BillSaysThis

I wasn’t going to post about the passing this week of Arthur C. Clarke, the last surviving member of the Golden Age triumvirate of science fiction along with Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein, but this memoriam from Edward Rothstein in the NY Times, For Clarke, Issues of Faith, but Tackled Scientifically, was just too lovely to let pass.

I gobbled up the novels and story collections by these masters, finishing nearly all by my high school graduation, and choosing a favorite of them would be very, very difficult. If you put a gun to my head (though why would you?), I’d probably say Asimov by a thin margin due to his mysteries and terrific non-SF books on science.

Despite overlapping in time and acclaim, these writers seem fairly distinct in their voices and expectations. Asimov was the political liberal, valuing the effort and ability of individuals within commonwealth framework but certain that, at the end of the day, we do need a strong guiding hand; the multiple Foundations working behind the scenes as well as the role of unaging robot R. Daneel Olivaw across so many of his books makes that clear.

Asimov was proud to have been president of the American Humanist Association and his fiction showed this, consistently featuring men and women working together for the good of all. Even with help sometimes necessary from outside agencies. One of his early novels, and a personal favorite as it was one of the first novels I read, The Ends of Eternity, typifies this thinking: the protagonists work for a police-type organization that works to prevent changes to the timeline after time travel becomes practical in the 27th century.

Heinlein was at the other end of the spectrum, coming close to facism in his late ’50s/early ’60s novels before moving over the line to unabashed individualism and libertarianism. The former is exemplified by his 1959 novel Starship Troopers, which was nothing like the recent movie except at the most basic plot level, and the awesome story collection The Past Through Tomorrow, released in 1967 but whose component stories were published between 1941 and 1959. Most people point to 1961’s Stranger in a Strange Land as the watershed in Heinlein’s career, and I suppose it was, but for me the great work of his “mature” years was the (fictional) Lazarus Long biography Time Enough For Love, released in 1973.

Clarke, as Rothstein writes, was not really concerned with the conventional political spectrum along which Asimov and Heinlein worked. Instead, despite deeply disagreeing with conventional Western religion, he was interested in the mystical and life-shattering prospects enabled by massive technology change, whether the technology be hard or soft. That is, what fundamental changes will developments such as faster than light travel or accelerated biological evolution bring?

Consider his short story The 9 Billion Names of God; in it, an order of Asian monks bring their centuries-long task of writing down all the permutations of the secret name of God to conclusion by using an IBM computer. Pencil or silicon, it’s technical assistance either way to the monks, and with the final variation on paper the stars above being to wink out.

My favorite Clarke novel is 1953’s Childhood’s End. Friendly aliens come to Earth and help create what seems like Paradise, with no more war or disease or crime. There is a price to be paid, there always is, and the cost is that eventually no more babies are being born. The last generation evolves, guided (or driven, as you prefer) to a different level of existence as beings of pure energy.

All three were towering creative minds and their variety was a key reason why the ’40s and ’50s are known as the Golden Age. Now that they’ve all gone from this plane it feels as if a big star in the night sky has set forever.

So Amazon sends me an email this afternoon to announce a contest with a grand prize (excuse me, “GRAND PRIZE”) of a trip for two to Honolulu with two tickets to a Jack Johnson concert there in late April. I’m not much of a Jack fan but, hey, a weekend in Honolulu, where we’ve never been, on someone else’s dime appeals to me.

I click the link in the email to hit the contest landing page. Instead Amazon shows me the page of rules, with a pretty image of Mr. Johnson at the top to click to enter:

What do I get after the click? A 404! “Looking for something? We’re sorry. The Web address you entered is not a functioning page on our site”

Let’s see how well Amazon’s web monitoring does, if they notice either the error from the 404 and send another email (either to all recipients or, since the URLs are personalized, to me) with a correction or, even better, this blog post.

According to Reuters, President Bush said this morning he had no regrets about the unpopular war in Iraq despite the “high cost in lives and treasure” and declared that the United States was on track for a major victory there.

Back in the land of reality, where thousands of young Americans are dead and many times that number permanently wounded and scared, and more than 100,000 Iraqis are still dead, the financial markets are voting with their boots on how smart this war’s been. They look at the map and see Afghanistan in shambles, with the Taliban and Al Qaeda making their way back to power not only in their own country but threatening Pakistan as well. Right, Pakistan, the country with a few dozen nuclear bombs.

Ben Bernanke and his pals at the Treasury may be doing their best to bail out Wall St. but after a brief run up the market figured out that maybe that $1 trillion-plus Bush has spent on the war might possibly have been better spent on real issues instead of a vain attempt to avenge his daddy’s honor. Some estimates–rigiorously done, by real accountants and economists–put the cost of the war at over $25,000 per American home. Of course the Administration wasn’t willing to raise taxes and pay for this trainwreck honestly, no, they borrowed the money so your kids and theirs can be paying for this when the get old.

But look out Ben, there’s a liquidity trap lurking around the corner and it wants to mug you like a meth addict jonesing for a score. You can try jumping in with both feet to bail out the hustlers on Wall Street, even get help from the guys down the block at Freddie Mac and Fanny Mae, but my Magic 8 Ball says “Too little too late.”

The Democrats, despite all their talk, are little better than belligerent co-conspirators; they’re politicians so why should we expect anything else? Nancy Pelosi and her pals have been in charge of both houses of Congress for more than 12 months now and what exactly have they achieved?

I don’t care if Bush vetoes every bill they send him. Where are those congressional committee investigations the pundits were predicting when the Dems won the House? The ones that would bring to light all the lies and frauds perpretrated by the Bush Administration. Instead they went straight for the standard diversions, like the recent televised hearings on steroids in baseball. Because Roger Clemons, he’s the guy responsible for all the ills in America.

No, my friends, we’re five years down the road and no safer. Heck, we’re mostly lucky the terrorists aren’t smarter and more ambitious than they’ve shown. Bin Laden and Mullah Omar are still large and in charge, Hamas and Hezbollah are still attacking Israel, China’s thumb is still pressed on Tibet’s neck, the banks are melting down, Elliot Spitzer fell over his own hypocrisy, lines at airport security checkpoints still add at least 30 minutes to air travel and George Bush still thinks he’s winning the war on terror.

Sorry to those of you who missed out, though there can’t have been too many since the big room at Fenwick & West’s conference center was packed. Udi Manber is VP Engineering at Google, responsible as he put it for the quality of search results.

Udi’s presentation was titled Here’s what I say, now give me what I need and he did talk about how his team approaches that problem as well as the shear scale of delivering good results to millions of people daily in less than 100ms.

He gave some examples of how the Search Quality group analyzes what you and me type in that little text box, and how after 20 years of exploring search he’s come to understand that in many cases we simply don’t put in a good query. The meaning of good here is unambiguous and having sufficient context. An example of his for this was the search “how many calories in a pound?” We look at it and see the most likely explanation is related to diet, so about 3,000; the algorithms, though, assumed it was a request for mass to energy conversion and gave 9,000 trillion (i.e., E=MC²).

Manber also looked at the other side of the problem, which is that there isn’t always enough information to give a good result. That example query was “Top 20 Names in Peru” and while there was a page that at first glance gave a good answer, and was the first result shown by Google, the page was not the right one. But Google, as he pointed out, doesn’t do much in the way of content creation (hosting on Blog*Spot and YouTube is not creation) and can only show what’s out there.

All in all, lots of good information and not the least because the audience asked some interesting questions. Thanks Udi!

Next month is another great speaker (thanks Tanya), Charlie Kirschner of AIPAC (Americn-Israeli Political Action Committee), who’ll give us a look at how the omelettes get made in Washington. Join us on April 8 if you can.

TS1 and I went from owning no Apple products ever just two years ago to being 100% Macified now. We each have a MacBook, iPod Nano and iPhone, and this week our Time Capsule arrived to complete the set. Admittedly we have the small end of the scale on each but they’re sufficient to our needs and make me happy. With the MacBook at work I’m almost completely insulated from the madness that is Windows, especially the strange, strange Vista.

The Reds recent powerful form continued with a home thrashing of Michael Owen’s Newcastle, a team yet to win since the return of former star Kevin Keegan as manager. $50 million man Fernando Torres followed a midweek hat trick with his 25th goal in all competitions, Jermaine Pennant got a rare score and Captain Fantastic once again closed out the books as Liverpool FC won their fifth consecutive Premiership match.

Tuesday shapes up as an excellent match, the boys are traveling to Milan for the second leg of the Champions League tie with Inter. The Italians are in good form as well, six points clear at the top of the Serie A after beating Reggina 2-0 yesterday. Until last Tuesday no English club had ever won at the San Siro but Arsenal (a 0-0 struggle against relegation-threatened Wigan today) beat stadium sharers AC Milan that night and knocked out the holders.

I favor the Reds to make it two English knockouts though not necessarily two wins if Javier Mascherano doesn’t shake a small injury to get on the pitch.

The team has clearly learned their lesson from Barnsley, even if Chelsea didn’t. Rafa and the players have done well despite the off-field ownership turmoil. After looking dead a month or so ago, the takeover bid from Dubai International Capital has been all over the media. A break in relations between Tom Hicks and George Gillett, Jr., the American co-owners, provided leverage for the Persian Gulf sovereign wealth firm to get back in the game.

The latest I’ve seen is that DIC will buy 98% of Gillett’s stake, 49% of the club,and Hicks the rest in order to retain control. The pair have an agreement giving each other veto over selling their respective stakes, limiting Gillett’s ability to cash in a 50% profit over what they paid just 12 months ago.

Hicks is publicly angry over how the Dubaians are operating, especially that they’ve leaked details of the negotiations to the media. Can’t say as how I blame him when the Emirates spokeswoman is described in the press as having said “that DIC, the investment arm of the Dubai government, would try to dominate Hicks by bankrolling the club with its superior financial clout, and pledged to work on forcing Hicks into selling his 50 percent stake.”

The Reds have a tough patch of games coming up, at Inter is just the beginning. The next four are Reading, away to ManUtd, the Everton derby (which could be the key battle for the fourth Premiership Champions League place) and away to Arsenal. Rafa seems to have gotten his rotation mania in hand and results from all five and a bit of luck could even see us climb over Chelsea.

Go Reds (whoever owns you)!

[Started this over two years ago and just found i lying in the dusty bins…]

The window in the shower in my bathroom
Looks out over a driveway high up and
Across the way to the matching windows
My neighbors’ bathrooms but usually they’re
Dark or closed and frosted, sometimes the
Wire mesh screen obscures the view

Hot water feels so good coursing over the top
Of my head, running down my back and legs
So many times I get lost in thought,
Far enough away from where I stand
To make me lose my place in the cleaning

Once, for three days in a row, one window
One floor down one apartment to the north
Was open and the light was on so I could
See into the bathroom from a high angle
But no one walked in, no naked body presented
Me with a stalker’s thrill

My window brings in fresh air and cools
The Summer heat, offers a path for the air
To flow across the apartment instead of
Standing and dying in place but in
Winter all the windows are closed
Against the cold, but I shiver still.

For years I’ve been talking with people about the way that every year technology and globalization enable smaller numbers of people to do greater amounts of damage. 9/11 was one horrifying example; this week John Robb wrote about a man who embodies this paradigm, Henry Okah.

“Henry Okah is likely someone you have never heard about. Despite that, he is one of the most important people alive today, a true innovator in warfare: a global guerrilla.”

Working mainly against Shell Oil in the Niger Delta region of Africa, Okah and his contractors have stolen enough oil to be a close second to George Bush’s ruinous Iraq adventure as primary factors behind the current $100 per barrel price of oil.

Fortunately for us Okah was arrested recently in Angola and extradited to Nigeria. There are plenty of other dangerous men, of that I have no disagreement with our current administration; when Bush’s second term ends in 11 months there will be a few less.

The NY Times had an article recently on the Product Red campaign and how big corporations are increasingly donating to charities like it. In the article, IIRC, a cynic pointed out that for every donated dollar these companies spend four or five publicizing their good deed.

Watching the Oscars tonight (congrats to Joel and Ethan Coen for their three big wins) I think Coke fell into this same dark alley. They ran a short ad during just about every single commercial break–for over three hours!–announcing a new women’s health initiative sponsored by Diet Coke. Plus a chance to win a red dress worn by Heidi Klum!

Running the spot once every 45 or 60 minutes would probably have fallen within the bounds of good taste but this was just sad. As the show wore on I found myself thinking again and again that Coca Cola would do a hell of a lot more good for women (and men) if they’d just stop selling regular Coke, not exactly the reaction their marketing execs were looking to get.

Seriously, how much damage do their ‘regular’ beverages cause? How can donating a few dollars to a good cause outweigh that?

The Kubler-Ross model describes, in five discrete stages, the process by which people deal with grief and tragedy, especially when diagnosed with a terminal illness. The model was introduced by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross in her 1969 book On Death and Dying. The stages have become well-known as the Five Stages of Grief:

1. Denial: The initial stage: “It can’t be happening.”
2. Anger: “Why me? It’s not fair.”
3. Bargaining: “Just let me live to see my children graduate.”
4. Depression: “I’m so sad, why bother with anything?”
5. Acceptance: “It’s going to be OK.”

I got to thinking about this topic because I’ve just about finished another re-read of Charles Stross’s amazing novel Accelerando and TS1 and I just watched the underrated science fantasy movie The Last Mimzy (which is based on the classic CL Moore/Henry Kuttner short story Mimsy Were the Borogroves).

Accelerando is an important book (in the science fiction world, at least), not just a good one, as the first novel to deal with life during and just after the Vingean Singularity. One of the values of science fiction as a genre is as a tool to simulate and understand possible futures and one can hardly deny the possibility that the pace of technological change may reach an asymptotic curve–the near vertical climb of the so-called hockey stick curve–within the next 20-50 years.

Successful memes often (always?) generate criticism and the singularity has its share. The most significant one for me, which Stross doesn’t flinch from in his story, is that the idea of the singularity is nothing more than nerd nirvana or geek rapture, an idealized future philosophically equivalent to a religious believer’s Heaven and no more attainable or desirable than any other Utopia.

Emperor Palpatine is as likely as Luke Skywalker, the Borg as likely as the United Federation of Planets.

The Five Stages of Grief can also be considered a framework for cultural maturity, albeit with as many exceptions as any analysis of human behavior.

Denial corresponds to prehistory. Human thinking was closer to our tree-dwelling ancestors than our own, with little concern for realities other than hunger, danger and pleasure. Death was nothing more than a phase change, and no one went away.

Anger drove the earliest conscious polities, with the first organized thoughts about the nature of existence and our place in it. Why should life be so difficult and, importantly, why should another tribe have things we need? Hence, theft, murder and war.

Bargaining was the source of religious belief. We can be bargained with and since humans are the pinnacle of existence, whatever explanation there might be for existence must surely be similarly open to negotiation and requests. The major Judean belief systems, Islam, Christianity and Judaism, all say that humanity was created in the Maker’s image and what are prayer and faith if not attempts to bargain?

Depression seems to me to be the predominant emotion of our current Post-Modern Age. Waiting for Godot and Night of the Living are the same story at the core, dressed in different clothing to appeal to different audiences, and part of the process of dealing with our more-developed understanding of existence.

Some people refuse to accept our new knowledge, which Jim Fitzgerald and I wrote about in the days after 9/11, and others propose a middle path, a third way, a belief in a Judean Deity for ethical, behavioral guidance and acceptance of the scientific method as the explanation of the mechanics of the physical world.

Both groups refuse to accept the logical fallacies of their mental models and are the core cause of the conflicts at the root of most of our current conflicts. Which shows how amazing consciousness truly is, without regard to hypothetical explanations of origin, that so many people can hold mutually contradictory beliefs inside their skull.

I recognize my own easily disproved belief: that with the right logical arguments and context any (mentally healthy) individual can and will change their behaviors and beliefs.

This recognition, I think, proves my own mental health but also underlies my point about depression. Some critics say that modern America over-medicates as a crutch but they’re wrong, caught in the third stage and unwilling to accept the utility of technology.

Stross along with Last Mimzy scriptwriters Bruce Joel Rubin and Toby Emmerich, as well as most others writing fiction about the topic these days, differ from the earlier views best exemplified by Arthur C. Clarke’s 1953(!) novel Childhood’s End in seeing science as the primary mechanism of transformation.

1953, after all, is only 10 years after Thomas Watson, then president of IBM, famously forecast that he could see only five computers fulfilling the entire worldwide demand. Clarke surely knew better while writing that novel, since there were already more than five computer companies, but he still resorted to an external agency as the means through which humanity ascended beyond physical shackles.

No, today’s futurists project from research on connecting our “meat sleeves” to external sensorium, processing and storage systems, unraveling DNA, RNA and proteins and glimpsing Planck scale phenomena. Stross sees less than a century from our present to near future developments like Manfred Macx’s theatre of mind, then his daughter Amber’s ambitious exploitation of the orbital energy of Jupiter’s moons and finally the conversion of our Solar System’s dumb matter to computronium arranged in successive shells around the Sun, each layer powered by the waste heat of it’s inner neighbor’s irreversible computations.

Which gets us, finally, to Kubler-Ross’s fifth stage, acceptance, the only way we’ll get to see those wonders come out of the lab and into our lives. The refuseniks’ violent response to the collapse of their simplistic world view, from Osama bin Laden to Timothy McVeigh, from Vladimir Putin to Dick Cheney, suggests the truth of my assertions as well as their fragility.

Frankly, every year science and the inexorable march of technology not only enrich our lives ; they also enable smaller and smaller groups of people to cause greater and greater damage. One obvious example from which we all suffer every day since September, 2001: Al Qaeda only needed 20 men and $500,000 to kill nearly 3,000 people, destroy billions in real estate and other property and draw us into six years of war that cost tens of thousands of lives and trillions more dollars.

Eric Drexler, in the prescient nanotech primer Engines of Creation, foresaw the need to develop a framework for controlling technology before it jumped out of theory, something Bill Joy brought to the mainstream in his 2000 essay Why the future doesn’t need us. Sadly, Drexler’s call went in general unheeded and Joy’s pessimistic screed provoked a defensive, can’t happen here backlash from techies concerned about losing their shiny toys.

So where do I see this going? To acceptance, of course, since despite all my fretting I am an optimist. My metaphor is a tree trunk across a high gorge which must be crossed and the trunk’s thickness varies with my optimism.
For many years the trunk got narrower as assorted negative and potentially negative events came to light, but in the last couple of years, despite the madness of King George and all his mistakes, it’s gotten steadily wider.

Major upsets are fun when you’re rooting against the favorites and for many reasons I generally root against the Patriots so the Giants victory tonight was a nailbiting pleasure. Of course I grew up in New Jersey and was a huge Giants fan and USC alum/rookie receiver Steve Smith was a key offensive weapon, so there’s that too.

I also enjoyed the unusually fast pace of the game; NFL games in general and playoffs especially are excruciatingly slow but tonight the first and third quarters barely took 30 minutes and the game ended around 40 minutes earlier than expected. That means besides the Patriots, the Giants also handed a big L to Fox and Rupert Murdoch.

Sweet!

In an analysis that should startle no informed person, the Human Rights Watch World Report 2008 says that the US, EU and other democracies are accepting flawed and unfair elections out of political expediency.

Allowing autocrats to pose as democrats without demanding they uphold civil and political rights risked undermining human rights worldwide, it warned. For example, HRW said that Pakistan, Thailand, Bahrain, Jordan, Nigeria, Kenya and Russia had been falsely claiming to be democratic.

Personally I was shocked, completely shocked, to read that Bush apologist US state department spokesman Sean McCormack said, without reading the report, that out country did not promote false democracy nor condone human rights abuses. “In terms of the United States and this administration speaking up in defence of, and advocating for, and putting its effort behind its rhetoric, I don’t think there’s any question about where we stand in terms of promotion of democracy,” McCormack said.

You probably saw that Highway 101 was closed from 2 p.m. on between Highway 92 and Palo Alto. The Marketo office is in San Mateo, a few blocks north of 92, while the BillSaysThis HQ has been in Mountain View for 11 years now. These two facts resulted in three (3!) hour elapsing between leaving the office and arriving at the HQ. BST executives were unwilling to provide a quote suitable for our family-friendly publication.

The tanker truck vs. minivan action behind the 101 closure caused a 2,000 gallon gasoline spill. The gas deteriorated the highway asphalt so badly an emergency repavement was needed; two lanes are still closed 24 hours later and all northbound lanes will be closed again after tonight’s commute hours to work on the rest. Fortunately my evening commute is southbound so I hope it will be okay, a repeat of yesterday’s would cause severe mental issues.

(One wonders, of course, how it is in this age of modern chemistry and near nanotechnology that highway asphalt is vulnerable to this type of damage.)

(One also wonders where the #$@! the local police forces and the CHP were during last night’s commute because they sure as heck were not out helping smooth the alternate traffic routes on, say, El Camino Real.)

This morning the BST limo took a delayed departure over the alternate routing on 280 and 92 in a reasonably successful attempt to minimize travel time. A co-worker coming from Milpitas did not and so arrived 30 minutes after me despite leaving earlier. Uggh!

I was reminded of the long ago days when I commuted from New Jersey to Manhattan and several times PATH service was disrupted. Yesterday might have been bad but barely knee high to those disasters.

My friend Pam has opened a new blog, Goal: Australia 08, listing some art pieces she’s collected over the years that are now for sale to help pay for her trip later this year to Australia. As she writes in the sidebar, “make me an offer so that I may truly realize this seemingly impossible dream.”

My favorite of the pieces listed so far is this Balinese Topeng:

Having pretty much surrendered to the whole Apple thing, I grabbed a free exhibit pass when they were available a few months back and the Big Guy and I headed up to SF Wednesday to see what happens when a critical mass of Macaholics come together.

Strangely, the main objects of devotion, judging by number of booths dedicated to them, are backpacks, carrying cases, covers, jackets and other means of protecting MacBooks (Pro, Air or plain), iPods and iPhones. A close second were headphones. I did pick up a cute little iPhone/iPod accessory called the Hangman for TS1 and me; it plugs into the docking port and provides

None of the software really got my juices flowing but that’s down to my not being a graphics or science geek. The Big Guy is more or less both so he found a few very nice pieces. H&R Block was handing out a free copy of the Basic version of TaxCut so I at least got that for my time. And a can of a not terrible energy drink called BrainTonique at the NewerTech booth.

I did try and get my hands on the MacBook Air but, not willing to wait the 15 or 20 minutes to get close to one of the many demo stations, had to settle for checking out the dangling strings that were hanging from the ceiling at either side of the Apple space. These are the most portable, awesomely designed little computers I’ve had the pleasure of seeing–they really are freaking light and thin!

As if you didn’t already know. You did, didn’t you? Let’s just say you did.

Cocaine and self-cleaning toilets are not a good combination even for hot blondes (YouTube video)

Jew Rock – while, despite the name, we can’t claim Mr. Springsteen (he’s Dutch/German) we do have–among many other–E Street drummer Max Weinberg, Bob Dylan and his sometime sideman Al Kooper, David Lee Roth, Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley of Kiss, Carol King and her early ’60s songwriting partner Neil Diamond, country rocker/Texas gubernatorial candidate Kinky Friedman, glam rocker Marc Bolan, Clash guitarist Mick Jones and poet/folkie Leonard Cohen.

McSweeney’s Internet Tendency is a true web institution with enough funny bits to occupy a guy for an entire weekend, or week.

Still proving it has legs, but Funny or Die is a web startup co-founded by fellow USC alum Will Ferrell and Adam McKay (who wrote and directed the SNL star’s hits Anchorman and Talladega Nights). This is probably why Ferrell gets sideline passes to Trojan football games and I do not.

Even the grey old NY Times tries to get in with this MBA-style appraisal by Andrew Kuo of Tod dHaynes’ very strange recently released Dylan bio-pic I’m Not There.

You can laugh now.

Since starting at Marketo (which is going great, by the way) I’ve become more and more impressed with the skills of Glen Lipka, our user experience architect. Just yesterday Glen, Jon (my boss) and I had an intense discussion around what tools we’ll be using to deploy our content and community.

My initial proposal was to use an integrated WordPressMU/bbPress system, abetted by a set of useful plugins, but Glen pointed out that (a) this would take quite a bit of effort and (b) not provide the best user experience since the same tasks would have two different affordances, to use Don Norman’s terminology. Instead, he convincingly argued, we’d be better off finding a malleable, extensible forum package.

The importance of this style of thinking about problems was reinforced for me when I read Mark Hurst’s post Customer experience case studies to start 2008 and seeing StaffTool, a promising new web application for churches and other non-profits that was developed by one of my fellow Joyeurs, Toby Sterret.

The converse example was my recent dealing with United Airlines. This company really does not want customers to be in real time contact with staff. The most obvious context is calling for help after one’s travel has completed, United’s phone system menu never explicitly lists an option to speak with a human except when the caller is interested in booking new travel; they leave it up to us to figure out that saying agent or operator (the system is voice-driven) will produce the result.

Don’t get me started on how useless the staff are once you do get to a live person. Not that I blame the front line grunts, mind you, who are required to follow scripts and policies given to them. While I enjoy working with customers, my situation is entirely different because, well, my product generally works well and when it doesn’t we have a great team to get things done.

No, the blame for this unconscionably poor user experience at United goes to the executives (as would the praise if pigs flew and this got fixed) and they, of course, never have to suffer from their decisions. They don’t have to listen to customer abuse from people like me who get frustrated at, say, the Kafkaesque frequent flier policies nor do they get frustrated from attempting to navigate those policies since their seats in first class are provided by the company.

I have little doubt that our founders’ decision to build Marketo based on good user experience from the get-go will be significant as we build a successful company while United Airlines’s history shows that ignoring this important factor produces terrible results.