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| Monday, June 4, 2001 |
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Is that the front of his head? 
| | The cover story  in the latest Fortune features a nasty close-up of Bill Gates with the headline "The Beast is Back." The guy looks like burn victim. I know it's fair game to pick on the fortunate, but jeez. Does he really look that bad? Whatever, the story, by Brent Schendler, is scary on other grounds. It reads like a puff piece, but one gets the creepy feeling it isn't at all (and that wouldn't be Brent's style). The gist: verything seems to be going Microsoft's way. |
| | My concern is that something is getting orphaned in the midst of sport & war coverage that pits success stories of open source and free software on the one hand and Microsoft on the other. The piece in the Times this morning was titled "New Economy: Open Source Advances." It was as dreamy a piece for the free software and open source movements as the Fortune piece was for Microsoft (Bill's face excepted). But if you look at the number of paying customers — which you need to make markets — Microsoft has nothing but — while the open/free movement has nothing. Sure, free/open software had zillions of users, but not a helluva lot of customers, relatively speaking. I know, I know: we can argue about that, but what I want us to talk more about is the whole software industry that sits in the middle of this latest Goliath/David story, has lots of truck with both combatants, and even more truck with customers (and in many cases is customers). |
| | Microsoft will do fine, that much is clear. But the open/free movement needs customers. It needs to work with people who have customers, and who are customers. Meahwhile the rest of the non-Microsoft software industry needs some respect it isn't getting right now. It's doing lots of good work that isn't getting attention because it isn't against anybody. What can we do to start bringing this all together? |
| | Calling a cease-FUD might be a start. |
Ouch.
| | Lawrence Lee is shutting down Tomalak's Realm which has been a kind of AP wire service for the Blog community since before that community materialized. I can understand why he's doing it, but Tomalak will be sorely missed. |
Say huh?
| | The top phrase on Microsoft's home page today: May the source be with you. The copy below says "Take XML Web services for a spin with MSDN sample code and docs." The link goes to Favorites Services Overview. XML appears nowhere on the page. |
Also Sprach Doc
| | I wish I could handle the tranlation here, but I can't. See, I took four years of German, but I gave them all back when I was done. All I remember are two phrases. One is what Zarathustra said on emerging from his cave: Alles ist einmut und schmutz und ein erbärmliches behagen! The other is what Mark Twain wrote after emerging from a visit to Germany: haben sind gewesen gehabt haben geworden sein. That was from The Awful German Language, which is one of the funniest things ever written for a terrible language student. |
Familiarities
| | In addition to the nice review of Activewords (second section from the bottom of the page) in Monitorblog (which needs much a more easily-linked-to site), I saw this (un-link-to-able) item about Gaston Bastiaens, whom I remember as the head of Apple's late PIE division, which handled Newton and other stuff. Seems he's being arrested and hauled back to Belgium to face some kind of fraud charges. When I went to look him up, everything seemed to be bad news. Mostly it was about his stepping down as CEO of Lernaut and Hauspie. While I barely remember the guy, the lingering impression is a positive one. Sad stuff. |
Flogrolling
| | Some advice from The Pimp of Pop: |
| | Become an artist, not a salesperson. Start a tangled conversation -- and make fun of the new boss. Better yet, writhe onstage in a wedding dress cooing about your virginity. |
| | Learn from the real pros -- fuck "professionalism" -- get personal. |
Now I have to go
| | Craig Mundie will speak at O'Reilly's Open Source Conference in July |
What the hell is wrong with just publishing the stuff?
| | At the coffee shop this morning I noticed a New York Times piece on free software and open source that I wanted to pass along (it pretty much sides with those Forces against Microsoft), and friends have been sending along the link. Here it is: <http://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/04/technology/04NECO.html>. |
| | But I can't see it, because I don't remember my @#$% password, even though, as the page brags, the site is Free of Charge. My browser used to know the password, but since I reloaded everything recently, a lot of that memory has been lost. |
| | I've registered for the Times site several times, with several id/pw combinations. None of the usual ones (that I use for every one of these kinds of sites) seems to work. When I click on the "Forgot your ID and/or password?" link and fill out my email address, a new page tells me to "check your email now" for a message that hints the answer. But no email has come from the Times. As we know, email isn't always instantaneous, but it shouldn't take fifteen minutes, which is what it's been so far. |
| | I hate this shit. Not just because it's a pain in the ass, but because I know what it's really about, which is trying to "target" me for advertising. How much money does the Times, or any of these publications, make with advertising on pages of old news? Not enough to make the hassle worthwhile. Or the cost in authority. |
| | The Times would be far more valuable as a newspaper if it were easy for anybody to link to their content, or to syndicate it. |
| | What's really valuable in this place, this Networked market we all live in, is authority, not content. Links increase your authority. Not cookies. Not passwords. Not fees for last month's digitized fishwrap. |
| | (Half an hour later...) Ah. The email finally came, and I'm back on the NY Times site. But I still can't find the piece.... Ah. Here it is, three links down in to the tree. |
| | Of course it's yet another OR story. Gnu/Linux will do fine. So will Microsoft. Where we run into problems is when either or both sides insist theirs is the ONLY way, and make it difficult or impossible to use — or do business with — the other guy's stuff. |
The Fonzie award goes to —
Boomtown tales
| | Thanks to Little Green Weblog for pointing to this series of Bay Guardian pieces on what the dot-com investment boom (and bust) did to The City. A sample: |
| | The artists, dancers, musicians, and nonprofits that were evicted in the past three years as the price of office space soared are, in many cases, gone for good. |
From the Department of Applied Rationalization
| | Can anyone tell me if this has 3 CCDs? I've heard from some people that it's just one. I want there to be 3. If there are, I'm buying it. |
Talking amongst ourselves
| | Bill has been coming through with some very useful feedback lately — first about the Wiki Web (which suggests interesting possibilities) and now about markets as conversations. Referring back to something I wrote the other day, he adds this: |
| | "Markets as conversations" is implicitly taken for granted, I believe, by all dynamic economic meta-models. The classical liberals (i.e. old libertarians) have written about this for a long time. |
| | Little gems from Bastiat: We recognize the right of every man to perform services for himself or to serve others according to conditions arrived at through free bargaining. |
One eyed monstrosities, cont'd
| | Tom enlarges on the matter of cable company arrogance, adding this perfect definition of "content": |
| | A fetid slurry that remains on the floor after a user's freedom has been amputated. |
| | And UseTheSource offers further dilation by observing that Amoral Wire Net is an anagram of AOL Time Warner. |
Disconnections
| | I was going to write something about Microsoft vs. Whatever, or Whatever vs. Microsoft, using Dave's exchange with Kieth Hurwitz as a launch point. The subject I wanted to talk about was Respect, which Dave often brings up; and how I thought that Respect kept arguments about highly charged subjects (the death penalty, abortion, Microsoft) where, in the words of Hal Crowther, one side can only "bare their teeth." |
| | Hal wrote that phrase about death penalty advocates. It was in a print piece published in a small North Carolina weekly at least fifteen years ago. The likelihood that it would be on the Web didn't seem large, but I went hunting for it anyway. The first item I found was this one, which is about half the subject at hand: death. |
| | As it happens the last item in Dave's Scripting News yesterday was also about death, which has been on my mind lately more than Microsoft, which is only half-jokingly regarded as a terminator of other companies. |
| | Now I find myself wanting the book Esther said she was going to write before she came out with Release 2.0. That book was going to take on the attitude she described as "I'm right, you're evil." That book never happened. If it had, it would have been about Respect, no? |
| | Yesterday Joyce and I went to an outstanding panel at UCSB. It was the last in the university's current lecture series. The opening lecture this year was by Douglas Adams, who died on his return to Santa Barbara just a few weeks later. He was 49. The panel, which featured Jeff Greenfield, Bill Safire, Richard Rodrigues and Kathleen Hall Jamieson, also inaugurated another series that was the brainchild of a much-loved professor who died a couple weeks ago at age fifty-something. |
| | I'll be 54 this summer, which seems unbelievable to me, except when I look in the mirror and see somebody who looks like my father, only older. My father died at 70 in 1979. The last he knew, I was 32. I still miss him. |
| | Why is it, I wonder, that when people die we "pay" our respects? Is there a cost involved in the act? Wouldn't we rather give our respects? |
| | Maybe it's because we want people to have our respect, which seems to mean owning it in some way. So we give it to them. Yet we usually mean respect as a verb. If I respect Microsoft, I do something to them. |
| | What is that, I wonder? And will it kill me if I do it? |
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