My Own Pirate Radio

Over on the Brightspark blog Mark Skapinker wrote something that really struck a chord with me:

“More “Bill Gateses”, not more graduates”
The press in Canada has been full of articles about how Bill Gates thinks that if Canada and the US want to stay ahead, they should “focus on improving the quality of education and expanding the number of young people who study math and science in school”. He wants us to create new computer scientists, engineers and researchers. Academics like Roger Martin answered him in the Globe and Mail by saying that North America has its lead because of our great MBA schools (like The Rotman School of Business where he is Dean) and management studies and the creation of more managers.”

Mark argues instead that what we really need is “more Bill Gateses. We need entrepreneurs who are willing to “go for it”, start new companies and create startups like Microsoft was not so long ago.”

Woot! This one speaks to me. Lessee, I studied Math and Computer Science at Waterloo, worked at Microsoft, and married a Queens University engineer who recently completed an MBA at Rotman. And now we’re both neck-deep in trying to get a startup off the ground. Must… voice… opinion.

I would love to see more entrepreneurs in Canada, especially in technology. Canada has a huge per-capita gap relative to the US on this. But what’s the cure? Check out some of the comments Mark’s post received:

• “Entrepreneurs are born, not made.”
• “[Bill Gates] was lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time, and ruthless enough to profit from it.”
• “[one of] our biggest barriers to entrepreneurship is the negativity surrounding failure”
• “few of our graduating students have entrepreneurship as their goal beyond education”

My take:

On nature versus nurture: It’s both.

Take Gates for example: Sorry naysayers, luck and drive were necessary-but-not-sufficient conditions for his achievements. I used to think wishfully that I could have done the same thing if I was just lucky enough. You know, show up at just the right time to become the driving force behind Windows and Office, grow a company from 2 to 60,000 employees, that sort of thing. But then I met Bill, and reluctantly swallowed my delusions of genius and grandeur.

While at MS I gained a good deal of respect for him. Don’t get me wrong; I’m no toady. He has his flaws, as do we all. But I assure you he is also an extremely talented technical problem-solver and business strategist, and — this is important — a big, big risk-taker. He was very, very good at being chief technology freak in a company chock-full of technology freaks. He will most likely be very, very good at running the Gates Foundation. Some of this capability derives from his nature — raw smarts, passion, drive, and guts — and some of it from nurture: family wealth and encouragement, access to great schooling, brilliant friends and colleagues, among other things. It takes both.

On schooling. Education is a huge enabler. It creates opportunities. In particular, for tech jobs, great problem-solving ability is essential. In large part, this can be taught.

Some might argue that problem-solving skill should emerge from a technical degree, or an MBA, or great community college programs, or from inspirational highschool teachers. I think debating this is a waste of time. We need ALL of these… and we should let the market decide how much of each. Entrepreneurs will emerge from all of these halls, and from the school of hard knocks too.

On funding. Entrepreneurs need financing. As Mark argues in earlier posts, we need a more concerted effort to make funding available for startups through a broad variety of non-governmental orgs.

The government tries, but can’t get it right. Case in point: $40M of government funding pumped into MARS Discovery District. It’s big. It’s beautiful. It makes for great PR. But that same money could have launched a thousand small startups instead.

The funding also has to be made available to companies from early stage up, not just startups that are mature enough for VCs to consider. And it needs to be available from a wider variety of funders, enough so that there is real competition amongst them to find and nurture the next great entrepreneur.

On risk. Innovation is fueled by risk. This single factor underlies everything else, in my opinion… the educational choices we make, the jobs we take, the inventions we create. The Canadian culture and economy needs to get much more comfortable with taking and supporting risks. And as things stand, Canada’s traditional risk-aversion is a real barrier to entrepreneurship. It makes it harder to get funding, it makes it less socially acceptable to fail, and it heaps too much emphasis on doing only “safe” things in school and in the real world thereafter.

That’s my recipe. I’d love to hear yours.

I’ve often wondered how well Google’s management structure works, particularly the high engineer-to-manager ratio. I’d always heard it was about 50:1, but this blog post I came across yesterday suggests ratios of 100 to 1 are not uncommon. Now that’s flat. Superflat. If you have the urge to peer into the murky depths of Google or Microsoft, give the post a read. (Yes, it might be a hoax, but personally I think it’s legit. Besides, hoaxes are people too.)

Management structure differences aside, Google really is a great deal like Microsoft was in its earlier days. It’s as if the same parents decided to have another baby 15 years after their first one. Same DNA.

As usual, the comments provide some of the most compelling nuggets. There is a bunch of good meaty stuff once you get past the initial chorus of “why we oughta fire that two-timin- free-breakfast-eatin’- NDA-violatin’- internal-email-leakin’- big-fat-secret-sharin’- son-of-a-!*@# employee!” comments from ’softies. This one particularly resonated with me:

…Many folks at both places seem to harbor a desire to start their own company ‘at some point’, and virtually no one at either place seems to be fully satisfied with the pace of their career growth, but the benefits and continuous train of internal opportunities keep most of those folks happy and entrepreneurially sedated.
…
Both are probably great places to work, especially if you can reconcile yourself to a nice, comfortable, interesting career, and you have the willpower to prioritize family over work and work email. For those who aspire to more, you’ll need to innoculate yourself against the sedating effect of the benefits and ‘industry influence’, get it [sic], build up some experience and a network, and get out.

Amen, brutha!

Researcher Elizabeth Van Couvering recently published research results on how search engine employees think and talk about their work.

In the face of rising controversy about search engine results—that they are too restrictive, too comprehensive, lacking in certain areas, over-represented in others—this article presents the results of in-depth interviews with search engine producers, examining their conceptions of search engine quality and the implications of those conceptions.

She interviewed employees of Google, Yahoo!, MSN, Ask Jeeves, AOL, Excite, Lycos, Infoseek, and WebCrawler, and her report is remarkable in terms of the insider verbatim quotes. (The search industry is notoriously secretive, so getting people to reveal their inner thoughts about it is challenging.) Her analysis reveals that search industry insiders consistently portray themselves as fighting a war, that they justify much of their work in scientific terms — even when trying to deal with unquantifiable issues like public good — and that they understand in a deep way how their business is driven by profit motives.

Her work is on target. And not just for search; her observations apply to every technical group I’ve been part of or collaborated with, both within and outside of Microsoft. We all used similar language “schemas”. We talked about marketplace war, about science for science’s sake. We often shrouded ideology — “censorship is inherently bad” — in technical terminology — “I suppose the algorithm decided to demote that result because its relevance dropped during our last crawl. We don’t decide; the algorithm decides.”. Or, “Sorry, we can’t implement that feature, the current architecture doesn’t allow it and it would take way too long.” Frankly, it was often easier to fight such technical arguments than to fight the underlying ideological battles, because the latter approach generally ended in stalemate. So technical language became a tool for keeping non-techies from influencing product design, and it shielded teams from struggling with uncomfortable thoughts like, “Does any of my work have a negative impact on society?”. I believe this shielding pattern reoccurs broadly in many science and technology fields.

Elizabeth’s methodology — analyzing the actual words people speak — reminds me of ‘The Four Horsemen’: Why Marriages Fail, a radio story that aired on NPR in 2005. It’s an interview with a researcher who talks to couples about their relationships, then analyzes their word choice and emotional tone to predict whether they will eventually divorce or not. Apparently there are four strong predictors of divorce: criticism, defensiveness, contempt and stonewalling. And words that convey contempt for a partner are the strongest predictors of all.

The NPR piece is designed for a mass audience. Elizabeth’s piece is written for an academic audience. I recommend both.

Dane Glasgow is moving on.

See also my previous post on this topic.

InformationWeek published an article on Microsoft’s internet strategy yesterday that I found interesting. Two bits in particular:

(1) The discussion on the new team under Ray Ozzie that’s going after cloud services (”Heavy Hitters on a Secret Mission”). This is a ray of hope. (Pardon the pun.)

(2) Speculation on business model:

…where online advertising figures into a software-plus-services environment isn’t entirely clear. Ozzie said in February that ad support won’t be the predominant way Microsoft generates revenue from its online enterprise software–volume licensing or subscriptions are more appropriate–and it will play a mixed role in its small-business services offerings.

Seems kind of obvious. Many businesses are happy to have a company like Microsoft, Google, Yahoo or Amazon handle some of their infrastructure — who wants to worry about storage, for instance? — but not at the cost of peppering their employees with ads while they’re trying to get work done.

The obvious alternative is subscriptions. This is a long-time Microsoft dream; I recall as far back as 1999 very explicit discussion about how to move to an “annuity” business model, i.e. deriving annually or monthly recurring revenue from customer subscriptions to software services that continuously improve over time. That’s essentially how it works anyway for really large Microsoft customers, by way of the multi-year enterprise licensing agreements they sign. These agreements give them “all you can eat” access to Microsoft products, services, and support. The only catch is that much of the software still comes in boxes, on DVDs. But that’s changing fast as network pipes get bigger.

The challenge is making this model turnkey and cost-effective for all types of customers. Think how far we have to go before we can buy “computes” the way we buy kilowatts of electricity and liters of water. We’re getting there fast with gigabytes of disk space, though.

I wonder, also, how far up the stack software services will become commoditized in the way true utilities are.

It’s a fun race to watch.

This is a post about making smart career choices within a tech company. It’s inspired by email letters I receive — about one every week or two — from colleagues I worked with and hired at Microsoft. They’re reaching crossroads in their careers and looking for advice on how to make their next decision. In a nutshell, “Should I stay or should I go?”

It’s a familiar question. About once a year I pop up from my rabbit-hole and wonder, am I in the right place? Is there something else I should be doing instead? Is this what it’s all about? Then I put on my peril-sensitive sunglasses and go back into my hidey-hole.

Just kidding. To cope with such soul-troubling times I built a handy little checklist of questions. Here it is:

1. Do you find the work intellectually stimulating? You want a job that’s challenging, after all, one in which you’re learning new things at a manageable clip. You need to scratch that intellectual itch. At the same time, your work environment shouldn’t be so diverse or chaotic that you never build true proficiency in an area. So find a job that’s difficult enough to stretch you and keep you engaged, and stick with it at least long enough to master and complete something substantial.

2. Are you valued fairly for your contribution? It’s no fun doing a job that your co-workers perceive to be low-value. As a program manager, for instance, you can all too easily find yourself doing work that is essentially secretarial… writing specs to match already-existing code, for instance. As a tester, you might find yourself testing something that was clearly written without the slightest thought of quality assurance or product support. Not surprisingly, jobs like that are soul-killing, and management values them little when it comes time to hand out performance rewards. These problems were common at Microsoft when I worked there, especially in engineering-dominated groups that preferred “coding for coding’s sake”.

Find a team where you can truly add value and be part of the core, rather than sit on the periphery. For program management, this means looking for teams with a strong desire to understand their customers, and teams that face a high degree of uncertainty and complexity. For test engineers, this means looking for teams where developers and testers work together from start to finish, rather than paying lip service to the quality assurance role. For developers, make sure the software you’re writing is truly essential to the product, and integrates cleanly with what your co-workers — in all job roles — are doing.

The twice-as-good rule applies here: “If you can’t make it at least twice as good as what already exists, choose something different to work on.” The Office team used that rule to help decide what features to put in a new product version, and I think the rule works well for choosing jobs too.

3. Are you passionate about what you do? If you’re working at a company like Microsoft, or Google, or insert-cool-tech-company-name-here, you’re probably a smarty-pants with a techie bent and strong ability to get the right stuff done. Frankly, you can work pretty much anywhere you want, if you put your mind to it. So, here’s a news flash for you, my fine-feathered friend: life is short. So work on something you actually like. This is especially true in positions that require long, intense hours… sooner or later, and probably sooner, there will come a day when your compensation package cannot possibly make up for burning the candle at both ends. At times like these, and indeed on not-so-hectic days as well, it’s passion that fills the gap and makes the work worth doing. If you can’t get excited about your job for, say, more than half of the time you’re putting into it, move on.

4. Are you working with good people? Do they inspire each other, help each other, treat each other with respect? Or do they just drag each other down? Again, life is short, and there are an infinite number of jobs out there, so it’s incumbent on you to find one staffed with people you like. In my experience, great people are often the differentiator between a good job choice and a bad one.

That’s it. Four simple questions. Learn ‘em. Use ‘em.

Parting advice: if you are at a point where it’s time to move on, do so with grace and integrity. Deliver on the goals you signed up for. Complete the promises you made to co-workers and customers. Hand off your responsibilities so they don’t just drop on the floor. And time it right, too… don’t leave just before a performance review, for instance, because weak managers will often use that opportunity to short-shift you. There will never be a perfect time to move on, but some times are certainly better than others.

Pass it on.

A year and a half after launching their new search engine, Microsoft’s US market share in web search has declined from 13% to 9%, while Google and Yahoo! both gained. Microsoft is treading water while the market overall has grown. Here are the share numbers.

Yesterday brought more bad news for the Windows Live Search team: VP Christopher Payne is leaving Microsoft to start his own company.

It’s hard to imagine how to spin this one positively. Christopher was one of the first to pitch Bill and Steve on building a new search service in-house rather than continuing to outsource to Yahoo!. He played a huge role in recruiting key people to the team, creating a vision, and integrating marketing, business and customer focus into what was undoubtedly a pure engineering team. And as you can imagine, his business performance goals were tied in no small part to gains in market share and profitability. So this is not just the departure of the chief cheerleader and visionary; it’s a sign that success in search is not coming nearly as fast as Microsoft had hoped.

Having been on the team myself I have mixed feelings about this changing of the guard, and I imagine many of the people I used to work with are feeling the same way. When a key leader heads for the door you stop and question what keeps you there. Is it your passion for the technology and business challenges? Your allegiance to the company, the leaders, the team you helped build? The paycheck? How does that stack up against the negatives of the job? (Unless things have changed radically, the main down sides were: unattainable performance expectations pushed down from above, grueling hours, and a maddening culture of prima donna behavior that was tolerated and even rewarded.) Most importantly, how does all that measure up against time you could be spending doing something else? It’s worth doing that math once in a while.

Of course, the search battle is not over. In fact, it’s barely begun. But it will continue to be uphill for Microsoft. From the Seattle PI, March 5: “You have to think that, with the heavy lifting behind it, Microsoft has got to be in a good position to execute, and execute well,” Nielsen NetRatings’ Cassar said. “But they’re competing against two of the strongest companies, between Yahoo and Google, and so Microsoft can’t just execute well. Microsoft needs to execute in an extraordinary fashion in order to just keep pace.”

Good luck to all the warriors.

update March 8: Danny Sullivan gives some history on search at Microsoft.