keeping simple » software business

Microsoft by the numbers

admin — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 23:41:06 +0000

From correspondent AY:

150,000,000
Number of Windows 7 licenses sold, making Windows 7 by far the fastest growing operating system in history.
<10
Percentage of US netbooks running Windows in 2008.
96
Percentage of US netbooks running Windows in 2009.
9,000,000
Number of customer downloads of the Office 2010 beta prior to launch, the largest Microsoft beta program in history. [source]
24%
Linux Server market share in 2005.
33%
Predicted Linux Server market share for 2007 (made in 2005).
21.2%
Actual Linux Server market share, Q4 2009.

http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_blog/archive/2010/06/25/microsoft-by-the-numbers.aspx

Those last numbers are especially damning since Linux started with superior technology, has an easier business model if your only goal is market share, and did not have a legacy ball-and-chain anywhere near the size MS has to drag along. But years of directionless bloat have taken a toll and the sponsor driven decisions to go for traditional “server/OS” technology methods in place of trying to find solutions to current customer problems has been very damaging.

Even discounting the obvious PR froth of this article: http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Linux-and-Open-Source/Linux-Losing-Market-Share-to-Windows-Server it is an interesting trend.

and just for kicks from April 2000

“During his presentation on scaling Linux to the enterprise, BitMover, Inc. CEO Larry McVoy raised a few furrowed eyebrows at the recently-held Colorado Linux Info Quest (CLIQ). His message: Symetric multiprocessing (SMP) scaling may be hazardous to your operating system (OS) health.”

“McVoy said that the level of harm is “directly proportional” to the amount of scaling and is “worse than linear” in the number of processors. Converting a uniprocessor OS to a four-way SMP OS introduces a “small amount of damage.” Converting the four-way SMP OS to a 32-way SMP OS does even more damage, he told the crowd. McVoy calls this phenomenon “the locking cliff.”"

“The bottom line, said McVoy, is that: “Linux needs to have bragging rights on ‘big iron’ to be taken seriously in the enterprise. But the traditional way of getting those rights involves a series of changes which do a lot of damage to the source base. So the problems are that Linux needs to scale, and traditional scaling is a bad idea. Linux will use traditional scaling if nothing else shows up,” he said, “but SMP clusters is a better way to do it. I’m the driving force behind that and I’m not driving because I’m wrapped up in BitKeeper.”"

http://www.linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2000-04-13-010-06-NW&tbovrmode=3

out of the loop in silicon valley

admin — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 21:35:21 +0000

NYTimes. But when she was raising money for Crimson Hexagon, a start-up company she co-founded in 2007, she recalls one venture capitalist telling her that it didn’t matter that she didn’t have business cards, because all they would say was “Mom.” Another potential backer, reports Claire Cain Miller in The New York Times, invited her for a weekend yachting excursion by showing her a picture of himself on the boat — without clothes. When a third financier discovered that her husband was also a biking enthusiast, she says, he spent more time asking if riding affected her husband’s reproductive capabilities than he did focusing on her business plan.

Ultimately, none of the 30 venture firms she pitched financed her company. She finally raised $1.8 million in March 2008 from angel investors including Golden Seeds, a fund that emphasizes investing in start-ups led by women.

On the other hand

She learned how to handle male-dominated pitches early in her career, when Rivals.com was buying another start-up. She was in the conference room, pouring a cup of coffee, when the other company’s executives and lawyers walked in. They proceeded to discuss the lowest bid they would accept, as if she wasn’t there.

“They assumed I was the admin,” or secretary, she says. When the group sat down to negotiate, she adds, “Their faces went white as ghosts.”

Priceless

Peer review in the electronic age

admin — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 21:43:14 +0000

In academic computer science, conferences are often more important than journals, but

The current system of publication in biomedical research provides a distorted view of the reality of scientific data that are generated in the laboratory and clinic. This system can be studied by applying principles from the field of economics. The “winner’s curse,” a more general statement of publication bias, suggests that the small proportion of results chosen for publication are unrepresentative of scientists’ repeated samplings of the real world. The self-correcting mechanism in science is retarded by the extreme imbalance between the abundance of supply (the output of basic science laboratories and clinical investigations) and the increasingly limited venues for publication (journals with sufficiently high impact). This system would be expected intrinsically to lead to the misallocation of resources. The scarcity of available outlets is artificial, based on the costs of printing in an electronic age and a belief that selectivity is equivalent to quality. Science is subject to great uncertainty: we cannot be confident now which efforts will ultimately yield worthwhile achievements. However, the current system abdicates to a small number of intermediates an authoritative prescience to anticipate a highly unpredictable future. In considering society’s expectations and our own goals as scientists, we believe that there is a moral imperative to reconsider how scientific data are judged and disseminated. (cite)

See my previous notes on refereeing in computer science.

Here

Shape of the internet

admin — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 14:43:47 +0000

“When we started releasing data publicly, we measured it in petabytes of traffic,” said Doug Webster, a Cisco Systems market executive who is responsible for an annual report by the firm that charts changes in the Internet. “Then a couple of years ago we had to start measuring them in zettabytes, and now we’re measuring them in what we call yottabytes.” One petabyte is equivalent to one million gigabytes. A zettabyte is a million petabytes. And a yottabyte is a thousand zettabytes. The company estimates that video will account for 90 percent of all Internet traffic by 2013. (cite)

(via Trevor Loy)

An interesting article in ACM communications: is the world ending?

admin — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 11:34:59 +0000

Coverity has a program that reads other programs looking for errors. The company started as a research project from Stanford (how unusual!) and the Communications article is really about what they found in commercial world. One thing they found was a lot of crappy programmers.

Upon seeing an error report saying the following loop body was dead code

“No, that’s a false positive; a loop executes at least once.”

Another thing they found is that “it’s more of a guideline than a rule” is a common theory among compiler writers – something that is an interesting problem when your program has to parse code to understand it. Microsoft’s “precompiled” header files feature is a great example of a non-value add. Here’s an amazing observation:

On the other hand, C# and Java have been easier, since we analyze the bytecode they compile to rather than their source.

What that says about the state of the art in abstract specification of programming languages is important. Perhaps byte code is a better target for all sorts of other program transformations including efforts to extract parallelism.

The article also gives a flavor of what its like to fall out of the university programming environment and wander across the strange lands of commercial practice where fossils still walk, unsolvable problems are routinely solved, and solved problems are impossible.

I liked the advice to make presentations to as large a group as possible in the interests of attracting at least one smart person who will get it. There’s nothing more despiriting than a presentation to a technical group that is in that sort of sullen defensive mood in which lousy practice and ignorance is a fortress of job protection.

Toyota’s problem: hardware weenies and poor accounting practices [updated]

admin — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 16:45:00 +0000

Jamie Kitman’s look at the twisted path Toyota followed to it’s current difficulties inspired me to think about software and money – two topics I spend way too much time thinking about. As a purely disinterested observer (ahem) it has come to my attention, repeatedly, that manufacturing companies undervalue, underinvest in, and undertest software. On a sales visit to a manufacturer of giant size industrial air-conditioners, I was told that some software improvements had reduced operating cost 25% but that purchasing software tools or hiring advanced consulting or top line engineers internally was out of the question. The software team was a capable enough group, but it did not contain anyone who could provide architectural perspective, help with design issues, understand tradeoffs involving OS/processor/board and so on so each project was a one-off desperate attempt to patch the existing undesign. The reason for this absence was simple: top level software engineers could not be hired for $40K/year. The team manager sadly told me that accounting was not willing to place high value on weightless, invisible code and so the usual rules for R&D for inputs to the manufacturing process gave their team nearly nothing.

As a visitor to Japanese auto companies 10 years ago, I was blown away by the brilliance of the industrial design and the enormous investment in that, and shocked at the software development effort – one in which the software team was clearly considered to be low status. Not that my, more limited, experience with US companies was much more impressive. In fact, it was interesting that as Japanese auto companies were reaching out to at least look at advanced control software, US companies relegated that work to the outer periphery. Of course, this was some time ago, but obviously a $100M investment in top level control software development and test at Toyota a decade ago would have been a good investment – even if they had not given any of it to me.

Once I was visiting an office products manufacturer and discussing their new project. The hardware team had chosen to use a processor for which there was no solid compiler suite, no existing strong web or network or other components etc. because it was cheap. I explained that the choice of processor was fine with us, but that our prices for providing basic RTOS support would be high due to the necessity of compensating for this environmental limitation. The team broke into a raucous argument between the software developers and the hardware engineers – with the software people basically yelling “we told you idiots!”.

One of the things that struck me at a Japanese auto company was how the manufacturing discipline that allowed them to make such high quality hardware was not even attempted with software. Software is still not taken seriously as a manufacturing area – and the consequences are not happy ones. See the article by founders of Coverity for a great tour of the strange views tolerated within software development

Do bugs matter? Companies buy bug-finding tools because they see bugs as bad. However, not everyone agrees that bugs matter. The following event has occurred during numerous trials. The tool finds a clear, ugly error (memory corruption or use-after-free) in important code, and the interaction with the customer goes like thus:

“So?”

“Isn’t that bad? What happens if you hit it?”

“Oh, it’ll crash. We’ll get a call.” [Shrug.]

Computer Science as a failed discipline

admin — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 17:47:03 +0000

Phrenology

I write an email to a CS Prof. asking if they have any followup work on some nice OS measurement research they published a couple of years back. The response is that there is no followup and then:

Me: Too bad. Is it just me or has everyone given up on measurement in OS research?

Prof: It is tough to get reviewers to not have the “there is nothing surprising here” reaction to a measurement study.

For many years, people working in academic computer science argued about whether the field was “science” or “engineering”. To me, this is a silly distinction for a lot of reasons, but currently the field seems to have settled on “neither”.

Amory Lovins on smart engineering

admin — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 02:58:26 +0000

Data centers show up around minute 24.

Green energy and smart devices

admin — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 04:04:51 +0000

We’re starting to see a confluence between IT and energy that will change both industries. A windmill power data center is an interesting data point. At some time, we’re going to want to control the energy generation from the data center – for example, to run big batch jobs when the wind is blowing or to generate more power during peak billing periods or to shut down unnecessary heat producing computations during low energy periods. As smarter technologies become available for generating power from waste heat, and as carbon generation costs become integrated into prices for purchased power, the whole economics of running data centers will change and the data center will have to act like an intelligent factory – producing compute time against costs of heat production and power consumption. As we get there, we have to understand that one of the most important properties of the Internet comes from its “end-to-end” design.Â Earlier networks suffered from the problem of being designed as layers, but the internet protocols and hardware were designed to solve the problem of moving streams and packets around networks of machines – considering the problem in totality, not as a set of layered components.Â Modularity is not incompatible with end-to-end, but end-to-end requires an understanding of the applications and is incompatible with the component supplier view that dominates modern computer systems development.

the elusive open source business model

admin — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 05:14:57 +0000

In some cases, dominant technology companies have used open-source projects as pawns. Google, for example, has needled Microsoft by providing financial support to the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation, which oversees of the development of Firefox. I.B.M. has been a major backer of Linux, helping to raise it as a competitor to Microsoftâ€™s Windows and other proprietary operating systems.

Many of the top open-source developers are anything but volunteers tinkering in their spare time. Companies like I.B.M., Google, Oracle and Intel pay these developers top salaries to work on open-source projects and further the companiesâ€™ strategic objectives. – New York Times.

There are four important views of open source:

The views of big companies like IBM and Oracle that make money from open source – as a tool for diverting money from competitors and evading anti-trust rules
The views of companies like Sun that lose money from open source -Â as a key part of the underwear gnome business model.
The views of programmers who embrace open source as a substitute for a coherent political point of view or a union or something.
The views of some engineers who see it as a way of getting low cost marketing of their work.