Michael McDaniel’s Dawning Awareness

Originally uploaded by alexedelman.

“A man and a woman had a little baby. They had three, they had three in the family. And that’s a magic number.”

Congratulations to Alex and Jordan on the birth of Angus!

Like most of you, I was taught that there’s no such thing as centrifugal force: the outward force you perceive is the thwarting of your bodies tendency to continue in a straight line.

Finally, my smug (but also cool) physics teacher, Mr. Gonzalas, is put in his place:

xkcd on centrifugal force

Microsoft has always had shareholders as it’s first priority. They make every decision based on how much revenue they can recognize and how soon. They are so eager to protect their bottom line (even at the expense of their users), that they have even disguised advertisements as news stories on msn.com. You click on a headline that looks interesting, but instead of a story there, it’s an ad. And the same get-the-money-now thing underlies their good-enough philosophy with respect to product design. Obviously, they can’t piss off their users too much, but it’s astonishing what people can get used to. After a while, you just get used to Office and IE and Windows. So if people will buy ugly things, why spend money making them beautiful?

So, Microsoft is all about shareholders. Isn’t every company? Okay, sure. But HOW do you create sharedholder value? At Apple, the belief seems to be that if you create well-designed, beautiful things, people will buy them and the shareholders will benefit. It’s a longer term vision, though. Sure, people will gradually get used to crappier products, but that downward spiral leads to bad places. Keep the vision and that spiral can go up. You have to think long-term, though.

Microsoft’s strategy is twofold: Job one has always been and remains protecting their monopoly. There’s a real limit to how user-focused they want to be — nothing that could potentially benefit another company is permitted. For example, when I worked on live.com, the execs made us pull a configurable-search feature entirely so as not to take traffic away from MSN search. I argued MSN search should have to earn that traffic, but they don’t care about such arguments. Protect the monopoly as much as possible is the rule. (I had been hired into the group with the promise that we were trying to do the right thing for the user as a way to save MSN, but when that didn’t pan out, I left.)

Things started to stagnate with just the one strategy, though, so several years back, they adopted another one: emphasizing developers. Everybody had fun with Ballmer’s little fit about that on stage. But developers are now yesterday’s beans and they’re on to the new thing: advertisers. See below. Yeah, that’s going to save them.

I genuinely worry about the Seattle economy. Microsoft is still expanding up here at a breathtaking pace. There are at least 10 new buildings under construction up here right now. When Microsoft finally runs out of things to try, it’s going to hurt. I’m sure there are a few years left, though.

Lessons on the Surge From Economics 101:

Oliver R. Goodenough, on the U.S. occupation of Iraq:

Economics professors have a standard game they use to demonstrate how apparently rational decisions can create a disastrous result. They call it a “dollar auction.” The rules are simple. The professor offers a dollar for sale to the highest bidder, with only one wrinkle: the second-highest bidder has to pay up on their losing bid as well. Several students almost always get sucked in.

[via Daring Fireball]

It’s so worth reading the whole thing, but what makes me want to meet him is:

If you bought an iPhone and you think Apple should give you $200, you are an idiot. In fact, you are so stupid I am hereby cordially inviting you to come to Seattle so I can punch you in the face.