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Monday, June 5, 2000
MOSOHO So I'm at the SOHO Summit in Carlsbad, California, which is in that perfect climate zone, just north of San Diego. When we drove through Anaheim yesterday, it was 93 degrees. By the time we reached here, the thermometer on the dashboard of our borrowed '86 Caddy read 73 degrees. Beautiful. Aside from tearing my left rotator cuff just flushing the toilet this morning (leaving my left arm about as useless as a flipper), it's been a great day. Jerry Michalski moderated a panel titled "Markets are Conversations" that featured Mark Hurst of Creative Good, Andrew Beebe of Bigstep.com, Casey Hughes of Smalloffice.com and myself. It was a strong panel that left me, even more than I expected, a bit awed by Cluetrain's effects. Also by the sense that an awful lot of the future is being hatched in home offices. I kinda knew that anyway, but this show does a good job of exposing the facts behind the sensations. I opened my own remarks by thanking the crowd for coming to the San Diego Macintosh Users Group meeting, since Apple had provided all the on-Net equipment, and a remarkable number of attendees were using PowerBooks. I traced the ancestry of the "Markets are conversations" idea back to the original Macintosh Office, the name of an Apple initiative in 1985 that was based around the Mac's easy networking. That informed a white paper I wrote about "workgroup computing" and "groupware" that brought me a bit of notoriety in the late 80s, plus correction by Reese Jones of Farallon Computing (now Netopia), who told me that all groups grow out of conversations. It was a bit of an epiphany to me, and I don't think I've ever given Reese enough credit. Afterwards the Apple people were not only interested and open to talking about all kinds of non-Apple stuff (new, compared to my earlier experiences with the company), but eager to talk about the Open Source qualities of OS-X and growing synergies with the BSD and Linux communities. Meetings will follow. Tomorrow I head for the Strictly Business expo in Minneapolis, where I'll talk twice about Linux in Business. Here's hoping the bad shoulder can handle the luggage.
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