My life with 4 browsers

I hated the late 90s. Actually, I hated developing websites on the late 90. You’d spend more time getting your page to look right on 4 or 5 different browsers and versions than creating great software or content. It was a nightmare. I was happy when Internet Explorer had won and Netscape was dying. Not because I was at Microsoft but because I could develop to fewer browsers. When Firefox was born, I was thrilled to see some browser innovation, but it brought back the bad memories of those years.


Fast forward to 2010 and we have 4 (or 5) solid browser platforms: Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome and Safari. The standards are a lot more solid, and it’s a lot of heck easier to create websites that works fairly well on all those browsers. So, there should be no difference between what browser you use, right? Well, not really.

The multiple browser issue

I have a Mac laptop and Windows PC. Over the last 6 years or so, I’ve used Firefox and Safari on my Mac, and Firefox and Internet Explorer on my PC. There are many reasons I use multiple browsers. Sometimes I want to be signed in to PayPal with two different accounts, and I can’t do that on the same browser. I also like for my taskbar to have an easy access to a certain set of websites (remember websites are applications nowadays, and neither Windows nor Mac get this right yet). So, on my PC I might have IE open with my personal email, personal calendar, and Google Reader, while on Firefox I have my work email, my work calendar, and some other content. It’s very easy to switch back and forth, much easier than switching between tabs.

The final reason I use multiple browsers, and no single browser will be able to fix it, it’s because I need to test websites. I need to see how they look on all 4 major players. That’s something I’ll have to keep doing while I’m building companies and products.

Chrome as the #1

I love to be an early-adopter of technologies that don’t affect my productivity, but once you are talking about daily tasks I don’t use new technology until enough people have suffered the early-adopter pain. I’m never the first one to upgrade my OS (Mac or Windows), my browser, Adobe Creative Suite, MS Office, etc.

For that reason, I didn’t use Google Chrome until a couple a months ago. It was too early for me. But once I joined Conceivian and I had a new computer to setup, I thought, what the hell let me just install Chrome and see how it goes. Wow. Chrome is fast. Firefox and Internet Explorer are slugs. Chrome is clean. IE and Firefox keep adding magic-this, automatic-that, etc.

Now I have Chrome installed on all my computers. I love pinned tabs. I love how Chrome tries to be out of my way, instead of in-your-face-here-is-our-gigantic-logo.

Now, Chrome is not “there” yet. It crashes with a certain frequency. I would say more often than IE crashes, although IE and Firefox tend to crash less, but hang more. I think the Google team building Chrome gets the “web-as-application” aspect, although there implementation still is far behind what it should be, particularly on Windows 7.

I’m very optimistic about the future of web browsers. I believe the standards we have are solid enough, evolving at a healthy pace (one of the reasons of so many incompatibilities in the 90s was because the standard bodies were not moving at the market speed), and the next battle will be on the user experience of the web browser, which for me it means a lot of focus at making me more productive.

TechStars mentorship: GoMiles & Giant Thinkwell

Maybe there hasn’t been a lot of buzz on the press – until now – about the TechStars Seattle and today is Demo Day. The 10 startups show where they’ve got during this period. I’ve been lucky to work with two of those ten startups providing (some) advice.

Giant Thinkwell

First of all, go to their App on Facebook and just become a Fan to show your support. Giant Thinkwell was born during Startup Weekend earlier in the year. Kevin Leneway, which I knew for a couple of years and a former contributor to Seattle 2.0, and Kyle Kesterson met, had a crazy idea.

Giant Thinkwell is creating a social gaming platform for celebrity-based games.   The startup game is combining one of the most powerful business models on the planet with the mass-market appeal of celebrities. Their first game is called "TykeStars". The game is a twist on the popular 1990s Tamagotchi virtual pet toy. However, rather than caring for a cute little animal, you raise a virtual celebrity, such as a baby John Stamos, the actor who played "Uncle Jesse" on the classic 90's sitcom Full House. The goal is to advance your baby from infant to superstar celebrity status. 

GoMiles

I also been involved with GoMiles, a startup cracking the airlines-miles code. GoMiles was founded by Michael Komanitsky and Marc Kamaka. The reason I like them is because they are tackling a real problem. The process of figuring out how, when and which flights you can use your miles is a huge pain. You can sign up for the service right now and they are adding new cool features on a weekly basis. Go try their service right now: www.gomiles.com

Google’s 10% Raise Is a Sign the Good Times Are Over for the Company

Did you hear about Google giving each employee a 10% raise across the board and $1,000 holiday bonus? If you have not, you can read it here. How awesome is this raise for the employees? If you work at Google right now you are feeling pretty good. If you don’t, you wish you worked there, don’t you? But wait I second, I think I heard this story before. Where was it again? Now I remember… It was called “Comp2000” and it was given to all 40,000+ employees of a tech company so big and so powerful every other business feared them.


That’s right… In early 2000 Microsoft was suffering a big problem: brain drain. The allure of the bubble was too powerful to hold back some very smart folks and Microsoft had to react. They revamped the entire compensation system and gave everyone a 15% raise on the spot! Not only that, but they changed the career levels and many people also got promoted, which added an additional 10% to their paycheck.

Microsoft used to pride itself by saying they paid just the average of the industry (50-percentile) and the appeal of working for the most powerful and dynamic company and the potential of stock options worth millions was enough to offset the lower salaries. Well, after a crazy couple of years and the stock at $120, management really didn’t see how things could get better for the stock and other companies were offering better salary, with more exciting opportunities and a much more interesting risk-reward ratio.

This is bad news for Googlers

Google is clearly doing this to put the brakes on the high numbers of employees leaving the company. The high-profile key-employees won’t be affected by that. A 10% raise will not be enough to hold them back more than a couple of months. These folks will continue to leave just like they continued to leave Microsoft during the 2000s.

The most interesting aspect for me is that it shows a lack of confidence from management on the growth value of the stock. Your salary going from $150,000 to $165,000 pales in comparison to your stock going from $500,000 to $1,000,000.

What’s next for Google?

If history repeats itself, no later than 2013 Google will eliminate stock options from their compensation package and give everyone restricted stocks, just like Microsoft did in 2003. That’s a clear indication that a company goes from “Growth mode” to “Value mode”.

I always thought that Google was a lot like Microsoft in many ways, except they started 23 years later, but they are running twice as fast, which means by 2020 both companies will have exactly the same age.