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| Wednesday, December 5, 2001 |
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The secrecy game 
| | I've never been a fan of secrecy. I would guess that about 90% of the time it's completely uncalled-for. In the Cluetrain book I told the story of a French company that had done such a good job of keeping its new product a secret — all so they could make Big Announcement — that when it came out nobody cared because nobody anticipated it and nobody had developed for it. |
| | At the Transmeta announcement, I stood up and asked "why the secrecy?" This followed an editorial in Linux Journal where I gave Transmeta grief for following Be's hypersecretive strategy, which yielded a fabulous rollout followed by widespread ennui. Dave Ditzel gave a pro forma response, but basically it expressed a strategy of paranoia. |
| | How come you want to buy a product that was developed behind thick walls of secrecy? |
| | How come you want to have it before the public have tested it, and not just hi-tech managers who live on hype? |
| | Well, if I were to boycott everything developed in secrecy I'd never buy anything with a microprocessor. Nor would I buy anything from the consumer electronics business. Nor another automobile. Nor another legal drug. |
| | But the point is a good one. I believe that Dean Kamen's creation is so original, and his vision so personal, that there is no way anybody else could have cloned it or stolen its thunder before it came out. So it annoys me that he and his crew were so deeply secretive about the thing, even though I know secrecy is pro forma in the invention business. |
| | Yes, there was some nice buzz about "Ginger" (aka "IT") when it was in development, there wasn't much to talk about. And now that it's out, there still isn't. We don't know enough. We haven't been talking about it. |
| | If Kamen and crew kept no secrets about Ginger when she was in development, I'd betcha there would now be far more demand, and far more creative thinking about what could be done with it. |
| | And I'll guarantee you this: the most original uses for this original machine will be ones Kamen didn't imagine when he created it. |
| | By the way, I wouldn't think of buying one until it's cheap. Wanting one is a whole different matter. |
Say where?
| | And sure enough, right at the top of Jesse's show page is a thingie that lets me enter my zip code and see what nearby stations carry the show. |
| | But the results are nutty: |
| | It says the show is on three stations called KSMA — in Santa Barbara, Santa Maria and "San Louis Obispo" (it's San Luis Obispo), each on 1240 AM. The right one is Santa Maria. The other two are decoys. They don't exist. And the Santa Maria station is obliterated here by a local station on 1250, so thats out. |
| | It also says the show is on KEWS/1350 and KIST/1340, both in Los Angeles. The real KEWS is on 620 AM in Portland, Oregon. There used to be a KIST in Santa Barbara, but it's gone. |
| | And it says the show is on KVTA/1520 in Los Angles. In fact there is a KVTA on 1520, but it's in Port Hueneme, near Ventura. But it comes in here, so maybe I'll listen to that one. |
More ant spottage
Chugging on
| | Some kind words from Mike this morning, and a pointer to the blogging discussion over a the Cluetrain list, which is as hot as ever. |
Reeling in .Net
| | More deep stuff about .Net on Cringeley's current Pulpit. Interesting series. A sample from the latest column: |
| | .NET won't be cheap, with corporations paying about $350 per seat per year. Most big companies have spent the last five years installing SAP, Oracle, JDE, PeopleSoft, and Seibel at a cost of tens of billions, not to mention all the aggravation and stigmata associated with those installations. These companies are very unlikely to throw out their existing solutions just to buy .NET services. They simply can't afford it. |
| | But that's what Microsoft is asking... |
| | This, by the way, is something Cringeley got from his readers. There's a relationship between columnist, sources and readers here that I doubt you'd find in a just-print pub. |
| | [Later...] The Head Lemur just pointed me to a long piece — published one Christmas ago — that ferrets around a lot of the territory that Cringeley opens up in his piece (above) about .Net. |
Crossloading paradise
| | I downloaded Limewire last night for Mac OS 9 (and I'm doing it on Linux right now). While it isn't as pretty or fast as it is on OS X, it's still mighty fine. I hadn't realized how much I missed Napster. I'm also amazed at how much the virtual library of music available through Gnutella has grown. It's nearly the equal of Napster at its peak. |
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