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| Monday, August 12, 2002 |
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Fuzzus 
| | What's the opposite of focus? Fuzz? Blur? Whatever, the car I rented to drive up here is a Ford Focus, "the world's most popular car." It got a nice review from Consumer Reports, which also dinged it for being a bit trouble-prone. I was looking forward to seeing if the thing was really that good and bad. The answer: yes. |
| | It drives very nicely. Fun, peppy, comfortable. The miles flew by today. |
| | Then, when I parked in San Francisco and started to unpack, a big piece of trim from the pillar between the front and rear passenger doors fell off the car. Nothing seemed to be holding it on there, other than being wedged in place on one edge. Amazing. |
And my tires are tired
| | Had a great drive up to The City from Santa Barbara. Lots of catching up to do — and at the moment I'm doing a lot of that with Dave Sifry. |
| | Meanwhile, lemme tell ya: it's great to be a guest in a house with lots of wi-fi. (Speaking of which, Dave's wi-fi company, Sputnik, seems to be doing pretty well.) |
Bayward ho
| | Driving up to San Francisco in a few hours. Between now and then it's all packing and sleeping. If I can find it, I might put up something I drafted and lost earlier in the week. We'll see. |
Hey!
Sage words
| | In terms of building software that people actually use, I strictly prioritize my platform investments and always have based upon "where the users are". No religion. Obviously that means Windows first. But we didn't know what to make of the Linux phenomenon when we were building Groove, so we covered our bases by funding a company (Macadamian) to enhance Wine so that Groove would run. We eventually gave up: nobody gave a hoot about Linux on the desktop. Regarding the Mac, two factoids - take them for what you will: a) the top personal request on the Groove website is currently "when will there be a Mac version?", and b) no major enterprise customer has yet asked to purchase a Mac version. Quite perplexed. |
| | In the first (nearly) five years of Groove, by concentrating for the present on a single platform, and by leveraging everything that we can possibly get our hands on, by embracing new processes that wouldn't have been possible without a sophisticated development environment, we've built about four and a half million lines of (C++) code and continue to deliver new feature releases quarterly, leveraging powerful tools, componentry bundled with the rich layers of code beneath us sometimes referred to as an OS, having both leveraged (the reasonably licensed IBM unicode libraries) and contributed (crypto++) open source code - again, purely for leverage and to help others leverage what we've done. From where I've come, it's truly breathtaking in so many dimensions, and the product could never be where it is without standing on the shoulders of giants - particularly Microsoft. |
| | Of course Ray is free to develop stuff that only runs on Microsoft because that covers 95% of the desktops in the world, and because he finds Microsoft's a very aggreeable and supportive environment. |
| | That's great. I'll miss running Groove on Linux and OS X, I'm sure, but it's no big deal. |
| | I still believe that many of the base functions of the desktop OS are being commoditized, and that Microsoft's hegemony (perhaps well deserved, as Ray's testimony suggests) will subside. |
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