouldn’t be hard for them to provide Gmail- and Gcalendar-in-a-box, perhaps even in the same box as their search appliance. If they provide intelligent backup utilities — which they probably already have, since Google has to back up Gmail already — then Google could eat Outlook/Exchange for lunch and have leftovers for dinner.
Furthermore, I have no reason to believe that Google wouldn’t do a better job at calendaring than Outlook. They have a lot of very bright people, they understand user interfaces, and they are unencumbered by a krufty old code base. They can use the latest in research, and they can search the Web for good ideas on what to do with calendars. Because they are a web service, they can do a rapid rollout, rapid bug fixes, rapid upgrades, and get rapid user feedback. Microsoft, meanwhile, is shackled by the weight of an installed base and by conventional software delivery/sales.
I’ll put my money on Google.
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03.27.05
Posted in Technology trends at 10:00 pm by ducky
Twenty years ago, my then-boss Jim Mikkelson gave me a compelling explanation of why the semiconductor industry has such impressive boom and bust cycles. It has to do with the semiconductor manufacturing process being incredibly sensitive and the design cycles being short and somewhat predictable.Imagine that the semiconductor industry has just started a boom cycle. Orders at the fabs — semiconductor manufacturing plants — has increased dramatically and suddenly (for reasons that I’ll explain later). This means that the fab increases its production. (In fab lingo, the wafer starts — the number of wafers put into the beginning step — goes up.)
Positive feedback loops: quantity vs. yield
Unfortunately, the fab process is incredibly sensitive to changes in the process. A small change can cause the yield — the percent of chips on a wafer that turn out to function correctly — to go down significantly. (At the fab I worked at, we once lost an entire month’s worth of product because a wafer cleaner was miscalibrated.)
One common response is to start even more wafers through the fab. You might think this is counterproductive, but usually the yield doesn’t go down so much that starting more wafers can’t fix it, it takes a while to diagnose yield problems, and the customers want their chips NOW. Unfortunately, running more material through the fab usually makes yield go down.
Hiring more people and buying more equipment also usually reduces the yield, at least in the short term.
Just as the fab starts to get its yield problems under control and get the new equipment up and running, orders suddenly plummet dramatically (for reasons I’ll explain in a minute). So the fab cuts back on its wafer starts, and that starts a positive feedback loop where the yield keeps going up.
Chip customers
At this point in the cycle, chips are incredibly plentiful and, because the fabs have excess capacity and high yield, ridiculously cheap. At this point in the cycle, Jane Engineer notices that and thinks, “Hmmm, with one of those and four of those, I can make a doohickey that is twice as good as what the competition has and at a quarter of the cost. We could take twenty percent of the market with that!” Jane makes a persuasive argument, and sells either her boss or the venture capitalists on the idea, and her team starts designing.
After about a year and a half, Jane’s team’s doohickey is ready to hit the market, so they ramp up orders for the chips they need. Unfortunately, unbeknownst to Jane, nineteen other companies saw the same opportunities that Jane did, at about the same time Jane did, and their design cycle was also about eighteen months. Thus twenty different teams all start ordering as if they are going to get 20% of the market, so demand skyrockets.
The teams, desperate for chips, start double- and triple-ordering chips in the hopes that that will increase their allotment from the semiconductor companies. (The fabs, however, have no way of knowing that the orders are bogus.) When Jane’s project does manage get chips, they hoard them in case the next shipment is delayed.
At some point, Jane’s management notices that Jane’s product has not, in fact, gotten 20% of the market, and that project is in fact losing money. Jane’s management sends in a hatchetman to clean things up. One of the first things that Ms. Hatchetperson sees is that Jane’s project is double- and triple-ordering product when the chips have become quite available and that there is a growing stockpile of those chips in the company warehouse. So Ms. Hatchetperson cuts all orders dramatically.
Meanwhile, the other nineteen projects come to similar conclusions at a similar time, so all twenty projects stop ordering at the same time, with devastating results for the fab. (This can happen astonishingly quickly: at my fab, we went from mandatory overtime in November 1984 to a two-week shutdown in December 1984.)
Conclusions
To summarize, there are four intertwined reasons why the semiconductor business goes through booms and busts:
- design cycles for products that use semiconductors are short
- it takes about the same amount of time for all companies to design a certain type of product
- semiconductor manufacturing yield is strongly negatively correlated with wafer starts
- it takes about as long for yield to come under control as it takes for companies to figure out that a product is a bust
Note that these were all true twenty years ago, when I was in the biz. It’s quite possible that yield management has gotten much better as a result of the computer revolution. (I certainly hope so!) But I doubt that the short design time, the similarity of schedules, and the optimism that a pet project will get 20% of the market has changed.
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