Month: August 2007

I Predicted Remote Working

Ed note: This was written in 2007 at timberry.bplans.com … looking back from 2024, it seems prophetic.

I admit it. I’m a hypocrite. I worry about global warming, and people, and how much humanity we waste every day in large cities all over the world with people stuck in traffic, moving their physical bodies from their homes to their offices, and back. I believe in the abstract in telecommuting as a good idea for not really saving the world, but delaying slightly its descent into chaos and destruction. So why am I a hypocrite? Because my own company discourages telecommuting.

I don’t think I’m atypical. There are a lot of times when running a business means compromising with some extremes.

In my defense, we’re in Eugene, Oregon, a college town of 150,000 where the commutes are way easier than in any freeway-clogged major urban area. Some of our people live outside the town 20 or 30 minutes away, but most of have fairly short drives, five or 10 minutes.

I paid my dues with commuting through heavy traffic (nine years in Mexico City, and 12 in Silicon Valley) so I’ve been sympathetic to the idea of telecommuting for years. For whatever reason my memory has stamped forever a time I was sitting in a taxi in Tokyo traffic, in the early 1990s, thinking about how much humanity was wasted every work day, in larger cities all over the world, sitting in traffic.

What brings this to mind today, with thanks to Steve King of Small Biz Labs for the tip, is  ABC News covering the virtual office and (implictly) telecommuting with a piece they called Any Time, Any Place Management. What’s interesting to me isn’t the story itself — hey, most of us have known about telecommuting for a long time now — but rather the recognition in the mainstream. ABC is noting that larger companies (they use IBM as an example) are opening up to this, bringing it into the mainstream.

Back then, stuck in traffic, maybe 15 years ago now, it seemed to me that this was an unrecognized major problem facing the urban portion of humanity, a problem that needs solving. At the time I was consulting extensively with Apple Japan, doing a lot of work from my office in Eugene OR, using email and telephone. I did have to go to Tokyo about one week a month, though, and I didn’t like it. I particularly didn’t like getting from one place to another in Tokyo when it involved any means of transportation other than walking or subway. And, for that matter, subway in non-rush hours.

I solved my commuting problem by moving to Eugene OR (subject of a recent post on this blog) but that didn’t make me forget how bad it was to lose a couple of hours a day to traffic. However, here comes the compromise. In this company we like to have our people on our team together during the day, in our one location, mostly a bunch of cubes. We like the instant communication involved, the immediate contact, the sense of team. Programmers talk to other programmers, and marketers talk to other marketers.

Years ago we tried working with programmers in Pakistan, and although the people were competent, the outsourcing didn’t work well for us because they were on the other side of the world, asleep while we were awake.

It does make a lot of sense for a lot of reasons. Think about trendy for a second, the problem of global warming for example, and then if some of the smaller things we do makes a difference, how about taking a significant percentage of people off of the road — less fuel, fewer emission, aside from the wear and tear to the human spirit. Sure, telecommuting doesn’t work for a lot of jobs like retail sales clerk or construction workers or traffic cops, but what percentage of the work force doesn’t really have to go from one place to another to work? I used to think about that when caught in traffic. There should be a campaign, a global building of awareness, I thought.

One roadblock was the idea of acceptance by employers. Does somebody working from home contribute as much to a company as the poor commuter who moves the physical body from home to office and back again every day? Now, today, this ABC news story is a reminder that mainstream employers are increasingly more likely to accept the idea, and, back in the real world of small business, I’m not. Not, at least, except for some special cases and special circumstances.

Like I said, I admit.

1992: Moving to Eugene

People ask why Palo Alto Software is based in Eugene, Oregon. I think business stories are a good way to communicate different elements of business, so I’ve decided to share that in detail. This is why we moved Palo Alto Software to Eugene. 

One day in the late 1980s my wife Vange asked me this question:

“Tim, we put up with all the down side of you insisting on doing your own business. Why don’t we get the upside too? Why don’t we just move to somewhere else, somewhere where we want to live?”

At the time Palo Alto Software was based in an office at 260 Sheridan, Palo Alto, CA. That’s a couple of blocks from California Avenue, towards the Fry’s store and the Fish Market. Home at the time was on Pitman Street, a couple of blocks from the public library.

It wasn’t just that one question that one day. We wanted to move. It was nothing against Palo Alto, which is an ideal location in many ways. Palo Alto is right in Silicon Valley, it contains Stanford University, it has beautiful neighborhoods, the second highest number of graduate degrees per capita in the U.S., the second highest average income in California, and we had a nice house.  We, however, wanted to move somewhere else that had less traffic and a different, if not higher, quality of life. And we wanted to reduce our fixed costs, because our variable income from consulting was driving us crazy. Our_house_in_eugene

Theoretically we chose Eugene after a rigorous analysis of university towns in the west, including Chico, Santa Cruz, and Irvine in California, Boulder in Colorado, Spokane and Walla Walla in Washington, and Corvallis and Eugene in Oregon. We looked at factors including pricing, neighborhoods, outdoor activities, quality-of-life indicators, pollution, nearby airports, and others. Eugene came out as the best bet.

In truth we chose Eugene because we had lived there before and we liked it. I did an MA in Journalism there (University of Oregon) after we were married and before we had kids. We’d been visiting off and on for vacations. We’d been happy there. It was a known quantity. Eugene

One thing that helped make a move possible was the lack of employees. We were a very small company surviving on my consulting income. I was the only full-time employee.

Although the company kept, and still has, its original name, it was a very different company from what it is now, with 70% market share in a product business and 40 employees. It was essentially a professional service business entirely dependent on my consulting, but one whose owner nonetheless stubbornly insisted on following a long-term plan to “sell boxes, not hours.” The vast majority of the revenue came from consulting with Apple Computer’s Apple Japan subsidiary, based in Tokyo. The software product was called Business Plan Toolkit, which was essentially a nice manual (if I do say so myself) on how to do a business plan along with templates for Mac or PC, Lotus 1-2-3 or Microsoft Excel. We advertised in the small ads in the back of computer magazines, and in some special promotions like in the box with Microsoft Excel. The software business lost money every year, but I supported it with consulting revenue.

Judy David was director of finance for Apple Japan. On one of my trips to Japan — I was going about one week a month, consulting in strategic planning — I had lunch with Judy and told her we were thinking about moving from Palo Alto to Eugene. Judy, one of the smartest and most competent people I’ve ever worked with, said the following:

“Tim, we don’t care where you get on the plane.”

She had a good point. Airfares, which the client paid, were about the same from Eugene to Tokyo as from San Francisco to Tokyo, so Judy’s comment eliminated the main business objection.

The actual moving was hard for lots of reasons not directly related to business: finding a house, dealing with teenage children, finding movers, things like that. On the business side, I contacted some local agencies responsible for fostering economic growth, from which I got good recommendations for banks, bookkeepers, and insurance agents.

There were also some legal implications. With the help of a local attorney we created an Oregon corporation named Palo Alto Software, merged the California corporation named Palo Alto Software with it, and eventually, two years later, dissolved the California corporation.

Of course we didn’t change the name, despite the name tie-in to Palo Alto the city. By the time we moved to Eugene we had already existed for five years, we had products in the market, advertising, and branding established. Palo Alto Software was always a good name for the company, because it evokes both Stanford University and Silicon Valley.

So Palo Alto Software moved to Eugene, Oregon, in 1992.

(Reposted from timberry.bplans.com)