the onda

Jon Udell has a great interview on his podcast "Interviews with Innovators" where he talks to Ed Iacobucci, a veteran software guy (founder of Citrix) about his new business, DayJet. Like others before him, Ed is looking at the constant money-loser, customer-displeaser that air travel has been in the United States and asking the simple question: does it have to be this way?

But unlike most others, Ed came out of retirement to start a business around demand aggregation for seats on a network of much cheaper regional jets (made by another software industry veteran Vern Rayburn). The core idea is that the network provides the ability for customers to self-select along a "time arbitrage" spectrum, and that when this is combined with some heavy duty optimization algorithms, the capacity of the overall system can be managed to make what has thus far been a terrible business (regional charters) profitable.

I won't go into the specifics of how this all works because Jon does such a good job of covering it in the podcast (I'm really digging Interviews with Innovators by the way). What I will say is that it is really interesting to see people that come out of the software industry try their hands at other businesses while borrowing a lot of the software thinking that helped them before. Outside of helping him to see two core business problems from the computational perspective (a potentially huge advantage), I was left wondering how much Ed's years at IBM and then Citrix are influencing his thinking in this new endeavor.

I first met Ed during the time when he was having his "false start" in regional air travel. He was brought to our office at Memora by a common friend to see if what he saw us doing would make for an interesting investment. And even back then, my take-away from our meeting was that he was very interested in how we might make a run at the platform that Microsoft was putting together for attacking the home. Though he was a very nice guy, he was rather skeptical about our prospects for making any kind of significant dent in the market. In the end he was both right and wrong: right because we couldn't make it work (Memora), but wrong because worrying about the Microsoft platform (or any platform) proved to be entirely useless. Six years later, the digital home is still unconquered, and the company that looks closest to it today had nothing but an overpriced portable music player which people were convinced was named after the acronym "Idiots Price Our Devices" back in 2001.

Throughout the interview Ed spends a bit of time talking about platform he is trying to usher in— at first making the analogy between the airframe being like the PC, the engines being like the CPU, and DayJet being like the OS/application suite— which is an interesting analogy which I found lacking in its predictive power. Interestingly, I find a lot of the same stuff going on today as software veterans talk about the Internet as a platform, or the mobile handsets as platforms— interesting but not totally insightful.

Meanwhile though, I think I am beginning to develop an aversion to the term platform.