No interest in the Nintendo 3DS in my house

I think it was Matt Shobe who first said to me a few days after the first iPhone came out something to the tune of "Wow, this is going to kill the Nintendo DS, my kids are playing Super Monkeyball non-stop."

I was a bit more skeptical.  "Ah, there's no D-Pad, how far can the iPhone get with games without a D-Pad?"   As a die-hard portable sports gamer who doesn't leave home without a way to play FIFA or NCAA,  I couldn't see a virtual D-Pad ever providing the same tactile experience as a hardware button.  At least I was right about that.  Virtual D-Pads all suck.  But I digress.

The Nintendo DS used to be a staple of every family vacation, long car ride, and even (gasp!) a restaurant trip with the kids where my wife and I wanted to enjoy some normal adult conversation.

But those days are long gone.   I can't remember the last trip we took where we even packed a DS.

But curious as I always am about new products, I gave the Nintendo 3DS a good half hour or so of play at the Game Developers Conference this year, and just came away with. "eh, that makes me sick" - I couldn't play the 3D games.

On a recent trip to Target, the kids tried the 3DS for a couple minutes.  I asked "What do you guys think?  Is that something you want to put on your list?"

"It's cool, but nah - I want my own iPhone"

And that was that.    The snackable, immediate gratification laden format of the games on the iPad and iPhone won the day, D-Pad or no D-Pad.

Note to gadget manufacturers: rules for designing chargers

Is anyone else getting tired of carrying 3 or 4 chargers around with them?   I'm not an electrical engineer and I guess I'm not really talking about laptops here, but if you are a manufacturer creating a phone, tablet, or some other similarly sized gadget, I'd love to know why you would choose anything but Micro USB as your charging interface.  I understand that some batteries are bigger than others.  I understand that some batteries mothers are bigger than other batteries mothers....but surely this is a solvable problem.

Okay, if you are Apple, you have a bazillion other accessories that are already out there in consumers' hands that use your special iPhone connector pinout...and we all have an iPhone and probably an iPad charger...and ahem, why are those different?  So that's okay.

If you are Sony, I will let it slide that you chose Mini USB before Micro USB was popular or existed and so the PS3 accessories and PSP (kinda) will charge with Mini USB.   And I have a Mini to Micro USB adaptor.  It's small enough to not be a bother.

If you aren't Sony or Apple, please make your device charge by Micro USB so I don't have to carry yet another charger.  It's okay if it charges slower than a second dedicated power source, but just make it charge through Micro USB.

Android tablet manufacturers I am looking at you.

Hoping Larry Page says "Damn the torpedoes"

Wow, Ben Horowitz really nails it with his Peacetime CEO/Wartime CEO post.  I think the first item in his litany about halfway down is amazingly salient:

Peacetime CEO knows that proper protocol leads to winning. Wartime CEO violates protocol in order to win.

and also

Peacetime CEO aims to expand the market. Wartime CEO aims to win the market. 

Google has been at a distinct disadvantage in that everything they do is under the microscope.  Google has deep pockets and people love to sue them when they mess up.  Externally, they can never admit who   a certain feature might be competing with or outflanking with things like competitive feature matrices in marketing material.  Users have to figure that out for themselves.

While at Google, I worked on features in my products were never launched because lawyers were concerned about potential legal actions of their direct competitors, and there were times I was asked to reword or redact statements in interviews for fear of seeming too competitive.  Meanwhile we had to watch as smaller competitors and launched the exact same features and make the exact same statements with impunity.  The result is that instead of providing features the users want, features got watered down.  It's the nature of the beast but it was truly a shame because the users lost, and Google lost users.

At the startups I have been involved with, the ones that have been the most successful (including FeedBurner) were the ones where the wartime strategy (redundant because most startups are always in wartime) was "we are going to crush competitor X and we are going to outflank competitor Y."   There's no better way to pull a team together and motivate them than when you have a solid opponent to rally around and beat.

A reason I'm bullish on Larry Page being in command at Google is I think he will take more of a "damn the torpedoes" approach to some of these risks and actually compete publicly.   He needs to be a wartime general and not a peacetime diplomat.  At least that's what I want as a Google user.

The obligatory "I've moved on from Google" post

A little personal news - after a little over three and a half years from the sale of FeedBurner to Google, I have decided to move on - and left Google about two weeks ago.   I've taken a few weeks off and have just gotten around to updating this blog with that news.

As I led the negotiations pre-sale and post-sale integration activities of merging FeedBurner into Google, and have always looked at Google as a place I liked and wanted to be, it was a difficult decision, but it was definitely time.

Most recently I had been working with the Mobile Display Advertising and AdMob team on their rich media strategy and implementation, and I'm glad I had the chance to work with that talented team, but I felt that was in a good place with some new product managers that joined the team, so the time was right to move on.

This will read like a lot of these blog posts - I have no regrets, and Google was an amazing place to work and learn.  From a technologist's perspective, it's hard to imagine a place that can put more interesting pieces of technology in front of you on a daily basis than Google.

Mostly, though, I'll miss the collection of smart and talented people I had the chance to interact with on a daily basis.   Watching how Susan Wojcicki, whom I had the pleasure of working for my entire time there, built and operated her team was a model for how any product executive should run business at Google's scale - and although she doesn't get enough credit for Google's success, I'm hoping her new role as the SVP of the Ads business unit will bring that.   Bringing Product and Engineering together under one leader is the right thing to do in all these announced focus areas, in my opinion.  It should have happened a long time ago.

What's next for me?   I'm taking some time to figure that out with the many people I've met before, during, and after working at Google,  while continuing to advise and invest in the startup community where I think I can offer value. I also have a few ideas of my own I'll be incubating.

I hope to finally have a little time to pick up the guitar again - music is something I spent countless hours on earlier in life but just dropped off for me around the time we started FeedBurner.   And hopefully, I can write here a little more often - I have a ton to say about my experience with FeedBurner and Google that I think can help other entrepreneurs.

I'll post more news here when I have some!