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| Monday, July 2, 2001 |
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Yes 
| | FWIW asks, If you were brought into a court of law on a charge of stupidity, would there be enough evidence to convict you? More to the KnowNow-bashing point, he adds: |
| | Someone (was it Jakob Nielsen?) once said: "If the CEO likes your web site, it is not doing its job." |
| | To me, any species that ever would dare to utter "synergies" with a straight face is a part of the problem, not the solution. Management have their own agenda (to make themselves rich at the expense of the bodies that they climb) and have their own vocabulary. The #1 rule for the vocabulary is that there be nothing concrete in it -- one must always leave weasel room. |
Crying "Wide!"
| | Back when I was a customer, my main problem with Metricom was honesty. They kept saying their first wireless client devices (called "modems" even though they weren't) connected at 33 kbps when in fact I never got much more than 14.4, and usually a lot less. When they bragged that their new modems ran at 128kbps, I stuck with my ISP, which actually delivered the same bandwidth over an IDSL link. Wonder how many other early customers didn't come back for the broader course? |
Question: What has $1 billion in debt, less than 41,000 customers and blames "the depressed state of capital markets" for its problems?
| | Says here that Metricom is filing for Chapter 11 and appointing a "Chief Restructuring Officer." Fun job, no? |
Gimme a ?! Gimme another ?!
| | I'm writing up an introductory something for a panel I'm putting together for Linux World Expo in August. Here's the promo poop: |
| | INFRASTRUCTURE: How Linux companies make it in the enterprise, and enterprise companies make it with Linux |
| | Linux is now infrastructure. So are lots of other open source creations, including Sendmail, Apache, the Gnu tools, XML, SLP, SOAP and LDAP. But plenty of other infrastructure comes from commercial developers too, from NetBIOS and the x86 instruction set to OpenAdaptor's Java/XML code, developed by the Dresdner Bank (plus all the stuff mentioned before that). Companies like Caldera are doing open source work with OpenSLP (an open protocol) while developing commercial products like Volution. Clearly more and more companies agree with Craig Burton's statement "Any company that doesn't have an open source strategy doesn't have a strategy." But they don't all have the same answer to his question, "How can you create global ubiquity while driving shareholder value at the same time?" Join Craig and the rest of the panel for a lively visit to the toughest question of our time. |
| | I want the whole introduction to consist of vexing questions for the panel. Got any? Let me have some. |
Buzzrolling
| | Deborah kindly thanks Peter and me (inside pun intended) for "bashing the bejesus out of the hapless folks at KnowNow (http://www.knownow.com/) for their meaningless marketing bather." Well, as Dave likes to say, it's even worse than it appears. I've been hearing lately from insiders at KnowNow that alpha funder Kleiner Perkins has installed clueless management where KnowNow's heart used to be. One ventricle of that heart, co-founder Rohit Khare, is described (and I'm using gentle language here) as a sinecure. |
| | I'm not sure it's KP's fault. At least not specifically. They also failed spectacularly by installing Fernand Serrat at Linuxcare. But in that case the co-founders didn't disappear when Serrat arrived (though some are gone now). Google's co-founders still appear to be very involved in their company. |
| | I think the real problem is Marketing Mentality, which is by nature detached from customers, and from markets. It's all about strategy. Marketing, by unspoken political agreement, doesn't talk to customers. That's Sales' job. In geek-founded companies, technologies are seen as an "asset" that needs to be "deployed" strategically to serve "bottom-line" needs. The nature of the founders' visions, and their connection to development communities, is considered irrelevant. In these cases, both Sales and Marketing take over and engineering, founders included, gets shoved aside. |
| | Near as I can tell, KnowNow is in no conversations at all, other than with its own customers. Maybe that's enough. But if they completely forget where they came from, they'll go exactly where they are right now. Which is nowhere. |
Suction Gradient Reversal
| | Just in case y'all didn't hear it clearly, Mr Faceless, Nameless, Conversationless Corporation, here it is: IF I WANTED SMOKE BLOWN UP MY ASS, I'D BE HOME WITH A PACK OF CAMELS AND A SHORT LENGTH OF RUBBER HOSE. |
| | Speaking of which, check out Marek's blog on The Butterfly Effect. |
| | Yesterday I got tired of hearing crap on the radio (even from NPR, which seems to be turning into such a foghorn for political correctness that for awhile I though I was listening to Pacifica) that I looked around for a tape of anything. All I could find was an unopened tape of The Cluetrain Manifesto (read by the authors!). I had never listened to it (having heard enough of each of us, I guess). So I cracked it open and stuck it in the boombox. To my embarrased astonishment, it was actually good. |
| | What's more, it seemed more appropriate than ever. Take the opening paragraphs: |
| | What if the real attraction of the Internet is not its cutting-edge bells and whistles, its jazzy interface or any of the advanced technology that underlies its pipes and wires? What if instead, the attraction is an atavistic throwback to the prehistoric human fascination with telling tales? Five thousand years ago, the marketplace was the hub of civilization, a place to which traders returned from remote lands with exotic spices, silks, monkeys, parrots, jewels — and fabulous stories. |
| | In many ways, the Internet more resembles an ancient bazaar than it fits the business models companies try to impose upon it. Millions have flocked to the net in an incredibly short time, not because it was user friendly — it wasn't — but because it seemed to offer some intangible quality long missing in action from modern life. In sharp contrast to the alienation wrought by homogenized broadcast media, sterilized mass "culture," and the enforced anonymity of bureaucratic organizations, the Internet connected people to each other and provided a space in which the human voice would be rapidly rediscovered. |
| | Sometimes even authors need to be reminded what the hell they've been talking about. |
All your tech support are belong to me
| | All I have to do is ask a dumb question and the smart answer comes right back. Yesterday's question was about Apple's iTools. Here's the answer, from Maurice Rickard: I've found that putting HTML documents directly into the Sites folder works just fine. Your URL becomes http://homepage.mac.com/yourUserName/ |
Uh huh
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