This is strange.
In 1960, almost 40 years before the Internet came along, Barbra Streisand drops the “a” from her first name.
Of course, with the unusual spelling, it’s much easier to find her in search engines, on Amazon, etc.
That woman has incredible foresight.
Coming next week: how to write specs!
Good service
I wrote to Starbucks. “The grease pencils which you use to mark up the coffee cups (in New York, at least) wind up leaving ugly black goo on my hands every time I order a Starbucks beverage,” I said. “Please consider finding some kind of marker for the cups that does not come right off on my fingers.”
(See what drinking too much coffee makes you do?)
“Cynthia B.” in Starbucks Customer Relations replied promptly: “I shared your suggestion for using a different type of marking pen in our New York locations with the Retail Operations Department for their attention.”
We’ll see!
Non-competes
Does your employment contract include a non-compete clause?
I’ve started hearing of some companies with the chutzpah to require a two-year non-compete clause in the employment contract. That’s nuts. What am I supposed to do? Go two years without a job? Go back to graduate school? Some of these companies have such grandiose/paranoid ideas of who their competitors are that they consider everyone a competitor.
I loathe these things (see my earlier story on the topic), so Fog Creek will never have a non-compete clause. When I mentioned this to a lawyer who works with a lot of high tech startups, this is what he said: “We’re trying to get all the employers to put them in. Provide a united front. So that employees don’t have any choice.” Who, exactly, does this benefit if everybody has the same clause?
I’ll tell you who it benefits. Me. Because I’ll hire you even if you don’t want to sign a restrictive non-compete clause that makes you scared to ever look for another job in your field.
The “Hello, World” company
Over the last four or five weeks I’ve been shocked, shocked at how much work it takes just to create a company that doesn’t do anything.
Payroll, incorporation, certificate of good standing, Federal EIN, Authorization to do Business, Workman’s Compensation, liability insurance, health insurance, business checking account, I-9 forms, W-4 forms, SS-4 forms, Payroll Direct Deposit, domain name registration, trademark search, …
Oh, wait, I forgot. Articles of incorporation, shareholders resolutions, election of the board of directors, by-laws, founders’ agreements, flounder agreement, baked flounder and spam, halibut and spam, plain spam, spam spam eggs and spam, and spam spam spam spam spam spam bacon spam and spam.
As if there weren’t enough reasons not to use Cue Cat, the company can’t even keep it’s customer data private.
Register.com and URL forwarding
A good friend, looking for a CTO job in NYC, called me to ask what I thought about register.com. He sort of thought that because “www.JoelOnSoftware.com” has a big ad for register.com on the bottom, that I was affiliated with them in some way.
Actually, the correct URL for Joel on Software is supposed to be “joel.editthispage.com”, where I sure as heck don’t have any ads for register.com.
But I wanted to reserve the domain name “JoelOnSoftware.com” for when I get rich and can afford to host it myself. So I used register.com to register the new domain name, and then used register.com’s “free” URL redirection service.
And that’s the problem: their free redirection service frames your site with a big fat ad. Lame.
For now, I’ve added a little bit of Javascript to get rid of the ad that they put up… but it still flashes briefly. Now I’m kind of hoping that people mistakenly believe that if you use register.com, your web page will have a big register.com ad. That would teach them to sneak their nasty ads in where they don’t belong!
Cobalt Qube
We’ve set up a Cobalt Qube for Fog Creek. It’s doing a nice job as a web server, email server, CVS server, firewall, NAT, and a few other things I haven’t figured out yet. All told, we got all this stuff running with about 3 hours of work between us… compared to several days of work when I set up the same thing for myself on a new Linux box at home.
When the Qube came out about a year ago at $999, they bragged about how it “doesn’t need a keyboard and monitor” and therefore can be a lot cheaper than a PC running Linux. Well, this thing is still $999, now a heck of a lot more expensive than the equivalent PC, and I’m sure it’s still selling like hotcakes… know why? It’s because of the software. Software adds value faster than it adds cost. Prediction: Cobalt will outsource all the hardware stuff and become a pure software company.
Did you get this little box in the mail this week?
I did. I think it’s because I’m a Wired subscriber. Inside the box was a free “cat”, which is supposed to remind you of a mouse, and Jared says looks like a fox:
The little cat can be used to scan barcodes which appear in magazines like, um, Wired, for example.
And when you scan the cool barcode, presumably, your web browser goes to the Altoids web page.
Well.
The number of dumb things going on here exceeds my limited ability to grok all at once. I’m a bit overwhelmed with what a feeble business idea this is.
The cat is called Cue Cat, which I’m supposed to punctuate as so: :CueCat. That’s right, the colon is a part of the name. The software that comes with this cutie says that it’s made by DigitalConvergence.:Com. No, don’t type the colon before the com, that’s merely there to be cute.
The colonated company DigitalConvergence.:Com has, and I kid you not, 200 employees, according to their web page. That means that even on the most moderate estimate, they are burning about a million dollars a month just on salaries. Now, the auditors say that the paid circulation of Wired is around half a million, so mailing this dang thing out is going to cost about a million dollars in postage, if they’re really sending it to everyone. Not to mention the cost of manufacturing the CD with the software; the cable that comes with the thing, and the :Cat itself: this is a company that is burning money at Iridium rates.
What kind of investors are willing to burn money at that rate? Don’t they realize that it’s a dumb idea?
I guess not. But it is. Here’s why.
1. This thing is not solving a problem.
I’ve racked my brain, and I’ve tried to figure out why I would want their cat chasin’ my mouse around the desk. I came up with two “problems” that it solves:
- typing URLs is hard. As if. Going to the Altoids web site is not a hard problem that I need solved. We’re talking 7 characters to type, here.
- magazines can’t prove to advertisers that people actually look at their ads and go to the URLs mentioned in the ad.
I think that #2 is really where the focus is, because that seems to be where the money is to be made (and that’s who’s going to pay for the cats, which users get for free). But #2 is a falsehood, too. People don’t have cats and they won’t use them. Just to direct mail a bunch of cats, free, to the subscribers of one magazine is going to cost millions, and if it’s like any other direct mail, 99% of them are going straight in the trash. If 1% of Wired’s subscribers install the thing, we’re talking about an installed base of around 5000 cats. So if Wired thinks they are going to impress their advertisers by showing them how 13 people scanned the page and went to the web site, they’re in for a rude awakening.
If you invent something that doesn’t solve a problem, it better be entertaining. Is the :Cat entertaining? Let me entertain you with a quick quote from the instructions that came with this thing:
“TO CHANGE YOUR COMPUTER’S BIOS SETTINGS…”
That’s where I stopped reading. Changing the BIOS settings is not my idea of entertainment. I don’t think I want to install this. There is no possible benefit to the consumer, so no consumer in their right mind will use this.
2. The Cat Suffers from Chicken and Egg Syndrome
No advertiser will bother putting the Cat barcode in their ads unless a lot of people have cats installed on their computers, because, well, it’s just a lot of bother and looks dumb.
Nobody will install a Cat on their computer unless they see Cat barcodes all over the place.
Conclusion: this thing will die an unhappy death of Chicken and Egg Syndrome. You can read all about this syndrome in my earlier article here. This might be a decent business if everybody had cats installed, and it would be a great business if every ad, everywhere, had barcodes, but, uh, they don’t, and they don’t, so it’s not such a great business.
To get around the chicken/egg problem, DigitalConvergence.:Com is spending a fortune giving away the devices. If they send them to all of Wired’s subscribers, well, that’s half a million people. Out of 300 million people on the net, I’m not impressed. And their system lets you scan in UPC symbols, for some bizarre reason, so if you want to go to the Campbell’s Tomato Soup web page, you can do that by scanning the actual can itself. Both of these are half-hearted attempts to solve the mother of all chicken and egg problems.
3. And anyway, what the heck happened to last month’s dumb Wired idea?
About two months ago, Wired magazine had a different technology for going to a URL automatically from an ad. It was some kind of weird thing where you held up the page to your digital camera, took a digital picture, and ran this wacked out software that navigated your browser to the Altoids home page. So now instead of typing 7 letters I have to find my digital camera, turn it on, wait for it to boot up, take a picture of the page, turn off the camera, wait for it to flush its memory to flash, remove the flash card from the camera, take the network card out of the PCMCIA slot, put the compact flash into it’s holder, plug it into the PCMCIA slot, find the picture, run the software which I previously installed, oh, don’t get me started. It would be a half-hour trauma just to go to the damn Altoids web site, where you can’t even buy an Altoids, for heaven’s sake. Curious.
Of course, that idea died so quickly that here it is, two months later, and there’s no sign of it in the pages of this month’s Wired. A mere flash in the primordial soup. I can’t even remember what the damn thing was called. (My readers inform me that it’s called the Digimarc MediaBridge.)
Bottom line: if you’re working for a company that’s spending millions of dollars trying to get people to do something with absolutely no benefit to them, and which suffers from chicken and egg problems, don’t be counting your stock options just yet.
[June 16, 2001: Digital Convergence lays off most employees.]
Cats
“The number of dumb things going on here exceeds my limited ability to grok all at once. I’m a bit overwhelmed with what a feeble business idea this is.”
Read my full review of DigitalConvergence’s new Cat:
New office!
Fog Creek Software has a new office. We moved in yesterday:
The office is located about a block from South Street Seaport. It has windows everywhere, a full kitchen, and some exciting bright-red walls (but not for long!)