A Secret Memo

I never dreamed that my friend would be able smuggle this document to
me. It came via a circuitous route that even Sydney Bristow and Marshall
would have trouble tracing. Anyway, pass it on if it suits you.

—————

Delivered-To: marty@mymac.com
From: DreamOn@devnull.net
Subject: The Memo
Date: Thu, 29 Jun 2006 23:17:22 -0700
To: marty@mymac.com

John,

I got this today. You may find it interesting. I’ve suppressed all the
headers so it can’t be traced. If you can get this published somewhere,
I’d really appreciate it.

D.

—-

The results of Project Rimbaldi have now been de-classified by the
government and circulated to all the department managers as a company
proprietary and trade-secret document. As you know, Project Rimbaldi was
jointly developed with us, Cisco, and people we still cannot name within
the Executive Branch of the federal government. Basically, the project
involved analyzing the activity of 65 million IP addresses in the U.S to
determine a “Net Presence Profile” as a function of new product
announcements across a broad range of vendors. Basically, we were able
to construct a time-line for each of the IP addresses to determine the
“absorption rate” of new products and services throughout each day for a
period of six months.

We looked at the top 250 “Internet Products” — which are listed
in the full report. I’ll just mention a few here as a recap.

MySpace.com, YouTube.com, News sites, Craig’s List, iTunes Music
Store access, PodCasts, RSS feeds, Cell Phone ring tone downloads,
BiTorrent file shares, Interactive game activity, on-line purchases,
E-mail on ports 25 and 110, VOIP, celebrity and product rumor sites,
ZeFrank’s show.

You get the idea. We used statistical techniques to look at the access
and connection time for each of these 250 Internet Products to determine how people are using them.

Here’s a quick summary of the findings.

1. At the 85th percentile of the 65 million IP address, 9.5
hours per day are completely saturated with about 70 of the 250 Products.

2. The average time for inactivity, as the user skips from one
Product to the next is 1.37 seconds. (We think the users
are obtaining food during software update downloads.)

3. With a four-sigma certainty, there is no evidence that more
than 0.4% of the users are engaging in any kind of learning activity
as would be evidenced by the download of software development tools
learning software, purchase of technical books at Amazon,
or Wikipedia entries of an educational nature.

4. In order to maintain the “absorption level” sought in the original
research objectives set by the government liaisons, each of the top 200
“hitech” companies must announce a new technology or product every 42
days in order to maintain the desired level of occupied time, frenzy and
associated low level of political dissent.

I’m sending this to all the product managers to remind them of the
schedule they’re expected to maintain for product releases. We simply
cannot maintain the desired level of cash flow from the Internet users,
keep them subdued, occupied, and indifferent to the nastier problems out
there in the real world unless we meet those ship dates.

One of my junior VPs asked me how we’re going to continue to create
these high-technology products if the American kids fritter away all
their time and money on the Internet Products and never really acquire
any useful skills. There will be no one to hire, he said. I reminded
him that we have launched an aggressive program (despite post 9/11
immigration issues) to hire engineers from China and India and
pay them handsomely.

Don’t forget, the top fifty product managers will receive a $100K bonus
this Christmas. Let’s see some teamwork out there!

xxxxxx Signature Suppressed xxxxx