Requirements are real work, episode 3217 - Wednesday, 22 December 2004
From Infoworld and the Delphi research crew comes the tale of an actual study of IT end users which tells a story you should already know: capturing requirements is hard.
Seventy percent of the respondents to an ongoing Delphi survey said they consider capturing and documenting business requirements a difficult process -- and more than 60 percent said their organization has trouble implementing changes to its processes and policies.
'In this survey, what was really notable was the very definitive responses,' said study author Nathaniel Palmer, chief analyst at Delphi (a unit of Perot Systems Corp.) 'Respondents were very explicit in identifying problem areas, like capturing business requirements. That's something that you'd think should be a core competency, but respondents overwhelmingly said they struggle with it.'
More than 75 percent of Delphi's respondents said their requirements data resides in a number of separate sources, and close to 90 percent said incomplete definition or capture of business requirements is at least a moderate problem in their organization.
Mr Gause, Mr Weinberg, the universe is finally ready for you.
Also noteworthy: the story casually mentions the latest SAP horror story. Hewlett-Packard "had done dozens of smooth ERP (enterprise resource planning) migration projects, but when its latest ran into problems, the cascading disruptions contributed to HP missing its third-quarter financial projections," Infoworld reports.
Reporting IT implementation disasters is high-risk for reporters (whose "sources" and PR story-feeders get cranky) and for publications (whose marketing departments face advertising withdrawals). The safest time to mention disasters is when everyone on the inside is so used to hearing about them that they can't strraight-facedly protest the occasional report. Back when I was still writing on IT, I heard about a dozen failed content management system implementations before I started writing about the issue.
So when you hear about one disaster, chances are there are others happening. In a sense, this is what Delphi's study confirms.
Permanent linkAdam Bosworth on the (un)wired home - Tuesday, 21 September 2004
When I wrote an article earlier this year on the difficulties of linking stereos and PC systems, I wondered briefly whether I was exposing my technical incompetence. Turns out I can rest easy. Adam Bosworth wants to do the same thing, although his ambitions go a little further than mine: he wants an all-wireless system that he can run from his mobile phone.
Who's Adam Bosworth? The guy in the picture. The guy who's contributed more to important Windows client apps than anyone else on the planet. He designed the original version of Microsoft Access, managed the development of the Internet Explorer 4/5 HTML engine, and pushed Microsoft into XML. Then he did a startup called Crossgain and spent time at BEA after they bought it. Now he's at a little company called Google. He blogs infrequently, but well. And he can't make his music system and his computer system talk to each other sensibly either. Phew.
This problem will get solved soon (see Tom's Hardware for the latest contenders). Soon is just taking longer to arrive than I'd have thought.
Hal Macomber's 10 rules for project managers - Saturday, 11 September 2004
In his Weblog, operations management consultant Hal Macomber derides those x-numbered lists of qualities that consultants turn into overpuffed business books. He does, however, have a more-than-usually useful list of his own: 10 Rules for Project Managers.
10. Adopt practices for exploring a variety of perspectives
We think we see what we see, but we don't. We really see what we think. Remember the blind men and the elephant. Make it your habit to inquire what others see. You'll see more together.
9. Stay close to your customer
Clients' concerns evolve over the life of a project. Take advantage of that to over-deliver. Stay in a conversation with your client to adjust what you are doing.
8. Take care of your project team
We've come to accept that the customer comes first ... the customer is always right. We can't take care of the customer if we first aren't taking care of our project team. It's a challenge. While there are some things we can do for the whole team, it comes down to taking care of each team member as the individual that he or she is. And to make it more difficult, then we must bring their various interests into coherence.
7. Keep your eye on the overall project promises
Project work can be difficult. It is easy to loose sight of what we are doing and why we are doing it. Remind your team and yourself of the overall promises and how you are doing fulfilling those promises.
6. Build relationships intentionally
Project teams come together as strangers. To do great work...innovation, learning, and collaboration...all take people who like and care for each other. Don't leave that to chance. Start your projects by building relationships among team members.
5. Tightly couple learning with action
Projects are wonderful opportunities to learn. Don't put that off for the after project lessons learned. Make it your habit to incorporate learning loops in all your project activities. Your team will appreciate it. Your customer will benefit from it. And best of all, it will make your job easier.
4. Coordinate meticulously
A project is an ever-evolving network of commitment. Keep that network activated by tending to the critical conversations. See that people are making clear requests, promises that have completion dates, and share opinions that advance the purposes of the project. Without attention to those critical conversations the project will drift.
3. Collaborate. Really collaborate.
Make it your rule to plan with those people who will be the performers of the plan. Don't wait 'til the project has gone south to get their help. Start out that way. Continue collaborating as the usual way you work through the project.
2. Listen generously
People are able to say what they can in the moment. For the most part, people are well-intended. Give them the benefit of the doubt. Take the time to listen. Ask questions. Seek others' opinions. And while you're at it, don't be so harsh on yourself.
1.Embrace uncertainty
Expect the unexpected. There is far more that we don't know and can't know than what we can anticipate. Be resilient to what life throws at you. Anticipate that your team will learn something along the way that can and should change what you have promised and how you can deliver on your promises. And when you take a set-back -- we all do sometime or another -- review the other nine rules for how you can work your way out of it.
Each of these is a rule I know, rather than believe, to be important.
Naming conventions - Thursday, 9 September 2004
This is highly influenced by my preference for the camelBack convention and the naming convention in CityDesk databases (and so owes a little to Charles Simonyi's Hungarian Notation). The different scheme that names a table TBL_ARTICLE is perfectly defensible. The key is a scheme that helps your eye pick up the elements of names and actually read the code, while keeping your finger away from the caps key most of the time. Pick one scheme and stick with it.
Database naming conventions
See http://weblogs.asp.net/jamauss/articles/DatabaseNamingConventions.aspx
Names in general will:
- be singular
- contain no spaces
- be predominantly lower-case
- be split up with capitals where they contain more than one phrase e.g. tblArticles
- run to no more than 30 characters
- be designed so that any name is not a part of another name (thus allowing search-and-replace where necesary e.g. when a name must be changed)
- avoid acronyms
Tables and views/queries
- Table names will start with tbl
- Query names will start with qry
-
- qapp, qdel, quni for special types of queries
- Form names will start with frm
Field names:
- start with:
-
- ix if index e.g. ixArticle
- s if text (actually stands for string)
- m if memo (Access)
- f if numeric
- dt if date
- kp if a lookup table
- is if boolean
- fields that are a table's foreign key to another table are named for that table e.g. ixArticleHeading
Site naming conventions
Directory names
For simplicity's sake, only a few files stay in the server document root:
- index.html
- .htaccess (Apache file access directives)
- favicon.ico (site icon)
The following standard redirects exist:
- /privacy
- /terms
- /contact
- /feedback
- /help
- /search
- /directory
- /bookmarks
The following standard directories exist:
- /section1 ... /section 7 - standard sections for navigation
- /facility - various site facilities such as contact form and site directory
- /blog - weblog
- /newsfeeds - aggregated news feeds from other sites
- /noindex - files we want to be accessible, but not indexed by the search engine or directory system - images, scripts, comments, tips and so on. This directory is protected by a robots.txt directive.
-
- /noindex/rss.xml - site news feed
- /noindex/images - graphics
- /noindex/media - downloadable audio, video, flash files, Word documents and so on
- /noindex/scripts - JavaScript, CS and certain PHP files
- /noindex/tips - tip files popped up from standard pages
- /noindex/display - presentations, typically popped up
- /noindex/bookmarks - bookmarks
- /nopublish - files which live in the CMS but which should never appear on the server - includes, old files, intranet material
Page names
To keep the search engines happy, we use underscores here: my_page_name.html. (There's an argument that my-page-name.html would attract more attention from Google, but I have used this scheme too long to ditch it now.)
Intranets look vainly to knowledge management - Sunday, 5 September 2004
The online magazine Line56 is running an article entitled "Intranet Trends to Watch For". As with most articles about intranets, it starts with the premise that intranets are valuable. From there, it goes on to predict that search tools will improve, that more employees will have to create intranet documents and that - here's the big one - knowledge management will at last become important.
The Line56 article interests me not because Line56 is a great authority but because it is typical of eveything I see about intranets and knowledge management. To quote the article:
The killer applications that replace the corporate telephone directory and the cafeteria menu will be knowledge management tools. Irrespective of your organization type, employees will perceive knowledge as a key mechanism to stay competitive with their peers and competitors. Effective knowledge management initiatives delivered via the intranet will take advantage of this trend. Furthermore, CEOs will treat employee productivity and knowledge levels as their only surviving competitive advantages as they attempt to limit the damage done by off shoring. Knowledge management tools will gain more prominence in this business environment and the corporate intranet will be the natural place to house them.
I have been watching the knowledge management boom for 15 years. I would love to belive that knowledge management was a valuable field. But to the extent that it's about capturing "knowledge" in documents, it goes against everything I know about successful organisations. Like artificial intelligence, it seems based on a mistaken idea about what knowledge is, and about how knowledge-based economies function. I've thrown my lot in with Peter Drucker, who knows all about knowledge-based economies but who famously declared that "you can't manage knowledge".
Take eChoice, the business where I work. We have lots of knowledge. It's all in people's heads, and it mostly won't come out. You could spend months interviewing the eChoice staff to find out what they know, and writing it down to create a sort of encyclopedia of the organisation. It would be an expensive waste of time. Barely anyone would read it, and they probably wouldn't recall it when they needed it.
Sharing knowledge takes effort and skill, even between two people talking face-to-face. You don't create that by writing stuff down; you create it by creating robust relationships that give people the confidence to ask questions and learn from each other, and by encouraging the disciplines of asking questions without wasting people's time, and of answering questions with clarity and power, of telling vivid stories within a shared value system. These are the things that matter, the things businesses need to be good at.
To the extent that this is knowledge management, knowledge management can be useful. But we have words already to describe this process: "teaching" and "learning". Teaching and learning should be core disciplines for any well-educated person, and organisations should work hard to encourage these skills.
But teaching and learning are not even inherently well-suited to digital media. At an individual level, this teaching and learning often happens best with the participants face-to-face or talking on the phone. if concepts need to be visualised, and pen and an A4 sheet of paper usually do the trick. And the digital media most often used for this sort of communication are email and instant messaging. Storing "knowledge" on an intranet is a poor substitute for real-time electronic exchanges, and an even poorer substitute for a yarn over a meal or a cup of coffee.
So here comes a massive generalisation with an extra dose of arrogance. The "knowledge management" industry seems to appeal to people with a natural bent for neatness and completeness, people who believe that if we could only capture all the knowledge then everyone would know what to do. It appeals to the librarian mentality. And this mentality is a natural response to the chaos of real knowledge. But it is nevetheless dangerous in a business environment which must value creativity and proactivity.
At eChoice, we have an intranet. Frankly, it needs a couple of days' work to neaten and straighten it. But the only bits I can actually bring myself to recommend spending time on are:
- The staff telephone directory. As far as I can tell, this is the one intranet feature that everybody wants. Names, numbers, photographs, areas of expertise all add value quickly.
- An index of links to business-critical Web-based applications. (Many of these apps might be classed as "intranet" applications, but they are in fact simply reporting and management apps that happen to run as Java applets communicating with our corporate database. They could just as easily be native Windows programs hooked into the same database.)
- A list of logos and other brand elements that people can copy into their own documents.
- Documentation of a few standard procedures, practices, rules and guidelines. (In organisations that truly value documented guidelines, intranets can be highly cost-effective. Governments, legal practices, work safety divisions can all probably make good use of intranets in many situations. But guidelines and procedures are not what most people mean by "knowledge management".)
Now there's a sensible argument in favour of tidying this system up at the edges: poor implementation in one part of the organisation sends a message that the organisation will accept sloppiness elsewhere. But there's no real business case for expanding our intranet. In particular, there's no real case for the sort of knowledge management initiatives that so excite Line56 and its ilk.
Mozilla will win - Thursday, 12 August 2004
Mozilla - the family of browsers that includes Netscape 7, Mozilla and Firefox - is headed above 10 per cent market share.
Microsoft's Internet Explorer has held more than 95 per cent of the browser market since June 2002, according to WebSideStory. That ended in July 2004. In a year, MSIE will have less than 90 per cent.
How do I know? I've been recommending friends install Firefox, the lightest version of the Mozilla browser. My friends are all broadband users whose systems have been sinking under the latest slimy wave of spyware. They're sick of trying (mostly vainly) to debug systems to eradicate random pop-up ads triggered by programs that mutate right in front of their eyes. They cover the spectrum from struggling teachers to $2000-a-day executives. They've been installing it. It's great, they say. Decoded, this seems to mean "it's like Internet Explorer, but without the problems". A couple of people like the tabs, but what they mostly like is the security.
Getting the next five per cent of users to install Firefox in exchange for getting rid of spyware hassles ... this is a done deal, now that Firefox just works.
If you need to stick with Internet Explorer, try installing BHODemon for browser helper objects, CWShredder for the CoolWebSearch trojan and Ad-aware for miscellaneous nasties. Ad-aware has recorded 60 million downloads from CNET alone. Both Ad-aware and BHODemon's creators are struggling to keep their Web sites up under the demand. CWShredder's creator, Merijn Bellekom, has given up, telling The Register [link] that "I simply do not have the tools to remove the latest variants. They are too aggressive or too complicated to allow for automated removal."
Ask the hard questions of the software vendor's reference customers - Saturday, 17 July 2004
Adam Kalsey, faced with the familiar task of talking to a software vendors' reference customers, has written a list of things you should ask. He prefaces his list with this insightful comment:
When interviewing references, people don’t often know what to ask other than non-specific questions about how they like the product and how good the vendor support is. This is certainly the information you want to get, but unless you ask specific questions, you aren’t going to get specific answers.
Kalsey recommends questions like:
- What did you learn during the implementation that you would have liked to know before you started?
- If you were doing the implementation again, what would you do differently?
I learnt this lesson in journalism, though I still struggle to put it into practice: if you want the truth, you have to ask about the detail. People who referee potential software providers, like those who referee potential employees, know things that can help you. Your problem is that they've made a vague agreement with the vendor to say nice things about them. Your opportunity lies in the fact that it's a weak agreement: no money has changed hands, and the referee hasn't actually promised to only praise the product in all its aspects.
So the referees will tell you what it does well and what it does badly, where it will delight you and where you will have to live with shortcomings. But they'll want to talk abstractly. You must drive them into specifics, make them tell stories, ask them to step through scenarios, get a picture instead of a generic thumbs-up. Kalsey's list gives you a starting-point.
Mystery solved: print Windows Media Player screens - Wednesday, 7 July 2004
If you use normal screen-capture software to take a snapshot of a video in Windows Media Player, it come out blank. This used to drive me nuts. Here's the seven-step solution:
- Open Windows Media Player
- Go to Tools
- Go to Options
- Go to Performance
- Click the "Advanced" button
- Un-check the "Use Overlays" tick-box
- Click OK
Now you're ready to print. Use a screen capture tool like MWSnap - or if you don't have one handy, Control-Print Screen on your PC takes a shot of the screen and puts it in the clipboard ready to paste.
Celestia puts the universe in your computer - Saturday, 5 June 2004
Celestia throws away the conventional planetarium-style approach to astonomy software, in favor of 3D-accelerated virtual reality. Roam around Jupiter's moons; view your city from the International Space station; travel around Saturn with the Cassini probe. There's nothing better for teaching the kids astronomy - and even geography.
Download it from creator Chris Laurel's site, shatters.net. It runs on everything from slow old Windows machines to the latest Macs, and on Linux too. My current version is 1.3.2 pre-release 8 (to download, click here). Then check out the add-ons and all the other resources.
The pic below of the Cassini probe on its first approach to Saturn shows you a little of what you get. In the program, though, the scene is moving (in real time, slowed down or speeded up), you can change perspective instantly, and you can travel to places like the Orion Nebula, M42, which appears in the picture as a pink smudge between Saturn's ring and Cassini.
Like I said, it does geography too.
Among Celestia's finest features is the Celestia URL: a hyperlink reference that takes you to a time and place in the Celestia universe. Install Celestia and then try some of these.
- Australia, Melbourne to Adelaide
- International Space Station over Ireland
- Phobos above Mars
- The Mars Odyssey probe above Mars, with the Andromeda Galaxy setting on the horizon
- 2001's Space Station V (requires this add-on)
- Mir above the Azores, 1990
- Asteroid 2002 MN passes Earth (and we didn't even know ...)
- The Cassini probe, the largest ever deep-space probe
- Passing Phoebe
- Approaching Saturn (roughly the view above)
- Approaching Titan
- Passing Titan
- Ida and Dactyl
- Io, the funkiest moon around
- Triton in orbit around Neptune
- Venus transits the Sun, June 8, 2004
- Earth ...
- in the Trifid Nebula (requires an add-on)
- in the Lagoon Nebula M8 (requires an add-on)
- in the Andromeda Galaxy M31 (requires an add-on)
- in the Crab Nebula M1 (requires an add-on)
Fonts listed - Tuesday, 1 June 2004
Table of Font Analogs
|
Familiar Name |
Alternate Name(s) |
|---|---|
|
Aachen® |
Charlemagne; Ruhr; Vanadium; Westlake |
|
Ad Lib |
Alibi |
|
Adsans™ |
Ad Gothic; Angro; Humanist 970; News Ad |
|
Akzidenz Grotesk™ |
Ad Grotesk; Gothic 725; Grigat; Standard; Wayland |
|
Albertus™ |
Adelon; Alburt; Flareserif 821 |
|
Aldus |
Breklum; Luce; Mannucci Roman |
|
Alternate Gothic No.2 |
Alpin Gothic; Gothic |
|
Amazone™ |
Amazonia; Fredrika |
|
Amelia™ |
Computer 651; Orbit; Orea |
|
American Text™ |
Blackletter 851; National Text |
|
Americana™ |
AM; American Classic; Aston; Colonial; Concord; Flairserif 721; Freedom; Independence |
|
Antique No. 3 |
Egyptian 710 |
|
Antique Olive™ |
Alphavanti; AO; Berry Roman; Gibson Antique; Incised 901; Oliva; Olivanti; Olive; Olive Antique; Oliver; Olivette; Olivette Antique; Olivia; Provence™ |
|
Antique Roman Open |
Roman Stylus |
|
Antique Roman Shaded |
Roman Shaded |
|
Arnold Bocklin; Auckland |
Bock; Expo; Medusa; Nouveau; Youth; Freeform 715 |
|
Aster™ |
Albany; AS; Astro; Aztec; Corolla; Dutch 823 |
|
Auriol™ |
Freeform 721; Robur; Skylark |
|
Aurora® |
Empira; News 706; News No.12; News No.2; Polaris; Regal |
|
Aurora Bold Condensed™ |
Anzeigen Grotesk; Aura; Aurora; Grotesque Condensed |
|
Baker Signet™ |
Keene; Signature; Signatur Vario; Signete |
|
Balloon™ |
BL; Freehand 041; Lasso |
|
Bank Gothic™ |
Bond Gothic; Commerce Gothic; Deluxe Gothic; Magnum Gothic; Square 021; Stationer's Gothic |
|
Baskerville |
Baskenland; Baskerline; Basque; Beaumont; BK; Transitional 401 |
|
Baskerville No.2 |
Euro Baskerville; Transitional 404 |
|
Bauer Bodoni™ |
Bodoni B; Euro Bodoni; Headline Bodoni; Modern 405 |
|
Bell Centennial |
Gothic 762 |
|
Bell Gothic |
Directory Gothic; Furlong; Gothic 761; Paddock |
|
Belwe |
Belter; Welby |
|
Bembo® |
Aldine 401; Aldine Roman; Ambo; BE; Bem; Bernstein vario; Bingo; Griffo; Latinesque |
|
Berling |
Carmichel; Revival 565 |
|
Bernhard Modern™ |
Beacon; Bernie; BN; Duchess; Engravers Oldstyle |
|
Bernhard Tango™ |
Aigrette; Carmine Tango |
|
Bingham Script |
Freehand 591 |
|
Bison™ |
Bison; Blizzard; Brush 738 |
|
Bitstream Alisal® |
Calligraphic 456 |
|
Bitstream Amerigo® |
Flareserif 831 |
|
Bitstream Arrus® |
Lapidary 721 |
|
Bitstream Carmina® |
Calligraphic 811 |
|
Bitstream Charter® |
Transitional 801 |
|
Bitstream Cooper® |
Freeform 741 |
|
Bitstream Fournier® |
Transitional 601 |
|
Bitstream Iowan Old Style® |
Venetian 801 |
|
Bitstream Oz Handicraft® |
Freehand 701 |
|
Bitstream Ventana® |
Humanist 800 |
|
Blippo™ |
Geometric 755 |
|
Bloc™ |
Geometric 885 |
|
Block™ |
Black; Block; Gothic 821; Hobble |
|
Bodoni |
BO; Bodoni No. 2; Brunswick; Empiriana; Gorvind; Modern 421 |
|
Bodoni Campanile™ |
Modern 735; Palisade |
|
Bookman |
Bookface; Bookman Antique; Bookprint; Revival 710 |
|
Bremen |
Exotic 011 |
|
Britannic |
Gallery; Grenoble |
|
Broadway™ |
Big City; BW; Deco; Hudson; Moderne; Modernistic; Ritz; Showtime |
|
Brody |
Brophy Script |
|
Bruce Old Style |
Bruce; No. 31; Old Style No.3; Old Style No.7; Revival 704 |
|
Brush Script™ |
Bombay; BR; Brush; Brilliant Bold Script; Brush 451; Punch |
|
Cable™ |
Geometric 231; Kabel; Kabello; Kobel |
|
Caledonia® |
Calderon; Caledo; California; Cornelia; Edinburgh; Gael; Gemini; Highland; Laurel; Transitional 511 |
|
Candida™ |
Candide |
|
Cascade® |
Freehand 471; Kascade Script |
|
Caslon 540™ |
Caslon 74; CL; Caslon 2; Caslon 484; Caslon 485 |
|
Caslon Bold™ |
Caslon No. 3; New Caslon; Caslon 74 Bold |
|
Caslon Old Face |
Caslon Old Style; Caslon; Caslon 128; Caslon 471; Caslon 76 |
|
Cataneo |
Chancery 731 |
|
Centaur® |
Arrighi; Centaurus; Venetian 301 |
|
Century Expanded™ |
Century Light/II; Century X; Cambridge Expanded; CE; Century; Century Bold |
|
Century Oldstyle™ |
Cambridge Oldstyle |
|
Century Schoolbook™ |
Century Text; Century Textbook; CS; Schoolbook; Cambridge Schoolbook; Century Medium; Century Modern |
|
Chapel Script |
Mahogany Script; Monterey |
|
Cheltenham Old Style |
Cheltonian; Chesterfield; Gloucester; Kenilworth; Nordhoff; Sorbonne; Winchester |
|
Choc™ |
Staccato 555 |
|
City™ |
Square Slabserif 711; Town |
|
Clarendon |
Clarique; Clarion; Cerebral |
|
Cloister Black™ |
Abbey; Cloister Black |
|
Codex™ |
Calligraphic 421 |
|
Concorde™ |
Dutch 809; Chinchilla; Concert |
|
Cooper Black® |
Bitstream Cooper; Burlesque; Coop; CP; Ludlow Black; Pabst; Plymouth; Rugged Black |
|
Copperplate Gothic™ |
Atalante; Copperplate; Formal Gothic; Gothic No.29; Gothic No.30; Gothic No.31; Gothic No.32; Gothic No.33; Lining Plate Gothic; Mimosa; Spartan |
|
Corona® |
Aquarius; Cardinal; CR; Crown; Elmora; Ideal; Koronna; News 705; News No.3; News No.5; News No.6; Nimbus; Quincy; Royal; Scotsman Royal; StarNews; Vela |
|
Coronet™ |
Pageant; Ribbon 131 |
|
Courier |
Messenger |
|
Davida™ |
DaVinci |
|
Della Robbia™ |
Cantoria; Canterbury; Dahila; Firenze; Westminster Old Style |
|
De Vinne |
Congressional; Industrial 731 |
|
Diotima® |
Calligraphic 810; Diotima |
|
Dom™ Casual |
Ad Bold; Brush 431; Brush Roman; Dom Casual; Polka |
|
Eckmann™ |
Freeform 710 |
|
Egyptian 505™ |
Egyptios; Egypt 55 |
|
Egyptienne™ |
Humanist Slabserif 712; Egyptien |
|
Electra® |
Avanta; Elante; Illumna; Selectra; Transitional 521 |
|
Embassy |
Boston Script; Florentine Script; Hellana Script; Script No.1; Script No.2 |
|
Englische Schreibschrift™ |
English 157; English Script |
|
Engravers Roundhand |
Roundhand No. 1; Signet Roundhand; Snell; Snell Roundhand |
|
Engravers' Old English™ |
Old English; Old English Text |
|
Engravers' Roman |
Lining Litho |
|
Eurostile™ |
Aldostyle; Astron; ES; Eurogothic; Europa; Gamma; Micro; Microstyle; Square 721; Waltham |
|
Excelsior® |
Angeles; Berlin; Camelot; Commerce No.1; Commerce No.2; Digi-Antique; Esquire; EX; Excel; Excella; League Text; News 702; News No.10; News No.14; Opticon®; Paragon™; Primus; Victoria |
|
Fairefax; Fairfield™ |
Fairmont; Savant; Transitional 551 |
|
Financial |
Letter Gothic |
|
Folio® |
Haverhill |
|
Fraktur |
German Gothic |
|
Franklin Gothic™ |
Gothic No.16; Pittsburgh |
|
Frutiger® |
CG Frontiera; Concorde; Freeborn; Humanist 777; Provencale; Roissy; Siegfried |
|
Fry's Baskerville™ |
Baskerville Display; Baskerville F; Baskerville Old Face; Transitional 409 |
|
Futura® |
Alphatura; Atlantis; FU; Future; Photura; Sirius; Utica |
|
Gando |
Gando Ronde |
|
Garamond |
Aldine 511; American Garamond; Canberra; Carrera; Garamond No.2; Garamond No.3; Garamond No.49; Garamont; GD; Grenada |
|
Simoncini Garamond™ |
Garamond Simoncini; Garamondus; Italian Garamond; |
|
Gill Sans® |
Eric; Gillies; Glib; Graphic Gothic; Hammersmith™; Humanist 521; Sans Serif 2 |
|
Gothic No.13 |
Gothic No.4 |
|
Goudy Old Style™ |
Grecian; Number 11; Goudy; Goudy Bold; Goudy Extra Bold |
|
Granjon® |
Elegant Garamond; Garamont Premier; Grandeur |
|
Grotesque™ 126 |
Gothic 720 |
|
Helvetica® |
Aristocrat; CG Triumvirate; Claro; Corvus; Europa Grotesk; Geneva/2; Hamilton; HE; Helios/II; Helv; Helvette; Holsatia; Megaron/II; Newton; Spectra; Swiss 721; Vega; Video Spectra |
|
Hanseatic® |
Swiss 924; Geneva 2 Hanoverian; |
|
Helvetica Inserat |
Swiss 921; Geneva 2 Sera; Geneva Inserat; Helios Inserat |
|
Helvetica Compressed |
Helvetica Pressed; Spectra Compressed; Swiss 911; Claro Compressed; Geneva 2 Compressed; Helios Compressed |
|
Helvetica Monospaced |
Monospace 821 |
|
Hobo™ |
Hobnob; Tramp |
|
Imperial |
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Google's weak growth story - Thursday, 13 May 2004
We live in the age of the growth story. In the technology realm, there's a presumption that things will get better, faster, bigger. That presumption is so ingrained, in fact, that it's hard to remember that things that get better may not get more valuable. Especially on the Internet.
Google takes this one step further than most by not even trying to explain why it will get more valuable. In fact, Google has engendered so much loyalty that other people are stepping in to argue that Google is building an "operating system", with the implication that this will be incredibly valuable. The idea has shades of Isaac Asimov's old Multivac, a single world-wide computer. The Google guys didn't need to write this story; their fans wrote it for them.
As Venturpreneur's Gordon Smith puts it:
The most surprising thing in this prospectus- which is full of surprises - is that the company does not articulate a growth story in the Prospectus Summary. If you are concerned about Google's future, as every investor should be, you want to know what's next. That information is simply absent. Their business model is simply stated: "We generate revenue by delivering relevant, cost-effective online advertising."
Google states repeatedly that it expects to keep growing. But margins (currently enormous) are declining as it grows. Each extra piece of growth is less useful than the last. Googfle is a geek toy, and all the geeks are already on board.
I admire the honesty with which Google is stating its case. Faced with a stratospheric valuation, it has decided not to try for low Earth orbit. It will keep its promises vague and its threats specific, in the sure knowledge that people will still throw money at it.
In a perfect world, the Google prospectus might say: "Management believes that Google stock is being hyped to buggery. Buy it and hold it, and you'll probably regret it. That's why we're selling it." But that's being picky. The Gooogle vendors are already a lot more honest than everyone else.
Link: Venturpreneur's long list of Google comments
The economics of Google - Wednesday, 28 April 2004
John Quiggin at Crooked Timber suggests that today's equity markets don't understand a few key issues:
- The search engine business has low barriers to entry (as various little start-ups including Mooter are demonstrating).
- When you value something at over 100 times its earnings, you need a pretty fancy story about revenue growth - even if it's an Internet stock.
- That something is useful does not make it profitable. Private investors sometimes can't capture all the economic rents. This happens a lot on the Internet, and it happens for a reason.
Quiggin is a professor of economics and an eloquent voice in Australian public policy debates, and his post is worth quoting in full. I hope he won't mind.
According to this report, the widely-predicted Google IPO is likely to value the equity in Google at more than $20 billion - others suggest $25 billion. I immediately wondered whether Google was really worth $25 billion.
I started on a standard financial analysis. Although, as a private company, Google doesn't have to publish annual reports, it's been estimated that Google has annual revenues of $500 million and profits of $125 million so that the return on equity is about 0.5 per cent. We can expect that to grow reasonably fast in the next few years, but the scope for expansion in Google's core business is far from limitless. Most people in the developed world are already online and most of the heavy users already use Google (Eszter might have more to say on this). Moreover,there's no strong reason to suppose that Google will be around in, say, 20 years time. I find it hard to draw a plausible earnings path that would yield a present value of $25 billion at any reasonable discount rate.
That's a problem for the investors, though. The Google example started me thinking about the more general problem of economic valuation in the Internet era. I started by looking at this piece by Simson Garfinkelhat tip - Tyler Cowen. As well as reporting potential competition from Akamai (relevant in considering Google's longevity), Garfinkel estimates that Google operates a network of 100 000 servers, but that clever design allows the use of very cheap computers as servers. Let's and suppose an average of $500 a piece. This implies that the main piece of capital equipment operated by Google is worth around $50 million1 - a hefty sum, but a tiny fraction of the estimated equity value (and presumably there's some debt in there as well) .
Next, it's of interest to look at capital-labour ratios. Google apparently has about 1000 employees, which would suggest a total labour cost of the order of $100 million per year - a little on the low side as a proportion of revenues of $500 million, but not implausible. On the other hand, the number of employees is minuscule in relation to the valuation above, which implies a capital stock of $25 million per worker. I feel sure that this kind of ratio would imply some pretty strange organizational policies.
Then there's the question of how much Google is worth in economic terms. I would think the correct answer must be lot more than the present value of its revenues. I use Google all the time, but unless text ads have a subliminal effect for which Google is being paid, I've never contributed a penny to its revenues, and quite possibly never will.
The general problem is that, in an economy dominated by public goods, like that of the Internet, there's no reason to expect any relationship between economic value and capacity to raise revenue. Things of immense social value (this blog, for example!) are given away because there's no point doing anything else. On the other hand significant profits can be made by those who can find a suitable choke point, even if they haven't actually contributed anything of value. Assuming for the moment that SCO prevails in its attempts to extract revenue from Linux users, it won't be because SCO's code was better than some free alternative but simply because it was widely distributed before anyone found out it was copyrighted.
If the Internet continues to grow in economic importance, the central role of public goods in its formation will pose big problems for capitalism, though not necessarily to the benefit of traditional forms of socialism.
Quiggin is a critic of several strands of the neo-classical synthesis which has dominated economics since the 1980s, but I think even he underestimates the extent to which Google economics is already taking hold.
Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, an economist called Paul Romer started modelling a world in which technological change caused some traditional rules to stop working. He was inspired by what was happening in places like the software market, where Microsoft was moving towards dominance. His work pointed out that traditional economics worked well in a world where goods were excludable (sellers could keep their stuff from buyers) and rivalrous (if you had it, I couldn't have it) and where economies of scale and scope were weak (as you sold more stuff, you didn't get disproportionately more for them, or for other things you made).
Change those rules somehow - say, by changing the way technology works - and you change economics. And as it happens, software and information tend to be non-excludable, non-rivalrous and open to economies of scale and scope.
Economists Brad DeLong and Michael Froomkin set this out nicely in a paper called Speculative Microeconomics for Tomorrow's Economy, available - of course - on the Web.
Back in 1990, as a journalist writing about Australian politics and economics, I used to walk out of my office on the second floor of Canberra's Parliament House, around the corner, and into the Parliamentary Library, where I could read this stuff to my heart's content. I loved it because it took economics beyond the debate over rules for preventing the next recession - not a bad debate, but a narrow one that was producing diminishing returns. Dozens of other economists began piling into the field (formally called "endogenous growth theory"). You could see it would soon start to affect the way people thought about public policy. And so it did. Its first effect was to make people worried that Microsoft was unstoppable, that technological change was creating a "winner-take-all" economy.
But the point that Quiggin is making is that you can equally create "winner-take-none" scenarios, where useful work creates less private profit than traditional economics would suggest it should.
