My career is focused on getting more technology moved into a
"software as a service" model, and enabling consumers to aggregate more of their data into a central data store where they control who has access to it. I started my career in the early 90's by creating some
of the first hosted services providing E-mail &
collaborative applications for businesses, as well as co-developing ASP platforms for Microsoft & IBM/Lotus.
I am currently a Product Manager at Google where I designed another corporate ASP service which is called Google Apps For Your Domain. I've also helped build many other systems include Google Accounts, Google Health, orkut.com, OAuth, & Open Social+Caja. Currently I am the Product Manager for the Google Security and the counterpart to Google's CIO.
Key people who have inspired my career:
- Marissa Mayer: Marissa is one of the most senior product managers at Google and responsible for search and general user experience at Google (see Wikipedia for more). She has an amazing ability to design one UI that works for 100s of millions of users. My focus is on the other end of the spectrum, i.e. designing an application personalized for a single user, and her job is definitely a lot harder then mine! I have worked for Marissa since 2003 and rarely do I walk out of a meeting with her without learning something interesting. She has also been critical in taking my ideas for a Google Health platform and wrapping them with an elegant and simple user interface.
- Adam Bosworth: Adam is well known for his leadership roles for XML, Internet Explorer, BEA, Microsoft Access, and Quatto Pro (see Wikipedia
for more). I had the chance to work with Adam at Google since 2004 on
many consumer services such as Gmail and Google Calendar. He later joined me on Google
Health and helped build a large set of strategic partners for the project.
- Ray Ozzie: Ray is also well known, mainly for his work on Lotus Notes, and more recently for his role as Chief Software Architect at Microsoft as Bill Gates begins his transition from the firm (see Wikipedia for more). My first startup was also the first hosted service for Lotus Notes and the Lotus Notes product has been my primary inspiration for most of the infrastructure I have built for the different hosted services I have developed. When I started that company, even Ray didn't think we could solve the security and namespace problems, but Lotus Notes was the only product I could find in the market where I was able to address those issues and build a popular service. Eventually Lotus recognized the value of the ASP model and joined with AT&T to create a service called AT&T Network Notes, but the ASP concept was new and not well understood at that time and so they ended up having to transfer their customers to my startup. However that gave me a chance to have my firm work with Lotus on a co-development project to help create the next generation of ASP services on the Lotus Notes (and then Domino) technology. Unfortunately Ray left IBM/Lotus soon after that time, but I was happy to see him launch Groove as a fully hosted collaboration service. He certainly has a challenging new position at Microsoft, but he is one of the few people who has the potential to fill Bill Gates shoes and help Microsoft adapt to the "software as a service" industry shift.
- Dr. R.G. Sachs: My father is a well known cardiologist, but also has been a great source of inspiration to me for ideas on how to combined hosted services to address large scale problems in medicine, especially his practical advice about the business/political aspects of the medical industry. He has also been president of the New Jersey Medical Society and governor of the New Jersey Chapter of American College of Cardiology.
- Tom Healey: My uncle has had a incredibly successful career in the pension and real-estate sectors of the financial industry, including as an Assistant Secretary for the Treasury in the Reagan administration (see his Harvard bio for more). While my initial interests were primarily technical, he helped me learn to combine those interests with a financial viewpoint, and that was what initially led me to develop my ideas for the "software as a service" model many years before the concept was accepted.
Services I have built
Hosted services I built before joining Google (and which were generally the first of their kind):
- 1992: Business E-mail - Founded Interliant (see its history) which is considered one of the earliest ASPs. It had an $80M IPO in 1999 and the core business is still running 15+ years later as part of NaviSite
- 1997: Consumer & Business 3rd party app hosting - jointly developed from large investments by IBM/Lotus and later Microsoft
- 2000/1: Business VoIP PBX & File Services - Libritas used these services to drastically improve revenue per subscriber and it is now owned by Covad
- 2003+: The Google Accounts system is our login/identity system that is used by hundreds of millions of users and integrated with all Google's personalized services.
- 2003: orkut.com (Google's social network) - For American's who think MySpace/Facebook rule the world, see Wikipedia for more on orkut :-) Or if you are more financially oriented, look at the impact of orkut.com on Google's market share in websearch/ads in the countries that orkut.com targets.
- 2006: Google Apps for your Domain - I started this based on my experience founding Interliant
- 2006: Google Health - This service was launched May 19th 2008. Even before the launch, Google had publicly blogged about it and discussed it at trade conferences. I started the project in 2006 based on some work I did previous to Google, as well as based on discussions with my father. It took me 4 years to find a security/authentication model to enable users to aggregate and share their health data with other sites. I spent much of 2007 educating the health community about this model (such as in the Connecting for Health Framework) and it has been widely accepted (as well as defining a version of the CCR medical data standard that Google Health would support). A number of projects within Google are now using things we learned from this project in other applications outside health. The project has also been a fun source over the years of early glimpses, gossip, rumors, partners, patents, pre-announcements, privacy discussions, etc.)
- 2007+: OAuth - This is an open source version of the auth mechanism that we used for Google Health. Other companies have developed similar delegated auth mechanisms and these techniques are enabling entire new classes of applications. See the Google OAuth site which has lots of resources for developers working on the OAuth standard.
- 2007+: Open Social - Extends the social network concept with a common programming model. My focus has been on the security/authentication / authorization issues.
- 2008 +: Caja - A next-generation Javascript sanitizer/sandbox technology to allow websites to more safely hosted JavaScript code written by 3rd party developers. This technology has also been used in the Yahoo Open Strategy (Y!OS) launch.
- 2008+: Security standards work (OpenID, OAuth, SAML, stronger auth, ...) with a focus on usability issues. See the Google OAuth site for more info.
- 2009: Product counterpart to Google's CIO - Aggressive migration of Google's IT systems to cloud computing as a way to dogfood those offerings, and help them evolve to better meet enterprise requirements.
**This is my personal homepage. The views expressed on these pages are mine
alone and not those of my employer.**