Put on your rant filters because I’m all over-stimulated about the state of Western consumer markets. Somewhere along the road from WWII to the post-modern world economy we got really used to every advertising and marketing trick employed to grab our attention. In fact we have become addicted to the next big thing. The thought came to me when my wife was telling me about a Starbucks in Shanghai where the Chinese manager wanted to serve spaghetti on Fridays in some sort of bizarre attempt at Western marketing. My first thought was, “how naive and childlike.” After all we gave up Spaghetti Fridays back in the 50’s didn’t we?

Anyway it got me to thinking about how product categories and the sophistication of our marketing campaigns have evolved over the years. Take personal computers. They began as a home brewed tangle of user built pieces and evolved into a standardized mass produced product and then into a commodity with little to distinguish one brand from another and now we see signs of the computer as fashion. You will see what I mean along this trail.

One can argue (so I will) that this trend exists in the software industry. First there was custom built software crafted by in-house programmers (stacks of Fortran cards) then the major application and OS categories coalesced (Windows and Office) followed by commoditization (open source). Is Web 2.0 just the natural tendency of any mature technology to become fad driven? Is MySpace only the fashion of the day to be replaced by FaceBook tomorrow and TagWorld next month? Can we begin to plan for churn in the software industry based on waves of fad as the fashion industry has long done? If so it means a major shift in the way we see software. No longer will need drive the decisions of software consumers—now what is cool or fun will rule the day.

Classic white Gmail anyone, or would you rather have the U2 endorsed subversive black version?

Patrick J. Ferrel

Skills

I have a demonstrated ability to lead large (see MSN) and small highly independent teams (see Trailfire) in a large corporate setting (Microsoft & Adobe) and in startups (Trailfire and Daily Planet).  My roles have included engineer, product advocate, architect, manager, CTO, CEO, and business consultant. I’ve managed more than 100 people in multidisciplinary multi-project groups but remain a hands-on engineer.

History

2004-2008 CTO, Trailfire (startup): Co-founded and served as the CTO of Trailfire, a startup company which was part of the 2005 Web 2.0 movement and produces an innovative social application centered around collaborative web research.  In 2008 we created our second application called the Web Guide, which is a system that automatically categorizes and cross-references web pages producing a catalog of web topics that allow the user to browse the web, by subject.  Our product makes heavy use of text and data mining technology in a collective web intelligence application and is delivered in web applications, web widgets, and browser extensions.  The Web Guide is built on a highly scalable architecture for processing and serving up very large databases by using parallel cluster computing.

1997 to 2003 Independent Consultant:  Did independent consulting for startup companies and venture capitalists.  Some of my startup clients included companies doing order fulfillment and online shipping management, online printing and form services for the enterprise, and a gaming and graphic engine.  I also did due diligence reports on potential investments for Venture Capitalists including Kleiner Perkins, Voyager, and Rustic Canyon as well as Seattle based Angel investors.

One of my last consulting projects was to report on the emerging Open Source Software industry.  This led me to start a blog on the state of OSS, which I still publish as occamsmachete.com.

1993-1997 Director of Tools and Application, Microsoft MSN:  Had responsibility for MSN search, electronic commerce, and authoring tools.  Built the team from zero to over 100 people in two years including product and program managers, software design and test engineers, documentation, and designers working in three separate product units.  Products that we started are now known as Microsoft Live Search, Commerce Server, Visual Interdev (a major component of Visual Studio).  Had responsibility for budget, recruiting, and technical leadership on all projects.  We were one of the first groups at Microsoft to use iterative development to deliver products on time.

1990-1993 Founder and CEO, Daily Planet Software: Conceived of and built a product similar to today’s RSS readers but which collected content from online services like Compuserve and Lexis/Nexis.  In 1993, through our talks over supporting MSN, we were acquired by Microsoft.

1982-1990 Principal Engineer, Aldus/Adobe:  Received a BSEE from the University of Washington with an emphasis in Mathematics in 1981.  After a stint doing embedded software, where I earned four patents and introduced object oriented programming to my projects, I moved to productivity and applications software at Aldus (which was acquired by Adobe).  There I was the architect of a cross-platform application framework, which formed much of portability layer for Aldus’ flagship product called PageMaker, one of the first large applications to run on both the Mac and Windows.

Bookmarks

• Trailfire—two patents; for placing applications of existing web pages and for browsing the web by subject, 2007.
• Microsoft—six patents for various online publishing technologies, including semantic text markup, ontological markup, and online delivery through generalized object replication, 1997.
• "VAMP: The Aldus Application Framework", IEEE Proceeding from OOPSLA '89.
• Intermec—four patents for barcode decode algorithms, 1985.
• BSEE with emphasis in Mathematics, University of Washington, 1982.

Address

Patrick J. Ferrel
1200 Western Ave. #1220
Seattle WA, 98101
IM: pat_ferrel at msn.com
email: pat at occamsmachete.com
blog: Occam's Machete
mobile: (206)419-7587

Resume’ in PDF