Ref: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/11/18/kurt-greenbaum-man-loses_n_362406.html
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I just posted the following comment to an sxephil episode on YouTube (NSFW), wherein Phil talks about the transition of a site called “Pirate Bay” to a legal, for-pay service… (see this). It reminded me of what happened to the original (real) Napster, which a decade later remains the best Internet app ever, by my reckoning!
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I wrote this up recently because someone asked, and I feel the need to share. Since I no longer work for Altiris or Symantec, and despite the risk of creating a karmic debt, I’m gonna go ahead and do something I don’t usually do — publicly speak ill (albeit factually) of someone in the industry. I figure the risk is low; it’s unlikely that John Dvorak will ever be the key to getting a job I want, and if he gives one of my products a poor review, that would likely only help sales. So here you go…
Now this is hot:
Come on, Baby, bite my (Cat 5) wire!
Oct ‘09: Per Google Analytics, this is the most-read post on my blog.
So this evening I’m driving by a convenience store in Gainesville, Florida, when my daughter Guinevere (now 6 yrs. old) suddenly blurts out, “Hey! That store has a Novell penguin!” I figured it was just some picture of a penguin that maybe kinda looked like the Novell Tux that used to sit on my desk. (Example here; not my daughter, but a great photo.)
We love penguins (who doesn’t?) — especially Linux penguins — so I backed up to investigate. My jaw dropped. It was Tux! Not just sorta-kinda Tux, but the real, official Larry Ewing-drawn Tux, faithfully reproduced — four times! — in roughly 2.5 foot treatments on the walls above the beverage coolers and “Beer Cave”.
I’ve created a couple Box.net folders to share files of historical interest ref: Novell’s BorderManager product. I was the Product Manager for BorderManager from Sept 2001 until spring 2004. Only files that were originally public material are included, of course.
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Through a typo (and some ignorance), I nearly flushed $177 down the toilet this week. Given the current economy (especially bad in my house), that’s not something I need to be doing. So I want to give huge thanks to SnapNames.com for being responsive to my plea for help and giving me a refund, even tho the error was mine.
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While many of the enhancements in Firefox 3.0 are good ideas and much welcomed, this release suffers from the same phenomenon as many new releases of platform-type software. That is, lack of 3rd party support. With supposedly over a thousand add-ons available out there, Firefox has, after all, become essentially a platform. This is by design, as extensibility is one of the basic value props Mozilla promotes for the open source browser. I’m highly acclimated to (and now dependent on!) the ten extensions that I use with Firefox 2.x (not counting the DOM Inspector and Talkback). So when I activated a Firefox 3.0 layer and cranked it up, I was dismayed that only two of my extensions worked (or had an update available). One of the broken ones (the Unified Back-/Forward Button) has been incorporated as a feature of Firefox 3.0, but w/o 70% of my add-on functionality, my browser was effectively broken by this user’s reckoning.
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I toned down the last paragraph of this Juice article last week for posting on the company site. But I can’t help myself. Here’s the original edit:
“The great part for SVS development is that we didn’t have to write any of this stuff. All the needed info was just there in Windows, waiting for SVS to come along and use it to make magic. This is one example of what I mean when I say that SVS extends the plumbing that is inherent in native Windows. MS put the process tracking system in place for a lot of reasons, but it’s core to SVS being able to do what it does. It makes redirection and prioritization — and the resultant normal visibility of virtualized apps — possible. It’s one of the reasons why the lead engineer who invented SVS, Randy Cook, knew that we didn’t need to build a new, alternate execution environment like other app virtualization vendors have. They didn’t need to build a proprietary execution environment, either, actually, but they did anyway. And you see the results. Guess Randy just understands Windows architecture better.” 
There are lots of different names for it out there. Intel calls it “Emerging Compute Models.” Dell and EDS call it “Flexible Computing”. Others call it “Desktop On-Demand” or any number of other names. I’ve been known to call it “Dynamic Environment” or (more recently) “Optimized Client Architectures”. What we are all talking about is the same, however — the more immediate, more reliable, more secure and less costly delivery of computer services to end users, whenever they need them, no matter where they are.
One fun. One scary.
It’s not all about Steve Jobs: http://www.glumbert.com/media/irack
The beginning of the (real) end of competition? http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/09/12/microsoft_sun_windows_server/
Before I tried to get this job with Altiris, I tried for a position at Symantec’s American Fork, UT, development center. Just before my scheduled interview, the position was moved to Cupertino, CA. Since relocation was not an option at the time, I withdrew my app. Considering how things have worked out… Boy, am I glad that happened! Not only did I get the best product assignment a PM could hope for, but I ended up working for Symantec after all! Excelsior!
A few months ago, we chose to add some new features to SVS and change “SVS 2.0 SP2″ into “SVS 2.1″. This is causing customers to wait longer for some important bug fixes that were targeted for 2.0 SP2. In my first draft of this post, I went into all of the details of the decision and explained our QA process and so forth, in hopes that you would appreciate why one project and one release is ultimately better for customers. But I don’t want to go through all that; since SVS 2.1 beta 1 shipped, the heat seems to be off. Everyone is happy with the performance fixes and many customers are rolling the 2.1 beta into production as if it were in fact 2.0 SP2. Still, I wanted to vent a bit of frustration over an issue that most (if not all) software PM’s are familiar with.
Disclaimer (Oct ‘09): This page is a popular Google hit. I assume that’s due to significant community interest in virtualization, esp. desktop virtualization. However, this post is now only of historical value. The market has changed. The products have changed. Altiris (now Symantec) has changed its positioning and strategy significantly since this was written. For current info on Symantec Endpoint Virtualization, visit Symantec Connect.
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This article has been sitting in my Drafts folder for months. Between being very busy and SoftGrid becoming less of a competitive issue for us since the MS acquisition (and their subsequent demotion of it to a promotional tool), I haven’t really had the opportunity or motivation to complete either this or my promised open letter to Bill Anderson. But there’s some good info in here, so I figured I’d post it in raw form, with minimal updating for any factual changes since it was originally composed back in May or June. If I have already extracted out some of this text for previous posts, my apologies for the duplication. Enjoy.
Twice in the Navy, I was promised a trip to Australia. Twice I was sent to the Persian Gulf instead. Now, eighteen years later, justice is finally done. Altiris has sent me to both Sydney and Melbourne, with Auckland, New Zealand, as a bonus.
