Careless talk costs wives
|
|
|
Father of OS/2, Citrix is flying high
Iacobucci always loved planes, and intended to study aeronautical engineering at Georgia Tech. Then Boeing dropped the SST.
"It caused me to reassess my career before it started," he says. Instead, he studied mathematics and operations research, and went to IBM.
"I fell in love with computers." The part he was best at: making software into a product.
"We really were changing the
world," he says of his time in Boca Raton. Then, "The idea behind Citrix was to build a server-based version of a
desktop system to leverage the operating system." When Microsoft and IBM split over OS/2, Citrix shifted to Windows,
creating Winframe.
"People don't talk about Citrix very much," he says, "but I wouldn't be surprised if it was in the top three or four software products in history." At the time, it was contrarian to think about shared logic and running applications on a server; the Web had barely started.
In 2000, at the age of 46, he was increasingly the "dissenting vote" at Citrix board meetings. "I thought I wanted to retire."
As Citrix CEO, he had found travel a time sink.
"The only way you can save time when you're very constrained is to find more efficient ways to use travel time," he says. "I bought a Lear jet 60 and was instantly hooked on the notion that I could plan my trips around my schedule."
The idea behind Dayjet is sufficiently wacky: a service that lets people fly where they want, when they want, with no published schedule, at a reasonable price. How…?
A typical airline tries to figure out where people want to go at what frequency months in advice; it publishes a schedule and then sells people seats and itineraries, adopting yield-managing pricing schemes to eke the most return out of that schedule. Prospective travellers tell Dayjet where they want to go and how much time they're prepared to give Dayjet to get them there. The bigger the time window, the lower the fare - Iacobucci says fares will be priced at $1 to $3 a mile. All planes will be three-seater, very light jets.
"How do you fill airplanes up when you can't tell people when you're going to fly?" he asks rhetorically.
The company has spent several years and $22 million modelling the business just to answer that question, which is almost a multi-dimensional version of the old travelling salesman problem. "That was one salesman and 50 cities," Iacobucci says. "This is hundreds of cities, thousands of salesmen, and hundreds of vehicles, and we have to resolve it not with hours and days of computer time but almost instantly." The fledgling business hired "a couple of complexity science guys" to develop its transportation model, while Mike Brown, the man who decimalised the NASDAQ, is on the Dayjet board.
Dayjet has also been working with the Federal Aviation Authority for four years. "They're very much supportive of what we're doing," says Iacobucci, "because we're not coming in drunk and disorderly to fly airplanes helter-skelter. The demand is essentially random, but the output that gets filed with FAA systems winds up looking like a schedule. It just happens to get built every hour, every day."
He adds, "Aviation hasn't changed in 50 years. The people who are providing transportation services, it turns out most of them don't understand what we're doing. We're squarely in one of the areas that's going to provide some of the greatest influence in transportation."
Dayjet, he says, is "an intellectual property company." But there's no way to pirate the software by distributing millions of unauthorised copies. "The whole notion of vertically integrated systems that provide differentiated value in some unique way is really where a lot of the next round of successful start-ups will be." µ
Wendy M. Grossman's Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and a page linking to in this series. Readers are welcome to send email to netwars@skeptic.demon.co.uk (but please turn off HTML).
Share this:
Share
