Emil's Wicked Cool Blog

We had a fantastically well done April Fools joke played on the 100k or so Intel employees today.

Everyone in the company received an email stating that there was a major new deal between Apple and Intel, and that executives would host a webcast to announce it today at 8:30AM Pacific. The webcast has been replaying every half hour since then. Very little details have been posted about the content of the announcement, and the article on our internal web site states that the announcement will be made public to the stock market tomorrow (Friday March 31st).

I missed the original webcast (conflicting meeting), but caught it later in the day. Keep in mind this is an April Fools joke...but the executives announced a merger between Intel and Apple. They demonstrated the new name (mactel), the new logo, new tag line (leap different), and talked about transition plans, and why they decided to merge. By the time they got to uniforms (black turtleneck) and Intel, wait, sorry - mactel values of "Be Cool", it was pretty obvious it was a joke.

Intel does a great job with April fools every year. Normally they turn our internal website into a huge pile of fake news, interviews, etc. This year, April 1st lands on a Saturday, so they thought they'd get us all a little early. Since it wasn't the standard fake news that we've now become accustomed to, it was extremely effective. We may be a big company, but we do have fun every once in a while.

I still hope they do the fake news...it may even be worth logging into work on Saturday just to read it. ;-)

Disclaimer: The content of this message is my personal opinion only and although I am an employee of Intel, the statements I make here in no way represent Intel's position on the issue, nor am I authorized to speak on behalf of Intel on this matter.

OK, so this is a bit bleeding edge, but very, very cool. Please take this mini-review with a very large grain of salt because both services are evolving fast.

Both Windows Live Custom Domains and Gmail For Your Domain provide the same basic functionality, which is the ability to use the corresponding company's mail service (either Live Mail/Hotmail or GMail), to host the users in your own domain.

I've been doing something similar to this for my own email at my domain, by setting up my accounts to forward messages to Windows Live Mail or Gmail (depending on the account). The problem here is that:

• People you're sending mail to can figure out where the mail comes from (Hotmail/Live Mail uses Reply-To, Gmail sets the From: address but uses a Sender: address of Gmail that will show up in some mail clients as "on behalf of").
• Only effective for your account - not everyone in the domain.

I credit Windows Live Custom Domains as having the first incarnation of the service. Basically, you tell the DNS system that the mail server (technically, this is changing your MX record) is not your hosting provider's mail server, but rather it's Google's or Microsoft's mail server. Some issues with any service like this:

• There's no halfway - it's either everyone in the domain or noone
• It's hard to change back

There's another issue that both services also have, at least right now, which is the ability to pull in all your existing mail. Of course, I believe both Hotmail and Gmail have the ability to pull from POP, so there is at least that migration path.

For the tests, I registered a free .info domain (lerchweb.info) at 1&1, a large hosting provider. I signed up for the Google Beta and the Windows Live Custom Domains beta (internally this is known as BYOD for Bring Your Own Domain). They both work essentially the same, with the following differences:

• Windows Live requires that each user establish a Hotmail/Windows Live account. So far (and this is preliminary), Google does not require this. I would give Google the edge on this point, but Windows Live may have a better privacy story to tell.
• Google lets you brand GMail with your own domain logo. Very cool touch.
• Google lets you import users from a spreadsheet (exported to CSV). Also very cool, and this is a new feature that Windows Live may replicate.
• Google beta took me about a month to become a member. Windows Live Custom Domains was immediate.

It's hard to ignore my feelings about the actual mail system (I tend to prefer Google), but judging on simply the domain hosting features, I think I give this one to Windows Live Custom Domains, primarily because it takes so long to get into Google's beta.

Next step is to get another free .info domain so I'm not repointing things all the time so I can do more than a 24 hour evaluation. This concept excites me, and I look forward to some cutthroat competition!

This is one of those very rare events for me - a slow day. This day has been brought to me by a a series of events that have all coincided at once:

• India has a holiday, so development and QA teams are not working
• Most of my projects are in QA right now
• A major event is going to occur next Monday at work, and in order for me to finish preparing I need to get information from some coworkers
• All systems are running fairly well
• Projects have been completing, but fewer new projects have been created over the last 3-4 weeks, so overall workload has been light the last 2 weeks, allowing me time to catch up

Weird - I don't know what to do with myself. I'm definitely not complaining...

So I've been working in several email systems comparing and contrasting the features. Here's my take:

Yahoo! Mail: I have a Yahoo! id, but did not set up an email account originally. I tried to sign up to test things out for this blog entry, but I get an error message. I dutifully reported the issue to Yahoo support (issue # KMM58274977V28957L0KM), but have not had any updates in the past month. I don't think I should be forced to get a new Yahoo! ID, so they lose.

GMail: Technically a beta product, it's pretty open to people. If anyone wants a GMail ID, let me know. I have most of my lerch.org forwarded here. I don't use the mail search all that often, but I like how the filters use the standard search terms. The filters are very flexible, and it's nice to be able to tag items with multiple tags (basically the equivalent of putting a message into multiple folders simultaneously). It's very "web-like", and the ecosystem is also nice. GMail notifier, browser plugins, the ability to see mail on Google.com's personalized home page and POP access all make the system very accessible. On the downside, visiting GMail with two browsers simultaneously really slows the system down.

Windows Live Mail (aka Kahuna): I'm now using "M2" of the beta product for all my commercial mail from lerch.org. The idea was originally that it would be the account that would collect spam, but it turned into a bit more than that. Anyway, it's basically a trimmed-down version of OWA (Outlook Web Access), with an Outlook look and feel. If you like that, you'll like this, and you can get automatic notifications through MS Messenger. Also, rules that you define have priorities, so if two rules match the same message, you can define which one should apply.

While Windows Live Mail is very much like Outlook, which should be comfortable for a lot of people. It does not have POP access, and it doesn't have the ability to keep a copy of a message in multiple folders. Also, it does not support all browsers (connecting with Firefox downlevels to a Hotmail interface, although as a rapidly evolving beta product Windows Live Mail may address this issue shortly).

Right now, I do like both, Live Mail primarily for the very polished interface, GMail for the ecosystem support and filter behavior. I seem to enjoy GMail better, and it's nice to have POP so I can truly archive my mail if I ever want to move away from the system. I look forward to both systems moving out of beta.

Now, what I find really interesting is Windows Live Domains and the fast follower GMail BYOD (Bring Your Own Domain) service. More to come on this...

Seagate = Hard Drives
Hard Drives...needed for 1st Gen PVRs (e.g. Tivo, Windows Media Center) and future (High Def) generations
Hard Drives...needed for personal music players that have lots of storage (or who add video)
Hard Drives...needed for advanced gaming machines
Hard Drives...needed for all the music and/or videos you're downloading
Hard Drives...needed for all those 5MP digital pictures you're taking

Advanced gaming machines, personal music players, digital photography, peer-to-peer downloading, PVRs...all are examples of technologies that are expanding rapidly and are at various (leading) points of the technology adoption curve. These technologies are using more and more data, and the technology is quickly becoming mainstream.

The data storage industry is dominated by EMC, but EMC is mostly a business storage deal. Other major consumer data storage businesses are Western Digital and Maxtor. Seagate is buying Maxtor, and is cheaper (in terms of P/E) than Western Digital (in my opinion, for no good reason).

Bottom line is that this company is doing the right things, positioned well in an expanding industry, and should enjoy higher than average shareholder returns for the next several years. Major threats? Western digital drives prices down and kills the industry, but they can still lower margins and increase turns in an industry that's expanding so rapidly. My biggest concern would be optical/holographic technology that provides much higher capacities in the same size form factor, but I believe we're still several years out from that, giving Seagate an opportunity to develop the technology themselves or purchase an emerging player in that market.

I'm a big fan of the concept of continuous integration, which is the concept that code is built and tested as early and as often as possible. As soon as a change is completed/checked in, the code is built and tested. Usually this is done automatically (as an aside, I wonder how this approach can work well with enterprise software). Anyway, I saw this article and I found it pretty amusing. Now I have a good reason to get a rubber chicken...

Just got back from Taiwan a few hours ago, and I'm refining my theory about flying business class. Here are the two rules that I have now:

• If flying for business and the flight is >6 hours, your company should pick up business class (Intel does not, and I think the policy is ridiculous - the difference in how rested you are at the end of a long flight between business and economy is crazy)
• If you're going to upgrade yourself due to poor company policy, try to get upgraded on the way back, rather than on the way out. This may be a work/life priority thing, but for me I'd much rather push through some business meetings than be exhausted when I get home and want to do things with friends and family.
  

Unfortunately, I did not get upgraded (was waitlisted but didn't clear the list) on the way back home, so I'm currently exhausted. Off to bed for a couple hours...

I feel much the same way about Sony's products as I do about Apple. I will never, for instance, buy any product that takes a memory stick.

However, there's a big difference in my mind between the two companies. First, Sony appears to be (slowly) realizing the error of it's proprietary ways. Second, as an investor, Sony is a huge conglomerate with revenue sources from many areas. While the second fact actually slows down adoption of open standards, it does smooth out the revenue stream.

There's quite a bit I could also discuss about Blu-Ray here, and while blu-ray has its drawbacks, it is (at least in theory) an open standard.

Umm...apparently it's bad news to use the < character flippantly on Blogger. My last post talked about AAPL P/S being <4, and when used in compose mode, it had the effect of mangling my last paragraph. I've actually been generally underwhelmed by Blogger's inability to properly format without forcing me to use HTML. Users should not have to necessarily understand and manipulate the underlying technology.

Don't confuse that statement by thinking it means systems should hide the underlying technology completely - power users should have access. My point is that general users shouldn't have paragraphs mangled when they type in a < sign, and have to:

• Know what broke


• Go to HTML to fix it


• Know the HTML code for <

Working for Intel, I've been hearing even more than the average person about Apple and how great it is. There are a lot of great things about Apple - here's a few:

• Great product design: I don't know anyone who doubts or questions Apple's product design prowess. This involves both hardware (iPod, iMac) and software (OSX).
• Steve Jobs: Steve definitely has a way about him. He is a great leader; however, in my mind not necessarily a good manager.
• Recent stock price: A year ago, AAPL was trading just over $40/share. It made it over $80 before settling back to it's current price of $69.35 (10:55AM EST March 2nd, 2006).

Please, stop the insanity. Apple will always be a player, and never be the player, at least not for very long, at least not while Steve Jobs is running the ship. Why? Despite 20 years of evidence to the contrary, Steve still seems to believe that proprietary systems, vertical integration and customer lock-in are the way to profitability, market share and investor value. When they hit on a great product, the stock will go up. When they can no longer innovate the product to keep its popularity up, the fad will go away, and Apple will lose revenues, profit, market share, and stock value. I see no evidence to suggest a sustainable model.

Sometimes I look at a stock and am completely at a loss to explain how the market can value the company the way it does. In Apple's case, P/S right now is <4, which does a fair job of explaining it, despite a 37.48 ttm P/E and a 26.73 forward P/E. However, Apple's company and stock, in my opinion, is a house of cards, and I'll stay away from AAPL, despite a belief that in the short run, there are profits to be had. Oh, and my music player? It's a Creative MuVo TX FM (1GB). I'll write about the virtues of it in another post.

So, with energies poured into other things, it's been a very, very long time. My intention from here out is to be a little more regular (I'm shooting for at least once/yr). ;-)

I'll come back over the next couple days to talk about the baby, ASP.Net 2.0, the new car, phone/mp3 player, etc., etc. Hopefully with the baby site I won't be posting to a crowd of no one!

With the baby I have finished up doing an application for our contest. Couple factoids about the site/technology/industry:

• .NET hosting providers are consistently more expensive, especially if you want a database. I'm sure this is due to an MS tax, but also makes me wonder about TCO for .NET.
• ASP.Net 2.0, which really does do a good job of killing off most of the hand-coding that used to be needed. Typical Microsoft evolution means that figuring out/controlling what it's doing is more difficult if you don't want the packaged behavior.
• My phone has a web browser, which I will need when the baby is born and I need to call people. One of the most difficult/time consuming parts of the site was getting the infrastructure to understand that my phone can accept cookies. Not absolutely necessary, but I did not want to have to log in (which is necessary for the admin interface) during all the excitement.