Interviewed by Michael Ivey
Chris Adamson, software engineer and weblogger
His website is here.
AUTHORS
Michael Fuchs
Elizabeth Hilts
Paul Riddell
Gary Rivlin
Jim Motavalli
Barbara Shafferman
Jules Siegel
Keith Snyder
ARTISTS/POETS/
PHILOSOPHERS
Jon C. Allen
Will Baker
Mike Leung
Jon Sarkin
COOL SITE KEEPERS
Mike Cash
Scott O'Neal Colf
Godfrey Daniels
Cliff Davis, DDS
Tammy Hocking
Wes Modes
Frank Rogan
DIARISTS
Ralph Becker
J. D. Bruns
Linda DeVault
Mike Reed
Moira Richardson
Jessamyn West
FILMMAKERS
JOURNALISTS
Bernie
Mary Cooley-Jones
Lindsay Crysler
Jamie Dupree
M.O.A.T.M.A.I.
David Moll
Robert Niles
John Orr
Steven Ovadia
Pierce Presley
Mack Reed
Rip Rense
Curtis Ross
Neal Ross
John Scalzi
Catherine Seipp
David Sheets
Dwight Silverman
Matt Welch
MOVIE MAVENS
HUMORISTS
Debbie Farmer
Mike Jasper
Madeleine Begun Kane
Patrick Keller
Bob Sassone
Valerie Sprague
Ken Swarmer
Ian Wolff
SOLDIERS
TEACHERS
TECHIES
Chris Adamson
Mike Gunderloy
Michael Ivey
Greg Knauss
Floyd Maxwell
Ellen McDonough
Mike Pingleton
Wayne Thume
John Worth
TEENS
UNDECLARED
WEBLOGGERS
What was your favorite thing about being in the Stanford band?
Hmm... since answering "7AM beer and doughnuts" sounds nasty to my 34-year-old mind, I'm going to have to say the musical repertoire. When I played in middle and high school, the hippest thing we played was the "Theme from Fame", and all the trombone parts were just transposed tuba bass parts (hold two whole B flats, hold two whole E flats, hold 4 whole B flats, etc.). So my first night on campus, the band hits all the frosh dorms and they're not just playing rock and funk, they're throwing in a few whacked songs like Edgar Winter's "Frankenstein", the Grateful Dead's "Truckin'", Squeeze's "Pulling Mussels from the Shell", and "White Punks on Dope" by the Tubes (one of my favorite bands in high school). Obviously, it's a lot more interesting when you recognize and enjoy the music you're playing. So, I re-learned trombone and played in spring band for two years, then year-round for the next three. In the late 80's, we had a problem with new popular music not working well in our format (an arrangement of MC Hammer's "Can't Touch This" was a pretty desperate low-water mark), but about the time I graduated the band was getting more into metal ("Back in Black", "Crazy Train", "Paradise City"), and now they play a lot of punk (Green Day, Offspring, etc.). Although to be fair, UCLA's winter band has been playing a terrific "I Wanna Be Sedated" for years.
What's the scariest part of being a father-to-be?
At the moment, it's the complete lack of an income, which more broadly points to the need to keep solvent, keep providing an income, and not take any big risks now that I'm basically responsible for the well-being of three people. Thing is, I think taking risks is a natural part of life, and crucial for making progress in your career, your personal life, etc. If anything, fear of failure has often made me too conservative. But still, do I get stuck in jobs that don't deliver either intellectually or financially, or do I take chances that if they go bad could affect how nice a house we have (or whether we have one at all), what kind of college the kid(s) can go to, whether we're all on a Kraft macaroni-and-cheese diet, etc. Doesn't seem fair to bet someone else's well-being on myself, yet I know that long-term, it's absolutely critical to do so.
What advice would you give to a manager making his first foray into the world of software companies?
Um... don't! The idea of the software company, per se, seems like a lousy proposition right now. I read an article a few months back (Business Week, maybe) saying that the 250 publicly-traded software companies had dwindled to 150, and will probably shrink down to about 80. So to such a manager, I'd have to ask, "do you think this company has ideas and people as good or better than Oracle, Symantec, or Microsoft?" It's sort of a spin on the old advice to would-be authors: "if you're not better than Hemingway, we don't need you." And why would you want to work in a field where the sign of success is being targeted and dismantled by Microsoft? I'll pass.
The strength of any market is in the middle, in the ability to play gatekeeper between parties (think of how movie studios control what movies get made and what people can watch, and make crazy money pissing off both sides). There's less of an ability to achieve this position with software, especially on the internet (which is all that matters now), because people generally don't want their business to be completely dependent someone else's proprietary software.
Seems to me like the corporate software-makers we all admire most aren't really software companies. Sun, IBM, and Apple are all hardware companies. Amazon's e-commerce software is terrific, but they're a retailer. Mobile phones, satellite television, and other service companies depend on software that gets the job done without us even noticing. With the exception of video game companies -- which have the traits of entertainment companies more than software makers -- I'd be very wary of getting into software as an end in itself.
If you must, be sure to read Business @ the Speed of Stupid by Alan Morrison and Dan Burke.
You know, that's interesting because I don't even know anymore. Years ago, I would have said screenwriting -- that's what I was trying to do when I got out of grad school (recssion dodge). Yet once I started working at CNN, writing for a living but still not really what I wanted to do, my creative writing stopped cold. When I did take personal time to set up a career swap, I didn't go back to my screenwriting, I taught myself Java. So at this point, my creative writing is dead as Marley, and at 34 I'm way too old to start a career in the entertainment biz (the Riley Weston story reminds us that 30 is over the hill in Hollywood). So what's left, video games maybe? We'll see if I ever get my secret game project off the ground.
I guess in answering my first question though, I was thinking in the abstract of making complete career changes (eg, when I went from journalism to software engineering), especially now that I've reached a pretty high salary level in software engineering. Surely when I'm used to that kind of income, and have a corresponding mortgage, it's impossible to contemplate doing something else, at an appropriately novice-level salary.
One risk that's scary but probably worth it is the idea of going it alone in some form, whether that be self-employment or starting a business or whatever. I've got a computer book proposal out there, something being unemployed gave me time to write, and if it bears fruit, I'd be incredibly psyched to follow through on the project, even though it'd be four months of hellishly long nights (right about the time the kid arrives!). The greatest appeal: the work would be _mine_, not just me punching the clock for someone else. But do that for a living, and your family's well-being depends on your ability to consistently pick popular topics and get assignments. Run these numbers: O'Reilly pays a 10% royalty (http://www.oreilly.com/oreilly/author/ch03.html) and their latest catalog says Java in a Nutshell has sold 700,000 copies. At $30 a copy, that equals $2.1 million in royalty payments for David Flanagan... a lot better than any of our 90's-era stock options will ever do. On the flip side, there are authors on a computer books mailing list I read who've written books that only sold 500 copies, and who've received royalty checks of less than one dollar. Pretty clear illustration of the risk/reward idea, eh?
What do you say to those who claim that Java is dead?
Wait wait wait wait wait wait wait... who is saying something so patently absurd? Some pundit looking to drive java evangelist traffic to his or her website, or someone who doesn't know what they're talking about?
Java's very alive right now -- I found an article (and put it on my blog) a few months back saying that in 2002, more developers would be using Java than C++. The Advanced Placement exam for computer science is now being taught and administered in Java. And on the back-end, J2EE is a widely-embraced standard for enterprise development.
That said, I will grant that there are some serious threats to Java's well-being. Foremost in my mind is its dependence on Sun, which looks like it's in trouble, threatened by cheap NT and Linux boxes and by mainframe Linux from IBM. They've been quietly laying off Java engineers, including those they'd loaned to Apple to help along their JVM. I've also noticed that the Java Media Framework has been allowed to drift into irrelvance -- it can't play Windows Media 8 files or QuickTimes that use Sorenson (ie, practically any commercial QT file). It seems like they're willing to retreat on the client side, since their focus is on the server anyways. But while that might be good for Sun, the company that sells servers, it's bad for Java, the language that's supposed to be easy to write and run anywhere.
What do you think Sun needs to do to make sure Java survives?
Well, as a platform, they've got to realize that there are practically no java apps out there. More than six years after its introduction, and despite the early client-side hype about applets, practically all Java development is custom enterprise development.
This is absurd.
There are all sorts of publicly-distributed apps that could and should be in Java. Think of things like UPS and FedEx package tracking software (not the web versions, but the more functional applications that customers install and run on their PC's) - these are just big GUI's with some network connectivity, easily done in Java, but instead written only for Windoze. Think of the extra goodies on DVD's that require a Windoze PC (yeah, my desk is the perfect entertainment-viewing environment for me and my family) Consumer software -- eductional, multimedia, productivity apps -- doesn't require functionality that Java doesn't already offer. Heck, were it not based on ten years of legacy code, Quicken could be written in Java -- in fact a competitor, MoneyDance, already is. The breadth and depth of the Java API's is enormous, certainly on par with the Windows API's or Mac's Carbon and Cocoa, yet businesses and developers don't see Java as a viable way to write full-blown applications for general use.
Arguably, Java is a platform -- it has more in common with OS's (Windoze, Mac, Linux) than with other languages (C++, C#, perl). Yet those other platforms come with lots of software, and in the case of Windoze and Mac, a lot of it is written by the folks who wrote the OS, to make the whole package more appealing. With Mac, stuff like iTunes, iPhoto, iWhatever really highlights the system's elegant design; as for Windoze, Office and Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player are there to establish standards and lock you into them. (Linux gets a free ride off of GNU, but then again Linux is GNU, isn't it?) Yet what do you get when you install Java or a computer that comes with it? At best, the same demos they've handed out since 1995 -- Tic-Tac-Toe, Tumbling Duke, etc.
Sun has spent a lot of time dropping API after API onto the developer world, and I for one would like to see them write some apps in Java that enrich the Java platform. Forte is a nice start, but yet again, it's only relevant to developers.
Let's go back to the DVD extras issue as an example of how Sun could use Java applications to advance the platform. What if Sun defined the "Java Theater" environment, specifying a JVM minimum version (J2ME maybe, to make set-top playback plausible) and a specific set of GUI and media classes sufficient to do DVD extras like multimedia and games and weblinks. A developer could write to that API knowing that it would play on any "Java Theater" device, whether a PC or a DVD player or a PlayStation2 or some device that doesn't exist yet. That's where Sun usually stops. But to actually succeed, they would need to do three things: 1) immediately make an implementation downloadable for desktop computers (preferably all-Java, but at least available for Win/Lin/Mac), 2) lean on Philips, Sony, and Matsushita to support it in hardware DVD players and other devices (which might mean Sun's writing it for them, or even paying them to put it in there), and then 3) making deals with the studios to get them to put their DVD extras in this format (including putting the installer from step 1 on the DVD, and maybe authoring some of the first few discs themselves). That's a LOT of work, and it goes against Sun's core competencies, but the result is that it raises the prominence of the Java platform among the general audience (not just developers), it leverages and shows off Java's One Great Strength (namely "write once, run anywhere"), it displays leadership in new businesses and gets them thinking about java, it gets Java on some computers where it hadn't previously been installed, and it hurts Windoze by co-opting a big chunk of "windoze-only" functionality into the java realm.
In a pre-7Q email, I asked you, "Why do you think it's worthwhile to
interview 'normal' people, meaning non-celebrities?"
Your answer:
"It's not. We should get all of our interesting ideas from
surgically-enhanced Hollywood actors, just as we should look to our
elected officials for moral guidance. That's what has made America the
indomitable intellectual force that it is. Now if you'll excuse me, I
have to set TiVo to record 'Fear Factor', so I can get in line for 'Dude
Where's My Car 2.'"
How did you develop such a sharp sense of
cynicism?
It's a dodge, a way to avoid dealing with things constructively. It's me being intellectually lazy while wanting to seem smart... the equivalent of people who use the word "literally" to mean "figuratively" (I *hate* that!). In this case, it's dealing with the idea that anyone would care what I think -- for most of my life, many of the people I've known and many of the situations I've been in have tried very hard to make me understand that nobody gives a damn what I think, something I'm afraid I've internalized. (I'm serious -- when I write stuff for my blog, it's about ME WRITING, not about ANYONE ELSE READING. In fact, I've never even gone back and looked to see how many hits I get a day/week/month.) So I guess the whole idea of particpating in 7Q makes me feel a little embarrassed, a little foolish maybe, and rather than deal with that, it's a lot easier to just lash out at the Usual Stupidities. And once you're on that road, it's just a matter of how cleverly you can phrase it and how much hype you can cram into your rhetoric.
Oh crap, is that meta-cynicism? Dammit!
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