Sandy’s small presence in a big world

Since yesterday I’ve noticed some strangeness going on with my Google search results - the UI looks different. It turns out I’m part of an experiment that brings “Digg” to search results. For example, I can promote a search result or bury it. As far as I can tell not every one has this feature ‘turned on’ and you can only know if you’re logged in.

This is the biggest product change I’ve seen on Google Search and I can’t tell if I like it or not. On the one hand, I think I might enjoy commenting on links so when I encounter it again later I can retrace thoughts. And I can’t wait to bury all those lame squatter sites / sites that have no content value. On the other hand, I don’t want to add complication and more work to my search experience. I like the simplicity exemplified by Google’s single search box. I type in something, results come back, done.

Also, at the moment my actions only affect my own search results. Will whatever I promote/bury be useful for even myself, given there is _so much_ on the web? I don’t really need help with the easy search terms like ‘Sandy Lin’ or ‘MIT Sloan’. Which means the only way for this to be useful is if all user actions collectively affect search results.

Indeed, the faq for Edit search results implies collective search edit might come in the future.

It’s been a week since Diane Greene’s abrupt departure from VMware. From my position on the fringes of the ‘inside’, the news was a shocker for every one. Mostly it was shocking for how it was done, not for it being done at all. People have been expecting her to be replaced by some one more ‘experienced’ for a while now, albeit in a more amiable fashion.

I personally like Diane, think it’s unfair, and am sad to see her go. I like the idea of a woman CEO, an engineer’s CEO, and a founder CEO all wrapped up in one - and was rooting for her to keep leading the company into competition with Microsoft. I even secretly enjoy her awkward public speaking skills - which always made me chuckle at the absurdity of the situation. She spoke to us at MIT last semester - during the Q&A session, she kept on interrupting a student who was in the middle of asking a question because new things popped into her head on a previous train of thought. This happened at least 3 times before he was able to finish his sentence. Poor guy - he must have prepped that question in his head many times only to have Diane ruin the moment for him.

During that same class session, some one raised the question of her relationship with Joe Tucci, CEO of EMC. At least back then she was politically savvy enough to say Tucci and her are cool and he’s leaving VMware alone to do its thing i.e. she told us nothing about the real situation. Now, it looks like some thing was brewing all along -

Fair or not, given EMC’s background, when a female CEO gets canned from the wildly successful company she founded and helped steer to its “unsatisfactory” 49% growth, and her “inexperience” and “lack of execution” are cited as the reasons, the tongues are going to wag.

In the end, she’s done a fantastic job. So much of the business-leader image is a smooth-talking MAN in a suit; but here she was kicking ass for years. I still remember how impressed I was when I first used the VMware desktop product at FactSet to reproduce some annoying Adobe Acrobat plug-in bugs. It’s awesome.

Along the lines of GoLoco (ride share), GottaPark is a parking-share marketplace that I encountered while googling for “San Francisco” and “Parking”. It basically facilitates renting out your extra parking spot, such as a driveway, for short-term parking.

This raises a bunch of questions about the validity of the agreement between the space renter and provider. But, if Zipcar works, why not this? I’m looking forward to trying it out. It would be nice to find a spot fast when I’m around Hayes Valley or the Marina - phone integration would be crucial. Zipcar does such a fantastic job with text messages to remind me of or extend reservations

They’re launching July 15th, 2008 and already buying up AdWords, which is how I found them.

The Team Fusion blog mentioned about academic pricing for VMware Fusion today for $39.99. Well, for those lucky Beavers out there, MIT has a site license for a host of VMware products, including Fusion. Couple that with a free student copy of your choice of poison - Windows XP or Vista - there really is no additional software cost to switch from a PC to a Mac and have access to all those necessary Windows-only apps (like Crystal Ball Predictive Modeling software for those DMD problem sets).

MIT students can download VMware products from the distribution site here.

This summer I’m interning in Product Marketing for VMware Fusion.

See me on the Team Fusion blog here.

I remember when I first got the email from VMware HR in the spring about a position in Product Marketing, I thought to myself, “What are the chances this is for Fusion?” Lo and behold, a day later I get an email signed “Pete Kazanjy. Product Marketing Manager, VMware Fusion”. Now Fusion is a fantastic product, but it’s a tiny fraction in terms of revenue share amongst VMware’s bevy of enterprise desktop and server products. I thought: maybe they saw my blog post earlier last year on VMware Fusion vs. Parallels. Or they saw my face on the Fusion Page on Facebook. Yeah, right. It was just one of those happy coincidences that really should happen more often in life.

After a few emails, a phone call, and a visit to Palo Alto, I’m here marketing the product. It’s awfully nice to work on a product that you actually use and love. As a recent Mac convert, I often get asked about dealing with the learning curve of a new OS and specifically choosing VMware Fusion or Parallels. And without being paid, I’ve always said VMware Fusion.

But, as a gamer, I’ve always suggested new Mac users to run their virtual machine off their BootCamp partition. Now the updated advice is to run a real virtual instance of Windows and keep a lightweight version on Boot Camp for the gaming itch. The main reason being you can suspend a real virtual machine, making it much faster to access when you need it.

More on my summer experience to come!

Last week Tim Westergren, the CEO of Pandora, came to speak at MIT Sloan. I have been a huge fan of Pandora ever since it launched 2,3 years ago so it was exciting to meet the man behind it.

Pandora

When I want to listen to new and good music, I go to Pandora (here’s my Pandora profile). It’s simple and it really works. Just last week, after the talk, I told Ting about the site and she wrote me later gushing about her addiction to her Kelly Clarkson channel (Kelly Clarkson? hmph). I haven’t found anybody who didn’t love the site once they’ve tried it!

From Tim’s talk, I found that after all these years Pandora’s music “engine” is still powered by the human ear. This is pretty interesting since not long ago I was just having a discussion with some one who thought Pandora must have figured out a better way to automate and scale its database by now. Well, I got it straight from the horse’s mouth: of the 120-ish employees at Pandora, 50 of them are “musicologists” who sit around all day long listening to new songs and rating them based on 400+ dimensions. It takes ~15-45 minutes to analyze each song. Tim joked about taking great pains to beat the personal bias out of musicologists to get an objective analysis - I had a vision of a poor struggling musician being locked in a tiny room listening to crappy techno all day long. He also defended Pandora on not factoring in social context and popular opinion - the phrase he used was it “eliminates social snobbery”.

He gave an anecdote of a user who emailed him - upset that on his “Enya” channel, a Celine Dion song - with a rather cheesy reputation - showed up. After a few back and forth emails, the man concluded, “Oh my gosh. I’m a Celine Dion fan!”

I suppose that’s a pretty good argument and directly contradicts some of the other recommendation analysis engines out there such as The Echo Nest, which purports using sentiment analysis of a song or artist on the blogosphere. I still think if there was a way to automate the music analysis portion of the business Pandora could scale its database a lot better.

On Music Subscription

Tim also stated that he doesn’t believe in music subscription services because 1) it’s “not the way people are use to paying for music.” This point I don’t agree with since I am the kind of person who would pay for subscription music. The radio is great but I also want control and access to a large library. 2) He also referred to the regulatory hurdle related to on-demand subscription service as a deterrent - each song has to be individually negotiated, thus making it impossible to have a large database of songs. On the other hand radio play requires just one RIAA license.

On Tim

I think above all I liked Tim’s personal story as a struggling musician turned entrepreneur. He’s a great story teller and has a ton of self-deprecating charm - taking us through Pandora’s early struggles (and even getting sued by employees by giving them IOU’s!) to its eventual popularity.