tl;dr

I’ve just caught a few of the new Currys advertising spots on Sky One — they sponsor The Simpsons and Futurama now after Domino’s dropped out last year (details).

I’ve seen three of these spots:

• A guy bolts a very large, glossy flatscreen TV to the wall over his mantlepiece. Channel surfing, he finds an exercise program and starts to jump around. Presumably dislodged by his antics, it falls from the wall and shatters to the floor, taking a vase with it for good measure. Cut to a Currys delivery van with two guys who proceed to bolt a new TV to the wall for him.
• An elderly gent is struggling to put his new TV into the back of his car in a car park. Balancing it with one hand while he opens the tailgate, it crashes to the floor. Warily, he shakes the box, accompanied by the sound of broken glass. Cut to “need a hand putting your TV in the car? We can help!”
• A lady is walking through a car park with a large TV in a box. She trips and the box crashes to the concrete. Cut to the same catchphrase.

All three of these ads have really well captured foley; really prominent crunchy shattering glass and plastic.

Now, I understand that they are trying to pitch Currys as a place with value-add services, like carrying things to your car and installing TVs for you. But the strongest mental link they’ve made in my brain is between “Currys” and “very expensive, very broken broken TVs”. Is it me, or is that somewhat wonky marketing?

Professional

In a blog entry on Telecoms.com, James Middleton writes:

More crazy money talk was being bandied around in the world of social networking this week as it emerged that Web 2.0 giant Facebook has been eyeing up Twitter as a potential acquisition.

Facebook, much the darling of the mobile space at present, if recent deals are anything to go by, is believed to have considered snapping up the micro blogging tool, but walked away over a high price tag.

How high? Anything up to $500m if some reports are to be believed – which injects a certain irony into the situation as potential suitors for Facebook, like Yahoo, have in the past been driven off by a high price tag themselves.

Around this time last year, Facebook was apparently valued at around $15bn, after Microsoft paid out $240m for a 1.6 per cent stake in the site. But the problem with these valuations is that there is little substance to them, as well as the fact they are tied to services that don’t make any money yet.

The implication here is that Twitter is demanding silly money – more than $500m – to sell out, but this is incorrect. In fact Mr Middleton’s second point — that these valuations have little substance — was what nixed the Twitter-Facebook deal. Facebook did indeed offer $500m, but that value was to be paid entirely in Facebook stock, valued at the same rates the Microsoft deal where at. Twitter baulked at this, showing skepticism that Facebook is worth $15bn — skepticism that Mr Middleton shares. This has been widely covered (e.g. in Valleywag and by Kara Swisher). The latter notes:

The $500 million offered was in an all-stock form, said sources on both sides, at the $15 billion valuation that came from the Microsoft’s investment in the company last October.

The Twitter side felt that figure was inflated and the shares should be valued at the lower figures that have also been reported for Facebook’s true valuation, more in the $5 billion range.

That would have given the deal a $150 million price tag, which was seen as too low, especially since it was in Facebook stock and not cash initially.

In fact, Twitter wanted cash, which some sources say was offered by Facebook in the $50 to $100 million range, in addition to stock, but taking too much stock was still a major issue.

It seems to me that, far from Mr Middleton’s implication that Twitter is looking for ridiculous valuations, Twitter actually shares his suspicion of valuations like the $15bn for Facebook. As John Gruber notes, “I’m not sure I’d sell a sandwich in exchange for Facebook stock”.

Professional

A note to future-me, who is going to forget the funny syntax of the /l switch:

msiexec /i Package.msi /l*v Install.log

Personal, Professional

Yet another app has been rejected for “competing” with Apple’s own apps, even though it doesn’t. This after the WiFi podcaster downloader also being rejected for alleged competition, and some apps being rejected for “limited utility” (yeah, because a dozen identikit ToDo apps are much more useful). Even Mac fans are unhappy.

I was really interested in the App Store, to the point where I was cursing my lack of a Mac to try it out. Clearly there is stacks of cash to be made. But if I was considering setting up a startup to write iPhone apps right now, I think I’d be reconsidering my business plan.

Personal, Professional, Tech, iPhone iPhone

Just a few days ago I wondered aloud if VMWare are screwed following the abrupt departures of four of its eleven board members. Well yesterday they made a massive product announcement.

Virtual Datacentre OS further expands the already-best-of-breed infrastructure management tools to include the possibility of automatically expanding, on demand, your datacentre into another site (probably owned by a third party) somewhere in the cloud. One of the hats I used to wear was as a scalability analyst for the travel industry, where ecommerce traffic demands are grossly seasonal (it is not atypical to see 60% of traffic land in just two months of the year); I would have killed for some sensible model to rent extra capacity at just peak times. There is more analysis from The Register.

As part of this, they are publishing a new API, vStorage, which allows the integrated tools suite to command SANs to carry out disk provision, configure clustering, rollbacks, and failovers as VMs are created and taken online and offline. Again, The Register has good analysis of what this means; essentially, VMWare are once again blazing a trail into new and exciting territory that no other VM vendor has even thought about yet.

So, as m’learned friend James remarked, if all this awesome stuff happened on Diane Green’s watch — and as she only left a couple of months ago it must have been — why on earth did they get rid of her? And with her and her supporters gone, can VMWare keep up the cool stuff, or will the R&D falter now? There are exciting times ahead, for sure. 

Personal, Professional Virtualisation

Valleywag is reporting that following the abrupt dismissal of former CEO Diane Greene by EMC, VMWare’s parent firm, they’ve lost another three board members — her husband Mendel Rosenblum quit (they offered him the job his wife was fired from! Just how clueless can you be?), product development VP Paul Chan, and research and development VP Richard Sarwal (more info from the NYT). This is the management team who did one of the smartest strategic moves I’ve seen in high tech in years — in 2006, just as the competition’s virtualisation offerings were catching up with VMWare’s bread-and-butter product, ESX Server, they made ESX Server free and released an impressively thorough (and expensive) tools management suite. At one stroke, they rendered their competitor’s new offerings moot (by making virtualisation software a commodity) and moved ahead of them (by changing the game to be infrastructure management instead, where VMWare has a commanding position).

Back to the present day, where Microsoft is pushing its all-new Hyper-V virtualisation platform with a big marketing campaign. I’ve not used Hyper-V yet, but I’ve heard very positive reports about it, and certainly on paper it goes a long way to closing the gaps between the current Microsoft virtualisation platform, the aging Virtual Server 2005 R2, and VMWare’s much more sophisticated offerings. I took part in a big evaluation of virtualisation technologies during 2007 at my former employer, and despite being a Microsoft shop, we didn’t even consider Virtual Server as the management tools where just so poor compared to the VMWare Virtual Infrastructure set. Hyper-V isn’t perfect but it seems much improved.

What does this add up to? Well, the share price is tanking, for one; it hovered around $65 throughout May and June 2008 but since the 9th July announcement of Diane Greene’s resignation it has plummeted, spending July and August in the mid-30s. It closed yesterday at $31.51, a 52-week low point. That’s a quarter of the 52-week high of $125.25. That’s a biiiig drop.

So, are they totally screwed? I don’t think so, actually. Consider this vomit-worthy white paper from some sort of Microsoft shill analysis firm. In amongst the usual PR smoke-and-mirrors that I could quote extensively but will spare you from, even this biased document is forced to admit that VMWare’s products still have the edge.

“Product depth is the single biggest differentiator when comparing VMware and Microsoft x86 virtualization. It can be argued that VMware has several distinct advantages when it comes to managing virtual machines — most notably in the area of virtual machine mobility (the ability to move live virtual machines with active sessions underway — also known as “live migration”). Further, it can be argued that VMware has done a good job in packaging — allowing it to sell its add-on management and infrastructure software as integrated software suites.”

Now, the white paper naturally glosses over this somewhat but in a production environment, these sorts of management tools that can move VMs around between host platforms on the fly are a big part of the draw to server virtualisation in the first place. Microsoft not having anything to compete with that is a definite knock against Hyper-V. So as it stands, VMWare still have some compelling product in the market place; but, in Wall Street’s opinion and my own, they’d better start pulling it together before Microsoft eat their lunch.

PS. Actually, I will quote some of the pro-Microsoft stuff from that report.

“Microsoft builds Windows, hence Microsoft controls Windows. Hyper-V is built in conjunction with Windows and can influence Windows OS developmental directions. … Microsoft’s plans to leverage this installed base by: Making virtualization available to everybody as a very low cost, integrated option.”

So, to paraphrase, Microsoft have a near-monopoly in the OS market and will therefore attain pre-eminence i nthe virtualisation market by exploiting the OS market. Uhh, didn’t we already go through this with the US Deparment of Justice and the European Competition Commission? Didn’t they both decide that was an illegal use of monopoly powers? I think they did!

Professional Virtualisation

From http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7417359.stm

According to Richard Sennett’s new book, The Craftsman, this ability to master a skill and then practice it well satisfies a basic human need. For Sennett, a craftsman doesn’t have to make beautiful inlaid cabinets or chisel stone. He could be a software programmer, a cook or even a parent. This satisfaction in the job itself seems to me the best sort of meaning there is. As a journalist, I survive on those rare jolts of pleasure that come when you find just the right words
and get them together in just the right order.

Yet this sort of “craft” meaning isn’t open to everyone. Shoving junk mail though letter boxes isn’t a craft. Neither, at the other end of the spectrum, is being prime minister. Indeed no jobs that involve managing or leading are crafts, which is one of the things that makes it so particularly hard for managers to find meaning in what they do. In fact managing is one of the most thankless jobs in the world. What managers are mainly trying to do is to get other people to do things that they don’t want to. To work harder, for a start. Their other primary function is to carry the can, and to get blamed for all sorts of things that probably aren’t their fault. Not only are they creating little meaning for themselves, they get blamed for destroying meaning for people below them.

I’ve never thought about it quite like this before, on a gut instinct level, this is why I’ve never wanted to be a manager. I derive a lot of job satisfaction from solving problems — the recent Honda ads with the slogan “every problem is a playground” really resonate with me. I’ve always had an aversion to the idea of being promoted into a team management role but never been able to elegantly say why, but now I can: it takes me away from being a craftsman and being a craftsman is what gets me out of bed in the mornings.

I think I’m far from the only one who feels this way, which is why we’ve seen the growth of Technical Architect as a recognised job title and as a career path over the last few decades. It’s to give options to software engineers who aren’t comfortable with the traditional “team lead -> dev lead -> CTO” career path.

Professional