Entries mentioning “bricklin”

In the middle of this year, in observation of his retirement from Microsoft, I wrote Bill Gates and the Greatest Tech Hack Ever, one of my most popular posts and one that I've had a number of people personally mention to me that they appreciated.

So, I was delighted to see Dale Doughtery's appreciation of Bill Gates. Dale's my favorite blogger on O'Reilly's popular Radar blog, and this post shows why: A keen focus on the implications and sustainability of our choices in the tech industry.

In many ways, Gates represents the "best of us" -- it's not just what he's doing but how he thinks about what he's doing. He's a curious geek. He wants to find interesting problems to solve. He believes that smart, self-motivated people working together can make a difference. Bill Gates reflects the best qualities of a generation that has grown up finding the innovative ways to apply science and technology to impact our everyday life in mostly positive ways.

Even better, as pointed out by my friend and coworker Michael Sippey, one of my heroes, Dan Bricklin, showed up and weighed in on the post as well.

In the world of business, and especially the world of technology, we have some archetypical stories of entrepreneurs in the garage, working to create new products and new companies. But too many of those stories seem to neglect the creative environment in which great ideas and inventions happen.

This is especially unfortunate because inspiration for this type of work doesn't seem to come from being surrounded by market analysis data, or charts and graphs about return on investment, but instead happens like so much creativity does, with a blaring soundtrack while sitting on a folding chair, inspired by the music, movies, books and art that surround us.

Worse, we hear about things like Celebrity Playlists and the artworks that people appreciate long after they've been successful, after they've already proven they have the ability to achieve, but seldom with a focus on what was playing at the time when they did the first work they were recognized for.

So, some time ago, I began a project to start to document some of these environments, inspired by the entrepreneurs and creative talents that I've had the chance to work with or be inspired by. Among others, I've gotten some great responses from Ray Ozzie of Microsoft (and of course Lotus); Jeff Bezos of Amazon; Pierre Omidyar of eBay; Dan Bricklin, co-creator of VisiCalc, and some more contributors along the way. As I start to share what I've found, I'd like to ask the same questions of you that I've asked of these people already.

1. What music, books or movies do you remember paying attention to at the time when you did your signature work? (This can be your "best" project, or merely your best-known, or the one you're most proud of.)
2. What do you remember of your physical workspace -- clutter on the desk, notes on the walls, whiteboards or blackboards, etc.?

The goal is to evoke a sense of what more subtle things may have been influencing the work that's created. There have, of course, been many similar or related efforts over the years, and I'll be trying to share and document of number of fantastic responses to these questions that I've collected.

If you'd like to participate yourself, you can answer the questions here in the comments, or post a reply on your own blog using the tag "createnv" (since it seems that's not taken yet) and/or embed this post on your own site with the code below. I'll be collecting responses from the blogosphere along with my own research and posting it all here in the days to come. (Thanks to Travis Isaacs for the image.)

A few weeks ago, I'd noted a Globe and Mail story that described Excel expertise as if it were a new fashion trend. That tickled my fancy, and I think the article turned out great.

However, there were a bunch of questions that Tralee Pearce, the story's author, asked me which didn't make the cut for the newspaper. Since I'd taken the time to write out answers, I thought I'd share them with you. Tralee graciously gave me permission to reprint the questions on my own blog.

Q: Okay, first off, what's it really like to be an Excel Ninja?

A: I am not sure I'm a ninja, but... Mostly, it's fun being able to make a tool do whatever you want. Anybody who's been a computer programmer or even who's done a do-it-yourself project at home knows that feeling of satisfaction that comes from finally making something just work. Of course, it's a little less fun if you're the person everyone is asking to help troubleshoot their problem with a spreadsheet.

Q: What do you do with Excel - work and/or play?

A: These days it's a mix of both. Work is the usual analysis, comparisons, reporting, or list management stuff that people tend to do with spreadsheets. A lot more fun is the crazy ways that both my wife and I, as well as a lot of our friends, find for using these "serious" tools.

Q: When did you get hooked on the possibilities?

A: I think I was very young, maybe 7 or 8, when I was first helping my father with some spreadsheets he was working on. This was on a Commodore 64, and I was just so excited about the fact that I could take the simple math skills that I had and turn them into something so limitless. That's probably still the reason it's fun to me.

Then, when I got a little older, I read about the people who'd invented the first spreadsheet programs, and how they'd also invented a lot of the ideas behind the computer software industry as a whole. Without them as pioneers, I couldn't have the job I have today, and I'm extremely fortunate to get to have met a lot of these people, who are still alive, still working actively in creating new software, and still mentoring geeks like me who grew up using their work. (Dan Bricklin, who invented the spreadsheet, has been active in blogging and podcasting from the beginning. And Ray Ozzie, who helped popularize spreadsheets with Lotus 1-2-3 just replaced Bill Gates as Chief Software Architect of Microsoft.)

Q: The web link you sent [referring to Excel Pile] is two years old. Of course I'm late in reporting on all this - but do you sense a mainstreaming of Excel lifestyle uses outside the computer programmer/engineer crowd? I have friends who plot wardrobes, wedding and rsvp lists all the time. I feel like I haven't heard that so much....

A: I think there are lots of people who use these tools to plan their important events, or even for recreation. They're so powerful and so adaptable, and people are familiar with them from their day jobs; It's only natural they'd take them home to use them there as well.

Q: Why Excel? Why is it such a lovable program?

A: I think there's a lot of reasons people use Excel in unexpected ways. The first is that we're wrongly taught that software is "serious" and should only be used for practical purposes. Technology is just as creative a medium as any other, and people have an inherent desire to express themselves. My sister's made art with Excel by coloring in the cells. She's self-conscious about it because it seems kind of silly, but I think you could definitely take it seriously. So there's a subversive element to using a business tool that way.

There's also the immense degree of personalization and customization that this kind of office software lets you do. You can really make it your own space, just like you do with your physical space in an office. Nothing says potential like a blank white sheet, and that's why Excel is compelling. Nobody thinks it's strange that graph paper makes you want to doodle; This is a digital representation of the same urge.

Q: You're down on Power Point? Why?

A: I wouldn't say I'm down on PowerPoint. I'd say that historically, it's made it very easy for people to make their communications worse. The tool focused on making all kinds of presentational tricks possible, without focusing on whether those effects were meaningful. And the fact that most people aren't designers meant that you ended up with slide shows that were worse than just hearing someone tell their own story in their own voice without needless adornment.

Tools influence content. Blogs encourage people to share with others in a way that gets a conversation going. Spreadsheets encourage people to create an organized, structured space that can make complicated information seem more approachable. PowerPoint has, until very recently, been designed to help people communicate like cave men: in short, grunting sentences accompanied by crude illustrations.

I'm also just picky because I spend a lot of time doing presentations and public speaking and I think it's like any other craft; You get much better at it the more you do it, and most people just don't do it often enough to justify using a tool as fraught with potential failures as PowerPoint. On the other hand, the upcoming version of PowerPoint is so dramatically improved that I think it will actually make meetings less painful all over the world, once people start to upgrade.

Q: What's a beginner to do? I stare at the Excel on my desktop and I don't know where to start.

A: It's a very forgiving medium! There's an undo button that lets you back out of any mistake, and you can save at any point. So first, be fearless. Second, think of all the times that people insisted that you'd never use the math you learned in school -- this is your chance to prove them wrong! And then don't think so much about formulas and mathematical expressions, because that's not what most people use spreadsheets for anyway. Think about lists and tables.

Once you've got a body of information that you want to organize, you can start to think about formatting and automation. You color the borders and cells and other pieces to look like you want, and then you add little bits of logic to make some magic happen. Whether that's creating a chart or dropping in a few simple formulas, it's pretty easy to use the built-in help and turn a simple to-do list into a color-coded, progress-charting life improvement system.

Q: That said, how do you know when to stop?

A: The new version of Excel supports a million rows. That seems like a decent limit. :)

I love magazines. Love, love, love. They're full of short, frequently-updated content and they make good use of layout and pictures: that's what I love in a medium.

I've been a magazine junkie since I was old enough to read, and part of the reason why I read so many is because it gives you a great way to find out a little bit about a lot of things. But sometimes, there's the rare chance to get two different views of a single topic.

Witness the story of Malcolm Bricklin. The entrepreneur behind the Yugo and the upcoming Chinese-made Chery automobiles which are due to enter the U.S. market, Bricklin's story is a fairly conventional "irrepressible dealmaker" narrative. In fact, it's prototypical enough that Inc recently put him on the cover, under the banner "Would You Buy a Chinese Car from This Man?"

From the intro to the Inc piece:

Arriving in wuhu, China, last July after a 17-hour flight from New York, Malcolm Bricklin was so juiced up, so shot through with adrenaline, that he couldn't sleep. All night, he paced back and forth in his hotel room, killing time before his meeting the next day with Yin Tongyao, president of the Chery Automobile Co., the eighth largest of the 120 carmakers in China. Since Chery's founding in 1997, Yin has made it known that his ultimate goal is to sell cars in the U.S. For Bricklin, the 66-year-old CEO of Visionary Vehicles and the man who introduced Americans to both the Subaru and the Yugo, the meeting represented a thrilling opportunity. It was also a source of agitation.

Meanwhile, the New Yorker published Car Town just a short while later. Interestingly, the introduction to the story parallels the Inc piece, but the story has a totally different tone.

On the way to Wuhu, I drove through Confucius’ home town. I also passed the Stone Warriors of Nanpi, the Iron Lion of Shijia, and the Alfalfa Land of Jinniu. The village of Jinxiang had posted a big sign, in English, above the highway: “The Best Garlic Is from Jinxiang in All of China.” Wuhu is a new car town. A local company had recently declared its intention to become the first Chinese automaker to export to the United States, and the American partners were scheduled to arrive on Sunday. On Friday, I had rented a Chinese-made Volkswagen Jetta and headed south to meet them. Two days, eight hundred miles: a road trip from Beijing to Wuhu.

I'm a big fan of blogs, as should be obvious. But when people say they're the only way to get a number of unique perspectives on an event, or to find different voices covering something that's going on, it's selling both blogs and other media short. It's probably no coincidence that the best of any medium reminds me of what I like so much about blogging, the ability to quickly dive into an interesting topic that I find serendipitously, while being guided by someone that's passionate and knowledgeable about the subject.

I just found an older post I'd saved as a draft nearly a year ago, and it seems even more relevant now than it was at the time. I have some additional comments, having more perspective now, but first let me share what I wrote last year:

Another one of the simple pleasures of my job: A few weeks ago I got to enjoy what was, for me, a huge personal milestone. As is probably extraordinarily evident, I've been a geek all my life. I grew up reading magazines like Compute! and its Commodore-specific spinoff, Compute!'s Gazette, along with broader industry-related magazines like Byte. In amongst the code listings (in those days, you were as likely to see a printed copy of the source code to an application as you were to see an article reviewing an application) and product announcements were a good number of personality profiles and interviews with the people who were helping create the nascent desktop and home computing industry.

So those articles shaped my view of who could be a role model. Many times, when talking to people about the business I'm in now, I'll make parallels to bits of past computer history that I've just absorbed through reading about them as they happened. While we talk about the browser wars or the birth of Netscape as ancient history, I tend to see direct parallels to the desktop suite battles in the late 80s and early 90s, or the competition between individual applications before the suites were created. In general, I think the software market is one of those industries that's better understood by monitoring the climate than by looking out at the weather.

This made my chance to meet Dan Bricklin even more exciting. Dan invented the spreadsheet, and was responsible for the creation of VisiCalc along with Bob Frankston, who programmed it. I first met Bob a few months ago and told him how I'd grown up reading their names and had honestly never considered that I'd get to meet them. As it turned out, when I met Dan he seemed to know who I was, which left me mutely geeked out for more than a few moments.

Later, we talked more about the projects Dan's working on, like his interesting work around SMBMeta and we critiqued the Tablet PCs that a few people at the conference had. I am a believer in the Tablet PC, of course, but one of the advantages of being an elder statesman in an industry is that you can point at any new device and find its strengths and weaknesses. It's the kind of perspective I'm hoping to have myself, some day.

I guess the beginning of a new year is when you're supposed to look back and be reflective. Looking at my weblog, the thing that's most striking to me is that, especially as I've put more time and energy into doing my Daily Links, I've neglected writing the lengthier posts that usually make up the bulk of my weblog.

I'm not the only one who's migrated away from the daily habit of blogging; I see apologies for lack of posting on lots of sites, most recently Dan Bricklin's. But the ones that stand out more to me are Ev's and Joi's explanations of the decreasing frequency of their posts. Like Ev and Joi, I have a decided self interest in blogging and promoting the medium, but I find it harder to blog on a day-to-day basis.

There are a number of reasons I don't write as much of the inside-baseball weblog posts these days, talking about new technology or debating philosophical fundamentals of the weblog business. I suppose some of it has to do with wanting to leave the day job behind when it comes time to writing for my site, but mostly it's a change in attitude about what I'm doing and how it relates to my audience.

I've been thinking a lot recently about the phenomenon of those of us who are in the weblog business having largely abandoned our sites, and I wrote some of my thoughts about this in a thread on Ask MetaFilter, where they were discussing the decay of the Blogroots site. If I'd have had to guess, I would have thought that a community site about weblogs with that kind of pedigree would have been extremely popular given the success of weblogs in the past year, but sometimes these things are hard to predict.

It may just be that we're all more jaded overall. The other day, there was a story on the cover of USA Today regarding weblogs, and it even had a quote from Ben. I suspect that a year ago, I'd have been jumping up and down with excitement, thinking about what great recognition that sort of press coverage represents. But I barely skimmed the article yesterday, noted a bunch of annoying inaccuracies, and bookmarked it for the future. I know that the grand theory of weblogs is that I could have Fact-Checked Their Asses™ but who cares? USA Today readers aren't going to stumble across my site and find the true facts, the newspaper isn't going to run a correction based on my blog post, and my readers already know the details of how weblogs work.

That's not to say there's no point to this stuff. Indeed, I'm more excited about weblogs in general than I've ever been, because we're not in exciting uncharted territory anymore. We're in the process of making a new industry, but it would seem social software has taken the mantle of "Hot New Thing" from weblogs and that blogs themselves are just seen as an inevitable part of the media landscape. Losing one's novelty value in exchange for credibility or acceptance is always a good thing.

I was realizing it was about a quarter century ago when people first heard "Rapper's Delight" on the radio and were excited at just the idea of hip hop being on the radio, whether they like the song or the Sugarhill Gang at all. I don't listen to the radio, but I'm betting they're not talking about blogs yet, and there's still never been a song that's charted with the word "blog" in it. Hell, blogs almost never even get mentioned on TV. But that's not a bad sign; It's only in the past few years that video games got mentioned anywhere other than print media, and it didn'it really happen until after the video game industry had exceeded the film industry in dollar volume. Someday soon we'll have almost forgotten about the time period when we could track media mentions of weblogs, and when we'd revel in early coverage as a sign of legitimacy.

But I'm hoping that I can rediscover the fun of just writing for myself and a few friends like I have been doing for a few years now. I get very frustrated when comments on a post of mine go all akimbo or people seem more fixated on fighting than contributing, but just as often I'm pleasantly surprised at the creativity and broad background of experience and expertise that's displayed by people who take the time to leave comments.

So, I don't make New Year's resolutions, but I do try to take advantage of any odometer event to make adjustments and course corrections as needed. This year, I'm going to try to update my weblog a little less self-consciously. I hope everyone else who's struggling with the professional/personal or public/private balance does the same.

A few weeks ago, I had started an entry with the phrase, "Though I work in the weblog industry..." and I had done so mainly as a tongue-in-cheek joke about how seriously the blogosphere takes itself. I was talking to Matt a few days later and he told me he'd pictured me coming up from the weblog coal mines, covered in soot, bringing home the permalinks. But I had time to think about it since then, and to talk to a lot of people about where weblogs are going, not just what they're doing now and what we've done so far. And I realized that, maybe a year from now, there will be a weblog industry, and not just the few scattered groups of friends and colleagues that I've watched building tools and technologies and companies over the years.

And oh, yeah, building great sites, too.

Because that's the part that mattered to me, and still does. The connection. I've had this site for just a bit shy of four years in its current form, with a weblog. And I've mentioned before on this site all of the ways that it's improved my life. But in deciding to leave the familiar industries I'd worked in, which covered IT and computers and technology, of course, but also television and the music industry and print publishing, I did what all of the career counselors advise you to do: I sat down to think not just of what I wanted to do, but why I wanted to do it.

One of the things that I keep coming back to is the importance of communication. I started using computers regularly when I was about 5 years old. At that time, we thought computers were for, you guessed it, computing. Even some of the people who invented the PC itself took 10 or 15 or 20 years to figure out that a personal computer's highest calling was for communication. Not surprisingly, some of the guys I look up to as heros were able to anticipate that communication would be as important as calculating, and they've ended up working in weblogs, too.

There was a more significant reason that I understood the value of communicating through technology, though. I've seen how it can broaden not just people's experiences and lives, but their ambitions. My father first came to the United States forty years ago this fall. When he came here, just before President Johnson signed the immigration laws that radically increased immigration from Asia to the U.S., there were only a few thousand people of Indian descent in the entire country. And my father's village in India had no running water or electricity, let alone a phone. So his arrival here isolated him from everything he'd ever known in a way that I've often told him I could only duplicate if I decided to emigrate to the moon.

But he'd still had the desire to come here for his education and his career, due to having read about the possibilities of life in the United States. Most of the people in his village didn't know such things were possible, and most of the people in his district couldn't have even found out about the opportunities because they were illiterate. The biggest factor limiting the life they tried to live was simply not being aware what their potential truly was.

So I make tools that help people communicate. Mostly because I love technology, mostly because I love to try and build things and to get other people to think these things are cool, too. And certainly because I'm hoping to impress my friends and family with the end results. But some small, central part of the effort is because I know I'm privileged to be able to talk to anyone in my family at any time. In the span of a few decades, my father went from not being able to even send a letter to his father for a few years to being able to instant message me frequently enough to pester me.

Our letters to each other used to be the documentation of the lives we'd lived, the entirety of our correspondence forming memoirs for those who weren't accomplished or pretentious enough to formally write out a memoir. I think that, among many other functions, this is one of the key roles that personal publishing can play in our lives. Weblogs and other social media document the lives we live and let us connect in ways that are, despite the cliché, genuinely new.

As of today, I've got the privilege of working with good friends for whom I have a tremendous amount of respect. And I get to work in the medium I know best, doing work I love. It'd be a dream job by anyone's measure. That the realm we're working in might actually turn out to be important makes it even better than a mere dream.

I thought it might be nice to take some time to commend some personal websites that I enjoy. I put categories on them for the sake of simplicity. This is just an off-the-top-of-my-head list, and I omitted, either deliberately or unintentionally, a lot of really great sites, even ones that I read enthusiastically every day. But I figured it might be worthwhile to go and point out some of the stuff I like. My Other Stuff page also randomly suggests 3 personal websites from a longer list, if you want to find some new and interesting sites.

Best Technology

Have to go with holovaty.com and Ftrain. Both use homebrew publishing systems. Adrian's focus is user experience, smoothing out things like searching and leaving comments. Paul's focus is using Perl to clone the human brain. With apologies to all the good folks doing work around RSS and all the other XML techie shit, I think these guys doing more to push the state of personal publishing than anybody except the Trotts. Most importantly, both use their technology in the service of very, very good writing.

Honorable Mentions: Jason Levine, for migrating from Manila to Movable Type, and sharing the tools to do so with others. And Hit-or-Miss, not just for his publishing system, but because Matt is a Tivo ninja.

Best Aesthetic Design

Fleeing Rabbit and What Do I Know. With its slight nod to Heather, Fleeing Rabbit has just the right balance of minimalism with content, and that precious ability (which I lack) to just shut the hell up. What Do I Know does the "I understand typography" look better than anyone else out there, making me wish I would remember to read the site more often.

Funniest

Always, Mimi Smartypants and Mighty Girl. Both laugh-out-loud funny on an astonishingly consistent basis. Since they're both women, I can get away with calling this sort of humor sassiness!

Honorable Mentions: Little Yellow Different, of course. Swoon-worthy in his own way, the only reason I omit Ernie is because I don't want him to always feel like he has to be the joke monkey. And Fussy, which I only omit because I only recently became aware of her site, and what if she's not funny all the time and it looks like I'm lying?

Most Missed

Nubbin, Monstro and Entirely Other Day. I still have them on my list and click them forlornly, hoping for new content. Metascene almost falls into this category, saved by one post.

Best Rediscovery

Links.net. After running into Justin a few times this year, I finally got back to reading his site, as the better part of a decade had passed since I last read it regularly. This guy is still ahead of his time.

Best Links:

Tigerbunny and Muxway. Tigerbunny's food and science links leave my stomach and my brain hungry. And Muxway's sheer onslaught of great links is formidable, only lessened by a lack of context. Honorable Mention: Dangerous Meta. How he has the time, I'll never know.

Best Mentoring

Jeff Jarvis and Dan Bricklin. Two of the few people who do a good job of revealing their experience on their personal websites, inspiring others in their industries.

Most Improved

Anil Dash. Yeah, me. Clearly not very improved in humility, but my writing's been getting better. Not to mention a lot longer. And the Daily Links over on that sidebar that nobody reads are the most fun part of the site. Much better than the "ha-ha, lookit this funny meme" linking I was occasionally prone to in the past.

Best site that isn't a Weblog

They're always bunched in with weblogs, for reasons I don't fully understand. But they're still probably my favorite magazine on the web: The Morning News. Still a bit honkified in that NPR way, but the course correction that brought lots of women on board helped a lot.

Best Writing

Kottke. More attention, effort, and just plain craft goes into Jason's writing than almost anyone out there on the web. And in reward he gets a ton of grief. I've been doing this for a little more than 3 years, and I only recently came to understand how hard it is to pare down a good piece of writing to the length of his posts. Honorable Mention: For the same reason as Jason, sheer subtle attention to craft, Rebecca's Pocket.

Best Site You're Not Reading

This is a tough one, as it changes daily for me. Right now, I'd say Somebody Dial 911, Snarkout and Cheesedip. Every time I mention these sites and someone says, "I don't know that site" I'm astonished. Too good to miss. Hopefully I'm wrong and you already know about 'em.

Most Promising Newcomers

Gujari Girl and Gizmodo. The former is just getting into the swing of the blogging thing, and the latter has yet to find its voice, but they're both very intriguing for completely different reasons.

Dan Bricklin weighs in on Small Business Blogging.

IBM PC Announcement 1981. I am so glad we have a class act like Dan Bricklin around to educate us and give us perspective. He's truly one of my heroes.