|
Monday, August 12, 2002
Previous topic
|
Next topic
|
|
 Monday, August 12, 2002
started 8/12/2002; 12:17:30 AM - last post 8/15/2002; 7:33:04 PM
|
|
Doc Searls - Monday, August 12, 2002 
8/12/2002; 4:17:30 AM (reads: 6207, responses: 5)
|
|
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. |
discuss
|
|
Fred Grott - Re: Monday, August 12, 2002
8/12/2002; 1:02:15 PM (reads: 902, responses: 0)
|
|
|
Doc okay I guess I should let out a slight secret now..
There is a Linux version of a groove like app being worked on..
Basically the idea is to take what I am learning about sharing apps on eyeMotion ( an photo sharing app that runs in itv) and P2P such as Jaxta and combine it into one neato application!
At this point development is or will start soemtime in early 2003 with it being set up as open source..
Okay I guess I answered my own question of what we can do to improve the Linux in the desktop market!
Please don't swamp me yet.. I am still in the process of completing the itv application while becoming employed agina after a 7 month job hunt..
Sometime in September I will put up a whole subsection for it on my site and set up the sf section so that I can start collecting developers and idea exchanging..
Wish me Luck :)
PS Yes I know that I can GTK said app to get on MacOSX and Windows..but I want to concentrate on Linux..someone else can do the windows and mac versions..
I need name suggestions though..eyeMotion will not do..humanMotion?
discuss
|
|
Shelley - Re: Monday, August 12, 2002
8/13/2002; 4:02:54 AM (reads: 1418, responses: 0)
|
|
|
I bought a Focus ZTS in January--Golden Girl. She's been from San Fran to St. Louis and back and to St. Lou again and still rides like she's brand new. I must have lucked out with mine because she's a jewel. Want to see a picture? (http://weblog.burningbird.net/photos/gg.jpg)
(Sorry, couldn't resist the picture--nice change from cats, don't you think?)
Of course, GG is my first car, only got a drivers license last May. Not surprising that I'm rather attached to it.
discuss
|
|
Samantha - Re: Ozzie and OS as commodity
8/14/2002; 4:54:05 AM (reads: 1772, responses: 2)
|
|
|
What difference does it make if Microsoft's hegemony in the OS market subsides, if they maintain their grip on the desktop with their desktop applications? It's not that Groove is for Windows only that matters, but that its being integrated into MS Office/IE. It's MS Office/IE, not Windows, that Microsoft is leveraging in a dozens, maybe hundreds, of big and little ways to ensure that it will dominate the next age of computing. Jon Udell paints the picture of how Microsoft will extend and embrace in the Infoworld article to which Ozzie points and illustrates, without meaning to, why it is a big deal when developers are seduced by Microsoft.
discuss
|
|
Doc Searls - Re: Ozzie and OS as commodity
8/14/2002; 7:46:45 AM (reads: 1310, responses: 1)
|
|
|
First, I'm not sure their applications account as much as we think for their "grip" on desktops. Remember that Microsoft Office is the top productivity app on Macs as well.
The grip to a large degree derives from the stuff Ray was talking about: the development environment, the tools, the support for people who work in that environment. The #2 guy at a competing software company (a pretty big one) told me tonight that he thought "90% of all business applications are written in Visual Basic." Maybe Microsoft deserves a little credit for making app development relatively easy. Call it "seduction" if you want, but Microsoft was interested when plenty of other companies weren't. Can we blame Ray for responding in kind?
I suppose we can, on the grounds you outline. The hegemony extends itself through all these ties and dependencies between applications. But I'm still not that concerned.
A special relationship between Groove and Office might be scary if Groove were another essential baseline gotta-have-it app. But so far it's not. By all accounts it's a great product, just not one we're all going to be using.
My wife is fond of saying "trees don't grow to the sky." Microsoft is one of those trees. that has seemed to defy gravity for a long time. But they won't forever.
discuss
|
|
Samantha - Re: Ozzie and OS as commodity
8/15/2002; 11:33:04 PM (reads: 1270, responses: 0)
|
|
|
A MAC is just a desktop with another OS and that MS Office is used by most MAC owners just underscores my point.
I don't fault Ozzie for anything. He expresses beautifully one of the major reasons for MS's success. A world in which there is only one OS and one set of core business applications - at least one that matter - makes developers' lives so much simpler and their profits (as long as MS doesn't want your business) so much fatter. That there might have been a world based on open standards that, for example, might have made Groove's functionality fully available to non-MS applications doesn't concern them - they're practical people with work to do. MS deserves all the credit for knowing that developers were the key and for providing them with the tools to make their jobs easier. (Sun certainly didn't "get it".) The only price - innovation and productivity.
I'm afraid I don't share your optimism, in large part, because no one - except MS - seems to see that it is the business applications, not the OS, that matter in the long run. .Net and MS Office/IE so tightly integrated that they will be inseparable.
discuss
|
|
|
Copyright 2009 The Doc Searls Weblog
|
