Valleywag
A press tour is oft the last refuge of a scoundrel. Salim Ismail, the pushy head of Yahoo's Brickhouse incubator in San Francisco and newest Silicon Valley Tool, is still talking up Fire Eagle, an admittedly useful software tool for broadcasting one's location to websites. Never mind that Fire Eagle isn't actually ready, and that Ismail's still omitting any mention of Tom Coates, the project lead. Smartly, Ismail is peddling his tale to gullible New York journalists at outlets like BusinessWeek, for whom Silicon Valley must seem too far away to bother with factchecking.
Ismail told BusinessWeek that Fire Eagle took three months to develop, "65 percent" faster than similar Yahoo projects. Sweet if it were true. A prototype version of Fire Eagle was already out in June. Which means that if the Fire Eagle team actually meets Ismail's made-up release deadline for the end of November, he'll only have have mislead the magazine by half. In other words, Fire Eagle's engineers won't have to miss that deadline to make a liar out of Ismail. He's already saved them the trouble.
(Photo by Timothy Archibald/BusinessWeek)
Comments
Cut Ismail some slack. Not sure what his supposed crime is, reading through your broadsides. And he's not a public figure, as far as I can tell.
Seems to me this product could easily have been developed in three months. Add testing, vetting, privacy review, etc., you know, readying for rollout.
Let them have it when they deserve it or ask for it (see "Pud"). Scoundrel? Liar? Tool? This smear campaign reads as unjustified and weirdly, creepily personal.
Very good choice, Owen, in indicating what Brickhouse is. I didn't actually know until now, and it sounds yawnable enough that I'm sure I'll forget. It'll probably be a good idea to continue reminding us what it is in the future.
@terran: Ludicrous. We first wrote about Ismail in March, before my arrival. He's a regular on the tech conference circuit, and has now been written up in the Wall Street Journal and BusinessWeek. I'll leave the cutting of any slack to Ismail's far-too-indulgent bosses at Yahoo.
@Rick: Brickhouse is a warehouse-loft office in San Francisco, the sort that was trendy 12 years ago. The way Ismail wants to define "Brickhouse," though, is any innovation coming out of Yahoo whatsoever that he can claim credit for.
Fair enough. He's gotten some press. But your coverage of him still reads as overly ad hominem. Slam his performance, but not sure why this guy's character or integrity are at issue - don't see the evidence in your posts. Usually enjoy the skewering people get, one reason I show up. But it's usually about their self-evident professional misdeeds or in some cases literal criminal or civil offenses. This, based upon subjective interpretations of ship dates or PR handling for a company employee on the job six months or something can't help but read as overly personal and hard to justify.
Worse still...it's hard to enjoy, putting a crimp in my daily schadenfreude. Let's step up the targeting, shall we?
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