James's Weblog

I received papers from Sony today saying that the USPTO actually approved some ridiculous patent application that my then-coworkers dragged me into filing with them four years ago.

I think it’s just further evidence of how overwhelmed the patent office is, of how ill-equipped they are to evaluate software patents, and of how software patents are usually lame. It’s another example of how large corporations flood the patent office with anything and everything to try to build up their patent portfolios, and not because they think they’re good ideas worth pursuing, but because they want things with which to defend themselves in case someone else sues them for patent infringement. Stupid patent cold wars.

It saddens me to think that my name is associated with that dreck. On the other hand, my name’s all over the dreck that I call my weblog, and as we already know, it’s not an uncommon name anyway.

Sony announced yesterday that they will not release any new CLIÉ handhelds in the U.S. this year:

Sony has divulged that they will not be releasing any new Clie Handhelds products in the coming fall. Sony will be suspending new Clie product development for the US while they reassess the direction of the conventional PDA market.

Sony has issued a press statement in which they announce they are going to reassess the direction of the conventional PDA market and will not introduce any new Clie handheld models in the us this fall.

While certainly significant, I think most web sites have blown this out of proportion a bit:

• It’s only for the U.S.. I expect that Sony will continue releasing new models in Japan.
• It’s only for this year. Palm OS 6/Cobalt will be out late this year, which will be a good time for Sony to get back on the saddle.

I can’t say that I’m surprised by the news; Sony’s poor sense of direction was one of the many reasons why I quit. The writing had been on the wall for a long time, but Sony was too busy not listening to customers to read it.

It’s a good idea for Sony to re-evaluate their PDA plans, to do some soul-searching, and to find themselves. They can’t even figure out what the “CLIÉ” acronym stands for. Originally it meant “Communication, Link, Information, Entertainment.” After a year or two, I guess the Sony heads realized that it made no sense (especially considering that the CLIÉ line had no wireless communication abilities, had few accessories to connect to, and for the most part wasn’t very entertaining), so they changed it to the even more enigmatic “Creativity, Lifestyle, Innovation, Emotion” (or “Create Lifestyle with Innovation and Emotion”, depending on whom you ask). “What happened to the ‘Entertainment’ part?” we wondered, since that was the only part that (should have) made sense. Furthermore, all of the model numbers are prefixed with “PEG–“, which somehow stands for “Personal Entertainment Organizer.” Maybe it’s comprehensible in Japanese.

How did Sony manage to get itself lost like this?

Bad drivers. I’ve already complained about the management and its inability to ask for directions.

Poor steering. What do you expect from a huge, 18-wheeled corporation? The CLIÉ handheld line is stuck; Sony can’t whole-heartedly pursue its original goal for mobile entertainment without intruding into the markets of its PSP and iPod-wanna-be products. Sony can’t whole-heartedly pursue the smartphone market either—one of the last bastions of hope for PDAs—because Sony-Ericsson already is entrenched in the cellphone space. Instead, CLIÉ models are shoehorned into hybrid entertainment/network-communicator/PDA roles. In many respects, they’re good PDAs, but they’re lackluster as music players, gaming devices, and digital cameras. They can’t excel in any single area without competing against other Sony divisions, so they’re instead doomed to well-rounded mediocrity.

I thought I was out of stupid Sony stories, but my former coworker Kevin was surprised that I hadn’t mentioned anything about the spiders.

What Japanese company wouldn’t have a special and conveniently accessible smoking area? The Sony building in San José has a fairly large atrium for such a purpose, complete with benches, trees, hedges, and a weird modern art sculpture. It also was infested with grasshoppers.

For some reason, birds within the atrium were rather rare. Maybe they didn’t want to be boxed in; maybe they were afraid of the humans who were constantly loitering around there; maybe they just didn’t want to get lung cancer. For whatever reason, birds ignored this plentiful food source, and the grasshoppers thrived.

The atrium also had a population of garden spiders. (A western spotted orb weaver, I think.) They were fairly large (not including their legs, they were about the size of a quarter), and they constructed gorgeous and expansive webs.

Every summer, these spiders emerged, fully mature, seemingly from nowhere. Every day of every summer, I tried to capture grasshoppers to place into the spiders’ webs.

Feeding the spiders was one of the few things that made my days at Sony enjoyable. Every fall I was sad when the spiders disappeared.

I guess I’m a sadist.

Miscellaneous happenings:

• Sony had a very restrictive Internet proxy server; it didn’t allow ssh, newsgroup access, or instant messagers (AIM worked eventually, though). I had the “bright” idea of resorting to a dial-up ISP with my second phone line. (I split a cubicle with someone else. There was a telephone line for each of us, but we shared one instead, giving us one extra.) Of course, businesses don’t have flat-rate local calling plans like residences do, which isn’t something I realized until after I had racked up many hundreds of dollars’ worth of telephone charges. Oops.

• One day, on my way to the bathroom, I overheard part of a telephone conversation: “Sony. S-O-N-Y. Like the televisions.” I could only wonder what planet the other person was from; who hasn’t heard of Sony?

• Sony provides an emulator for the CLIÉ handheld. It’s based off of PalmSource’s standard Palm OS Emulator, which is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). For anyone not familiar with the GPL, the gist is that any derived work must have its source code available. (This is a gross oversimplification for a number of reasons, but it’s close enough.) Sony sometimes was delinquent at providing the source code. (Developers want tools available yesterday; GPL zealots say nothing should be provided without source. There’s no pleasing everyone.)

  Eventually, one of my worst fears came true and someone submitted a story to Slashdot about the lack of code. We were used to receiving hate mail, but were we prepared to deal with a gajillion emails from angry, GPL-crazed Slashdot readers?

  We received only one email about it. The complainant didn’t even understand the GPL all that well.

• After too many incidents of rolling into work at around noon-time, my manager instituted a policy: If you can’t make it in by 10:30 AM, don’t bother coming in at all. Uh, so rather than showing up late and putting in 8+ hours of work, I should take the entire day off from a job I hate? Okay.

• I wasn’t there for this, so this is second-hand information: apparently, after I left Sony, they almost hired another person named “James Lin” to replace me. Bizarre. Some cheap Chinese knockoff, no doubt. I wonder if they would have tried to pass him off as me in emails. (Not that Sony didn’t have enough James Lins working for them already; Sony’s silly Microsoft Exchange mail server regularly got confused and sent me mail intended for other James Lins.)

Incidentally, for anyone who ever wanted to know about the meaning and design of Sony’s “VAIO” name: The Origin and Philosophy of VAIO(R) PCs. The “VAIO-let” color scheme is a clever touch.

Somehow, though, I don’t think that kind of thought or ingenuity went into the oft-mispronounced “CLIÉ” name.

My official job title at Sony was “Developer Technical Support Engineer”. I answered programming questions from third-party software developers.

For some reason, I expected programmers to be smarter than the average bear. At the very least, I expected them to know how to ask reasonably intelligent questions, since programmers are on the other side of the fence when their own users submit questions and bug reports.

Boy, was I wrong.

We received a number of emails that looked like:

FunctionFoo() doesn’t work.

to which I’d have to reply with:

Thank you for reporting this issue to us. However, we are unable to reproduce your problem; to speed up our investigation, please provide more information about:

• what specific model you’re using (Sony has a lot of models)
• whether you’re using a physical device or an emulator
• exactly why you think FunctionFoo() doesn’t work (what do you expect to happen, and what actually happens?)
• exactly what arguments you pass to FunctionFoo()

Please provide a snippet of code to reproduce this problem if possible.

(Actually, I usually was a little less polite.)

Even when people did submit code snippets, for inexplicable reasons they too often thought it was easier to retype their code rather than to copy-and-paste it, hence introducing new errors into their code or sometimes removing the actual ones.

In retrospect, it’s not too surprising we received the sorts of questions we did. The smart people usually were able to solve their problems on their own. They also knew that Sony’s technical support services had an abysmal reputation and to avoid them at all costs.

In the aftermath of the theft problem, Sony forced all of its contractors to take an ethics test. We had a choice between taking an hour-long online test or spending two hours in an ethics training class. I chose the test.

It turned out that the “online test” wasn’t online at all; it was a program that ran off of a CD. One of my coworkers explained it to me:

“How will the company know that I took the test?” I asked.

“Your boss will sign you off on it.”

“How will he know that I took the test?”

“You’ll tell him so. If you want, you can save an hour by just saying that you took it.”

Well, being the ethical person that I am, I wasted an hour of company time taking the test anyway. The whole concept of an ethics test seems pretty stupid to me. Wouldn’t unethical people just cheat? Sony’s test was particularly dumb; the questions it asked were all black-and-white, it was always obvious what answers the company wanted, and the questions were mostly about legal issues, not ethical ones.

There was an incident at Sony last summer where someone was fired for stealing equipment from work and selling it on eBay. Apparently he sold:

• complete systems built with parts from testing machines
• device accessories (PDA cradles, notebook docking stations) that had been lying around in quantity
• pirated DVDs that he copied with company equipment

I don’t know the exact details to how he was caught, but the rumor was that he sold a pre-production unit of an old model, that the buyer took it to a service center for repair, and that the service center identified it and discovered the shenanigans.

Sony’s security department monitored him (and probably everyone else) for a while and uncovered his other auctions. After security collected enough evidence, management finally clued the rest of us in on what was going down and on his imminent termination. That night, an eBay user named “sonysecurity” was the high bidder on one of his auctions.

The next day, he was curiously absent from work. (They did find him eventually.)

Several other people involved with him also were fired shortly afterward.

Some CLIÉ handhelds have a feature that lets them behave as universal remote controls. One day, one of my coworkers and I went to Fry’s Electronics to test them with various brands and models of televisions, VCRs, and DVD players. (For obvious reasons, the only A/V devices we had at work were made by Sony.)

Whenever we found some device we couldn’t control, we’d write down the manufacturer and the model number. After a short while, a plain-clothes Fry’s security guard approached us.

“Do you work for us?” she asked.

“What?”

“Do you work here at Fry’s?”

“No, we’re from Sony. We’re testing these devices.”

“Do you have approval from the store manager?”

“No.” (Note: if someone asks if you have prior approval, always say yes.)

“You can’t write down prices without approval from the store manager.”

“We’re not writing down prices. We’re writing down model numbers. See?” We showed her our notes.

She consulted with someone else with her walkie-talkie. “You can’t do that either.”

“So if we were consumers, and we wanted to compare prices, what are we supposed to do?”

“Memorize them if you want, but you can’t write them down.”

“Uh-huh.”

Fascists.

(Someone later explained to me that manufacturers and retailers have agreements that prohibit retailers from selling below a certain price, and everyone knows that Fry’s is no stranger to shady business practices. (Telling the guard that we were from Sony didn’t help.) This also explains Fry’s newspaper ads for items from “name-brand manufacturers”.)

Now that I have a new job, I no longer need to worry about bad-mouthing my Sony references. (Ha, just kidding.) Regardless, it’s an out-with-the-old, in-with-the-new kind of time, so over the next few days I’ll try to recount some stupid Sony stories:

One of my coworkers wanted to buy a “game enhancer” for his PlayStation so he could play imported games. (Such devices also have less legitimate uses.) Another coworker told him about a store nearby that sold them, so we stopped by there after lunch one day.

“Hi, I’m looking for a ‘game enhancer,'” my coworker asked.

“Sorry, we don’t have any,” the clerk nervously replied.

“You don’t? Well, are you expecting to get any more soon?”

“Uhh… no… They didn’t seem very… reliable, so we stopped carrying them.”

“Oh-kay….”

As we left, my coworker asked me, “Did that guy seem to be acting a little weird to you?”

Then we realized that his Sony ID badge was hanging prominently around his neck.

Wow. It’s been two months since I left Sony.

(For anyone unaware, I had spent the past three years working at Sony Electronics in San José as a developer technical support engineer for their CLIÉ handheld line of PDAs. My duty was to answer—rather, to try to answer—programming questions from third-party software developers.)

Some people probably are still wondering exactly why I left a well-paying job and—for lack of a better term—pulled a Karen, especially in today’s harsh U.S. job market.

I don’t think I can express fully my three years of frustration there, but here’s a sampling:

I joined Sony because I wanted to avoid the fledgling, volatile, ultimately-doomed dot-coms. I wanted to work at a large, stable, proven company. (If you know me, you probably know that I don’t like change; I’m an ardent supporter of the status quo. Slow and steady wins the race.)

Although I spent three years hating my job, I don’t regret working at Sony. My job had its share of good moments, it was overall an interesting experience, and indeed Sony was large, stable, and proven. My main problem was that I had underestimated the morass of corporate bureaucracy.

1. Sony is a world-wide corporate giant but at its heart is still Japanese. Any decision worth making is made in Tokyo. Most of the hardware and software is designed and developed there. The rest of the world often gets table scraps: uninteresting, unimportant projects. Busy-work. The best moments of my job were during the slow periods where I was free to work on my own stuff. The worst moments were when I was working on someone else’s useless project that never got to see the light of day. Through it all, I didn’t have the responsibility nor the access to information and tools to do my job properly.

Meanwhile, the designers and engineers in Tokyo did their own thing without listening to anyone else. To its credit, this strategy had worked for Sony in the past, where Sony created new markets not by listening to what people wanted but by telling people what they’re supposed to want. This is fine for revolutionary products, but for the past couple of years most of the CLIÉ handheld models have been only evolutionary, and for those cases it’s just stupid not to listen to your customers.

Watching a company throw away perfectly good opportunities is just sad. I didn’t like where the product line was headed, and I hated how Sony focused its efforts on useless new endeavors instead of fixing existing problems.

2. Huge corporate bureaucracies have long corporate ladders. People can’t wait to climb them. Corporate ladders conveniently orient climbers so that the faces of the people below are aimed at the asses of the people above. At Sony, people’s lips seemed to like the taste of ass so much that it’s no wonder the cafeteria got away with serving such lousy food. Naturally, in my three years there, I didn’t go anywhere.

3. Huge corporations have huge teams of lawyers. When I joined, I signed a typical contract that gave away my claims to any work-related software that I would write or envision. Fair enough. But what happens when I have an idea and Sony doesn’t want it?

I designed a software library that I thought would be useful to third-party software developers. I proposed the project to some of the higher-ups in Japan (after all, we can’t make decisions on our own). They thought it was interesting but decided not to pursue it. I decided to pursue it on my own outside of work, but I wanted to do the Right Thing and first make sure everything was legally square. After all, who wants to be sued by a huge team of lawyers?

I talked to one of the intellectual property lawyers from the local San José office about assigning ownership back to me. I got the run-around for a few months. The lawyer from the local office didn’t have the authority to waive ownership, so he had to talk to another lawyer in San Diego. The lawyer in San Diego didn’t have that authority either, but he didn’t want to bother his superiors over such a little, insignificant project. Everyone got annoyed at me for trying to channel this through the legal system. People told me, “You know, you just should have done it on your own without telling anyone.” Sigh.

The lesson I took away from all of this was independent thought at Sony is fruitless. The heads in Japan don’t listen to anyone. You can’t get ahead without being a bootlicker. Any ideas you devise are at risk of being thrown away, forgotten about, wasted; Sony owns them all anyway, and it has no infrastructure for you to do anything about it. Why bother thinking at all?

I couldn’t take it anymore.