Fifteen years ago yesterday, the World Wide Web became official and was put into the public domain. In honor of that fact, one of our colleagues at frog (thanks Ben Tomassetti!) brought in a birthday cake for it today:

(Thanks to Cary Gibaldi for the photo) 

Note the nerd humor with the binary numbering of the years…there are 10 kinds of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don’t. I can’t say that it actually was the “moistest cake I’ve ever tasted”, but, like the web, it was free, so I’m not going to complain.

This blog post at SiliconValley.com from yesterday sums up the situation nicely:

It could easily have gone differently. Fifteen years ago, the management of the CERN physics lab in Geneva could have decided that this World Wide Web thing that researcher Tim Berners-Lee was working on might have some proprietary value down the road and put it under lock, key and license. But they didn’t. Fifteen years ago today, they put it into the public domain and changed history. Of the many Web milestones we celebrate, that makes this one special.

The CERN directors took some convincing. “The difficult part was explaining to them the true nature of what the Web was going to be,” Berners-Lee’s colleague Robert Cailliau told the BBC. “We had to convince them that this was going to take off and it was a really big thing. And therefore CERN couldn’t hold on to it and the best thing to do was to give it away. We had toyed with the idea of asking for some sort of royalty. But Tim wasn’t very much in favor of that.”

A public service announcement for Richardsona readers: Avoid 10,000 B.C. like the plague. What an excorable movie. If the Geico cavemena are ticked off at that company’s slogan “So easy even a caveman could do it,” they should be launching a class-action lawsuit against the makers of this monstrosity.

The dialog is awful (even considering they are “cave men”, as one reviewer put it on IMDB, “the dialogue that comes out of the mouths of these people are as wooden as the spears they carry”). The plot turns went beyond fantasy - which at least needs to have some kind of internal logic - to plain ridiculous (the travellers move from Himalaya type mountains to rainforest to Egypt, all on foot and seemingly within a matter of days; the saber tooth tiger doesn’t kill the hero after hero frees said big cat). And while I wasn’t expecting National Geographic historical accuracy, the jaw-droppers came thick and fast (the pyramids are being built in 10,000 BC using domesticated woolly mammoths; tamed horses way before they actually were; all kinds of mix-ups of stone and metal ages).

The special effects are well done, but ultimately for nought as the scenes themselves are dull. The set-piece woolly mammoth hunt and the giant-killer-ostriches-in-the-tall-grass scenes completely lack tension and are terrible copies of their obvious antecedent scenes in Jurassic Park.

The hero’s-journey plot is straight out of Joseph Cambell 101 and is extra-ordinarily ham-fisted compared to even the last three Star Wars movies, which come across as paragons of subtletly by comparison. Come to think of it, the acting, dialog and pacing of those three films are all way better than 10,000 B.C. and that’s saying something as I had a hard time sitting through those.

At least 10,000 B.C. had the sense to limit itself to 90 minutes, but it’s an hour and a half of my life I’d like to get back. Oh, and I’d like to get the twenty bucks back too.

My wife felt that it was a notch above The Avengers (probably agree) and Waterworld (simply because 10,000 B.C. lacked Kevin Costner, but otherwise I thought Waterworld was at least visually more interesting and, heaven forbid, more plausible). So it certainly makes my top 5 of worst big budget movies.

Don’t even bother to pay cable on-demand, wait til you’re suicidally bored on a Saturday afternoon and it comes up on regular TV in a couple of years. Even then, I’m sure you’ll be able to find something better.

And finally, a personal note to director Roland Emmerich: you’ve had some OK movies in the past (Day After Tomorrow, The Patriot) and I was willing to give the benefit of the doubt. I thought even if the plot was stupid and the characters cardboard cut-outs, at least the spectacle would be good and fun would be had. Wrong on both counts. This is the last movie you’ll get me into.

So here are the lessons I take from these movies and apply in my daily work life:

• End commands with “people”, as in “Let’s work this, people!”. The word “everyone” is far too wimpy. And the “let’s” shows that you are actually contributing, not just telling them what to do. This is Tommy Lee Jones’ favorite.
  
• If you want to get your team’s attention for an inspirational speech, start it with “Listen up!”. This is even better combined with “people”, as in “Listen up, people!”. Pamela Landy in The Bourne Supremecy  abbreviates this to start off a great motivational talk: “Listen, people - do you have any idea who you’re dealing with? This is Jason Bourne. You are nine hours behind the toughest target you have ever tracked. Now I want everyone to sit down, strap in, and turn on all you’ve got. That would mean now.” Hoo-wee!
  
• Stalk the room and bark orders while your team cowers at their stations. Hover over them, so that they work more quickly and efficiently. Everyone knows that typing speed goes up exponentially with proximity of an observer.
• Divide tasks up and assign them to individuals so that they can’t collaborate. Furthermore, make them individually responsible and give them impossibly large tasks, but discourage them from collaborating. Pamela Landy again demonstrates this in The Bourne Supremacy where she instructs her team to “box” the problem out, dividing it up into chunks to be worked on separately.
  
• If you want something done quickly, add the word “stat” at the end of the request. As in, “Get me those files, stat!” No-one knows what it means, except it’s vaguely medical and is just a fancy word for “now”. But it gets respect and action, without any eye-rolling.
  
• Never praise your team, individually or collectively. And in fact it’s much more effective to take credit for their work
• Berate and swear at team-members in front of their co-workers if they do something wrong (or even if they don’t). It’s a proven motivational technique.
• If your team screws up, throw them under the bus to management
• Stereotypically nerdy workers with bad hair, taped-together wireframe glasses, and untucked shirts can be driven to work long hours while they write obscure software that only they understand. The fact that only they understand it should mean they are highly valuable to you and would have lots of latitude for negotiation, but in all cases they fear for their jobs, possibly because they will be deported back to the foreign country they often seem to come from, where their work is unappreciated. (A great example is Russian programmer Boris Grishenko in Goldeneye, in one of Alan Cumming’s more nuanced roles.)
  
• If all else fails and your team can’t work the problem, computers and networks of remote cameras, databases (encrypted with 4-letter easily-guessed passwords) can be relied on to miraculously deliver a solution. (It happens on CSI every week, and in all 18 of the Tom Cruise Mission Impossible movies.)
  

Anyone else have any good leadership advice they’ve found from movies and TV?

Listening to a radio program this morning about the possible Microsoft/Yahoo merger, Cnet’s Michael Kanellos argued that one of Yahoo’s problems has been its inability to kill off unsuccessful properties. Citing Google as a counter-example, he discussed how Google has been able to pull out of less-than-successful businesses, such as its own social networking tool and Google Video (I would throw Froogle onto the list as well). 

To be fair to Yahoo, they have recently stopped Yahoo photos in favor of Flickr, and just today announced they are selling their music service to Rhapsody. But it’s also fair to say that Yahoo has gone beyond being a “one stop shop” (1990’s portal thinking) to a company that neither employees nor customers really know what it is about. I would tend to agree with Kanellos that an unwillingness to draw boundaries around what’s in and what’s out has a good deal to do with that. (Full disclosure: both Yahoo and Microsoft are clients of frog design, where I work, though I have no inside knowledge of the merger at all.)

In the book Code Name Ginger which chronicled the development of the Segway Transporter, there was a great phrase — “drowning puppies” — that describes the mindset necessary when tackling innovative products and services.

The challenge is this: you’ll have lots of great ideas, but you will only be able to expend finite resources to bring a small number of them to market. If you try to spread resources across them all, they will all be starved and unhealthy. So you have to prioritize and not fund some of them. This is very difficult because, just like puppies, these ideas bounce around joyfully and are so shiny and perfect and full of future growth and promise. But the sad fact is you have to drown some of your puppies. It’s a harsh phrase, but accurate.

Yahoo has continued adding property on property, service on service, but has not done enough drowning of puppies to allow shifting away from less successful areas. Regardless of whether the merger happens or not, let’s hope they can regain some of their focus both for their employees and their customers.

I wrote in my end-of-year wrap-up about the Pentax K10D, a prosumer digital SLR, and Pentax has just announced its successor, the K20D. This has led to a storm of commentary in several Pentax discussion forums which are a microcosm of the extremism that the internet often generates. The level of emotion really gets out of hand quickly as people try to one-up each others’ arguments.

What are all the arguments about? In this case, in part whether Pentax dropped the ball by not improving the frames-per-second (fps) that the camera can shoot. Both the K10 and the K20 are 3fps, which is arguably slower than the competition. Some people, presumably who shoot fast moving sports, wildlife or kids, are vociferously complaining about “only” 3fps and are really dominating the conversation. However, a poll going on at The Online Photographer is (as of this writing) showing that 3fps is just fine for the vast majority of people.

This highlights two things:

1. Complainers tend to outweigh the silent majority of satisfied people and leads to a skewed perspective of the quality of a manufacturer’s products.
2. People’s perceptions of the importance of features can be very different at the point of purchase than in ongoing use.

In any case, the whole dialog reminds me of the famous Monty Python “Four Yorkshiremen” sketch where each man tries to one-up the others on how horrible their childhood was.