California Dreamin?

We buried my grandfather today. He died on Saturday at the age of 83. It was a terrific ceremony as so many of his friends and family came.

I saw a woman wearing a BEA t-shirt here in San Antonio yesterday. She was jogging as Shandelle and I drove by. Against Sha's wishes, I stopped and asked here why she was wearing the t-shirt. Like San Antonio is as far from Silicon Valley as you can possibly get -- BEA doesn't even have a sales office here. The woman was very friendly and it turns out her daughter had done one of those mba-visit-days from UTexas to BEA. Neat.

It's April 20th and 92 degrees here. Time to learn how to sweat again!

What's happened to Yahoo!?

Like many others, I became a Yahoo! Fan in the late 90's. The system was well-designed and the most pleasurable to use of all the web portals. But, for a number of reasons mostly consisting of product problems, my opinion of the web giant has changed for the worse. Most of these problems indicate that the new profit-orientation since the hiring of Teri Semel (sp?) as CEO has taken its tool on Yahoo's enjoyability. It seems that they're cutting off maintenance and update on a vast number of applications. Back in the good old days (about 3 years ago!), the boys at Yahoo! cooked up great interfaces. They seemed to create products that users would want to use. Today, they're on 4 strikes (and therefore OUT in my book):

1) Pocket PC support for Yahoo! Messenger. While they supported Pocket PC in the past, the code they still have up for download (http://messenger.yahoo.com/messenger/ce/downloads_ce_msgr.html) doesn't work and is unsupported. They have also been too good to put up a notice that they're not updating this software. You can read the posts of pissed off users all over the web discussion groups. Now, I realize that Microsoft is trying to encroach on their IM territory, but Yahoo is either plain "dim" to assume that not supporting this platform (while supporting all others) will truly cause people to not buy Microsoft, or they don't seem to care about their users.

2) Yahoo! Web Hosting. For this, I was actually a real paying customer. I'm paying $20 per month, their software is buggy and they don't answer their emails to tech support. For $240 a year, they could atleast offer an 800 number for support.

3) Yahoo! Groups. This is perhaps the worst application ever as it contains both a bad administration UI and is full of bugs. Other basic features contribute to the pain such as you can't provide URL's for others to jump in to your site -- and if you do, it provides a confusing error message. This is another once "free" application that they are no longer updating, is full of bugs, and have not had the deceny to simply kill off.

4) Yahoo! Mail. They're squeezing the features down on this so that it's basically unusable without paying a fee. They don't offer Spam protection included in the service, so your mailbox overflows because they only provide 5mb in space. So, you have to upgrade to do anything at all.

I appreciate that these guys now need to make money, so they're cutting off support for unprofitable offerings. But any good consumer-product company knows that services have to go through an end-of-life process. This is done so users like me don't get fed up and leave (and spoil the brand). I'm sure I'm not the only defector.

Where's that MSN CD anyway?

The First Change in Blogger

I noticed today that blogger.com has made it's first change since the Google acquisition: You can pay to advertise your blog on their site.

Most interestingly, the first advertisement I saw was the Blog of another former BEA employee: http://www.toobeautiful.org/blog/blogger.html.

People Mapping

Given the advances in transportation over the past decades, it would be interesting to take a large sample of the earth's population and truly map how people travel. I imagine a system where individuals (randomly sampled) from around the world each carry a GPS-enabled box that records their daily movements. These movements would be recorded as Lat-Longitude-Altitude and those could be then mapped. These movements could be shown across all of the different regions of the planet and indicated by lines. Darker lines would indicate greater numbers of people travelling those routes and so on. The map would give us a good perception of how people are really moving by region. You could also imagine creating other maps that show movement by career type, weight, age, sex and so on.

Why do this? First, it would be pretty cool to look at. Second, it would potentially be very valuable to marketers. Imagine combing a survey with this GPS data and suddenly air transport, commuter transport systems, consumer product good companies, etc. have a good way of understanding how people (and the markets they form!) move around. And thus how to market to them.