Software

Nolo Contendere

Readers have been asking -- demanding even -- an update on Team Cringely, my plan to win the Google Lunar X Prize and give my kids an inheritance worth fighting over. So this week I have to announce that, alas, Team Cringely is no longer in competition for the Google Prize. But we're still going to the Moon.

Huh?

The idea behind the Google Lunar X Prize was irresistible to me from the start. It was so audacious to think that private citizens could do what few governments had been able to do before -- to fly to the Moon, land there, launch a rover, drive around, and send pictures, video, and other data back to Earth. Yet the closer I looked the more feasible it seemed to be, especially with the impetus of that $20 million first prize. It would be the ultimate expression of Moore's Law as my team applied miniaturization to the task of lunar exploration.

So I boldly announced my intention to form a team, win the prize, and -- here's the kicker -- actually make a profit on the deal. Readers and their friends flocked to my cause and, almost before I knew it, I had the nucleus of exactly the sort of lean-and-mean organization I felt would be required to win the prize at a profit. Understand here that of the 15 announced teams, only two have said they can win the $20 million while spending less than $20 million, with the average team budget more on the order of $50-$75 million.

Then reality began to set in. This reality had nothing to do with the actual engineering exercise of going to the Moon: that was contained and calculable. This reality had to do with politics and economics. Economic reality said that all 15 teams were looking for a total of up to $1 billion -- a LOT of money. Even more sobering, most teams were approaching for support exactly the same potential investors, who probably wouldn't choose to invest in multiple teams. Charles Simonyi from Microsoft is a typical example, having been approached by at least three teams almost immediately because, of course, he had spent $20 million to visit the International Space Station, thus qualifying as both a Space Nut and a Space Nut with Money. But Charles, to my knowledge, hasn't yet invested in ANY Google Lunar X Prize team, nor have many other Space Nuts with Money.

With government funding limited by the rules to no more than 10 percent of any budget, I concluded that it is very doubtful that many teams will come anywhere near their funding goals. This means most of the 15 announced teams will never fly. Some will disappear while many will merge, but every merger brings with it inefficiencies as duplicated services that have already been paid for are jettisoned, technologies abandoned, team members scattered. It is going to get ugly.

These money issues had little effect on Team Cringely, however, simply because our $5 million budget was so low. I could find a couple investors, a couple corporate sponsors, and then -- as a TV guy -- cut a media deal or two and put together the $5 million budget with little or no pain to any participating parties. No children would have to miss their prom so Team Cringely could reach the Moon.

But I hadn't counted on the X Prize Foundation, which has done an extremely effective job of administering the contest to make it harder and harder to win.

This baffles me and, frankly, baffles everyone I have spoken to about it. It is hard enough to land on the Moon and drive around without someone setting additional administrative obstacles in the way. The X Prize Foundation should WANT a winner for this prize, but they don't act that way.

Here are a few examples of the obstacles. For one, while the X Prize Foundation released early on preliminary rules for the competition, they said the final rules wouldn't be cast in stone for another 20 months. For Team Cringely, with our very aggressive development schedule, this meant that we'd be landing on the Moon before the rules were finalized. We could win the contest only to find out that we were disqualified from receiving the prize. That's a hard one to explain to potential investors or sponsors. It still isn't clear why the X Prize Foundation feels the need to wait so long to finalize the rules, but they seem firm on this issue, which negates completely one of the strategic advantages of Team Cringely, which is essentially time to market.

The X Prize Foundation also required that rovers carry an "instrument package" weighing no more than 500 grams. We at Team Cringely came to call this the "bowling trophy," which we'd need to super glue to our one-kilogram rover. A pound of bowling trophy might mean very little to Carnegie Mellon University with its 500 lb. rover (and $100 million budget), but to Team Cringely it was a deal killer. More recently the rules have softened a bit to require that the bowling trophy be no more than a certain percentage of the vehicle weight, but we could never figure out why it was required at all. Couldn't we just paint X Prize logos on our rovers and be done with it? No explanation.

But the biggest obstacle of all for Team Cringely was the X Prize Foundation's insistence that only it could come to agreement for commercial media coverage of the contest. Team Cringely couldn't cut its own TV deal, nor could it even make its own TV show if that was intended to be done for substantial revenue. That would be handled by the X Prize Foundation on behalf of all teams with coverage and revenue equally shared. While that position sounds egalitarian, it isn't. The X Prize Foundation has no significant experience in media licensing -- certainly they have less than we have at Team Cringely where we've sold TV shows over many years to more than 50 countries. And by treating all teams equally it means the easiest (and only sure way) to make money from the Google Lunar X Prize is to pay the $10,000 registration fee then do nothing more, just waiting for that check to arrive for an equal share of the media dollars.

As the first team to launch, Team Cringely believed that we would provide most of the media coverage for the first two years of the five-year contest. Sharing that equally with teams that never got beyond fund-raising seemed terribly unfair.

We had some back and forth with the X Prize Foundation over these issues. When the preliminary rules were released 48 questions were submitted, 36 of those coming from Team Cringely. If a foundation could have an ass I'm sure the X Prize Foundation would have considered Team Cringely to be a pain in theirs. But we felt passionately about these issues and hoped for a positive resolution.

We even reached out to Google, which appeared to be aware of the issues and uncomfortable with the performance of the X Prize Foundation, but friendships were involved and Google is not a fast-moving organization anyway, so we got no help there.

To this point Team Cringely was still an unregistered entrant in the contest. We hadn't signed the entry form and hadn't paid our $10,000 entry fee simply because doing so would have tied us into these very rules that we found both intolerable and unnecessary.

Then earlier this month the Google Lunar X Prize teams met for two days in Strasbourg, France. And where we hoped the situation would improve, it hadn't. Here is the new X Prize Foundation position on media rights, for example:

"The X PRIZE Foundation is in the best position to generate, aggregate and distribute Competition content. The X PRIZE Foundation will produce television, digital media, et cetera that covers the context, issues and all the Teams efforts in their race to the Moon. ...The Foundation will also have considerable costs to stage ramp up events to stimulate and sustain interest, develop and distribute educational programs and materials, and package the content into meaningful programs and platforms to reach the public. The Foundation's planned mix of promotion, publicity, television programming, and online content is essential to the competition...

"Although some may feel that this takes some potential revenue streams away from teams, that is not the intention of the PRIZE. Allowing each Team to separately package their own programming and mission coverage is not practical or beneficial to the overall competition. Imagine if Olympic teams each went out and tried to make their own television deals: it would not result in the best telling of the entire story, and there would be chaos in the marketplace...

"The X PRIZE Foundation is hiring a major international agency to represent its competitions in the packaging and sale of television and other media rights.... Rather than allowing each Team to negotiate deals separately... the responsibility will be borne by our world-class representative, with long time experience in selling media packages. ..."

Sounds pretty defensive, eh?

The problem with the Olympics analogy is that it doesn't hold up. There isn't one media deal for the Olympics, there is one media deal PER COMPETING COUNTRY -- PER TEAM. NBC doesn't buy the rights to broadcast the Olympics in Japan. And NBC's coverage is biased toward its own market, which means mainly covering the U.S. team, just as a Japanese broadcaster would have its own Olympic contract and would bias its coverage toward the Japanese team.

And the X Prize Foundation bureaucracy, which made so little sense in the first place, seems only to have increased. Here are typical comments I gleaned from a public forum after the Strasbourg meeting:

"The Team Summit's Guidelines workshop showed that the more bureaucratic part of the mission has begun," wrote a poster from one team. "While on a personal level, I liked each of the leaders there from XPF, and enjoyed interacting with them, I was puzzled at the somewhat cavalier way they seemed to dismiss some of the teams' concerns. For example, we were very proud of the fact that our team had managed to get some surplus company fuel tanks; when I asked about it, without much thought I was told 'you'll have to get a ruling on that.' Also, when I asked something about our camera design (a design we had worked very hard on), I was told that the way we were doing it would not be allowed. HUH? Do they know how hard we have worked on this?"

Here's another: "I inwardly cringed at their responses to some of the other team's concerns. ... They all had concerns regarding the media aspects of the rules that I did not feel were adequately addressed, and maybe even more important -- even adequately appreciated. The cumulative effect coming from the XPF leadership was one of discouragement, rather than encouragement."

So what's a poor team leader to do? The answer came to me a couple weeks ago during an engineering colloquium I gave at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center near Washington, DC. This was my second such colloquium at Goddard, the first being 14 years earlier. "Why yes, Virginia, I AM a rocket scientist."

I was embarrassed to tell the engineers and scientists at Goddard that Team Cringely, being a pirate operation, really had no scientific basis for its mission. Other than simply proving that it was possible to send a small rover (or in our case 24 small rovers) to the Moon for $5 million, we weren't inventing anything or answering any scientific questions. But with the help of the very friendly NASA folks that day I came up with a scientific purpose for our mission -- a purpose I'll detail in some later column. Suddenly it was about more than making money and I was much happier as a result.

But what about the X Prize Foundation, the crazy rules, micromanagement, the absence as adult supervision from Google, and the continuing media rights problem?

I said, "Screw it."

So Team Cringely is no longer intending to compete for the Google Lunar X Prize. Nor will we make ANY further comment about the contest, any participants, or the X Prize Foundation. We wish them all well, but life is too short for bickering, so we're moving on to the next stage of Team Cringely's existence.

Which still involves going to the Moon. The idea was too good to let die. We are moving forward aggressively on our new scientific mission, which I hope will be conducted jointly with Goddard, though with little or no NASA money involved. We'll still send our 24 little rovers to the Moon and we'll still do it on an aggressive schedule because I get bored too easily. We just won't be expecting that big payday at the end. What we WILL get, however, are some scientific answers of great value, control over our own technology, and hopefully a very fine little media deal to pay some of the bills.

To the Moon!

IT Wars

Last week's column on Gartner Inc. and the thin underbelly of IT was a hit, it seems, with very few readers rising to the defense of Gartner or the IT power structure in general. To be fair I probably should have said that Gartner isn't totally worthless, but I think their specialists should be more specialized and they shouldn't promote technologies or products without being darned familiar with them -- a lot more familiar than they seem to be at present. But the bigger question is why IT even has to work this way at all?

I don't think it has to.

Most of the problems of IT start and end with bad management. I speak fairly often to technical audiences and one question I like to ask is simple: If you were hit by a bus tomorrow, could your boss do your job?

The answer is almost always "no." By "almost always" I mean 97-99 percent of the time.

It's a question I have been asking for 15 years and the answer hasn't changed in that time. It would appear bosses aren't becoming more accomplished, at least not yet.

The implications of this answer are profound. It either means that IT managers aren't being promoted from within or, if they are being promoted from the ranks, they lose their technical skills almost immediately.

If we drill down a bit further some real truths start to emerge. Whether IT managers are promoted from within or brought from outside it is clear that they usually aren't hired for their technical prowess, but rather for their ability to get along with THEIR bosses, who are almost inevitably not technical. For every John Reed, who rose from IT to run CitiCorp (and ultimately failed), there are a thousand CEOs who want nothing to do with computers.

It might be easy to say that IT, as a staff -- rather than a line -- job simply isn't seen as critical to the success of the organization, but that's crazy. IT touches every employee and customer every day. Most of what's accomplished in business these days is ordered, fulfilled, paid for, and analyzed through the use of IT. We can't eliminate it because now government expects -- even demands -- that it be there. If something is so important, then, why do the big bosses understand it so little?

For the most part they are kept in the dark.

Since the early mainframe days there has been a priesthood of sorts in corporate computing -- a level of executives who felt that their power would be enhanced by keeping technology mysterious. "It's much too hard for you to understand, Mr. CEO, even if you started out long ago as an electrical engineer. Electrons are different now you know."

"It's complex and mysterious, this IT stuff, and dependent on people who don't think like you or I do," the CEO is told and he/she believes it because the alternative is laboriously becoming an expert in an area they don't like or thought that they had outgrown. This leaves IT in a bit of a vacuum but it is a vacuum with some power. And in most organizations power ultimately manifests itself in head count, so IT organizations grow like crazy, becoming ever less efficient in the process.

The typical power structure of corporate (which includes government) IT tends to discourage efficiency while encouraging factionalization. Except in the rare instance where the IT director rises from the ranks of super-users, there is a prideful disconnect between the IT culture and the user culture. It's the AV kids from school versus the "normal" kids. IT organizations often disrespect users and users often disrespect IT. This is not good for either group.

One of the real miracles of the PC revolution was that it often was led by super-users -- enthusiasts who had a PC at home before they had one at work and who led their co-workers as much through example as skill. Well those days of the 1970s and '80s are long gone and IT is today as entrenched and isolated as it was during the mainframe era of the 1960s.

In time this will end through the expedient of a generational change. Old IT and old users will go away to be replaced by new IT and new users, each coming from a new place. This is the same challenging effect I wrote about a few weeks ago for education. A generational change will completely alter our cultural approach to information technology. And it can't happen soon enough for me.

An analogy we used to make years ago was comparing the PC industry to the early U.S. auto industry. There were hundreds of companies in both businesses at one time (in the 1920s for cars and the 1980s for computers), but each eventually consolidated into a dozen or so major brands and a few hot rods. Our problem using the auto analogy today is that we haven't let it evolve. Where IT may have once been like the 1920s auto industry, now it is becoming more like that same industry in the 1980s.

This transition goes far beyond simple brand consolidation. When was the last time you worked on your own car? You could change your oil, probably, but you don't, right? And you haven't done so since the late 1970s or early 1980s. Same for IT today, where the do-it-yourself attitude of the 1970s has given way to a do-it-for-me attitude. I'm not saying this is bad. Indeed, I think it was inevitable as the market broadened from just PC enthusiasts until it today encompasses everyone.

Al Mandel, who helped market the original LaserWriter at Apple and later had several high-level positions at AOL, used to say that the step after ubiquity was invisibility, and that's where we are headed today with IT, which has become so pervasive that everyone uses it to the point where NOT using it is no longer even an option. The problem is our management of IT hasn't evolved as quickly as our assimilation of it. We'll probably still be fighting over who owns IT long after the IT resources, themselves, become effectively no longer ownable, except in our corporate minds.

I'm writing this column on an iPhone, for example. It isn't the easiest or best writing environment but, as Adam Osborne used to say, it is good enough. It offers the input, output, networking, and storage I need and almost nothing I don't need. I'm not saying the iPhone or smartphones like it are the absolute future of personal computing, but I AM saying the desktop PC is its absolute past.

We're in an era of transitioning business models. IT is shrinking in traditional terms and will continue to shrink as cheaper mobile devices replace more expensive desktops for some workers. Software will change from being a product to a service. And because the incumbent players in the software biz are especially uncomfortable as service organizations, we'll inevitably see some changes in that pecking order. Microsoft will go down and Apple, for example, will probably rise. Users will be changed forever as new paradigms emerge, but for a few more years at least, corporate IT won't notice, being too darned busy fighting its own internecine wars.

Problem solved with Windows Home Server

In this previous post, I mentioned that I was having probelms setting up my HP MediaSmart.  I connected the server and a laptop to a router that wasn't being used.  Once I did this, the setup worked perfectly, and I configured it.

When I connected the server back to the network, the probelms came back.  I then discovered, that if I disconnected my D-link NAS, the problem also went away.

I then tried connecting to the MediaSmart with RDP, and that works, even with the other NAS connected to the network.  I am able to do everyhing, and more, through rdp that I could do through the configuration application.

There is something wrong with the configuration client.  Maybe it has something to do with both the NAS and the MediaSmart being on different workgroups.  Maybe the clients sees one workgroup, the one from the NAS, and then it stops looking for the MediaSmart that happens to be in a different workgroup.

Reality Check

I have this notion to write a series of columns from time to time under the title "Reality Check" -- columns intended to explain how the world of Information Technology actually functions. Because like any other entrenched, complex, and often closeted industry, things in IT don't really work the way many people think they do. I'm guessing the Vatican is a bit like that, too. So I'll be looking at various IT players and their roles and trying to put them into perspective, much as I did recently with a column or two about the role of computer consultants. This week the topic is Gartner Inc., or rather all the Gartner-like operations that give advice about technology to America's largest businesses: what do these guys actually DO?

Not much of real value I'm afraid -- at least of value in my view.

While Gartner is the biggest of these outfits, I need to say that my comments apply equally to Gartner's main competitors, Forrester Research, International Data Corp. (IDC), and the Yankee Group.

Here's what Gartner says it does, straight from their website:

"Gartner offers the combined brainpower of 1,200 research analysts and consultants who advise executives in 75 countries every day. We publish tens of thousands of pages of original research annually and answer 200,000 client questions every year. We can help you make smarter and faster decisions. Our years of relevant experience and institutional knowledge prevent costly and avoidable errors. Be confident that with Gartner, your decisions are the right decisions."

So Gartner and, by association, Gartner's competitors help customers make better IT decisions. There is nothing inherently wrong with that. But why do governments and big companies NEED help making IT decisions? Don't most companies hire IT professionals to make those decisions in the first place? Do they really need to spend more than $2 billion per year between these consulting companies just to make better IT decisions?

The truth is that there is no IT "profession." Most of what IT managers know about IT they learn from vendors, consultants, and folks like Gartner. Because they feel isolated, and because the IT vendor/consultant/media system encourages them to worry about such things, IT managers tend to feel they must have their important decisions validated and Gartner is the most popular place to find validation. Yes they wield a lot of power, but it is often the power of discovering the obvious.

It's all about churn. If customers aren't buying stuff they won't worry about buying decisions, so they are always encouraged to buy. If customers don't change their IT infrastructure (or change it too slowly) they might become confident in their own ability to make the right choices, which would threaten the consultant relationship.

How often do these consultants tell their customers that everything is fine and no action is required? Almost never. In fact I'm tempted to say "absolutely never" simply because I haven't heard of such an instance, but I'm playing it safe here.

After all, I'm attacking the very temple of IT.

There are themes at Gartner and its competitors -- ideas that are presented on an almost seasonal basis like adding fins to change a 1956 Chrysler New Yorker into a 1957 Chrysler New Yorker. Two such themes that are popular with such consultants right now are offshoring/outsourcing and getting rid of legacy applications to gain agility, whatever that is.

I've written columns and columns about offshoring and outsourcing and the success of both policies is decidedly mixed, unless perhaps you are outsourcing down the street and offshoring Lake Michigan.

Outsourcing, while a very popular recommendation to improve IT, is treating the symptom and not the problem. The problem is IT applications require lots of ongoing maintenance and that costs labor, meaning REAL MONEY. Rather than make applications more reliable and reduce problems, IT managers seem to prefer shopping for cheaper labor. The problems are still there. It is cheaper to fix them with offshoring and outsourcing, true, but it often takes longer. If the end users -- the people who actually make MONEY for the company (IT doesn't, Lord knows) -- are unable to work from time to time, this is okay because IT is spending less money.

Yeah, right.

Much of this comes down to the decided lack of professionalism in IT, which is after all a very new job classification. There is a huge difference, for example, between someone with an engineering degree and someone in IT who calls himself an engineer. Real engineers are often valued employees. Their opinions matter and they have real responsibilities. Good companies know engineers are important to their business and treat them accordingly. But IT workers are a commodity and are treated as such. Many IT workers are clueless about the technologies they are working with. They aspire to be project managers and are often not very good at that either.

Into this knowledge vacuum come the vendors, who want to sell stuff, and the consultants like Gartner, Forrester, IDC, and the Yankee Group, who need IT managers to feel uncertain about every decision except the decision to buy something, anything. Then look at the number of "research reports" that are commissioned by vendors. Uh-oh.

The five P's of IT are Pride, Prejudice, Politics, Price, and Performance, with the last two being by far the least important. Consultants like Gartner are very useful for minding the pride and politics, their real function being to provide $2 billion worth of IT management CYA per year.

Now that I have alienated an entire industry, let's turn to this week's deal for Hewlett-Packard to buy Electronic Data Systems for more than $12 billion in cash. I'm not here to say this is the worst idea in the history of bad ideas, but I wouldn't do it.

The goal here seems to be size for the sake of size, because it sure isn't size for the sake of profitability. This is a business segment, remember, that IBM has been carefully and quietly leaving for more than a year now only to have HP jump in with both feet by purchasing a competitor less profitable at this stuff than IBM. The result will be a bigger business for HP that returns lower profit margins, which makes no sense to me.

I wonder what would happen to an outfit like HP Services if the company just decided to forget about acquisitions and simply invest $12+ billion in their current operation? Heck, half the people working right now in HP Services probably worked at some point in their careers for EDS (or IBM). What DNA is HP acquiring here that they don't have already?

None.

It just looks better to Wall Street, which loves acquisitions with their associated investment banking fees but doesn't seem to understand in the least the idea of boldly investing in an existing business.

Bill Hewlett would shake his head.

HP MediaSmart ex475

I have been interested in getting a Windows Home Server for a while.  Last week we got a HP MediaSmart ex475.  I was looking forward to installing it, and transfering everything off our NAS and our Mac mini.

When I plugged it in, it started up fine.  I installed the software fine on my laptop, but when the setup assistant tried to find the server, it failed.  It looks like this problem is happening to many other people. Reseting the server back to factory defaults didn't solve the problem.

I am extremely frustrated with this.  I am going to try creating a network with only the server and my laptop, to see if a noisy network could have caused the communication to be interrupted.  If that doesn't work, I will call HP techinical support.  (Unfortunately, this is hard for me to do, as they are only open during business hours, and I am at work at that time.)

I am very close to sending this back.