sanfrancisco.com
Interview by Tony Ryan
I expected history to weigh heavily on modern day San Francisco and to a certain extent it does: not just the 60's and the history of labor conflicts but also the memory of the earthquakes linger in the same way the Civil War does throughout the rest of America. What I wasn't prepared for on my first visit in June 2000 was the all-consuming computer culture.
The phrase "dot-com" screams from every billboard, shopfront and street car, every TV and newspaper ad. San Francisco is booming, labour and accommodation (and parking) are critically short. With a population of around 800,000 and extending less than eight miles across, this beautiful and exciting city is being subject to social and economic pressures that are rapidly changing it - perhaps forever.
My host in June 2000 was Giovanni Moro, musician, poet and corporate web site developer. His immigrant Italian family arrived several generations ago and bought a sturdy home in the mission district. Gio still lives there but now he is surrounded by middleclass Mexicans with shiny new cars. He loves the Mission and devotes much energy campaigning against the gentrification that is forcing artists, dance and theatre groups out of their cheap accommodation and eventually out of the city... stealing its heart and culture. Then earns his living from the same industry.
Gio's house has a direct internet connection via DSL (digital subscriber line) which is as fast, effectively, as a T1 connection and I could check my email or surf the web to my heart's content. I was in Heaven. So one day Gio and I walked a few blocks from his house, one block from where an Hispanic community centre was facing closure after noise complaints stopped fundraising dance nights, to the very trendy Atlas Cafe.
We sat outside amongst the dogs, mountain bikes and some very cool young San Franciscans to tape an interview. Everyone around us seemed to be talking business so my first question was... just what are your corporate clients asking for on their web sites?
"We've been doing a lot of Flash animation. People like seeing things move. Everybody wants something that's more dynamic. People are bored with static web pages. I think that's great from an entertainment point of view and if someone emails me to go look at some website that is really neat I'll do it. The problem is the pages I go to most often for information don't do that because there's download time. Quite often I want to look at the weather, I want to know what the headlines are, I want to know where to find this piece of software, read a review of it, - and those sites from an interactive standpoint of view are very boring but they deliver their information quickly and efficiently and make me very happy.
The clients, more and more, are wanting things to not be boring and the way to achieve that is using more Java script, more Flash, more stylesheets. I am not a fan of style sheets. I really like them but since Netscape and Explorer haven't agreed upon using them properly it makes them a nightmare for cross-platformers. The other thing corporate clients really want now is something that works. We have gone through a period where everyone knows how to do html so when a corporate client needed something done there would be someone in the office who would say 'My friend Harry does html'.
I think now enough of these clients have had people do very shoddy work Ð maybe not intentionally but while html is simple to learn, often people will code without the diligence you'd expect from a programmer, that kind of efficiency and naming structure. I have one client now... the pages work, they work fine but every time they hire me to make a change I have to charge extra time because I have to figure out how each subdirectory was set up. There is no consistency across that web site at all.
So now I think clients want people who can give them something that can be easily maintained, isn't boring and has a little bit of activity and that works more than 90%. In fact most of the smaller jobs I do Ð and I do a lot of this Ð are calls from clients to fix things that either never worked or recently stopped working for some reason. Most of it is actually pretty basic scripting problems; the Perl path isn't set correctly, the permissions weren't set correctly, the Perl script requires a Perl module that was never installed. I guess you could say I do a lot of investigative work for clients."
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Is there an increasing need for you to use scripts like Perl and ASP? "ASP is on the rise because it is so much easier to maintain a site if you are creating the pages from a database in real time. I wouldn't say that clients themselves are saying they need more scripts. |
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But we have definitely got fromthe stage where they said 'Okay let's put the company name on a web site with ourphone number and email with some guidelines'. I wouldn't say that clients themselves are saying they need more scripts but we have definitely got from the stage where they said 'Okay let's put the company name on a web site with our phone number and email with some guidelines' to where they want an actual email form rather than a form the clients could print out and mail.
So clients have reached the point where they understand the automation that can happen. I think a lot of the companies that spend tons of money already knew this because they have whole departments dedicated to it but smaller businesses up to 100 employees are starting to realise this. These are companies that don't have computer departments or even a computer-literate person on staff. Now they are starting to want to use forms so that they can send the information to a database to be retrieved later. This requires scripts."
I know you have views on how the dotcom boom has affected San Francisco and I gather you are pessimistic about the future of the industry.
"Well the dotcom boom has taken a lot of money and put it all into new companies which are springing up all over San Francisco, taking over older buildings in residential areas. This raises property values, raises the rents, changes the dynamics of older established residential areas to transient renter districts. I'm not happy with that transformation.
As to the future of the .coms what I think is happening is we saw this explosion of dotcoms and a lot of venture capital went into them. Investors chose to back those new projects. In the old brick and mortar world if I chose to lend you a million dollars to start a company I was in for the long term, I was owning part of your company and over the next ten or twenty years I'd be making a bunch of money.
Now, when you approach venture capitalists, part of your business plan is an exit strategy and they want to see that within two to three years you will have either sold the company, or gone with an IPO or public offering where you bought from stock. This is their exit, this is where they get their money back. They are not in it for the long haul - they want to get in and get out.
Some of the exit strategies are as short as a year where a VC will give you a million to start a company. On your second round of funding you get ten million. They get bought out for two million - they're gone. They have doubled their money in a year. They don't care if your company ever goes public or makes a profit. That's how the dotcom world is right now. So the VCs get in and start the companies with their funding. They get out early before it is proven that they are going to be a success.
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Eventually
there is a public offering, normal middleclass people buy stock
and they are eventually paying off these initial capitalists who
put the money in. Then these investors are stuck with the company
if it is successful or not. In the short history most of them are.
In fact however, really nobody is making a profit; its all a sort
of wild wild west atmosphere, a gold rush. |
A good analogy I heard was that the Internet is like a big hole and everyone is throwing money into it hoping that at some point they can stand on top of their money and look out. I think in the end what is going to happen in the end is that the people with the big money will win out. Big broadcasters are investing heavily in the Internet on a level that most companies are not. It's not really public, they don't make a lot of noise about it but they are preparing. They know the future of broadcasting is on the Internet.
They know the future of interactivity is on the Internet and they can look back (and in your country too) and see how the richest men in the country own the media. You have a lot of say when you own the movie rights, the music rights, all the media and news outlets. With the smaller companies there is going to be a shakeout within the next three years. There is already lots of editorial about how the honeymoon is over. It is harder to find money to start a company now.
I have a feeling that as the VC money dries up and that enthusiasm tapers off, investors who buy the initial stock options will thin out and these companies who started with ten million but can't get money from stock and spent their ten million will have to close their doors. Nobody is going to give them funding. It's not like five years ago where companies were getting 100 million with no intention of making a profit any time soon."
Like Amazon.com?
"Yeah, exactly. It's a power play, a gamble.
Because the dotcom industry is so concentrated in the San Francisco Bay area, as these companies close we are going to see increasing unemployment as a few service shops go under from less people to support. I don't think it is going to be a widespread depression because there are a lot of other industries going on here but the .com industry is going to shake out. I think the computer industry on the whole is a great one to be in if you want job security because regardless of what company you work for, who has the money or what the latest fad is they are still going to need IT professionals, they are still going to need someone to program."
Continue on the unauthorised San Francisco tour:
(1)
Home - (2)Sanfrancisco.com
- (3) Luver and Me - (4)Visit
the Tenderloin
(5) Peoples' Park - (6)
Land's End Beach - (7)
People's Park Today - (8)
The Innocent Arrives
(9) The Mural Culture -
(10) My exhibitions in SF - (11)
The Battle for San Francisco
(12) Victorian Architecture - (13) Return
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