Fishpool

I wanted to link to Andrew Chen's recent article, Does every startup need a Steve Jobs, because it's a useful discussion about the differences between technical feasibility, design-led desirability, and business viability, a triplet productized by IDEO, and one that we also identified a decade ago at Razorfish (wow, it's really a decade ago!). As for the question in the title - no, I don't think that's the only way to create greatness, though clearly if you have Steve at your disposal, you could do worse than have him run everything. :)

Seriously though, at least in this consumer-targeted software business that I'm familiar with, it's crucially important to have those three principles well represented at every level of the business. Sure, it's possible to create a successful business with just two or perhaps even just one of those viewpoints, especially if you can get away with copying someone else but just doing it with better economics. However, to create something new and be successful, it'd be a mistake to ignore business, technology or design. Sadly, of the three, design is the one most commonly ignored. According to this interview of Ken Auletta of his new book, even Google ignores it, Marissa Mayer notwithstanding.

Anyway, what I'm particularly interested about is how can you marry great design with incremental, rapid iterations on the market. I'm pretty sure I've understood how to iterate out in the open with regards to technical work, and relatively comfortable with iteration regarding business aspects. I've yet to come up with a really convincing argument for iteration and design on a very granular basis - well, I can convince myself, but I'm having less success convincing designers. :) If anyone cares to share their secrets, I'd love to hear more.

I've kept away from this debate since last April, but this eternal dragging-on is getting to me. Could we please move on already regarding the Oracle-Sun-MySQL decision? I'm a customer of MySQL, and I don't really savor the idea of becoming a customer of Oracle. Even so, I'd much rather see Oracle own it, than leave it straggling, let alone see this process drag on and on. This is helping no one.

I'm using a product from a company from which I buy commercial support, but I could switch to using a binary-compatible Open Source tool any day I chose. I am not bound to remaining a customer of the company I'm buying support from for any period longer than the current contract. I can definitely live with that obligation. I can live with the OSS-tool (whether we want to call it MySQL Community, Percona, MariaDB or whatever, I don't care) instead of the commercial product - in fact, I'm getting the understanding that the OSS-tool may in fact be better suited to my requirements than the product. So, I have no issue being bound Oracle, should the merger go through, because I am not bound to them. I can see as much interesting related technology being developed outside the discussed commercial unit as inside it, so I'm certainly not worried about the future of the tech.

At this point in time, I could buy support from at least a couple of different organizations to replace and extend that which I've bought from MySQL/Sun. I have absolutely no reason to think that option would go away should the merger be approved, despite what certain founders now claim. If it's not commercially possible to develop and support a database product without being in full control over its copyright, then how come Percona has a business? If it's possible to provide such support for GPL software on a limited basis, but not on a big-business enterprise level, then how come Red Hat is a successful public company?

I use MySQL as an infrastructure component to run a business which could be described as software-as-a-service. I do not redistribute the code base as part of a licensed product. There are companies who do that, but they've always done it with the full understanding that what they're doing is dependent on having to license something from an independent party over which they have no control. If they don't like licensing from Oracle, then they can choose to re-engineer their solution to work on top of some other database engine. It's not like those don't exist, or like technology, licensed or not, hasn't always carried that risk with it.

I can't avoid thinking that some of the parties keeping this thing from reaching completion are dreaming of Skype -- selling the same business twice. Hey, more power to them if that happens, but frankly, that was dependent on Ebay making a stupid deal at the time. I just do not see what that has to do with anti-trust and why the European Commission needs to be involved. THIS is hurting the market, more so that Oracle is likely to.

I have nothing further on the matter. Thank you for your attention.

So, I mentioned an idea of relaunching Mobiles Disco in celebration of 10 years of Habbo history. It's actually super-easy to do so. We've created a similar space in Habbo, and with the embed functionality launched last month, setting up a web site with your own rooms is no trouble at all, and the only tools required are just two browser windows while you're working on it. Here's how..

Come up with a theme. I'm just going to use the existing Old Skool rooms, but go wild with your own idea!

Create the rooms in Habbo. Again, I got mine pre-created, but since you can do pretty much anything with your own Habbo spaces, the sky's the limit to what can be done. And with Teleport furni, you can create a complete world if you want to...

Go back to the first room you want start your site from. You'll see a small window at the bottom left corner with instructions for "embed this room". Copy the code from that window, and paste it somewhere for safe-keeping for a moment.

Next, you'll set up the web site for your own Habbo to live on. I'm going to use the Google Sites creator for this particular effort, since it's pretty easy to use. You'll need a name for the site, and decide on, or make your own background theme. I went with a retro theme for this particular one..

The Site will begin with just one page on it. Edit the page, and go into "source code" mode. In Google Sites, this is the "HTML" button at the right end of the toolbar. Paste the embed code you copied from Habbo here and save the page.

Google Sites editor will turn the code into a Google Gadget. Other site creators may work slightly differently. The Gadget is easy to tweak though, so this is pretty nice. Clicking on the gadget pops up a small edit menu, where I can choose to center the gadget, and click on Properties to make it a bit larger (960x720 instead of 800x540 to use my screen better), and turn off the title.

That's it! This simple creation took 10 minutes to do, and 30 to write the instructions for. I'm sure you can do a better one, though. Tweet me about yours, and I'll come and check it out!

A couple of days ago, Baron Schwartz posted some simple load and select benchmarking of MyISAM, Infobright and MonetDB, which Vadim Tkachenko followed up with a more realistic dataset and interesting figures where MonetDB beat Infobright in most queries.

Used to the parallel IEE loader, I was surprised by the apparent slow loading speed of Baron's benchmark and decided to try and replicate it. I installed Infobright 3.2 on my laptop (see, this is very unscientific) and wrote a simple perl script to generate and load an arbitrarily large data set resembling Baron's description. I'm not going to post my exact numbers, because this installation is severely resource-constrained below Infobright's recommended smallest installation. However, you can reproduce the results yourself with the attached script, and I will note some observations.

After my last night's posting, I had a small exchange with @moximilian and @jludwig about my claim that calling the N900 a computer is BS and nobody wants a computer. Somehow, Nokia has gone from calling the N-series devices "multimedia computers" a couple of years back to "mobile computers" today, but it's a totally horrible thing to do from a market positioning point of view. I suppose I should clarify my reasoning a bit.

This is how I imagine the thought process has gone: Nokia, an engineering-led manufacturer of fixed-function devices (phones) has had the ambition to "put the Internet in your pocket" for quite some time. So far, so good. Now, an engineer designs a brilliant package of a high-performance programmable microprocessor, significant amount of working memory and storage memory, and a rich set of input and output mechanisms. To an engineer, this fits the definition of a computer, thus it must be a computer.

However, that is not how the world at large sees computers. The general understanding of a computer is a device which requires constant management, is at risk from viruses and other malware, produces incomprehensible error messages and, despite being a window to the wonderful new world of Twitters, Facebooks and all kinds of information and entertainment, is best left alone when at all possible. Yes, the computer industry has made great progress in the last decades in making their produce more approachable and human-friendly, but it's not there yet. Apple, for all its faults, is generally regarded as the gold standard in "computers for the normal people". Yet who hasn't seen a Mac or even an iPhone (once loaded with applications, at least) bug out in the most bizarre of ways?

Computers don't have any built-in value of their own. The value is completely attached to the applications, services and solutions to which they provide access. If it was left at that, and calling something a "mobile computer" would be simply a bad choice of marketing titles, I wouldn't mind. However, as long as the engineers working on the future devices think it's desirable to think of them as computers, they will carry the problems I mentioned along to future devices, because that's what computers do.

The device in your pocket is a terminal, a window onto the services of the Global Computer, and a flexible access point to things no one has yet to invent. It is programmable, it does have memory, and it can compute. Even so, lets not call it a computer.