The Snack Box - Best Taken Literally

Virgin Atlantic's New Business Class Cabin

I stand before you humbled by having to admit that, for the first time ever, I finally caved-in and bought one of United Airline's on-board "snack boxes".

I was sort of hoping that my upgrade request would have gone through but it didn't, and I only got to find this out at the gate as they were boarding my flight back to San Francisco. I therefore had held off buying anything at the airport to eat on the way home, hoping instead to be dining on roast swan off the back of a naked airline stewardess, or whatever else they do for you in business class these days. Alas, 'twas not to be. Therefore, I checked my conscience at the door, swallowed hard, and forked over $10 for a (very) small bottle of merlot and one of the 4 "hearty" concoctions on offer, the "rightbite" in this case, in order not to get home even crankier than is usual after 4.5 hours in the tender care of United (motto: " we piss the staff off so you don't have to").

Contents? Let me quote from the Book of Revelations, aka the United Hemisphere magazine:

"Bumblebee Sensations Lemon & Pepper Seasoned tuna medley; Late July organic crackers; Wild Garden hummus;Stacy's Multigrain Baked pita chips; Glacier Ridge Farms Gouda cheese slice; Sunmaid raisins; Mini-Toblerone." And all for the princely sum of just 5 of our Yankee dollars. "How can they deliver such fine comestibles so ridiculously cheaply?", I hear you cry.

As you may suspect, the quality of the marketing prose far exceeded that of the item itself. I have no idea what constitutes a "medley" when applied to some dry tuna in a tin, unless it was mashed with the eponymous bumblebees at some point of course, but then it would have actually had some taste to it so that can't be right. And what, pray, makes a few common-or-garden Ritz crackers into "Late July" doses of pure sunshine and health? I'm pretty certain it's not the one-inch crust of salt that the trans-fats handily help to attach to it for a start.

Apart from the Toblerone, which was the only accurately labelled thing in there (especially the "mini" part) the rest was high fat/high calorie junk. Believe it or not, you have to be incarcerated on a flight for more than 5 hours these days on United before you can even qualify to buy a bog-standard sandwich, let alone find out that they ran out three rows ahead of you, so this really is about as good as it gets for almost all domestic runs. Oh, and I forgot to mention that the one I chose was supposed to be the healthiest of the lot ....

It turns out that "snack box" is a very fair description. Indeed, "junk the contents and eat the box" get my vote as a much more accurate marketing pitch. And it's healthier, too. I mean, at least the cardboard will give you some much needed fibre, is meat-free, has no added salt or sugar and definitely no trans-fats. Hard to get food that's better for you than that, right?

(And yes, the wine was ropey too.)

Chicago-bound

So now the Q is largely done then it's time to go back on the road again, though a two day trip to Chicago hardly seems to count as the business equivalent of crossing Africa in search of the source of the Nile. Still, despite being an hour late leaving, the flight actually arrived on time. Hard to explain quite how rare this is for Chicago, and to be fair was only the case this time around because of a 120 knot tailwind knocking an hour off the flying time.

One other bonus: I was actually able to use some electronic upgrade coupons for a change and so got a seat up at the pointy end of the plane, where all the free drinks and food hides out. And, believe it or not, the cabin staff, even on United, are helpful and polite in this most rarefied of places. I know, I know, you thought it was just the stuff of legend.

Bet the flight back isn't anything like as much fun .... especially as I get demoted from row 6 to row 27.

How the mighty have fallen.

Dead Horse Point, Utah

Arid Lands, Utah

As we head out of winter and into spring, thought I'd raid the archives and show what the South Downs will look like once global warming takes hold ....

Dead Horse Point State Park in Utah is an amazing place, quite unlike anything you'll find in northern Europe. From visiting Utah, Arizona, Nevada and New Mexico, I've come to really appreciate the desert environment and scenery. The sterile, blinding-bright landscape, fashioned from nothing but rock, really does have a deeply-etched - if stark - beauty.

Maybe it's just because we're still exiting the California winter, but I wouldn't mind moving to, say, Sedona. Being a few thousand feet above sea level means it doesn't get as unbearably hot as does Phoenix, for example, but you still get all the buttes, canyons and mesas to play with. Alas, even a cursory glance at property prices shows that there's no easy escape. For the sort of place you'd like to live in then prices are very comparable with Silicon Valley, just with the added disadvantage of no jobs for the likes of me to be had.

Still, I'll definitely be heading there again someday soon, and since this year we're headed to Africa in July then "hot and dusty" will be in our future one way or the other.

New T5 A Resounding Success .. Unless You Have These

Yup, the first full day of service at the newly opened T5 was, predictably, a disaster. I say predictably because it happens at pretty well every new airport (Hong Kong and Denver, to name but two) pretty well every time. And interestingly, it always seems to be the baggage system that blows up.

In classic "I'm All Right Jack" fashion, British Airports Authority is blaming British Airways, and vice-versa. One runs the baggage system, and one is responsible for handling the bags ... cue finger pointing, left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing, everyone shrugging and saying "not my fault guv", etc.

By mid-afternoon, BA was refusing to check anyone's bags, and by days-end they had cancelled 34 flights on top of it all.

All I can say is I'm glad I wasn't there, and that I have no plans to be going through there any time soon! From watching the BBC news tonight, the queues were long and fractious. One passenger was complaining that he waited in one queue for 3 hours only to have the desk close as he got close to the head of the line. Surprisingly, he wasn't being interviewed whilst throttling some hapless BA employee, but only because they a) appeared to be in short supply and b) travelling in packs for safety.

Worst. Terminal. Ever. At least, until the next one opens somewhere.

Washington Sex Scandals: The Deepening Crisis

'Nuff said ...

Jaguar Goes Tata - Sold, But At What Price?

Racing Jaguar, Monterey Festival of Speed, 2006

There's been a, slew of stories on the impending - and long-mooted - sale of Jaguar and Land Rover to India's Tata group over the past week, indicating perhaps that a final resolution is near. As we've mentioned before, this is the latest in the line of disposals by Ford of it's old Premier Auto Group business, assembled back in the days when the company was flush with cash and keen to splash. Alas, buyer's remorse set in very quickly once they found out just how much money it would take to revive Aston Martin, Jaguar, Land Rover and whatever else got thrown into that bucket, and to overcome decades of mis-management by, in the case of Jaguar and Land Rover, that old bogeyman British Leyland. Remind me to do a post one day on some of the wonderous cars those guys managed to produce .... Allegro, Metro or Maxi anyone?

Anyway, new management, new era, new plan: sell the lot just as they turn from cash sinks into cash cows ... maybe. One of the last peices on the block is a job lot of Jaguar and Land Rover (motto, "buy one, get one free"), and after hitting every conceivable buyer in town India's Tata conglomerate is the only one left standing. Despite some reports that the price would be around $2.6 b, pundits are now saying that it won't reach anything like that figure, struggling to deliver $2 b back into Ford's fast-draining coffers (they posted a $2.8 b loss in the 4th quarter alone).

It's tough to have an auction with only one bidder, and it's hard to build value when in the last couple of sales - Aston, anyone? - Ford has accepted what is quite frankly bargain-basement pricing. But Ford has only itself to blame, especially in the case of Jaguar. A string of lack-lustre models tied to unrealistic sales targets took the brand from premium-to-proletariat in a few short years.

Buy high, sell low, and kiss goodbye to countless billions, leaving Ford as a cash-poor producer of volume sheet metal. Now there's a strategy for Harvard Business Review to pick apart.

Can You Still Be A Startup At 10 Years Old?

Just thought I'd make note that the company I run today hit it's 10 year mark. I've only been there 3 years mind, which either makes me able to claim 30% of the credit or 30% of the blame - take your pick!

Ten years is a long time to still be considered a start-up, especially with Web 2.0 companies having a half life measured in something more like months. Still, "different strokes for different folks" as they say, especially in Nevada ...

We serve a different kind of customer and with a much more technical, complex and revolutionary set of products than is the case for YAWNS companies (yet another web-based networking- and social-site). Therefore, the way we look at this question is very different from how you'd view things in a market where 24 hours can give you what to us would be a lifetime's worth of customer usage data. This is a huge advantage for Web properties. That ability to get almost instantaneous feedback on how effective a new positioning or sales mechanism is drives a fundamentally different approach to things.

In the same way that there appears to be some sort of natural life expectancy for a land mammal based on the total number of heartbeats experienced (roughly a billion) then perhaps there's a similar metric for companies? Instead of the total number of heartbeats then perhaps it's down to total sales cycles with customers. In the same way a shrew has a heartbeat so fast (the animal almost looks like it's vibrating) that it results in a life-span of only a few years, so too with Web 2.0 startups? Anyway, food for thought for another day, but I will say that what's still very important to us at this point is getting more sales cycles completed with customers a) to increase total sales and b) to up the level of knowledge we have about how and why they are (or even are not) successful.

In all of this, my goal is to try and create something that can embrace the positive qualities of a start-up (constant questioning and self-assessment, highly responsive, customer-driven, cash-conscious and hungry) with what a more mature organisation can bring (maturity of thought, experience, continual process improvement, battle hardened, specialized.) Doable? I think so, but it's a goal that's always going to be challenging, if for no other reason than, in the fog of war, what's right in front of you can sometimes seem way more important than trying to sort out the bigger picture.

Be interesting to see how the VC community reacts when we head out to do our C-round and if we are able to get this across in a slide or two. Indeed, the challenge, as always, is to convey the excitement and opportunity we all see and experience in a set of slides that makes the viewer not only sit up and take notice, but take out their cheque book.

I have no idea what the next 10 years will bring, nor even the next 3, but it will, most definitely, be interesting!

Work-Life Balance

Surfer, Natural Bridges Beach, Santa Cruz, CA

This is just one of those days where you can't help feeling you've got the balance wrong. Above, a shot from Santa Cruz last weekend where we again had sunshine and gusty winds, offering an excellent excuse to get the car out the garage and the camera from the cupboard. Surfer-dude was having fun doing what he does, and so was I.

Contrast that with today where I am in a seminar from 9 am through until 5 pm, the first half of which was so dull it risked sucking all the life from me before I'd even made it to lunch time. In fact, I'm declaring defeat. While being well organised and reasonably well attended, the agenda is all over the map, ranging from detailed, low-level things to do with semiconductor physics right up to multicore-based software benchmark design. From my perspective, two mistakes were made:

1. All the boring stuff was in the morning, rapidly killing any spark of enthusiasm you may have started the day with, and


2. they handed out printed copies of the slides at registration, instantly negating much of the value in sticking it out to the end. Few presenters - me included - are capable of adding much to whatever is on the Powerpoint these days, so a paper version of a decent slide deck gets you 90% of the way there.

I got as far as eating lunch which, as usual in these things when they are hotel-based, comprised those two wacky characters "chewy chicken" and "stringy beef", before throwing in the towel.

I should instead have just bunked-off for the morning, and gone for a walk or sat in the library for a while and got some decent thinking time in. Quite honestly I and the company would have got way more value from a bit of introspection and analysis, something I could have quite happily done sitting at a cafe somewhere.

Whatever you do in life, it's all in how well you balance things. Bit like surfing, really.

Whirly Magnetic Disks Still Rule

Couple of interesting things popped up today here and here pointing to new laptop users being disappointed in both the performance and reliability of solid state drives (SSDs), a feeling that's probably amplified by being asked to fork over in excess of $1,000 extra for the privilege of being on the bleeding edge. Oh yes, and battery life wasn't any better either, it seems.

These stories echo what was written in Business Week a couple of issues ago when they profiled IBM's work to develop a new super thin and light laptop, the X300. IBM pulled SSDs from the first iteration of this machine because suppliers couldn't meet the contracted levels of quality.

Some experiments done by ARS technica on a Macbook Air show that, for a premium of $1,300, you only win with the SSD-equipped version when doing random-access based disk reads. In daily use, despite a 200 Mhz clock speed advantage over it's HDD-based sibling, the SSD-equipped Macbook was only noticeably better in one circumstance, namely, "it didn't suffer entire machine slowdowns when there was a lot of disk activity—or at least less so than the HDD model. "

So there you have it. Further proof that it's sometimes better to lag than it is to lead, especially when you plonk down your dollars before the pundits get their hands on a new advance, in advance of you. And for the more cynical amongst you, another victory for Jobs et al in their relentless war to squeeze increasing profits from hardware before the law of commoditization kicks in.

Apple acolytes please note: this is one expensive religion to adopt, particularly if you are relentlessly at the head of the queue for the latest blessing.

Me? I'm just disappointed that this technology doesn't appear, at least at first blush, to be the answer to achieving a major step-up in both the performance and reliability offered by current generation laptops; one piece of the puzzle perhaps, but not a complete new picture.

CA Gas Prices: Worse Than You Think

Just in case you hadn't heard, California has some of the highest petrol prices in the country. Partly, this is because that's what the market will bear, but largely it's because the formulation of gasoline in this state is different from that found anywhere else in the USA. This means that refineries in the state have to produce almost all of the local demand and gas can't be brought in from other locations in order to smooth supply vs. demand cycles. Nope, makes no sense to me either.

Quite how the California legislature ever thought it sensible to get into the petrochemical specification business (sometime in the 60s?) is a mystery to me. Indeed, it's a mystery to many people, especially as one of the things they insisted upon was that petrol sold in the state should have a specific oxygenator (MTBE) added that subsequently turned out not only to be a carcinogen but also to actually lower fuel consumption, which was a problem because that completely wiped out all of notional smog benefit it may have originally offered.

Anyway, this week I also figured out that we getting the middle finger in one other dimension too: octane rating. Back east, premium petrol (the top grade) comes in at a middling 93 octane, a level itself quite some way below what's standard in the UK, for example. However, premium gas in California only makes it to a measly 91 octane.

A couple of octane may mean slightly less power and the engine running a bit hotter, but having never done experiments on any of my cars to see the difference first hand I can't really say how significant this difference may or may not be. Either way, we don't even get offered that choice, or at least I thought that was the case until this week I found a gas station in CA that was selling 93 octane, albeit at a whopping $5 a gallon, which is a dollar-thirty more than they were charging for 91 rated "standard" premium juice. Nope, guess I won't be running those experiments just yet because that's a complete rip off. Save your money for a tank or two of racing gas (100+ octane) next time you are at the track is my advice. Now that's the good stuff!

So let's recap: we pay more than anywhere else, we get a lower octane fuel than is the norm in other states, and our state legislature insists on making up it's own formulation with who-know-what consequences.

Hard to view all of this as a victory for the California consumer ...