Last time around I vented, more than a bit, about Voice XML and how the end result was arguably worse than any problem the standard set out to solve. You’re as locked into your platform provided are you were 20 years back and apps are harder to build and maintain than they were on the villainous “proprietary platforms” VXML replaced.
Voice over IP, VoIP going forward, gets no such criticism from me. It was inevitable and, honestly, a pretty good idea. I mean, who wants to pull two sets of cables through an enterprise, one for phones and another for data, when you only need one set?
The vision of VoIP… as suggested by Google Gemini
The problem was the same problem we always have with tech. We thought we were all ready for VoIP about five to ten years, depending on the enterprise, before we really were.
I mean, we had been through Y2K, we had upgraded everything we could, gig EtherNet was most places, and your CEO had heard about Skype. We were clearly there in the minds of many. Our marketing team, ahead of their time and also reading the same airline magazine as the CEO, declared that 85% of our new sales would be on VoIP in 2003… and we didn’t even have a solution yet. Work to be done.
Along the way we had to dispense with a bunch of silly ideas before we got down to the reality of how things had to work.
On the list of silly ideas were stand alone VoIP phones. Perhaps silly is the wrong word… but practicality didn’t quite enter into it. For a stretch in the mid-aughts I had a blue Pingtel Xpressa phone on my desk. Really a nice looking phone. It won a design award. It was a solid piece of equipment.
The black version of the phone… it came in various colors
It had a web server in it so you could configure it from your desktop and was entirely run in Java, because we were still thinking that the JRE was a good idea back then. That means if you can find one today… and there are some on eBay… that they will still work. I mean, they are a security nightmare and would be running a Russian or Chinese bot net within 5 minutes of being exposed to the open internet, but it would still make a SIP call if you could configure it correctly.
We had some other, more pedestrian physical SIP phones
In our lab we had an OnDo SIP server (later Brekeke PBX) setup in the lab and could make calls into other lab systems through it. We also setup the server so that dialing specific error response number would return that response. Dial “404” to get a 404 error sort of thing. Handy and lots of fun and of no practical use at all outside of a testing environment.
The base theory was that we’d all buy a phone we liked and subscribe to some sort of VoIP phone service or some such. But non-tech people have issues activating freaking cell phones. In what world was a phone you needed to get on your wired network… Wi-Fi need not apply at that point in time as it was still in the slow ages… and then configure from your PC going to be a viable solution?
Pingtel and a few other SIP phone manufacturers faded away. They were all kind of expensive, and the Pingtel itself was super pricey in a world where people love a quality product right up until they see the price, then they buy the cheapest, low effort unreliable garbage they can find.
A hot market… in all the wrong ways…
Pingtel itself was purchased by Northern Telecom, Nortel, which was desperate for anything that might save it from itself. Pingtel was just another rock thrown to a drowning man. The joke about Nortel was that if you had spent $1,000 on their stock around Y2K and $1,000 on your favorite domestic beer in the can, five years later the redemption value of the cans the beer came in were worth more than the stock and you at least had the pleasure of drinking the beer.
A few such vendors, Pingtel included, tried to pivot away to a soft phone idea, but for consumers that removed the reassurance of a physical phone, left the config issues, and put them in a market where Skype, which mostly just worked and was free to start while they were expecting you to BUY their soft phone AND subscribe so some service or another to be able to dial… who exactly?
Skype you could pay a bit more to and dial not just your pals on your friend’s list but real phone numbers. I used to use it for that. Hell, for a while I had a ten digit phone number so you could dial into my Skype account from the public phone network.
The SIP phone thing was going to be cheap public options, like Skype and expensive proprietary options, like Cisco’s phones, and specialized implementations for things like call centers. And it remains pretty much that way today. Sure, Skype has gone away, but Microsoft Teams, Zoom, and similar software has replaced it.
So it wasn’t too much later that I ended up with one of these incomprehensible bad boys on my desk.
A Cisco 7961 Series VoIP phone
I mean, it is a UI nightmare and almost overtly hostile to the average user, but that is what the IT department loves about it. It makes them feel good to tell end users to RTFM when they cannot negotiate the garbage menu system of an overly complicated device that they forced on their company. I mean, it must them feel good, right? They wouldn’t keep making these sorts of fucking decisions if they didn’t enjoy it, right?
Not that I don’t still see old PBX systems and Nortel phones still in use. But if your company buys something new, they probably buy a full service solution from Cisco or RingCentral or Mitel, or a few other minor players in the market. Or they just force Microsoft Teams on you and let you figure out how the Teams app client and the Teams web client are actually supposed to be the same product.
But the market had to make that choice, and that took a few years. If you work in an office now you probably have some ancient relic system, some spiffy but over complicated integrated VoIP phone and service… or you have a cell phone that you use exclusively and you can’t even remember if you have a phone on your desk, much less what it is.
Meanwhile, as this was shaking out, the network infrastructure had to be made ready.
Yeah, we installed a lot of gig Ethernet switches for Y2K. It was a big bragging point to get that gig port in your office for a time. But the network is more than just a speed. There were a pile of issues to get through, starting with things like class of service… how do I know what this data even is… and quality of service… how do I prioritize things correctly… and a bunch of subsidiary issues that early solutions caused, like the great buffer bloat crisis, which I always denigrate largely because it was an issue of our own making due to everybody having the same easy solution to whatever their immediate throughput issue was, all of which meant coming up with standards that would work across equipment from different vendors… or even equipment from the same vendor but configured by different individuals. I mean, I was there in the 90s when we couldn’t get caller ID to reliable talk across phone companies.
And those are just a few of the real issues and doesn’t even get into some of the dumb bits. We had a customer buy the IP Contact Center package I inherited at one point and, despite the very clear language about network requirements, they expected it to work over their WAN between offices which consisted something like a 5BaseT coax connection that had no QoS configured and was being actively used for real time database replication.
These sorts of issues always start with the customer calling up and saying the software doesn’t work and then, hours to days later, the discovery of the actual issue.
Then there was the question of the IVR servers and how they would handle VoIP traffic. We came into the 2000s with a few vendors like Dialogic and NMS selling very expensive PCI telephony cards. They were making money, were happy with their margins, and did not want to spoil that.
The card vendors were doing so well that IBM bought Dialogic because its mark up on their products were so good, and IBM wanted them to get better with VoIP.
NMS, our chosen vendor, offered up IP integrations that worked with their pricey CG-6000 cards, while IBM had a software solution that used the Dialogic software interface that so many vendors had already integrated with, but a software VoIP stack that charged, per port, the same price as the physical card solutions from Dialogic.
There was a lot of that sort of thing going around. One of the RAD Group companies was likewise offering up a VoIP stack for license at a rate that boggled the mind.
This in a world where your typical CEO thought VoIP was going to be cheap because they could use Skype without charge to call their kid at college.
And, along those lines, there was the question of how many lines could a software VoIP stack handle. Yeah, NMS wanted tens of thousands of dollars for that 4xT1/E1 card, but it had the processing power to handle it and leave your server to do the other work it needed to do, which often included network calls to back end systems like the database, speech reco server, and TTS server.
Let’s take a quick time out to remember a major mobile and long distance provider, Sprint, that was a customer of ours who had outsourced their IT to IBM. Everybody who did that regretted it because IBM was very much in the “promise everything just to get the contract signed, then do as little as possible” mode.
The IBM people told Sprint they could solve server network load issue by running all of those external servers on the IVR server. So each one ran its own copy of an Oracle database, a Nuance reco server, a ScanSoft TTS server, and a few other items. That not only did NOT solve the network issue… all those Oracle databases needed a constant replication scheme to stay in sync… but loaded up the local CPU so that each server could only handle a small number of VoIP sessions which meant they needed more servers which exacerbated the replication issue and… well, it wasn’t my problem so I could laugh about it. Oh, and it cost the customer a ton to license all of that software for so many servers. Our implementation guide explicitly said not to do dumb things like this, but you cannot fight stupid some days, and IBM level stupid was some serious world class stupid.
Tales from the old days. But Sprint has since sold itself to T-Mobile a deal, like every such large merger, promised to add more jobs to the company and improve consumer choice, and led to huge layoff and less competition in the mobile phone market… which should have been the obvious outcome to anybody alive since the 1980s, but which somehow is always surprise when the lies are revealed.
Anyway, it took about a decade or so for infrastructure to catch up with the idea and for the market to figure out how this was going to be handled. NMS went out of business. IBM spun off Dialogic, which is still around, but is a shadow of its former self. Meanwhile the big network hardware companies, already pals with the IT teams, stepped in and took their place, setting up the IP versions of call queues and call routing.
Once laid out, VoIP just followed the path that the web did. VoIP is more prone to issues with network disruptions, but after years of upgrades and learning, it settled down to being pretty much an analog of how the web works. Voice browsers take the call, routed to the by a load balancing mechanism, then requests the VXML pages, reaching our to the reco or TTS servers at need. Those sit in front of the app servers which dish up the VXML pages and handle all the backend data issues, like querying a database or using some other connection method to support the app.
All in all, it is probably easier in the end as well. I mean, I find it easier to use something like WireShark to figure out what is going on than I did trying to piece together data from a line analyzer and the call detail record that whatever platform we were using might have been keeping.
A win in the end and one that, unlike VXML, lived up to most of the key promises. I mean sure, there was an obsession with “caller presence” and a few other splashy but impractical features early on. But in just replace what the phone system did… seems okay… unless you have to admin a Cisco implementation. But IT people tell me they love that sort of thing.
And all that specialized telephony knowledge I had gained up until then? Mostly just trivia now.
We are now entering the era of my blogging. Not quite this blog yet, but an earlier blog I was writing that was not about video games. Written under a different pseudonym, it was mostly to annoy some relatives in Nevada county by picking out amusing entries from the police blotter published in the local paper.
In the midst of that I recorded several entries about the big move that our new leader Mitch had been demanding.
I am going to repost what I wrote at the time, trusting my memories that were contemporary with the events more than my vague recollections of things that happened nearly 20 years ago.
In these posts I refer to our new CEO as “Tim” rather than “Mitch” because he was our CEO as I wrote this and I wanted to avoid being fired in the extremely unlikely scenario where these posts were revealed and pinned on me.
Some imagery the evoke feels
I have made some minor edits to correct awkward phrasing, typos, and my usual subject/verb mis-match issue. Otherwise, this is 2006 me speaking, trying to tell a story that had been in progress for a while. But at least I was about 18 years closer to events at that time.
Approximately five years and four month ago my company signed a five year lease on the building in which I work. The bubble had burst on the web frenzy, there was no more frantic Y2K buying to prop up the industry, my remaining stock options were under water and doomed to remain so for all eternity, and our director of facilities, in a move that some speculate lead to his being let go eventually, managed to lock in the sky-high monthly rent on our crappy building for another five years. (With increases incrementally over the five years to be, you know, fair to the landlord.) [This was demanded by the CEO, who I have covered in a previous post.]
So while 7 of the 10 buildings in our complex ended up empty, we still paid the internet frenzy era going rate for office space in Silicon Valley. We would hear in quarterly result meetings that the mill stone of the rent hanging around our neck was keeping us from being profitable. Occasionally some optimist would approach the land lord of the day (the complex turned over owners 6 times during our lease, although I don’t know if you should really count the bank repossessing the property as an “owner”) to try to negotiate some reduction in our rent, as though the owners could see some advantage in cutting off their minimal revenue stream.
Three years ago we got a new CEO. We will call him Tim. The new CEO, a former Next and Apple Exec and an neighbor of Steve Jobs, hated our building from day one. He had degrees in the “science” of Sociology, so he would bemoan the lack of “warmth” and “energy” in the building. He wanted more “buzz” and a better sense of “collaboration.” However, he was also pretty sharp when it came to business and got us to a point where the quarterly results meetings included a complaint about how much more profitable we would be if it were not for this 60,000 square foot drain on our bottom line, so we cut him some slack on the touchy-feely stuff. After all, not many of us were overly fond of the building at any price, and having the CEO tell us it was a bad building only built up our dislike.
About two years ago, Tim started to talk up his vision of a new building for us. While nobody was keen on his disdain for offices (a view shared by our engineering VP, who likes to sit in his huge office and tell fond stories of working at HP after college where nobody had an office) or his vague quest for more “warmth,” he did also talk about better locations (which, in the end, meant closer to his home), better facilities, exercise rooms, cafeterias, and carpets that did not leave a bad smell on your hand should you accidentally touch them. Basically, he wanted something that we would admit to working in with out duress being involved.
Around February 2005 Tim announced that we were going to begin looking in earnest for our new home. Tim told us how “A” level real estate was available at a fraction of what we were paying per square foot for our, at best, “B-minus” space. We were happy. We got whispers from our CIO, a very competent guy under whom the responsibility for facilities rested, about the places he and Tim visited. Some nice places in in the north county area where we would share a cafeteria and have access to a full gym, one on Moffett (north), one on Charleston (even further north), and another place on Sand Hill Road (cripes, too far north!).
Tim lives in Palo Alto (and is a neighbor of Steve Jobs) and so he concentrated on locations between his home and our current office in Santa Clara. That meant we were moving north. At the time a Dilbert cartoon ran about his company moving and the fact that the new location was close to the CEO’s home was purely coincidence. I still have this cartoon in my office.
About a month and a half later, Tim said at a company meeting that the search for a new building was being postponed. No landlord wanted to commit space to a company that was a year away from moving. At the six month mark, however, landlords would begin to entertain our interests, so the search would begin in earnest in September.
September arrived and we begin asking about new buildings again. More whispers about places in locations not far off from the past list, though at least Sand Hill Road was no longer on the agenda.
We were told in October that the hold up on getting ourselves signed up with one of these locations was getting a letter of intent passed through the legal department of our parent company. Still, we had enough time to get things setup, get access to the building, begin the move in early February so that come April 1, 2006, we would be free of our old building.
We are told that we won’t be able to sign a lease until the deal is closed because our parent company doesn’t want to be on the hook for anything and the buyer won’t sign anything until we belong to them. We are assured that the deal will close by the end of November, first week of December at the latest. After that, we can get on with our moving plans.
January 1, 2006: The deal closes.
During the second week of January, the Director of Facilities for our new company shows up. I will call him Smithers. He comes in and talks to us enthusiastically about moving. He is going to send out a survey for us to take so he can get our input. Some of us go talk to our old CIO. He has been given a nice severance package if he stays for a given duration and has been relegated to an advisory role. He tell us that all of his work has been tossed and that Smithers is here to start from scratch.
Smithers takes his survey and then talks to us about the results. He, at least, does not have a vested interest in moving the building closer to his home and through some very faulty calculations, declares that in our current general area is the best place, commute-wise, for our office to be located. We can see on his chart that he has left off the people in Fremont and a couple in Gilroy who would skew the whole thing south, but at least in the same area means nobody’s commute gets worse.
Smithers says he is going to hire a real estate rep out here (having let go the one we had been working with for five months) and that said rep will meet with the departments to find out their needs. Smithers will be off in the UK finishing up moving the one of the company facilities out there.
Departments without a lot of inherent infrastructure… people who can do their jobs at home on a laptop… remained unconcerned. My boss, who is directly responsible for a lab with 180 servers and the entire infrastructure for our software build system, was starting to get nervous. We got together our space requirements and delivered them to the real estate person who is working with Smithers.
She goes off to do her thing. She comes back and asks if a place that is all offices is okay with us. Well, Tim is gone, our VP isn’t opposed, so we say sure, why not. Despite the fact that I keep hearing different people claim that “such-and-such a group doesn’t like offices” I have yet to find anybody at our location who would choose a cube over an office.
Smithers gets back and tells us that they need to get some stuff together and signed, but we should be ready to move at the end of February. That gives us a month of buffer on the back side. That also doesn’t give us much time to get our crap together for the move.
We get shown the new location, the 7th floor of the Sun building off of Great America Pkwy, right next to Birk’s. [Which is still there!] We got in electrical people, cabling people, moving people, an architect, and started laying out how this was going to happen. We promised extra money to the contractors to get stuff done in time for the move. We cannot have any down time! We put in rush orders on equipment for the new place. We spend lavishly because timing is everything!
January 30th, moving boxes arrive. People begin packing up their cubes and offices. My boss packs up nearly everything in his office the day the boxes show up. I put together a few boxes in my office and haphazardly toss some stuff into them. I have collected a lot of junk over the last eight years and I suspect I won’t miss most of it if I just toss it. Certainly my binder of S1 company rules, including the notorious “how to answer the phone memo” won’t be any loss to me.
We put up a floor map of the new building in an empty office. We let people pick their offices. Only a few of us have been to the new building, but people are getting excited. New stuff, the promise of a better building, something we were told we deserve, and everybody gets their own office makes us feel good.
I am one of the people who has been to the new building. The offices are 7’x9′ and have sliding glass doors with ‘privacy stripes’ on them that look like they are etched into the glass from a distance, but are in fact stickers. If you took out the desk and put in a double bunk and a toilet, it would be about the size of a prison cell. I am asked to stop using phrases like “Orwellian” to describe the new place. My boss wants me to be more positive and I have to admit that yes, the place looks cleaner, nicer, and it lacks the distinct smell our building has had since the second floor men’s room plumbing gave out last May, and that on the 4th of July we can all watch the fireworks at Great America.
About the second week of February we are at the point where we can do no more without regular access to the building. We get the real estate lady to let us in to do some planning, but we need to have the place opened up for us to get electricity in place, air conditioning routed, labs build up, networking done.
Then the word comes down. We are working out some issues in the contract. It will be a little more time before we move.
Responses to questions about the move are few and far between.
Equipment begins to arrive. We find places to stash it. Routers, switches, a KVM control system for the new lab, 19 enclosed racks, power strips, and huge new servers are now sitting all over our building, waiting for a home.
People start digging through boxes for items they need. Two people who went on long vacations and expected to come back to a new building have to set their computers back up in their old locations.
March blows in. We are told that we will be “GO” to move on March 20th. Access to the building is just waiting on one more signature.
At this point I have to speculate. We are told that the hold up is that the owner of the building has to sign something to let Sun sub-let the 7th floor to us. Sun has no employees at all in this building, the company having pretty much collapsed into a shell of its former self with the end of the dotcom boom, so there is just a big sign on the outside. But it has managed to sub-let the first six floors.
My theory is that, somehow, Sun screwed over or otherwise pissed off the building owner while sub-letting the first six floor because the owner is dragging his feet big time. The first agreement of intent needs the signature of the building owner, but if the owner ignores it, the agreement will be considered signed after thirty days. The clock on that started running on March 1st.
On March 30, the agreement of intent is considered signed. Now we can move onto the details of the lease.
However, it is now April 1st and our own lease on the building we are in has expired. We are now paying month-to-month which, according to our agreement with the landlord, means paying DOUBLE our current, already way over market rate per square foot.
Smithers goes to “negotiate” with out landlord to try and get that number reduced. Hah. I can’t imagine what a landlord with seven empty buildings can see as the advantage to lowering the income he is getting. Still, through some inducement, he gets them to change it to a day-by-day lease, so we have an incentive to get out sooner, but the price is the same.
And things grind on at the new building. The owner is coming up with all sorts of restrictions and such to add to our lease agreement. We have to change back any construction we do on our floor when we leave. We cannot change the air conditioning. We can change the air condition (because it turns out Sun owns the A/C units) but we have to put back all the ducting as it was when we leave. We have to submit plan and permits for all of the work we want to do (but we don’t have access to the building yet!) We cannot have a floor loading of greater than 50 pounds per square foot. This technically means that I, and some of my co-workers, will not be allowed to stand on the floor in our new office. Others will merely forbidden to stand on one foot.
And these are only the items that made it to me and I was not plugged into the process at all.
Meanwhile the contractors are pissed at us, and justifiably so. We promised them work, made them accommodate our schedules, and now, two months after our proposed start date, we are still stringing them along without paying them a red cent.
On or about April 13th, Smithers, under heavy pressure from his boss and the CEO to finish up this move, decides he needs a plan B.
[I had delayed updating the story because we hadn’t moved yet when I wrote the July posts, but delayed the next installment due to unwarranted optimism that I would be writing the final entry soon.]
Deus Ex Machina?
Our current landlord shows up. He tells Smithers that we can have the top floor of the building behind us, which can be completely refurbished, and he will even throw in some money for custom construction and improvements, all for only twice the price per square foot of the Sun building. though he will lower our day-to-day rent to that price as well, as soon as we sign.
This is a Plan B on a silver platter for Smithers and he jumps at it like a hack writer on a mixed metaphor.
This change of plans will mean:
The company will save a lot of money on rent in the short term, as the Sun deal shows no sign of being resolved any time soon.
Rather than an office for everyone, only managers will have offices. Everybody else will be back in cubes.
The move date will be some time in July. [Remember, I am writing this at the end of August.]
We have to start from scratch on design and planning
We will end up in a twin of the building we have been told is crap for the last two years.
We have to find a new place to watch fireworks on the Fourth of July.
Morale is down on the whole subject as one would expect.
All Smithers has to do to come out of this smelling like a rose is get the deal signed and get us moved in July. The duration of the work to get the building in shape for us is estimated to be about eight weeks. That is the estimate he is giving us, anyway.
April becomes May. Again news is sparse. All we hear is that the Sun deal passed another deadline that allowed us to walk away without losing any money.
May becomes June. A company-wide note goes out to announce that Smithers has decided to pursue other career opportunities, which is what you say when you fire somebody in management. They don’t get fired or laid off, they go to a farm upstate or some such, like the employees would be sad to hear that incompetence was being justly punished.
June becomes July. A new guy is hired to take over the move. We shall call him Sanders. Sanders talks to all the departments to make sure that everybody is happy with what they will be getting in the new building. Not knowing how Smithers had built up a history of empty promises while ignoring everybody for the most part, he opens a can of worms. Jokes start about not packing any Halloween decorations because we will be hanging them in our current building.
July becomes August. Sanders is busy trying to incorporate suggestions as well as design and color scheme ideas. There is a plan to get better cube material and furniture. A committee is formed to review chairs and partitions. Jokes about Thanksgiving decorations begin to circulate.
August nears its end. There is no hiding that nothing is going on at the new building. We can look out the window and see it. We also learn that the previous eight week estimate was “very aggressive.” Jokes about New Years Eve in our current location start.
We have not heard anything about the move for a while. One can look out the window of our building and into the building we have been told we are moving into and can clearly see that nothing is going on. No work is being done.
Still, we have been spending time picking out cube furniture. Or at least the people who will be sitting in cubes have been participating in that process. There were several different types of chairs to consider and the color and texture of the cube walls and how much desk space people need in cubes.
Managers have picked out or have otherwise been assigned their offices on the big chart that shows how the new building will look when we move in.
We have become used to the idea of the new building. The offices promised to everybody in the last building choice have been mostly forgotten and people are becoming involved with the issues involving the building in our complex.
And then last week an announcement comes out of HQ. They have acquired another company. This company is only a few miles from our location.
The first question in my mind: How will this affect the move?
Details begin to crawl in over the following week. HQ wants all of us in the same building. The new company is small, but not so small that we can all fit in the space allowed by the building behind us. The new company has their own building in a nice location and lots of space because they used to be a much bigger company until they fell on hard times.
They also have tiny cubes with half height walls. This tidbit has not yet made the rounds as it came from a scouting report made by one of the managers. And the cube material is all pretty much new and there is a ton of it, so we won’t be tossing it out to buy new cube walls. We cannot afford to toss it out anyway as this will complicate things with our current landlord which is going to cost us.
And then the question comes around from Sanders, the director of facilities, “How can we get you guys moved into this new building by the end of the month?”
I keep thinking this story is almost over, then some new twist occurs.
There have been a lot of ripples caused by our ever impending move. At least one was to our benefit.
Back in February when we were planning for the Sun building, when it was thought that everybody would be sitting in a 7×9 office, accommodating people and their belongings was a concern. (It is again, now that we are all going into 6×8 half height cubes, but that is another story.) We gave serious thought on how to cut down on wasted space.
One thing that came up was monitors. All of us in engineering had 20-21″ CRT monitors sitting on our desks. Some people had two or three. They take up a large amount of real estate on your desk, and nobody’s desk was going to get any bigger. There was also some concern about the amount of heat generated by a big CRT in a 7×9 office.
As part of the plan to get us into smaller work areas, we asked for an LCD monitor for everybody in engineering. As it turns out, at HQ, a new standard LCD monitor had just been designated, the Dell 2001FP, a 20″ 1600×1200 native resolution monitor.
A pallet of these monitors arrived in late February. All of engineering got one. There are still empty 2001FP boxes sitting around like it was Christmas last week.
These are nice monitors. They are nicer still if you have a video card that supports DV-I output. The company was not going to pay for that, but a couple of people, including myself, had spare video cards at home with the necessary output.
So for the last seven months or so we have benefited from the move in at least one way. Well, most of us have. One engineer said that 1600×1200 isn’t enough resolution and he stuck with his 21″ CRT running at a very tight resolution indeed. He wears glasses and sits very close to his monitor and I do not wonder why.
It had been a tradition at our old company over the years to have a “yard sale” to get rid of old equipment. The usual suspects in the sale were computer systems that were 3-7 years out of date, lab equipment, some older network gear and the like. Occasionally office chairs and other furniture were included. Mostly it was junk, but there have been some gems including a very nice HP oscilloscope complete with all probes and the manual which I bought then donated to a local high school.
Of course we are now part of bigger company with headquarters in the South. The company is ISO 9000 certified and has a process for everything. Everything it seems, except documenting and publishing processes so that those of us not based at HQ can figure out how to get things done. And even when you can get documentation on a process, it always assumes knowledge you probably do not possess if you need to read the document.
Of course you know, if you have been reading here for a while, that we are going to be moving to a small and less expensive location. Some day soon if we are not careful.
We used the upcoming move as an excuse to clean shop here. In a couple empty areas of our building we collected over three dozen 20″ monitors (because we have all those new LCD monitors I mentioned in a previous entry), five dozen Pentium III 500-850MHz systems, a few early Pentium IV systems, four Sun servers, a dozen giant, rack mount Compaq multi-processor (PII or PIII) servers, a few dubious laptops, and a variety of printers, routers, and other stuff that could only charitably called “junk.”
Nothing terribly exciting, really. I have better junk, or enough junk, at home already, depending on with whom you speak.
My boss ended up in charge of this sale, mostly because nobody else would take the job. He spent some weeks trying to get somebody in HQ to okay the sale. Finally, with the cooperation of other local managers, he set the date for the sale for a Friday in late April. The Thursday before the sale an email went to everybody at our location that the sale would be at 3pm the following day.
The next morning, in response to the many inquires, an email finally arrived. It was from the company controller. Nothing ccould be sold without the express permission of the office of the controller. Before the sale could commence, the controller needed have a complete list of all items in the sale.
An email went out to everybody located out here saying, “Yard Sale Postponed.”
Being very organized, my boss already had such a list, complete with asset tags and serial numbesr, for the items our department contributed. Other departments did not have anything resembling a list. Still, we had segregated the stuff by department, so if we had to sell theirs at another time, so be it.
The controller, when asked about pricing of the items for sale said he did not care about that, but that any money from the sale had to be sent to HQ to be accounted for. (Thus ended or usual plan which has traditionally been “Fund a lunch time BBQ out back with the proceeds.”) He said that facilities would set the prices.
Facilities, of course, had no interest in pricing anything and left that to us. Facilities did say, however, that we would need to collect sales tax.
My boss asked the controller about sales tax. The controller was not interested in sales tax, but directed him to some other accounting group.
My boss sent an email to this other accounting group asking about sales tax and if we could just charge round numbers ($5, $10, and $20) and then take the tax out later rather than having to make complicated change for each transaction.
The OAG (other accounting group) came back and said that charging round numbers sounded like a fine idea and certainly we could take the tax out after the fact. And, by the way, if we chose to sell anything for under its current market value, the purchasing employee’s W2 at the end of the year would have to be adjusted to indicate the financial benefit from such a transaction.
Market value? I guess this keeps companies from selling business jets, homes, and cars to their senior execs for cheap, but what is the market value of a 4 year old Pentium III 700MHz with an 18GB SCSI hard drive and no operating system? (All of the Windows operating systems were licensed under our MSDN agreement, so we had to erase them before we parted with the machines.) It has zero value to the company, we have depreciated it as a capital expense over the last few years. And how attractive does a $20 PIII system look if it might mean that it changes your W2 at the end of the year?
And while we were pondering this gem, an email came in from OAG2 (or is that OOAG?) who had been directed by the controller to account for all of the items on our list in the list of assets they have for our location. OAG2 sent us a spreadsheet with all of the purchase orders for the last six years listed and asked us to please indicate which item from our inventory matched up to which purchase order.
Our local accounting group never bothered to associate an asset tag or serial number when putting together this spreadsheet. But then, all of the local accounting people handed over their data to HQ as they got laid off at the end of March, so we cannot blame them. The list of purchase orders only showed vague items, like “computer systems” or, sometimes, just the vendor in the description field. There was no possible way that these two lists could be reconciled.
So my boss was just about ready to call the whole thing off and call up the computer recycler we had lined up to take away the remains and have him come over and cart off the whole lot. But even that needed to be approved.
I suggested shipping everything to HQ, since we cannot part with the stuff without approval, but he thought I was making a joke.
Silence followed. Not a word more came from HQ. This is not an unusual situation. HQ is frequently unaware of our existence.
Then, a few weeks later, an email showed up from the controller. The sale was approved. My boss just had to hand over any cash to our local HR representative.
Sale on!
In the end, very little of the stuff was sold. The dubious laptops were purchased for the boy scouts. A monitor or two was picked up. There was no mention of market value or W2s. No inventory reconciliation was demanded.
I think somebody did threaten to ship everything to HQ.
A week later the computer recycler came by and carted away all of our left over junk. And one of our coffee makers! Damn them!
The Company Move – Resolution – May 2024
I never did end up posting a final entry about the move, though I can assure we did, in fact, move. We schelped our stuff from the corner of San Thomas and Walsh, where NVidia now resides, our old building just a memory, to downtown Mountain View and the old PayPal building at 303 Bryant. It was a nice enough building, certainly better than our wretched old space at 2840 San Thomas.
I have been saving this post for this day because it is a special day, the anniversary of my experiencing the Silicon Valley dream; the IPO! Been there, done that, and literally got the T-shirt. What else can I say? Well, a lot of things it seems.
My wife ironed it a bit
30 years ago today Global Village went public and was availble for trading on the NASDAQ exchange under the GVIL ticker.
Everybody who worked at Global Village on that day got one of those T-shirts. Mine has been sitting in a frame for more than 20 years now. It used to be on the wall in my office at work, back when I was important enough to warrant an office, and it has sat in my home office since then.
Stock options and going public are the things that Silicon Valley dreams are made of… though being bought out by Google used to come pretty close on that front. There are legendary tales of invididuals who got in early, worked hard with the promise of their stock options being worth something some day, and who were able to retire when the magic moment hit. (And equally legendary tales of people who gave up their shares only to later find that they have abandoned riches.)
There is a long standing story of old hands at Microsoft with stickers on their badge reading “FYIFV,” which stood for “fuck you, I’m fully vested” meaning that they could take the money and run any time they pleased.
I know people who have hung around Apple for ages who are worth millions due to stock options they were given over the years, especially options handed out at very low valuations during the bad days between Scully and the return of Steve Jobs.
My story is perhaps less dramatic. It is certainlty less lucrative.
When I started in tech support at Global Village in 1992 I made $28K annually, was given 2,500 options valued at 25 cents each, that being the estimated value of shares when I was hired, and the choice of a better computer if I opted to sit in an interior cube versus a window cube.
And you only need to look out the window if your computer is slow, right?
As with most people, my stock options vested over time. For some reason they decided to set the vesting period for five years, so after working there a year 500 shares would be available for me to purchase at the initial valuation. I would then accrue more shares on a monthly basis until I hit five years, at which point I would be fully vested.
Most places considered four years enough, but somebody at GV got five years in the head. Later, when I moved on to Big Island I complained to Rick that I was going to have to leave behind more than 500 shares of stock because I wouldn’t be fully vested until mid-1997. The stock still had value then. By 1997 it has lost much of it.
As I worked my way out of support and upstairs into engineering, the company was harnessing its success and building towards going public. One of the things that happened was the VCs started putting people in place to run the company, people who would follow their instructions for preparing the company for an IPO.
Our CEOI was one of the marketing executives from Apple who were on the PowerBook project, and the CFO… I forget where he was from, though I recall he later left in disgrace due to some ethical lapse.
But that wouldn’t make him alone in the board room I guess.
We needed two things to go public back then. The first was that we had to have two successful product lines. We already had the Macintosh modem market sewn up pretty well. But modems were all viewed as a single product line. That was where the OneWorld network fax, modem, remote access server line came in.
The Global Village OneWorld
It didn’t have to be super successful, it just had to prove that we had two product lines.
Then we had to show a continuous pattern of growth. This meant that every quarter had to exceed the past quarter for revenue. That mean cutting off some quarters early when we had made enough revenue in order to carry it forward into the next.
This was, of course, unethical and probably unlawful. But our CEO told us they were doing it at a company meeting, so it isn’t like they were hiding it.
And, of course, we had to be profitable. But that was no problem. The Mac modem market was lucrative, the PowerBook segment especially.
This all changed not too far down the line. The rules changed when the VCs decided they wanted to cash out on Netscape about a year and a half later. Netscape didn’t need to make money or have a long term plan, they went public on hype and a pomise that there must be SOMETHING of value in the company because we were all using the Netscape Natigator browser… you were supposed to pay for it, but almost nobody did… and a company that had something on damn near everybody’s computer had to be wise and powerful.
It set the pattern for the dotcom boom, the idea that you just had to have a lot of users, that butts in seats, as it was called, was more important that making a profit or having a business plan that made any sense.
I happened to live at an apartment at Whisman and Middlefield Road, at one end of the series of buildings that would soon have the Netscape name on them. They, somewhat ironically, even had the old Cisco Systems building on Middlefield, a company that was the target model for many startups in the 90s.
As sure as Marc Andreesen provided the spark that made Netscape possible, he also provided most of the very dumb ideas that kept it from being anything beyond a brief flash in the pan. If Steve Case, head of AOL, hadn’t been a sucker, hadn’t believed the hype, he might have saved himself the effort of dismantling the failure that was Netscape rather than buying it in 1998. Instead he bailed out Andreesen and made him even richer. Case was smart enough to only buy Netscape with AOL stock, and he managed to turn around and sell AOL to Time Warner in 2000, so he wasn’t a complete chump.
Anyway, if you see me dismissing Marc Andreesen as somebody who was simply in the right place at the right time, I submit as evidence pretty much everything he has done since the Netscape IPO… and doubly so that he and his current firm are all in on crypto, though they clearly want to be the scammer in that equation, the rent seeking landlord, the house that wins no matter what happens.
But I digress.
So the day came, February 24, 1994, and Global Village went public. GVIL was listed on NASDAQ. I think the CEO got to ring the opening bell on Wall Street that day. We were all going to be rich!
Right? RIGHT?
Well, no. Or maybe. I certainly was not.
The stock opened up at $8 a share. If I had been able to exercise and sell ALL my shares on that date, it would have been worth $20,000. That wasn’t going to buy me a house, much less let me retire, even in 1994. But it could have been a down payment on a nice condo.
Except, of couse, I couldn’t sell all of my shares on that day. I had only hit about a year and a half of vesting, so I only had some shares available. 791 I think.
But still, if I could sell those, it would still net me more than $6K after fees and such.
I could not, however, sell ANY shares because when a company does an IPO employee shares are generally locked out from being sold for a period of time in order to let the VCs and other favored investors cash out in the initial frenzy. We had to wait six months.
And in six months, after the big cash out, the stock was down to $5 a share. That was even less interesting than $8 a share. But our time was not done yet.
The inetrnet was becoming a thing. While I disdained Netscape just a few paragraphs back, a company with no plan and no proven track record that went public on hype alone, the hype was not reserved for Netscape alone.
The market itself was rising. We were past the post Cold War recession, the peace dividend was a thing, Bill Clinton was president, and the internet in general and the World Wide Web in particular were suddenly the most interesting thing for Wall Street. We all wanted to get online, to the point that I wrote about the great dial tone drought a while back. Netscape was a symptom, not a cause of the hype, and any company that was involved with getting online was suddenly viewed with a great fondness beyond anything Lord British ever felt. (If anybody gets that call back reference I will be amazed.)
Among the beneficiaries was GVIL, which was pulled out of its $5 doldrums and began to rise with the internet tide. It passed $8, then $12, then $16 a share. Maybe we would be rich!
The price peaked just past $21 a share at one point. I remember this vividly as I had my shares with a broker and the day it hit that I put in a sell order. I could have sold at market, which would have just gotten me the money. That was in early 96 I think, which would have given me nearly 2,000 shares to play with. That many shares at $20… well, again, I wasn’t going to be rich, but that was a down payment on a real house or maybe a new car paid for in cash, with money set aside for the taxes on the sale.
But I did not put in the sell order at market price. I put it in at $22 a share to eke out just a little bit more cash. And it never got there. I then chased the price down the drain for the next two years. I would set a sell order at a price… because it wasn’t in constant decline, it would bounce back up a bit, before settling down to a lower plateau than before… hoping to catch an uptick, only to have the price drop, never to return.
It fell through $18, $12, $10, $8, $5 and was mucking about around $4 a share, at which point I was hardly paying attention. The modem market had collapsed… modems were becoming a commodity and Apple was at its nadir, that period when it was bouncing around between $12 and $18 a share, when Michael Dell was quipping about the company just giving them investors their money back and calling it a day… and Global Village sold off its modem business and its name.
San Jose Mercury News – April 1, 1998
By that point Big Island was in its own spiral and I was a Cypress Research and had an offer from a company called Edify, that would change my path into enterprise software.
The company became One World, and its stock ticker changed to OWLD. Lots of grandious promises were made and hamfisted attempts to create a pump and dump scam out of the stock were rife in the Yahoo finance forum for the stock.
I sold most of my stock before it turned to OWLD at somewhere around $3 a share. I went from a new BMW to a new PC in value. And I didn’t even sell all of it. Before the pre-IPO I had exercised my first vesting of shares. I have a stock certificate for 500 shares of Global Village in a drawer with my name on them.
Exercising shares before the IPO was a dumb thing to do, and I blame my youthful ignorance and enthusiasm for this lapse. When you buy shares like that, before the IPO, they become directly registered shares. You may have heard reference to directly registered shares as part of the dumbassery around the GameStop stock bubble, where the amateur investors, the “apes,” built up a whole fantasy around direct restistered shares. (If you haven’t heard about that, Folding Ideas has an excellent video about the whole thing. Worth watching, or at least listening to.)
The reality is that such shares are just a pain in the ass to sell because you have to do transactions through physical mail, with all the delay that incurs, to do anything with them. By the time I wanted to do something with them, the stock was already sinking.
Meanwhile, the company stayed in steady decline. OWLD would fall below $1 a share, with delisting threatened, before the company folded up shop in 1999.
It could have been worse. The story was one of the early hires held onto their 25,000 shares until the place went out of business. They believed in the company, and emotional investment in something like a tech company is never a good idea.
But I did learn my lesson. When I took my vested Edify options… a merger caused them all to vest early, which changed the ticker to SONE, a company we’ll get to later… and sold them because my wife and I wanted to buy a house. I set a sell order at market value and cashed them all out at $130 a share. The stock closed over $131, and touched close to $134 before the bell that day, at what was the absolute peak of the dotcom boom. It was literally the bubble just before it burst. I was a bit disappointed that I had sold below the days high and wondered if I had called in too early, if the next day would see the market climb even higher.
It did not. The next day the stock fell to $128. And it fell a bit more the day after that, and more every day for many days to come. I had the good fortune and amazing luck to have sold at just a couple of bucks below its ultimate peak price point. We bought the house and, as it turns out, buying real estate in Silicon Valley in 2000 had a better return than most investments.
Nobody has ever offered me stock options again. It stopped being as much of a thing after the dotcom bubble. Taxes and accounting laws were tightened up and the executives decided that only they deserved stock options for all of their hard work.
I closed my brokerage accounts and have not since invested directly in any stock, avoiding anything like the stock purchase plans that some companies have offered now and then, where twice a year they buy stock for you with money they have held back from your paycheck at the market price less a discount for being in the program… usually 15%.
And at every buy date the stock in question would spike up, much more than the 15% discount, and then fall back the next day, ensuring that the whole thing was a screw job for those who bought in on it.
I have money in a 401k for retirement, in an index fund. But investing in stock as an individual retail customer with an eye towards increasing your money… that is just gambling. And, as with any form of gambling, the house wins and the individuals lose. The index fund is only allowed to “win” because somebody on Wall Street earns their bonus based on that. You’re allowed to win a bit while they win big… though somehow they win big even when you lose.
I’d like to say it wasn’t always like that. But then I think about the 1920s and the great depression that the market caused while people like Joe Kennedy got rich. Even in the calm periods, where the market seemed focused on dividends and stability, the house always won in the end.
I asked Google Gemini… Google Bard had to change its name… to draw me some pictures of enterprise software… it also does images now… and it came up with some respectable output that gave me the *feel* of what I was looking for.
Tell me how this makes you feel…
I asked because when I think of enterprise software I think of some Paul Zwolak prints that were in our office at Edify that were meant to represent the concept as well.
Taken in 2001 with a cheap digital camera
Those three prints… those were just the ones I took pictures of with the now rather primitive Fuji 1MP digital camera I had at the time… were part of a series meant to suggest the effects of our software. They were titled:
Tackling the Enterprise through Self Service
Software for Interactive Service
Extending the Reach of Interactivity
I wish I had better images of them. I also wonder what happened to them. They probably ended up in a dumpster like so much of the companies I worked for.
I have been thinking of the approach I should use for the next stage of my career in telephony related technology. I do want to keep going, in part because I did actually get to work on a bunch of interesting things, often by dint of raising my hand when some director or VP asked if I wanted to go work on something new. (New stuff is fun and interesting, and leaving your mistakes behind is always a relief.)
The thing is, we will also be moving from an era in my career where I can point at products and services I worked on that thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, of people used… Global Village modems were everywhere if you had a Macintosh in the mid-90s, and even Jasmine hard drives were pretty well known in the late 80s and early 90s… to a stage where almost nobody could see what I was working on directly.
I can point at some things that I touched that people used. Did you ever use the voice verification feature when calling in an order for Home Shopping Network? Were you a GM employee who needed an employee discount code to purchase a car? Did you access your Banamex checking account over the web? Did you call up to check on your jury duty status in Los Alamos county? Did you ever call AMC’s toll free number to find out a movie show time? Did the Royal Auto Club send you a response to an email you sent them ages ago and to which they had already responded?
I was involved, or at least sat next to somebody involved with most of that in some way. (I had a cube across from the recording studio where the AMC movie line updates were recorded.) Most of those are well in the past, but there are tales to be told. (If you call 1-888-AMC-4-FUN these days it just tells you to use the damn web site like a normal person grandpa!)
Anyway, as I mentioned in my previous post in the series, I had found the golden ticket and was on the path into enterprise software.
Golden ticket? Why yes, because while you work in anonymity compare to other types of software… there are very few About boxes that credit devs because companies don’t want competitors poaching their key staff… the pay is better. How much better?
Back in my early days at Global Village, when we were hiring contractors to do some manual testing, one of the people at an agency we used laid out the hierarchy of pay/abilities for their staffing. It ran, from lowest to highest:
Educational Software
Video Games
Productivity/Desktop Software
Utility Software
Enterprise Software
That was an off the cuff comment, meant as a general illustration, but the truth of it… not just for testers, but for developers and other engineering staff as well… has stuck with me all these years.
Yes, there are exceptions. The trio that made Valheim (and hateful old Notch and Tim Sweeney, and some others) certainly made much more on games than your typical enterprise software developer. But those tales also reflect an ownership stake, and the boss always takes most of the pie. The old ditty about “my boss makes a dollar while I make a dime” is only wrong in that the ratio has move closer to a hundred dollars for every dime a worker makes.
And there are crappy enterprise software companies that pay poorly. I could name a few.
In general though, as somebody seeking employment, the pay scale holds pretty true. New college grads make more in enterprise shops than many senior devs at video game companies if the the industry compensation reports are at all on accurate.
And once you go up a rung on that ladder it is difficult to step back.
At one point, further down the road, I applied for a position at a video game company as a manager for their server ops team, something I was nominally qualified for on paper, plus I knew somebody at the company and had a strong recommendation. But I didn’t get past the initial screening call because they said a couple minutes into it that, based on my most recent position, they were not going to be able to offer me anything comparable in pay. My resume alone had priced me out of the industry.
It priced me out because it said at that point I had been in enterprise software for a dozen years and was a senior manager acting in a director level role at a large multi-national company.
Now, there were good reasons to not hire me that would have no doubt come out in any interviews. I am not saying they owed me the job or anything. But they couldn’t see the point of trying to move any further for the stated reason of price. Oh well.
Why does enterprise software pay better than the other categories?
Often the deals for software licensing at the enterprise level can be for tens of thousand to hundreds of thousand to millions of dollars for a single implementation. And since these implementations are often considered “mission critical,” there is usually an ongoing maintenance contract that goes with the deal that often generates more revenue over time than the initial sale.
So you only need a few customers to be viable in enterprise software, and a couple hundred on maintenance will make you quite profitable as they are all paying for the same team to do updates and support.
This does tend to make those customers somewhat demanding when it comes to support… though honestly I have had people yelling at me on the phone about a $129 modem they purchased three years ago be more demanding than some of enterprise customers.
Then again, there are enterprise customers who want something for nothing all the time… but we’ll get to Walmart eventually. I’ll just say that you probably don’t want them as a customer ever.
Anyway, for some reason I felt the need to meander off into the topic of enterprise software before jumping to the next step in my career where I end up doing something other than what I was obstensibly hired to do.
I have been saving this post for this day because it is a special day, the anniversary of my experiencing the Silicon Valley dream; the IPO! Been there, done that, and literally got the T-shirt. What else can I say? Well, a lot of things it seems.
My wife ironed it a bit
30 years ago today Global Village went public and was availble for trading on the NASDAQ exchange under the GVIL ticker.
Everybody who worked at Global Village on that day got one of those T-shirts. Mine has been sitting in a frame for more than 20 years now. It used to be on the wall in my office at work, back when I was important enough to warrant an office, and it has sat in my home office since then.
Stock options and going public are the things that Silicon Valley dreams are made of… though being bought out by Google used to come pretty close on that front. There are legendary tales of invididuals who got in early, worked hard with the promise of their stock options being worth something some day, and who were able to retire when the magic moment hit. (And equally legendary tales of people who gave up their shares only to later find that they have abandoned riches.)
There is a long standing story of old hands at Microsoft with stickers on their badge reading “FYIFV,” which stood for “fuck you, I’m fully vested” meaning that they could take the money and run any time they pleased.
I know people who have hung around Apple for ages who are worth millions due to stock options they were given over the years, especially options handed out at very low valuations during the bad days between Scully and the return of Steve Jobs.
My story is perhaps less dramatic. It is certainlty less lucrative.
When I started in tech support at Global Village in 1992 I made $28K annually, was given 2,500 options valued at 25 cents each, that being the estimated value of shares when I was hired, and the choice of a better computer if I opted to sit in an interior cube versus a window cube.
And you only need to look out the window if your computer is slow, right?
As with most people, my stock options vested over time. For some reason they decided to set the vesting period for five years, so after working there a year 500 shares would be available for me to purchase at the initial valuation. I would then accrue more shares on a monthly basis until I hit five years, at which point I would be fully vested.
Most places considered four years enough, but somebody at GV got five years in the head. Later, when I moved on to Big Island I complained to Rick that I was going to have to leave behind more than 500 shares of stock because I wouldn’t be fully vested until mid-1997. The stock still had value then. By 1997 it has lost much of it.
As I worked my way out of support and upstairs into engineering, the company was harnessing its success and building towards going public. One of the things that happened was the VCs started putting people in place to run the company, people who would follow their instructions for preparing the company for an IPO.
Our CEOI was one of the marketing executives from Apple who were on the PowerBook project, and the CFO… I forget where he was from, though I recall he later left in disgrace due to some ethical lapse.
But that wouldn’t make him alone in the board room I guess.
We needed two things to go public back then. The first was that we had to have two successful product lines. We already had the Macintosh modem market sewn up pretty well. But modems were all viewed as a single product line. That was where the OneWorld network fax, modem, remote access server line came in.
The Global Village OneWorld
It didn’t have to be super successful, it just had to prove that we had two product lines.
Then we had to show a continuous pattern of growth. This meant that every quarter had to exceed the past quarter for revenue. That mean cutting off some quarters early when we had made enough revenue in order to carry it forward into the next.
This was, of course, unethical and probably unlawful. But our CEO told us they were doing it at a company meeting, so it isn’t like they were hiding it.
And, of course, we had to be profitable. But that was no problem. The Mac modem market was lucrative, the PowerBook segment especially.
This all changed not too far down the line. The rules changed when the VCs decided they wanted to cash out on Netscape about a year and a half later. Netscape didn’t need to make money or have a long term plan, they went public on hype and a pomise that there must be SOMETHING of value in the company because we were all using the Netscape Natigator browser… you were supposed to pay for it, but almost nobody did… and a company that had something on damn near everybody’s computer had to be wise and powerful.
It set the pattern for the dotcom boom, the idea that you just had to have a lot of users, that butts in seats, as it was called, was more important that making a profit or having a business plan that made any sense.
I happened to live at an apartment at Whisman and Middlefield Road, at one end of the series of buildings that would soon have the Netscape name on them. They, somewhat ironically, even had the old Cisco Systems building on Middlefield, a company that was the target model for many startups in the 90s.
As sure as Marc Andreesen provided the spark that made Netscape possible, he also provided most of the very dumb ideas that kept it from being anything beyond a brief flash in the pan. If Steve Case, head of AOL, hadn’t been a sucker, hadn’t believed the hype, he might have saved himself the effort of dismantling the failure that was Netscape rather than buying it in 1998. Instead he bailed out Andreesen and made him even richer. Case was smart enough to only buy Netscape with AOL stock, and he managed to turn around and sell AOL to Time Warner in 2000, so he wasn’t a complete chump.
Anyway, if you see me dismissing Marc Andreesen as somebody who was simply in the right place at the right time, I submit as evidence pretty much everything he has done since the Netscape IPO… and doubly so that he and his current firm are all in on crypto, though they clearly want to be the scammer in that equation, the rent seeking landlord, the house that wins no matter what happens.
But I digress.
So the day came, February 24, 1994, and Global Village went public. GVIL was listed on NASDAQ. I think the CEO got to ring the opening bell on Wall Street that day. We were all going to be rich!
Right? RIGHT?
Well, no. Or maybe. I certainly was not.
The stock opened up at $8 a share. If I had been able to exercise and sell ALL my shares on that date, it would have been worth $20,000. That wasn’t going to buy me a house, much less let me retire, even in 1994. But it could have been a down payment on a nice condo.
Except, of couse, I couldn’t sell all of my shares on that day. I had only hit about a year and a half of vesting, so I only had some shares available. 791 I think.
But still, if I could sell those, it would still net me more than $6K after fees and such.
I could not, however, sell ANY shares because when a company does an IPO employee shares are generally locked out from being sold for a period of time in order to let the VCs and other favored investors cash out in the initial frenzy. We had to wait six months.
And in six months, after the big cash out, the stock was down to $5 a share. That was even less interesting than $8 a share. But our time was not done yet.
The inetrnet was becoming a thing. While I disdained Netscape just a few paragraphs back, a company with no plan and no proven track record that went public on hype alone, the hype was not reserved for Netscape alone.
The market itself was rising. We were past the post Cold War recession, the peace dividend was a thing, Bill Clinton was president, and the internet in general and the World Wide Web in particular were suddenly the most interesting thing for Wall Street. We all wanted to get online, to the point that I wrote about the great dial tone drought a while back. Netscape was a symptom, not a cause of the hype, and any company that was involved with getting online was suddenly viewed with a great fondness beyond anything Lord British ever felt. (If anybody gets that call back reference I will be amazed.)
Among the beneficiaries was GVIL, which was pulled out of its $5 doldrums and began to rise with the internet tide. It passed $8, then $12, then $16 a share. Maybe we would be rich!
The price peaked just past $21 a share at one point. I remember this vividly as I had my shares with a broker and the day it hit that I put in a sell order. I could have sold at market, which would have just gotten me the money. That was in early 96 I think, which would have given me nearly 2,000 shares to play with. That many shares at $20… well, again, I wasn’t going to be rich, but that was a down payment on a real house or maybe a new car paid for in cash, with money set aside for the taxes on the sale.
But I did not put in the sell order at market price. I put it in at $22 a share to eke out just a little bit more cash. And it never got there. I then chased the price down the drain for the next two years. I would set a sell order at a price… because it wasn’t in constant decline, it would bounce back up a bit, before settling down to a lower plateau than before… hoping to catch an uptick, only to have the price drop, never to return.
It fell through $18, $12, $10, $8, $5 and was mucking about around $4 a share, at which point I was hardly paying attention. The modem market had collapsed… modems were becoming a commodity and Apple was at its nadir, that period when it was bouncing around between $12 and $18 a share, when Michael Dell was quipping about the company just giving them investors their money back and calling it a day… and Global Village sold off its modem business and its name.
San Jose Mercury News – April 1, 1998
By that point Big Island was in its own spiral and I was a Cypress Research and had an offer from a company called Edify, that would change my path into enterprise software.
The company became One World, and its stock ticker changed to OWLD. Lots of grandious promises were made and hamfisted attempts to create a pump and dump scam out of the stock were rife in the Yahoo finance forum for the stock.
I sold most of my stock before it turned to OWLD at somewhere around $3 a share. I went from a new BMW to a new PC in value. And I didn’t even sell all of it. Before the pre-IPO I had exercised my first vesting of shares. I have a stock certificate for 500 shares of Global Village in a drawer with my name on them.
Exercising shares before the IPO was a dumb thing to do, and I blame my youthful ignorance and enthusiasm for this lapse. When you buy shares like that, before the IPO, they become directly registered shares. You may have heard reference to directly registered shares as part of the dumbassery around the GameStop stock bubble, where the amateur investors, the “apes,” built up a whole fantasy around direct restistered shares. (If you haven’t heard about that, Folding Ideas has an excellent video about the whole thing. Worth watching, or at least listening to.)
The reality is that such shares are just a pain in the ass to sell because you have to do transactions through physical mail, with all the delay that incurs, to do anything with them. By the time I wanted to do something with them, the stock was already sinking.
Meanwhile, the company stayed in steady decline. OWLD would fall below $1 a share, with delisting threatened, before the company folded up shop in 1999.
It could have been worse. The story was one of the early hires held onto their 25,000 shares until the place went out of business. They believed in the company, and emotional investment in something like a tech company is never a good idea.
But I did learn my lesson. When I took my vested Edify options… a merger caused them all to vest early, which changed the ticker to SONE, a company we’ll get to later… and sold them because my wife and I wanted to buy a house. I set a sell order at market value and cashed them all out at $130 a share. The stock closed over $131, and touched close to $134 before the bell that day, at what was the absolute peak of the dotcom boom. It was literally the bubble just before it burst. I was a bit disappointed that I had sold below the days high and wondered if I had called in too early, if the next day would see the market climb even higher.
It did not. The next day the stock fell to $128. And it fell a bit more the day after that, and more every day for many days to come. I had the good fortune and amazing luck to have sold at just a couple of bucks below its ultimate peak price point. We bought the house and, as it turns out, buying real estate in Silicon Valley in 2000 had a better return than most investments.
Nobody has ever offered me stock options again. It stopped being as much of a thing after the dotcom bubble. Taxes and accounting laws were tightened up and the executives decided that only they deserved stock options for all of their hard work.
I closed my brokerage accounts and have not since invested directly in any stock, avoiding anything like the stock purchase plans that some companies have offered now and then, where twice a year they buy stock for you with money they have held back from your paycheck at the market price less a discount for being in the program… usually 15%.
And at every buy date the stock in question would spike up, much more than the 15% discount, and then fall back the next day, ensuring that the whole thing was a screw job for those who bought in on it.
I have money in a 401k for retirement, in an index fund. But investing in stock as an individual retail customer with an eye towards increasing your money… that is just gambling. And, as with any form of gambling, the house wins and the individuals lose. The index fund is only allowed to “win” because somebody on Wall Street earns their bonus based on that. You’re allowed to win a bit while they win big… though somehow they win big even when you lose.
I’d like to say it wasn’t always like that. But then I think about the 1920s and the great depression that the market caused while people like Joe Kennedy got rich. Even in the calm periods, where the market seemed focused on dividends and stability, the house always won in the end.
I asked Google Gemini… Google Bard had to change its name… to draw me some pictures of enterprise software… it also does images now… and it came up with some respectable output that gave me the *feel* of what I was looking for.
Tell me how this makes you feel…
I asked because when I think of enterprise software I think of some Paul Zwolak prints that were in our office at Edify that were meant to represent the concept as well.
Taken in 2001 with a cheap digital camera
Those three prints… those were just the ones I took pictures of with the now rather primitive Fuji 1MP digital camera I had at the time… were part of a series meant to suggest the effects of our software. They were titled:
Tackling the Enterprise through Self Service
Software for Interactive Service
Extending the Reach of Interactivity
I wish I had better images of them. I also wonder what happened to them. They probably ended up in a dumpster like so much of the companies I worked for.
I have been thinking of the approach I should use for the next stage of my career in telephony related technology. I do want to keep going, in part because I did actually get to work on a bunch of interesting things, often by dint of raising my hand when some director or VP asked if I wanted to go work on something new. (New stuff is fun and interesting, and leaving your mistakes behind is always a relief.)
The thing is, we will also be moving from an era in my career where I can point at products and services I worked on that thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, of people used… Global Village modems were everywhere if you had a Macintosh in the mid-90s, and even Jasmine hard drives were pretty well known in the late 80s and early 90s… to a stage where almost nobody could see what I was working on directly.
I can point at some things that I touched that people used. Did you ever use the voice verification feature when calling in an order for Home Shopping Network? Were you a GM employee who needed an employee discount code to purchase a car? Did you access your Banamex checking account over the web? Did you call up to check on your jury duty status in Los Alamos county? Did you ever call AMC’s toll free number to find out a movie show time? Did the Royal Auto Club send you a response to an email you sent them ages ago and to which they had already responded?
I was involved, or at least sat next to somebody involved with most of that in some way. (I had a cube across from the recording studio where the AMC movie line updates were recorded.) Most of those are well in the past, but there are tales to be told. (If you call 1-888-AMC-4-FUN these days it just tells you to use the damn web site like a normal person grandpa!)
Anyway, as I mentioned in my previous post in the series, I had found the golden ticket and was on the path into enterprise software.
Golden ticket? Why yes, because while you work in anonymity compare to other types of software… there are very few About boxes that credit devs because companies don’t want competitors poaching their key staff… the pay is better. How much better?
Back in my early days at Global Village, when we were hiring contractors to do some manual testing, one of the people at an agency we used laid out the hierarchy of pay/abilities for their staffing. It ran, from lowest to highest:
Educational Software
Video Games
Productivity/Desktop Software
Utility Software
Enterprise Software
That was an off the cuff comment, meant as a general illustration, but the truth of it… not just for testers, but for developers and other engineering staff as well… has stuck with me all these years.
Yes, there are exceptions. The trio that made Valheim (and hateful old Notch and Tim Sweeney, and some others) certainly made much more on games than your typical enterprise software developer. But those tales also reflect an ownership stake, and the boss always takes most of the pie. The old ditty about “my boss makes a dollar while I make a dime” is only wrong in that the ratio has move closer to a hundred dollars for every dime a worker makes.
And there are crappy enterprise software companies that pay poorly. I could name a few.
In general though, as somebody seeking employment, the pay scale holds pretty true. New college grads make more in enterprise shops than many senior devs at video game companies if the the industry compensation reports are at all on accurate.
And once you go up a rung on that ladder it is difficult to step back.
At one point, further down the road, I applied for a position at a video game company as a manager for their server ops team, something I was nominally qualified for on paper, plus I knew somebody at the company and had a strong recommendation. But I didn’t get past the initial screening call because they said a couple minutes into it that, based on my most recent position, they were not going to be able to offer me anything comparable in pay. My resume alone had priced me out of the industry.
It priced me out because it said at that point I had been in enterprise software for a dozen years and was a senior manager acting in a director level role at a large multi-national company.
Now, there were good reasons to not hire me that would have no doubt come out in any interviews. I am not saying they owed me the job or anything. But they couldn’t see the point of trying to move any further for the stated reason of price. Oh well.
Why does enterprise software pay better than the other categories?
Often the deals for software licensing at the enterprise level can be for tens of thousand to hundreds of thousand to millions of dollars for a single implementation. And since these implementations are often considered “mission critical,” there is usually an ongoing maintenance contract that goes with the deal that often generates more revenue over time than the initial sale.
So you only need a few customers to be viable in enterprise software, and a couple hundred on maintenance will make you quite profitable as they are all paying for the same team to do updates and support.
This does tend to make those customers somewhat demanding when it comes to support… though honestly I have had people yelling at me on the phone about a $129 modem they purchased three years ago be more demanding than some of enterprise customers.
Then again, there are enterprise customers who want something for nothing all the time… but we’ll get to Walmart eventually. I’ll just say that you probably don’t want them as a customer ever.
Anyway, for some reason I felt the need to meander off into the topic of enterprise software before jumping to the next step in my career where I end up doing something other than what I was obstensibly hired to do.
I asked Google Gemini… Google Bard had to change its name… to draw me some pictures of enterprise software… it also does images now… and it came up with some respectable output that gave me the *feel* of what I was looking for.
Tell me how this makes you feel…
I asked because when I think of enterprise software I think of some Paul Zwolak prints that were in our office at Edify that were meant to represent the concept as well.
Taken in 2001 with a cheap digital camera
Those three prints… those were just the ones I took pictures of with the now rather primitive Fuji 1MP digital camera I had at the time… were part of a series meant to suggest the effects of our software. They were titled:
Tackling the Enterprise through Self Service
Software for Interactive Service
Extending the Reach of Interactivity
I wish I had better images of them. I also wonder what happened to them. They probably ended up in a dumpster like so much of the companies I worked for.
I have been thinking of the approach I should use for the next stage of my career in telephony related technology. I do want to keep going, in part because I did actually get to work on a bunch of interesting things, often by dint of raising my hand when some director or VP asked if I wanted to go work on something new. (New stuff is fun and interesting, and leaving your mistakes behind is always a relief.)
The thing is, we will also be moving from an era in my career where I can point at products and services I worked on that thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, of people used… Global Village modems were everywhere if you had a Macintosh in the mid-90s, and even Jasmine hard drives were pretty well known in the late 80s and early 90s… to a stage where almost nobody could see what I was working on directly.
I can point at some things that I touched that people used. Did you ever use the voice verification feature when calling in an order for Home Shopping Network? Were you a GM employee who needed an employee discount code to purchase a car? Did you access your Banamex checking account over the web? Did you call up to check on your jury duty status in Los Alamos county? Did you ever call AMC’s toll free number to find out a movie show time? Did the Royal Auto Club send you a response to an email you sent them ages ago and to which they had already responded?
I was involved, or at least sat next to somebody involved with most of that in some way. (I had a cube across from the recording studio where the AMC movie line updates were recorded.) Most of those are well in the past, but there are tales to be told. (If you call 1-888-AMC-4-FUN these days it just tells you to use the damn web site like a normal person grandpa!)
Anyway, as I mentioned in my previous post in the series, I had found the golden ticket and was on the path into enterprise software.
Golden ticket? Why yes, because while you work in anonymity compare to other types of software… there are very few About boxes that credit devs because companies don’t want competitors poaching their key staff… the pay is better. How much better?
Back in my early days at Global Village, when we were hiring contractors to do some manual testing, one of the people at an agency we used laid out the hierarchy of pay/abilities for their staffing. It ran, from lowest to highest:
Educational Software
Video Games
Productivity/Desktop Software
Utility Software
Enterprise Software
That was an off the cuff comment, meant as a general illustration, but the truth of it… not just for testers, but for developers and other engineering staff as well… has stuck with me all these years.
Yes, there are exceptions. The trio that made Valheim (and hateful old Notch and Tim Sweeney, and some others) certainly made much more on games than your typical enterprise software developer. But those tales also reflect an ownership stake, and the boss always takes most of the pie. The old ditty about “my boss makes a dollar while I make a dime” is only wrong in that the ratio has move closer to a hundred dollars for every dime a worker makes.
And there are crappy enterprise software companies that pay poorly. I could name a few.
In general though, as somebody seeking employment, the pay scale holds pretty true. New college grads make more in enterprise shops than many senior devs at video game companies if the the industry compensation reports are at all on accurate.
And once you go up a rung on that ladder it is difficult to step back.
At one point, further down the road, I applied for a position at a video game company as a manager for their server ops team, something I was nominally qualified for on paper, plus I knew somebody at the company and had a strong recommendation. But I didn’t get past the initial screening call because they said a couple minutes into it that, based on my most recent position, they were not going to be able to offer me anything comparable in pay. My resume alone had priced me out of the industry.
It priced me out because it said at that point I had been in enterprise software for a dozen years and was a senior manager acting in a director level role at a large multi-national company.
Now, there were good reasons to not hire me that would have no doubt come out in any interviews. I am not saying they owed me the job or anything. But they couldn’t see the point of trying to move any further for the stated reason of price. Oh well.
Why does enterprise software pay better than the other categories?
Often the deals for software licensing at the enterprise level can be for tens of thousand to hundreds of thousand to millions of dollars for a single implementation. And since these implementations are often considered “mission critical,” there is usually an ongoing maintenance contract that goes with the deal that often generates more revenue over time than the initial sale.
So you only need a few customers to be viable in enterprise software, and a couple hundred on maintenance will make you quite profitable as they are all paying for the same team to do updates and support.
This does tend to make those customers somewhat demanding when it comes to support… though honestly I have had people yelling at me on the phone about a $129 modem they purchased three years ago be more demanding than some of enterprise customers.
Then again, there are enterprise customers who want something for nothing all the time… but we’ll get to Walmart eventually. I’ll just say that you probably don’t want them as a customer ever.
Anyway, for some reason I felt the need to meander off into the topic of enterprise software before jumping to the next step in my career where I end up doing something other than what I was obstensibly hired to do.
I asked Google Gemini… Google Bard had to change its name… to draw me some pictures of enterprise software… it also does images now… and it came up with some respectable output that gave me the *feel* of what I was looking for.
Tell me how this makes you feel…
I asked because when I think of enterprise software I think of some Paul Zwolak prints that were in our office at Edify that were meant to represent the concept as well.
Taken in 2001 with a cheap digital camera
Those three prints… those were just the ones I took pictures of with the now rather primitive Fuji 1MP digital camera I had at the time… were part of a series meant to suggest the effects of our software. They were titled:
Tackling the Enterprise through Self Service
Software for Interactive Service
Extending the Reach of Interactivity
I wish I had better images of them. I also wonder what happened to them. They probably ended up in a dumpster like so much of the companies I worked for.
I have been thinking of the approach I should use for the next stage of my career in telephony related technology. I do want to keep going, in part because I did actually get to work on a bunch of interesting things, often by dint of raising my hand when some director or VP asked if I wanted to go work on something new. (New stuff is fun and interesting, and leaving your mistakes behind is always a relief.)
The thing is, we will also be moving from an era in my career where I can point at products and services I worked on that thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, of people used… Global Village modems were everywhere if you had a Macintosh in the mid-90s, and even Jasmine hard drives were pretty well known in the late 80s and early 90s… to a stage where almost nobody could see what I was working on directly.
I can point at some things that I touched that people used. Did you ever use the voice verification feature when calling in an order for Home Shopping Network? Were you a GM employee who needed an employee discount code to purchase a car? Did you access your Banamex checking account over the web? Did you call up to check on your jury duty status in Los Alamos county? Did you ever call AMC’s toll free number to find out a movie show time? Did the Royal Auto Club send you a response to an email you sent them ages ago and to which they had already responded?
I was involved, or at least sat next to somebody involved with most of that in some way. (I had a cube across from the recording studio where the AMC movie line updates were recorded.) Most of those are well in the past, but there are tales to be told. (If you call 1-888-AMC-4-FUN these days it just tells you to use the damn web site like a normal person grandpa!)
Anyway, as I mentioned in my previous post in the series, I had found the golden ticket and was on the path into enterprise software.
Golden ticket? Why yes, because while you work in anonymity compare to other types of software… there are very few About boxes that credit devs because companies don’t want competitors poaching their key staff… the pay is better. How much better?
Back in my early days at Global Village, when we were hiring contractors to do some manual testing, one of the people at an agency we used laid out the hierarchy of pay/abilities for their staffing. It ran, from lowest to highest:
Educational Software
Video Games
Productivity/Desktop Software
Utility Software
Enterprise Software
That was an off the cuff comment, meant as a general illustration, but the truth of it… not just for testers, but for developers and other engineering staff as well… has stuck with me all these years.
Yes, there are exceptions. The trio that made Valheim (and hateful old Notch and Tim Sweeney, and some others) certainly made much more on games than your typical enterprise software developer. But those tales also reflect an ownership stake, and the boss always takes most of the pie. The old ditty about “my boss makes a dollar while I make a dime” is only wrong in that the ratio has move closer to a hundred dollars for every dime a worker makes.
And there are crappy enterprise software companies that pay poorly. I could name a few.
In general though, as somebody seeking employment, the pay scale holds pretty true. New college grads make more in enterprise shops than many senior devs at video game companies if the the industry compensation reports are at all on accurate.
And once you go up a rung on that ladder it is difficult to step back.
At one point, further down the road, I applied for a position at a video game company as a manager for their server ops team, something I was nominally qualified for on paper, plus I knew somebody at the company and had a strong recommendation. But I didn’t get past the initial screening call because they said a couple minutes into it that, based on my most recent position, they were not going to be able to offer me anything comparable in pay. My resume alone had priced me out of the industry.
It priced me out because it said at that point I had been in enterprise software for a dozen years and was a senior manager acting in a director level role at a large multi-national company.
Now, there were good reasons to not hire me that would have no doubt come out in any interviews. I am not saying they owed me the job or anything. But they couldn’t see the point of trying to move any further for the stated reason of price. Oh well.
Why does enterprise software pay better than the other categories?
Often the deals for software licensing at the enterprise level can be for tens of thousand to hundreds of thousand to millions of dollars for a single implementation. And since these implementations are often considered “mission critical,” there is usually an ongoing maintenance contract that goes with the deal that often generates more revenue over time than the initial sale.
So you only need a few customers to be viable in enterprise software, and a couple hundred on maintenance will make you quite profitable as they are all paying for the same team to do updates and support.
This does tend to make those customers somewhat demanding when it comes to support… though honestly I have had people yelling at me on the phone about a $129 modem they purchased three years ago be more demanding than some of enterprise customers.
Then again, there are enterprise customers who want something for nothing all the time… but we’ll get to Walmart eventually. I’ll just say that you probably don’t want them as a customer ever.
Anyway, for some reason I felt the need to meander off into the topic of enterprise software before jumping to the next step in my career where I end up doing something other than what I was obstensibly hired to do.
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