I’m a huge O’Reilly Media fan boy. I can’t hide it. I hear Tim O’Reilly speak at conferences and I think to myself, “Screw being president, I want to be Tim O’Reilly.” I’ve been a subscriber to their online book services called Safari Books Online for years. Every month I see the bill for $43 come through and I think to myself, “Self, that’s the best $43 you spent all month.” But the real downside of Safari Books Online is that it is, as the name implies, an online service. I spend 90 minutes each day on a train and I would LOVE to spend a huge chunk of that time reading O’Reilly books. My iPad is not the 3g model so reading Safari Books Online is not an option for me. Then earlier this week I read that they had released the O’Reilly Safari to Go app for the iPad. I was stoked and excited! I got so breathless that I even tweeted my excitement and then was re-tweeted by @OreillyMedia as you can see from the image in the upper left corner.

I immediately downloaded the app and started playing with it. The fit and finish was not too good, but this is a first release product so I was cutting it some slack. It was a little slow and the screens visibly flashed when I changed screens. Typing was so sluggish that the cursor would lag behind my typing for 5-6 letters. This was all annoying but I was so excited to have these books on my train ride. After struggling a little to figure out how to get books into my offline book-bag I loaded 6 books into the bag and then left the app up and iPad running so they could download while I worked. When I got on the train I was dismayed to discover that I had no books at all in my off line book back. Odd. I know I put 6 in there. After tucking my daughter into bed I spent 3 hours fighting with the app. My final conclusion is that the app is complete and utter shit. It’s poorly designed, poorly executed, and horrible to use. And the UI is nothing like an iPad app. It has zero redeeming value. The offline book bag is so buggy that it takes me ~8 tries to get a single book in the book bag. Often this after waiting for > 5 minutes for the book to download only to have it fail and I have to start over. For online book reading on the iPad the mobile version of the Safari Books website is far superior to the iPad app. Most of my time with the app was reading error messages like the one to the left. What I found bemusing was that I really did feel mad at O’Reilly for this app. It wasn’t the mad that I feel when I get ripped off, it was the mad that I feel when my 3 year old dumps her plate out on the table like a baby. It was a feeling of being let down by someone who I know can do better. And it appears I’m not the only one. The pissed off comments on the Safari Books Online official blog are down right angry. So I did a little soul searching and asked myself why I felt so angry about my experience with the app. What I uncovered I tried to capture in a response post I made to CJ Rayhill, SVP Product Management & Technology. You can see my response here. And here’s the same text for your easy reading enjoyment:

CJ, I know you and your team have to be in pain over this app. It’s terrible. You know that. And now you have a sunk cost problem, a vendor issue, and a “pissed off geeks with pitchforks” problem. Many of us have been there. There are bound to be multiple come-to-Jesus meetings over this. I’ve sat in meetings like that. I’ve led meetings like that. It sucks for every single person at the table.

I’m not sure if the vitriol in the tone of the comments above makes sense to you or your leadership team. Some folks reading this blog might think that the responses are a little over the top. Let me take a shot at helping this make sense through a personal anecdote.

I love O’Reilly Publishing. Recently I was invited to be a tech reviewer for _R Cookbook_ and I was over the moon to be asked by O’Reilly to be a reviewer because I love O’Reilly and I have a ton of positive feelings about those fantastic animal clad book covers. So, it’s an understatement to say I’m a fan. And I have this very personal device, my iPad, which I also love. This device is so intimate that I bring it to bed with me and my wife sometimes feels jealousy toward the time and attention I give to this device. So I invited O’Reilly, who I love and trust, to come join me for a shared experience on this very personal device. And when O’Reilly came over, in the form of the Safari to Go app, it was like having a trusted friend over who then decides to rub their muddy shoes on my suede couch while yelling “F*ck your couch! F*ck your couch!” The app is shockingly bad and totally inconsistent with the rest of my experience with O’Reilly. Hours which I could have spent kicking ass were spent being mocked by this poorly coded and dysfunctional app now hogging the resources of my most intimate personal companion.

You can see this level of hurt and frustration in the blog comments above. The relationship O’Reilly has with its customers is special. You help us kick ass each and every day. When we want to learn something we go to you and you teach us through your books, your blogs, and your magazines. We’re the ones who download IT Conversations podcast and scan through the playlist deleting Dr. Moira Gunn in order to move Tim O’Reilly higher up in the playlist. When we daydream about being rock stars, we don’t think about which model of Fender we’ll play, we think about which animal the editors will pick to go on the cover of our book. And we hope to god they don’t pick some overly cuddly critter or a 3 toed sloth. We want to be like Randal Schwartz and have our book known simply by the animal on the cover.

CJ, you’re an ass kicker too. You graduated from the Navel [sic] Academy, for crying out loud. You’re a trail blazer and the Safari to Go app is a trailblazer. But I (and many others) think this project has lost its way. It seems the trail you tried to blaze was creating a multi-platform reader. Please allow me to be so bold as to suggest this is not the right goal. A better goal is to thrill your rock star fans with the best possible mobile off line Safari reading experience that helps them kick serious ass. You’ve got some hard choices to make about your vendor, your technology stack, and your implementation strategy. They are hard choices. But hard choices are the cost of being a trailblazer. If it was easy, someone else would have already done it.

I believe that the Safari mobile initiative could revolutionize not only technical books, but also text books. But the core of the platform has to be solid. Not only is the current core not solid, it’s unusable. But I know you can fix it. I’m glad Safari Books Online has you at the helm of their ship. Fix this thing, CJ, so we can all be rock stars with you. We’re mad because were disappointed. But we want so much to be thrilled.

-JD Long
@CMastication

If the couch reference is not entirely obvious, then you should brush up on your Dave Chappelle:

Radiant Heat System. Not in my house... yet!

My wife and I bought a foreclosed house a few months ago. This house had been part of mortgage fraud and we bought it at auction. Interesting life experience, to say the least. The finished basement was built with radiant heat tubing poured into the concrete. These pipes are designed to be hooked to a hot water heater so the warm water can provide radiant heat through the floors in the basement. I love radiant heat in basements. It makes the floor warm and the whole basement feels cozy. The heat radiates up to the rest of the house and it’s fairly energy efficient.

The radiant heat system in our basement was never finished, however. The pipes were there but there was no hot water heater, pumps, or thermostat. I started scouring the Web for information on radiant heat systems. There’s lots of sites selling radiant heat related bits, but it was VERY hard to find detailed info on the types of systems or what the options are for radiant heat. I wanted to educate myself on the pros and cons of different systems. Do I use a hot water heater? Maybe a boiler? Should hook it up with my potable hot water heater? I was full of questions and struggled to find anything useful. Until I stumbled on Radiant Floor Company. Their whole business model is around selling assemblies to help the DIY market install/upgrade/maintain their radiant floor systems. And their site has, hands down, the best information about radiant floor systems. It’s not the prettiest site in the world, but they have a great intro, then sections on each major type of system.

They provided me information that I couldn’t get anywhere else. And as a result I’m probably going to buy my parts from them (they are working up a quote for me today!). I’ll probably go with an on-demand hot water heater and a fully closed system. And they will get my business because they gave me the best information AND they have good prices. It takes BOTH info and price to make a sale on-line. Amazon gives me info through their customer reviews and ratings. Radiant Floor Co gives me info through great documentation and background info. This combo of price + info means that some providers will compete on information + reasonable price while others will compete on absolute lowest price with little info. I love this. It gives me, as a consumer, options.

Plymouth Rock... or something

There’s an interesting article in the WSJ this week about poultry farmers who grow for Pilgrim’s Pride (PPC). PPC is in bankruptcy and have canceled grower contracts with 400+ poultry growers. In poultry farming the farmers own the chicken houses and provide the labor but the poultry company (Pilgrim’s Pride, Tyson, Perdue, etc) own the birds and provide the feed. The producers get paid for every pound they put on the flock and they get extra bonuses for efficiency. If there is only one poultry company in the area, or if there are multiple companies but they are not taking new growers, then a grower is truly beholden to the poultry processing company. If the processing company cancels a grower’s contract then that grower can end up with hundreds of thousand’s of dollars of capital and/or debt that is going fallow.

One of the jarring annicdotes in the WSJ story is this one:

Last May, a tornado whipped through Center Ridge, population 1,332, demolishing two of the Dixons’ chicken houses. Their $370,000 insurance payment wasn’t enough to rebuild; they grappled with whether to quit.

Mr. Dixon says he received a visit from a Pilgrim’s representative who said, “Build them back as quick as you can and get ‘em rolling again.”

The Pilgrim’s spokesman says, “At the time of the May tornado, the company was in need of square footage for housing…But no one could have foreseen the dramatic changes that occurred in the U.S. chicken industry last summer.”

The Dixons tapped their savings to rebuild. On Aug. 1, a fresh batch of Pilgrim’s chicks took up residence. Ten days later, Pilgrim’s called to say those chicks would be the last.

There are two big business risks mentioned above. Both of these risks are difficult to deal with, but critical. The first is the risk the growers face if the poultry processing company goes bankrupt. The second is the reputational/legal risk faced by the processing company if they encourage growers to expand and then cancel their contract as happened to the Dixon’s.

The risk producers face if the poultry processor goes bankrupt is exactly the type of risk that a credit default swap (CDS) can hedge. Interestingly enough I have not heard a single mention of a poultry farmer or rural bank buying a CDS against a poultry processing company. WTF? Seems like JP Morgan would put their jeans and boots on and head out to the fly-over states and make some money. Too late now. You can’t shut the barn door once it’s on fire.

The other risk, legal/reputational, is much harder to manage. The risk is qualitative not quantitative, like credit risk. The WSJ article mentions a group of farmers who are suing PPC because the farmers think PPC made verbal promises that were not lived up to. I’m not a lawyer, I just sleep with one every night, but if the farmers can make a strong case that PPC was saying ‘go’ with one hand then ’stop’ with the other they might just have a case at which point I guess they line up behind all the other creditors in bankruptcy court. This is a hard risk to avoid and this type of mixed message issue is increasingly more common as a firm gets larger. My guess would be that the probability of a firm employee saying/doing something stupid goes up exponentially as the firm gets larger. At least PPC employees were not blogging about it… we hope.

Sean Park

I’m a reader of Sean Park’s blog, the Park Paradigm. It’s a good blog despite the fact that it has his face in the header and has the word ‘paradigm’ in the title. I know, I know, it’s an alliteration and that’s cool. Yes, if the domain name “MentalMastication.com” were not taken I would have had an alliteration too. But anyway, besides having a pretty face and a fancy blog, Sean’s a good thinker. While I’m trying to remember the difference between a hash in Perl and a data frame in R, he’s pondering the weighty strategic issues around financial service business models. I’m a practitioner of financial models and Sean buys and sells guys like me over a biscotti and venti lowfat decaf vanilla lata with extra sugar and whipped cream. But today I was reminded of Sean when I was on the phone with a colleague. I’ll call the colleague “Kim” because to use her real name, “Betty Sue Williams” would be tacky. So the conversation went like this:

Kim: “JD, I had an interesting conversation with a broker in Paris”

Me: “No kidding? I just bought some more RAM for my computer at Buy.com. Can your broker friend come install it for me, or does he still have a job.”

Kim: “No seriously, he wants to improve his models and would like our South China data.”

Me: “South China data, tell him to go fug himself. What’s he going to give us for that?”

Kim: “France data.”

Me: “Would he like that on a DVD or an FTP site?”

The way this ties back to Sean is he’s been saying for years that one of the currencies of business used to be information (rumors, inside skinny, etc.) and now it’s data.

Here’s a quote from a 2003 report written by Sean while at Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein

The ability to store,manage and manipulate data is the single most daunting challenge faced today in the capital markets arena and will ultimately play a determining role in defining leadership in the new era. As financial markets harness the exponentially growing power of information,their reliance on complete,robust and accurate data multiplies accordingly.Unfortunately for most financial institutions and investment banks this is an area that is too often delegated (or relegated) to the dusty corners of operations or IT and does not enjoy either the focus or the understanding by senior management that it deserves.

Sean linked to that article in a blog post this week. I was reminded of the blog post when having the discussion about data with my colleague. You know, this reliance on data and the ability to manipulate said data is why I am a VP and I write code and manipulate data. My boss? The Senior VP? Yeah, he writes code and manipulates data. This isn’t a job for code monkeys, it’s our strategic advantage.

I also got a chuckle when I read the DKW Article and saw the quote Sean used at the top from Pablo Picasso.  Remember those flat book mark pens mentioned last Thursday? They have quotes on them:

JD's Fancy Flat Pen