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Wednesday, May 31, 2000
Tune in, turn on, click out. What's the opposite of "sticky?" Try "clicky." A clicky site is one with plenty of interesting hyperlinks to elsewhere. What better to support than curiousity? As promised. The press release on Transmeta's deal with AOL and Gateway deal is now up at the Transmeta site. For the rock & roll side of the story, check out the Slashdot fray. My favorite line: Now we see the downside of OSS—all us geeks doing cool things to impress each other has produced an open source WebTV.
Classic Salon returns. Sort of.
We are markets. We come in peace. Unless, of course, we get pissed off.
Metaprogress. The second was from Duncan Smeed, writing from the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow:
A good background story to Transmeta's project has just been published by IEEE Spectrum: http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/publicfeature/tran.html Transmeta (and Ketchum Thomas) deserve credit for brilliant publicity work around the lauch of both the company and Crusoe. Now it's time for Transmeta to join the conversation they started.
Bet on the documents: Titled "The Real Document Architecture," the first piece in this JOHO arrives at the same answer. But this time the answer frames today's hot topic -- the lust for broadband -- in a clueful context:
The weird thing is how easily we have grown accustomed to the hybridization of documents and buildings. Perhaps this is because an absorbing work of fiction draws us into its imagined world, so we already have a sense of books as portals to new places. The transition, weird as it is, is not as unexpected as it might first seem: books-as-portals have become documents-as-buildings. This is where the real battle with broadband will be waged, for broadband (as envisioned by companies who still haven't gotten over TV) is a code word for "broadcast," turning the semantic landscape of the Web into a mere communications medium. We will have both document sites and Web-based programming. But only one will change the world. Exactamundo.
Say where? Transmeta's press release page features just two documents: one for its hugely publicised Crusoe rollout in January and another for landing $88 million in financing last month. Maybe they could spend a few bucks to make the Web site a bit more useful. It's pretty and the organization isn't bad; but there's just not much to find inside, either for a reporter like me or for the EE at some hardware company looking for the hard data that might lead to a Transmeta design win. The sad truth is that it's still the brochure Transmeta published as part of the publicity explosion in January. One revealing item: every single page title is "Crusoe - a new world of mobility from Transmeta." When I look under my Go menu to see where I've been at the site, I see fifteen listings for exactly the same hype. The deeper problem is that Transmeta was so secretive for so long that it never joined any real market conversations. It wanted people to talk about the company, not with it. So it has no publicity habits. I like Transmeta. I like Crusoe. I have friends who work there who seem to love the company -- at least to the extent they are allowed to talk about it (yes, the secrecy persists). But I'm concerned about it. Here's the reason, in the form of a clue I delivered in a Linux Journal editorial nearly a year ago:
By the way, if you want to read the release, it's at the Gateway site. The San Jose Mercury News also ran a story.
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