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Posts related to specific software applications

My First Job: Do You Know What a Dollar is Worth?

/ Adam Nash

I started reading personal finance blogs with the discovery of My Open Wallet.  Since then, I’ve started following more than a dozen of these sites, where real people anonymously provide significant details about their own finances, questions and progress towards their own financial goals.

Today, for some reason, the post on the blog “2Million” really resonated with me:

Do You Know What a Dollar Is Worth?

It’s a simple post about his first job as a dish washer, and the incredible realization that after a whole day of work, the end result was a $35 paycheck.

If you don’t count the times that my brother & I went door-to-door with a wagon selling lemons from our tree for a quarter, my first job was actually in the software industry.

It was the summer of 1991, and the father of a friend of mine hired me to work at his software company, an enterprise software play focused on one of the hot themes of that era: “Expert Systems“.   The company was called Expert Edge Software.  I was 16 years old, and it was the summer before I started college at Stanford University.

Like any normal Silicon Valley start-up, we had a small office space in a non-descript building in Mountain View.  My job was to actually make the software.  No programming – I literally was in charge of:

  • Copying the final build to production 3.5″ floppy disks
  • Testing the floppy disks
  • Typing labels for the floppy disks
  •  Packaging together the floppy disks and manuals into the production boxes
  • Shrinkwrapping the boxes (which I did by wrapping them loosely and then using a hair dryer to shrink the plastic around the box).

8 weeks, and I was paid $4.25 per hour (minimum wage), before taxes.

Ironically, I almost worked myself out of a job in the first week.  I quickly learned the task, and spent the first day forming an assembly line.  On day 2, I made 20 copies of the disks (4 per set).  I then tested them all, typed all the labels, made 20 boxes, and shrinkwrapped them all.  On day 3, I met with my friend’s father (the CEO), and showed him the progress.   He wasn’t thrilled.

Apparently, what I didn’t understand at the time was that for an enterprise software company, especially a startup, 20 copies was more than they were likely to sell in a year.  Previously, the lead engineer had been packaging the software, but because he had much more important things to do, he rarely made more than 1 or 2 copies in a week.  I guess somehow no one realized that making 20 boxes of software wasn’t going to take a whole summer, even for a high school student.

Fortunately, there is always more to do at a startup.  I spent the rest of the summer learning about direct marketing.  There was no email back then, but I learned how to purchase and mine commercial databases of contacts, and I put my assembly line skills to work sending out thousands of marketing brochures to manufacturing executives.  I am still a force to be reckoned with, when it comes to Microsoft Word, Filemaker Pro, and Mail Merge.  🙂

Most of my memories from that summer are not from the work, but from the people at the company.  I didn’t know them well, but I would hang out with the engineers, and we’d go to lunch in Los Altos or Mountain View.  It was actually the summer I discovered Bueno Bueno Burritos & Yogurt, still my favorite burrito place (on El Camino, near San Antonio).  I remember getting my lunch and realizing that at about $8, I was working almost half the day, after taxes, just to buy lunch.

Just one of those experiences that help frame your life.  Thought I’d share.

Don Norman in Defense of PowerPoint

/ Adam Nash

How is it possible that I didn’t know that Don Norman wrote a post entitled:

In Defense of PowerPoint

He wrote the post over two years ago. However, I remember the storm over this like it was yesterday. It all started with a New York Times article in 2003 called “PowerPoint Makes You Dumb“. It was written in response to the investigation into the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster, which pinned part of the blame on a “PowerPoint Culture” with too little detail.

A sample paragraph from the NYT article:

This year, Edward Tufte — the famous theorist of information presentation — made precisely that argument in a blistering screed called The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint. In his slim 28-page pamphlet, Tufte claimed that Microsoft’s ubiquitous software forces people to mutilate data beyond comprehension. For example, the low resolution of a PowerPoint slide means that it usually contains only about 40 words, or barely eight seconds of reading. PowerPoint also encourages users to rely on bulleted lists, a ”faux analytical” technique, Tufte wrote, that dodges the speaker’s responsibility to tie his information together. And perhaps worst of all is how PowerPoint renders charts. Charts in newspapers like The Wall Street Journal contain up to 120 elements on average, allowing readers to compare large groupings of data. But, as Tufte found, PowerPoint users typically produce charts with only 12 elements. Ultimately, Tufte concluded, PowerPoint is infused with ”an attitude of commercialism that turns everything into a sales pitch.”

This issue resonates with me for three reasons:

  1. Don is one of the HCI legends. Even though I now work at eBay, I began my career at Apple Computer, working in the Advanced Technology Group before transferring to the WebObjects team after Apple acquired NeXT. Towards the end, ATG was rebranded the “Apple Research Labs”, and Don Norman was the VP (and Apple Fellow). Don’s book, The Design of Everyday Things, is one of the standard bearers for an education in design.
  2. I find myself using a lot of PowerPoint. It started with my work in venture capital, digesting 6-10 new presentations a day presented live, and an uncounted number over email. Now at eBay, I find that in the end, there is no better way to pitch a new business or a new product strategy broadly than to go through the exercise of producing a truly great slide deck. I wonder sometimes whether I now see more decks at eBay than I did in venture capital.
  3. Don is right. PowerPoint has its place. I love to joke about PowerPoint – I even use some quotes from the article in a lunch presentation I do at Stanford every year as an ice-breaker. But the fact is, there is a time and a place for a PowerPoint presentation. Like any other mode of communication, there are situations where the ability to distill concepts into a short, simple visual presentation is the right answer. I have written my share of 1-page memos, 10-page decks, and long emails. There is a time and a place for each, and if you think any one of them is right for every audience and every situation, then you are not thinking hard enough how to match the best communication vehicle to every situation.

So while I can’t say that I’m proud of the fact that these days I probably produce better PowerPoint decks than Java code, sometimes it is the right tool for the job.

As an aside, I remember the Columbia disaster like yesterday. It was a relatively quiet time for me, as I was home with my wife and our new puppy, Newton, who was only a few months old. I woke up that morning, read the news, and we went to get coffee and a bagel to relax and absorb it. (For those in the Valley, we went to the Starbucks & Noah’s Bagel on the corner of De Anza & Stephens Creek, right near Apple)

Why I Want a Nintendo Wii

/ Adam Nash / 5 Comments

So, before I get cynical, let me be perfectly clear:

If you want to buy me a great holiday present, buy me a Nintendo Wii. I want it, I love it, I need it. Get it for me.

Now, as the buzz builds, and I see machines priced at $300 over retail due to the scarcity of the machines, I thought I’d comment on why I want one.

It’s not because of the name. Wii? Are you serious? Even the codename, “Revolution” was better. If Nintendo needs to trim the fat on their marketing expenses, I’m pretty sure we can find some of the people responsible for that name to top the list.

It’s not because of the new controller. Nintendo really seems to have gotten the press going after E3 this year. All I see now are articles highlighting this new controller that lets you “swing a bat” or “cast a rod”. It seems to have hit some sort of chord with journalists who for the most part don’t play video games, but see some sort of excitement in a video game system that has more interaction in it and is easier to learn. Forbes has even reminisced about the old codename for the machine, by saying Nintendo’s Wii is a Revolution.

Maybe.

But you are talking to a Nintendo fan from the mid-1980s. Someone who bought the Light Gun. Someone who bought the Power Glove. Someone who has been promised these type of innovations before, and eventually realized that they are, in fact, just a gimmick.

Some of the best games ever had a single joystick and a single button. Or used four keys on keyboard. There have been exceptions – games that became famous because of their input device. I’m thinking of Centipede with the trackball or Dance Dance Revolution. Sometimes they create an entire genre of games (how many shooters with pistols have you seen in the arcades over the past 10 years.) In most cases, however, the input device does not define the quality of the game.

I’m just not convinced that Nintendo is going to redefine the input device for all games, which means that most good games will be designed for a traditional controller. And that means that someone is going to make a lot of money selling a traditional game controller for the Nintendo Wii very soon.

It’s not because of the price, although who would have thought $249 would be the “low end” price in late 2006 for a modern game system. And that’s without HD!

No, I want a Wii for a very simple reason, and it is the reason I’ve wanted every game system that I’ve ever owned since the Atari 2600.

It’s the software, stupid.

Nintendo continues to make unique and great games. Games that you cannot find on the other platforms, games that are better designed for all ages. I want to play the next Zelda, I want to play the next Mario. I’m excited about the fact that in a year or two I’ll be able to play the next Mario Kart with my son. I’m even excited about the fact that I may be better than him at it… at least until he turns 6 in 2010.

Sony has tried this round to differentiate themselves with better graphics. It’s ironic, since this was the approach that Microsoft tried to take with the first Xbox, and failed. Why? Because in a world where most games are made by third parties, the games tend to be cross-platform. Cross-platform means lowest common denominator development, in most cases.
That’s why it was rare to see significant improvements in the Xbox version of a game over the Playstation 2. And that’s why it’ll be rare to see significant improvements in a PS3 version of a game over the Xbox 360.

Microsoft is smarter this time. They have unique software for their platform based on in-house game developers that they have built or acquired. Of course, Microsoft has it’s own strategic fault, which is that they are a dual-platform gaming company. They continue to build games both for the Xbox 360 and for Windows. As a result, since most people have a PC, they can buy a PS3 and know full well that they will be able to play any game from Microsoft on their Windows PC, and any others on the Sony PS3.

I’m sure I’ll end up with an Xbox 360 or PS3 at some point, when the prices come down, and when I actually have an HD television in the living room.

But for now, buy me a Nintendo Wii. I need to start practicing now if I’m going to maintain my video game edge over my son through 2010. After all, he’s already 2.

Insights on Design: Marissa Mayer & Google Search Results

/ Adam Nash / 2 Comments

I picked up this snippet from John Battelle’s Searchblog yesterday:

Marissa Mayer, at Web 2.0 today, shared insights into some lessons Google has learned in trying to serve users. The take-away is that Speed is just about the most important concern of users—more than the ability to get a longer list of results, and more valuable than highly interactive ajax features.

What was most interesting to me, however, was the comments below about how the most effective results from testing were the opposite of what users believed they preferred:

…they didn’t learn that from asking users, just the opposite. The ideal number of results on the first page was an area where self-reported user interests were at odds with their ultimate desires. Though they did want more results, they weren’t willing to pay the price for the trade, the extra time in receiving and reviewing the data. In experiments, each run for about 8 weeks, results pages with 30 (rather than 10) results lowered search traffic (and proportionally ad revenues) by 20 percent.

The reason I wanted to highlight this insight here is that it offers up perhaps one of the greatest challenges across any design practice that tries to focus on the customer experience: what people say they want, and what actually performs best are not necessarily the same. In fact, I would argue that they are different in most cases.

This challenge is not a surprise for professionals in marketing, politics or finance. These fields have long recognized that there is a large difference in what people say they will support vs. what they actually do support. However, it’s a particular challenge in product design because so many people want to “provide the best possible user experience”.

At every company I have worked for, there has always been a large debate about how to do the best product design. Do you reach out, through focus groups and customer visits, and ask your best customers what new improvements they would like to see? Or do you quietly observe, through testing and product metrics, and then use inspired design professionals to produce the great advance in usability?

As a product professional, I truly believe that the answer is to do both. There is no doubt that listening to your customers directly can give you great insight into their experience and their prioritization of problems. This insight is the key to customer empathy, which I believe is the key to customer-centric design in any field.

At the same time, it is extremely important to recognize that the rationalization that many people give when making choices may not be fully informed. They likely do not realize all of the options available to them, or the options that are available technically. They are likely not experts trained in design, finance, marketing, technology, or psychology. Observation, whether direct or indirect, is they key for more informed experts to help produce solutions that the customer may not understand are possible. Customers will ask you for a candle, when what they really want is portable light. They will ask you for a VCR with fast rewind, instead of a DVD player.

So, in this case, to borrow the corporate-speak, you need to embrace the AND. Listen to your customers, empathize with them, know them as they know themselves. But measure and observe, review the data, and leverage the professional expertise of the product team to delight your customer with solutions that they didn’t even realize were possible. Once you have those designs, you have to test and tune them. You’ll know when you are on the right track when you find yourself surprised and delighted by your customer insights and design results.

Goodbye Eudora. Goodbye Safari. Hello, Apple Mail & Firefox.

/ Adam Nash / 1 Comment

To everything, turn, turn turn
There is a season, turn, turn, turn
And a time for every purpose under heaven.
A time to be born, a time to die
A time to plant, a time to reap
A time to kill, a time to heal
A time to laugh, a time to weep (continued)

I guess I’m getting overly sentimental about saying goodbye to my favorite internet applications, but the time has come.

I’ve been using Eudora on the Mac since 1992, when I finally got a dorm room in-wall connection to the Internet at Stanford. I have thousands of folders, gigabytes of email. I have little notes to classmates, friends, family from the last 15 years. I even have some very cute, flirty notes that I had sent in 1997 at Apple to the woman who would later become my girlfriend and then wife.

But Eudora has been so long abandoned by its owner (Qualcomm), so underdeveloped (it still lacks HTML email), and so unmanageable (archaic search functionality) that it is time to say goodbye. I will miss your ability to easily read Unix mailboxes, your simple file structure, and most of all, your ability to execute filters on a manual key-command trigger.

I’m moving to Apple Mail, and I’m also moving the brave new world of “search-based” email management. Instead of thousands of folders, I’ll just have one for “saved email”, and I’ll use “smart folders” to save searches for key people or topics.

I’m less attached to Safari, but I’ve stuck with it because of its tight integration into Mac OS X. I’m just tired of website forms not working properly on Safari 2.x. It seems I have to use Firefox more and more often anyway, just to be compatible with many of the websites I visit. Firefox 2 looks strong enough, and Mac-like enough for me to move over. Maybe I’ll change my mind again with Safari 3.0 in a few months, but for now, I’m making the move.

I found a nice application to move bookmarks from Safari to Firefox, so I’m good to go. I’ll post if there are any problems.

So, goodbye old friends. You will always have a place in my heart.

Blogs I Read: Mac Mojo (The Microsoft Office for Mac Team Blog)

/ Adam Nash

This is a relatively new one for me, but I find the posts pretty interesting from time to time.

This is the team blog from the group responsible for Microsoft Office for the Mac.  Most people don’t realize this, but Microsoft Office actually originated on the Mac, and despite all the conspiracy theories, the business continues to be a fairly large one for Microsoft.

For example, check out this post from yesterday about the size of the Microsoft Office for Mac codebase.  It shocked the hell out of me:

It’s all in the numbers… 

30 million lines of code.  For a suite of applications.  Unbelievable.

For those of you non-technical folks out there, this is a really big number.  I remember when it was revealed that Windows XP was approximately 40 million lines of code, and Sun had a field day pointing out that Solaris was only 7 million at the time.

In software, bigger is rarely better from a complexity or reliability standpoint.  This blog post explains some of the very human reasons why.

I personally have always believed that a complete rewrite is likely necessary from time to time with software applications, usually every 3rd to 4th major version or so.  The problem is, the economics so rarely support re-writing a codebase.  The time you spend rebuilding what already works could be spent on building new features, or fixing old ones.

In a small way, this legacy cost is what helps fuel the ongoing development of new applications, new companies, and new businesses.  It is always easy for the new entrant to “rebuild” what already exists.  This doesn’t make up for the incredible market advantage that the large players have, but it’s an interesting cost advantage that you don’t normally see in most industries.

Anyway, check it out.  Since I am a longtime Office for Mac user, I like seeing ongoing communication from their team to the community.

Code Monkey Video on YouTube

/ Adam Nash / 2 Comments

Found this today on Chad Alderson‘s blog. It’s not worth $1.65 Billion, but it’s definitely worth something.


Jonathan Coulton releases his songs under the Creative Commons license, allowing third parties (like Michael Booth) the ability to create things like these videos with them. These videos themselves are spliced together from World of Warcraft.

Lyrics are available here.

Some key lines:

Code Monkey think maybe manager want to write god damned login page himself
Code Monkey not say it out loud
Code Monkey not crazy, just proud

Code Monkey like Fritos
Code Monkey like Tab and Mountain Dew
Code Monkey very simple man
With big warm fuzzy secret heart:
Code Monkey like you

Very funny, and very cool.

Austin, TX: America’s Most Impatient City

/ Adam Nash

This is a fun one, reported in Forbes today:

Column: Marketing, Games, Speedy Towns – Forbes.com

This data is courtesy of eBay Express, so of course, regular readers know my bias as a unwavering member of the eBay Express team.

I had the pleasure of living and working in Austin, TX during the summer of 1995. One of my good friends had been tapped, as part of “Trilogy University 1995” (the first) to help build a Human-Computer Interaction group at Trilogy Software. As an intern, between my Bachelors & Masters degrees in Computer Science, I was one of the lucky inaugural members.

I remember a lot of fun things about that summer:

  • The amazing energy and camaraderie of the small (but growing) Trilogy team
  • Fun nights out at the Copper Tank, 4th Street, and who knows what else
  • The fun of spending a summer living in an apartment complex with a large number of other fun, energetic and brilliant software engineers from Stanford, Carnegie-Mellon, and MIT.

The energy of the summer was contagious in the tech industry. SGI was hiring 5000 engineers. Netscape went public. Windows 95 was about to release. Yahoo was a real, growing entity. Amazon vs. Barnes & Noble was a real debate. I even remember a fun, passionate argument with CEO Joe Liemandt about the future of Apple Computer (in all fairness, Joe was one of those burned PowerBook 5300 series users…)

The collection of talent that Trilogy attracted between 1993 and 1998 is a really impressive in retrospect. Trilogy was a case study on the power of human capital in shaping a company. Joe really had a vision of the type of people, and the type of company he wanted to build. It permeated who he recruited, how he recruited, and what type of experiences he tried to provide for new hires at the company. It permeated the culture, the compensation, and the way the company designed and built product.

That generation of employees is dispersed now, but the amount of raw horsepower of that talent pool was amazing.

Austin, TX is a great city, and was a lot of fun. Although I am a native to the Bay Area in California, I found the city easy to love.

Hard to believe it was 11 years ago already.