Yearly Archives: 2013

You Know You’ve Lost When…

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Sounds like the start of a Jeff Foxworthy comedy routine. Instead, we have Microsoft at its saddest:

In the ongoing battle between Microsoft and Google over the market for office software, Massachusetts legislators are now considering a bill that would restrict cloud computing services from using student data for commercial purposes like (but not limited to) advertising. According to The Wall Street Journal, the bill is the work of Microsoft, which is trying to protect its lucrative Office business from encroachments by Google’s free Apps for Education.

I’m not saying that Microsoft is wrong and that privacy for schools and students shouldn’t be a concern but come on! Battle this out in the market, not by crying to your local legislature.

More Value Off-Contract?

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This is a chat I had with a very friendly support person at Frontier Communications. Frontier acquired Verizon’s FiOS high-speed Internet connection business a few years back. I changed the support person’s name.

Elia: Hi. I received a flyer in the mail regarding re-upping my contract and it offered an Apple gift card. I missed that window but thought I’d check in regarding re-upping, see if there are any deals, and what the rate would be to do so. My contract expires in July, I think.
Tom: Yes if you renew your services on a 2 year term and added a security product it would be a $150 apple gift card if you just renew on a 2 year term it’s the $100 gift card
Elia: Has the price changed? I’m currently paying $50/month plus taxes.
Tom: Looking at your current plan for the price you have the best service as you would lose upload speed and pay $5/mo more
Elia: So extending my current plan would still get me 35 Mbps up/down at $50/month + taxes?
Tom: no it would be on new pricing and services 59.99/mo pretax for Fios 35/15
Elia: That’s significantly worse then what I have now.
Tom: yes
Elia: If I don’t renew what happens?
Tom: nothing your services continue as they are
Elia: Same price as I have now?
Tom: yes
Elia: Not much incentive to renew then. 🙂
Tom: correct
Elia: Okay… thanks for your time Tom. I will leave my account as is.
Tom: OK. Is there anything else I can assist you with today?
Elia: Nope. Have a good day.

I’ve been a happy FiOS customer since I could get it but I really don’t understand this decision from a business perspective for Frontier. In essence, if I don’t sign a new contract, I will get significantly faster upload speeds at a lower price. Seems backwards to me.

Daylight Savings Time

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I love Daylight Savings Time. I hate that day. It always screws me up. But I love DST. It feels like renewal to me, a change over from the cold damp winter to spring and summer weather I love so much. Dr. Drang has an article outlining the benefits and problems, headlined by how nasty the summer sun at 4am would be in most of the country if we didn’t observe it:

If we stayed on Standard Time throughout the year, sunrise here in the Chicago area would be between 4:15 and 4:30 am from the middle of May through the middle of July. And if you check the times for civil twilight, which is when it’s bright enough to see without artificial light, you’ll find that that starts half an hour earlier.

This is insane and a complete waste of sunlight. Good for a nation of farmers, I suppose, but of no value to anyone in our current urban/suburban society except those people who get up and go running before work. And I see no reason to encourage them.

So yes it screws me up for a day or two twice a year. But I’ll take the 9pm sunsets here in the summer over that minor disruption any day.

His Saving Grace

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Great story in The Chicago Tribune about Chef Curtis Duffy. It’s the story of a small town kid whose upbringing was less than ideal. When he was a teenager, his father killed his mother and then himself. But Curtis found a love and found a person, his home economics teacher, who would nurture it.

Slowly Curtis re-entered the world, and he seized upon the one stable thing in his life: the kitchen. When he’d first started cooking five years earlier, the kitchen was a place to run away to from the fighting at home, a place that kept him from bullying neighborhood kids.

Now his parents were dead. Every hour focused on cooking was another hour not dealing with his confusion and anger.

Curtis worked his way up from dishwasher to line chef to chef de cuisine until he decided to open his own restaurant. It’s a great story and touches on so many of the things that we treasure about our country. Hope you’ll read it this weekend.

Optimistically Depressed – Start-up Life and Roller Coaster Rides

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In mid 2007 Infinity Softworks was falling apart. The project we spent two years working on was ending with a big thud, I had already laid off most of the team and was about to let go of the remaining two. I was tired and worn out. A friend looked at me and said it was the first time in the eight years he had known me that I ran into a brick wall and stopped.

At that point in 2007 I was clearly depressed: depressed with my situation, depressed with the state of the company, depressed with my failure, nervous about fatherhood and the new pressures that brought on me. Brad Feld had a great post on depression last October.  As Brad said:

For some reason we’ve embraced failure as an entrepreneurial trait that is ok, but we still struggle with acknowledging and talking about depression. Entrepreneurs function with a wide range of stresses and emotions that often have overwhelming intensity. In many cases, we are afraid of admitting depression, and are often highly functional when we are depressed. But that doesn’t deny the fact that entrepreneurs get depressed. To deny this, is to deny reality, and that’s against my value system.

But by late 2007 a plan was in place and we kept it together by doing contract work. We survived to fight another day. I wasn’t blinded by the realities but I still believed in what we could do. We’ve battled for over five years now, learning a ton along the way.

Which leads me to the recent post in The Atlantic about optimism:

This questions turns out to matter a great deal if you are trying to figure out who grows after trauma and who gets swallowed up by it, a question that each movie [Life of Pi and Silver Lining’s Playbook] addresses and that psychologists have been grappling with for years. Think back to the last time you experienced a loss, setback, or hardship. Did you respond by venting, ruminating, and dwelling on the disappointment, or did you look for a faint flash of meaning through all of the darkness — a silver lining of some sort? How quickly did you bounce back — how resilient are you?

The roller coaster of start-up life never really fades away. Optimism, depression, it all turns on a dime. Keeping a positive outlook, though, that’s the key.