Hold On To What You've Got

Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook have taken their share of shots over the last year or so (including, not that he has noticed, more than a few from us), and a good number of them are justified; his company has a well-documented history of playing fast and loose with the personal information of his website's members, and that is something we think is cause for avoiding the registration page.

But we do have to give him credit. As if being named Time's Person of the year wasn't enough, Mr Zuckerberg's personal wealth increased -- at least on paper -- by about 100 per cent over the New Year's weekend, courtesy of the good folks at Goldman Sachs (everyone remembers them, we're sure). Considering Mr Zuckerberg took money from a company that is arguably one of the three poster children for financial sleight of hand (there will always be Enron and AIG), one suspects that Mr Zuckerberg's apparently disarming personality has dazzled the bankers (or baffled them, as the case may be). We further have to give him credit for first giving $100 million to schools in New Jersey and then going all in with Bill Gates and Warren Buffett; yes, it's all paper and promises at this point -- but it's still a good thing to do (Goldman Sachs should take lessons). Finally, MySpace, once the dominant player in the social networking non-business industry, was all but declared dead by the New York Times, having long since been lapped a couple of times by Facebook.

But with that huge increase in investment and valuation comes a huge increase in expectations. We're not talking about a rich uncle putting up a few grand to make the down payment on a starter house for his favorite niece here; we're talking about companies known for being profitable putting up millions of dollars -- and they don't do that out of the goodness of their hearts. There is an expectation of a Return On Investment -- the Holy Grail of commerce. That means that Mr Zuckerberg's company will be expected to perform, and that his tenure as the chief bottle washer could be at risk at some point -- a perfect legitimate reason (at least to him) to delay the IPO everyone expects.

But what's more interesting to us -- perhaps because we don't foresee Mr Zuckerberg donating to the ericpete Benevolent Society And Retirement Fund as part of his charity -- is the quandary he has regarding the culture of his company. All fifteen of the devoted readers of this space know we've been saying a lot about that over the last year or two because, as the mattress company says about sleep, when you spend a third of your life doing something (either as the owner and manager of a company or as an employee of it), you should be as comfortable as possible. The culture of the organization matters, not only in how well someone will perform, but in how well the organization will perform.

Mr Zuckerberg has done a lot to ensure that his company stays the way he likes it. Instead of hiring away from established companies, he buys start-ups on the theory that people who create something are more flexible and "entrepreneurial" than someone who is the deputy chief engineer among thousands of engineers. It's expensive -- he pays a lot of money to acquire what amounts to a few developers -- and there are only so many slices of the pie he can use as incentives or currency in those acquisitions. He has some cash, and he is certainly paying his bills, but he's running into the wall of creating profits -- dividends, if you will -- for the people who have given him money, and it's hard to see people providing Facebook with a revenue stream sufficient to do that.

We're not going to compare the culture of Facebook to that of, say, Zappos or NetFlix or even BMW; for one thing, it appears that Facebook is all about Facebook and not about what it can do for its members. That's fine, but it's difficult to respect or admire a company that just comes up with ways to make money by forcing its customers to prevent the company from stealing underwear.

Companies, as they grow, exhibit a tendency towards bureaucracy in the worst sense of the term. Because of the volume, the company creates rules to govern common situations, and over time, the maintenance of order according to the rules replaces (for the company's personnel, anyway) the initial mission of the company. People like Tony Hsieh of Zappos get that; so does Mr Zuckerberg, regardless of what the mission of the company is. Maintaining what is described as Facebook's "hack culture" won't be easy, because of the pressures from investors and the inevitable evolution from a dorm-room start-up to an org-chart based institution.

The second problem Mr Zuckerberg is going to face is that he has to be aware of what the company's true culture is. We saw a commercial the other day from a major cable company that promises top flight service at every step, but you would have a hard time convincing our friend Annie about that; she had to wait about three weeks for someone to come turn on the service in her new cable/interent/telephone-ready apartment, and got a major run-around at every turn... and we don't even want to think about airlines or the DMV. It makes absolutely no difference what he says his corporate culture is; it will be a reflection of his personality and mode of operation. You can see it already; he wants to win, and if getting the jump on one of his perceived competitors means putting up with some flak from the users of his site, he can live with that. 2,000,000 people being annoyed with him seems like a lot until you consider that he has about 250 times that many who don't say a thing.

A lot has been written over the years about how people love Apple or hate it; we think it's more like they love Apple or don't think about it. The company's culture reflects that of its CEO -- a little secretive, like they know more than everyone else, and full of passion for their products, but if you're not an acolyte, you are almost less than a whole, real person. That's the culture of the company. Zappos cultivates customer loyalty based on providing service because its CEO lives and breathes service; he couldn't care less about changing fashions or new styles. That's the corporate culture.

Facebook -- depending on who you believe and how well you read between lines -- was created by a college kid who took an idea, made it a little slicker, and then outfaced (pardon the pun) a corporate competitor by being quicker to respond and better at doing whatever it is Facebook does, and the fact that he didn't think about the niceties of privacy and security be damned. That's the corporate culture, and it's not going to change until Mr Zuckerberg does -- or until, like Steve Jobs was at one time, he is compelled to step aside. If that happens, one thing we can be sure of: it will change the culture of the company.

More News and Notes

When it leaks, it pours: Back before our Expert of the Year issue, the news was all about some cables released by Wikileaks that despite dire warnings from the US government, did little more than expose US diplomats as being somewhat undiplomatic. But hell hath no fury like a superpower scorned, so using the pretext of the ongoing investigation of [imprisoned yet untried and unconvicted] alleged leaker Pvt. Bradley Manning, the government successfully pressured major credit card companies from processing payments to Wikileaks; supporters of the site retaliated by crashing their websites.

Since then, the US government upped the ante a bit by getting a sealed subpoena that compels Twitter, Facebook and Google to provide information about anything they have related to Wikileaks; for those not familiar with US law, by sealing the subpoena, the people whose records are being sought need not be informed. Twitter responded by first challenging the gag order and then telling the targets about the government's request (which also annoyed European politicians, as if they weren't a bit miffed over the State department cables in the first place). If anyone else has received a similar order from the US court, they're not saying. We can just see the Justice department cackling over how lousy Assange is at Farmville.

The US news media that are getting all kinds of readership for publishing the documents released by Wikileaks are treating Assange and company like a red-headed stepchild. And as if all of that weren't enough, Wikilleaks boss Julian Assange was in a British court fighting extradition to Sweden, was sued for "neglegent inffliction [sic] of emotional distress" (and $150 million) and in turned threatened to sue The Guardian (one of his original publishers) for releasing the documents it received from another source, and was accused of treason (Assange isn't a US citizen, so he can't commit treason against it) and targeted for assassination on the Fox news network. Let's all hope there's a dead man's switch for the files he has on Rupert Murdoch.

Happy birthdays: Wikipedia is ten. Microsoft Excel is twenty-five, and Microsoft is giving away two Xbox/Kinect packages to celebrate. modus_operandi had a birthday January 6, but isn't saying now many he has had in the past.

More from the Sieve Department: Four people were fired from the University of Arizona Medical Center after they looked at the medical records of the victims of the shootings in Tucson. The folks at gawker.com had a bit of trouble with a security breach ("the irony is not lost on us") and had its database of users (including passwords, usernames and email addresses) breached, forcing 1.4 million people to get a note saying "ummm... please reset your password". (You can check to see if you're at risk.) That, in turn, caused LinkedIn.com to disable the passwords of LinkedIn member whose email appeared in the database. If you logged into Gawker using Facebook, OpenID or Microsoft Passport, you probably weren't affected. McDonald's got hacked, too (oh, no! now someone knows how much we like their fries!). There is an article by EE's DanRollins that has good information on strong passwords, and another by mrsjock that has some simple tricks for stronger passwords.

Silly question of the week: No, they're not adult film stars. But there are too many jokes out there just waiting to be written by the people who can tell us what Mike Steele and Reince Priebus have in common. We have a prize for the best publishable answer.

Legal notices: The US Supreme Court has ruled that an antitrust lawsuit against major record companies can proceed, and sent the case back to the federal court hearing the matter. The suit alleges that the companies consipired to fix the price of digital music; the Supreme Court upheld an appeals court ruling that said there was enough evidence to warrant hearing the lawsuit.

Can someone please 'splain this to us? In a blog post, Google announced that it is going to stop supporting H.264 videos in future releases of its Chrome browser, concentrating instead on "completely open codec technologies" -- like its own WebM project. That prompted an entertaining response from Tim Sneath, the director of the Windows "technical evangelism team", comparing WebM to Esperanto. But it still doesn't explain why Google would decide it could buck a trend set by Microsoft and Apple, especially since Adobe is trying to come up with something to make Flash more attractive to the browser manufacturers.

"We were just playing around... honest"...: Nobody is talking, but it is beginning to look more and more like the US and the Israelis teamed up to create the Stuxnet worm that put a major dent in the Iranian nuclear fuel development program. Darn the bad luck.

Someone give this guy a medal: After being awakened at 4:30 a.m. by a robocall that told him what he already knew, a Maryland father exacted some payback.

If it walks like a duck: For quite a while, we had items about the European Union's protracted look into the business practices of Microsoft, which wound up costing the company Several Hundred Million Dollars in fines -- probably enough to finance a couple of the EU's member states, when you think about it. Now, the EU is looking into the practices of another tech giant: Google. The big difference: Google has a lot more cash lying around. Meanwhile, US antitrust officials are trying to block Google's planned $700 million deal to merge with ITA Software, the company that builds the software that lets various sites -- Orbitz, Kayak and Bing among them -- compare airline ticket prices.

The early money is on Jennings: IBM's Watson gave Jeopardy champions Kevin Jennings and Brad Rutter a pretty good spanking at their tuneup to see if the computer could match up against them, but there was no Final Jeopardy round, and that's where Jennings kept his winning streak of 74 games going on the game show ten times. Let's just hope IBM doesn't challenge Gloria Clemente.

Words, words, words... LinkedIn has issued its ten most overused buzzwords. Lake Superior State University has issued its annual 2011 list of banished words. Best line: "Standards for using 'epic' are so low, even 'awesome' is embarrassed." Also, picking on advertising.

Now we know how the Feds set priorities: The decision of the Federal Communications Commission on the merger of Comcast and NBC -- which has some huge implications for the pricing of bandwidth consumption will be set -- was delayed because all five of the commission's members were at the CES in Las Vegas, presumably to look at all the fancy new toys on display.

Signs of the Apocalypse: Political correctness gone mad. A South Carolina man was injured while playing a real life version of Frogger. And do you really need a Firefox add-on to change a color?

Nata's Corner

I know my other half is just hoping that the WWW story about Facebook shutting down is true.

Two months after I got my new phone from Verizon, they have finally gotten iPhones to sell, but I'm not all that unhappy I got a different phone. Mine has a touch screen (along with the little QWERTY keyboard that slides out), but I'm not likely to use it (or any other phone) for watching movies or catching up on my email, unless I use the mobile hot spot feature to hook up my laptop. I did get the chance to watch WhackAMod use his new iPad at the meetup in Los Angeles though. If Apple had built something into it to make it useful as a phone, I might have lived with the old AT&T phone for a couple of months, but they didn't. Speaking of the iPhone, here's a quiz to see how much you know about it.

If you happen to be visiting the Silicon Valley, you might want to make the newly-reopened Computing History museum, located in an old Silicon Graphics building in Mountain View. The other half says that he remembers his college roommate building games using an IBM PDP-11. As might be expected, the museum's website will make you want to visit just to see the special exhibits.

About a week ago, Facebook pushed its new profile layout to all of its users, following up on the option to switch they offered back in December. As anyone who has been around Experts Exchange could have guessed, the reaction from a good number of people was outrage ("Why do you keep changing Facebook when you can see that nobody likes the changes? Just stop."), which brings up an interesting point. I have been a member of EE for a little over seven years, and I remember people screaming -- but mostly continuing to use -- the site every time a change is made. Most of the time, the changes are actually for the good -- but they're not what we have grown used to.

What bothers me most about the Facebook pages isn't so much that they were sprung on me -- which a lot of people complain about because they don't pay attention, or they ignore the emails and notices warning them that the changes are coming. It's that when Facebook changes anything, they always change how you have to edit your privacy settings, and a lot of the time, unless you edit them, you're going to find out that they aren't what they were before Facebook pushed the changes. Like any change to a page, when something gets moved around, then it's going to be a little while before you get used to it, but I've found that when a site changes how you do things, they do it because it's a real problem; they don't just add or change things because someone has a "great idea".

Finally, Microsoft is again reminding everyone to know what phishing scams look like, and New Scientist has released its list of the best videos of 2010. A warning though -- the ant one is kind of creepy.

Milestones

New Geniuses: CodeCruiser picked up a rare double play as he earned his second and third Genius certificates in the .NET Programming and ASP.NET topic areas. Tintin, long a stalwart in the Linux and Unix TAs, earned his first Genius certificate in Perl. Also earning their first Genius rankings were carrzkiss in Active Server Pages, Awinish in Active Directory, and anarki_jimbel in C# Programming. Well done by everyone!

Of note:

• angelIII has earned over 35,000,000 -- that's Thirty Five Million -- points since joining EE in March 2000.
• TheLearnedOne became the third EE member to go over 3,000,000 points in three different topic areas: VB.NET, ASP.NET and C# Programming.
• matthewspatrick is the tenth member of EE to earn more than 12,000,000 points overall.
• rorya has reached 11,000,000 points for his career at EE.
• GrahamSkan has earned over 8,000,000 points since becoming a member in December 2002.
• cyberkiwi and rrjegan17 both reached 6,000,000 points overall. rrjegan17 has also earned 2,000,000 points in both the MS SQL Server and SQL Server 2005 topic areas.
• alanhardisty and Infinity08 both reached the 5,000,000 point level for their careers at EE. alanhardisty has also earned 4,000,000 points in the Exchange Server TA.