When several, seemingly unrelated threads on TechMeme discuss the same things, you know they are onto something big. Today it’s data. Where you store it, how accessible / safe it is – and no, today’s s safety discussion isn’t about protecting it from intruders: it’s about whether you, the rightful owner can assess it safely.
Computing Without a Whirring Drive is an interesting article in The New York Times about how hard-disk industry executives are worrying about their future with the advent of of netbooks, smartphones and other devices. Some data may be on SSD’s in these gadgets, the rest in the Cloud – and today’s teenagers increasingly don’t care where it is, they trust it will always be available.
Which operating system is best for solid-state drives? –asks ComputerWorld, ironically the same day a new forecast predicts Netbook SSD usage may fall in 2009. Whichever way the trend goes, hard-disk execs don’t really have to lose a lot of sleep: data has to be stored somewhere, even in the cloud. In fact if you buy into to IDC's Storage Paradox ( I don’t), we’ll soon create more data than we can store.
But whether you store it locally or in the Cloud, how certain are you you can always access your data? Not only computer-generated data, but your music, photos, videos – even paper. Paperless office was a popular phrase but remained largely a dream for decades, but it’s now happening for real. Hardly any new information is generated on paper, so finally we are now willing to digitize old stuff and shred the paper originals. Soon all our information will exist only electronically. But there’s a problem as discussed over @ Technium:
The storage medium itself can decay. Turns out that paper is much more stable over the long term than most digital media. Magnetic surfaces flake, peel, shatter. And the supposed durable CDs and DVDs aren't very stable either.
The proposed solution: move your data regularly, probably at least once every 5 years. Now, for most of us, with computer-generated data it’s never been a problem, as we keep on replacing old computers with new ones, copying data over and over again. But do you have digital archives of really old data (rarely accessed documents, music, photos..etc) typically stored on CDs and DVDs? They may not be perfectly readable after a few years.
We don't know what the natural movage respiration cycle is for digital media yet since it is still very new, but I suspect the cycle is much shorter than we think. I would guess it is 5 years. No matter what digital format you have your precious stored on, you should expect to move it onto new media in five years -- and five years after that forever!
Move it, move it, move it.
For some of us the solution will be keeping everything on large hard-disks, syncing it between multiple machines, backing it up locally or online. But there is some naivete regarding online backups, as illustrated by this comment to the Technium post (emphasis mine):
i keep all my data on the built-in hard drive of my laptop. no dvds, no external drives. this way i can always be sure the physical media is still working. whenever i run out of disk space i buy a larger hard disc (and one for backup of course) and copy everything over.
in addition i push the really important stuff to amazon s3 regularly - in the cloud there are no physical media. oh wonderful world.
“In the Cloud there are no physical media” – really? Information still has to be stored somewhere, Cloud or local. When we move it to the Cloud, we’re simply pushing the responsibility onto others, trusting they do a better job then we would. But let’s face it, Cloud services have not been around long enough to face the issue of storage decay, and until they start talking about it, we don’t really know how they safeguard rarely accessed old data.
Then there’s the issue of formats and continuity. I’m not even talking about media formats (Last year I found my old University Thesis on a 5 1/4” floppy disk – I keep it as a souvenir, but can no longer access it). No, let’s assume you moved all your stuff from floppies, VHS tapes ..etc: you are savvy enough to take care of media format conversions before they become obsolete. I keep all digitized (formerly paper) documents in PDF format, hoping that will last forever.
But here’s the hidden trap: your application data my become inaccessible, even while you keep on upgrading to the most recent release of the application itself. A few examples:
The list could probably go on and on. The point is, that you’re in danger of losing access to data where you expect it the least: when you’re a “good customer” upgrading to new releases, and think you are safe, since all your data is created by the same application.
Digital continuity is important, and not something you can take for granted. Whether you take care of it yourself or outsource it to a provider “in the Cloud”, make sure your data is:
Oh, size issues again… Size Matters – said yours truly back in April, before returning the very first eee PC after only a day:
I could get used to the screen size, my fingers would learn to deal with the keyboard, but it’s impossible to browse the Net with this thing. The problem is that most websites are designed for larger resolution, and the eee can only display part of a page. Vertical scrolling (a lot) is not the end of the world, but having to scroll horizontally, just to find disappearing action buttons is simply ridiculous.
Asus may have created the netbook mania, but others certainly picked up, and not a day goes by without significant netbook announcements: it’s the single fastest growing (albeit low margin) segment of the PC market. It’s Not Only About Size – I wrote recently, pointing out, the real question was not whether the screen is 8.9” or 10” (7'’s are dinosaurs by now), but how we use these cheap little thingies:
A Netbook is a light mobile computing device that allows you to process information, access the Internet, and that does not store a bundle of bloated programs or data.
It’s really all about device-independent computing on the Web, or, as As Coding Horror’s Jeff Atwood says: The Web Browser is the New Laptop.
Today, we’re revisiting the size issue once again. It’s not about how large the display / keyboard is, but what you can do with them on the Net. Most websites today are designed at a resolution of 1024×768, and guess what: there’s not one single (good) netbook on the market today that that can display that. All of the current crop, including the deluxe Asus S101 max out at 600 vertical resolution. The only exception was the first version of the HP Mini, at a generous 1280x768 on a small screen, but while HP should be commanded for lowering the price on the second generation, they blew it by downgrading the screen to 1024x600. Dell’s new Mini 12 comes with 1200x800 resolution, but they blew it, too, by pairing the sleek machine with Vista: before it even hit the market the judgement was out: sleek, but slow.
So that leaves us with no decent notebook as of now. Yes, I enjoyed the small size and light weight of the cute Acer Aspire One I took to a conference, but the 600 resolution proved to be more of a hindrance than I had expected. It’s not fun when your browser toolbars occupy half your screen real estate (keep on hitting F11), but browsing, reading is not the worst part: just try using any input form or edit window where the action buttons are missing - some at the top, others at the bottom, you keep on scrolling forever.
So I am still waiting for the first really usable netbooks to arrive. But I disagree with Tom Doyle, who recommends web designers switch back stick to 800 pixel width: you can’t turn time back. Progress means higher resolution, better screens, and the market has already moved on anyway. Rather then downgrading websites, let’ trust manufacturers will soon wake up and start shipping netbooks that are actually net-compliant.
Update: The worst thing about the screens is vertical resolution, which is generally 600 pixels - says TechCrunch.
Hardly a day goes by without another new Netbook announcement, at lower and lower prices. The first baby eee PC by ASUS was toy-like ( I returned it after a day), but the current crop are quite usable mobile computing devices.
These new Netbooks are flying off the shelf, so much so that sometimes you wonder if manufacturers rush to re-label their notebooks to netbooks, just to ride the wave. Whereas the first model had a puny 7” screen, the current standard is a minimum of 8.9, but 10” is becoming widely available, and when Dell recently announced their Inspiron Mini 12, ZDNet’s Larry Dignan rightfully noted that the netbook-notebook-laptop lines have just become blurry.
Dell’s divider line may very well be at the 12” screen size, considering anything beyond that a notebook. ASUS CEO Jerry Shen clearly draws the line at 10” – a definition that fits his own eee PC line. I think all these size-based definitions are meaningless. Size truly matters, but for another reason: when you pick a travel n*tbook, you clearly need something small and lightweight, yet with a decent keyboard and screen. But that’s not what differentiates Netbooks from any other computer.
The real divider is how you use it. A Netbook is a light mobile computing device that allows you to process information, access the Internet, and that does not store a bundle of bloated programs or data.
When computers first became personal, most of us only got one at the workplace, then years later the family PC appeared– one expensive computer shared by the entire family. Now we often have individual PC’s for just about anyone at home, including the kids, and are moving to a new pattern, where individuals will have a number of purpose-oriented computing devices, be it a desktop, workhorse laptop, netbook or smartphone. The fundamental change is that we’re not really working on the computer itself, but on the Net: the computer (keyboard, screen) is just our way to access the net. As Coding Horror’s Jeff Atwood says in The Web Browser is the New Laptop :
After spending some time with a netbook, I realized that calling them "small laptops" is a mistake. Netbooks are an entirely different breed of animal. They are cheap, portable web browsers.
We’re getting to the point where for most productivity task the computer’s performance or even the operating system won’t matter anymore: all we need is a decent screen and keyboard to get online.
But computer manufacturers while jumping on this hot new trend, seem to be confused. Minor flavors aside they typically offer two major configurations:
That’s not a very smart combination, if you ask me. Statistics show the return rate of Linux vs. Windows based netbooks is 4 to 1. Buyers of the cute little netbooks are happy first, then they become frustrated that they can’t instantly do things they are used to – and a learning curve with a $400 $200 device is unacceptable. Let’s face it, Linux is not friendly enough for most non-geeks – including yours truly. But why can I not have a netbook with XP and SSD?
Typical netbook SSD's are still in the 8-16GB range, while harddisks are up to 160GB. That’s a trap that vendor themselves fall into: my sexy little netbook (an Acer Aspire One) came loaded with crapware, including trial versions of MS Office, MS Works, Intervideo WinDVD (on a DVD-less computer!) and who knows what else. Once the pattern is established, and you have large storage, you will start installing your own programs and data, too, the temptation is just too hard to resist. You no longer have a netbook, it just became a noteboook.
The New York Times ran an article this week: In Age of Impatience, Cutting Computer Start Time, discussing the problem of slow boot times. Anyone who ever had a Windows computer knows this tends to get worse over time. My own Vista desktop had a sub-minute startup time a year ago when new, not it takes 3-4 minute to boot it. The two older XP-based laptops take 6-7 minutes to reboot. This well-known Windows disease can only be cured by refreshing your system from time to time. It’s an ugly process, requires wiping out your harddisk’s content, re-installing Windows, then your programs and data. PC manufacturers don’t exactly help by providing “restore disks” instead of proper OS CD’s: why would you start with a pre- SP1 copy of WinXP and reinstall a bunch of years-old obsolete crapware when the objective was to cleanup your system in the first place?
If you want to avoid the pain, keep your netbook free of applications and data: use it as a NETbook, and it will stay nimble and fast (sort of).
Talk about fast, there’s a neat solution to reduce boot-up time: Splashtop, a quick-load platform by startup company DeviceVM can put you online within seconds, without loading the main operating system. Chances are you’d be using it 80% of the time, relegating full Windows to an as-needed basis. DeviceVM charges manufacturers about $1 per system, so why is it that it’s often found in high-end notebooks, but not in the netbooks by the same manufacturer? Splashtop should be a must on any netbook.
Finally, a word on connectivity and prices: Wifi gets you online almost, but not all the time, so obviously a 3G connection is a useful addition to your netbook. But you will pay for 3G data usage, so why don’t carriers subsidize your netbook purchase, like they do with cell phones? The day will come, as the WSJ reports, HP may be one of the first to introduce such a model: H-P Mulls Service Bundles for Netbooks. When that happens, your notebook will not be too different from a smartphone, just with a larger keyboard and display.
For the second day TechMeme is overflowing with Microsoft news coming out of PDC: Azure, Windows 7, Web Office (whatever the MS name will be). But on the very day that supposedly all belonged to Microsoft there was a stream of seemingly unrelated items on TechMeme all pointing in the same direction, none too good for Microsoft.
Joe Wilcox @ Microsoft Watch declared that Windows Vista No Longer Matters :
Contrary to ridiculous assertions recently made by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, Windows Vista is a flop. If businesses aren't buying Vista, after waiting six (now seven) years, it's no success. Yet, during the last day of the Gartner 2008 expo 10 days ago, Steve asserted that Vista "has been extremely successful."
Success in terms of revenue does not mean actual product acceptance. The fact is, most of the Vista revenue comes from consumers, not the corporate Market. Consumers don’t intentionally buy Vista, they buy computers: good luck trying to buy a system without Vista on it – unless it’s a Mac or the refreshingly new category of Netbooks. And if you cough up the extra $50-$99 most OEM’s charge you to “downgrade” to XP, it is still booked as a Vista sale! Like I’ve said before, don’t be blinded by Vista sales numbers. No wonder MS omitted the Vista licence count during last week’s earnings announcement.
PDC has shown that Microsoft is now eager to forget about Vista, a bad dream, fully focusing on Windows 7. They must have realized that no multi-million-dollar marketing campaign can fix Vista’s badly tarnished reputation.
Where public opinion is more divided is whether this was just a perception issue, or actual product problems. Count me in the latter camp – no Mojave Experiment can convince me otherwise. The problem with Vista has never been appearance, or features as originally designed: it’s the zillions of inconsistencies, little things that fail every day turning us Vista-users into Vista-sufferers.
The stream of messages coming out of PDC appear to confirm this: it’s clear that Windows 7 does not mean major architectural, infrastructural changes – that’s what Vista did. Win7 is all about the user experience – in other words, putting the finishing touches on Vista. I said over a year ago: we don’t need another desktop OS. But I guess I am OK with Windows 7, provided Microsoft:
Whether it’s Vista or Windows 7, almost doesn’t matter – it will likely be the last major desktop OS MS releases, and as such it represents the end of an era. Obviously Microsoft themselves recognizes it (finally!), this years PDC is all about moving to the Cloud, be it the Azure initiative, or the announcement of moving Office to the Web. (To be precise it’s the announcement of a future product announcement).
This trend will only be accelerated by the shift in what devices we use for our (cloud-based) computing needs. Time to Leave the Laptop Behind – says The Wall Street Journal, joined by Coding Horror’s Jeff Atwood who declares: The Web Browser is the New Laptop. Every day another Netbook is announced, at lower and lower prices, and they change how we access information forever. I’ll be devoting the next post to this subject, in the meantime leaving you with another post from Henry Blodget: Microsoft Windows: The Beginning of the End.
Image by geognerd via Flickr
Asus created the Netbook craze with the first eee Pc (the one I owned for a day) released last year, and it has become a huge market – in fact the most dynamic segment in PC sales. Laptop Magazine published an interview with ASUS CEO Jerry Shen. Key factoids:
Four million Eee PCs have been sold to date. He plans to reach the goal of 5 million Eee PC sales by the end of 2008.
Touch-enabled Eee PCs are on the way and will be here by early 2009.
He then goes on explaining that the difference between netbook and notebok is screen size: anything below 10” is a netbook, above that are notebooks. OK… but this is the part he got wrong:
For us, the difference though between netbook and notebook, is that the netbook is used to consume content and have that connectivity experience. The notebook is for creating content and you have more storage and memory – its a machine that can do more.
No way, Jose! (Ok, Jerry
). I actually hate viewing those tiny little screens – but am going to conferences, meetings, travel a bit, and need a lightweight work tool for all those times. Nobody I know buys netbooks as their main computer, but as a travel machine, which is:
In other words, netbooks are all about creating content for me – and to do that, I don’t really need more power or storage, since I am primarily using Web Applications.
In fact I’m flying to Denver for the Defrag Conference soon, and decide I would no longer carry my notebrick, so have just ordered a netbook myself – not an eee PC, but the Acer Aspire One. I think I got a good deal @ Amazon, for $399. Yes, I’m aware of the $309 deal, but mine is a different configuration:
So I was happy that I got the best deal – until this morning, when I saw the exact same configuration for $279, shipping included!
I am speechless… this looks too good to be true. I can’t find any info on the vendor (BeneficialTech.info) , there is a contact email but no phone number - but they have Google Checkout. 
So I leave it to my dear readers to decide: do you think this is real or a scam?
P.S. I'd rather have the Asus S101, but it's not yet available.
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Just because I wrote How Software Can Be Resilient to Recession doesn’t mean I’m naive enough to declare that all SaaS businesses are recession-proof – they just have a better model to weather the storm, which is now inevitable.
OM Malik, who is now a VC Partner himself reports:
Sequoia Capital, arguably the smartest venture capital investor in business, is sounding the alarm and asking its portfolio companies to buckle down for what could be the worst economic downturn of their relatively short lives.
Senior Sequoia Partners got their portfolio CEO’s together and warned them the downturn would be worse than they might expect, then proceeded to lecture them on how to cut costs, business function by function.
In other words, Business 101, which probably many other startup Founders should take quickly. You see, it’s one thing to call yourself CEO in the good times, living the fun startup lifestyle on your VC-funded salary in what’s your first real job, and it’s entirely different thing to manage a business to survival in tough times.
But it’s not Game Over, as today’s sensationalist titles would suggest: IT’S OVER! POP GOES THE BUBBLE, Sorry, Startups: Party's Over. No, times are officially tough, but the truly strong businesses will survive, and I also trust some of the whiz-kid baby-CEOs will come out of this as battle-hardened Entrepreneurs.
Who needs a financial crisis, “smart” Executives can wreck the business on their own…
On-demand CRM provider Entellium’s CEO and CFO gave a new meaning to double-entry bookkeeping: they had one (real) set of books for themselves, and another (fake) one to show their Board and investors. The Board believed Entellium had annual revenues of close to $4 million, while the real amount was $582,789. The CEO and CFO are now facing prosecution, and some of the $50M in VC funding still has not been accounted for.
There have been rumors of Entellium trying to sell itself for a while – now it’s down to a garage sale, potentially selling assets and some IP. I feel sorry for the honest employees, but mostly for the customers.
I strongly protest the sensationalist title found @ InsideCRM: Entellium execs charged; is SaaS next to go on trial? Entellium’s demise had nothing to do with their business model. This company was wrecked by two crooks, period. No reason to taint the entire SaaS sector.
This company clearly did not falter due to the recession: two crooks brought it down. This can happen in any industry.
The next two stories are not failures … but something isn’t quite right.
The InfusionSoft blog, where I first saw the Entellium news also cited NetBooks, which halted new customer registrations. This is my post title from February 2008: NetBooks: Integrated SaaS Suite for Very Small Businesses. Almost. Almost being a key word.
Other than missing a few key business processes, their UI wasn’t just boring, it had shortcomings that rendered the whole system quite useless. CEO Ridgely Evers reached out to me, we met, he revealed future development plans and showed me screenprints of the revamped UI. I was optimistic, and really liked the concept of giving small businesses an integrated system (mini-ERP) at $20 per user, a fraction of the next step up, NetSuite. I also liked Ridgely’s deep passion and understanding of small businesses. Not only was he the guy behind the original Quickbooks, but he ran an actual small business along with his wife. Finally a business owner bringing solutions to his own…
So receiving Ridgely’s email response (which he says got nuked by the InfusionSoft blog’s comment spam filter) was a surprise:
The reason we stopped was that we discovered some pretty deep flaws in the software architecture, flaws that would not allow us to scale. Rather than subjecting new customers to what would be a less-than-positive experience, we made the tough (and, I think, correct) decision to stop adding new users while we re-tool.
As you might imagine for a product with the scope of NetBooks, re-tooling is not a simple process, and will take another quarter or two. But rest assured, we're in this for the long haul and will absolutely be back -- better than ever!
I hope they will be back. But how can you discover deep flaws in your architecture after years of development?
This story reminded me of another conversation I had with Dean Carlson, CEO of ViewPath, an On-Demand Project Management tool company, in preparation to my Office 2.0 Panel. I was surprised to find they had been in business for 7 years, yet hardly any information is available and their competitors barely know about them.
As it turns out the first few years were spent developing the original product, then a year or so went into trying to sell it when they realized their architecture woudln’t scale. You can guess the rest of the story: back to development for another two years or so, and now, finally the launched ViewPath 2.0.
The first look at the product is promising, in fact we will cover it later in our PM 2.0 series. So this is not a failure story – or is it? I can’t help but have some doubts about the company’s ability to execute, if it took them years to discover the architectural flaw, and altogether 7 years to bring a real product to market.
The common thread between ViewPath and NetBooks: both are founded, run, and funded by former Executives who are passionate about their business, but probably not too hungry. Unlike the whiz-kid baby-CEO’s I was somewhat teasing early in this post, this is not the big break they need in life – and it shows. It shows on the pace of business. I whish them success, but am worried they will be left behind.
If you’ve been wondering how all these stories are related together, well, there’s one common thread: the Founder / Entrepreneur often makes or breaks business. I think these stories bring up a list – a very incomplete one – of traits a Startup Entrepreneur needs to have – or shouldn’t have. But instead of spelling them out, I leave the conclusions to you. They are all in the stories, after all.
Update: Want to get off the "Sky is falling" treadmill? Need inspiration? Find it here.
Even better, get really inspired at Defrag. Use discount code zoli1 to get $300 off.
