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| Tuesday, July 31, 2001 |
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Meaning our ultimate dependency is on each other 
| | As the leaked memo from Craig Mundie makes clear, Microsoft is being equally bold and uncertain in its move to embrace as much as it can of the open source development community and its development methods (though not, so far, what Mundie calls its licensing "regimes"). |
| | David Coursey calls Mundie "the bravest man at Microsoft," and maybe he is. But the real action is elsewhere. Much of it is in the open source development community, but I'm starting to see a larger circle in a new Venn diagram that conceptually maps the Internet develpment bazaar: independent developers. |
| | This is a population that includes everybody in the free software and open source communities, plus everybody other than Microsoft in the whole softare industry. Mundie wants it that population to include Microsoft as well. (I have a feeling he also speaks for Bill Gates.) Increasingly it looks like the only thing keeping Microsoft out is the corpse of Netscape. With good reason, trusting Microsoft is not something that comes easily either to developers or customers. In the past Microsoft has trusted market forces other than trust — especially it's own inspired application of supply-side muscle and leverage. But the market shares the government's sentiments on that matter: they don't want that system any more. And they don't just want "choice," or even "freedom." They want n grown-up marketplace that works as a real bazaar, not a producer-dominated distribution system where everybody in the whole value system has no choice but to adapt or consume on one producer's terms. |
| | Independent developers are the software industry's equivalent of the independent contractors and building material manufacturers that constitute most of the construction industry, which the software industry increasingly resembles. (The construction vocabulary of software — "design," "develop," "tools," "builds," "architect" — is not just coincidental). The mature industrial "ecosystem" Mundie talks about is one in which (to use his words) Microsoft plays a "small role." Indeed the software industry is already a worldwide bazaar defined and supported by the Net. As Dave put it to me on the phone last night (and Craig has put in similar terms as well), if you want to attract developers to your platform, your platform has to be open source. In other words, if you have a box, it better be open. You can't lock people in. Today even Microsoft can't make a closed box big or fancy enough to attract any developer with any sense of self-perservation. The Net is now the context, the platform and the free & open bazaar where we're all going to do business. Frankly I think it's quickly becoming the only "platform" deserving of that noun. |
| | By the way, if anybody wants to draw that Venn diagram, I'll be glad to use it or point to it. Right now I gotta drive to L.A., so this will probably be my last bloglet for the day. |
Imagine failing to get a toaster running because the install program couldn't find a driver for the rye bread adapter
| | Here's Howard, Microsoft veteran, on his experience installing Linux (the Mandrake variety). |
The last elevator
| | WiFi (802.11b) is going into hotels all over the place. Soon it'll be a required grace, like cable TV and housekeeping services. |
| | If the hospitality industry continues to insist on charging guests on a per-use premium activated by the guest over redirection to a sign-up Web page (as do some Marriotts I've stayed in recently), it'll continue to annoy many guests even more than it serves them. If you're going to charge for it, better to ask the guest at the reception counter if they want their Internet service turned on for $9.95/day, and then to activate it for the room at the hotel's server. As for WiFi , make it free as plants and furniture in the hotel's public spaces, and bury the costs in other charges. |
| | In any case it's starting to become clear that Internet access in the long run will just be something saturating the air in places that make their money some other way. In that respect it'll be more like electrical service than telephony. |
Were deck chairs involved?
| | Did Norlin get married? I think I scanned past that part the first time I read about his dog's health problems. I have no idea what perspective to keep on the matter, especially now that the dog is fine. His name is Norman, by the way. I'm talking about the dog. I don't know about the wife. All this is in keeping with the spooky nature of the Norlin's background. |
Isn't that what BOGU was all about?
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