Microserfs (12 page)

Michael has a new obsession: he sits on the patio beside the pool and watches the automated Polaris pool-sweeper scrape decomposed eucalyptus leaves off the pool's bottom. The pool sweeper looks like R2D2 as it hobbles about its duties, and I think they're becoming best friends.

Oh - we have this Euroneighbor named Anatole. He started dropping by when he found out there were other nerds in the neighborhood. As he used to work at Apple, we don't mind his presence as much as we would otherwise. He's a repository of Apple lore (gossip ahoy!). He's a real turtlenecker - one of those French guys who'd be smoking in the rain up at Microsoft.

He said that it was at Clinton's congressional speech when John Sculley sat next to Hillary Clinton that everybody realized Apple was way out of control. Personally, I thought it was glamorous. Then he hit us with a bombshell, which was that Apple never had a contingency plan in the event that they lost the Look & Feel suit. They totally believed they were going to win. Maybe the PowerPC will save them. We warned Anatole not to discuss Look & Feel with Bug, but he said they'd already discussed it and that Bug had seemed bored by it. Bug's forgetting his roots! California's turned him mellow.

Also, Anatole says nobody's simply at Apple; they're still at Apple. It would appear that none of what we hear matches the One-Point-Oh, Gods-in-the-Clouds mental pictures we have of the company. But like most gossip, it merely makes us want to be closer to the core of the gossip itself. We're all drooling for a chance to visit Apple, except a chance never seems to appear. Anatole is useless in this regard. We think he burned some bridges before he left - expense report fudging?

And of course Anatole is a genius. In the Silicon Valley the IQ baseline (as at Microsoft) starts at 130, and bell-curves quickly, plateauing near 155, and only then does it decrease. But the Valley is a whole multi-city complex of persnickety eggheads, not just one single Orwellian technoplex, like Microsoft. As I said - it's sci-fi.

Bug accidentally used the term information superhighway, and so we were able to administer a beating.

Our money situation is tight.

Trying to find money through venture capital is a long, evil, conflictual process full of hype and hope. If I have learned anything here, it's that snagging loot is the key struggle and obsession of any start-up. Fortunately for us, Michael and Ethan have agreed that the best thing to do is to be an R&D company (research and development) and get another company to "publish" our products. That way we don't have to hire our own sales and marketing people, or shell out the enormous amounts of money it takes to market software. We still need funding to build the product, though.

Susan's freaking out worse than anybody. Maybe that's why she and Ethan disagree on everything. He always says everything's "fabulous," while she fumes.

Today Ethan called Silicon Valley "the 'moniest' place on earth," and he's probably right. Everything in this Valley revolves around $$$ . . . EVERYTHING. Money was something you never had to think about at Microsoft. I mean, not that Microsofters don't check out WinQuote daily, but here, as I have said, there's this endless, boring, mad scramble for loot.

For financial reasons, we have to work at Mom and Dad's place, until we're flush with VC capital.

We work at the south end of the house in a big room that was supposed to be the rumpus room, back during the era when society still manufactured Brady children. It has been completely converted into the tasteful carnage of our "Habitrail 2." We call it Habitrail 2 because it's a big maze, because its ventilation hinges on the anaerobic, and because paper is everywhere, just like gerbils nesting inside a Kleenex box. Michael has installed his own two pet gerbils, "Look" and "Feel," inside his astoundingly large yellow plastic Habitrail kit, which encircles the office . . . decades' worth of collecting. We get to hear Look and Feel scampering about endlessly while we work. Karla likes the Habitrail setup because it reminds her of the old cartoon with the chipmunks trapped inside the vegetable factory. She and Michael are continually adding on to it. It's their common bond.

At a glance around the Habitrail 2, there are Post-it notes, photocopies, junk mail, newspapers, corporate reports, specs, printouts, and litter, plus thumbed-to-exhaustion copies of Microprocessor Report, California Technology Stock Letter, Red Herring, Soft•Letter, Multimedia Business Report, People, and The National Enquirer. You get the feeling that if you only reached into this paperstorm you could withdraw a strand of six pulsating rubbery pink gerbil babies. Paperless office . . . ha!

There is a billiard table covered with SGIs, MultiSync monitors, coding manuals, printouts, take-out food boxes, coils, cables, dry-erase pens, and calculators. Over by "The Dad Bar" (diamond tufted leatherette; "Tee Many Martoonies"-style knickknacks) there are compiler manuals, more monitors, and an EPROM chip toaster stacked alongside cases of Price-Costco diet Cokes and fruit leather whips. (My workspace, I am pleased to say, is spotless, and my barely scratched Microsoft Ship-It Award rests proudly underneath a Pan-Am 747 plastic model.)

Needless to say, Far Side cartoons are taped everywhere. I think techies are an intricate part of the life cycle of The Far Side cartoon, the way viruses can only propagate in the presence of host organisms. Susan says, "We are only devices for the replication of Far Side cartoons." Now that's one way of looking at humanity.

And of course there are two long couches for those flights to Australia.

Mom is happy to have our pittance of rent money, and my commuting time is ninety seconds, as I live with Karla in one of the guest bedrooms.

The main drawback about the Habitrail 2 is the ventilation, which could be better. Todd calls it "hamper fresh." We'd keep the sliding door leading into the backyard open more often, but Ethan doesn't want dust and insects infecting our technology. Or Mom's golden retriever, Misty.

Habitrail 2 also features:

• 4-fingered cartoon gloves

• ubiquitous Nerfiana

• 24 Donna Karan coffee mugs (long story)

• a decaf coffee tin labeled "666"

• GoBot transformer-type toys

• Glass beads at the door, like the ones Rhoda Morgenstern had

• herbal tea packets and tea-making apparatus

• several Game Boys

• three 4'-x-8' dry-erase wall boards

• a diet 7-UP pyramid

• an extensive manga collection

• T2 spin-off merchandise

• one Flipper thermos

We inhabit our workstations daily for a minimum of 12 hours. We use brown and white plastic folding patio chairs, so our backs are completely shot. So much for ergonomics. (Thank God for shiatsu.) There's the occasional Homer Simpson "doh!" punctuating the air when someone's cursor bleeps, or the occasionally muttered piss and crap. No one can agree on music, so we play none. Or use Walkmans.

We're doing a Windows version and a Mac version of Oop!. And Michael's drafted the coolest ERS for the graphics, AI, interface, and maybe sound. Just killer stuff, all patentable. Michael needs us to bring his vision to life. Our jobs are:

Michael: Chief Architect. He has the overall vision. He also writes the code engine that drives the graphics and modeling algorithms. He rules the engineers - us.

Ethan: President, CEO, and Director of Operations. His job is to find investors to fund us, find a company to publish and distribute our products, and to run the business day-to-day. Most companies have a CFO, but we can't afford one, so Ethan does the bill-paying, accounting, taxes, equipment-buying, and all that stuff.

Bug: In charge of database and file IO (Input/Output). It's how Oop! stores information to and from the hard drive; it's really complicated, and the kind of thing Bug loves.

Todd: He is "Ditherman" - working on the graphics engine and printer driver. All of the graphics need to be converted into an output format in order to be printed by a printer.

Me and Karla: We're working on the cross-platform class library so Oop! will run on both Mac and Windows. I'm Windows lead, she's the Mac lead.

Susan: She's the User-Interface Designer; in charge of the look-and-feel, the graphics, all that. She's the U-I police keeping me and Karla's code in sync.

Mom has a collection of rocks. This sounds weird, and it really is weird. She has this small pile of rocks on the patio that just sits there. I ask Mom why she likes them, and she says, "I don't know, they just seem special."

So is this something that might lead to her requiring medication? I mean, they're not even nice-looking rocks. I keep looking at them and try and see what she sees, and I can't.

As stated, Karla and I are working on the same things, just in different formats. She's Mac, I'm Windows.

"Entirely appropriate," says Karla, "because Windows is more male, and Mac is more female."

I felt defensive. "How so?"

"Well, Windows is nonintuitive . . . counterintuitive, sometimes. But it's so MALE to just go buy a Windows PC system and waste a bunch of time learning bogus commands and reading a thousand dialog boxes every time you want to change a point size or whatever . . . MEN are just used to sitting there, taking orders, executing needless commands, and feeling like they got such a good deal because they saved $200. WOMEN crave efficiency, elegance . . . the Mac lets them move within their digital universe exactly as they'd like, without cluttering up their human memory banks. I think the reason why so many women used to feel like they didn't "understand computers" was because PCs are so brain-dead . . . the Macintosh is responsible for upping not only the earning potential of women but also the feeling of mastering technology, which they get told is impossible for them. I was always told that."

Remember at the very end of Soylent Green where Charlton Heston screams, "Soylent Green is people!!!!"? Well, I had that same sort of feeling today when Anatole began telling us about working life down at Apple . . . "Apple is Microsoft!!!" He told us that the moods on the two "campuses" are almost exactly the same, and that the two corporate cultures, although they purport to be the opposite of each other, are actually about as different as Tide and Oxydol.

Anatole was hanging around all day today and on the drywall he made this big list of similarities and differences between Apple and Microsoft. Herewith:

Microsoft

waiting for stock to vest

Apple

trying to get laid off

Microsoft

"the Campus"

Apple

"the Campus"

Microsoft

make money

Apple

"1.0" sensibility

Microsoft

Microsoft Way

Apple

Infinite Loop

Microsoft

Bill

Apple

(no longer any equivalent)

Microsoft

Apple envy

Apple

Microsoft envy

Microsoft

boring buildings/good art

Apple

good buildings/art a sideline only

Microsoft

better cafeterias

Apple

better nerd toys

Microsoft

soccer field

Apple

sculpture garden

Microsoft

I-520

Apple

I-280

Microsoft

Intel

Apple

Motorola

Microsoft

average age: 31.2

Apple

average age: 31.9

Microsoft

gray Lexus

Apple

white Ford Explorer

Microsoft

not wild at creating new things but good on follow-through

Apple

good at creating new things but not wild on follow-through

Microsoft

no one ever gets fired

Apple

no one ever got fired. . . until the layoffs started

Microsoft

wacky titles on business cards

Apple

wacky titles on business cards

Microsoft

eerie, Lagan's Run-like atmosphere

Apple

eerie, Logan 's Run-like atmosphere

Microsoft

uneasy IBM symbiosis

Apple

uneasy IBM fusion

Microsoft

13,200 employees

Apple

14,500 employees

Microsoft

people hired in 1991-92 being shuffled around

Apple

people hired from colleges in 1988-89 being turfed

Microsoft

stock set to split

Apple

stock price at cash liquidation value of company; now's the time to buy!

Still no tour of the Apple facilities, I note.

Today was one of those days where it was warm if you were standing in the sunlight, but the moment you left it, you froze.

I saw doves and I thought they were rocks, but they were asleep. My breath made them stir, and the rocks took flight, the earth exploding . . . and my only thought was that I wanted you to see them, too

The man from Whirlpool came to fix the washer today, and he found Black Widow spiders nesting underneath its broken engine, and he showed me the web, and I found myself thinking of catching you, biting you, spinning you within my limbs and setting you free

Don't tell me this isn't true.

Tell me you feel this fire.

Oxydol

Revell

makeover

throw cushion

binder paper

lipstick

Down at the library, Mom made up a list of "deer-proof" plants for Ethan. She got it from Sunset's Western Garden Book. Mom loves Ethan. He's a go-getter.

During lunch, as Ethan, Todd, and I drove in Karla's Carp through the Carl's Jr. drive-thru, Ethan gave us an inspirational chat. "Guys, the last thing we want," he said, "is to seem to be hurting for money. Venture capitalists like to see stability first. Only then will they come in with cash."