A Businessman's View

...And you're reading this because you thought I was serious. A number of months ago, an EVP and member of the Executive Management Team emailed me to say he wanted to spend a few minutes chatting with me.  He and I had met, face to face, for the first time the week prior and I left a positive impression on him that he wanted to explore further.  In the spirit of full transparency, I allowed this meeting to stay visible in my work calendar in spite of the risk of my management chain seeing it and misunderstanding. So, of course, my manager did see it and did misunderstand.  He called me up a week after the appointment was made (but still before the actual date of the meeting) and seemed distraught that I didn't trust him enough to tell him if I were dissatisfied with my role.  This was the inspiration for a previous blog entry where I contrasted the concept of happiness versus contentedness in one's role.  Another part of my discussion with my boss, that I ...

Figure 1.  The iOS code exhibiting the SSL handshaking problem. (Originally published on www.servicevirtualization.com ) As a veteran of the application development industry, I can share plenty of horror stories about things that just "went wrong," from a tape backup software vendor not having a backup of my hard drive and then having the hard drive fail after I left, to projects that were canned after being in development for four years without a single beta release. During those 18 years, however, I can recall having to go through a very rigorous process while working on Wall Street whenever any code was considered a Release Candidate for production.  Essentially, any code to be rolled out to production had to pass a code review by your peers, and we all took delight in shooting down other members' code, all in the name of quality.  In one instance, a library of common routines that I created after refactoring a few of my own applications was stuck ...

While researching for my blog entry about the Facebook purchase of WhatsApp , I wanted to get the opinion of someone who has industry experience in this sort of thing.  So I reached out to my good friend and former colleague Mark Pilipczuk who is a marketing veteran with 25 years of experience and a former SVP at AOL.  My question to him was simple:  did the purchase make sense when taking the cost into consideration.  His answer is below. " I haven't spent any real time thinking about whether the $19B was a good/bad/indifferent deal.  What I have been thinking about is the YouTube acquisition by Google a few years back. Many thought the purchase for $1.65B in stock was excessive, particularly for a startup that had no real revenue model and had some serious potential copyright issues. In fact certain three letter ISPs looked at YouTube a couple of times prior to that and couldn't make the math work for an acquisition. What Google was betting on--it turned o...