Well, this is interesting - if what Gates says is true, then he's FUD-ing MS' own Vista product:
In response to a question about Windows Vista, Gates, speaking before the Inter-American Development Bank here, said: "Sometime in the next year or so we will have a new version." Referring to Windows 7, the code name for the next full release of Windows client software, Gates said: "I'm super-enthused about what it will do in lots of ways."
Admittedly, you have to take any MS date statements with a huge grain of salt; just look at the various predictions of Vista's release over time. Still - that line could put another nail in corporate adoption of Vista, as businesses already nervous about Vista impact could decide to take another year of stability with XP.
Dave Winer put out a complaint I see a lot - his happens to be about the fees paid to some speakers, but I've seen other people make the same one about sports figures (etc):
I'd love to see a breakdown of the speeches. Who pays $1 million for an after-dinner speaker and why? Maybe I'm missing something, but something doesn't sound right here.
Commonly, you'll se this mixed with something like "policemen don't get paid that well, and they do a much more important job". Here's the thing though: a thing (object or service) is worth what people will pay for it. Period. There's no such thing as a "fair" price - it simply doesn't exist.
You need to drill the idea of "fair" prices out of your head, because it's a nonsensical one. Use this an example: you want to sell your house. The local government has assessed its value as $300,000. You offer it at $350,000. Are you cheating? Now, someone comes by and makes an offer of $300,000 - and then someone else comes by and offers $360,000. Do you take the lower offer, on the assumption that the "fair" price is what the house was assessed at?
When someone starts going on about how prices should be fair, here's my advice: hold on to your wallet, because "fair" is rarely cheap.
On this week's podcast, we talked about how developers go about learning code they aren't familiar with - and how the approaches differ in Smalltalk and other languages. From there we rambled into static/dynamic typing some before wrapping up on the core topic.
Other bloggers complain of weight loss or gain, sleep disorders, exhaustion and other maladies born of the nonstop strain of producing for a news and information cycle that is as always-on as the Internet.
To be sure, there is no official diagnosis of death by blogging, and the premature demise of two people obviously does not qualify as an epidemic. There is also no certainty that the stress of the work contributed to their deaths. But friends and family of the deceased, and fellow information workers, say those deaths have them thinking about the dangers of their work style.
Dial the clock back to the early 20th century (or the 19th, for that matter) - it wasn't much different for the newsies of the day. We forget that many newspapers put out multiple editions a day, as news broke. You think the reporters responsible for getting those leads didn't work as hard (or harder - the news didn't come to them over the fiber)?
You would think a NY Times writer would know that, but maybe I'm expecting too much...
Dell Inc., the personal-computer maker that pioneered selling custom-made machines directly to clients, is moving away from its build-to-order model to reduce costs.
Dell is limiting the degree to which buyers can dictate specifications while expanding its line of prepackaged models, operations chief Mike Cannon said Wednesday. Dell will also outsource more PC manufacturing to partners, he said.
That reminds me of a sales call I made back in the late 90's, when I was at ObjectShare (the one that had been ParcPlace-Digitalk). We were at a Wall Street client, pitching "Parts for Java". They liked the demo, and they were interested in Java - but then I watched (with an admitted sense of Schadenfreude) as the guy said to us: "That looks great, but why would I buy Java from you guys?"
You might recall that this was just at the point where ObjectShare was trying to claim that its "core competency" was objects, not Smalltalk - and this client just shot that idea right out of the sky.
That's what Dell is doing now. Why would you buy from Dell, if they are simply putting together run of the mill packages like everyone else? Dell is known as the "custom order" place - this is a complete violation of their entire Brand. I wonder what Laura Ries thinks of it...
Doc Searls posts a lament about what "blogging has become", and ends up pining for something purer:
So I want something new. Something for which the making of money is at most a secondary or lower priority. Not sure what that should be, but I am sure, if it ever happens, it won't be called blogging.
The thing is, the same sentiment surrounded the internet itself back in the early days, right around the time the first browsers were released. Suddenly, this pure, non-commercial thing was going to be ruined by all the money making.
I don't get it. I'm not sure why this changes things for any particular person, or why anyone should think it does. Blogging is really nothing more - or less - than personal journalism. It varies across the spectrum of utility just as print journalism does - recall that for every professional journal out there, there are tons of "National Enquirers" - online, where the price of posting content approaches zero, why would it be any different?
The subject line is something that Comcast, at least, needs to ask itself. I've had my troubles with them - day long outages, and - over the last month - constant micro-outages (just long enough to knock my IM clients and/or IRC channels over).
It seems that I'm not the only one with Comcast troubles - see this Twitter scan that radiates out from an annoyed tweet by Mike Arrington. Comcast doesn't realize it yet, but this could be the same kind of PR problem for them that "Dell Hell" became for Dell. This little comment in the Twitter scan pretty much says it all:
I don't get it. Why can't these companies make money simply selling "dumb pipes" to the Internet? I'll pay for that
Indeed. Instead, they have various kinds of filters to defeat BitTorrent, and their customer service is a mostly sorry joke. I think Comcast needs to read the subject line of this post, and then read the quoted comment above. Their theories for what counts as "internet service" are way, way more complex than they need to be.
This is one the things I like least about the supposedly "professional" media: narrative is far, far more important than fact. Take Larry Dignan, who was interviewed for the "blogging kills" story, but didn't make the cut. Why?
And that brings me to my point with Matt. Yes, blogging is stressful. Yes, it can be insane. But is it any worse than being a corporate lawyer? How many of those folks dropped in the last six months? How about mortgage brokers? Hedge fund traders? FBI agents? Any job where you gnash your teeth together? We write for a living, yap all day and don’t have to wear suits. You could do worse than blogging.
But that didn't fit the narrative, so it didn't make the story. To read the Times' story, you would think that everyone blogging is desperately trying to push out "one more post" in order to get the maximum amount of Google juice possible. Heck, they didn't even produce the classic "on the one hand, on the other" type of story - it was lazier. Yet another reason to realize that most reporters don't have better skills than the average college grad of 21, much less the average blogger.
As Mike Arrington says, Comcast mostly doesn't have to care about your connection issues (or TV issues, for that matter), because they have a local monopoly in most places (I suspect that I have things a bit better here because Verizon laid down fiber - and started offering a real alternative). Having said that, what possesses them to tell outright falsehoods? Like airlines, are they operating under some bizarre belief that "we can't handle the truth"?
As Arrington relates the story, they told him that the outage he had was "California wide" (even though he was getting online at other people's houses nearby). It was only when he started the tweetstorm that Comcast called him, and then came out and fixed his problem. On the one hand, it's good that they monitor corporate references; on the other, they end up looking stupid due to the earlier behavior.
This kind of thing drives people nuts, and makes them feel like a prisoner rather than like a customer. Does anyone at Comcast see that? From here, it looks like the answer is a resounding "no".
On today's Smalltalk Daily, we pick up with Seaside and linkable urls - how do you make a part of your application externally linkable? If you need to catch up, grab this file in. If you want to start from the beginning, head on over here.
Robert Love has written a very nice looking Bible companion application in Cincom Smalltalk - I've got some screenshots from it that show it off (click through for full size images). You can buy the application (German language) here.
I'll be out of the office most of Wednesday, as I'll be heading up to NYC for a meeting with a customer. I haven't ridden the Acela trains in awhile, so I'll be interested to see how they are these days.
Google has announced their application platform, and their hook to get you started is that it's free up to a certain level of usage - that usage level is restricted for the beta period (first 10,000 signups). Here's the detail on that:
Google's App Engine initially will have limits of 500MB of storage, 10GB of daily data transfer bandwidth, and 200 million daily cycles of processor use. That should be enough to power a Web site with about 5 million page views per month, Koomen said.
Once they get out of beta, that usage level will be free, with anything beyond that charged on a pay as you go basis. The interesting thing is this: the development environment for it is Python. So much for Sun's theory about what you need to scale in the Enterprise.
That provides an interesting counterpoint to what Amazon is offering though. With Google, small scale use is free, but your toolset is limited. With Amazon, you pay as you go from the start (not a lot), but you can use whatever tools you want.
Bottom line, developers just got more choices for building out web apps.
With the release of ObjectStudio 8.1 and VisualWorks 7.6 (the commercial CDs should be going out shortly), there have been a few changes to the system browser. Today's Smalltalk Daily goes over the main changes.
Jeff Jarvis is connecting the dots on CBS moves in the news division:
The signs have been adding up: CBSNews.com did major layoffs and an aggressive retreat from news online. CBS stations made news layoffs aplenty. And now CBS is said to be talking with CNN -- again -- about outsourcing news to CNN. One imagines a one-woman-thick news operation: Katie Couric reading intros to CNN reports.
As Jarvis notes, this isn't a bad thing. I rarely watch one of the 30 minute national newscasts - why would I? I have CNN, MSNBC, and Fox running news 24x7, and CNN runs a headline service if I want something short. I also have the whole net to choose from.
The interesting question is what this will do to local news operations. Those have long been seen as the "farm teams" for the big networks, but that's not going to hold any longer. I expect to see more and more affiliation with the cable news networks, and for the bons between local stations and their "home" networks to loosen.
Michael has been putting together OpenGL and Cairo, and the results are pretty interesting - I've got a short (45 seconds) video demonstrating what he's been working on. You can load it and try it out yourself: just go to the public store, and grab the OpenGL-Examples package.
It's been a slow but steady process - over the last couple of years, we've been moving more and more to the Mac, and to Apple products in general. It started with the Mini we bought, just before Apple went to intel. Then came the iPods, one for me, one for the kid.
That was it for awhile, but then the MacBook Pro arrived last summer - I was sold enough that my wife got a MacBook - which she loves. Now I've upgraded my old iPod to a Nano, and my wife is getting one of the classic models.
This is a sea change for us - not too many years ago, I was arguing that Macs simply weren't worth the cost premium. Now? The sheer amount of time I haven't had to pound my head on the desk makes up for that differential.
Dave Buck has announced a Smalltalk training class in Santa Clara, California:
Simberon will be offering an open enrollment course Introduction to VisualWorks Smalltalk course in Santa Clara, California. It's a 5 day course that will be running from May 12th to May 16th 2008. The course covers the Smalltalk language and basic libraries, version control, refactoring, and building user interfaces. To register visit Simberon's web site.
I like taking the train (as opposed to flying) when I head to NYC. This might come as a surprise to people who know me, as they know that I'm fairly skeptical about any expansion of high speed rail in the US. The thing is, it works in the Washington - NY corridor, and in the NY - Boston corridor. There are other places in the US where it either works now, or could work - the region around the Great Lakes comes to mind, and also the coastal California corridor between LA and SFO. That's not to say there aren't problems though.
If the railbed isn't ready for high speed trains, the infrastructure cost for laying those down is enormous - especially compared to planes, that don't have to stick to a restricted space. On longer haul routes, rail makes even less sense. In the abstract, I'd love to take a comfortable rail trip across the US. In reality, there aren't enough people who want to do that on a regular basis to justify it - why take a multi-day train when you can fly in 5-9 hours (depending on whether it's non-stop or not)?
To relate this to software, I think it's another case of picking the best tool for the job. When I have to head to NYC, the train is a far, far simpler and more efficient option than air travel. When I have to head to Cincinnati? It's a different ballgame.
This is kind of curious. My trip up to New York was completely uneventful. On my way out of Penn Station I noticed soldiers (National Guard, maybe?), all unarmed. I wasn't sure whether they were working or just in transit, like me. Now, on my way back home, I noticed soldiers at Penn Station again (unarmed, so what's up with that?) - and then on my train (the 5 pm southbound) - police stationed on the train, in between every car. I've never seen that before - is this normal, or are they looking for something? Very strange...
A second wave of audits began on March 30 and will continue through June 30. Laura Brown, a spokeswoman for the FAA, said it could not rule out further groundings. "We don't know," she said. "We find what we find."
Who knows which airlines will end up in the crosshairs? I'm still planning to fly American to Smalltalk Solutions - odds are, the problem will have gone by them by June. Knock Wood....
Charles Miller isn't happy with the rash of Twitter-spam out there. I'll note that this isn't new; Immediately after I joined Twitter (awhile ago) - I recall that one of the first "follow me" requests came from "Girls Gone Wild". I kind of figured that they weren't interested in "Smalltalk Daily" :)
Who knew Yahoo would go this far to avoid Microsoft - it looks like an AOL/Yahoo merger is in the works. I'm not at all sure that it's a good idea; both companies are foundering, and it's rare that two bricking companies do more than sink faster.
Meanwhile, Microsoft is talking to News Corp. to create a joint MS/News Corp/Yahoo monstrosity? Sheesh, Microsoft can't focus now; can you imagine them after that took place?
If Google has any sense at all, they'll sit back, order some popcorn, and watch their competition commit suicide.
Mathew Ingram points out that a lot of PR pros haven't caught up with reality - the "dead tree" release is as dead as many newspapers are:
This is not rocket surgery. Put links to relevant information in there; add multimedia content if you have it, with either embedded images or links to them. Better still, create a blog post that has all of these things in it and is tagged properly, and people will find it. Whether you follow the structure here or not is up to you (some people believe starting with the facts and not the spin or “hook” is the wrong way to go, but that’s debatable). Just put some damn links in there, and quit hoping that a boatload of overused adjectives will somehow sell the thing for you.
With old releases, the goal was to get phone calls. With new ones, the goal is to drive people to the right part of your website. If you aren't linking to it, how exactly is that supposed to happen?
A devilish Boston fan working on a concrete crew at the $1.3 billion stadium covertly buried a Red Sox T-shirt under what will become the visiting team's locker room to jinx the Yanks, two construction workers told The Post yesterday.
The only solution is to tear that part apart and remove that jersey!
On NPR this morning, I heard an old lady in a wheelchair forced to come to the airport to change her canceled American tickets -- she wasn’t allowed to do it online or on the phone, not even after she said she was disabled and her daughter had seven children and a newborn and couldn’t take her to the O’Hare’s hell.
Unless you sell a commodity whose value is solely determined on price grounds (like, say, gas at a self serve station), customer service is everything. The reason a lot of companies don't get this is simple: Excellent service seems to have little upside. No one comments on it, and praise is infrequent. However, bad service gets passed around via word of mouth. Restaurants figured this out a long time ago; unless you can count on a steady traffic of non-locals, you simply cannot afford bad word of mouth n the food business.
The thing that's changed is how viral word of mouth has gotten. A decade ago, stories like the one Jeff relates would have appeared (maybe) in a local newspaper. Unless a national news organization latched onto it though, it would have been very unlikely to see it spread beyond the people the woman in question knew.
Now? All it takes is someone who thinks the topic should be talked about, and there are so many bloggers around that the liklihood of that happening starts to approach 100 percent. That doesn't mean that it will be known by "everyone", but you can bet that frequent travelers - who follow this kind of news - will find out early, and react to it. It's a whole new ballgame, and it's one that companies and public figures are having a lot of trouble with. Take this item about Bill Clinton, for instance - and never mind the politics, it's the communications issue I'm interested in:
Watching Bill on the trail makes folks wonder whether he could have held up to scrutiny in 1992 had YouTube and instant fact-checking existed back then. No one has seemed less prepared for the intense scrutiny of this campaign than Bill. He seems to forget that even when he's in rural Indiana, he's on the national stage. In '96, the Clinton campaign thought their local market strategy was innovative (it was), since it allowed him to talk to key media markets outside of the interference of the national press. Now, the national press is everywhere since local can become national in an instant.
This is a key thing in modern PR that is just as true for companies: it's virtually impossible to segment a message to different audiences now. Want another example? How about this Absolut Vodka campaign, intended to be targeted solely at a Mexican audience? Again, the people who put that together assumed that the audience was limited; they learned all too quickly that the audience was global, regardless of the theories they held.
You simply can't segment the audience with any expectation that it will stay segmented. "Edgy" campaigns are now every bit as dicey as the idea that you can campaign one way in this area, and another way in a different one. You have to assume that a video camera, phone, and internet connection exist in every single context, and act accordingly.
Here's the video I shot of Peter Deutsch's talk at SPA 2008, on March 18. It's a bit over an hour, with half of that being a Q&A segment. I'll have this out as audio only (podcast) over the weekend. In the meantime, you can grab the video in one of two formats:
Windows is to the new crop of smaller, lower power devices. I'm not the only one who thinks Windows is on the way down - see Joe Wilcox at Microsoft Watch:
By contrast, Vista dramatically increases operating system complexity and hardware requirements. But, with the increasing business and consumer shift to mobile devices, the market demands less complexity and lower-powered hardware. Microsoft's inability to offer Windows Vista for low-powered laptops is example of the problem's size. Vista demands too much. Something else: Deployment complexity plagues Windows and many supporting applications, particularly in the enterprise.
If Vista hadn't landed with such a resounding thud, they might have had a shot at turning things around. However, they are now in panic mode, trying to get Windows 7 out in order to sweep the latter day Windows ME under the carpet. Meanwhile, the next generation of small devices will evolve without Windows.
Scoble brought the whole Shyftr thing to my attention with this post; apparently, it's a service that rehosts syndication traffic and allows commenting directly on their site. There's a lot of chat about that; some people think it's awful, others (like Scoble) seem to be taking a "what can you do?" attitude. That's mostly where I am, but with one caveat: my ability to follow.
For this blog, I don't really have much of a problem, but if you're more popular (like Scoble), the conversation is going to extend far further than you'll possibly be able to deal with. That's what I'd worry about more than anything else; the sheer inability to follow the conversation as it continues to fracture.
This week's podcast is another keynote from SPA 2008: Peter Deutsch's talk on his experience (50 years worth) in software development. This was recorded on March 18, 2008 at the conference - I posted the video of the same talk here.
I finally sat down and watched the last episode of season 2 of Jericho; it had more holes in it than the first season, which was hard to do. On the other hand, if you're the kind of conspiracy nut who still thinks FDR planned Pearl Harbor (not to mention the more modern versions of the same thinking), then maybe you'll enjoy it - it definitely falls into the "6 impossible things before breakfast" theory of plot development.
Though not the first omni-directional treadmill we've ever seen, this version crafted for the EU-funded CyberWalk Project is entirely more interesting. The 6- x 6-meter device features an active walking area of 4.5- x 4.5-meters, and later this month, individuals anxious to prance through a virtual city will be able to strap on a head-mounted display, lace up their LA Lights and indulge in escapism.
So how soon will I need to pick between the blue pill, and the red pill :)
We are about to get a change in the weather here (two good days - it's about to get colder again). Right at sunset, I took two photographs of the wild sky/cloud color:
