Christian Renaud's Blog

Virtual Meetings revisited

Back in October I penned a missive about substituting virtual meetings for live (meatspace) ones.  I challenged myself and others to avoid the convention of boarding a plane for remote face-to-face meetings and use network collaboration tools like conference calls, video conferencing, and virtual worlds as an alternative.

I was able to successfully use these virtual substitutes for the last calendar quarter of 2007 with only one exception, and have a 50%-less-travel goal in 2008, using virtual meetings instead.

One very nice side effect of this effort was that I was contacted by the excellent people at the Nature Conservancy, who asked me to write up a brief summary of my efforts for Nature.org, which they were kind enough to publish here, which was also picked up by the Digg community here.  I appreciate the support and outreach I have received from the community, which has been extensive in the short period since the article was published.

As a result, I'd like to encourage those would also like to adopt virtual interactions as a more environmentally-friendly substitute for air-travel to share their best practices and guidance in the blog comments, which I pledge to aggregate into a user-editable Wiki for the community to share.  I will be bringing up a Wiki in the next 24-48 hours and will publish a link here as soon as I have it.

Gotta love the Center for Public Integrity

Who were kind enough to compile this comprehensive list of false statements by the government regarding the  casus belli for the war in Iraq.

WarCardChart.jpg (JPEG Image, 750x580 pixels) - Scaled (99%)

The Center's article is here.

Tags: politicsiraqwar

Its profane, childish and unbelievably crass, but.....

....I laugh like a monkey on nitrous oxide every time I read the classic 'Episode IV as it should have been' from Pointlesswasteoftime.com.  It looks like their flash is having problems, but it's still available here.

Another perspective on AppleTV

You know what, it honestly never occurred to me that Apple's movie-rental expiration model was analogous  to the original expiring Divx discs of Circuit City fame.  Dead on.

Penny Arcade! - What Goes Around

Tags: AppleTVPennyArcade

See you Bob, We'll miss you.

Chess Legend Bobby Fischer died yesterday in Iceland according to reports.  You may not care for his politics, anti-semiticism, or just plain eccentricity, but you gotta give the guy credit for being a master at not only chess, but psychological warfare on his opponents.

Thanks for a shelf of books on my bookshelf and hundreds of amusing anecdotes Bobby, I'll miss you.

Alas, poor Arden.......

It is with much sadness that I read the recent eulogy of the Arden project at Indiana University.  For those who weren't tracking Arden, it was an ambitious project by Prof. Edward Castronova at IU to create a historically accurate Shakespearian world as a massively multiplayer online game.  Imagine  yourself not acting out Falstaff or Iago in some dry classroom, but walking through one of the Royal plays and interacting with the characters (computer or human driven).  Adding some problem solving or other narrative devices would keep it moving along and challenging.

The gamer community took great pride in bashing Prof. Castronova's idea as not fun and a bad idea for a  game.  People inside the game development community said that the project budget was insufficient for what they were trying to accomplish.

To these people I respond, quoting the Bard himself, "Either thou art most ignorant by age, or thou wert born a fool."

A few things  have been overlooked.

1) "Shakespeare is a bad idea for a game".  For those who spend time playing Call of Duty 4, Shakespearian prose probably seems pretty unapproachable.  For those who are more inclined to intellectual pursuits and enjoy the wit and wisdom of Shakespeare, the idea of interacting with others in that capacity is a pleasure in itself.  Look at the booming Renaissance faire demographic to see those who enjoy the rapacious wit and debauchery of 16th Century England.

2) "A Shakespearian MMORPG would be boring."-  Yes, if that what was being built.  If it's a themed social networking environment (think Second Life sans strippers), with an educational twist placed in that time, you'd be able to draw upon the aforementioned Ren Faire crowd, and SCA-ers, worldwide to give them a common ground to meet and interact.  How many Night Elf nightclubs or meeting places existed before Warcraft?

3) "The budget was way too low for creating a game".  People have said that you'd need anywhere from $10M to $200M to build a MMORPG, to which I would agree  if they were building the entire thing from scratch.  They weren't.  They were using the Multiverse platform, which is somewhat of a 'construction set for virtual worlds', and were pushing the upper limits of the platform's functionality.  That's the whole value proposition of Multiverse, low initial authorship costs and complexity in return for a share of  your profits when commercialized.

If anything, the program suffered due to the fact that the technology available is insufficient (currently) for the laudable goals of the project.  I personally met a number of the student developers working on the project and they are as smart as many 'professional game developers' I bump into around industry, so I'd rule out 'execution failure' as root cause and look to other externalities instead.

My one hope is that Castronova and his students are not set back by this project's conclusion and keep up the excellent contributions they have made to the community and industry at large.

"One more thing..."

Tis the season (the week, to be more precise) when Apple Fanboys around the world stay glued to liveblogs during Steve Jobs' keynote address at the MacWorld Expo.  There are classes of day-traders who speculate on Apple stock at these times, people who line up in the wee hours to get a coveted seat at the Moscone convention center, and legions of people in the blogosphere who make and compare predictions of what Steve will be announcing.

One of the more common predictions this year is a 3G iPhone, since the CEO of AT&T evidently leaked the information during an interview that there would be a 3G iPhone during Q4 of 2008.  Ok, lets say this is actually the case and not just the CEO of AT&T smacking Apple in a backhanded way by stalling revenue growth of existing iPhone sales.

Why would Steve, months in advance of shipping (6 months, 9 months?), announce a product that would cause every potential iPhone buyer to sit back and wait for the 3G model?  It would stall his sales on iPhones, which are (as the iPods) causing a lot of foot traffic in Apple stores and associated pull-through Macintosh sales?

He wouldn't.  Unless there is a mandatory public declaration of intent that is required with each FCC certification for use, which would pretty much create a 6-12 month 'telegraphing my competitive strategy' tool for all of those in the mobile industry, then the best advice is to wait until a week or two prior to availability to announce.  Preferably during a historically weak sales time like early summer, so parents can purchase the new iPhones and Macs for their kids during back-to-school season when production volume has caught up with demand so the book-to-bill ratio on their quarterly earnings looks close to 1:1.

One of the things you learn in shipping multi-billion-dollar product lines is that it is a really bad idea to stall revenue.  You take great pains in not disclosing any information that will, say, make a current $100M/month-run-rate product go flat in anticipation of version 2.0 which is shipping in 3 months.  I learned this first-hand when we were starting up the enterprise voice business at Cisco, as I was on the (then tiny) voice team and interfacing regularly with our (really big) switching group.  When we decided to put powered Ethernet on the switches, we had to be very careful how we disclosed this information to customers when promoting the future of IP Telephony.  We could talk at length about the future benefits of IP Phones and Call Processing, because we weren't in that business and had no business to stall (except for Nortel and Lucent (at the time, now Avaya)).  What we couldn't do was intimate that we'd ship something other than our existing switch products, as that would induce an order stall on a very large product line.  Bad idea for career viability.

This is same situation at Apple.  Unless the FCC forces disclosure for licensing reasons, Steve does NOT want to stall existing unit sales by pre-announcing product.  Think about the (really admirable in a non-fanboy way) same-day announcements he has made the past few years in new computers.  For product lines they are already in, he does 'available now' announcements.  For product areas they were not in, say AppleTVs or iPhones, he could easily announce upcoming products without negative booking impact.

I'll be happy to face up if I am proven wrong tomorrow, but I doubt that a company as business savvy as Apple will purposely stall existing product sales by advance-announcing product in an area they already ship product in.  If there are any big future announcements, they will be in an area that is relatively flat for existing revenue (AppleTVs, sadly) or net-new markets for the company.

In Vino Veritas

(belatedly for David H)

Wine. Vino.  Nectar of the Gods.  Thunderbird.  Plonk.  Call it what you want.

Clifton Fadiman, one of my favorite writers, has a quote carved into one of the ceiling beams at Fado's pub in Newport Beach that reads "To take wine into your mouth is to savor a droplet of the river of human history."  If you read any history, this is proven again and again as you see wine pop up into each narrative like some recurring immortal Shakespearian homunculus, helping sometimes and (more often than not) dragging great men down in a moment of Bacchanalian weakness.

Despite the risks posed by Mr's Homunculus and Bacchus, I still infrequently enjoy the grape.  I noticed early that I have a predisposition to French wines, specifically the appellations around the Rhone valley.  Ironically, I discovered years after arriving at this preference that my familial seat is near the Rhone, so some degree of this appellation preference may be genetically inherited.  One thing is for certain, the best wine in the world doesn't have to come from a multi-thousand-dollar bottle in some fancy restaurant, but is shared with good friends at the right time.

When I moved to Iowa, one of my wine group colleagues told one of the local television stations that I had a sizable wine cellar, so they came out for a brief interview around our annual Des Moines Winefest.  One of the interviewer's questions was 'What is the best wine?', to which I unhesitatingly recited the wisdom conveyed to me once by my buddy Fred, which is worth sharing for those of you who may be established or budding wine snobs....

1) What is the event?  Who are you dining with?  The first priority is figuring out the chemistry of the guests with each other and yourself.

2) Based on the guests, and the event, are you in the backyard with bbq or cooking a multi-course gourmet meal?  How formal or informal of an event is it?

3) Finally, based on WHO is coming and WHAT kind of meal you are planning, then you pick the best wine compliment to the event.  It could be a $10 grocery store Chardonnay with fruit and cheese in the backyard, or a big old Bordeaux with lamb, it entirely depends on (1) and (2).  One particularly well-heeled friend of mine takes great pleasure in finding new $40 treasures when he could be drinking La Tache with his huevos rancheros, while other friends love to drink comfortable and familiar brands from the U.S..  The best wine pairings aren't only with the food, it's with the person consuming the food.

There are three particular glasses of wine that stand out in my mind among the many great ones I have had....the glorious old Bordeaux handed down through generations to finally be opened at Gunnar and Anja's wedding in the fjords of Norway one beautiful August day, a remarkably complex bottle of Cal Cab that Fred and September brought with them to Iowa for their first visit, and some phenomenally good yet nameless plonk scooped out of a barrel in a beach-side restaurant in Cannes when I took my mother there in '00.

All were great wines, but all would have been diminished by the absence of the people and settings they were appreciated in.  So, as I said to the nice television reporter, the best wine is the wine that pairs best first and foremost with the people you are enjoying it with, and next with the food being prepared.

David, thanks for the nudge.  Since you and I spoke last, wine has evolved for me from being [just?] the excellent violin soloist in the symphony to being the enjoyable Sonata Allegro form used by Beethoven, Mozart and other composers where you get to appreciate the experience over and over in all of it's variety.  I hope the same is true for you, and that we all 'mellow like fine wine.'

P.S.  One other piece of advice, for those playing the home game....never go to a wine tasting with a bunch of lawyers and doctors and then come home late (and tipsy) to find the same wines on the Internet for sale.  You wake up with a scary and expensive surprise in your inbox and/or printer.  My wife has dubbed it 'Drinking and One-Clicking', and it is not recommended if you plan on sending your children to anything other than a community college.

My 'Dear Steve' Letter

[Sent 1/10/08]

Dear Mr. Jobs,

On behalf of the silent minority, thanks for releasing the AppleTV.  I know it has been accused of being a flop, and before it's time, however my family makes extensive use of our four AppleTVs.  We've digitized our extensive DVD library (as we had done with our music library years ago), and being able to access our movies, music, photos and podcasts from any room in the house is just plain useful.  Great price point too.

Two favors to ask.

First, can you please incorporate an advanced sorting and categorization interface for those of us with more than 10 movies/cds in the tool?  It takes me about 10 minutes to locate my chosen film on the long alphabetical list as there are >800.  Even a Genre subtab somewhere would be great, and it works just fine for iPods.

Second, would you please consider removing the YouTube (or making it a removable option like the iPod menu customization) for those of us who have difficulty stomaching low-rez YouTube videos on large HDTVs and replacing it with a menu driven iChat client?  You could utilize that vestigial USB port in the back of the unit for an iSight camera and walk away with the home video telephony market if you made it as easy as iChat.  Imagine a sea of HDTVs with AppleTVs below them and iSights mounted to the top.

Thank you again for releasing such a useful unit.  In the future, if the rest of the industry or customer base doesn't financially validate it enough to retain it in your product line, please make sure you don't discontinue support for it in iTunes 8.0. 

Thanks, Christian

David Lynch on Watching movies on the iPhone (NSFW)

David obviously does not have young children, but I love him anyway.

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