waffle

The iOS Enterprise developer program is not limited to companies with at least 500 employees any longer. It still requires a DUNS number and provides support for “in-house” apps only (no App Store support), but it’s a step forward.

On November 18th, 2007, I received a bug report. It seemed that what was then Gmail+Growl, my plugin to Gmail Notifier to make it display Growl notifications, didn’t work properly when the email it was connected to was a “Google Apps for Domains” account, which is to say an email address on your own domain, but hosted by Google via the MX record. Gmail+Growl had a feature such that when you clicked the notification, it would open the message in the browser by opening a link that Gmail Notifier provided it with. The link provided for Google Apps for Domains addresses didn’t work.

(Gmail+Growl for Gmail Notifier morphed into Google+Growl for Google Notifier somewhere along the way. They’re of the same respective lineage, and the issue is the same.)

On April 9th, 2008, after having received more of those bug reports (I don’t have one of those and couldn’t test for it), sending a few experimental builds to some collaborators and finally gone over my own code with a fine-toothed comb, I emailed the project head for Google Notifier, David Phillip Oster, having shouldered the project from Greg Miller, who started it. Within a day, he’d replied, saying he’d look into it. Six days later, he said that he’d tracked it down and fixed it, tentatively. I thanked him profusely.

It’s now been just short of two and a half years. I’ve been emailing him a bit more over that period of time, and there have been more technical obstacles in the way (including suspected certificate problems, which if managed properly should be hard for a random person from outside that group, which David is, to mess with too much), but it seems like it should be possible to get this resolved.

I don’t write this to shame Google, or Greg, or David. Really, I don’t. They have done a good job of making sure that the good Notifier exists in the first place. There’s no shortage of unofficial notifiers, and I like having an official one around. Neither do I claim that David hasn’t got anything else to do. I’m sure that his day is packed, and I’m sure he’d much rather not have this millstone around his neck regardless of workload. I’ve been holding off for a good while on writing this because I don’t want to pressure people who can’t do anything about it.

But when people keep emailing me about it, I think I’m allowed to restate what I know: the cause of the problem, the extent of the problem and that it’s not fixed. And when people email me for the third, fourth and fifth time, they’re the ones asking if it’s fixed “yet“, and I don’t begrudge their choice of words.

“An Objective C guide for getting a girlfriend”. Go read it. It’s exactly what you think (defining a girlfriend ‘class’), and it’s as bad as you think (“- (BOOL) canLeaveTheHouse“).

This is the kind of shit that makes people not want to be programmers. (I’m sad that people write things like that all on my own, not because I think other people need me to be sad for them. Other people have their own voices and can handle themselves. I speak for me.) I am especially sad that the post ends relatively sensibly with:

Apart from being incredibly sexist and stupid, this blog post also has a very clear purpose: “Get the hell out of your house and meet a real person! Software generated girlfriends aren’t real. [..]“

So, in short, it’s okay to be incredibly sexist and stupid as long as you excuse yourself afterward. I’d rather hold that it is especially dumb to be incredibly sexist and stupid when you know about it and do it anyway as a joke.

You can joke about anything, and I’m not stopping anyone from doing so. (If you think dissenting on one’s weblog is in any way prevention, welcome to society.) But that doesn’t necessarily make every joke funny. Sexual stereotyping and stove-chaining jokes aren’t inherently funny, they’re just outrageous. More than that, they’re tired. Almost as tired as the tendency of nearly every programmer to make jokes in pseudo-code.

If you’d like to make a point, just make it. Don’t stoop to that level, especially if you profess to disagree.

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I don’t think, or at least don’t hope, that any of the waffle readers are of the persuasion that they’d actually do something like this. I’m not writing to instruct, I’m just tired of the status quo in all the subjects touched upon, and I will start calling them out as stupid. Me doing this won’t make the behavior change, but the behavior won’t change unless people do this.

DHH: “Facebook is not worth $33,000,000,000″.

Joel: “I hate to leap in with what seems like an ad-hominem attack on the 37 signals, but their utter and complete misunderstanding of all the basics of business is starting to grate on me, and I’m wondering if it has anything to do with Chicago. [..] The whole section “Minority investment evaluations aren’t real” is so economically bizarre and incorrect that I don’t even know where to start. It’s like you wrote a blog post arguing that it is incorrect to refer to a 5′ tall boy as 5′ tall because he’s often sitting down. Every single day every single public company in the world is valued by the last share traded, usually for a tiny fraction of the company.”

Ignore for a second that, as the thread soon clarifies, Facebook isn’t publicly traded and that “They are very profitable and their profit is almost certainly growing at a rate that will make their valuation reasonable.” Ignore that, for all the hopscotch several billion valuations of Facebook, you can’t buy a twentieth of that for 5% of that money, which makes it a worthless valuation in Joel’s absolute terms: it justifies the price at that point of purchase under those terms to that buyer, not to any buyer. 37signals, for all their accused apparent ignorance, has thought about this at least once.

Here’s the thing. Stock markets don’t value what companies are actually worth. Maybe, at most, they value how the skittish market sees companies. Someone said something and the stock dives by 20%. The company has talent and a legacy and materials. The stock market cap defines the value of the body of stock in play, not the company, not by any direct measure.

Maybe it’s true that if your company lives and dies by direct sales and a strong trademark, bad news that will make the stock market crash will also halt the business of that company, retroactively justifying the crash, and at times escalating the crash, kick-starting a vicious circle. But an actual valuation of the company would take all of those values to heart. There’s nothing inherent about the stock market that’d stop it going below the price the company’s office furniture would fetch on a garage sale.

I haven’t even mentioned the rest: stock market tactics, games, clever ruses, short selling to cover your risky ass with more risk to flip a pointless number back to positive, third-removed derivates where you’re not even really betting on the company as much as the bunch of other nonsensical process and schemes going on between there and here. High frequency fucking trading.

If the stock market did ever truly value a company, how can anyone acknowledge the existence of this mindless bullshit and claim with a straight face that it still does? It’s the world’s largest game, fit for tilting and prodding, but with outcomes that affect reality, millions of companies and billions of people. It’s economic Jumanji, steered by egos, fear and greed. (It’s popular to say “formulas”, which is a bit like attributing the oil dependency to anti-lock brakes.)

Joel didn’t talk about the stock market mainly, though, he thought about valuation by venture capital firms. This has the prospect of being saner because there are fewer games going on. The problem is that they’re guessing as much as anyone else might be. They can measure many of the values: profit, revenue, materials, payroll, but they can’t even capture all of them. What’s a product that’s in development actually worth?

Let’s not even get to soft values. Here’s a question for you: two otherwise identical companies, both of which create near-identical products with identical billed hours, materials cost, planning effort and negative impact on other business units. One of the products “has potential”. The other doesn’t. That’s up to the venture capital firm to decide.

Their valuation can’t ever be “the” valuation, it can only be “a” valuation. “The” valuation would include everything the company’s worth, and that’s different from person to person. There’s presumably an objective cost to be found; burn down the building and extract the raw materials. What about their software? That was on a hard disk in engineering, and on optical disks in shipping; they sold it for $30. Yes, but most people downloaded it for free. Untold people cracked the trial. Several IT departments purchased it to stuff their budgets so they wouldn’t lose money for next year. The value of the company isn’t in their compacted chairs.

You tell me what “the” valuation is of a company, any company. I don’t think you can do it. You can ballpark a theoretical figure for a hypothetical scenario. You can actually close a deal to buy a company, and that’s your valuation at that time, given your wits; who’s to say it’ll be worth exactly that much to you? How can you ever even know?

Valuations aren’t real and don’t matter. They’re made up by people who want to quantify their intuition and research and use that as a business tool. They have to do something, put down some number. They can keep doing that, but for all I know, it’s impossible to accurately and absolutely value a company ever.