As I May Think...

This morning at 6:19:51am, the SEC accepted for publication Google's IPO prospectus. Sometime later they actually published it and PubSub.com notified me of it at 6:25:29am -- just over five minutes later. At 6:42:55am, almost 23 minutes after the SEC released the prospectus and 17 minutes after PubSub had alerted me about it, I finally got a notification from Google that the prospectus had been released. Note: Google used a Morgan Stanley mail server (picfbh6.ms.com) to send the announcement.

I had thought that as a registered bidder on Google shares (I didn't actually buy any), that I would be receiving notifications about the IPO from Google much faster than if I had relied on other channels. However, throughout the process of the auction, as Google made new filings and modified older ones, I consistently received notifications from PubSub.com about 20 to 30 minutes before I got similar notifications "straight from the horse's mouth" -- i.e. from Google itself.

Adam Bosworth has moved from BEA to Google and after a lifetime of building enterprise applications is beginning to discover both the joy and the challenge of building web-based consumer services. Part of the challenge, he recognizes, is that "The scale [of consumer applications] is orders of magnitudes more than is normally processed by a business process within even the largest corporation." Adam uses this as a jumping off point to talk of how important it is to focus on simplicity in design -- not only to ensure that the system is usable by "mere mortals", but also to ensure that the required performance can be delivered.

The drastic scale difference between enterprise and consumer services is something that we've grappled with quite a bit at PubSub.com. We're constantly having potential investors look over our plans and then "wisely" tell us that we really should focus first on enterprise applications to pick up some "easy money" and fund our initial development. They tell us that only after having had success in the enterprise market should we even try to deliver the consumer service that we have at PubSub.com. The problem, of course, is that we know that the requirements of enterprises are vastly easier to meet than the requirements of a broadly used consumer oriented service. Thus, if we were to do as they recommend, it is almost inevitable that we would take short-term short cuts that would let us meet the limited scale needs of enterprise applications but would probably not help us address the vastly greater needs of the consumer application that is our real goal.