Two Feet

I have two feet. One is in the optics business. And one is in the rugged business. Rugged is a great word these days, hip almost. Ruggedize, Rugged this, Rugged that, my three little Rugrats. Rugged electronics means that the part (in our case, an optical transceiver), can survive in Industrial Temperature or beyond and harsh environments where physical contact shock or vibration occur. One foot wears a cool Dolce Gabana street sneaker, and one wears a conformally coated, screw mounted, separate power and ground plane combat boot. Ok, so the optics guys are not so hip and put their late 90s VANs back on to save money. But mil/aero/industrial needs the protection. Our Industrial customers use transceivers connected to high speed processing devices that live outside. Not in your backyard under a garage, but smack outside and sometimes next to an ocean with 100 plus degrees of heat. And, a nice 20-30 degree drop at night. Salt air…the worst thing in the world for electronics.

Building transceivers for harsh environments is hard stuff. I’ve worked at Apple Computer, an embedded networking company who sold to Cisco, and created a nationwide optical network VAR. But building a transceiver is the hardest thing yet. Why? Because if something fails you don’t know who to blame: optical, electrical, or mechanical. You might guess the answer to the “how many engineers does it take to build a lightbulb” is three but you would be wrong…the answer is none. It takes a technician to debug it. We’re not designing SFPs for commercial temperature data center operation. we build stuff that operates up to 95C and stores up to 100 or more (sorry to switch from F to C in one article, but it’s not like this is a satellite program manual). And our link budgets are bigger and our parts have to survive being banged about. This is where the rubber separates from the road in our case.

Saturday morning, March 14, 2009. oops. 14th of March, 2009. I am just getting out of my hotel by London Heathrow Airport and going for a walk. Across the road is an office part which runs along one of the runways at Heathrow’s International terminal 4 sans British Airways which has its own terminal as I accidentally found out. I cross the road, cut thru the office park, and am at Flight Global/360 center elevation. There are dozens of people watching airplanes take off. No joke. It’s cold too. On my arrival to Heathrow, I saw the monster on the tarmac, but in what we call the “western wind” of COTSWORKS, it is my fortune to have just made it out of bed and crossed to the viewing area exactly as Singapore Airlines’ A380 is taking off for the day. It lands early morning, takes off late morning. 747s are parked here like Chevy’s at a dealership last month. My god there are lot of them. Sandwiched in between, however, is the great white whale (with a blue stripe and Singapore written on it). The A380 isn’t actually that big with regards to its length. The 747s seem longer, but that upper deck is deceptive. The tail is what really gets you. It’s just huge. Really, you have to see it to believe it. I’ve been next to the tail of the 747 at the Boeing museum, but this tail is enormous. What’s so nuts about it, of course, is that all it does is hold course (it has no storage in it). Just when I was settling in on the size, the plane took off. It doesn’t move fast and it takes a long time to get airborne. The view from, as the mechanical guys tell me, isometric, is shocking. There is so much metal and surface area where the wing joins the body you have to laugh a bit. That’s the critical point on a plane and this one is critical mass. It finally takes off and unlike the 737s, A330s, and 767s that flew first, it hangs in the air. It’s so big that your eyes see it all the way up into the clouds. You can actually see it go into the clouds even though its far away. Amazing.

There are four engines on that monster, like the 747, A340, and the old 707s. Four engines means more lift and in turn, more gas. So you have to carry a lot of people to make four engines worthwhile. That’s why the 777 remains the best plane in the skies today in my book. Two giant engines, a perfect tube, and delivered on time. I hope the arc of the 787 is beautiful enough that it makes up for the two year delay. Waiting has been painful. But neither Rome, nor the Internet was built in a day. And watching the A380 take off reminds me of why I do what I do. Why I get out of bed to work so hard; why I travel so much; why I have risked just about everything to get COTSWORKS going. I was in telecom on the end user side and the equipment side for ten years. I called on companies like Digital Domain who pioneered special effects and had renderfarms the size of a Venice, CA block. I sold optical networking motherboards to Cisco and tested and debugged fiber optic networks on Virginia Class subs. I drawled with the best of ‘em when I said the word “gigabit” and counted RJs by the ten, then hundred, then by stacked racks. But I know a bit about the network in the A380. and a lot more about the one in the 787. and I cried as it took off in front of me on that beautiful spring morning. Because the data centers I help build now come with two to three hundred thousand pounds of thrust attached to them and no IT manager who reads Network World can say that. That data center might not be the fastest network pipe, but it is for sure the fastest moving network pipe.

I miss my kids, my wife, my friends, and the people I work with at COTSWORKS when I’m away. The travel, especially an entire week, is hard but I do make new friends who also, commonly in this business, happen to be customers and salespeople for our products as well. I get to see amazing cities like Amsterdam, Munich, and London. Sometimes I’m lucky enough to go to Cedar Rapids, IA or Grand Rapids, MI too. But in the end, the work and effort are all proving to be worth it. I tell my kids that my job is to build lasers for airplanes and how cool is that? I dream about being a part of a worldwide team of professional engineers that make products which help make our world safer, smaller, and available for everyone. Getting stuck in London for one extra day gave me the time to watch a movie, Catch Me If You Can. It’s a great movie and happens to include scenes on how the main character impersonates a Pan Am pilot. Travel back in the ‘60s was so glamorous and exciting. It isn’t at all anymore. Singapore tries hard to make it so with their huge seats, HDTV, and the insane installation of a shower in one other airline’s planes. I don’t think that’s dreaming, I think it’s nuts.

Get it there safely. Make it cost effective. Do things like improving the air and services on board. And please, lighten the load so it uses less gas and costs less. One shower eliminates a mile of weight savings from copper to fiber wiring. These are the thoughts I have about that A380, 787, and others. Two feet. One in optics, one in aerospace. Head in the clouds…but both feet firmly planted on the ground.

Congratulations Airbus.

Last One Off The Ship

Holy Crap. It’s a good phrase to describe what’s happened to optical company stocks. What was once a first round funding is now the market cap of some of the biggest names in the business. Why are they trading so low?

At the OFC conference last year I accidentally had lunch with a Hedge Fund analyst. Yep, I missed my chance to poison her drink then, but now I understand the words she said to me. Wall Street couldn’t figure out how optical companies were going to make money. They were right about this and they bailed. I can’t figure out how they are going to make money and I’m in the business. If I were running one of them, I’d be looking for work or a new business model.

It’s the business model that is the problem. The idea back when we loved Finisar, E20, Stratos, OCP, etc was that with enough cash they could outlast their competitors and play in God’s greatest market since Eden: high speed Internet connectivity. There was even enough hubris to think there was enough business to go around. I don’t have an MBA (and don’t want one) but that didn’t make sense then and it played out accordingly. Stratos bailed to military and AV, OCP got swallowed up by a passives vendor, E20 ran out of O2, and JDS left the US and now the SFF business (help me with that Picolight acquisition). The only one who ever made any money was Hitachi/Opnext. And outside of restating their earnings, they survived and thrived by living in the 10G space as Avago and Finisar bled each other in the SX market and the remaining players consolidated manufacturing to make 1310 and 1550 parts in Taiwan and China…which then setup shops to slice and dice their trainer. And what happened to Opnext? They sold 1/3…ONE THIRD…plus $30 million in cash to hire Stratalight people to do product marketing and hand over 40G technology. What the…you mean you get to make 10-15% net for a few years and then sell 1/3 of your company just to survive?

The transceiver business is busted. As one expert transceiver salesperson put it: something has to change more than just me losing my job. The network equipment market isn’t too much better. The whole game in Internet connectivity was based on selling Ports. How many ports was the mantra of Ethernet strategic analysis experts. So everyone just gave stuff away to get as many ports out there as they could. Too bad they forgot that with no follow on business past giving away the razor, they couldn’t make money on razor blades that were all based on 802.3 and MSA standards. The only one laughing is Cisco, who buys parts for $20 and sells them for several hundred $s. and worse as they get to longer distance or higher speed parts. As long as the MSA exists, nobody is going to make money making transceivers.

This is direct contrast to the insanity of the US government handing out coupons for its citizens to get digital TV adapter boxes. Who is running this show, Milton Berle? I’m an American History Major and I am sure there is no damn amendment in the Constitution, i.e. a Federal right and responsibility, to television. Thomas Jefferson deployed troops and killed people to protect States Rights, so where was he when the Federal Government came along and said: we are responsible for what our citizens see and therefore liable to help them continue to watch television. It’s a coupon, but it’s the point of it. The all powerful analog television lobby must be behind this. But how could they be more powerful than the Internet Generation? Where are the tech companies saying: forget the coupon, give everybody in the US one year of free broadband. Or lets try to keep up with countries our military protects like S. Korea or Japan. They could have done something really cool like create backup servers for all email servers in the country. Not the real servers, but if you run an email server, you could get hosted space and backup links to a govt. owned and secured data center. Imagine how reliable eMail could be? I’m not saying they police it, I’m saying the help guarantee the service…US Mail online.

The US government does some silly things. Worst in the world, except for all others and all that; getting out of the country recently helped me look back on home. I made a trip to Canada, Montreal, recently. It’s still pretty easy to travel there from the US. Easier now than a few years ago and I hope to back to the land where everyone wears black clothes with red highlights. I stayed in the best hotel, right by the airport. Outside of the great French accent the receptionist had, she wowed me with a frosted glass of Champagne when I checked in. Flowers, chocolates, nice bed…and this, would you believe, was a Hilton Garden Inn. I did run into a problem at the airport that I’ve suffered thru elsewhere and am really tired of dealing with. That is, which side is the Men’s room on. When I lived in New Orleans and stumbled to the bathroom, getting out of this mistake was no big deal. But now, I need this decided. I want government action. Right or left, make a decision. Men need to know. Can’t it be like a transceiver? Isn’t there some IEEE equivalent for these kinds of things? Bathrooms are free and there is no standard, how did they do it?

I guess that in the end of this downturn we finally see the companies that need to act, act. The OFC show returns next month for anyone who wants to go to what will likely be a wake. Their tagline is “where innovation comes alive” which is hilarious considering it really should be “where desperation keeps a few of us alive.” But I’d bet that the tag line was left over from some years ago and OFC cut staff including marketing and support. At the rate we’re all going we’re going to have to decide to go left or right, but not continue stumbling straight ahead.