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Monday, May 5, 2003
Redefining recession 
Viral research
| | I've been asked by about four sources to fill out A Survey of Blogs and Bloggers. It's waaayy too long, and far too obsessed with politics, but still. Might be interesting to you. Or somebody. |
Maybe his money will be easier to find than his ass
Sound on sound
You aren't there, but somebody is
| | Eric Norlin is blogging WinHec (which I'd never heard of before this week). Taking public notes, basically. I can't follow follow his rap, but I gotta feeling it's not my music, since I'm in the minority of nonWindows followers out there. |
Katz's Plugged
| | I'm just wondering if the place will be unwired for '-fi by the time I get back in town. |
We're outa here. Or are we?
| | I love Silicon Valley. In many ways, I still consider it home, mostly because its the geographic instantiation of the place where I really live, which is here: The Net. And because I lived in the Valley for sixteen years. |
| | But now I can live whereever the packets flow wide and fast. Hence, Santa Barbara. |
| | In any case, there's been a migration going on. Here's Michael Taht: |
| | Last week two friends decided to chuck the Silicon Valley. |
| | All the good, talented people they used to work with had been laid off, and the only people left at their respective companies were neurotic pathological backstabbing dweebs that were better at holding onto a job than doing it. They were exausted from five years of relentless expansionary overwork, and two years of endless recessionary corporate bullshit, and the endless planning meetings producing pointless specifications that couldn't be implemented. There was always one thing missing (money, people, time, talent - and especially - flexibility) always delaying the project, always leading to more meetings, where nothing happened. Mental paralysis had set in - a far cry from the heyday of the boom years when the path from having a problem to solving it was whipping out a credit card, hiring a consultant, or a late night's coding. |
| | It took them a long time to realize that they were wasting their lives propping up people that deserved to be on the street themselves. |
| | And so they plan now to get up and go, themselves, move elsewhere (they won't let me say where), and start something of their own. They keep each other going now by instant messaging each other with "I'm so ready to leave" and variants, reduced, now, after months, to a series of acronyms. They've been sweeping up sweet, well engineered, barely burned in Cisco gear on Ebay for pennies on the dollar in preparation for their new company. |
| | But it features a happy beginning, sort of: |
| | This morning, at 6:30, clutching a cup of strong coffee, I staggered outside to have a cigarette. The Chinese/American paperboy delivered the Sunday SF Chronicle next door. I told him I wished I had a buck-fifty so I could get it. |
| | He looked me up and down, smiled sadly, mysteriously, and just gave me one. (I looked in a mirror afterwards: I was unshaven, wearing friday's seafood stained shirt and paints - and I had enormous bags under my eyes.) |
| | Also last week, another friend, nine months unemployed, submitted a resume to a startup via email, and 5 minutes later was talking to a recuiter. Another friend had had a resume sitting on monster for a year and got a callback out of the blue. |
| | Trendspotting? The joys and pains of capitalism. Do I have reason for hope? Is this the turning point? |
| | Not that I'm going back. :-) |
See what happens when you disintermediate everything?
| | If you want to see the future of advertising, and of the stuff it supports, consider the growing fortunes of Overture and Google. |
| | Overture's preliminary revenue report for the last quarter verges on a $1 annual billion run rate. That's for advertising, folks. Remember how that business model was supposed to suck? Welcome to one walking disproof of that. The company has also been running at gross profit margins way upwards of 90%. Google is in the same business, although they aren't public like Overture, so we don't know what their revenues are. We can be sure they aren't small. |
| | Like I said here, the new advertising game is low-overhead classifieds with high accountability. The holy grail: Ads that work by making themselves useful. Period. We're almost there. |
| | Disintermediated are agencies and other go-betweens that served as massive reduction gears in an industrial machine that never worked that well in any case (if you just consider the waste). |
| | Gaze into the crystal ball, and wave goodbye to Business as Usual. |
| | Bye-bye to ad agencies. Bye-bye to creative, media and account folks. Bye-bye to operational frictions and value-subtracting costs and annoyances of all kinds. Give it time, and you'll be saying bye-bye to traditional media too. |
| | Then say Hello to simple messages in vehicles that work for everybody and don't annoy anybody in the process. |
POGE vs. Microsoft?
| | POGE is an old geek notion: the Principle of Good Enough. It's why we have such free range simplicities as the Net, the Web and email. Even such handy protocols as LDAP. All are also noncommercial, even though they support commercial activity. Companies don't own them, and none make money from locking down access to them. |
| | Marketing has an opposite notion: PONGE — the Principle of Never Good Enough. That's what companies like Apple and Microsoft are about. For Exhibit A, Check out what Microsoft is up to with Longhorn. It features scary/annoying shit like |
| | a radically redesigned user interface with a dynamically composed desktop featuring compelling new visual effects like graphically tumbling, rotating, and warped windows |
| | Plus useful stuff like sub-pixel rendering and support for higher pixel densities. |
| | We need both POGE and PONGE, of course. The best commercial developers achieve one while pursuing the other, giving customers something durable to live with in the meantime. The danger to the commercial developer comes when Good Enough becomes a fixed state. In those cases, NGE becomes the enemy of GE. |
| | I'm reminded of what Bill Gates once said when he was asked about competition between then-new Windows 98 and MacOS. "Our competition isn't MacOS," he said. "It's Windows 95." (That may not be verbatim, but it's close enough.) Longhorn is reportedly nearly three years away. Will all the major OSes, including XP, be Good Enough by then? I have a feeling they will. In any case, prepare for a major fight between POGE and PONGE when Longhorn hits the streets. |
From the Office of Suspicious Coughs
Does Norlin know?
Go Northwest, young man
Toward a Taxonomy of Linkage
| | The "linkers" among the extra-bloggers have made it their goal to discover and share links to places they've discovered which might not otherwise come to their readers' attention. These folks have a blogroll - sometimes a very lengthy one - but the meat in their posts come from non-blog sources. The truly orthodox web logger falls in this category: those skinless sites that often feature streamlined "link dump" posts in which the link titles themselves are the content and the blogger provides little to no additional commentary. A less-extreme example is Doc Searls ' site. |
| | Not sure this here blog is a great example of that, since I blurt too many mini-essays within which linkage is more background than foreground (though not many lately, I'll admit... sorry, been busy). Still, a fun list. |
Lost Linx 2 Bubba
| | Bubba says he moved a page, but blames Manila for the resulting 404. The original link comes from here and points to Bubba's June 8. 2001 blog. An error comes up. I wonder if the original blog was on a different day, and the link just points to an unblogged day or something. Can't tell. |
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