from the editor of aseidman.com

Poetic Justice

Posted by Ariel Seidman | July 20, 2008

Innovation at the expense of laziness and old-minded dogma

• Ford Motors pumps billions into upgrades of its Ford F-150 pickup truck (i.e. gas guzzler)
• Ford Motors loses $15.3 billion in 2006 and 2007 and more to come.
• Ford Motors shuts down its Menlo Park, CA car dealership
• Tesla Motors (an electric car manufacturer) opens up a new car dealership in Menlo Park on the same site as the old Ford dealership.

Software Companies Should Kill the Cubicle

Posted by Ariel Seidman | January 31, 2008

Cubicles are the ultimate form of a poor compromise. Lets consider the two reasonable extremes of providing a working environment for employees. On the one hand you can go with the bullpen approach or you can go with offices. Somebody must have said, well if we just built walls around these desks then we would have the best of both worlds (lots of bad products get developed with this type of thinking). We would have the privacy of an office as well as the open and egalitarian benefits of the bullpen. Nothing could be further from the reality as cubicles

1. provide a false sense of privacy — you can’t make a private call from your cube.
2. generate just as many distractions as a bullpen environment as you can hear every conversation.
3. rarely provide the upside associated with the bullpen model where ideas can flow quickly and people have the latest information required to make good decisions.

I have no doubt that technology companies and especially those companies whose success relies on developing code cubicles are a significant drain on productivity and general employee satisfaction. Rather, a better model would provide employees (especially software developers, product managers, qa, etc.) with a small office and in the center of the floor provide an ad-hoc meeting places (not conference rooms that you need to reserve) with Wi-Fi (of-course), refreshments, etc. where employees could congregate around if they need to ideate, exchange information, etc.

Silicon Valley Power Play — When will the Pendulum Swing?

Posted by Ariel Seidman | September 23, 2007

Silicon Valley is fortunate to have leading companies in large industries — media, computer/devices, and micro-processors. With lots of cash on the balance sheets, confident execs, and smart folks on the payroll some of these growth companies (Google, Apple, HP, etc.) in these industries are starting to expand out of their core business. This expansion has been pushing the pendulum to a point where the concentration of power in Silicon Valley may soon hit a wall.

Lets have a quick look at the current lineup of major industries in the Valley and the top players in those industries:

Media companies

• Google
• Yahoo (ok, 9% growth is not exactly hitting it out of the park, but there is untapped potential here — full disclosure: i work at yahoo)

Computer/devices companies (both of these companies are on a tear)

• HP
• Apple

Micro-processor companies

• Intel
• AMD

Well — when times are good folks start to expand beyond their core and these companies are expanding — especially the folks at Google — into the following industries:

• Wireless & Telecom
  • iPhone
  • Gphone
  • Buying wireless spectrum: Apple & Google are each other
  • Undersea fiber: Google
• Entertainment
  • Apple TV & iTunes –> distribution hub for all entertainment
• Energy (alternative forms)
  • Silicon Valley in general is playing a major role in this space — however with the exception of Intel and AMD the companies above are more dabbling then anything else — but $20M here and $30M there and it becomes a bit more then dabbling.

For the past 4 years the pendulum has been swinging in favor of these Bay Area companies but when you expand beyond the core you inevitably start to piss off the legacy players… Once these legacy players start fighting back and the economic slowdown forces these companies to curtail their investments beyond the core will the pendulum reverse?

Protect Your Downside with Farecast.com

Posted by Ariel Seidman | February 11, 2007

Farecast is a great service — here’s why:

1. Clever use of free data (costs a ton to process this much data, but the data itself is free)
2. Deliver the right information (will fare’s increase or decrease) at the right time (at the point of search or transaction)
3. Leverages consumers fear of overpaying. 

However, will your average consumer spend enough time to grok how this works — not sure about that one.  Some good marketing folks will be needed on this one. 

A Quick Comparison of Google and Indeed.com Trends

Posted by Ariel Seidman | February 3, 2007

Steve Rubel has a good post on the use of basic (yet powerful) analytic tools such as Google Trends and Indeed to develop insight into whether or not certain technologies are hype or here to stay.  While there is no doubt that these tools are powerful I have some concerns with the use of the Indeed data for a few reasons:

• Unlike Google Trends or Flickr Camera Finder which rely on data that is directly provided by users on their respective sites the data on which Indeed trends is based on is based on their crawled data and therefore very suspect (full disclosure I did work in the Yahoo!’s HotJobs group).  Lets go one level deeper and look at the Indeed corpus and why it is not suitable for analytics and trending:
• Hiring managers and recruiters flood their job descriptions with buzzwords in order to rank higher on Careerbuilder, Monster, HotJobs, etc. hence generating hiring trends based on the occurrence of certain keywords in a job description won’t tell you that much and for certain keywords will likely lead you in the wrong direction.
• Aggregating job listings via a crawl (which is what Indeed does) is not easy and it yields tens of duplicates per job (every recruiter posts their jobs to multiple sites).

By the way Indeed is a pretty good job search engine, this trends feature is a bit out of place.  It would be far more interesting if they provided trends on what their users were searching for.

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