Notes from a Desi Geek

Eric Sink, one of my favorite writers, recently wrote an article titled ‘Game is Afoot’. Eric strongly believes that avoiding competition is a bad idea. He has written an excellent article on how to choose competition. He believes that almost always, there is a place for different products in same market. A concept called market fragmentation. I found a very compelling example for his argument.

Yesterday, I was reading latest issue of Business 2.0 and it has an article on Opera Browser and how it is succeeding in marketplace by targeting its browser for mobile platforms. They are the number one browser vendor in mobile phones market, their browser is currently preinstalled on over 12 million handheld devices. What I found even more interesting was that Opera sells 100,000 copies/year of its desktop browser for $39 each. That’s 3.9 million dollars revenue in a market which is dominated by free products! There is Internet Explorer by Microsoft (Big and Smart competitor), there is FireFox (which has a sales force comprising of thousands of people) and Netscape. All the competitors of Opera are giving away their product for free but there are still people who buy their browser.

Conclusion: Don’t avoid competition. Accept them and create a product which fills need of a niche audience in your market.

Am I the only one who feels that Bloglines service has slowed down in recent times? I have 200+ feeds in Bloglines, and I get the feeling that it takes longer for Bloglines to show the updated feeds.

If that’s not enough, there are many more ‘planned’ outages at Bloglines. Check Bloglines News page and you will find that there is downtime planned this evening (22nd July 05) as well. Other outages were on
19th July 2005 (unexpected outage)
17th July 2005 (expected downtime)
26th June 2005 (Post about repeated outages)

I can understand that they have huge user base but c’mon, two planned downtime in 5 days (17th July and 22nd July) ? I can’t help but feel that this might have to do something with Ask.com acquistion.

JD

Wow!

That’s the word which came out of my mouth when I saw Fogcreek office full of geeks! [Normally, I give this 'Wow!' reaction only when I see hot chicks in clubs! ;)]

Yes, I attended Fog Creek Open House on Thursday, 14th July 2005.

I was so excited when Joel announced that he will be organizing Open House in July. I have been reading JoelOnSoftware since my college days (when I was in India) and I must admit that his writing has profound effect on how I look at the world of software engineering. I had never imagined that one day I will be in US and will get a chance to meet Joel in person!
So on Thursday afternoon, I left Office at 4:30 and headed to NY City. Instead of taking train, I decided to drive. [Lesson learnt: Never ever drive from NJ to NY City. Best way is to take NJ Transit train. 9 out of 10 times, train will get you to the city faster. ] First I went to Lincoln Tunnel and found that it has 40 minutes inbound delay so I drove all the way north to George Washington bridge. Once I was in City, I parked my car and took cab and finally reached Fog Creek Office on 8th Avenue.

I was late to the party and place was already full of geeks.

Joel was always surrounded by geeks and he was talking about topics like ‘Stock options as compensation method’, ‘How software product company are valued better than software consulting companies (the hockey stick curve) ‘, ‘How Aeron chairs costs few cents a day’ etc.

If you are avid JoS reader, you know that Fog Creek software was founded by Joel and Michael Pryor. I am sure that you know very little about Michael. Somehow he has preferred to be behind the stage. I asked one intern about him and finally I get to meet Michael. Somehow I had impression that Michael is an old guy, but lo and behold, not only he is young (he is 28), he is one _handsome_ chap. Here’s my picture with Joel and Michael.

I found that Michael and Joel met when they were working together in Juno. I asked Michael about what do they do when he and Joel are not in agreement over some particular issue. Michael answered that most of the time, he and Joel are in agreement most of the time, and in one-off cases when they disagree, depending upon who has put his foot down, they let the other person take decision. Joel talked about an incident when their new hire Ben (who did cross country bicycle trip) mailed Joel and Michael whether he can join Fog Creek earlier than his assigned joining date. Not only Joel and Michael both replied in affirmative, they both wrote the same 3 line reply to Ben!

I had always wanted to see Joel’s office and as I had expected, he has very clean and tidy office/desk. (Joel, why don’t you get a black keyboard?)

BTW, the monkey on the desk has ximian.com written on his tee. Here’s one more picture of his desk.

Here is picture of other part of office.

If you were to look through window in Joel’s office, here’s what you will see.

BTW, did I tell you that when you enter in to Fog Creek’s office, first thing you see is Fog Creek Library.

The library has books on Linux, PHP and Perl too! Here’s the proof:

I asked Joel about the secret product he mentioned in this entry on JoS. Joel answered that he wanted to create a product called ‘MailRoom’ which would handle incoming support mails and send appropriate replies/assign it to support personnel. Unfortunately, they killed the product.

One thing I liked the most in Joel’s office was his DJ Gear.

BTW, did I tell you that there was wine and some yummy snacks?

I asked Joel whether it ever happened that he couldn’t hire a person because he couldn’t offer him salary he was expecting. He told me that it happened only once when an intern wanted salary + stock options and he had to turn him down. [Joel doesn't like stock options much.] Finally, I asked him what kind of advice he would give to guy like me who is currently working in IT Services and wants to move to product companies like Fogcreek, Microsoft. Joel said, “Not knowing you personally, I don’t have specific advice. But in general, there is no action plan or strategy which will get you in product company. Just be yourself.” I think he meant that one needs to great programmer (who understands pointers! ) , a good communicator and that’s what will get him in great software product companies.

I also met some interns (couldn’t meet all of them), Babak (first hire by Fog Creek), Paul, Karan and others. Overall, it was one memorable evening, thanks Joel for organizing the open house!