dive into mark

New essay: Assume we have a can opener. This is my response in a continuing discussion about the idea of companies giving every employee a weblog to be published within the company. John Robb kicked off the idea initially. I responded by saying that it was a great idea in theory, and technologically sound, but that it would never work for a variety of social (not technological) reasons. He replied with some very interesting comments. This is my response explaining why I think John is missing the point.

Others have chimed into this discussion. Robert Scoble thinks weblogs wouldn’t fill up with junk, although he agrees the company e-mail fills up with junk (and John has previously said that the main purpose of weblogs would be to capture the “knowledge” that was lost in company e-mails and instant messenger conversations, so I don’t know what to make of that). And, on a related note, Duncan thinks that teachers’ weblogs are great, but will never supplant face-to-face lectures. I agree completely; weblogs are extremely well-suited to enhance (not supplant) existing mediums in an educational setting. The goal is to communicate, learn, and challenge each other’s thinking, and any new way to communicate can help do that. But none of these goals describes the corporate environment.

The Register: WinXP activation harmless, cuddly. Businesses who’ve bumbled along casually copying and have therefore stuck with Microsoft software quite frequently won’t have the budget for going legit at Microsoft prices, so they’ll be inclined to take a look at cheaper or free alternatives. This is the real problem. Microsoft’s entire long-term strategy was to hook businesses on the idea that they needed all this stuff, give it to them for free, lock them in with proprietary data formats and protocols, and then squeeze them once they were hooked. Well, Microsoft did all of that, and quite successfully, but now that they finally feel they can start squeezing, the landscape has changed. There are open source alternatives in every market they care about.

• Windows 95 was cheap because it could only talk to Windows NT server, which was expensive… oops, now I can use Linux and Samba to add a file server for free.
• IIS was free (as in beer) to drive out all those other commercial web servers, a task in which it has been wildly successful… but Apache is even more free (speech + beer) and has 3x the market share.
• IE is free because they wanted to lock in their proprietary web standards “enhancements” (like proprietary tags and MS-specific client-side scripting), but everybody is sick of it and doesn’t use them; people who want a really rich client-side interface use Flash. (Yes, I know Netscape tried the same thing before them. That’s why everyone was sick of it already.) Plus we have open source web browsers now that rival IE in features and ease of use, and they aren’t stuck on Windows either.
• Office was never free, but Microsoft tolerated widespread piracy because they knew that even a non-paying Word user was helping make Word ubiquitous and therefore required. They relied on proprietary data formats to keep customers locked in. Oops, StarOffice is free and can read and write Word files. (Also Excel and Powerpoint.)

And now MS is putting the squeeze on their customers, thinking that they’re locked in and it would be inconceivable for customers to be smart enough to come up with alternatives. (Reminds me of Inigo, from “The Princess Bride”: “You keep using that word [inconceivable]. I do not think it means what you think it means.”)

Hampshire College Favors Noncommercial Web Software Open to All [via RRE] A CS professor’s quote: Politically, I think the control over the means of production of technological materials is an economic and political battle of the 21st century that has clear parallels to control over the industrial production of the 19th and 20th century. Wow, the workers control the means of production! Where have I heard that before? It sounds so… un-American.

Why Windows XP Faces a Rebellious Audience [via RRE] With Windows 95, reporters raved about a cool new OS. With Windows XP, they’re saying, “Take your castor oil” — while Consumers Union, the Consumer Federation of America, two other national consumer organizations, and six state attorneys general warn that XP’s digital media, messaging, online identity database, and other extensions expand what a district court and the U.S. Court of Appeals unanimously ruled illegal and anticompetitive behavior.

Microsoft Announces Major Changes to Security Practices. I still think this all smells of the time a few years ago when everybody was railing on them for lack of scalability, so they hosted a “Scalability Day” and ran a bunch of banner ads saying “Did somebody mention SCALABILITY?” Did they do anything about scalability? No, but it bought them some time until everybody’s attention turned onto something else and they could come up with a long-term plan.

The New Republic: Idiocy Watch [via ViewFromTheHeart] A collection of stupid things various people have said since 9-11. The sort of thing that would be funny if it weren’t true.

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