January 30th, 2009

What is American?

Posted by John Carroll @ 1:14 pm

Categories: General

Tags: Massachusetts, H-1B, Productivity, Human Resources, Labor Relations, John Carroll

A recent post by Brian Sommer noted that H-1B visa holders might be in for a rough ride in 2009 as the weakening economy invites calls for special preferences for the accidental citizens of the United States of America (I say “accidental,” as most of us were bestowed our rights as citizens by accident of birth). In fact, Sommer makes note of a demand by Charles Grassley, a Republican senator from Iowa, to Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, that upcoming layoffs at Microsoft affect H-1B visa holders disproportionately.

It’s peculiar that such calls tend to come from politicians from states which lie the furthest it is possible to get from our nation’s borders. Equally odd is that such statements are typical of today’s crop of politicians from the party of Ronald Reagan, whose pro-trade credentials were rarely in doubt, and as the author of the last big amnesty given to illegal immigrants in this country, would look askance at such anti-business populist nonsense.

It’s also odd that that so many computer professionals respond enthusiastically to such populist blather. Every time anyone writes about the H-1B program or foreign workers, the Talkbacks are littered with posts decrying the foreign workers who take “our” jobs away. That’s odd, because most such professionals wouldn’t even have jobs if globalization hadn’t brought the cost of computers down to levels where practically everyone in the developed world has one. Lower prices make bigger markets for OUR services.

Think about it practically. Imagine if the government of Massachusetts decided to force MIT to accept exclusively residents of the state. What would happen to the quality of science conducted at MIT? It’s not because citizens of Massachusetts are stupid. Rather, it’s because Massachusetts is a drop in the bucket compared to the 6+ billion people who exist on this planet.

You find more gold if you sift a mountain than if you sift the pile of dirt you have in your backyard. The same applies to IT personnel.

Quite frankly, hiring and firing decisions should be based on how valuable a particular individual is to a company.

Anything less is un-American.

December 17th, 2008

Hiatus till January

Posted by John Carroll @ 8:36 am

Categories: General

Tags: Blogging, Corporate Communications, Investment, Financial Accounting, Internet, Marketing, Finance, John Carroll

Not that I think crowds of angry people will descend on my West Hollywood apartment because of this, but I am going to be off until January.  As noted three weeks ago in my last post (I am a very bad blogger), a startup I co-founded recently received an important dose of financing.  As people who have actually been in this situation probably know (and which I am learning), you have a ridiculous number of things you need to do the day after.  Stressful it definitely is, but I wouldn’t change it for the world.

Anyway, Prague was a great place to have a planning meeting.  I put together a two minute video excerpt from about an hour’s worth of footage, which you can see here.  I love Sony Vegas.

October 9th, 2008

Anonymity and the Internet

Posted by John Carroll @ 9:57 am

Categories: General

Tags: Anonymity, Internet, Web Site Development, Web Technology, John Carroll

Pennsylvania is more than a swing state in the upcoming presidential election. It’s also the site of what may turn out to be a test of an Internet user’s right to remain anonymous while posting to Internet forums. The Scranton City Council President Judy Gatelli (a city name that popped up numerous times in this election season, as it was the site of Hillary Clinton’s supposed childhood experience with rifles, and is also Joe Biden’s home town…or rather, one of them) is suing a web site administrator and a number of anonymous posters for “defamation, civil conspiracy, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and abuse of process.” Though the initial case was thrown out, a subsequent filing led the judge to conclude that the web site in question must disclose the identities of six forum participants (from an original group of about 100).

The ruling cited case precedent that would be exciting reading material if you are a lawyer. However, Judge O’Brien summarized his reasoning thusly:

“The First Amendment protects opinion criticism of public officials. The above quoted statements attributing serious sexual misconduct to Defendant Gatelli go beyond the bounds of those protections afforded by the First Amendment.”

Suffice to say, I’m Read the rest of this entry »

July 30th, 2008

The LA earthquake

Posted by John Carroll @ 5:26 pm

Categories: General

Tags: Los Angeles, CNN, Blogging, Internet, John Carroll

Everyone has probably heard about the quake that happened in Los Angeles yesterday.  It wasn’t that big a deal, though as I explained to a reporter from CNN, it was the biggest quake I’d experienced in the three years I’ve lived in Los Angeles. 

 It couldn’t have been too serious, as I did a very geeky thing an hour after the quake occurred:  I fired up my webcam, recorded my experiences, and posted it to CNN’s iReport site.  There really is no hope for me.

No, not a terribly technology-oriented blog post, possibly because I’ve spent the past few days poring over ethereal traces to figure out problems with connections to a server in Africa.  I shall re-emerge from my cave tomorrow morning.

May 27th, 2008

Leaving Microsoft

Posted by John Carroll @ 7:56 am

Categories: General

Tags: Microsoft Corp., Professional Development, Channel Management, Blogging, Strategy, Development Tools, Career, Marketing, Internet, Management

I’m not the sort of person who believes all good things must come to an end. Microsoft has been an incredibly good company at which to work. I have, however, a chance to do something that is extremely meaningful, all the while pursuing interesting technology into which I have a unique input as one of the company’s co-founders. For that reason, I am choosing to bring this current good thing to an end as I pursue life with a communications-related startup.

This startup will require regular travel to Africa in the near-term, an exciting prospect that will rack up frequent flyer miles even as it sends me into a permanent state of jetlag. We have larger ambitions, to be sure, and I certainly see us bringing our products back to this hemisphere once they are more fleshed out over the coming year. For now, however, Africa makes a lot of sense, and so that is where we are going to concentrate our efforts.

Microsoft is a hard place to leave, and it isn’t just because of the stellar benefits. Microsoft is a company full of really bright people with a keen interest in technology. Hallway conversations during trips to Mountain View (my corporate office home for this LA-based migrant worker) are different than any I have had at any other company. The intensity can sometimes translate into weird meetings where participants engage in the verbal equivalent of intellectual chicken, but I’ll take intensity over sleepwalking any day of the week (in case you hadn’t noticed, I’m a rather intense person myself). To be frank, if it had not been for this new opportunity, I would likely have stayed at Microsoft for a very long time.

I am, quite simply, a different kind of programmer after three years working at Microsoft. My father described going to work at Microsoft as akin to joining the major leagues after a career spent in the minors, and that comparison holds true still today. Working at a company of the size and importance of a Microsoft boosts your confidence and steels you to situations you never have to face as a contractor or an employee of a smaller company.

I’ve had some of my most humiliating moments as an IT person at Microsoft, such as the time I had to give a presentation to a group of content industry suppliers only six weeks after joining the company (six hours of being flayed alive is how I describe the experience). I’ve also had some of my proudest moments, such as the fact that Bill Gates responded three times to Thinkweek pieces I have authored.

Even bad situations, however, are extremely useful. That painful meeting, though grueling, served as a backdrop that made future meetings seem like a cakewalk. In the end, it has made me better positioned, mentally, to tackle the challenges of a small startup. That is a debt I will always owe to Microsoft.

I will continue to have a strong interest in the company, an interest that predates my employment by many years. That interest will continue to be reflected in this blog.

March 21st, 2008

Globalization's roots in the boom 90s

Posted by John Carroll @ 10:18 am

Categories: Economic Policy, General, Outsourcing

Tags: Outsource, Telecommunications, Worker, Computer, Fiber, Thomas L. Friedman, Globalization, Outsourcing, Productivity, Strategy

I’ve always wanted to read Thomas L. Friedman’s “The World is Flat,” a book that describes the globalization forces that have shaped the first decade of the 21st century, and in Friedman’s mind, constitutes version 3.0 of a globalization wave that will be more intense - and move faster - than the two waves that preceded it. Since I tend to visit the “Borders” book store on El Camino Real in Mountain View whenever I visit the Microsoft Silicon Valley office (on account of their wonderful selection of computer books, which is a rare thing indeed these days), I decided to pick it up due to a “buy 1 get 1 half price” sale going on at the store.

I’m only on page 70, but already it has got me thinking pretty seriously about how much has changed since 2000.

The “flattening” of the world which serves as the unifying theme of Friedman’s book is, in essence, a computer and network-driven reduction of the distance barriers that prevented workers in one country from competing directly with those in another. Friedman lists some surprising outsourced professions that I didn’t know about, such as the ability to hire a dedicated India-based personal assistant for $1500 / month (useful for executives who want someone to read books for them and summarize the contents, or crunch the numbers and chase down references for a research paper), math tutors with high-level degrees available for $15 / hour who interact with students through their computer, or more suprising, a McDonald’s franchise that has outsourced its “drive-thru” order service in a way that has halved the wait time from the McDonald’s national average, thus boosting throughput and raising revenue by 20% (though in this case, the outsourcing was to Colorado Springs, and employment costs only went down by 1%).

This will obviously Read the rest of this entry »

May 16th, 2007

Tiptoeing through the patent minefield

Posted by John Carroll @ 12:46 pm

Categories: General, Intellectual Property, Open Source

Tags: Patent, Microsoft Corp., John Carroll

As everyone already knows by now (I’m writing this purposefully late), an article which included an interview with Brad Smith, General Counsel for Microsoft, basically makes clear that Microsoft wants to continue to push for cross-licensing deals with other patent owners of the sort Microsoft signed with Novell. However, the article also notes that they are willing to throw in “or else” to incentivize people to sign, and royalty payments aren’t off the table, either.

We’ve known for quite some time that Microsoft was planning to take a page from IBM’s playbook and create a patent licensing business of their own. It is important, however, to tread carefully. It’s worth remembering the words of Bill Gates, which were included as part of a memo written in 1991 as part of internal analysis of challenges facing the company.

If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today’s ideas were invented, and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today. I feel certain that some large company will patent some obvious thing related to interface, object orientation, algorithm, application extension or other crucial technique. If we assume this company has no need of any of our patents then they have a 17-year right to take as much of our profits as they want. The solution to this is patent exchanges with large companies and patenting as much as we can.

Patents are a risky business.

Read the rest of this entry »

May 15th, 2007

Responding to Mr. Allison on ODF

Posted by John Carroll @ 8:42 am

Categories: General, ODF, Office, Office 2007, Open Source

Tags: OpenOffice, Microsoft Office, Jeremy Allison, Mr., Microsoft Corp., OpenDocument Format, John Carroll

Jeremy Allison, in a recent article for ZDNet, complains that Microsoft prevents little girls from turning in their homework.

Okay, that's not precisely true. After dropping a few anti-Vista dings, he explained the problems he had trying to open Office XML files in OpenOffice, and used that as reason to call for all the world to standardize on ODF.

Had both word processors supported Open Document Format as an option then it wouldn't have mattered if she had been using Microsoft Office, OpenOffice or any other common word processor.

Fair enough. If all the world DID use ODF, compatibility problems would disappear. You'd have to go non-standard to write spreadsheet formulas (not likely to be a part of a little girl's homework project), but it would create a degree of standardization with parallels in TCP/IP and HTTP, other protocols for which universally applied standards exist.

On the other hand, the same would apply if everyone supported OOXML.

The ODF standard was

Read the rest of this entry »

May 11th, 2007

Silverlight confusion (where AJAX fits)

Posted by John Carroll @ 10:13 am

Categories: General, Microsoft, Programming, Web Technology

Tags: AJAX, Microsoft Silverlight, JavaScript, John Carroll

A recent article on Betanews dinged Bill Gates for dissing AJAX, even though a Silverlight demo where he showed off a prototype application made for Major League Baseball was "written in JScript."

Not having access to the source code of the demo myself, I can't be sure how, exactly, the MLB demo was written. However, having both the Silverlight 1.0 (Javascript only version) and Silverlight 1.1 (Javascript, plus download of .NET assemblies written in any .NET compatible language, including C#, VB.NET, Java, Ruby, Perl, etc.) SDKs installed on my system, I have an idea as to how it might have been written.

JScript (Microsoft's superset of Javascript) was likely used for the Gates Silverlight demo to handle events generated by the Silverlight control.  This demo rendered a XAML document, the XML format that is used for User Interface layout in WPF desktop applications and Silverlight. That, however, doesn't make the Silverlight application "written in JScript" any more than a page that contains a Flash control which handles Flash-generated events using Javascript handlers is "written in Javascript."

Silverlight 1.0 seems

Read the rest of this entry »

May 10th, 2007

Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

Posted by John Carroll @ 10:52 am

Categories: General, Programming, Web Technology

Tags: Microsoft Silverlight, Java, Technology, Tool, Programming, John Carroll

Change is endemic to computer programming. That fact was part of a discussion I had with one of the managers here in Mountain View. Computer professionals tend to get wedded to technology they know, which to a certain extent is understandable. I know English very well, and though I can speak and write (somewhat) in French, I can certainly express myself much better using the language skills that I have spent a lifetime perfecting. Even so, a good programmer rolls with the technology. Willingness to upgrade one's skills is a requirement if you are going to be a good programmer.

Change is certainly in the air in web programming. AJAX had its buzz-period, but I expect that people will quickly get tired of the limitations of that environment. Something else will be needed to make web applications the feature-rich products people expect, and three challengers have stepped into the ring.

The current champion

Read the rest of this entry »