Global Nerdy

Just after the good news that Apple’s sold nine digits of iPod (I’m still guessing that they crossed that mark in April, as I predicted here), the company comes out with the bad news that they’re slipping the next version of Mac OS X, 10.5, better known as Leopard. According to the New York Times,

Apple Inc., the computer and consumer electronics company, said Thursday that the introduction of the new version of its flagship Macintosh OS X operating system would be delayed as much as four months because of quality issues.

The company previously said the program would ship this spring.

The uncharacteristic schedule slippage is particularly embarrassing for Apple, which is based in Cupertino, Calif., because it had previously poked fun at Microsoft’s struggles to complete its Vista operating system.

If you think slipping an OS release four months is just as bad as slipping it two years (while shedding previously marquee features like an all-new file system), then, yes, I guess Apple’s embarrassed.

Here’s Apple’s terse—and oddly informal—official statement on the matter:

iPhone has already passed several of its required certification tests and is on schedule to ship in late June as planned. We can’t wait until customers get their hands (and fingers) on it and experience what a revolutionary and magical product it is. However, iPhone contains the most sophisticated software ever shipped on a mobile device, and finishing it on time has not come without a price — we had to borrow some key software engineering and QA resources from our Mac OS X team, and as a result we will not be able to release Leopard at our Worldwide Developers Conference in early June as planned. While Leopard’s features will be complete by then, we cannot deliver the quality release that we and our customers expect from us. We now plan to show our developers a near final version of Leopard at the conference, give them a beta copy to take home so they can do their final testing, and ship Leopard in October. We think it will be well worth the wait. Life often presents tradeoffs, and in this case we’re sure we’ve made the right ones.

Comparisons with Microsoft’s ability to ship major OS releases aside, there’s really no good way to spin a slip, but some Infinite Loopoligists among the technorati have gone overboard in their bearishness, calling this slip evidence that the iPhone is in serious trouble, and that Apple’s taken its eye off their core business in computers.

To be sure, slips are bad. For one thing, Apple’s losing a quarter’s-worth of software sales revenue at best. At worst, they may experience a pause in computer buying as users hold off on upgrades until Leopard’s released (after all, who wants to buy a $1,000+ machine, pace Mac mini, only to have to shell out $150 for an OS update a couple of months later?), slowing down revenue they might otherwise have booked. For another, a slip is a measure of last resort. Before you slip, you cut. Apple’s probably down to the bare minimum of new features they can get away with while still calling Leopard a major OS release, and they’re still having problems getting it all in the can. Good thing a bunch of the features are still secret!

Even so, to say that any of this augurs badly for the iPhone is rank speculation. Apple may, or may not, be shifting last minute software engineering to their mobile device. For all we know, the resources “borrowed” from Mac OS for the iPhone have been tasked to the project for months already. We can only wait and see.

What’s more, dividing the iPhone and Mac OS X efforts ignores the fact that we’re still talking about the same core operating system. Here’s where things have really changed for Apple over the last year: Apple has gone from a simple client/server OS split (with the iPod’s OS as the adopted child, drawn from a different gene pool) to a much more complex family tree. The iPhone and Apple tv (which also slipped, but that could have been for manufacturing reasons) both have Mac OS X at their core, too. The Leopard project has implications for more than just the computer side of Apple’s business. That makes this OS iteration a huge change for Apple; they’ve never had so much at stake on a software engineering effort.

Technorati Tags:
Apple, iPhone, Leopard, Mac OS X, Apple tv, Microsoft

Clearly Joey and I are busy enough that we’re having a hard time with the care and feeding of the Nerdy. Why don’t we start light, and open with a joke this Friday night?

Hey, kid. That trash compactor you designed is up and running and I’ve got to say it looks great. Lots of grime, a magnetically sealed hatch that can’t be opened from the inside, a tentacled garbage creature that practically serves no purpose at all. It’s got everything a salty old janitor could ever want.

One thing, though. It takes an awful long time to flatten garbage. I’m talking a minute or more, depending on how many flimsy poles I toss in there. If our capital ships can boogie at faster than light speeds, why can’t we make a few walls slide toward one another at a speed that outpaces a Hutt’s leisurely stroll?

From the inbox of Nardo Pace, the Empire’s worst engineer.

Yes, Global Nerdy is an ongoing concern. The blog’s been silent this week thanks to our work- and life-based commitments. More posts are coming!

In the meantime, please enjoy this op-ed graphic from yesterday’s New York Times that illustrates the life cycle of a blog post:

Not strictly an “everyday technology” post, but a link in today’s Wall Street Journal caught my eye. It’s a table of total compensation figures for a number of Fortune 500-type bigwigs. Mostly CEOs, but the odd chairman’s in there too, I think. Have you ever wondered how the high-and-mighty of the technology world compare, pay-wise, with the rest of industry? Here are a few hints. I’ve taken the liberty of converting the WSJ’s table into a handy chart, ranking the total compensation figures, and highlighting the technology companies in orange.

Of course, this is merely a selection of CEO total comp figures from recent filings. It’s by no means a complete survey, nor a representative sample, so it would be a mistake to conclude any general rules for how tech CEOs (or even CEOs in general) are compensated, but, boy howdy, do them sumbitches make a lot of money!

Click here to see the full chart.

Over at the Tucows Blog, I’m writing a series of follow-up articles that expands or explains some of the things covered in the article by our CEO Elliot Noss, Questions to Ask Before You Pick Your Domain Name Registrar.

The first article in the series, titled Domains Explained, Part 1: Registrants, Registries, Registrars and Resellers, explains some the confusingly similar terms registrant, registry and registrar as well as the often-misunderstood term reseller. It starts with the handy diagram below and then explains each term in detail.

Hey, something to watch while on the elliptical machine on Monday morning: Chris Locke writes that he met Kathy Sierra on Thursday night — on camera, by way of a CNN interview. According to the email sent to Locke by CNN, unless some “breaking news of a serious status” occurs, the interview will be broadcast on CNN American Morning (which airs from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern).

Don’t worry if you’re too busy in the morning to catch the segment. Someone will upload the Sierra/Locke summit segment to YouTube within an hour of its initial broadcast, and the analyses should appear online shortly afterwards.

Paul Graham’s latest essay, Why to Not Not Start a Startup has an unwieldy title and is a little bit of a mess. It would seem that Paul can’t make up his mind between making a list of reasons why you shouldn’t start a startup, a list of reasons you really should start a startup and a list of excuses as to why you haven’t started your own startup yet.

However, that’s a minor quibble. If you’re thinking about starting your own startup, forget the thematic mess and just read it. It’s a good list of points to keep in mind.

1. You’re not an “adult” yet. “There are a lot of adults who still react childishly to challenges, of course. What you don’t often find are kids who react to challenges like adults. When you do, you’ve found an adult, whatever their age.”
2. You’re too inexperienced. “What really convinced me of this was the Kikos. They started a startup right out of college. Their inexperience caused them to make a lot of mistakes. But by the time we funded their second startup, a year later, they had become extremely formidable. They were certainly not tame animals. And there is no way they’d have grown so much if they’d spent that year working at Microsoft, or even Google. They’d still have been diffident junior programmers.”
3. You’re not determined enough. “You need a lot of determination to succeed as a startup founder. It’s probably the single best predictor of success.”
4. You’re not smart enough. “You may need to be moderately smart to succeed as a startup founder. But if you’re worried about this, you’re probably mistaken. If you’re smart enough to worry that you might not be smart enough to start a startup, you probably are…If you don’t think you’re smart enough to start a startup doing something technically difficult, just write enterprise software. Enterprise software companies aren’t technology companies, they’re sales companies, and sales depends mostly on effort.”
5. You know nothing about business. Not actually a sign that you shouldn’t start a startup, but advice for someone starting one. “This is another variable whose coefficient should be zero. You don’t need to know anything about business to start a startup. The initial focus should be the product. All you need to know in this phase is how to build things people want. If you succeed, you’ll have to think about how to make money from it. But this is so easy you can pick it up on the fly.”
6. You don’t have a cofounder. “Not having a cofounder is a real problem. A startup is too much for one person to bear. And though we differ from other investors on a lot of questions, we all agree on this. All investors, without exception, are more likely to fund you with a cofounder than without.”
7. You don’t have an idea. This might not be an obstacle if you’re looking for funding from Y Combinator: “In a sense, it’s not a problem if you don’t have a good idea, because most startups change their idea anyway…In fact, we’re so sure the founders are more important than the initial idea that we’re going to try something new this funding cycle. We’re going to let people apply with no idea at all.”
8. There’s no more room for more startups. This is also not a sign that you shouldn’t start a startup; this is Paul’s dismissal of the statement that there isn’t room for more startups. “A lot of people look at the ever-increasing number of startups and think ‘this can’t continue.’ Implicit in their thinking is a fallacy: that there is some limit on the number of startups there could be. But this is false. No one claims there’s any limit on the number of people who can work for salary at 1000-person companies. Why should there be any limit on the number who can work for equity at 5-person companies?”
9. You have a fmaily to support. “This one is real. I wouldn’t advise anyone with a family to start a startup. I’m not saying it’s a bad idea, just that I don’t want to take responsibility for advising it…What you can do, if you have a family and want to start a startup, is start a consulting business you can then gradually turn into a product business…Another way to decrease the risk is to join an existing startup instead of starting your own. Being one of the first employees of a startup is a lot like being a founder, in both the good ways and the bad.”
10. You’re independently wealthy. “Startups are stressful. Why do it if you don’t need the money? For every ‘serial entrepreneur,’ there are probably twenty sane ones who think ‘Start another company? Are you crazy?'”
11. You’re not ready for commitment. “If you start a startup that succeeds, it’s going to consume at least three or four years. (If it fails, you’ll be done a lot quicker.) So you shouldn’t do it if you’re not ready for commitments on that scale. Be aware, though, that if you get a regular job, you’ll probably end up working there for as long as a startup would take, and you’ll find you have much less spare time than you might expect. So if you’re ready to clip on that ID badge and go to that orientation session, you may also be ready to start that startup.”
12. You need structure. “I’m told there are people who need structure in their lives. This seems to be a nice way of saying they need someone to tell them what to do. I believe such people exist. There’s plenty of empirical evidence: armies, religious cults, and so on. They may even be the majority…If you’re one of these people, you probably shouldn’t start a startup. In fact, you probably shouldn’t even go to work for one.”
13. You’re uncomfortable with uncertainty. “Perhaps some people are deterred from starting startups because they don’t like the uncertainty. If you go to work for Microsoft, you can predict fairly accurately what the next few years will be like—all too accurately, in fact. If you start a startup, anything might happen.”
14. You don’t realize what you’re avoiding. “One reason people who’ve been out in the world for a year or two make better founders than people straight from college is that they know what they’re avoiding. If their startup fails, they’ll have to get a job, and they know how much jobs suck.”
15. Your parents want you to be a doctor. “When I was a kid in the seventies, a doctor was the thing to be. There was a sort of golden triangle involving doctors, Mercedes 450SLs, and tennis. All three vertices now seem pretty dated. The parents who want you to be a doctor may simply not realize how much things have changed. Would they be that unhappy if you were Steve Jobs instead? So I think the way to deal with your parents’ opinions about what you should do is to treat them like feature requests. Even if your only goal is to please them, the way to do that is not simply to give them what they ask for. Instead think about why they’re asking for something, and see if there’s a better way to give them what they need.”
16. You believe that having a job is the default. “This leads us to the last and probably most powerful reason people get regular jobs: it’s the default thing to do. Defaults are enormously powerful, precisely because they operate without any conscious choice…To almost everyone except criminals, it seems an axiom that if you need money, you should get a job. Actually this tradition is not much more than a hundred years old. Before that, the default way to make a living was by farming. It’s a bad plan to treat something only a hundred years old as an axiom. By historical standards, that’s something that’s changing pretty rapidly.