Gabe is a smart guy and he is “concerned about Windows 8”:http://allthingsd.com/20120725/valves-gabe-newell-on-the-future-of-games-wearable-computers-windows-8-and-more/

And there are investors like “Bronte Capital”:http://brontecapital.blogspot.com/2012/07/changing-my-mind-on-microsoft.html?spref=tw who are abandoning their MSFT positions.

Both super smart guys and I respect their thoughts and analysis, Gabe in particular you ignore at your peril.

But really – the catastrophe for MSFT happened long ago, the consequences are just being fully realized now. Win8 and Surface and Azure are responses to that catastrophe, and are necessary, though they are very late to the party.

The lock on developer mindshare was lost in 1995 with the advent of the Internet. I stood in front of a room of developers in late 95, trying to convince them to develop Windows-specific content for Internet users, and got savaged. This was at the height of MSFT’s dominance and the leading edge of developers had already moved on to platform-independent install-free solutions like HTML and Java. There was no getting them back. Some parts of MSFT fought hard to stem this tide in the late 90s but ultimately the company never had the focus and products to remain relevant to these developers. The development community moved on to Internet-friendly technologies – first HTML and Java, php, perl, python, ruby, aws, etc etc etc.

Similarly, the tide has been running against the “MSFT OEM model for 15 years”:http://theludwigs.com/2012/02/msft-and-the-decline-of-the-pc-hardware-ecosystem/. Buying a PC hasn’t been a great experience for years and the OEMs gave up on design leadership years ago.

MSFT is now making bold moves to address the erosion of developer relevance and the erosion of the oem model, but the Win8 and Surface and Azure may all be a little late, or may take some time to stem the tide. They are necessary steps, they are not the catastrophe, they are the response to the catastrophe. They may not be enough, MSFT may have to continue to take big risks to get back to a position of leadership and growth in some segments. At almost any cost, MSFT has to get back out in front of the developer parade for some significant segment of developers.

* “Massive”:amazon by Ian Sample. “Soul of a New Machine”-style telling of the chase after the Higgs. Not very technical, more about the people and personalities. OK but I’d like a little more science content. * “Arguably”:amazon by Christopher Hitchens. Well, after reading this, I am embarrassed to claim that I review books, or even read them. Hitchens knew how to deeply read, and man could he completely eviscerate an author. A full book of these essays is a bit much to wade thru, this is powerful stuff. * “Herzog”:amazon by Saul Bellow. This is a struggle. We all have our inexplicable neuroses, but wandering thru the depths of one character’s particular bag of irrational introspection just isn’t that compelling. * Contrast with “Disgrace”:amazon by J. M. Coetzee. This story of an aging man struggling with his irrelevance grabs you from the first paragraph and holds you all the way through. I tore through this.

So apparently the “hammer is going to fall on PSU tomorrow”:http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/ncaaf-dr-saturday/ncaa-announce-penalties-against-penn-state-monday-paterno-141212517–ncaaf.html. Who knows what will happen, but I think it is reasonable to assume that PSU will be uncompetitive in football for at least the next 5 years. Either because of massive financial penalties (this seems likely to me as it penalizes the institution directly), significant scholarship reductions (less likely in my mind, as this hurts future kids), loss of TV and bowl exposure which has financial and recruiting implications (this will certainly happen), an outright ban on the team (unlikely), and the resultant flow of staff and players to other schools. It is hard to imagine that PSU will field a quality program for years.

So what does the Big 10 do? I am sure there are very active conversations today.

* Stand by PSU. The noble thing to do. And the Big10 at times has tried to be noble. I could certainly live with this. But you can bet this would hit the Big10 in the pocketbook, it will affect the next round of TV rights negotiations. And on every discussion of the Big10 standings, or Big10 allstar teams, or whatever, there will be that PSU logo and the PSU issues will come up. It is going to be a thorn for the league. But I could live with this. * Dump them ASAP and try to fill their spot with 1 team. Given how damaged the Big10 would be with PSU in the league, I think the league would make substantial compromises to get the right 12th team in, so this may be ND’s best time to strike a deal that preserves some of their special treatment. * Dump them ASAP and make a big play to the south. Try to pick up the disaffected ACC football programs who aren’t getting the revenue they should because of their ACC affiliation. This would be costly, but there are no cheap solutions in sight. If you could pick up 3-5 southern teams, this would create a dramatic positive press story and allow the league to bury the PSU story.

My bet is that the league does not stand by PSU. They may throw PSU a bone and say that they will reconsider them for full membership in 6-7 years but this is just window dressing. to I wonder if this PSU story was a motivator for some the Pac-12 schools who submarined the Big-10/Pac-12 linkup.

UPDATE: and so we know. The Big10 will stand behind PSU, as PSU works thru it’s misery. It is going to be 10 years before PSU is a competitive team again, if that. I’m not sure this was the right business move for the Big10, but it is noble. Perhaps having PSU ever-present in the league will serve to remind every other coach and institution, every day, that they need to put the kids and players first.

* “Ruby for iOS development”:http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2012/05/exclusive-building-ruby-ios-applications-with-rubymotion.ars. Fascinating stuff. Moving beyond ObjectiveC seems like a good thing. $200 seems a bit steep. * “Simple explanation of F stop”:http://www.petapixel.com/2012/04/02/a-simple-explanation-of-f-stop-numbers/. Useful. But beware, “simple” == 15 minutes, because the topic just isn’t that simple. * “Convert handwriting to LaTeX”:http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2012/07/20/converting-hand-drawn-equations-to-latex-and-mathml/. Kind of awesome. Tho I tend to learn the easy keyboard equivalents for LaTeX pretty fast, but still this is awesome * Rich has a bunch on “Wifi channel selection”:http://www.tongfamily.com/archives/2011/11/wifi-channels-which-are-the-best/, I am probably massively suboptimal. * “Sugru self setting rubber”:http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2012/07/12/back-in-stock-sugru-multicolor-pack-self-setting-rubber/. Awesome stuff. * What are you going to do with all your obsolete incandescent bulbs? I bet it won’t be as cool as the “Bulb Box”:http://www.alhamaddesign.com/collection1.html#8

I thought we were past that. Anyway I used “SignNow’s online notary feature”:https://notary.signnow.com/, sadly “Docusign”:http://www.docusign.com does not yet have a notary feature.

So the way the SignNow feature is supposed to work is this – you upload a document, they throw you into a video chat with a notary, the notary asks you all the notary type questions, looks at your ID, accepts your signature, stamps the doc, and you are done. It could be a great convenience. And the people at SignNow were incredibly gracious, they are just rolling out this service, they worked super hard to make sure I was satisfied. I could hear the notary on the other end working with her tech support to solve issues as they cropped up.

But the stupid Adobe Flash in-browser video control is killing them. It would never work on my machine (Brand new macbook pro retina, google chrome). I restarted the browser to no avail. We finally go to the point where the notary could see me, and we could hear each other, but I could never see the notary, all I saw was a frozen Flash control. This isn’t the first company I’ve seen struggle with the Flash control, that thing is a killer.

But thanks to the diligence of the SignNow folks I did get a notarized doc and so my problem was solved. For their sake I hope they find a solution that doesn’t need this Flash thing. I assume they are completely nonstarters on the iPad.

The whole experience does make you wonder about the value of notarization, if you weren’t already wondering. Has this process really made my signature more trustworthy and reliable – I mean, the notary was in Virgina, attesting to my signature in Washington, for a lease document in California.

Mutant eggplant? Fermented grape jelly? Jolly Joe’s Candy? Or maybe just a starfish at low tide.

“Big move for yahoo”:http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/07/16/googles-marissa-mayer-tapped-as-yahoos-chief/?hp. I’d make job 1 cozying up to Apple and help supplant all the Google services on Apple devices. If Yahoo could become the most relevant internet content brand on the iPad and iPhone, that would be a good step forward. The weather, stock apps would be fine places to start, along with the maps app but that horse may have left the barn.

OK it is wonderfully fast, the 768G SSD is awesome, Aperture opens in seconds. I love the speed. Love.

But – one spontaneous reboot. Address Book hangs on first run. The migration utility took forever and silently gave up trying to transfer my music and photos over, I had to do those manually. Had to boot into the repair utility to fix some “strange permission problem”:http://osxdaily.com/2011/11/15/repair-user-permissions-in-mac-os-x-lion/. Software Update tool failed updating iTunes twice.

Not conclusive yet but something seems a little off.

I’m several days late to the news about “Docusign’s most recent funding”:http://www.geekwire.com/2012/esignature-company-docusign-raises-475m-names-mary-meeker-board/. Congrats to everyone involved, it is great to see the company continue to move ahead. I’m an increasingly frequent user of the app, the iPad experience is pretty good, and I know the team is working to make it even better. I have pretty much retired the old “print-sign-scan” cycle that I used to do on everything. There are still a few things they need to make better for me – notably docs with multiple signers – but great great progress by the company. I am starting to see docusign originated docs from non-tech people show up in my inbox unprompted, that is a good good sign.

A new “Vanity Fair”:http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2012/07/microsoft-downfall-emails-steve-ballmer article on MSFT’s struggles, and “DF stresses”:http://daringfireball.net/linked/2012/07/03/microsoft-vf the impact of the stack rank:

Eichenwald’s conversations reveal that a management system known as “stack ranking” – a program that forces every unit to declare a certain percentage of employees as top performers, good performers, average, and poor – effectively crippled Microsoft’s ability to innovate. “Every current and former Microsoft employee I interviewed – every one – cited stack ranking as the most destructive process inside of Microsoft, something that drove out untold numbers of employees,” Eichenwald writes. “If you were on a team of 10 people, you walked in the first day knowing that, no matter how good everyone was, 2 people were going to get a great review, 7 were going to get mediocre reviews, and 1 was going to get a terrible review,” says a former software developer. “It leads to employees focusing on competing with each other rather than competing with other companies.”

I am a decade removed from MSFT and have no particular insight into the culture today, but this smells like BS to me. No one ever loved stack ranks, team members or managers. It was a sucky process and I hated it from both sides. But…everyone always wanted to know their relative importance to the team, and the top 50% of my teams never felt bad about the outcome. Whether explicit or implicit, some stack ranking takes place in every organization, unless you are working in some commune. I’ve worked in orgs with less explicit stack ranks, but it was always there, and everyone knew about it. I don’t believe the stack ranking system has hurt MSFT at all, I think this is the whining of bottom quartile performers.

There is plenty of other meat in this article, and I am on board with a lot of it, but not the stack rank point.

If I were to pick one factor that has hampered MSFT, I’d say the love of grand convergence strategies. The current imperative to run the exact same bits on PCs, tablets, and phones. The many many grand storage convergence strategies that have largely failed. In earlier times, the insistence on one Windows code base which inevitably created internal winners and losers. The many many “strategy taxes” that teams have to pay to be in line with the grand strategy du jour. Looking at the current PC/phone/tablet issue, MSFT has 0 share in phones and tablets, and unless they fix that, it doesn’t matter if phones/tablets/PCs are converged. Job one should be to create the greatest, no-compromise, phone and tablet products. And then when MSFT is sitting on an installed base of millions of these devices, they can go solve the convergence issues they have created for customers and developers. But there is no point in putting the convergence horse before the cart.

UPDATE: over on “my FB page”:https://www.facebook.com/jhludwig several very bright and respected MSFT alums have some good comments, several of them are more negative about the stack ranking system than am I. So there is room for reasonable people to disagree on this point. Everyone agrees on rewarding achievement but would go about it different ways, and I certainly don’t want to stand up as a defender of the 1988-2000 MSFT stack rank system, I would certainly change some things about it if I was implementing a system.

I still stand by more core point, the stack ranking system is not the cause of any MSFT stagnation; it may not be helping, but it is not the cause.

“Awesome article at Forbes re Hipmunk”:http://www.forbes.com/sites/bruceupbin/2012/06/29/why-hipmunk-is-the-worlds-best-travel-site/. Congrats to the Hipmunk team! If you haven’t tried it out, give it a whirl.

* “The Same River Twice”:amazon by Ted Mooney. A film maker and his wife are caught up in events that seem strangely like a film, while he is making a cinema verite film of their lives. Actual events drive the movie narrative, and the movie narrative drives actual events, an interesting interplay. * “The Liar’s Lullaby”:amazon by Meg Gardiner. Unreadably bad. How has this author and this character been able to sustain a series? I gave up 20 pages in, it read like a particularly bad episode of Law & Order. Worst book I’ve picked up in a while. * “Parrot and Olivier in America”:amazon by Peter Carey. I really wanted to like this book, and it seems well written with a unique voice, but the style just didn’t pull me in, I had trouble sustaining interest. The book gets good reviews, this is probably my failing. * “The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood.”:amazon. Loving this book. I remember when I took my first course as an undergrad on information theory and learned about the interplay of information, entropy, energy, etc. It was perspective altering, and this book brought it all back. A great book. * “The Lean Startup”:amazon by Eric Ries. I’m way late to this one, but an excellent book.

Microsoft had a busy week running over OEMs:

* “Microsoft Surface”:http://www.microsoft.com/surface/en/us/default.aspx seems like a very interesting product, the announcement did the job of generating buzz (and probably stalling enterprise iPad purchases, which was likely a key factor in announcing this early), and it was a move MSFT had to make – the existing OEM model has been getting killed by the superior Apple integrated design, retail, and support experience. So the right move by MSFT, but they threw over 25 year relationships with OEMs to make it happen. It will be fascinating to see how OEMs respond – goaded to create even better Windows products, run to Android, other? I wonder if MSFT will license all the nice keyboard and cover technology to OEMs if they want to build Surface-like machines. * “Windows 8 not coming to existing Windows Phones”:http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-57456655-94/no-windows-phone-8-upgrade-for-current-devices/. No new news here, Microsoft just confirmed they are abandoning existing Windows Phone devices. Sure they are backporting some of the UI features, but I don’t expect any new significant app to ever appear for the existing Windows Phones, and that sucks. As a user, I will certainly walk away from the device as soon as it makes sense (likely iPhone 5 time). And how must Nokia feel after pinning their corporate strategy to Windows Phone – there is no way Lumia sales improve on this news. * And of course Nokia is now on deck. MSFT just demonstrated a willingness to dump 25 year relationships to achieve MSFT’s goals. How patient will MSFT be with Nokia? Not very.

When I joined MSFT in the 80s, MSFT was selling its LAN products through 3Com and other OEMs, and MSFT blew up those relationships when they didn’t pan out. Right move for MSFT, tough on 3Com. In the early 90s, the IBM relationship played out the same way. Again the right move for MSFT. And these current moves seem right for MSFT.

As a user I’m pretty unhappy about the phone situation and I will probably dump my Windows Phone, but I am pretty happy about competition in the tablet space, it will result in better choices for all of us.

UPDATE: “DF points”:http://daringfireball.net/2012/06/surface_between_rock_and_hardware_place to “this excellent article on asymco”:http://www.asymco.com/2012/06/20/who-will-be-microsofts-tim-cook/ which digs into the numbers for msft behind the decision to bypass the oems.

“Streetinsider”:http://www.streetinsider.com/Press+Releases/Bromium+Pioneers+Micro-virtualization+Technology%3B+Secures+%2426.5M+Series+B+Funding/7531426.html … “GigaOM”:http://gigaom.com/cloud/how-bromium-lets-bad-guys-in-and-still-keeps-data-safe/ … “Network Computing”:http://www.networkcomputing.com/end-to-end-apm/240002428