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The Very Long Post about “The Move”

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.

The Company Move – Part I – Posted July 21, 2006

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.

The Company Move – Part II – July 24, 2006

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.

The legal excuse continued until early November when it was announced that we were being sold by our parent company to one of our biggest competitors. [This will get a post of its own.] This is the real reason nothing has gone on since September.

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.

The Company Move – Part III – July 26, 2006

Time passes.

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.

The Company Move – Part 4 – August 25, 2006

[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.

The Company Move – Part 5 – September 7, 2006

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.

Let the wailing begin.

The Company Move – Side Track I – September 15, 2006

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.

The Company Move – Side Track II – October 4, 2006

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.

The series so far:

The Special Business Unit

4 Replies

In which unqualified people inflict absolutely the dumbest ideas on us.

The story so far was that Edify had been bought by web banking competitor S1 Corporation, which in turn destroyed out web banking product in hopes of making our customers move to their platform, the major flaw in that plan being their product was garbage and their promised platform never seemed to materialize. I think we changed 401k plan providers more often than S1 even did patch updates. They were not good at the whole software thing.

The IVR side of the house was stuck into a building on San Thomas Expressway that is now gone, replaced by one of the big, swoopy NVidia buildings, declared the “special business unit” and left to fend for itself… but not before hanging a giant anchor around our neck in the form of the VP of sales, who was made CEO of the new unit.

Pretty sure we failed on all points…

I suppose the main lesson from this is never put the sales people in charge of a tech company.

The sales team is always somewhat at odds with the developers in an enterprise software organization. They have quotas to hit and they get flustered because customers always want special features and they will promise anything to get them to sign on the bottom line. And then they would show up asking for the feature they promised. Sometimes it wasn’t so bad. Sometimes it was insane.

It happened so often that back before the merger there was a limit set on a deal size before somebody could request a feature. The potential deal had to be at least $6 million in size… and, suddenly, every deal that was being sized was potentially $6 million so the queue of feature requests, never slowed. We used to joke that we should build up a price list based on all the features we didn’t have in the hope that the sales team would actually sell something we did have, their need to go off-menu being so reliable.

Anyway, they put Joe, a corpulent, red faced buffoon in charge of us and he set about creating a kingdom of his liking. He wasn’t mean or nasty or anything. He was quite friendly and jovial and people generally liked him as a person. Joe was a nice guy in front of everybody. He wanted to be liked.

But he was like the Moll Flanders husband who keeps living beyond his means while trying to get everybody on board to enjoy the party before it all comes crashing down. And there were parties. Many parties. It was a hallmark of his era. I don’t think he actually fled the company in the end by jumping out of a back window and riding off into the night, but I like to imagine that is how it went. Anyway, Joe went straight to work screwing things up.

One of the first things he did for his sales team is start paying commissions when deals were put in the queue but not yet signed. This led to a HUGE boost in unsigned deals in the backlog because the sales team was now incentivized to get customers there even if they had no hope in hell of actually closing a deal. And that was easy enough to do. You just tell the customer you want to get them in the queue but they don’t have to commit and they’ll go along.

That eventually had to be rolled back because it was patently dumb, so obviously so that I thought somebody was joking when they told me about it. My first question was, “We’re paying commissions for not closing deals now?” and we were!

Our buffoon CEO also pushed our facilities guy… who was one of those people who signed up for every task offered until they were in way over their head and then commenced to make lame excuses as they failed to deliver on anything or meet any date… to sign a five year lease on our building because we were at the peak of the dotcom boom and rents were going up and the CEO, like sales people everywhere, thought the line would never stop going up so wanted to lock us in as projected rents might double or triple over five years given the behavior of the last couple.

Instead the dotcom bubble burst and as soon as a year later buildings in our complex were going for less than half of what we were paying and would continue to decline as 9/11 hit the economy.

Our CEO also wanted the company to become a leader in technology so signed a deal with an overseas university in a city that happened to correspond with where family lived so his trips were all business expenses, with first class airfare paid for by the company, to work on foundational research in speech technology.

This is something a giant, successful company can afford to do. IBM did it back in the day, Lucent or Microsoft or Apple could manage it, and now big names like NVidia go there to keep their edge in the market. A little company like Edify… we had no business doing that.

We also bought seats on the VXML Forum and SIP Forum standards committees… again, not something a little player like us should have ever done. Lucent, Nuance, and SpeechWorks had bought in too hard before we showed up and the whole thing was about them squabbling of changes that would give one of them an advantage over the other two.

So we kept spending money even as sales were flattening out with the post-dotcom bubble reality. We still brought in a lot of cash, but new sales were harder to obtain, so we were relying on our substantial ongoing service contracts to pay the bills. Growth was not happening.

But that didn’t stop our CEO. We totally missed our numbers? Well, we’re still taking all the sales people on the big annual trip to Mexico, even if they didn’t make quota, because otherwise they might become demoralized and stop selling so much… as though their salaries didn’t depend on commissions.

We also had to hire the CEO’s daughter and best friend as summer interns where they basically hung out and gossiped and did as little work as possible. This probably would have been the least of his sins if the pair hadn’t been so obviously there to party and do nothing. Like, not even a pretense of work whenever I saw them.

And then there was the big annual holiday party, and the company birthday party, where he liked to stand up and bloviate about how great things were going and blah blah blah.

He also set us on a path to make a new product built on our platform. This wasn’t necessarily a bad idea. The web banking and HR apps we had done before had been very successful… so much so that they had led us to being acquired which got us into this situation with the buffoon CEO from hell.

The problem wasn’t building up an app, the problem was that it was envisioned as a “do all the things” contact center, customer relationship management app that was so ill defined that we spent a couple years working on it, the had to change it completely for the first customer. It was a disaster that drew time and resources from the core product that was, and would always, make all the money for the business.

Meanwhile the CEO was printing up marketing documents based on interviews he did where he declared our platform could do things that we were clearly not capable of. There was a Dilbert cartoon at the time where the sales person promises that their product can detect tachyon emissions. That was Joe in interviews. And then he would loop back and make tachyon emission detection a critical priority. So when he promised we had full language understanding in our product, he wanted it to happen.

We ended up buying a proto-language model startup called YY Software that was ahead of its time, but clearly not capable of delivering on its vision, and tried to make that into something.

That led to an incident where the team working on it was training the language model based on a history of email provided by the Royal Auto Club, which had been promised an automated email response system, and the lab’s test Microsoft Exchange server that was used to simulate the RAC environment and generate responses linked itself to the main corporate Exchange server, because that is what Exchange servers are supposed to do, and sent automated replies to the thousands of test email messages they had been working with.

That was not a good day.

There was also a huge push to get out features more quickly, so it was declared that we would go to a quarterly release cadence.

We had been on something like an annual release cadence, supplying patches and updates while we worked on the next release. But sales needed features NOW if they were going to make quota… the poor sales people couldn’t be expected to stay engaged unless they had new shiny things to sell constantly… so we had the horrible year of four releases.

That may not sound like a big deal, but here is the thing. IT departments do not like to upgrade software more than once a year. Also, enterprise software vendors don’t like to support more than a couple of versions of their platform. So everybody was happy with the annual cadence. And then we sped it up and got a ton of push back from the field.

Our support policy, agreed to by all customers, was that they had to update to the current or previous version of the platform in order to get support. By pushing four updates in a 12 month period, we basically pushed our entire customer base back four versions, so technically nobody was supported except for those few companies who happened to be ready for an update or were doing new installs.

And when push came to shove, when support started telling people about the policy, the threats to cancel the support contracts started to show up, and that was the life blood of the company, what paid the bills. So the CEO… and the new VP of sales, who was a pretentious, self-important jerk of the “this feature should be easy, development is lying when they say how long they need to make it” sort… declared that we would support many versions of the platform, leading to no end of headaches in engineering because every release had to maintain its own build system because annual releases meant we often made big changes to libraries, third party integrations, and compiler versions.

We ended up having one version released during that cycle, EWF 7.2 as I recall, used by exactly one customer, Toys R Us. That is not the situation you want to be in. We also had one of those releases that had zero customers adopt it… which was better, but we had to go through all the supporting work for a release, which is not trivial, and we incremented the latest supported release by one with this.

And then there was the overwrought customer feedback module. Joe gave some academic who had impressed his with something about “delighted” customers being some huge percentage more lucrative to a company, so Joe hired him at some no doubt obscene salary, put him in charge of this new product module, and told us to do what he said. Again, a nice guy, but academics in a business setting are often completely out of their depth, especially when trying to shoehorn their pet theory into product reality. He had absolutely no idea what would sell, he thought just having a good idea was enough.

So we ended up shipping a post-call survey module that was supposed to come with a bunch of professional service in the form of this guy setting up the surveys and then evaluating the data. Because of this he insisted that every copy of the module come with a fully licensed copy of SPSS. That is a bit like requiring the full version of Microsoft Access Professional with a simple contact manager app… only, at least Access is aimed at business use, and not a purely academic tool like SPSS.

And, to top it all off, I was told to sign off on the product before it was anywhere close to being done or ready to ship because it has been promised for whatever quarter that was. I did what I was told, though I was comforted by the fact that I knew we would never sell a copy or, if we did, we would probably have to refund it for being a ridiculous waste of time. Our professional services team had been making post-call surveys for years. It was not a difficult thing. Most companies just want a feel for how things went, not an academically rigorous study of their customers mood.

This was an era of lying really. I am going to sound mean here, but that is what you get when you put the sales VP in charge of things. This was the era when I was asked by marketing to create a list of features we were working on for the Gartner Magic Quadrant review and I gave them the true and honest list. They came back and told me we were currently telling people we had all of these features already. I had to ask what they wanted then. They worked in marketing, they could theoretically make up better ideas for Gartner than I could.

With all of this profligate spending, the dotcom bubble having burst, our rent being way over market, and the crazy, go nowhere projects that were being demanded, and just a constant stream of lies to the market, our customers, our owners, and anybody who dared give us a listen, we were losing money. That was made up for in the usual way, by laying people off.

Come 2010 and the valley crisis caused by the collapse of the housing market investment scam HR professionals started a policy of not hiring people who had been laid off, as there was something wrong with them. There was a headline in the Wall Street Journal in favor of this.

I always felt you ought to get credit against that asinine policy for the number of layoffs you managed to survive. I would have gotten a lot of credits as for several years we were doing layoffs every six months as we failed to control spending but needed to cut costs.

By that point I was a manager and had to stack rank my team every time that came around, prioritizing the people I would need to complete current projects… because at no time were we allowed to reduce our goals as we laid people off… so I had to pick and choose from who could cover what aspects of the plan. Anybody who specialized in one area was likely gone… unless nobody else knew that code. Then I couldn’t part with them.

That didn’t stop the parties. We laid off a bunch of people one week and had a big holiday party at a fancy restaurant the next. Or maybe that was the one at the museum of modern art? They were always poorly planned by Joe’s admin, the hallmark of their incompetence being ritzy locations with about half as many chairs as people attending so early arrivals would grab all the seats and anybody after had to eat standing up. Always the same mistake, over and over. It was as though our corporate motto was something about never learning from our mistakes.

Finally, at one point, many quarters too late, Joe was called on the carpet for not delivering on anything he had promised and losing money… because all S1 asked of us was to not be a drag on the bottom line until they could sell us. Just don’t suck was literally the goal, and he couldn’t manage it.

He was out as were a few other people at the top. There was also another round of layoffs. And then we got a new sheriff in town, a guy name Mitch. Somebody who wasn’t in sales, who was supposed to have some business sense, somebody who was going to turn the place around. A neighbor and pal of Steve Jobs who was going to do for us what he did for Next… quite literally in the end.

Mitch showed up on the day after another big layoff and told those of us who remained how we were going to return to growth. He told us a bit about himself… he liked to remind everybody he was friends with Steve Jobs… or at least a neighbor of his… then ended up in a meandering, old man tale about his career where he told us he had never been dumb enough to hang around at a company when it was clearly going down hill and laying people off.

Then, of course, he realized that we was talking to a group that would be critical to any success the company would have going forward and that he had basically called us a bunch of losers and dumbshits for sticking around. Also, it was not lost on us that mister smarty pants had also signed on for this voyage. Anyway, he tried to recover in a way along the lines of that scene in Caddyshack.

This is the worst hat I have ever seen! Does this hat come with a free bowl of soup?

Then on seeing the whole room wearing that hat…

But on you it looks good!

So we were leery. He said a lot of the right things, but he clearly had a low opinion of us. And, as would be obvious in the end, he didn’t give two shits about anybody in the room beside himself. He didn’t care about the company at all. He was just there to sell us down the river and collect his 30 pieces of silver like any of the VC/Wall Street class.

But first he wanted to get us out of our crappy building. At least we were all kind of on board with that. That led to the event which I refer to as “the move.”

The tales so far:

Web Banking, The Acquisition, and the Start of the Great Decline

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My problem with writing the next post about my time at Edify is figuring out what is even worth mentioning. I posted how I got hired there and then how I went on to avoid what I had been hired to do in order to dig into speech recognition. From there I could write a whole series of posts about various technologies I worked on, from text to speech and controversies over what “US Spanish” really is, to automated response tech based on language models that have evolved into what we’re calling AI today (but which have just about zero “I” in them), to being involved in standards committees for things VXML and SIP, to a whole range of products attempting to serve call center agents that failed for a variety of reasons that were pretty obvious up front, to that time I spent as an ISO 9000-2000 site monitor, and a whole bunch of really stupid business decisions that absolutely screwed the company again and again.

And I may still cover some of that. There are a few amusing stories in there. But I am in a mood to lay the groundwork for what really screwed over the company, how it played out, and why it is just another in a long list of tales about why Wall Street won’t ever allow us to have nice things. Everything must be burned to the ground in the name of shareholder value.

The catechism of Wall Street is that if you are not growing then you are dying, that the line must go up, and that if your company isn’t poised to be one of maybe three leaders in a market segment then you should just give up and go home. Sell out to the leaders, consolidate the market, let efficiency benefit the consumers.

Mergers and acquisitions are always sold with the idea of efficiency and benefit to the consumers, and it is always, always, always a lie. I mean maybe, if two small companies merge but they are not market leaders, the customer might benefit. But usually not. And what Wall Street seeks is monopoly control over market segments so they can raise prices. The only efficiency involved how fast they can grab more cash and the other thought for the consumer is how hard they can screw them over before government regulation looms.

And they’ve bought so many politicians that regulation never looms.

Okay, with that out of my system for the moment, let’s talk about Edify again. While I was toiling away over in the telephony subsystem, another group had used the extensive back end connectivity built into the product to create a web subsystem, which would deliver data to a web site as easily as we did to our IVR apps, and then built a state engine over that on which they built a web banking app.

This was pretty big stuff in the late 90s and, with the dotcom boom, put Edify on the map in a way that our steady, reliable, but boring IVR technology did not. Sure, we had a PC in every Sears store in North America, but did you see we stood up a web banking front end for Scotia Bank or TNZ is no time at all? [Edit: I am informed I might mean the ANZ Bank deal.] Or maybe Scotia Bank was somebody else. I don’t remember at this point in part because it was 25 years ago and in part because I never worked on any of that directly.

Anyway, it was announced at a company meeting that we would be merging as a company with two competitors, S1 Corporation, based in Atlanta, a web banking company that was a spin-off from the failed Security First Network Bank that was the first attempt to be a completely online, internet bank, and FICS Group, a European company doing web banking.

The S1 corporate logo of the time…

Edify had beaten out S1 on a couple of critical deals and now we had S1 president Chip Mahan showing up at our company meeting telling us how the united company would be “the dog catching the truck!” in this merger of equals.

This turned out to be an incredibly apt metaphor, because the joke always is that the dog won’t know what to do should it catch the truck and certainly Chip didn’t know what to do once the deal came to pass in late 1999.

To start with, the vaunted merger of equals became “we bought you and own you now and don’t you forget it!” on day one. We were all treated with great disdain as HR acted like we were a batch of new hires and sent us forms to sign, including unenforceable non-compete agreements, and instructions for things such as how to answer the phone correctly as an S1 employee.

S1 then divided up the IVR team from the web apps team, put the web apps team in one building, us in the other, then laid off everybody on the web apps team in a series of waves. We managed to shift a few over to our building… they knew the platform and we needed more staff… but a lot of the core than made the web apps we were selling were gone for good.

The plan all along was to buy Edify, kill our competing product, then force all the customers using it to migrate to S1’s platform. This is the sort of market consolidation Wall Street loves.

The problem was that S1 had a crap platform, which was a major part of the reason they were losing deals to us, and over the next few years while they owned us they persistently and repeatedly failed to ship the promised new platform that would address all customer issues.

Big customers of ours like Banamex refused to consider what S1 was trying to force down their throats. Also, we were such a small segment of the market that the three companies combined made no tangible change in the landscape of web banking. It was all bullshit to make a few people more wealthy and to feed the self aggrandizement of Chip.

So the CEOs and boards of directors at Edify and FCIS Group were laughing all the way to the bank having gotten a big payout. Our own CEO went off to work for the VCs who effectively destroyed the company, he now being a certified expert on such things.

FCIS had especially snookered dip shit Chip as they were primarily a professional services organization so there wasn’t even any source code S1 could pretend they would integrate, while FCIS had been greatly over valued by Chip’s team. I think they ended up getting spun back out as their own company having succeeded in fleecing Chip. Good on them.

Chip was not very good at the whole business thing. He only excelled at talking a big game, which as we have all seen, is only enough to fool Wall Street for a while. Chip was eventually replaced, then returned when things got even worse for the company. S1, so far as I know, never shipped their new platform and was scooped up by ACI Worldwide in 2012 after foundering for over a decade.

But they left the IVR side of the house to its own devices… mostly. We were put in one building, spun off as a wholly owned “special business unit” and were back in the telephony market which, while not as hot as all things web, was stable and reliable and where we were a trusted name. (Also, we took some of the web banking customers with us because S1 had thrown away the organization that had built it, so couldn’t even provide support to justify the lucrative maintenance contracts. We at least knew the core mechanics of the platform and had a couple people from the old team, so it was back on us.)

And then S1 put the worst possible person in charge of us, which nearly drove us out of business with a series of obviously dumb, even to the outside observer, decisions, starting with our building lease. But that is another tale.

Rambling about Speech Recognition

Into the Telephony Subsystem

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It is spring of 1998 and I was starting off at Edify, the company that would be, from one perspective, my place of employment for the next twelve years.

Stability, in Silicon Valley?

During that dozen years the company would be bought, spun off, bought again, merged, then bought one more time before laying almost the whole staff off… after which the company that did that would be bought again, capping off my resume where I literally ten employers listed over 22 years, most of which do not exist at all or in any recognizable form today.

Edify Corporation

Despite being a successful company whose software was used by a large number of big name companies, there is little or no record left online about it. At least Global Village managed to be worth a page on Wikipedia. I can dig and find things about Big Island and the YoYo. Edify though, that is just some smoke in the wind now. If you didn’t know it was there you would never know it was missing.

That is Silicon Valley. A lot of medium size successful businesses come and go without a ripple, and the fact that a few hundred other people have jumped on the name Edify since then doesn’t help.

That roller coaster of a ride started with just Edify, which had just gone public about a year before I signed on. As I mentioned last time, Edify was in the enterprise software domain, which meant better pay and some stock options just for coming on board.

The company had been founded as Reach Systems around 1991 by a group of engineers who had come from the Rolm PhoneMail group, and a hearty set of old school devs they were. They were serious engineers in a way that a lot of Silicon Valley no longer is, rooted in the foundations they had learned dealing with embedded systems where you had to fill out a justification form to use up any of the precious RAM those boxes had back in the day.

Having seen the potential for computer telephony and what would later be called IVR systems, they sought to carve out a new market niche they called “self service” that would allow average department level administrative people build and update phone apps. By 1994 they were headed to market with their new product.

Email was very important in 1994

This is a recurring theme for me, the idea that a company can make an easy to use development environment for telephone apps… I totally forgot to mention that Cypress Reseach had such a vision at one point, and I had tinkered with Prometheus’ speech app development environment way back in the day… that will lead to sales because people really want to develop their own custom apps.

Spoiler: No they do not.

And so, as happens in every iteration, the company created a professional services group that would use the software, called Electronic Workforce, or EWF around the company, to build solutions for customers. Dumb companies sell technology, smart companies sell solutions, or something like that.

Anyway, that was a viable business plan and by the time I joined they had some big customers like MCI, Kodak, and Sears, along with a host of smaller companies and an close ecosystem of value added resellers, who also offered professional services and app hosting and all of that sort of thing.

Edify, which was the third name of the company… and I have forgotten the interim name that was in there between Edify and Reach… set off to build such beast on IBM’s OS/2.

They can be forgiven that choice because, at the time, for a serious enterprise app you could use that or some flavor of UNIX. They couldn’t know how badly IBM would botch the OS/2 marketing plan. When you proudly declare that your operating system runs Windows software better than Windows, you have effectively told everybody they don’t need to support your OS because they can just do Windows apps and you’re covered.

But that is another story.

EWF was broken up into subsystems, each of which handled things like connections to databases to look up data, connections to terminal emulation to screen scrape data, connections to home brewed DLLs to do any task you wanted, along with a bunch more that were focused on data retrieval. These were all connected via an object bus written early in the development of the product, and which was so robust that it is still the core of whatever is left of the product today.

Then there were the subsystems that connected to the outside world, and the primary amongst those was the telephone subsystem, which handled inbound and outbound dialing. Edify had gone with Natural Microsystems for telephony hardware support, so we had a host of ISA, then PCI cards to deal with for configuration and support. You can still find many of the boards I worked with… the AG-4 and 8, the AG-T1/E1, the AG4000… for sale on eBay or Amazon.

An NMS Alliance Generation (AG) T1/E1 ISA Board

Voice over IP eventually replaced all of that, though not without a period of extreme awkwardness that we’ll get to later, but at the time you needed a card in a slot that could hook up to a telephone line.

Natural Microsystems (NMS), which was based near MIT… there was a nexus of speech and telephone companies around both MIT and Stanford/SRI that were off-shoots of the research being done at those schools… was the more open alternative to Dialogic. Dialogic had more market share, but NMS was more open, easier to work with, and was less focused on UNIX, so Edify had opted for the latter.

And into this mix in the spring of 1998 I wandered, starting the same day as another member of the QA team who would go off to work on the terminal emulation subsystem. At one point, who was the more senior of the two of us would become a minor issue when we moved buildings and the VP of engineering let us pick out cubes based on seniority. The conflict was resolved because there was only one window cube left by the time we were up and I didn’t want to sit by the window. He did, ignoring the fact that it was also the cube next to the VP’s office, and when you sit next to the VP you effectively become his admin, so people were always asking him if the VP was in or where he was. I am pretty sure I won on that deal. (Always sit as far from the boss as practical.)

Edify was in the midst of transitioning off of OS/2 and onto Windows NT. They had shipped the 5.0 version of the product on Windows, but that first release only had a subset of the OS/2 features, so there was work to be done. The 5.1 release was just being launched as I signed on, and I was there to work on the 5.2 release, which was slated to be feature parity with OS/2.

I was hired because I knew things about ISDN from Big Island… though absolutely nothing useful or applicable, but I knew SOMETHING, which was apparently more than the current team… and because I had experience with Windows NT. As mentioned, I had to install OEM configs of various versions of Windows back at Cypress Research. I could install Windows NT 4.0 in Japanese… also not particularly useful… but I knew how to work with the device manager, which was.

And my new boss was a co-worker from Global Village. I also had another former GV co-worker there as well. The easiest way to get a job in tech is to know somebody at the company who will recommend you. So I was hired and joined the telephony team. Engineering was broken up into groups based on which subsystem you worked on, and I was in the telephony club.

Once I had been brought on board, had been given the telephony history talk… which I would later give myself to new members of the team… went to Edify training… we had a training team to teach people how to develop apps in EWF… and could install, configure, and get a simple “Hello world” level telephony app running reliably, I was given my first assignment.

I had to get the NMS DTI-48 configured to run with EWF. The DTI-48 was an older NMS board, one that had long been superseded by the AG range of cards, but some of our OS/2 customers had them and we were worried they wouldn’t upgrade to Windows NT until we supported that card.

Here’s the truth. I could never get that card to work. It was a two card solution with all the signal processing on one board and the phone interface… two T1 lines, the name standing for something like “dual trunk interface, 48 lines” if I recall right… that was old enough that the NMS tech I ended up working with on it hadn’t ever seen one either.

But no customer ever made their order contingent on us supporting that card either. So I spent a couple of months learning about NMS configurations and banging my head against this one particular setup. Nothing like completely failing on your first assignment, though at least I had other tasks to work on while the machine in the corner of my cube with the DTI-48 just sat there, sullen and brooding, a menace I tried to ignore.

I had been given a double size cube… they had originally been planned as double occupancy cubes for pairing… which was not yet a common concept… but people hated that so the telephony people got them because it let us set up a mini-lab in our cube with a couple of PCs… 200 MHz Pentium Pros all around at that point… with the requisite 20″ CRT monitors along with an 8 channel analog phone line simulator and a few phones plugged in for good measure. You needed at least three if you were going to test transfers.

So I puttered along, not exactly setting the world on fire, but neither being grossly incompetent.

Then my boss came along and asked me if I wanted to work on something new. In Silicon Valley, being offered a chance to work on something new is often a lifeline, a chance to leave whatever you’ve messed up behind you, to hide the evidence, bury the skeletons, and start a fresh new life withe a fresh new project. It is like witness protection, but you don’t have to move to a new town.

So I said yes. That DTI-48 had bested me… though in hindsight, the whole task might have been an initiation ceremony, as nobody else ever got the damn thing to run and it was eventually forgotten about… and I was ready to dive into something different.

I and one of the sharp new developers drove up from out Santa Clara offices to Menlo Park, to an office on Willow Road, not to far from what was once the headquarters of Sun Microsystems and is now where the main Facebook campus is located, in what was at the time kind of a dicey part of town. Rising real estate prices had yet to gentrify that part of Menlo Park and East Palo Alto. Hell, there were still “bad” parts of Mountain View back then.

We were headed to the offices of Nuance Communications, one of those SRI spin-offs that you can find in the valley, where I was going to learn all about speech recognition, a technology that would dominate my career for the next few years.

The story so far:

Stock Options and the IPO

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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.

The story so far:

Thinking on Enterprise Software

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What to say about enterprise software?

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!)

Wikipedia has a pretty good general entry on enterprise software if you want to know what I am even going on about.

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.

Set Adrift from the Island

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By the autumn of 1997 the breaking point had come for Big Island. The VCs were not going to give us any more money, the YoYo wasn’t selling well enough to sustain our burn rate, and the Boogie Board was a shining city on a hill that didn’t exist in our reality.

Yo-yos used to market the YoYo

It had been a difficult spring and summer as that reality sank in. We had already gone down to being paid for four days a week and some of us stayed home on that unpaid day because there wasn’t a lot to be done. I learned how to run the Visual Source Safe setup for our build system, dug into Windows 95, and answered the few support calls and email messages that showed up.

This was an especially hard time for Rick, our founder, who took his role as motivator in chief extremely seriously. We entered a period that I think of in retrospect as the “new plan of the week” era, where Rick would lay out a new path forward for us, shifting our focus or giving us a plan with some hope. It reached a point that I started to feel something I might call hope or enthusiasm fatigue. You can only see things crumble then jump on board a shiny new idea so many times before it begins to wear on you.

If I had been more mature or more confident, I might have just told Rick it was okay, we knew, we signed on knowing there would be risk, that in the valley a mere one in ten startups finds success enough to even earn back their initial investment. I don’t know if it would have helped. Instead I tried to buy into each new plan. It was exhausting, even at just four days a week.

So, come the autumn the money had run out. Nobody was going to be paid at all going forward. They key devs stayed on board for a while without pay, but most of us needed to cover rent and so the search for new jobs began.

At this point my girlfriend at the time made what I have often called one of her most ill-advised moves. She told me I could move in with her. She owned a condo way down in south San Jose… back in 1986 or so both of us had (completely coincidentally and independently, as we didn’t know each other then) ended up with about $10K from grandparents.

I took that money and bought a new car, a 1986 Mazda 626, which I was still driving in 1997. She took her money and used it as a down payment on a two bedroom condo in what was kind of a cheap and seedy part of town. She still had that condo, with a mortgage that was half the rent of my two bedroom apartment on Whisman Road in Mountain View. That added up to $400 a month we would split, plus the home owners association fees.

We’ll get into what in the hell my girlfriend at the time was thinking, letting her unemployed boyfriend and his cat move in with her, at a later date. But I moved in and then started looking for a job.

Well, continued looking for a job. I had already been looking. In fact, I had already been rejected.

Several of us had applied over a Palm, which wasn’t too far away. Two of us got hired there, but I was not one of that pair. The hiring manager turned out to be the wife of the half-wit product manager I embarrassed in front of his boss when he showed presented a completely unworkable project schedule. (Event noted a couple of posts back) After noting that I had worked with her husband previously she made a point of telling me, on rejection, that they were looking for somebody who was a team player.

I suppose the upside was not having to work for the rolling disaster that Palm became… and I say that because I got to hear about it regularly for the next few years from my two former co-workers. We had a bi-weekly card game with a few current and former GV people from 1995 until about 2008. It ended when a critical mass of us had moved out of the area, and once you leave Silicon Valley it is tough to come back because of the price of housing.

They did get me a free Palm 5000 though. So I had that going for me. I still have that unit in a drawer.

It was a refurb unit that Yuji got me

Palm, where we knew some people, was my one possible safe landing. Otherwise I was an accountant who hadn’t been doing that for seven years, who had a resume full of Macintosh related experience at a point in time when Michael Dell was telling people that the Apple board should just liquidate the company and give the investors the money. It was a bad time for Macs. (In a mildly ironic twist, it would end up being Micheal Dell paying off investors to take his own company private some time later.)

There were a couple of other options. I knew a few people over at Adobe in downtown San Jose. I started interviewing for a position over there which required so many interviews… and this was a time when ALL interviews were in person, suit and tie, and all of that… that I feel as though I might still be interviewing with them to this day had I stuck with it. The upside was that they kept inviting me back. The downside was that I seemed to need to speak to every single person in the building.

Maybe they were not sure about me, maybe this was a corporate culture test, but either way I wasn’t that patient and saw the inability to make a decision as a warning sign, even if everybody got their own little office and there were free snacks and drinks in the kitchen area on every floor. (It was a very nice place.)

So I called up a contracting agency. I was feeling the pinch of not being employed enough that I needed to start earning some money, even if it meant becoming a nomad, a technical temp, willing to do whatever.

And the agency wasn’t too keen on my resume out of the gate because it had all that Mac experience and very little Windows. Yes, I emphasized the Windows product at Big Island, but my time there was pretty short and Global Village just screamed Macintosh. But they had a place that was doing something with modems and wanted some experience in that area. So they sent me off for an interview with Cypress Research who made a product called MegaPhone that was included on some of the Performa Macintosh models. (Also part of a past post.)

MegaPhone for Performa

I had worked with them, but that was a few years ago on a brief, if successful project, and aside from email contact I think I met two people from there in person when I delivered them a dev unit of the Performa model from the units we had received. I was pretty sure that was such a tiny blip in the past that it would be long forgotten.

It was not. The same team was working there, recognized me and, while I was still being screened for the position, the whole thing was more of a catching up and introductions and talking about where Cypress Research had been headed since the collapse of the Macintosh market.

They too were now on the Windows wagon. Their MegaPhone product was available for Windows 95 and NT 4.0, but they were mostly making it via OEM contracts with companies Compaq, HP, Gateway, and the like. They were all Mac people making their way in this new market, so I was a kindred spirit. Also I knew modems, could program the Teltone simulator, and knew a lot about caller ID… well, when I say “a lot” it is very much the usual case of me being the one-eyed man in the valley of the blind. But I knew something and had experience in the field with it.

So they told the agency I was fine and I started the next day.

That afternoon a co-worker from the Global Village days called. She worked for a company called Edify where she ran the QA group. She wanted to know if I was interested in a tech support job there. We had both started in tech support together back at GV

A lot of the job was very manual. A company like Compaq would have a new model coming out and Cypress made the phone modem or video phone software that went with it. So we would get a machine and have to configure it with different versions of Windows 95… which is to say, Windows 95 in different languages… to make sure the software loaded and ran and detected the language correctly and what not. For some models Window NT 4.0 was also an option.

This is where I learned to install NT in Japanese. For every other language, French, German, Spanish, Swedish, Portuguese, and whatever other Roman character set installs we had to do, you could puzzle out the whole OK/cancel routine in an install, select the right path and all of that. Japanese… not so much. I eventually figured it out, but made some errors along the way.

As tends to happen with my career, I showed up, found some horribly obscure bug and figured out the pattern that was causing it, which set my reputation and put me in good standing. In this case, it was an intermittent caller ID bug. Somebody would see an issue one day, write a bug. But then the next day the dev would look at it and they couldn’t reproduce it.

This happened a couple of times and made me suspicious. I was the only one in the lab who was doing much to configure the Teltone line simulators. So I got out my configure scripts from the Big Island days and started playing with dates and caller ID to see if the error was related to that. As it turned out, yes. I forget the exact scenario, but if the second bit in the string used to indicate the day of the month was ON, the caller ID got corrupted due to a chip set flaw. This turned out to be all documented by Rockwell and fixed in a later revision of the chip set, but the fact that I figured out seemed to impress somebody.

So I started getting a few more complicated tasks. I ended up doing a lot of the testing for the WinLogo certification. In order to get the “Made for Windows” sticker on your box (or ad, or whatever) you had to pass this certification test.

WinLogo Certified

The primary focus of it was to leave behind any 16-bit software. You setup a system, ran a scanner application which cataloged what was on the machine. Then you installed your software and ran a second scan which basically did a diff on what was on the drive and analyzed the new stuff.

We were failing. That was bad because the OEM manufacturers who were including our software needed everything on the machine to be WinLogo certified to keep their own WinLogo certification, and we were in danger of messing that up.

So I spent a lot of time formatting and doing fresh system installs as we updated and eliminated problems. Eventually it was down to dlls that InstallShield was leaving behind. That wasn’t us, but we had to explain why this wasn’t something that should keep us from being certified. The lab doing the certification down in Long Beach was particularly dense, so I ended up having to fly down there with an install CD and stand around while they did the install and then point at the screen a lot and explain that it was InstallShield that was doing us wrong.

We got the certification.

My contribution to that was largely my ability to patiently do fresh installs while the developer updated the files for another try and then my success at gesticulating at a monitor until the team at the lab got tired of me and probably passed us just so I would go away and leave them alone. (I wrote a post about this back in 2015. You can go see how much the story changed in 8+ years.)

But sometimes that is enough. They liked me enough that they were talking to the contracting agency about how to convert me to a full time employee. And they had plans. To start with, they were changing the name of the company. Cypress Research didn’t roll off the tongue all that well and tended to get confused with Cypress Semiconductor. They were changing the name of the company to Aveo.

Aveo Logo

That image has texture because they were close enough to hiring me that they printed business cards for me. I still have some. I had to dig one out to get the logo because… well… things did not go to plan for them over time.

They had a product idea to solve versioning, a piece of software that would keep some new install from overwriting current drivers with older ones or old versions of DirectX or whatever. It was a strong pitch and, as I recall, Dell even shipped the software on some systems. I don’t know the exact details for its downfall, but I can guess; maintaining the database necessary to keep it up to date and accurate and dealing with all the possible vectors that would come in to play over time… my bet is that ramped up too fast to control.

But when I was there they were still doing the pitch that involved a fictional dragon slayer game that needed a specific version of DirectX. I was on board for it.

Then my friend Terry called back again. Edify had a QA position open and they really needed somebody who knew something about ISDN. Oh, and it was an enterprise software position, which meant it paid about 40% more than Aveo was about to offer me. Once again, a chance to be the one-eyed man in the valley of the blind. I managed to get past the interview and get an offer. I mean hell, I had actual ISDN installed in my home. How could they pass me up?

I told the team at Aveo about the offer and the pay. They understood. We parted on good terms.

I went off to Edify and Aveo… well, if you Google that name you get a cheap Chevy import and not a successful software company. (Or, if you are persistent, maybe a Canadian software company that is using that name.

Some of the team re-formed and started The MegaPhone Company to support and sell upgrades for the software, but that couldn’t last for long. There hasn’t been an update on that site for 20 years. Their installed base shrank as people upgraded machines and once we got iPhones telephony on the computer… the idea of using it as an answering machine or for caller ID or anything except a dial-up internet connection if you lived somewhere without broadband… was dead. Like the name Aveo, the name Megaphone was scooped up by another company and ended up in the hands of Spotify.

For me, following the money seemed to be the right choice, both at the time and in hindsight.

Telephone tales so far:

The Great Failure of Residential ISDN in the US Market

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Integrated Services Digital Network, or ISDN, was going to be the next step, the incremental movement beyond modems.

Because incremental was the norm. We were used to that. We had a whole industry that went from 300bps and 1200bps hardware to 2400bps then to 9600bps then to 14,400bps then to 28,800bps then to 33,600bps, finally capping at 56,000bps some 20 years down the road.

And modems were capped at 56Kbps due to the bandwidth of phone lines in the US. And even hitting that speed was a bit of a pipe dream. Modems commonly negotiated down to a lower speed based on line conditions once 28.8Kbps became the standard. The firmware on a typical 56Kbps modem was configured to return CONNECT 56000 on any v.34 connection, regardless of the speed it actually settled on… and unless you had no problems in your home wiring and were connecting to an ISP on the same phone switch in the same central office, that speed was not going to be 56K.

If you worked on modems you knew that was the truth, that what you could do in the lab on a line simulator could be miles from what was going on in the real world.

But ISDN was going to solve all of that. ISDN was all digital… that “D” is for digital, just like I said in the first sentence of this post… and so if it said it was going to deliver a 64Kbps connection, you got a 64Kbps connection. And, you didn’t have to settle for that incremental upgrade… it is hard to sell going from 56Kbps to 64Kbps even if you know that the 56Kbps value is a lie and not at all comparable to the low latency, solid 64Kbps connection that ISDN could deliver… because with each residential ISDN line you got TWO 64Kbps connections, called B channels, for bearer channels, which could be paired up for 128Kbps AND you got another 16Kbps D channel for signalling and other side data needs.

And if a call came in, ISDN would tear down one of the B channels, pass through your voice call, and you could continue on doing whatever online at 64Kbps while talking, then when the call was over you could get back to full speed.

The promise of all of that, plus the D channel, which could potentially pop up news or sports scores or whatever… it was a 16Kbps secondary channel… opened up a fantasy world of possibilities.

Then the phone companies got involved and fucked the whole thing up.

Okay, the fantasies were a bit grandiose at times and today, where I have a 400Mbps line pinned up in my home 24/7 for always online internet (Are you old enough to remember when people used to brag about their company having a T1 line for data, which was 1.544Mbps?) the idea of even a 128Kbps connection seems piddling. At the right moment in history though, that speed would have been something.

If the phone companies could have gotten on board with large scale residential ISDN around, say, 1990… or even 1993… it would have been a boon for the end users and would have sunk the modem market early.

The truth is though, while there were pockets of experimental deployments, the demand wasn’t there and the phone company wasn’t interested in investing without that… and when the demand was there… well, the phone company got greedy.

When we were facing the great dial tone drought in Silicon Valley in the mid-90s, the phone companies were suddenly regretting the whole flat rate dialing plan idea that they had come up with in the late 60s. That plan was great when phone calls rarely lasted more than a few minutes and their infrastructure didn’t need to be scaled up even as they were hooking up more residential phone lines. It was a reliable, predictable revenue stream that made both them and the customer happy.

And then the internet showed up and a bunch of people started staying online all evening or even all night, reading email, checking for email, downloading stuff, checking for email again, looking at porn, checking for email once more just in case, playing a video game or two, and arguing with people on Usenet… and the infrastructure wasn’t up to the task and the customers were not happy and the government boards that oversaw the phone company’s happy local monopoly started asking awkward questions, and soon then had to actually open up their pocketbook and start upgrading the network they had been largely neglecting since the break up of AT&T.

So the phone companies swore they wouldn’t get suckered again with a flat rate dialing plan for any new service, and the next new service on the agenda was ISDN. That was going to be a metered connection, pay by the minute, make those internet addicts pay pricing plan.

Flat rate, all you can eat at 56Kbps… even if that ends up being 24Kbps for a lot of people… suddenly looks very attractive when compared to 128Kbps when the phone company is looking to bill you in six second increments or some such.

This played out differently in different markets, and I can only speak to how PacBell operated, but the net result was that demand for residential ISDN was suppressed.

Here in the domain of PacBell the Public Utility Commission viewed the whole metered connection thing as the cash grab it was and reigned in PacBell, making them offer a some of the connection time at a flat rate, but allowing them to have a data cap, after which they could charge more.

PacBell had to go along, but they did so by embracing ISDN installation the way one might embrace a week old halibut found laying on the street on a hot summer day.

You could get an analog phone line installed the same week, but if you called up and asked about ISDN you might get no answer at all because they weren’t sure where it was available or who might install it. When you could get an appointment, staff were untrained and admitted as much… they were not happy to have been assigned a task they hadn’t been trained for… so your chances of getting a live line on the first try was dubious.

I happened to get lucky. When the installer came out for my appointment he had already done a couple and knew what to do. This made me an outlier at the office where tales of failure were the norm and it took two or three tries for some people before they had a working line.

At my place the junction box was close by and even though the installer wasn’t sure what the SPID was for my connection… that process was not yet codified or some such… I had on me a patented… seriously, PATENTED… document of instructions on how to calculate the SPID based on a set of known parameters and standard behaviors of various phone companies, which turned out to work. So I was up and running on ISDN on the first try. I had a Motorola terminal adapter… it isn’t a modem because there is no modulation by default, at least until you attach an analog phone to it… because the Boogie Board was still a work in progress. But we wanted to have knowledge of the process of getting residential ISDN set up. We had been through the whole caller ID thing without caller ID being available and were still smarting a bit from that.

It was a unit like this… maybe the Bitsurfer… it was a long time ago

And the hardware was another thing. Unlike a modem, which you can go buy at the store and setup immediately with your phone line, the ISDN terminal adapter is of zero value until you have your ISDN line wired up and configured correctly. And, thus, ISDN was also not an impulse purchase, and I cannot emphasize how much of tech progress is driven by impulse purchases by males with more hope than sense.

But when it all came together, it was sweet. In the age of modems, ISDN was head and shoulders above analog dial-up. My ISP wanted to charge me extra for 128Kbps connections, but let me ride at the same price as normal dial-up for a single channel 64Kbps connection, so I lived with that. Playing early online games like Delta Force or Starsiege: Tribes on even that single 64Kbps line gave me a serious advantage. Playing Diablo II online with friends I could see their locations getting updated more slowly compare to my own. And when EverQuest came out, oh man. I used to zone so much faster than other people.

It came at a price though. When the tech wired up my ISDN connection, he punched down my pair of wires at the far end of the box, by themselves, to indicate that they were a different service.

However, that did not translate to other techs showing up. They would show up, see a pair of wires hanging out by themselves at the far end of the junction box and think, “Cool, an unused connection already setup for me. I’ll just wire up this order I have with those and be done in record time.”

Then I would get home from work and the ISDN would be down and I would have to call PacBell who would get to it in a few days. It used to be that I would be driving home and I would see a PacBell service truck on our street or driving away as I pulled up and I would know that the ISDN would be down… and I was right every single time. And about half the time the tech who came out for my service call wouldn’t know what the hell was wrong or what ISDN was, so unless I stayed home for the service call there was a good chance I would have to call back again and complain that they didn’t fix the problem.

When it was up, it was sweet. When it was down… well, a down line is of no use at all.

And I know that this is my own experience in the SF Bay Area in the back half of the 1990s… though you might be excused for believing somehow that Silicon Valley would be on top of this stuff, being the tech capital of whatever. Other places in the US fare differently, and I know that in Europe there were countries with very high adoption rates.

The problem in the US was that once the phone companies started to get their act together on the whole ISDN thing… other technologies were already becoming available. Sure, I zoned fast in EverQuest, but not as fast as a guy we used to group with who had this thing he called a “cable modem” from his local cable TV provider. My first brush with what we now think of as broadband.

Which brings us to Big Island and our ISDN ambitions. We were some keen early adopters… relatively speaking for the area… of the technology, but even as we were getting our first product out the door, the YoYo I wrote about previously, PacBell was announcing ADSL, a flat rate, always on digital data connection that could be run on the same wires… simultaneously… as your analog phone line.

I seem to recall the PacBell announcement was the same day as the YoYo launch press release, but I could be wrong on that. It coincided with some event at Big Island and it was a turd in the punch bowl of our dreams.

I kept my ISDN line for quite some time, until my wife and I bought our first house. The new place was too far from the local junction box to run either ISDN or ADSL and I had to return to analog modem dial-up. And if the copper pair is too far to run those digital services, then there is no way in hell I was going to ever get anything close to a 56Kbps connection. It would be a while and a couple of tries before something like real broadband was a thing for us.

Big Island’s ISDN card, the Boogie Board, and all the wonderful things it was going to be able to do… as I said, everything the YoYo did on steroids along with a lot more… fell by the wayside. The VCs who had been financing the company cut way back. They shifted some of our tech… which they owned… to another startup they were funding. We were not selling enough YoYos to pay anybody, so if we couldn’t hold out and work for free we were going to be looking for another job.

And, our there somewhere, somebody was annoyed enough by the collapse of the company to write to the US copyright office to ask that commercial software source code be put in escrow so that when a company goes away there will be some way to get the software updated. I am kind of with him on the Claris Emailer front, which happened to be the software package I used to do all of the email support for Big Island.

Putting software in escrow… that is an enterprise software thing, and we’re not there yet. Before we get there I had to go find another job.

The Telephone tales so far:

YoYo Mechanic

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I was chatting with another member of the Big Island team a couple of months back and shared with him that one of my biggest regrets of the whole venture is that we had such a huge concentration of talent… literally some of the smartest developers I have ever worked with in my life… and we invested our time in the YoYo.

Yo-yos used to market the YoYo

Again, hindsight, but there we were in 1996 with a software team that could have made anything happen sitting on the precipice of the internet age and the DotCom bubble, and we were not building something like Pets.com or some other online presence that could have been huge, or at least could have gone public and made us all rich before imploding after Y2K. It was the age when eBay and Amazon and Yahoo were in still in their origin story phases and the road ahead was paved with cash for any dumb idea that included a web interface.

And we chose to make a called ID device. In Silicon Valley. At this moment in history.

For the third, and I hope final time, hindsight is an exact science. Things were in play before hand, we had a path forward, that it would crumble to dust in our hands was yet to be determined.

Though I will say, there were signs. I made a point of saying we were in Silicon Valley, in the central coast area of California, a state which, at that time, had not yet even allowed the phone companies in its jurisdiction to offer caller ID as a service to residential and business customers on the public phone network.

At this point I suppose I am going to have to write some words about caller ID and the state of play in the back half of the 1990s.

If you are under 40… a phrase I seem to be using more and more as time goes on… you may not be aware of the struggle to implement caller ID across the nation in the 1990s.

As a service, caller ID had been available to some businesses for decades at that point. If you called a WATS line, the original toll free or “800” number service, the phone company passed on inbound phone number data on the the theory that the receiver was paying for the call so they were entitled to know who was calling. Not a lot of companies did anything with that at first… the technology for responding programmatically to CLID and DNIS information at the time was primitive… but there it was.

And many of you probably know that today caller ID is often garbage because it is so easily spoofed… seriously, even Skype lets you set your caller ID number display in its settings, it is that trivial… and is built into your cell phone in any case, so you likely don’t even think of it as its own thing.

But back in the 80s and 90s the phone companies were looking for services to sell, and caller ID was an option. This was the era when we all had a land line at home, where a pair of copper wires connected your device… from a big clunky Western Electric rotary model to that football shaped phone you got for subscribing to Sports Illustrated… to the rest of the world.

In the US at the time, caller ID was a message that was sent down the line between the first and second ring of your phone. Don’t answer on the first ring or you won’t get your caller ID… at least on an old style, two wire, land line phone.

The data itself was either just the phone number… single message data format (SMDF)… or the phone number and some identifying text… multiple data message format (MDMF)… that, if you subscribed to the service and had a device able to decode the message… would display that information.

Pretty simple. This was going to make the phone company money and solve a lot of problems. If Moe is getting a lot of crank calls, he just has to subscribe to the service and get a caller ID enabled device, and he can find out that it has been Bart Simpson tormenting him all this time.

And in a number of states it was just that simple. But not California. Ours was not the only state where it was a struggle, but we seemed to take the longest to get to a resolution. People didn’t like the idea that others could see their number when they called so demanded the ability to block the broadcast of caller ID. This caused a counter demand for the ability to block all incoming calls that blocked caller ID, along with how the *69 dial back service would work and probably a few other complications I am forgetting more than 25 years down the road.

The upshot of all of this is that we were developing a product to use a service that wasn’t actually available to us.

Yes, there are ways to simulate caller ID. I became quite adept at programming the Teltone analog phone line simulator we had in the office we called the lab. I assembled a bunch of scripts in ZTerm to set it up for various scenarios, something that would be useful at a future date. But we couldn’t just take a unit home and try it to see how it responded to incoming calls from various services and locations across the country. We also couldn’t test in live environments locally to see what various ringer equivalence loads would do to the device. Both of these became issues.

At this point I should probably get to the product itself, the YoYo.

The 1996 YoYo… dirty after years in somebody’s garage

The YoYo was a computer peripheral that hooked up to your computer and your phone line… very much like a modem, because we were all modem people on that bus. The Macintosh version, which we did first, was also like the old Global Village Teleport in that it hooked up to the Apple Desktop Bus port, which allowed it to be daisy chained with your keyboard, mouse, and whatever other device you happened to have plugged in there, leaving your serial ports free for other use… such as a modem.

YoYo system requirements for Macintosh… look, we even put a modem in the layout

I know why it wouldn’t work on the MacPlus, as it lacked an ADB port. I cannot recall why the SE and the Classic were excluded, save for the fact that by 1996 those were both pretty old and out of date models.

Once plugged in, the YoYo would allow you to do all sorts of things.

The back of the YoYo box with all the details

You may have to click on that to read the fine print. Looking at that now, decades down the road, sends me into a reverie of memories about features and how we arrived at some of them, as well as just the general state of phones and contact management. I personally had Now Contact, from Now Software, that kept all my address and phone information and which would print out mailing labels for Christmas cards and a nice little wallet size phone list for numbers I might need but hadn’t memorized. It was an era when, even if you had a cell phone, it maybe had a few numbers you could program as a speed dial feature, but was nowhere close to my iPhone today which now serves as my contact manager.

Anyway, the YoYo could take the incoming caller ID and pop up the caller information on your computer screen, play a custom sound for numbers you had setup (before custom ringtones were a thing on your phone!) or even say the names using text to speech, block other numbers from ringing through to your phone, filter calls passing through to your phone based on a time filter, store caller ID on the device when your computer was off, keep an inbound and outbound call log, dial the phone for you from our address book or your contact manager (the YoYo would go off hook and dial, then you could pick up your phone handset and take over), and even page you caller ID information when you were away, also based on filters and also available when your computer was off.

It would also blink its single red/greed LED based on whether it had stored information. (The LED was obnoxiously bright as I recall.) And, it could also be setup to blink if you had messages on your phone company / Centrex voice mail.

And it was all kind of neat. It really worked and did what the box said.

We have also entered an era where there is finally web coverage of a product I worked on. So you can find mentions of the YoYo on the following sites:

Tidbits – Hardware Gift Ideas 1998
LA Times – For the Geek who has Everything 1996

The whole thing didn’t really make as many waves as we were hoping for. While we got some mentions, the reception wasn’t stellar. I found a reference to MacUser giving us 3 out of 5 mice in their review, not the endorsement we were looking for.

But we were not done yet. We also rolled out a version for Windows. Windows 95 was still pretty fresh on the scene and it seemed like being early on that bandwagon might be good. We hired a dev to do the Windows version for us and… we hired the wrong person. If you couldn’t do it by default using Microsoft Foundation Class Library, this told us it couldn’t be done.

So that dev was let go and the former GV devs, who had done the Macintosh version, learned how to do the same things in Windows, often from scratch. And so we had a multi-platform solution.

But there were problems.

On the Windows side of thing, while we wanted to do a USB version of the YoYo, USB wasn’t really a thing yet. I mean, the spec was there and the motherboard of the Windows PC I bought for home had USB ports on the back. However, Windows support wasn’t there yet and wouldn’t be for a while.

Because of that, our hardware required a serial port. People used to scoff at the Mac for having just two serial ports, which seems funny until you start dealing with Windows PCs with just one serial port.

So the problem calls began to roll in and part of my duties were to be tech support. I handled the email support and three of us rotated coming in at 5am to cover the support phone to be there for the beginning of east coast business hours.

The Windows people called up to tell us they didn’t have a serial port to plug it into because their single port was being used for their mouse. Ooops.

The Mac people called up because, while they could get theirs plugged into the ADB port, the YoYo wasn’t picking sensing the called ID coming in, usually because they had five phones plugged into jacks in different rooms or they had some ancient Western Electric model phone plugged in or that Sports Illustrated phone was causing some issue, all scenarios that pushed the ringer equivalency past the threshold at which we could detect the incoming call.

We also had a number of calls from places in semi-rural Texas complaining that they would get a call from a friend in Chicago and their caller ID would show up just fine, but when their neighbor called the app claimed there was no caller ID to be had.

For those people we sent out a $5,000 phnoe line analyzer via FedEx overnight, then talked them through how to take and store a reading, then had them send it back to us, only to discover a pattern. It turns out that Texas, being geographically large, had at the time a bunch of small phone service providers, many of whom couldn’t or wouldn’t configure their 4ESS or DMS-100 phone switch to correctly adhere to the Bellcore spec.

After a few of those we learned the pattern; if somebody says out of town caller ID works but the neighbor doesn’t, it is their phone company they need to speak to. But nobody is happy to get that answer, and all the more so when there were caller ID devices out there that had already been through that pain and had adjusted their tolerances in order to deal with the rural outliers, so we had people angry that their $10 Radio Shack caller ID device worked with the neighbors and our $150 doo-dad did not. Also, the local phone company didn’t care. That is a tough call to get through.

We no doubt would have learned a lot about that sort of thing had we been building the YoYo in a location where caller ID was available from something other than a Teltone line simulator, a device that is, by default, very much on spec.

Meanwhile, a lot of the feedback from our customer base indicated that we had been focusing on the wrong features.

We spent a lot of time on the whole sound and icons aspect of incoming calls. Our limited ad campaign highlighted the fact that you could tailor sounds to match your incoming caller… in that our ad headline said you could make your mother-in-law sound like a cow or a pig.

This was sufficient to earn us a second place award from a group ranking the most misogynistic tech ads, which was kind of saying something in 1996, where some other contenders below us seemed to be overtly condoning sexual assault and ads objectifying women were a staple of the back page ads of most computer magazines. I am sure 30-something me thought our ad was funny, given the time I spent with my grandparents growing up where Henny Youngman was considered hilarious and mothers-in-law were ripe targets for comedic barbs.

The ad was neither here nor there when it came to sales, which were slow. Our most invested customers seemed to be interested in the automatic paging function of the device. We had done a rudimentary paging feature because the chipset in the YoYo included modem functionality… it was, in fact, another modem product I worked on… which allowed us to dial out and communicate with paging services.

The initial feature would just send a number, but on getting feedback we expanded that to support different options, including the ability to send MDMF information to pagers that supported text data.

In addition, we had a few customers who really like the ability to use the dialer integration to contact manager apps to log calls for business purposes. We ended up honing that feature as well.

But the audience for the YoYo… seemed to be pretty small. Our big moment of hope came when we received a huge order from Incredible Universe, the Tandy Corporation… owners of Radio Shack… attempting to get into the big box electronics store business, which was a thing in the 90s.

Then they filed for bankruptcy, which meant not getting paid for their order. Then, slowly but surely, deliveries of YoYo, returned to us, showing up in dribs and drabs.

The YoYo was not a success. Like a lot of niche products, it had a small user base that really liked its features, but never found any broad appeal. There was a special version that was built for US West, one of the regional Bell operating companies that came out of the breakup of AT&T in the 1980s, that had a specific feature set tailored to their needs. That was after I had been let go, so I never knew much about that deal.

But none of this mattered. This was but a minor set back. This was a skirmish in the larger campaign. We were on our way to launch the killer product for residential ISDN, which was the post-modem future. Our ISDN product, the Boogie Board, would do all that the YoYo did and more.

Which means that next time I need to get into the complete collapse of residential ISDN as a viable market in the United States, a tale of bad timing, bad training, and corporate greed.

As for my former co-worker mentioned at the outset of this post… he agreed. We had the talent to do so many things in that era where dotcom money was flowing like water, and we chose to go with the YoYo.

The series so far:

The Ancient Gaming Noob

Veni, Vidi, Scripsi

Tag Archives: Telephone

The Very Long Post about “The Move”

The Special Business Unit

Web Banking, The Acquisition, and the Start of the Great Decline

Rambling about Speech Recognition

Into the Telephony Subsystem

Stock Options and the IPO

Thinking on Enterprise Software

Set Adrift from the Island

The Great Failure of Residential ISDN in the US Market

YoYo Mechanic