VWvortex Forums: A photo tour of the Transparent Factory in Dresden

I have visited the Phaeton assembly plant in Dresden several times, and thoroughly enjoyed each visit. The building and grounds are beautiful, and the whole process of both making and selling Phaetons is totally different than that for any other car in the world.

Wow!

Too bad it doesn’t look like this is providing a good ROI as VW is going to stop selling the Phaeton in the US.

NYC Commuters Coping With Transit Strike – Yahoo! News

NEW YORK – Subways and buses ground to a halt Tuesday morning as transit workers walked off the job at the height of the holiday shopping and tourist season, forcing millions of riders to find new ways to get around.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who had said the strike would cost the city as much as $400 million a day, joined the throngs of people crossing the Brooklyn Bridge as he walked from a Brooklyn emergency headquarters to City Hall.

“It’s a form of terrorism, if you ask me,” said Maria Negron, who walked across the bridge. “I hope they go back to work.”

And I thought my commute this morning was bad! (Who made the decision to set the traffic signal at La Avenida and Shoreline to be in Stop sign mode?)

But nothing ever stops NY:

YouTube – Lazy Sunday – SNL Digital Short

Lazy Sunday – SNL Digital Short

Oh my… this video clip is hysterical.

Chronic-WHAT-cles of Narnia! Watch them drop those Hamiltons!

Totally SFW. Not SFB (Safe for Beverages)

Jimmy is a great friend of mine, and we share a lot of the same background (Mac fans, reformed Micro$loth haters) – heck, I even own his HDTV and much of his furniture.

Well, his blog noted today that MacIE is no longer available – he has some great commentary, and there is also some great commentary from Jorg Brown who used to have the office next to mine (and we’d compete to have the loudest music at midnight sometimes.)

Jimmy Grewal’s Weblog ? End of an era: Mac Internet Explorer

Jorg and Jimmy no longer work for Microsoft, so they say a lot more than I’d be comfortable with. There’s a lot of other ‘war’ stories that can be told – they’ll come out some day.

My personal experience of working on MacIE was this: I interviewed in November 1999 to work on Mac Outlook Express and Mac Internet Explorer. I got an offer and accepted in December 1999. I attended the launch of IE 5.0 at MacWorld SF 2000 on Microsoft’s dime as a college student. That spring, I heard rumors on the Mac sites that the Internet Explorer team was being disbanded… and when I started on 6/19/2000, I found that to be basically true.

Jimmy understates his accomplishments during that time: he basically kept MacIE development going by himself. More than anyone else, his passion for the product kept some amount of attention paid to it with his relentless championing of it.

There is sort of a MacIE 6 – it’s inside MSN Explorer, and it’s sort of in Entourage in the form of an HTML rendering engine.

That said, in the end it makes perfect sense for Apple to include an HTML rendering engine as part of the OS – heck that’s what Microsoft did (though the reaction was slightly different. )

MacIE is dead. Long live MacIE.

One of the hardest questions that I face is “What does a Program Manager at Microsoft do?”

Well, Steve Sinofsky has a pretty good answer here:

Steven Sinofsky’s Microsoft TechTalk : PM at Microsoft

Program managers got started at Microsoft while developing Excel for the Macintosh.

[snip]

Where developers were focused on code, architecture, performance, and engineering, the PM would focus on the big picture of “what are we trying to do” and on the details of the user experience, the feature set, the way the product will get used. In fact the job has matured significantly and it is almost impossible to document a complete list of the responsibilities of program management. One way to do that is to list the sections of a specification for features in Office that a PM would complete before the code gets written which includes nailing the scenario you are solving for, the worldwide implications (will your work make sense to customers in China, India, Estonia), how will developer customers extend the product (object models, programmability), is the product secure and is privacy maintained, what are the other features your work interacts with, will the feature be responsive and performant, and more. These are critical parts of the design of any product, and when you will have 400 million potential customers thinking these through before you start the work is critical.

[snip]

But if you’re doing something new and innovative or more importantly if you want more than incremental feedback then you need to have much more sophisticated mechanisms than just beta feedback from power users. Most importantly, the role of PM is to represent all customers, not just the ones who do beta tests or the ones who take the time to send in feedback or use early products. A key skill of program management is to have empathy with a broad range of customers. Often when you are just getting started you will see how easy it is to over-emphasize early power user feedback or anecdotes over broad based feedback. Don’t get me wrong, power users are great but they are just one type of user. A great advocate for the “little guy” is Walt Mossberg and he really does point out when you’re missing the mark on a product and too focused on “techies” as he calls them. The bottom line is that most people are not techies, but most beta customers and most early adopters are so you as a PM have to do the leg work to validate your work with a broader audience.

Do read the full entry!

Edit: Updated the URL to point to one specific entry.

On Wall Street

Cialdini illustrates reciprocity with the story of a waiter who presented a table of four with their bill, accompanied by four mints. His tip went up. When he offered two mints each with the check, the tip increased. But when he gave each diner a mint, then hesitated and gave each a second as a “special” gesture, his tip went up even more. “Not because of the second candy,” Cialdini explains, “but because it was personal and unexpected.”

The waiter, he adds, was clearly a “smuggler” of influence, one who uses the system and eventually, loses credibility.

To capitalize on the reciprocity principle, he insists, you must be a detective of influence, someone who genuinely looks for real favors or provides service above and beyond expectations… making it “wise,” he repeats, “to say yes.’”

Fascinating stuff. Go read it and let me know what you think. Do you use any of these tactics?

Earlier this week I got stuck in some major traffic as I drove past a middle school. I had never, ever, ever seen so many cars (well, SUVs and minivans) before waiting in line to drop off kids at school before. I was amazed at how horribly inefficient that was.

And then I saw this piece today:

In Exurbs, Life Framed by Hours Spent in the Car – New York Times

The result is that the modern exurb has more daytime residents than the suburbs did a generation ago, urban experts say. More people frequent a different mix of shops, restaurants and recreational facilities. And that has created more traffic throughout the day, the morning rush hours giving way to gridlock caused by shoppers, school drop-offs and lunch throngs.

As a resident since 1993, Mr. Kinnunen qualifies as an old-timer in Frisco. And although most newer residents say they have found it easy to make friends, older residents note a subtle change in the pattern of life as subdivisions spread and people spend more time in the car.

“We don’t really see our neighbors so much anymore,” Mr. Kinnunen said. “We all drive into our back alleys and into our garage, and that’s that.”

[snip]

People are too jealous of their time, because they have to be.”

Jay Crutcher, a lawyer who commutes to downtown Dallas from Frisco, said any trip of under an hour constituted a good day.

We love the car because it provides us freedom… like in the ads on TV. But all that happens is that we get stuck in traffic. If you saw the parking lot for my high school, you’d probably be shocked at how tiny it is – because there was a great school bus system that everyone took.

It’s no suprise that we don’t understand trade-offs, because often times they’re too abstract and they require forward thinking – just look at retirement saving rates!) We don’t want mass transit because it’s not efficient and you don’t have freedom, and its expensive to support through taxes. It’s “cheaper” and you get “more freedom” to if we built more roads and everyone had their own cars.

But then we get stuck in traffic, fight for parking spots, wonder why our roads are so awful, clamor for more roads (even as we can’t afford to maintain the existing ones), and completely forget that it costs about 48 cents a mile to drive (it’s not just the price of gas!).

And so we go buy SUVs because our roads are so bad, and we have to spend so much time in the car because we get stuck in so much traffic. They consume more oil so demand and price continue to grow. We build more roads which leave less room for houses which means we need to put houses further away whith then require more roads which invokves an infinite loop. The roads continue to suck up more tax dollars for maintenance, which we won’t want to pay so they’ll fall into worse shape and so we’ll need more car repairs and SUVs. Meanwhile buses and trains (if they even exist) will be able to serve fewer and fewer people meaning more and more cars on the road.

Which means even more time in the car.

Does that really sound like freedom to you?

I don’t have the answers, but I suspect figuring that out involves thinking more about the future, investing in the future, planning for sustainability, and planning for servicability.

Every once in a while, I see something that makes me ashamed to be involved with software development in general. I just feel embarassed on behalf of the entire industry because of some horrendous piece of UI.

Here’s the latest offender:

So let me get this straight, I used the Check for Updates component of Rhapsody, it downloads and installs the newest version, and then it tells me that my log in is tied to a previous version?

What the heck?