Update

Way too busy. Here's the quickie:

• Shipping CRMbrella to existing customers. You can try it at CRMbrella.com. If you have SalesWorks, uninstall that first (no we didn't do the uninstaller work because there are not a lot of you out there).
• Rainy weather made the strawberries late, says Henry Stoltzfus to Amy, and now we have tons of berries sitting in creates. Casey'll sell them! We're buying some and freezing for the winter. A great idea that served us well all through the year.
• Gotta run. Yeah, it's that bad--tons to do, not enough people to do it...

O'Reilly's Producer

The other side of the O'Reilly blowup video...

Shipping

Shipping, as Steve as said many times, is hard, not because any particular task is hard, but because there are so many of them, and it's hard to know, well, the unknown. Rumsfeld famously said

There are known knowns; these are things we know that we know. There are
known unknowns; that is to say, there are things that we know we don't know.
But there are also unknown unknowns; there are things we don't know we don't
know.

Yes, well, when it came from him it seemed callous and arrogant at a time when troops were dying and we couldn't get a straight answer out of him.

But in software, there are black holes, sometimes; a problem occurs intermittently and it's hard to narrow down the cause. Works on XP but not on Vista, but it does on Vista Pro if you have a certain setting, but not on Home because that setting doesn't exist, so then of course it turns out it's an error in a test script and not a bug at all. Those are the worst--when the tools you come to the table with aren't quite working, so it makes the software appear not to work.

My initial target to ship CRMbrella (formerly SalesWorks, and I'll explain the name change some other time), internally, was April 25th. We started testing several weeks before then. But in the course of testing, writing help, incorporating help, creating the licensing, testing the licensing, accommodating for some of our planned market testing, unexpected vacations and the lack of a journeyman on the project, we slipped until May 12th.

And then we hit the unknown unknown. And it was solved after several late nights and early mornings by a hero, Jeff, who works for a local contractor we're using. And now it's a known, and we'll know better the next time, which is only 6 weeks away.

Me, I like the known when it comes to shipping. Discovery should be about innovation, not about packaging the damn product. But I'm proud of the product--it's stable, and it's better than it was before. I'm pretty sure this will do very well.

More on CRMbrella next week.

7 Shots

Trouble sleeping tonight. Got up for some water and heard 7 shots ring out in rapid succession. The last time I heard that was in Honduras outside my hotel room. When someone shoots like that, they mean it.

The History of MultiTouch (iPhone Uses It)

As seen by a Microsoft researcher...

Obama Clinches It

Obama now has more superdelegates than Hillary--the rats are leaving the ship.

So--who for VP? My calls?

1. Governor Sebelius (Kansas, woman)
2. Bill Richardson (Governor of AZ, Latino)
3. Nancy Pelosi (Catholic, Italian mother of 5 from San Francisco)

Pelosi won't play well in Red States, but so what. I'm not a huge fan, but she's tougher than the right portrays her to be. Regardless, we'll have a fun time trying to guess who's on the ticket. I'm pretty sure it won't be HC.

I know Brad Feld has written a bunch about this, but I was wondering if it's a subject you could throw out there on your blog if you have one. The big problem for us is pricing options. There's no specific guidance from the SEC or IRS on pricing of options, other than "fair market value", and I fall on the side of employees: options can't be traded or sold in a private company and have very few rights, so their value is not nearly the same as actual common or preferred shares.

My board isn't aligned around this issue. Investors are more conservative, and frankly they have nothing to lose with options being priced high (unfairly high in my opinion). To me, employees of a startup take a risk just by working there, and the options may never have any value. Investors only risk capital; employees risk their livelihoods. If the employees are young and just out of college, then the risk isn't nearly as great as when they have families. At Mission Research we have a LOT of families.

Let me know your opinion. This is one of these issues that is esoteric, painful, and likely irrelevant for most companies. This problem was introduced by Sarbanes Oxley, designed to curb the excesses of the likes of Enron and Worldcom. I understand the need for oversight and regulation, but I hate to see startups crunched by the sins of public companies.