Year: 2006

The Cost of Cisco’s Company Meeting

mike 0 Comment Editorial

This morning, traffic was the worst its ever been for me coming to work.  It was over 2 hours, and everyone in the office is complaining.  Even those with what is usually only a 10 minute commute suffered for 90 minutes or more.  The cause?  Cisco decided to have a company meeting at the Shoreline Amphitheater this morning.

According to the radio, 30,000 Cisco employees descended upon Shoreline this morning.  I suspect that number is inflated, but regardless, traffic in all directions was completely snarled from 8am to 11am.  Several people decided to bail on work altogether.

I don’t care much about how much this meeting cost Cisco, as they did it on their own.  But what did they cost the two other major employers in the Shoreline area?

Assuming the average employee makes about $100K per year here, and assuming the average employee was delayed about 1 hour, and assuming about 80% of employees were impacted:

Microsoft, 1500 employees: $60,000

Google, 8000 employees: $320,000

Ouch.  And we don’t even work for Cisco. 

If you had trouble getting to work today, please link to this article with “Cisco Sucks” in the link text!

Screen Scraping Made Easy

mike 1 Comment Technology

I stumbled across Dapper today, a pretty phenominal UI & utility that can create sophisticated screen scrapes from any website.  I have two reactions:

1) WOW!  These guys did a great job of making it easy to scrape!  Fantastic interface, boiled down to very simple tasks!

2) Jesus Christ!  Who in their right mind would try to build anything off an unknown screen scraper?

The latter is really where I finished thinking about it.  It seems that in our Web-2.0 world, people think that somehow hacks can sustain.  Hacks can’t.  Hacks are hacks.  And fundamentally, screen scraping is a hack.  One small div-hierarchy change and the whole thing breaks.  One slight UI one-off, and the data provided is bogus.  I usually try to avoid being a purist, but screen scraping is just one approach I can’t support.

Conclusion: Dapper represents a lot of very nice work behind what is ultimately a futile effort.

Google’s ClickFraud Report

mike 0 Comment Technology

Google published their findings after investigating several allegations of Click Fraud.

The report is good, and Google rebuts that the ClickFraud detection companies are doing sloppy detection.  Naturally, hearing Google claim that ClickFraud is bogus sounds like they are being defensive.  But, if you read the paper, Google clearly did some solid engineering to investigate these claims.

Google found that the ClickFraud-detection companies are just making basic errors in their detection of fraud.  According to ArsTechnica, at least one of the ClickFraud claimants (ClickFacts) has agreed that Google did identify real problems in the ClickFact’s detection logic.

Google also researched the results from an AdWatcher report.  In the report, AdWatcher told the advertiser that they had been a victim to ~12,000 fraudulent clicks.  However, during that period, the customer was only billed by Google for ~6,000 clicks.  This is just impossible; obviously the fraud count can’t be larger than the total clicks billed.

If you know even a little about how http, referrers, and web-browsers work, you should check out the Appendices in the Google report.  Frankly, it’s shocking that the ClickFraud companies are making such basic errors in their reporting.  Obviously, their business is hinged on proving that ClickFraud exists, but they need to do a lot more diligence in their engineering before making their claims.

It’s refreshing to see real engineering research being done on this stuff rather than the marketing claims based on fuzzy data that we usually see. 

Thoughts on Niall leaving Microsoft

mike 0 Comment Editorial

I’ve had some time to think about Niall Kennedy’s announcement that he’s leaving Microsoft.  I met him once for probably less than a minute, so I don’t really know him.  I have read his blog a fair bit and have a lot of respect for him.  But….

I’m a little disappointed with Niall too.  He started work at Microsoft only 4 months ago.  Frankly, he should have known that Microsoft could be like this.  To quit after such a short period of time, and then to declare the company of being in “general paralysis” seems unfair to Microsoft, his colleagues, and his readers. He did generate a lot of press for himself though (ZDNet, Information Week, CNet, Seattle Post, SoftPedia).

There is no doubt that Microsoft is undergoing major changes in order to compete going forward.  This type of metamorphasis is one that Microsoft has successfully done before, but it takes a long time.  The change can take a huge toll on employees while the company gets priorities sorted out.  Coming from small companies myself, I definitely sympathize with Niall’s frustration that Microsoft and Windows Live is moving too slowly!  It’s fair, but any seasoned engineer should expect this when they start with Microsoft (and then work like a dog to make it faster/cheaper/better).

Obviously, each of us faces our own career/life decisions and sometimes the best thing to do is to leave.  In making his decision, I’m sure Niall did the right thing.  I’m just a little disappointed at the damning words that he left for Microsoft on his exit.  He’s a smart guy, but when you only had the patience for 4 months of it, you didn’t earn the right to conclude the whole thing is just screwed up.

Anyway – Niall – best of luck to you with your new adventure!  I’m sure you’ll go far.