Category: business

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rtlinux software business systems

The long haul in the embedded software business.

Chris Lanfear from VDC systems asks

FSMLabs has the product line, but lacks the market presence and awareness that other companies have invested in with venture-backed capital. We believe the company has largely bootstrapped itself over the years and while this conservative approach has a number of benefits, it is difficult to achieve the market presence of a MontaVista that way. That said, the problems that MontaVista appears to have are only compounded by investors with high-return expectations. Maybe the folks in Socorro have a better plan?cite

And that’s reasonably on target. We have grown slowly, invested in technology and engineering, remain relatively clueless about “market presence”, and have a pretty straightforward business operation (make products with some compelling technical advantage, sell them at a profit, sell support at break even or better, move towards more integrated products, leverage the open source
base so we don’t re-create commodity stuff, … ). Chris underestimates the number of mission critical applications using RTLinux, but see “clueless about marketing” above. Our sales guys have to sell the stuff on price and quality – a daunting task in this market.

Chris mentions our lack of VC investment, and one of the reasons we have not taken VC investment is that we have resisted pressures to make up stories about fabulous wealth in blinks of an eye and “innovative” business models that create profits from “market presence”. We sell highly complex, technical software that requires a long slow engineering and test process. Our “business model” of looking for compelling technical advantage pushes us towards hard problems (you can’t obtain a compelling technical advantage on work that can be done easily).

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software business

PowerPoint and RocketScience II

In a previous note I objected to venture capitalist Guy Kawasaki’s requests (demands) for shallow and glib sales pitches in PowerPoint, but Professor Edward Tufte is also asking for sales pitches, just ones with more sober disguise. When you read “My other models for NASA are Feynman’s lectures on physics, and the A3 page (or 11 by 17 in) folded in half” the excellent quality of the writing helps slip by the emotive appeal to the form of Fenyman’s lectures and crisp clean sheets of paper as if something were implied about the quality of the content. Any University library computer science section can supply an apparently infinite number of illustrations of how perfectly good paper, verb predicate sentences, and beautifully typeset symbols can be employed to transmit vacuous nonsense.
What Tufte identifies as marketing values – “fast pace, misdirection, advocacy not analysis, slogan thinking, branding [and] exaggerated claims” – can easily be found in academic conferences. Computer science is not unique. Physicists joke about the rate of increase of the size of Physics Letters, calculating the date when it will be growing faster than the speed of light, and noting that no laws of physics will be violated since “no information is carried”.
Kawasaki is asking the desperate “entrepreneurs” to pitch their products and companies in 10 quick pictures. Could a presentation like that convey an idea of what HP or Visicalc or Apple or Adobe or Microsoft was trying to do? And all that simple stuff has already been done. Shallow pitches cannot give enough information to distinguish between a brilliant new idea for a storage system and some tired rehash of what everyone else did twenty years ago. But Tufte is also judging books by the illustrations. Feynman was a showman. I don’t believe that he would have refused PowerPoint, smoke machines, laser light shows, a samba band, or live dancers (especially not live dancers) in his lectures. The clarity, intellectual rigor, and honesty of the work (what Feynman described as bending over backwards to look at any possible weakness in the argument) has little to do with the medium or the venue.

Kawasaki and bullshitTufte are both very sharp and provide interesting observations on presentation syntax. But the semantics is the real deal. Presentations are collaborations between audience and presenter. If the audience is passive, lacks expertise, and doesn’t want to do the work required for critical analysis, the presenters will be drawn to the audience level. If the presenter is making a less than honest pitch, a 40 page tightly written document carries with it no warranty. The failure of managers to understand the problems with the Columbia space shuttle would not have been overcome by banning PowerPoint. Professor Frankfurt points out that bullshit “is one of the most salient features of our culture”. Seeing through bullshit is tough work and it can’t be delegated to formatting.

(put the graphic back 0ct 2 2014)

 

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software business systems

Power Point, Rocket Science and dangers of compelling stories

In American English, you can say that something is not too difficult by saying “it’s not rocket science.” We don’t have a good idiom for saying the opposite – that something is hard to understand, not bullet-pointable. Edward Tufte dislikes PowerPoint because it can be used in a way that obscures critical data under a pile of graphics and misleading bullet points.

My other models for NASA are Feynman’s lectures on physics, and the A3 page (or 11 by 17 in) folded in half. You can see where we’re at. If they would just write sentences, with subjects and predicates, rather than those damn bullet points.
At some of these organizations, a technical report is called a “pitch” and is presented in 10-15 minutes, or presented simply as a PP deck to look over, or shown as a one-slide executive summary, or circulated by email-attached PP slides for the cognoscenti. Some of that reporting is done in a crisis; the Boeing PP slides were prepared in 2 or 3 days when the Columbia was in trouble but still flying. ( cite)

Guy Kawasaki wants shorter, sharper, presentations:

a PowerPoint presentation should have ten slides, last no more than twenty minutes, and contain no font smaller than thirty points.

from Guy Kawasaki

I’m dubious that improving the technology or execution of presentations is a solution to anything. Certainly improving the technology of selling political candidates has not improved their quality. Kawasaki is asking for a short sweet pitch. He’s asking to be told a compelling story about how he can make lots of money fast. And the NASA bureaucrats wanted compelling stories about how they could complete the mission. Making the NASA presentations shorter and sharper would not have helped. Maybe the pitches tell Kawasaki what he needs to know – part of what he wants to know is whether the presenter is a good salesperson. Sales and sales pitches are part of how we communicate. But some things are rocket science or just as hard and for those things pitches are dangerous. For rocket science or the equivalent you need tough, demanding, focused presentations that painstakingly dig out the tradeoffs and uncertainties. These presentations don’t have to be dull, but they are too qualified and too complex to be good pitches. Compelling stories may not be true stories. Pitches that engage us emotionally may also lead us down the wrong path. Something may feel right but be wrong. I often ask for more detail, more caveats, more analysis both on engineering issues and business issues. In both places, short sweet and compelling can mean  too good to be true.

I’m biased of course, because many of our competitors* have much better pitches than ours. Fortunately for us, although not necessarily for everyone involved, physics trumps salesmanship in our field – eventually and sometimes spectacularly. (There’s a followup to this note here)

*[ this was back in the RTLinux days – VY]  (added this and removed broken link 10/3/2014)

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software business

Why programs fail and get hacked

“People’s distrust of the high-pressure engines was confirmed when the boiler of a stationary engine exploded at Greenwich on 8 September 1803. It was the usual tale; the boy who had been trained to work the engine went off to catch eels and a labourer stopped the engine without releasing the safety valve.” Richard Hills, Power from Steam, Cambridge 1989.

I posted this to Risks digest in 1995. Software is still in the pre-safety equipment steam boiler stage.

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rtlinux software business

The romance of trade and fuzzy slippers

Commerce used to be more fashionable. The French historian Fernand Braudel writes that in the 1630s “ten ships a year from the Indian ocean, from Calicut, Surat, or Msulipatam, and the odd Portugese ship out of Goa were still arriving in Mocha with cargoes of pepper, cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves“. He quotes a French trader of the 17th century about Cairo: “the number of merchants of the Indies is beyond reckoning, in coffee, incense, gum, aloes of all sorts, senna and tamarind, saffron-bulbs, myrrh, ostrich plumes, fabrics of all kinds of thread and cotton, stuffs and porcelains.” I’d like to believe that 300 years from now, someone will read “real-time operating systems from New Mexico sent for cell phones in Nice, jet engine testers in Hartford, machine tools in Shanghai, network switches in Sunnyvale, and locomotives in Germany” and marvel at the odd commerce of a forgotten age. It does seem unlikely. the software business is just not as romantic as shipping coffee and tamarind via Mocha. But I doubt that those ancient merchants in Mocha could beat us on sheer absurdity of our Internet age world mix of cultures. G. and I went to visit the Japanese owned machine tool company in Shanghai, climbed the stairs to a foyer where, as per Japanese custom, shoes were exchanged for slippers provided by our hosts, and then we tried focus on a serious business discussion, suavely drinking green tea while dressed in suits and ties wearing fuzzy Budweiser-logo slippers on our feet.
I guess it could have been worse.fuzzy slippers

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software business

Class and lack thereof

From the always readable Joel on Software:

Attention, FogBugz competitors: a court has ruled that you are welcome to continue to advertise your products when people search for FogBugz on Google. I actually don’t think there’s anything wrong with this although it does show a certain lack of class, mm, don’t you think? You don’t see Wal*Mart advertising when you search for Tiffany.

Type “rtlinux” in Google. RTLinux is a registered trademark of FSMLabs. Actually, the number of companies on the right has declined over the last year.