It was with shock and disbelief that I learned the passing of Professor Rajeev Motwani of Stanford University, technical adviser and angel investor in numerous companies, including Google. I was introduced to him by a mutual friend a few months ago. I had read his research papers, and I discussed with him one of my favorite technical obsessions: relational data models and how they intersect with programming languages. He was intrigued by the idea, and suggested we should cooperate on researching it further. I was going to write up a research proposal of sorts, and was looking forward to work with him. Professor Motwani, you will be missed.
Inevitable comparisons are made between the hugely enthusiastic developer response (including from us at Zoho) to Google Wave yesterday with the relatively tepid reponse to Microsoft's new search engine Bing. The real interesting contrast to us, as independent software developers, is the way developers responded to Silverlight as opposed to the reaction yesterday to Google Wave. Both Silverlight and Wave are aimed at taking the internet experience to the next level. To be perfectly honest, Silverlight is a great piece of technology. Google Wave, as yet, is not much more than a concept and an announcement.
It is easy to dismiss all this with "Oh, the press just loves to hype everything Google, and loves to hate Microsoft," but that cannot explain why even competitors like us are willing to embrace Google's innovations, but stay away from perfectly good innovations from Microsoft, such as Silverlight?
It comes down to one word: karma. Microsoft just has so much bad karma in this industry that I cannot imagine a company like us trusting them on much of anything. Take Silverlight: Microsoft pledged that they will always support Silverlight on Mac and Linux, and on browsers other than IE. Do you really, really believe their promise? Let's recap some ancient history here: Microsoft used to have IE for Solaris and even had a beta of IE for Linux. That was when IE was way behind Netscape and was trying to catch up. Once Netscape was safely vanquished, Microsoft's commitment to support IE on other platforms vanished. In fact, Microsoft intentionally pulled IE on other platforms, because it was clear to them that making the web experience suck on other platforms was a way to keep Windows firmly entrenched. I am glad they adopted that strategy, because that strategy eventually paved the way for Firefox (and Safari and Chrome ...), and together those browsers have rendered the operating system utterly irrelevant. Apple's resurgence - based on design prowess, not platform dominance - and Vista's failure, have demonstrated that convincingly.
Let's try to imagine what a Google Silverlight would have been. It would have been a fully open source product from Google, with a very liberal open source license (BSD or Apache). It would have all the technical specifications published openly. They would pledge to have the Silverlight VM interoperate with Javascript and HTML5. And a company like Zoho would have a ton of developers working on Google Silverlight based applications by now - as opposed to having exactly ZERO developers working on Microsoft Silverlight. Please note that this has nothing to do with the technology: as I said before, I happen to agree that Silverlight is a great piece of technology.
What could Microsoft do to earn our trust? For starters, they could really support all the web standards on IE. IE is increasingly an embarrassment of a browser and a pain for developers to support. The only reason IE is making any progress at all is the competition from Firefox and Safari and Chrome. I know, IE was once known for web innovation, including AJAX - but that was the time Microsoft was really trying to catch up and beat Netscape. Fair or not, the impression independent developers get is that Microsoft would prefer the web to stay crippled, so pesky applications that challenge their cash cows can stay frozen as "online Wordpad", as Bill Gates put it.
That brings us back to Google: today, it is Google which is driving web standards forward. That is why we at Zoho are firmly aligned with them, even if they are our primary competitor. We believe in an open web, there is plenty of opportunity for all of us. Could Google abuse its position? Well, I am sure they understand karma!
Today, Google announced Google Wave, described as "What email might look like if it were invented today." From our perspective, the most exciting part of it is the open XMPP based protocol that Google has defined, and their pledge of an open source reference implementation. Having worked with technologies like Google Gears which is used in Zoho Mail & Writer today, with other services to be added soon, we are really excited about Google Wave. Here is a third party (competitor!) perspective on the technology and how we plan to use it.
Currently, our Zoho Chat message bus works across Zoho services to knit them together in real time. A few examples would serve to illustrate this. Let's say you are working in Zoho Mail, and a colleague shares a Zoho Writer document with you. You will see a notification in the chat bar in Zoho Mail, and you can choose to open the document right from that notification. When that document opens in Zoho Writer, the chat bus carries the real time editing information back and forth. Zoho Meeting, of course uses a real time screen sharing system.
In other words, real time communications permeates Zoho services. We plan to embrace the Google Wave protocol to make these communications open and interoperable with any other Wave provider, including Google itself.
How do users benefit? For example, when Google Docs and Zoho Writer both implement the Wave protocol, it would be possible for a user to collaborate on a document across these services. Similarly, a screen sharing session from Zoho Meeting could work with a user logging in from any Wave provider.
We are hugely excited by the potential of this technology and plan to fully embrace it, just as we embrace other open innovations from Google like Gears. Thank you Google!
I found this link via Hacker News: Francisco's Money Speech from Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. I remember being really, really inspired by it the last time I read Atlas Shrugged as a 20-year-old undergraduate student in India. The fact that I am a businessman today owes a lot to Ayn Rand's work. After 20 years, I still find that speech inspiring, particularly in these times when the Federal Reserve and practically the entire profession of academic economists is treating money as if it were a mere electronic entry in the books of an institution somewhere.
I can do no better than quote the moral clarity of Rand's prose:
When you accept money in payment for your effort, you do so only on the conviction that you will exchange it for the product of the effort of others. It is not the moochers or the looters who give value to money. Not an ocean of tears not all the guns in the world can transform those pieces of paper in your wallet into the bread you will need to survive tomorrow. Those pieces of paper, which should have been gold, are a token of honor--your claim upon the energy of the men who produce. Your wallet is your statement of hope that somewhere in the world around you there are men who will not default on that moral principle which is the root of money, Is this what you consider evil?
...
To trade by means of money is the code of the men of good will. Money rests on the axiom that every man is the owner of his mind and his effort. Money allows no power to prescribe the value of your effort except the voluntary choice of the man who is willing to trade you his effort in return. Money permits you to obtain for your goods and your labor that which they are worth to the men who buy them, but no more. Money permits no deals except those to mutual benefit by the unforced judgment of the traders. Money demands of you the recognition that men must work for their own benefit, not for their own injury, for their gain, not their loss--the recognition that they are not beasts of burden, born to carry the weight of your misery--that you must offer them values, not wounds--that the common bond among men is not the exchange of suffering, but the exchange of goods . Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men's stupidity, but your talent to their reason; it demands that you buy, not the shoddiest they offer, but the best that your money can find. And when men live by trade--with reason, not force, as their final arbiter--it is the best product that wins, the best performance, the man of best judgment and highest ability--and the degree of a man's productiveness is the degree of his reward. This is the code of existence whose tool and symbol is money. Is this what you consider evil?
Those words are particularly relevant today, where financial engineers from the Federal Reserve are trying to bail out the financial engineers of Wall Street; together their financial engineering has fundamentally altered the nature of money and credit, massively redistributing wealth away from the productive segments of the economy towards the speculative financier class. Basically what we had for a decade or more is financialism, not capitalism in the true sense of the word. Capital arises from savings, i.e., deferred consumption. When Fed-orchestrated easy credit masquerades as real capital, the predictable consequence of that illusion is the mess we find ourselves in. History records numerous instances of it and none of them had a happy ending.
Yet, the tragedy of the present episode is how strong the mainstream consensus has been - it is an unquestioned article of faith among the decision makers that it is the role of the government to bail out the financial speculators and convert the debt of private institutions into government debt, while the men who ran these institutions get to keep the massive rewards they reaped based on the illusory past profits. To pay for all that newly socialized debt, the productive classes have to pay more taxes in future and suffer more inflation, all in the name of fairness. In other words, in order to save the world, we have to destroy the moral foundation of its money.
People who call themselves Keynesian should
heed the great man's own warning:
Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalistic System was to debauch the currency... Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million can diagnose.
Mr. Verbiest is absolutely right: it is better to be poor in a warm country than a cold country, particularly in the lush, tropical countryside. Even small plots of land tend to be extremely productive year-round, and some agricultural activity or other goes on pretty much all the time.From the bright green rice-terraced hills in Indonesia to this expansive plateau in northeastern Thailand, an exceedingly fertile countryside is a cushion for hard times for Southeast Asia’s 570 million people.
...Laid-off migrant workers in other parts of the world, notably in China, are also reportedly returning home. But one difference for workers in Southeast Asia is that they live in a very accommodating climate.
“Somebody said to me the other day, ‘It’s better to be poor in a warm country than a cold country,’ ” said Jean-Pierre Verbiest, the country director of the Asian Development Bank in Thailand. For this and other reasons, returning to one’s traditional village in the countryside is a sort of “social safety net,” Mr. Verbiest said, although he is not sure what the scale of the exodus will be because links to the countryside are weaker than they once were.
That is exactly what I found in my many years of running this company. This was such a strong observation that first we stopped caring about where someone went to college, then we stopped caring about whether someone even got a degree, and finally, we took the ultimate step, and started hiring kids right of high school, and train them ourselves. Each step seemed risky, even a bit radical, but in hindsight, it should have all been obvious.I have learned that where someone went to college (or even if they didn't go to college) has absolutely no correlation to whether they will be a good entrepreneur or not. I don't pay attention to that part of a resume. I focus on what they've done in the work world, what they've shown they can do, and most importantly what they've done to date on that specific startup.
Entrepreneurs don't need degrees like lawyers and doctors do. They are credentialed by virtue of their track record. The first startup is hard but if they make that one work, they end up with something much better than a college degree. They have a notch in their belt. They've got a track record of success.I don't believe it is only entrepreneurs who don't need degrees. In fact, I don't believe the lawyers and doctors need formal credentials either. This is not a very original assertion: Milton Friedman, in his book Capitalism and Freedom, has proposed how the market system would solve the quack problem far better than formal credentials do. To summarize the argument, the way it would work is basically extended apprenticeship under experienced people. That is essentially how our internal training system works.
We've been spending a lot of time lately thinking about, talking about, learning about, and looking at the whole education sector. Education is critically important. But you don't have to go to school to be educated and if being an entrepreneur is your goal in life, that's even more true.
I have been in Japan for the past week, working out of our office here in Yokohoma, meeting with customers and partners. The first thing you notice when you spend any time here is just how hard the Japanese work, even compared to the famously hard-charging work culture in silicon valley. That's what kept coming to my mind when I read Arrington's post comparing silicon valley to France.
Here is the schedule of my colleagues in Japan, and this is entirely typical in Japan: come in to work at 9 AM, on the dot, after a standing-room-only commute on a very crowded train lasting an hour or more, often changing 2-3 trains along the way. Lunch around 12:30 to 1 - usually a quick affair, often at their desk, so it is not even much of a break. Work till at 8 to 9 PM, with many folks staying in the office as late as mid-night, catching the last train, another hour spent commuting (trains are crowded even at 11 pm on week days!). If it is an important customer, you go out to dinner with them (add 3 hours!), and that means last-train-if-you-are-lucky and the last train is usually even more crowded. Yet, they are back at 9 AM next morning, impeccably dressed. I estimated that most of my colleagues cannot be getting more than 6 hours of sleep a night, and that's assuming they do nothing at home after work other than sleep - which is what I did most of last week. I was so exhausted every day, all I could do was get to my apartment and just sleep.
I had joint meetings and a press conference with Intalio CEO Ismael Ghalimi, who also runs the Office 2.0 conference. Ismael and I were in violent agreement that life in silicon valley is a walk in the park compared to Japan. I also have a colleague from India staying with me, and he tells me he can't keep up with the Japanese, and work life in India is easy compared to Japan. We have bad commutes, and lousy roads in India, but at least the work hours are not nearly so long or so strenuous.
Here is what was shocking to me: I got off at my station one day at 11 PM, and there were 3 kids, who looked about 12, still on the train, returning home from their after-school study session. My Japanese colleague told me that was not unusual, and these kids would get up and go to school next morning at 8 AM. Well, at least Japan is very, very safe: one of my female colleagues walks the last 20 minutes home well after midnight, because by the time she gets off the train station, the last bus would have departed.
I am married to work myself, so it felt all the more weird for me telling my Japanese colleagues to cut down their insane hours. I am technically the CEO, and they are very polite, but when I hear "Sridhar-san, this is Japan" - the all-purpose "explanation", I know they are not going to listen.
One of the most trenchant criticisms of Zoho is the integration (or the lack thereof!) across various applications. A good recent example is a comment by Phil Hodgen in Paul Greenberg's blog:
Zoho's greatest failing for me is that they are splintered all over creation with little integration between what they offer. My suggestion is to stop churning out new products and features and instead put all of those great engineers to use in knitting the pieces into one cohesive whole.
Let me acknowledge this criticism overall, but let me also state that there is a lot of integration work taking place under the hood. Just off the top of my head, a couple of recent examples: a) the "Share" link in Zoho Writer/Sheet/Show now sport a common way of sharing, with contacts fetched from your common Zoho address book, which is also used in Zoho Mail b) Zoho Docs pulls together your documents, spreadsheets, presentations with a convenient viewer for read-only purposes, so just for the sake of browsing your documents, you don't have to load the editor c) Zoho Docs then integrated under the hood with Zoho Share. There are many more integration projects going on.
What is interesting about each of these developments is a) they take a fair amount of work, often measured in several months of development for a team b) they don't make news, sometimes not even a blog post from us. So there is a "news bias" - you may hear about Zoho only when we release (ahem, "churn out") a new product, but there are a lot of incremental, integration oriented updates we make that you never hear about - but you will notice when you use the product!
Now coming to the substance of the criticism, which we acknowledge, let me explain our product management philosophy, summarized by the phrase "depth first". As an example, we intentionally prioritized having a world-class stand-alone CRM offering ahead of integrating that CRM offering with the rest of the Zoho suite. If we had reversed the priorities, we would have shallow products integrated with each other, but individually no product would be really satisfying. Doing integration before a product matures is like getting married too young - your spouse may find you growing up to be someone totally different than the one they married.
Now, there is a subtler, deeper criticism: "What if you visualize the product differently, as an integrated whole, than as the sum of its parts?" This is a great point - if we had all along visualized Zoho as an integrated whole, would we get a completely different result than our "depth first" strategy of developing individual products and then integrating them?
That idea, realizing an integrated whole, is a remarkable seductress, take it from he who knows! But, alas she ultimately leads us to the Turing tar-pit. To quote Raganwald:
What is the Turing tar-pit? It’s the place where a program has become so powerful, so general, that the effort to configure it to solve a specific problem matches or exceeds the effort to start over and write a program that solves the specific problem.
I suffer from a tendancy to go swimming in tar. I start out trying to solve a specific problem. I become frustrated with the obvious deficiencies of the tools, and before I know it I’m sketching out ideas for platforms, frameworks, and architectures to solve a whole class of similar problems.
That's why we solve specific problems first, then stitch them together, imperfectly at first, getting better with experience, to form a coherent whole.
Crucially, we keep those specific solutions as direct entry points to Zoho, usable in their isolation. Yes, there are tantalizing possibilities of CRM & Mail together, but we have to recognize and respect the choices customers make. If we tried to force a Zoho CRM customer to use Zoho Mail, we would just lose a lot of customers. So we have to perform the integration in a way that leaves those choices open to the customer - be it Outlook or Thunderbird or GMail, to quote the most common choices. Keeping these direct entry points also permits third parties to integrate just the specific component of Zoho they want in to their solution.
Here is a case where the right thing to do by technology is also the right thing to do for the customers. And as we go about the messy business of integration, we seek your patience!
Our favorite Nobel-laureate has written a new NY Times column Depression Economics Returns. It is worth understanding this because a) Krugman's thinking is solidly mainstream in economics - don't confuse his partisan politics with his mainstream economics b) it is very likely the government is going to go along with some version of the Krugman program. I pick Krugman to critique because he happens to write clearly, and because of his elevated profile with the Nobel prize, particularly in the new political dispensation.
Let's start with:
We are already, however, well into the realm of what I call depression economics. By that I mean a state of affairs like that of the 1930s in which the usual tools of economic policy — above all, the Federal Reserve’s ability to pump up the economy by cutting interest rates — have lost all traction. When depression economics prevails, the usual rules of economic policy no longer apply: virtue becomes vice, caution is risky and prudence is folly.
An economic layman might find it a bit puzzling that the recipe for getting out of economic trouble is the same as the one you use to get in trouble in the first place: abandon virtue, caution and prudence. It is just as well that Krugmanomics doesn't deal in questions of root cause: when the police arrive to break up the party that got totally out of control, they should inform the revelers that the cure for massive hangover is government supplied 120-proof liquor.
Now what happens if the current episode of abandoning virtue, caution and prudence, not to be confused with the previous episode that got us into the present predicament, leads to fresh new trouble down the road? Well, we will just raise interest rates - seriously, you didn't expect they would hand out Nobel prizes when you can't handle such trivial questions in economics, did you?
Finally, in normal times modesty and prudence in policy goals are good things. Under current conditions, however, it’s much better to err on the side of doing too much than on the side of doing too little. The risk, if the stimulus plan turns out to be more than needed, is that the economy might overheat, leading to inflation — but the Federal Reserve can always head off that threat by raising interest rates. On the other hand, if the stimulus plan is too small there’s nothing the Fed can do to make up for the shortfall. So when depression economics prevails, prudence is folly.
In November of 2002, Bernanke's biggest concern was how to prevent deflation, which arose from the bursting bubble of the late 1990s. The exact sequence of events that Krugman prescribes - first a massive credit & government spending binge, followed by inflation, followed by an increase in interest rates - happened between 2002-2006. Well, at least the Professor is consistent. Except that, we are at the long term horizon from the view point of policy in 2003, so by Keynesian logic, we should all be dead now.
To leave no one in any doubt, in this blog post, Krugman elaborates on what kind of actions the government should take now:
What’s the answer? Huge fiscal stimulus, to fill the hole. More aggressive GSE lending. Maybe a “pre-commitment” by the Fed to keep rates low for an extended period — that’s a more genteel version of my “credibly promise to be irresponsible.” And maybe large-scale purchases of risky assets.
More aggressive GSE lending! Really? Like interest-only option ARM mortgages for 110% of assessed value to anyone who can fog a mirror? Pre-commitment to keep interest rates low for an indefinite period? Oh wait ...
So what is the exit strategy for Krugman? When it would finally become prudent for the government to abandon imprudence? If we pile on even more debt to cure the problem of too much debt, what happens when that bigger-pile-of-debt starts to crumble?
Here is a prediction of my own: the Nobel prize in 2008 will be seen in hindsight as a moment of bankruptcy, the intellectual bankruptcy of mainstream economic thinking.
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