Moonwatcher

$500 Referral Fee for the Person Who Finds My Sister Her Next Job

I'm currently working on adding an economics major to my computer science degree, so when I learned that my sister Martha had just been laid off from her tech writer/editor position at Freescale here in Austin, I saw her job search as an opportunity cost problem.

She's already begun her search for a similar position here in town and will undoubtedly find something suitable. But there's an opportunity cost for the time she spends searching (and not earning).

It occurred to me that she would come out ahead if she could pay to reduce that amount of time as long as her out-of-pocket cost was less than the opportunity cost of the time saved. (Dr. Hickenbottom, do I get extra credit for this?)

This is also an interesting opportunity to crowdsource a job hunt, something I've never done before.

So I called her up and asked if I could offer a $500 bounty to the person who finds her her next job. She agreed (and will be paying the $500 herself), so that's the offer:

The first person to lead her to the job she winds up taking gets $500.

Specifically, she's looking for a full-time technical writer or editor job in the Austin area. She's held similar roles at companies as diverse as ichat, HP, and Freescale, and is exceptionally smart and very professional.

Please don't bother sending in every listing on Monster.com. You're guaranteed not to be the first person to send any of those in. This is for people who personally know of an open position and can make the connection.

Please email your job leads to martha.wood.jobs@gmail.com. And as always, you can reach me directly at charlie.wood@gmail.com.

This should be interesting!

Update: In the week since I posted this, several people have sent in job leads that Martha is pursuing. But she hasn't decided on one yet, so there's still time to submit yours.

Is Your Company About to Become a Victim of Its Own Success?

The good news: your company is growing, which in this economy is a testament to your hard work and foresight. The bad news: you're about to become a victim of your own success because your customer service is reactive, and therefore always a step behind. What do you do?

You know they need to get ahead of the power curve in service before it becomes a serious drag on your business, but your can't just call a time out while you figure out how to do that. You certainly aren't going to call some big consulting company to help—after all, you need results now, not a 250-page analysis six months from now. And although you'd like to hire an ace service expert, that's expensive in both money and time.

To help companies in exactly this situation, my good friend Jay Grady and his co-founder Lester Thornsberry have just launched Bootstrap Service. Between the two of them, Jay and Lester have an excellent track record of building proactive service organizations, including those at Motion Computing, Vignette, Fujitsu, and Wyse, and others. Now they're providing their services to SMB's that recognize the strategic role of service. They can help with tool selection and implementation, strategy, vendor management, organizational development, and everything else you need to improve and scale your service.

They're blogging so you can get a feel for their philosophy, which spans John Madden, plumbers, and fruit.

End of the Honeymoon for Apple and Google

Apple and Google used to be the Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie of the tech world: beautiful beyond reason, wealthy beyond measure, and totally in love. So how did it come to this?

In 2006 Google CEO Eric Schmidt was named to Apple's board of directors. In 2007 Apple and Google took the top two spots in BusinessWeek's ranking of the World's Most Innovative Companies. Apple built Google search into Safari and the iPhone, and incorporated Google Maps into many of its applications. Google took pains to make their applications work for Mac users. They both hated Microsoft. It seemed like a match made in heaven. But little by little, things changed.

In mid-2007, there was a rumor spreading around the valley that Google and Apple would team up on a cloud computing initiative, possibly by replacing Apple's neglected .Mac service with a branded version of Google Apps. Eric Schmidt seemed to favor such an arrangement when he told Wired News, "We're a perfect back end to the problems that they're trying to solve." But he went further—probably too far. "They have very good judgment on user interface and people. But they don't have this supercomputer [that Google has], which is the data centers. What they have is a manufacturing business that's doing quite well."

Telling Steve Jobs that Apple is "a manufacturing business that's doing quite well" is like telling Bill Gates that Windows is a "poorly-debugged set of device drivers". One year later, Apple responded by launching MobileMe, a set of applications that includes online email, contacts, and calendars. Like Google Apps, but with over-the-air iPhone syncing. But the sparring wasn't over.

At the end of 2007, only five months after Apple's spectacular release of the original iPhone, Google announced Android, a competitive mobile platform. Steve Jobs responded by telling the New York Times that Android would "divide [Google] and people who want to be their partners." Like all celebrity feuds, the one between Apple and Google had moved into public view and was now taking place in the press.

In early 2009, Google announced that it had ported Picasa, its iPhoto replacement, to the Mac. Apple announced iWork.com, which is similar to but not the same as Google Docs. By this time no one was surprised by the passive aggression.

Yesterday Google launched Google Sync for iPhone, which adds the over-the-air sync functionality (perversely, using a Microsoft protocol both companies had to license) to Google Apps that has until now been the defining feature of MobileMe. Suddenly Cupertino and Mountain View seem a lot farther apart.

Celebrity marriages are hard to maintain and often end in very messy, very public divorces. But for the moment at least, Apple and Google are still together. Eric Schmidt still sits on Apple's board, but now recuses himself from mobile phone discussions at board meetings. Presumably he'll need to start doing the same when the subjects of online productivity applications—or photo applications for that matter—come up.

Apple and Google are two of my favorite companies. I hope they find a way to stay together. (And if they don't, as my friend Chris Selland points out, who gets custody of Al Gore?)

Google Starts Publishing a Changelog for the Calendar API

When I was at Google in Mountain View last year I met with several of the people on the developer advocacy team. Each of them asked me what improvements they could make to better serve the developer community. My immediate answer was, "Version your services and publish a changelog for them." And lo and behold, they're now doing just that!

Thanks, Google! And more specifically, thanks to Ryan, Trevor, Lane, Michael, Dick, Dion, Vic, Sebastian, Jarek, Tomek, Sergey, and the dozens of other individuals I've dealt with who actually make the changes that better serve the developer community.

Just kidding about Sergey.