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No, it's the virus outlook Check the top of this page for Microsoft's advice for avoiding virus-vulnerable email software. Blue hell Special bonus page. Because it cries out for fact-checking Dan utters the most responsible words: If Jim Allchin really said this stuff.... Because it was a cry for help Craig Burton calls Jim on his shit. Dig this Great piece by Jeff Angus, sourcing yours truly and other Cluetrainers. Stay tuned I just registered Bullforge.com. Proof not all the names are taken. The Black Hole Don Norman says Microsoft is a conversational black hole. Drop the subject into the middle of a room and it sucks everybody into a useless place from which no light can escape. Yesterday Jim Allchin made the gravity well around that hole a lot bigger. It doesn't matter why. It doesn't even matter if he was accurately quoted. He said something, and here we are. This morning Dave said this: In a perfect world a top exec at the Largest Software Company In The World would only say politically correct things. But Doc man, now maybe you can understand how I feel about some of the nasty shit the spokespeople in the Open Source World say about people like me who make software for a living. I'll make a deal with you Doc, I'll say Allchin is a Bad Man if you'll have a talk with ESR about this same subject. No deal. The black hole is big enough. I'll be glad to talk to ESR. I already have, many times — he and Dave are both great friends of mine. There is huge distrust and suspicion across the divide between the commercial software industry and the free/open software movement. A lot of nasty shit gets thrown back and forth. But smack in the middle of that divide both groups are building common infrastructure. They can't help it. Sooner or later they'll learn to help each other. Yesterday made it later. Or maybe not. A lot of people are talking about it. A lot of that talk is across the divide. And hey: maybe that's shrinking the hole. Let's say it's gas I have an old friend who is an amazingly good entrepreneur. He could sell anything. When he was an undergrad at Duke, he talked the university into buying a struggling little FM station and going into the commercial radio business. It was working for that station that I got my nickname (or its ancestor, Doctor Dave), by the way. This guy was brilliant and original, but also unpredictable and strange. An employee once described his management style this way: "To find a problem and intensify it." His college roommate, a co-worker of mine at the radio station, once said, "I don't know whether it's drugs, or hormones, or gas, but every once in awhile that boy comes at you straight off the wall." I don't know Jim Allchin very well. But a couple months ago I had a long conversation with him on the phone as background for a story I was writing. He gave me some excellent information, as well as useful insights into where Microsoft is going in its development methodologies — among other things. I was so pleased with all of it that I just began to weave some of those quotes and insights into several stories that I wrote under the gun over the last several days. Those stories expressed my belief that it's important for Microsoft to get past its fear & loathing of Linux and open source development. And that it's just as important for the Linux and open source communities to get past their fear & loathing of Microsoft (and, to a lesser extent, of commercial software development). Yesterday CNET ran a piece that quoted Jim scorching Linux and open source in ways that just didn't make sense. Did he really say this stuff? Was he quoted out of context? Was it drugs, hormones or gas? Whatever it was, it intensified several problems at once. Perhaps the least of them was the bunch of stories I had to kill or rewrite because the Microsoft guy whose words added substance to each of them just discredited himself. There are responses to this message:
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