Create software that supposedly enhances your users’ convenience by enabling them to do web-based things more efficiently and offline. Require them to download extensive software framework that locks their registry files. Make sure said framework is a slow, painful download, disables the cancel button, continues to log all the scary things it’s doing for maximum effect, and then crashes the computer. Give completion messages with dingbat characters and typos, and then format it incorrectly. On restart, make sure your user knows his performance lags by at least 100% now.

Then, make sure your program hangs on startup. Work on 2nd or third try, with bugs and prompts for serial numbers that you don’t know if you have or why you would need, and make him think, WTF? Let your user figure out a way to get past that.

Be completely non-intuitive on first use to a new user trying to use it to blog, and who has invested so much time and pain in trying you that he is desperately hoping there’s some fantastic payoff. Have some cool features, like Flickr integration, that seem really promising, then totally blow one of the easiest API’s to get right.

Thanks, Ecto! This will be the first and last post I’ll write using you, because I’m going to have to log in on the web interface anyway in order to include the photos of your sucktardedness that I’m going to upload to my flickr account.

Then I get to spend another hour uninstalling everything and hoping it doesn’t smoke my machine.

Please get yourself a copy of Getting Real, kthxbai!

N.b. - As is probably obvious from the above, this refers to the Windows version. . . .

I just came from an internal all-hands meeting at which Jerry Yang presided as newly minted CEO, and Terry Semel announced his stepping aside to the employees of Yahoo! I can’t discuss the content of the meeting, but I can say that this is a very exciting transition to experience, and I am reminded that it’s not the first such passage I’ve participated in in my career.

When I first joined St. Martin’s Press in 1994, it was as the editorial assistant to a guy named Tom McCormack (whose Wikipedia entry really deserves attention). A quirky, opinionated character, muscular creative judgment, an actor’s command, and a sharp’s ability to cover the angles don’t often arrive in a single package, but when they do, look out. Most everyone I knew either revered Tom or reviled him (and occasionally both), but nobody failed to appreciate him — or the $100+ million publishing house that still ran like a family affair and somehow managed to wring profit out of the unlikeliest books.

Tom was a mentor in the truest sense of the word, alternately encouraging and scolding to the verge of tears younglings of various vintages before me, but ultimately jabbing his cuban cigar at the door and sending them off to beat a sure path to success. I was last off the line (and I’ll keep you posted about the other bit); knowing early on that I would witness an interesting transition if I stuck around long enough, I was not disappointed when Macmillan, the parent company, was sold to the Holtzbrinck conglomerate a few years later.

Ideas clash and things change; hypercompetent individuals rebel at the idea of process; cults of literary personality give way to MBA’s. . . but the main thing is the culture and those charged with its clarity. Either a leader can embrace the tonic change, and the management has the stomach to handle the hangover and convene the new day at the old table, or politicians and bureaucrats prevail. At St. Martin’s, I had a front-row seat, was given a chance, and took my medicine (running a line of travel books, mostly figuring it out as I went). The house’s success after Tom left speaks for itself, a testament to the talent he groomed and the successor he seated firmly at the table’s head — the most abiding of the lessons I was left to ponder on his retirement.

As for Yahoo!, I’m similarly thrilled to be a witness to this changing of the guard. Reorgs have their un-fun parts, but change like this at companies as interesting and important as Yahoo! is right now don’t happen very often. Once again, I’m sitting in a pretty interesting spot.

History — and the shareholders and employees of a $40 billion company — will judge the new CEO with a much harsher lens than Jerry Yang ever put himself under as a Founder or as “Chief Yahoo!”. Yahoo! is in a good position to continue its success, but realizing its true potential depends on whether the new guy “gets it” when it comes to recognizing the issues and the opportunities, has the DNA and the creative vision to know what to do, and has the balls and the stamina and the sheer will to make it happen.

For that job description, I can’t think of a more inspired choice.

After I accepted a colleague’s invitation to join his network today, LinkedIn gave me a list of ten other people I might know. Historically, those lists have been utterly useless for me — “other people who have worked at Self Employed”, etc.

Today, amazingly, 10 out of 10 were people I knew personally. Quite a few of them were non-obvious - people I’d met at conferences, or had specific business communications with. Most of them were people I knew well enough to add to my network.

Maybe it was a lucky batch, but it sure seems like LinkedIn’s algorithm found the people in my connections’ networks that I was most likely to know. If I had to guess, I would hazard they are extracting some kind of parameters from the kind of people already in my network and applying them to the set of people (in my network’s 1st-degree network + matching my employers). The approach is obvious, the execution is probably hard to nail, and the effect is exactly what it should be: magic.

It’s a good reminder that, despite all the exciting things Facebook is doing these days, LinkedIn is a very effective “social graph” for my business network. If they innovate fast enough, there’s a lot more they could do with it — and I look forward to it.

If you’re not already in my network, btw, the link is in the column to the right.

I’ve been brewing on a couple of threads over the past few days that I think come together in a complicated but interesting point. We’ll see.

First, I flew over the entire Baja peninsula on the way here. It is almost entirely devoid of anything other than desert life exept at a few very small points. On farms and construction sites, they drive water around in tank trucks, with the water splashing out of the valves. As I sit in a vertiable water-works of a resort without any clue how they get water down here, I am thinking this is not environmentally sustainable.

Second, I see a lot of Volkswagen Beetles on the road, still. As the owner of a ‘71 Ghia built on the Beetle platform (aka VW Type I), I came to the realization that VW Beetles are one of history’s finest examples of an open-source platform. Viz:

• a large number of cars in many varieties built on a common, simple platform
• wide availability of parts (original, refurbished, reproduction) without any that are “proprietary” to VW - you could literally build one from scratch using after-market parts and VW wouldn’t come after you
• a large number of mechanics who know how to work on VW’s
• a robust after-market modifications and add-ons trade (think Baja dune buggies, etc.)
• truly anyone can hack on one without specialized training - if you can build Ikea furniture, you can probably adjust the valves and carb on a VW

Third, I’m here with a bunch of fraternity brothers, a significant number of whom are investment bankers, analysts, or techies. It’s led to some interesting discussion points - among many others, that poverty in China is appalling beyond description; that “small hedge funds aren’t interesting anymore - the consolidation has already begun”; that autism rates are climbing dramatically, and well-educated and affluent people in the U.S. are afraid to trust the food they eat; that “it’s surprising and a little sad that none of us are doing much of anything creative.” (I like to think I’m doing something creative, but the point is well taken given the breadth and artistic creativity of the people we were in college.)

Fourth, I started reading Paul Graham’s (so-far excellent) Hackers & Painters, thinking about value creation and software.

What I’m building up to is a point that the problems of the world are becoming more and more severe, more inter-related across local geographies, increasingly cumulative, and more and more addressable only at an institutional level. The size that institutions need to be to be players is growing - and I personally believe that government is broken.

Small players and startups can take whacks at global-scale problems, and can certainly create value in doing so. But there is so much more leverage if they can slingshot their distribution off a platform. And certain kinds of problems are going to really benefit from the kinds of contributions only an open-source movement can make.

Specifically, I would love to see another generation of open-source vehicles, this time around with an environmentally friendly bent. There would be plenty of motive for this to come from a single source - after all, the VW Beetle was the longest and most produced single-design vehicle in history. But it seems to me the Who Killed the Electric Car? problem largely goes away in an open-source context. People who hack Priuses are on the right track, but we need something more accessible to laypeople, and more modular.

I would also love to see open-source variations on Kiva and KickStart - perhaps with a Cambrian House approach to development and distribution. If you can invent a better human-powered irrigation pump that can increase productivity in developing world rural farming, distribution should not be a barrier.

Finally, we all need to be thinking about the power of the institutions we work for, and how they can be better harnessed - or at leasted “opened” - to potentially powerful, world-changing uses. Because as a society, we’re not going to be able to fly to remote desert destinations and splash around in abundant water forever.