Google Chrome. Sucks. For Real. Part 2.

What's a EULA? Oh, just the licensing agreement you sign when you want to use some software. Chrome has one. And it sure sucks. From what Google says, they just tried to apply their existing EULA (that they use for other products) to Chrome. Not such a good idea. And here's the nugget - Chrome wants users to sell their souls over to Google and to provide them with a:

"perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content."

If Chrome really wants to be the desktop of the future, which I'm sure they do, how could they thoughtlessly attach this EULA to Chrome? Imagine Google using your desktop for whatever they wanted. Imagine having a document open in Chrome and now Google can take it? And use it for whatever they want. Or people, not me of course, looking at offensive material (uh, porn) online and Google exposing that?

While Google pulled that piece from their EULA yesterday, I think this speaks volumes about some tiny holes that are starting to open up in Google's armor. As with the release of their browser - which never would have happened at the Google I worked at, a EULA like this would never have been blindly attached to a product that is expected to have such a huge impact on the market.

Google needs to start paying attention to what has made them so great.

Google Chrome. Sucks. For Real.

I was asked for some advice recently about starting a company. And some of the basics of how to go about doing it (incorporation, finding people, networking, etc). So I referred them back to my early blog postings when I detailed going through that stuff myself. Now that I'm at the point where I don't have any sage business advice about Vyoo (for the time being - release, marketing, and fundraising will ultimately follow), I'll continue to highlight mistakes and even the rare promising moves that I notice in other companies.

I've written glowingly in the past about Google. I love almost everything they do. Maybe to a fault. Well, I finally found a flaw in one of their products. I hope it's not a result of their growth that I wrote about several weeks ago (here). Maybe they're too big for themselves...

Google released Chrome yesterday. Their foray into the browser space. I was pretty excited, because I knew it would be great. Low on resource use, clean, simple, better! I mean, when has Google ever f'ed up a product release? Ok. Maybe they have for some products I haven't used. But a big release like a browser?

I downloaded it right away (here). It's pretty slick (from a UI perspective). And you can read a host of reviews and comments about it elsewhere, so I won't go into too much detail. It's very clean though. And it spawns separate processes for each tab you open so a problem with one browser window shouldn't shut you down like Firefox or IE.

Let's just say that Chrome didn't work as advertised. I installed it on an XP box and a Vista box. And it sucked. On both. It froze. It crashed. It hogged resources. I'd click tabs and it would close windows. It wouldn't respond. It would reload windows as I scrolled down the page. I understand that it's a beta. But damn, they shouldn't be releasing a piece of crap. Which is basically what this is.

Ironically, I'm at Google today. I have to teach a GMAT class down here and I ran into a b school buddy. He works at Mozilla, but he's on the Google campus every few days because they work fairly closely on things. While Google publicly stated that they were moving towards more collaboration with Mozilla on the browser side, my friend told me specifically that they've been moving away in terms of collaboration for the last two years. And that the release is viewed as quite a competitive move. I agree.

The second ironic event was that through reading about other people's issues with Chrome, it has come to my attention that the winner in all of this is IE. Their new beta apparently uses far fewer resources and has far fewer problems than resource hog Firefox and bug riddled Chrome. I'm apprehensive about trying it. But I think I have to.

Let me clarify!

So I'm out over the weekend and I run into a good buddy of mine, Mr. Schneeds we'll call him. He runs his own blog, Rude Not To (rudenotto.wordpress.com). Don't go there unless you're old enough. That's all I'll say. Anyway, he chastises me for my last post on screen scraping. If it wasn't clear enough, let me break it down right here.

Our business is not and will never be based on screen scraping. I hate screen scrapers. Especially when that's their business. We're simply using it initially to prove our technology. And that's it. We've begun initial partnership discussions with several sites and we're using this as a way to demonstrate the power that our technology can provide for them. In fact, when we go live, you may not even see any screen scraping or any use for the screen scraping we have. We will be happily sending lots of traffic to these other sites. It will become clear when you see what we're doing... Stay tuned...it's coming.

That's it.

To Scrape or Not To Scrape?

We've been toying around with the idea of screen scraping for some time now. The main reason, wasn't to avoid entering a debate about whether it's fair or not, but rather because we weren't sure we even wanted to deal with hosting any content of our own.

When I say hosting content, I'm referring to large amounts of content (videos, photos, documents, etc). Not simple things like user information and a few photos. I'm talking YouTube. It reminds me a bit of the discussion that took place at my last startup. To hardware or not to hardware. Hardware is a beast I would avoid at all costs - unless of course that's your thing. We weren't a hardware company. Yet we forged ahead designing some hardware for our product (electronic ticketing). I didn't know that this was a problem at the time, nor was there much I could have done about it anyway. But an MBA and some perspective later... hardware was one of our downfalls. It was a money pit. The design, implementation, and rollout were all overly expensive. Especially when you have a company like IDEO design things. And we built this big bulky system. I mean, there were probably a few smart ways we could have made hardware work to our advantage. But we weren't hardware people - so we should have left it for them.

Back to Vyoo. We were playing around with hosting our own reviews and recommendations, photos, vidoes, etc. But then we realized that it wasn't our core competency. Why rebuild the wheel? So we decided to link out to other sites or to try to partner with sites in order to allow users to find this preexisting content. Well, it's hard to forge relationships before you have a finished product and we wanted to prove out our concept. So we decided to scrape some screens to pull some data into our site. We only provide snippets and we link out to the original sites. But it's a more user friendly experience for our users.

This decision made me think about the implications of screen scraping. Initially, I had been opposed to the idea. I felt like people were just duplicating sites. Where was the innovation, originality, or hard work? And in that sense, I still believe screen scraping is a poor choice for copycats. Bring something new to the table! Or use snippets of the data to provide enhanced value (Digg). But then how about user generated content? First of all, that's where I think startups can provide quite a bit of value - for the user's themselves. And after all, this is our information isn't it? If I leave profile information on Facebook. Well, that's my information. Facebook didn't go to Haas. It didn't take my picture for me. It only let me use their service. And it's getting something out of that by using that information (targeted ad revenue). If I put my clothes in a locker at the gym. Those are still my clothes. Sure the gym owns the locker, but they don't own my clothes. This is a much larger discussion - with lots of nuanced ways in which I would take a different approach to this question of ownership.

Anyway, that's where I stand. With permission (if it's user generated), sites should be able to leverage a user's information in a unique way. If it's not user generated, well, providing snippets and sending traffic to the original site is totally cool. Again, Digg comes to mind.

"Quick and Drrrrty" vs. "Doin it Right"

I've had some small wins this week. For those who are developers, you'll be able to relate. Those that aren't, well, you'll be able to relate too, just under different circumstances.

I'd been struggling all week getting something working for our site. Again, I'm using Rails, and while it's been a breath of fresh air compared to learning C back in college, I've still had my share of hurdles. See, I'm a perfectionist when it comes to my code. Sure, I can find a way to do something "quick and dirty", but I always like to write the best code possible. That way, if you never get a chance to go back and refactor (which often happens), it won't be the end of the world. So many people I know just code to get things out there. Then when it turns to shit, as it undoubtedly will, they spend too much time fixing what should have been done right the first time.

I'm aware that there are separate camps on this subject matter. And both have their advantages. For example, the "quick and dirty" method will get you out the door more quickly. Which has its advantages. So is there a compromise?

I realized this week that the answer to that question is "yes". I spent so much time trying to figure out the "rails" way to do what I was doing that I got bogged down in details. It just so happened to help me redesign our database so that the data and presentation layer fit more closely together. Which is one of the key components of Rails. But not being a pro left my presentation layer with too much code. I just couldn't figure out a better way to do this. So I left it... not feeling great about it.

But what I realized is that I now completely understand my data layer and am comfortable with its design. That part won't need to change. But now I can leave quick and dirty piece available for refactoring - which hopefully will happen. I've asked our other engineer to take a look when he gets time. I'm aware this might not happen... but it's more ok than an entirely dirty solution.

My point is that I think there can be a beneficial relationship between "quick and dirty" and "doin' it right the first time". Do right what needs to be right (the guts of the system, data, scaling, security, etc). And maybe, if you absolutely must, get that frontend component done quickly. Of course, there are exceptions. If an undue load is forced on your database because of your Q&D work....that's unacceptable. And if your system looks like shit... well, that's a problem too.

Jane Capital

My parents were in town this past weekend and my mom met her old college friend, Jane Lindner. It had been years since they had seen each other, but they quickly fell back into conversation like they were back in college.

I was excited to meet Jane. She's quite an accomplished San Franciscan, having spent many years in the Valley and across the globe working in venture capital, management consulting, and the clean tech sector. She started her own company back in 2001, Jane Capital, which focuses on corporate advisory and venture investments in the clean tech sector. She's been quite successful with her business.

We spoke at length about what we both do and she expressed sincere interest in helping us with our company. She's already offered to make some introductions for us.

Jane will likely be a valuable contact both with Vyoo and beyond. She's spent quite a bit of time working in APAC, a place I hope to move my career at some point down the road.

One of the lessons that I continue to profess is the value of cultivating relationships and your network. You never know who you're going to run into.

I Hate EBay! For Real!

(Note: Yea, my ebay handle Silentwarrior is totally lame. But I opened this account in '99. So give me a break)

I was all sorts of fired up today. Firing on all cylinders. I even woke up at 7. I never wake up at seven. I don't think I've seen the 7 hour from this side of night since '85. Yea, my sleep was crappy, but that wasn't from a lack of it. It had everything to do with a guest staying over who decided it was cool to turn the washing machine on at 4:45am. "I didn't think it would make any noise". Um. Ok. That guest is banned. For being an idiot.

I start checking my email and low and behold there's an urgent message from ebay: eBay Registration Suspension: NonPayment. Oh no, not this again. Talk about a time drain. It's not like I don't have anything else to do with my time.

As you know, someone hacked into my ebay account and listed items for sale. They sold a ton of them and accrued quite a large amount in listing fees. Ebay said they would cancel all the fees. They didn't. I received a bill. Spent hours talking to their shitty customer support via chat (they have NO phone support) and they told me next billing cycle, all would be handled. I assumed the ten hours I spent on their silly little chat customer service meant they got their story right.

Well, after that email this morning, I logged in, and my account was locked. Shut down. Incapacitated. Now I was livid. I had spent, literally, hours upon hours on the chat program several days ago getting this resolved. They had sent me back and forth from billing to fraud so many different times that my head is still spinning (in a chat window too! And every time I was shuttled back and forth, I was queued up again, having to wait to speak, er, chat, with the next available idiot). When I would begin to raise my voice to tell them they had been doing this 6 times already...you know, by CAPITALIZING WHAT I WAS SAYING, they wouldn't answer me and they would just send me back and forth between fraud and billing. It was a nightmare. That's when I was finally assured next billing cycle the charges would be dropped...no problem.

So today I get on chat to resolve this. I'm so angry I can barely type. This is such a nuisance I don't even know what to say about it. But it makes me realize when a company just doesn't get it. I write a lot about companies not getting it. And while in good times, this can be ok, because everybody is happily spending money, it is not a sustainable practice, either when the economy turns or when alternatives begin to pop up. With eBay, it'll be more about competition than about the economy. It will be about customer backlash and their own mistakes. A big error they already made was dropping 3.5 billion dollars for Skype. Man. That was dumb. But another is alienating customers. Last year they made some changes to feedback ratings and listing fees which put the eBay community on the offensive. Customers left in droves. They held boycotts (great story). I hate eBay so much right now. But I'm sure I'll still use them for things. At least until the next auction site starts competing.

The worst part of this whole thing is that I can't even complain to ebay. I've sent emails...I get a canned response back. There's no phone number. No management on the chat program you can talk to. It's a nightmare! And their partner company, PayPal, is no different.