Photo by Nick Richards

Ken Olsen, founder of Digital Equipment Corporation, died Sunday, February 6 at the age of 84.

Looking back on the amazing arc of Ken Olsen’s life brings home an important point about the pace of change in the technology business. When I graduated with a CS degree in 1980, DEC was on top of the world, and the minicomputer was the driving force behind a paradigm shift in business and scientific computing. A generation later, DEC was gone, picked up by Compaq in a fire sale in 1998, and sold for parts.

In that short period of time, DEC’s minicomputer business was overtaken by changing technology. The corporate IT world we live in now is centered around networked PCs; if there is a legacy hunk of iron anywhere at the center of it all, it is likely to be a mainframe. The transcendental VAX 11/780, sitting on top of the world in 1980, was scrapped long ago. And Ken Olsen famously sat out the revolution, convinced it was not going to affect his business.

I think business leaders in today’s environment are more likely to realize that sea changes in technology can and will force them to completely rewrite their game plans on a regular basis. Companies like Netflix, Apple, and HP seem to have incorporated reinvention into their DNA. And if the CEOs don’t get it, their boards will replace them with someone who does.

There’s a quip that shows up on tee shirts, bumper stickers, and refrigerator magnets from time to time: Maybe your purpose in life is only to serve as a warning to others. That may not the legacy of choice for a corporate titan, but perhaps it is better than no legacy at all.

These days I’ve turned over a lot of my life to Google – they have my email, a lot of my documents, and my primary phone number.

This is all great while it works, because in general it’s free, and the uptime is very reliable.

But if you are non-paying customer, when things break, you can find yourself in a world of trouble.

I use my Google Voice number as my primary phone number, and it rings my mobile, work, and home numbers. That’s a nice feature. In addition, I use it to receive texts, because I can send and receive them from both my Google Voice web page and my phone.

This morning I noticed that my texting traffic had strangely disappeared. A little checking showed that I could still send texts from my Google account, but it wasn’t receiving any. My cell phone could still send and receive properly, but nobody uses that number.

Generally my first debugging step on something like this is to search Twitter to see if this is a big problem. Maybe Google broke SMS for everyone, or some sizable portion of the population.

No such luck.

Now I found myself in free service hell. Something I depend on rather heavily stopped working, and I basically had no avenue for support.

As an unpaid Google Voice user, my only hope was to post a message on the appropriate forum. I wrote up a problem report, doing my best to provide as much detail as I could, but with not too much hope. If you browse through the forums you’ll see that the resolution rate for people’s problems is depressingly low.

As it happens, my story has a happy ending. Although I hadn’t done anything to my Google Voice settings, I remembered that this morning when I logged into gmail, Google asked if perhaps I would like to set up SMS password recovery for my account. Seemed like a good idea, so I gave them my Google voice number. I didn’t bother to try a test run – I have this feature set up on other accounts and it is drop dead simple.

But as it turns out, somewhere in the bowels of the Googleplex, adding that field to my account database broke some piece of code in Google Voice’s SMS reception code. When I changed the setting to point to my cell phone number, I instantly regained the ability to receive SMS messages on my Google Voice number. I have to believe this is a simple bug – I can’t think of any reason that using a Google Voice number for SMS password recovery should break it.

Of course, it appears that all the messages that were sent during my downtime were discarded, but I think I can recover from a few hours of SMS silence. If I hadn’t been fortunate enough to connect the dots and ferret out a fairly serious bug, there is no telling how long I would have waited to see a fix.

I might have even demanded a full refund.

Yes, another middle manager in my organization has decided to part ways with my employer, Cisco Systems, Inc. Dave Corley has been a key part of Cisco since he was acquired along with the rest of Selsius in 1998. He’s now giving us a friendly handshake and showing himself out after just shy of 10 years service. His departure marks the loss of one more innovator from the team that literally created the voice business at Cisco, a business that now generates billions in revenue per year.

A Little Bit of History

Dave didn’t spring fully formed from the brow of Zeus destined to become a father of VoIP. Aafter graduating from the United States Naval Academy in 1975, he found himself at the Naval Postgraduate School writing Heat Transfer Analysis of a Rotating Heat Pipe Containing Internal, Axial Fins, still considered a classic by many. Submarines, not telephones, seemed to hold the key to his future.

A sterling career followed as Dave served as an officer on a trio of nuclear submarines, including the USS Hawkbill, USS Corpus Christi, and USS Parche, serving variously as engineering division officer, weapons officer, and navigation/operations officer, with a rank of Lieutenant Commander on his last two boats.

But all good things must come to an end. The USS Parche went into drydock for a multi-year renovation, and not long after that, Dave’s career in the USN came to its conclusion, retiring from active duty with as Commander. (Later upped to Captain while serving in the reserves.) However, unlike the Parche, which was decommissioned in 1994, Dave still had many years ahead of him, and he settled down in the Dallas suburbs and entered the telephony business.

Corley 2.0

After spending some time with the now defunct Voice Control Systems, Dave hooked up with the crew at Intecom that was to eventually be spun off as Selsius Systems under the leadership of Richard Platt and David Tucker. While at Intecom, Dave worked with Richard and others to develop what is arguably the first commercial VoIP phone system, an achievement that culminated with the purchase of Selsius by Cisco Systems, Inc. in 1998.

When Cisco bought Selsius, they got a company that had a working phone system, but it was not really ready for market. It was still too expensive to manufacturer, the infrastructure was not particularly scalable, and it had a long way to go before it was really managable by enterprise IT departments. There was a lot of work to do.

Dave rose to the task. As a product manager at Cisco, he shepherded Call Manager through several years of major releases, prioritizing features, haggling with development, marketing, and sales, and maintaining a vision that within just a few years, Cisco would own this voice segment.

You really can’t think of a less glamorous job than managing feature lists in a big company like Cisco. Life is an endless series of phone calls, meetings, small victories, and painful setbacks, with very few breaks for catching your breath. Dave oversaw the process of moving Call Manager from a single NT 4.0 server with an Access database to a distributed, redundant server farm using a replicated SQL database. He saw Call Manager progress from limping along with a couple of hundred phones to becoming a system that handles tens of thousands of phones inside Cisco. He worked through complex product integrations, like the deployment of Unity Voice Mail, another product line Cisco acquired around 2000.

When you look back on it today, it all seems inevitable. Cisco now owns the VoIP business, and went from a standing start to sharing leadership in enterpise telephony sales with Avaya. Back in the 90′s it would have seemed impossible for anyone to break into the tightly controlled PBX market, but VoIP opened the door, and Cisco charged in.

Dave’s part in all of this reminds me of the similar role of Lt. General Leslie Groves played in the Manhattan Project. Historians love to write about the enigmatic Robert Oppenheimer, but Groves is the one who oversaw the enormous effort required to get a gigantic bureaucratic enterprise on its toes and sprinting to a successful conclusion. Not glamorous work, but pivotal. In many respects, Dave was the Leslie Groves of Call Manager.

The Linksys Saga

As Cisco’s VoIP business matured, I got the impression that Richard and Dave were becoming restless. My suspicions were confirmed in 2004 when Richard announced that he was creating a new group within Linksys (part of Cisco by then) to build a PBX targeted at the small business market. Apparently Richard and Dave weren’t familiar with Fitzgerald’s maxim that there are no second acts in American life.

The Linksys project was succesfully executed, with Dave in his familiar role, managing features, creating requirements documents, and convening the usual endless rounds of meetings. But unbeknownst to us all, there was trouble afoot.

It turns out that in 2007, Richard Platt reached the point of no return in his quest for job satisfaction. You could characterize Richard as an entrepeneur, or perhaps even a free spirit, but regardless, the constraints of a big company like Cisco apparently wore him down, and he exited on short notice.

Leaving Dave in charge of the group.

Managing Expectations

I’m not going to tell you that entering management at a company like Cisco is guaranteed to drive you stark, barking-dog mad. After all, there are people who take to it with relish – John Chambers seems both sane and happy.

But for some people, it can be a soul-crushing, stultifying existence – divorced from the reality of real work and instead enmeshed in an endless series of political battles, policy altercations, reeducation camps, and regular group recitals of the company song. I couldn’t take it, and at the same time I’m astonished to find that there are people who thrive on it. I’ve mentally divided humanity into two groups: us (people like me), and them (people who are attuned to management). I assume that we are of two different species.

Watching Dave’s experience as a manager at Cisco had me wondering: is he really one of us? He didn’t seem to be enjoying his new position as head of our engineering group. In the past, Dave’s level demeanor was a source of reassurance to me, now that demeanor seemed to have been turned down a notch or two.

My suspicions turned out to have a solid foundation in early May, when Dave announced that he was leaving. Word soon leaked out that he was joining Ripcode, a company that makes a video transcoding engine for the data center. (It’s kind of sad that companies today are restricted to naming themselves using the unregistered portion of the .com name space. Makes for some pretty strange monikers.) Dave knows a bit about building a company, and can no doubt help these guys get their feet on the ground and then go someplace.

Unfortunately, that leaves this ship without its captain.

Apple is in the middle of a minor fuss right now over their use of software updates as a promotional device. It turns out that if you are a Windows user with a copy of iTunes, Apple’s update process does its best to get you to install a copy of their web browser, Safari, along with whatever you need to keep your iPod humming along properly:

Of course, it’s not particularly unusual for companies like Google, Adobe, and Apple to try to sneak their software onto your system using somewhat deceptive practices. Last time I checked up on my Dad’s PC his browser had Google Toolbar, Yahoo Toolbar,  AOL Toolbar, and a Toolbar from his ISP. The actual browser window was a miserable little ribbon a few hundred pixels high. Dad had no idea how the toolbars got installed, but I have no doubt they were all stealthily piggybacked on one piece of software or another.

But Mozilla CEO John Lilly seems to think this use of the update feature to promote a web browser goes beyond aggressive marketing and into the depths of evil. His angry blog post basically says that using an update/patch service to load new software violates some sort of basic compact between users and providers:

It’s wrong because it undermines the trust that we’re all trying to build with users. Because it means that an update isn’t just an update, but is maybe something more. Because it ultimately undermines the safety of users on the web by eroding that relationship. It’s a bad practice and should stop. 

John goes on to say that he doesn’t condemn the common practice of using installed software to push your other products – he seems to be saying that the update program is a special case.

Things get really interesting when you start reading the comments to his post. As is often the case with All Things Apple, the issue seems to have caused extreme polarization.  A selection of anti-Apple comments include:

This is disgraceful. It fails the user in favor of serving Apple. It is, in fact, malware-level tactics. 

This is just a sick way of tricking users to download their browser by making it seem as if an update if available for a piece of software already installed. I bet it even takes over as the default browser afterwards, which would look very bad on Apple.

Right on, John Lily. “Update” means “update,” not “Give me your other products.”

But predictably, the Apple apologists insist that Cupertino can do no wrong:

You Windows users are not only paranoid, but so anti-Apple that your comments are hysterical. This is the biggest NON-ISSUE yet – and anyone using a computer that can’t use that screen and make a good decision should go back to a typewriter. 

The consumer has already trusted Apple (or any company) by downloading one of their pieces of software already. There is already a placement of trust in Apple (or other company). If they trust Apple enough to install one of their apps, then extending that to another one of their programs seems to make sense to me.

Some of the complaints here are over the top. Pushing Safari with a iTunes update is “Malware”? Please. Sure, it’s marketing, but it is utterly benign, other than using a little disk space that is trivial by modern standards. … Compared to all the real malware issues faced by Windows users, this is not worth notice. And, most of all, compared to the execrable practices of Microsoft and other PC software vendors, this is a tempest in a teapot.

I think one thing we can agree on is that there are tens of millions of Windows users with iTunes installed, and the vast majority of them are going to be clueless about what Safari is and whether they should uncheck that radio box.Does this mean Apple is preying on the ignorant? Are they in fact somewhat evil? Or is this just the way the world works now?

Use the comment box to let me know what you think. Inquiring minds want to know.

(By the way, I should note that in the past I’ve always used Firefox on OS/X – Safari 2.0 was lame, unstable, your basic piece of crap. I’m writing this on Windows using Safari 3.1, which is surprisingly fast and seemingly bug free. Quite an improvement!)

Jeff Bezos Hawks the Kindle

It’s still not clear whether electronic books are the wave of the future or a consumer products cul-de-sac. Technology continues to improve, and there are certainly lots of good reasons for a device like Amazon’s Kindle to be the leading edge of a major wave of adoption. A few of the more obvious arguments include:

• Reduced cost of distribution. The publishing industry wastes a lot of money printing and shipping books, and because of historical practices, creates huge numbers of books that never even get sold. Not very green, and a waste of money.
• Niche markets that can be very well-served. For example, high school and college students can replace those 30-pound backbacks with a 30-ounce tablet-sized device.
• Removal of barriers to publication. The news and magazine businesses are being revolutionized by self-publication in the form of blogs. Self-publication is possible in the printed book world, but it is still a rather awkward process. Publication to electronic format is presumably a trivial problem.
• Integration of information resources. A device like the Kindle allows you to consult the Internet, written reference materials, and your personal notes all from the same device, making it a true information portal.

But consumer acceptance is a fickle thing, so we don’t know if these rational arguments are going to fly. And of course, every writer who reviews a device like the Kindle or the equally capable Sony Reader feels compelled to write something along the lines of “But I just can’t imagine forgoing the pleasure of curling up on my couch with a good book.” I’m sure that when Gutenberg introduced movable type there were millions of industry reviewers posting notes to their blogs saying “The uniformity of the type is just esthetically unpleasing – I love it when I recognize the script of one of my favorite transcribing brothers.”

And then of course there’s the Steve Job’s money quote on the subject:

“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore, forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”

So it’s really pretty hard to be sure just which way this is going to go.

Looking Beyond The Reader

Sony’s Reader

For electronic books to succeed, one thing is certain: the physical reading experience needs to match up well with the one we have right now for our printed media. In some ways this problem is already solved – readers like the products from Amazon and Sony are book-sized and lightweight, with displays that are doing their best to match the various good qualities of paper.

But there are still issues that need work. One of the most important is in the area of layout and markup. A presentation format such as HTML is designed to work with multiple display sizes, repositioning elements as needed. This doesn’t necessarily work so well with textbooks, magazines, etc., where graphic artists invest huge amounts of time and energy on positioning, font selection, and other esthetic issues.

Additionally, there is am staggering amount of material that is simply not in a format compatible with today’s electronic books. Even magazines being published today are not always ready for transfer to an eBook format, and there is of course a massive backlog of valuable material in the world that has never existed in digital format.

Into this void steps Robert Maxwell Case, who has developed a system called ReadAllOver, and is attempting to exploit it via his company, SeeAndBelieve.com. SeeAndBelieve.com has created a digital layout technology called ReadAllOver (the company seemingly has a love affair with awkward CamelCase constructions) that does a superior job of preserving the look of printed materials. The company web site gives a good demonstration of exactly what they are capable of doing – it is definitely worth your time to take a look.

I asked Robert if he could take the time to answer a few questions about ReadAllOver, and he was gracious enough to respond.

Questions With Robert Maxwell Case

Mark Nelson: Hi Robert. I just recently became aware of your company, SeeAndBelieve.Com, and your imaging system, ReadAllOver. Before we get into the details of your technology, can you tell me a little bit about the history of your company? How long have you been at it? Are you working mostly solo or do you have some help? What kind of background do you have that got you into your current work?

Robert Maxwell Case: Sure, Mark. I come from a background of being a full-time musician and a part-time graphic designer. Around 1991-92, I was unhappy with then-current digital halftoning routines and began experimenting on my own. So I’ve been at it 15-plus years.

Jimmy Kung (left) and Robert

I’m not a programmer, so I have had a succession of programming assistants. In recent years, they have come from my affiliation with the Computer Science department at Texas State University-San Marcos where I am a seven-year member of the Industrial Advisory Board. Currently SeeAndBelieve.Com, in addition to myself, has one full-time employee, Jimmy Kung, and several part-timers.

The first of my five U.S. patents (three issued, two pending) was filed in 1993 in response to some interest expressed by Steve Carlsen, developer of the .TIF graphics file format at Aldus (he’s now with Adobe Systems.)

MN: Can you give me a capsule summary of ReadAllOver? How does it differ from page layout systems like we see in web browsers or PDF viewers? Does it differ from the rendering systems used in Sony and Amazon’s current eBook readers?

RC: Well, ReadAllOver in a nutshell is a digital halftone-based graphics system suitable for eBooks. It renders on the screen a digital page with the “look and feel” of a printed page, with all included graphic elements, typography and images, placed precisely as the graphic designer intended. It differs from existing web browsers and .PDF viewers in that it relies less on text files and font metrics and instead places more emphasis on a simplified, highly-compressible bitmap image. In many respects, it is a “picture” of the page, with an ancillary text file.

The Sony and Amazon eBook readers are primarily text-based, offering a limited number of typefaces and few graphics. They both use the E-Ink subtractive screen and we think ReadAllOver’s halftone system can be tailored to enable a good fit with that screen.

MN: It looks like your technology emulates the halftone process used to render photographic images in newspapers and magazines. How does it improve on that process to achieve smaller file sizes? Do you have data showing the level of compression you get for specific images? And do you also render type as halftone images? That would seem a lot less efficient than treating type as marked-up text.

RC: That’s right, ReadAllOver does emulate the halftone process with one major difference, and that is that typography can be processed with it and not fall apart.

Samples of ReadAllOver output (Detail may not be representative, images were resized)

The big idea is that the output image starts as an interim monochromatic checkerboard pattern, beginning from gray. To simplify, we derive the output image by rendering local areas of the input image that are darker than checkerboard gray by turning corresponding output monochrome white pixels to black. Conversely, we render local areas of the input image that are lighter than checkerboard gray by turning corresponding output monochrome black pixels to white. The result is a checkerboard-based ordered dither that can be re-ordered for variable-length run-length compression.

We presently are comparing compression levels for specific images and plan to publish the results. So with typography, abrupt gray level changes such as font outlines fall on the black pixels of the interim checkerboard to render any font without reliance on font metrics or hinting. For example, ReadAllOver pages containing only typography are competitive in file size to marked-up systems, and with the additional attribute that our system is able to efficiently render any font, in any language, and any image, placed correctly. That’s exciting.

MN: I get digital delivery of some magazines already. For example, IEEE Spectrum is delivered using technology from Qmags. Do you think you can do a better job than they are already doing?

RC: Qmags has selected Adobe PDF as its preferred file format, so the comparisons I’ve made previously between ReadAllOver and PDF come into play here. Taking a quick look at Qmags’ file sizes, I would say that ReadAllOver is competitive and looks subjectively more “print-like.”

MN: Have you released any sample code or SDKs for people to work with your compression technology?

RC: Not at the present time … we have been too busy developing our prototype (you can see it at SeeAndBelieve.Com ).

MN: The idea of an electronic book reader has been floating around for a long time, but right now it seems like we’re finally seeing designs that are actually gaining some traction. There are still a lot of naysayers, however. What do you see in the future for the electronic book reader? Will it eventually do for reading what the iPod did for music? Or will it forever be a niche product that is stuck on the verge of popular success? And how hard will it be for you to get the manufacturers of eBook readers to adopt ReadAllOver?

RC: Mark, I do believe that an electronic book reader will achieve iPod-like popular success, and, hopefully, in the near-term. In my opinion, the more book-like the readers become, the closer we will get to that so-called tipping point. Then the public will recognize the added benefit of having access to any publication, including one’s own library, available whenever and wherever they desire. There are some of obstacles still to be overcome, like screen pixels that are pretty large, and wired and wireless transmission pipes that are pretty small.

I personally would like to see a reading device with 8-1/2″ x 11″ facing screens, about the size and weight of a coffee-table book, with graphics-intensive magazines and newspapers rendered on screen nearly indistinguishable from paper and ink. I certainly can imagine a college student not having to carry a backpack full of textbooks around campus.

Here’s my vision for our product: We’re hoping to make adapting to ReadAllOver as seamless and easy as possible. We envision three communities of ReadAllOver users:

1. The reader

2. The publisher/bookseller
3. The hardware manufacturer.

We plan to provide each of these groups with a cost effective, easy-to-use solution. The ReadAllOver Viewer will be free for readers. They’ll read .RAO files on dedicated eBook devices, and most likely on other devices that could emulate a book-like reading experience. The inherent look and feel of printed material should reduce eye strain and, of course, we plan to offer such extras as page flipping, content search, printing, etc.

Publishers and booksellers will use ReadAllOver Publisher, our media content production system. They’ll be able to convert content from scanned material, as well as from existing editing and page layout systems and standards, including Adobe InDesign and FrameMaker, Quark XPress, MS/Office, Open Office, etc. (and, of course, we’ll include a .PDF to .RAO converter.) This community will appreciate a built-in high level of content protection with ReadAllOver’s emphasis on bitmaps. Hopefully they won’t need more, but if they do, our product should easily be able to incorporate additional encryption and DRM mechanisms.

We also plan to collaborate with eBook (and other display device) manufacturers in order to provide built-in support for the ReadAllOver rendering system. We feel we can efficiently adapt our system to display components with limited available grayscale and color levels. We also hope to offer a fixed-bit-rate option where every delivered page is the same file size.

Conclusion

Thanks Robert, this is all interesting stuff. I can see advantages to ReadAllOver that we don’t get from layout systems like PDF or HTML, so perhaps you will be able to hammer out an effective market position. I don’t have an eBook reader yet, but I think when the technology reaches the point where I can have a color Kindle I’ll probably jump on board. I’m almost there now, but since the Kindle is perpetually sold out at Amazon.com, my dollars are still safely in my wallet.

Jerome Kerviel is (or by the time you read this, was) a stock trader for French bank Societe Generale. Jerome is supposed to execute stock trades, probably according to some very specific programs, in order to keep the bank’s assets humming along.

But like any of us, Jerome had a rough day or two. His trades didn’t get executed properly, his numbers fell, and he was going to look bad. And like many of us, Jerome thought he could cover it up by doing better on his trades the next day.

Problem is, Jerome’s catch-up strategy failed him. He started deviating from his programmed trades, kept his losses hidden, and kept trying to get back to even, until somebody noticed that the bank was $7.2 billion in the hole. Whoops.

Jerome the Programmer

Just how did Jerome get to this point? I mean, wouldn’t you think that after you were maybe $100 million in the red you might realize it was time to call for help? That’s what the sensible man would do, right?

It turns out that Jerome was hired by the bank as a programmer – supposedly to help work on the back-end systems that watch over traders. Naturally, when the bank decided they liked Jerome, they moved him out of his natural element, turning him into a trader.

Which is where you run into big trouble. You’ve got a programmer who is knows that no matter how bad a bug is, you’re just one line of code away from a fix. He also knows that management controls and standards are just BS that nobody believes in anyway. And he knows how to circumvent the control systems that are supposed to ensure that he doesn’t color outside the lines.

Put those together and next thing you know you’re front page news for three or four days, as you try to explain to shareholders how you’re going to get that $7 billion back, just like George Bailey did so famously. Only problem is, George is a fictional character, Jerome is real:

George Bailey: [yelling at Uncle Billy] Where’s that money, you silly stupid old fool? Where’s that money? Do you realize what this means? It means bankruptcy and scandal and prison. That’s what it means. One of us is going to jail – well, it’s not gonna be me.

And what are they going to do to Jerome? Hard to say, but it looks like he didn’t pocket any of that dough for himself. Might be tough to find a criminal charge, but I’m sure the gendarmes are looking hard.

Hero Worship

So why is Jerome such a heroic figure to me? Because the next time my boss complains that my work is going to delay the release of some stupid point-point upgrade by a week, costing the company a fortune, I’ll be able to say “Sure, that’s not great, but it’s no Kerviel either, is it?”

Yes, Jerome has set the bar for workplace screwups, and he was kind enough to set it so high that we don’t have to do the limbo to get underneath. Thanks Jerome!

American Express is so excited about having me as a customer that they were willing to pay me $5 to take part in a survey:

American Express Needs YOUR Feedback!

Dear American Express Blue Cardmember:

American Express would like your feedback. We would like you to participate in a survey about your Blue card from American Express. Your participation will provide us with valuable feedback and help us tailor card benefits to better meet your needs.

As a token of our appreciation, you will receive $5 from American Express*. Please note that this survey will be running for a limited period of time. To increase your chances of receiving the honorarium, please complete the survey at your earliest convenience.

The web address for the survey is shown below. To begin the survey, simply double-click on the address to go directly to the questionnaire. However, if you are unable to double-click on the address, please copy and paste the text below into your browser’s address bar.

Well, I need five bucks, and a little bit of checking gave me moderate insurance that this was really from American Express, not a phisher. The survey was being outsourced to Confirmit, a real company, and they don’t seem to be on any malware site lists. Furthermore, as things went on, there was an enormous amount of content in the survey and seemingly no payoff for phishers, so it seems unlikely that this is a scam.

However, right off the bat there was some cause for concern. Double-click on the address? How many browsers do you use that need a double-click before they follow a link? If Confirmit is a real company, they clearly didn’t assign their top copywriter to this project.

The real fun started when I actually started the survey. The classic “make a good first impression” rule that your mother taught you is just as true for web pages as it is for anything else. And the first page of the American Express survey was the equivalent of showing up for your first date with a big gravy blotch on your tie:

Yes, that’s right, the first thing I see is some inner workings they’ve inadvertently exposed. No doubt the URL I clicked was supposed to preload a survey question and zip me right past this. This question was undoubtedly in use to stage their testing of the survey, and was supposed to be removed in the published version. There’s a lesson in that.

From Bad to Worse

The rest of the survey only served to further tarnish my impressions of Amex’s IT outsourcing choice. After making it through a few innocuous questions, another page I wasn’t suppose to see popped up:

Apparently I was going to be be seeing ths particular error quite a few times:

Survey Hell

Finally I seem to have made my way through the setup questions. The progress bar showed 50%, and I detected that I was entering the first ring of survey hell. This is where the survey designer starts trying to milk you for a ton of information by repeatedly varying some scenario, then asking you a bunch of detailed questions about it. (This is sheer idiocy on their part. Once they start trying to find the correct adjectives for how a particular ad makes me feel about the product/company, it’s over.)

In this case AmEx had a list of perhaps 15 benefits that their card offers. They started tossing them up in various combinations on the screen, and in each case asking me on a scale of 1-10 how that made me feel about the card. They then tried to quantify the results by asking me how much more I would put on my card each month given that benefit. (Again, totally moronic. No data retrieved this way could possibly have any value.)

This would all be great if their page actually worked. In this case, I’ve told them that I put a tidy $5,000 on the card each month, and they want to see how much I’m going to bump that up if someone comes to my house to give me a back rub. (No joke!) Just to see what would happen, I put down a lower number, and got this nifty error message:

It turns out the only way I could get past this page was by putting in 1, yes $1. But that’s okay, because at this point there’s obviously no reason to cooperate with the tragically broken survey.

Unending Hell

AmEx then applied the coup de grâce by inserting a fiendish logic error in the survey. I started looping through various permutations of three possible card benefits, over and over, for each one picking a number from 1-10 and then assigning it a cash value. I realized that the progress bar at the top of the page was actually moving back to 50% after each answer! In other words, I was stuck in the survey forever. They had a bug that prevented them from exiting the loop.

Nicely done, Amex!

So I bailed. In theory I can come back in a day or two and finish. Perhaps they will have fixed things up by then. More likely they will have fired Confirmit. Will I get my $5? It doesn’t seem likely. AmEx put the fix in here as well, by breaking the payment page. As you can see here, I’ve entered data in all the fields, but the survey software refuses to accept it, somehow thinking I’ve left something blank. This is a big PR win for Amex, putting people through a 20 minute broken survey, then refusing to pay!

Moral

The moral of the story is obvious. If you’re going to send an email out to thousands of customers, all of whom are most likely uninformed civilians, it would be a good idea to thoroughly test your product first. The fact that Confirmit clearly didn’t do that is a nail in their coffin, considering this is their livelihood. The fact that AmEx hired this joke of a company doesn’t say much for them, either.

Priceless Web Design:

• Designing a survey for your customer base? $10,000
• Deploying the survey and passing out rewards? $25,000
• Making yourself look like an incompetent pack of rubes for the whole Web to see? Priceless.

Yes, the New York Times is with it. So much so that they can pull off an ironic headline in full belief that they and their equally hip readers will all get the joke when they read this article.

Patent Owner Sues the Internet

We salute you, Gray Lady!

Actually

Well, it’s always fun to take a big shot to task, but in reality this article covers a not-so-funny lawsuit. You’ve probably never heard of Brightware Inc., Amy Rice, or Julie Hsu, but in 2002 they more or less claim to have invented automated email response systems, and were awarded US Patent 6,411,947.

When trying to understand a patent, the best place to start is with the claims. That section of this particular patent leads off with: