Coulda, Woulda, Shoulda

Dr. Dobb's Journal August, 2004

From time to time, we all reflect on what could have been. Let's see, there's Gary Kildall not returning IBM's phone call, John Sculley's dismissal of HyperCard, Pete Best leaving a band called the Beatles to make room for a drummer named Ringo Starr, and just about every version of UNIX other than Linux. The list goes on and on.

For me, it was grass trimmers. Warned early on about the perils of BB-guns ("you'll shoot your eye out!") and lawnmowers ("you'll cut your foot off!"), I once designed a lawnmower with flexible blades—specifically, nylon strings that spun around in circles. But then, I thought, if this was such a good idea, someone else surely would have thought of it. And, as it turned out, someone did—a few years later.

Looking for a better way to cut grass around trees, George Ballas was inspired by the spinning nylon bristles at his local automatic car wash. According to legend, he then went home from washing his car, punched holes in a tin can, ran knotted fishing line through the holes, and attached the contraption to a rotary electric edger. Voilà! The "Weed Eater"—and another Texas millionaire—was born.

These days, my coulda, woulda, shouldas are more along the lines of articles I wish I'd written or published. For instance, after spending a couple of maddening weeks tracking down and eliminating some really nasty computer viruses, I jokingly said that I'd support capital punishment for virus writers. What'd you know, but a few days later, Steven Landsburg's article "Feed the Worms Who Write Worms to the Worms" popped up on Slate.com (http://slate.msn.com/id/2101297/). More than just a rant, Landsburg makes a solid, albeit tongue-in-cheek, argument for executing virus writers who, according to estimates, cost society $50 billion a year. (That said, Landsburg neglects to factor in revenue generated by antivirus companies, such as McAfee, Symantec, LavaSoft, and others.) Applying economic justifications usually associated with capital punishment, Landsburg points out that the usual deterrence benefit to society for executing a killer is about $100 million. He goes on to say that if a single execution would deter 0.2 percent of all virus writing, society would logically gain the same $100-million benefit that we do by executing murderers. Any more would be, as he says, simply gravy. I'll leave it to you to mull over Landsburg's arithmetic (not to mention ethics), but on a cost-benefit basis alone, his bottom line does suggest we'd be better off executing virus writers than killers. Of course, we all know that's not the case—unless you've just spent a couple of weeks going nuts over a virus, worm, or Trojan.

The biggest shoulda that Michael Dell admits to is "not getting into printers sooner." In a New York Times article (May 24, 2004) that I woulda liked to have published, reporter Steve Lohr examines the issues of innovation versus distribution—with Hewlett-Packard personifying innovation and Dell cast simply as a distributor. There's a lot at stake here for both companies. Overall, computer printers are a $106 billion-a-year pie, with HP carving out a $23 billion piece in selling 43.6 million printers. By comparison, Dell sold "only" 1.5 million printers in the first three quarters of 2003, although the company expects to sell 4 million this year. So in truth, Michael Dell is saying he woulda liked a bigger piece of the printer revenue pie, if he coulda.

Compared to Dell, one of HP's strengths is its research and development. Overall, says Lohr, the company invests more than $1 billion a year in printer R&D. Dell, on the other hand, focuses on private-label branding of—and adding features to—low-cost Lexmark printers, then hanging onto HP coattails in consumer distribution channels.

To be fair, there's nothing wrong with Dell's focus on distributing, rather than innovating, printers. From algorithms to XP, the computer industry has been built, to paraphrase Sir Isaac Newton, by standing on one another's shoulders. Recall that before Excel, there was VisiCalc. Before C++, there was C (and, before that, B). Before the RC6 block cipher, there was the RC5 cipher. And before Microsoft's MS-DOS, there was Tim Paterson's QDOS. Then there's the whole concept of open source, which encourages innovation, improvement, and differentiation. Of course, I woulda said all this and much more if I had written the article that Lohr wrote. Maybe I shoulda. Maybe next time.