April 05, 2006
Jakob Nielsen's hype levels
In his latest Alertbox, web usability expert Jakob Nielsen has decided we are in a repeat of Bubble 1.0 and dusted off an old column with some new examples of why slavishly following The Next Big Thing is a bad idea. Looking back at the 1997 column, you have to wonder whether the new examples were needed. All you have to do is substitute the names in the table he put up then to see how much has remained the same.
Unfortunately, like a lot of salient advice, people will read Nielsen's two columns - if we're lucky - and they will think, "Those are very good points." And then they will turn to their colleagues and ask: "Now, where were we? Oh yeah, Web 2.0. We need to leverage the edge..."
Posted by Chris at 09:42 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 23, 2006
FreedomPods
Those perfidious French have done it again. Apparently, they have had the temerity to tell Apple it should open up its FairPlay digital restriction management system to consumers. In effect, give consumers the means to circumvent the mechanism used to prevent songs downloaded from its iTunes store from being copied.
Well, almost.
Some people posting about how Apple should quit the French market have got a little ahead of themselves. I'm half expecting someone to demand that Apple's music players should be hardwired to reject Johnny Halliday and Jacques Brel* songs in retaliation. Anyone want to listen to a FreedomPod while they munch their freedom fries? Wired struck a more balanced note.
In reality, all that has happened so far is that the French parliament decided to pass a law that demands that digital content - of any type - bought online should be playable on any type of music player. This decision seems to affect Apple the most because the company has refused to license its FairPlay system to any other manufacturer. Microsoft will also be affected but, because it licenses its system to hardware makers, the problem looks less serious. Apple has, for some strange reason that is actually alienating consumers, decided to overreact.
Somehow, Apple has managed to paint the French move as tantamount to legalised piracy. That is stretching the truth to breaking point. The position taken by the French seems entirely reasonable to me. The consumer has bought the music; the consumer should not be restricted in what computer or portable device that music is played back on. Nobody wants to be in the situation ten years from now where they find they cannot listen to a song just because they don't want to pony up for a new iPod - maybe Creative finally got around to making a player that looks good and works better. The French government is not asking for DRM to be removed; simply for decoding software that understands the format to be able to run on any computer. Apple has no real justification for maintaining a lock over iTunes songs. It is not as if cross-subsidies are involved, although the company might regret having cut a deal so friendly to record companies in the hope of driving iPod sales if FairPlay does have to be licensed out.
Om Malik's presentation of the lock-in as being a good thing is simply bizarre. Having Fairplay run on another machine will not suddenly stop iPods from working (unless there is some very strange code inside it). Nothing in the French law says the DRM has to work well on another platform, just that it works.
I'm curious as to whether Apple would even fall foul of this new law. To be fair to the company, its copy-prevention system is more flexible than most of the alternatives. Backing up songs from iTunes actually involves turning them into CD tracks that you can then rip to move the songs to just about anything you like. Should France target Apple, this might prove to be the company's defence for keeping FairPlay to itself: everything needed for interoperability is already in place. It's not seamless. But it would allow you to play the music on anything you like (assuming you did the backup before you tossed iTunes). Try doing that with a Windows Media file that has been given the DRM once-over. And I can imagine the chagrin at Microsoft when somebody realises this law may mean having to provide source code for Linux distros.
Having said that, I have yet to buy a single DRM-locked music file from anybody. CDs work for me just fine - the lack of fair-use rights in the UK notwithstanding - and I like the selection of regular MP3s from the likes of Emusic and Wippit (if only they would make the site just a bit more stable). AllofMP3? Sorry, never heard of it mate.
* Well, Belgium's in that part of Yoorp too. And the songs sounded kind of French.
Posted by Chris at 06:16 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 02, 2006
Shareholder rights or management rights?
A few days late, I noticed that Analog Devices has got around to rescinding its anti-takeover plan, first established in 1998 under one of my (least) favourite business euphemisms: the "shareholder rights plan". Otherwise known as poison pills - a much more descriptive term - these plans effectively prevent any attempt to buy a controlling stake in the company and dump its management.
I was always curious where the term "shareholder rights plan" came from, as it was clearly enhancing the rights of the management rather than the shareholders, who would get to cash in on the ambitions of a purchaser. However, timing is important in how these things swing in and out of fashion. 1998 was a surprisingly bad year for electronics companies relative to other stocks. After the technology mini-boom of 1995 crashed and burned, the chipmakers ended up with the third-degree scars. While Internet stocks coughed and continued skyward toward the much bigger collapse of 2001, chipmakers bounced in and out of recession. Looking cheaply valued, a number of electronics stocks decided to fend off being eaten up by deals financed with overvalued paper using these poison pills. The argument generally promulgated at the time was that shareholders would not be sold short by a temporary imbalance in stock-market valuations.
Now it's the era of corporate governance and the idea of a shareholders rights plan, which makes it notionally more difficult for shareholders to sell up, is most definitely unfashionable. I really need to look at how many other companies in the sector are throwing out these late-1990s rules. It's not all that tricky to do: the deal looks to cost ADI about $180,000 by my calculations, given that the rights were worth $0.0005 per share. But is corporate-governance chic the only motivator to toss out these rules?
Posted by Chris at 11:36 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 08, 2006
BT learns how to build its own DDoS attack
I just received an email from BT telling me that I can win free songs from iTunes by logging in every day to a subsite at BT.com with a name and email address. OK, it has to be a BT email address to qualify, except for Fridays when it looks to be a free-for-all and you get to play for an iPod as well as songs. The first batch of vouchers gets released at 9am tomorrow (Thursday 9th February). And it's: "first come, first served...Log in early to see if you can get your hands on them!" Oh dear.
Limiting the qualifiers to BT addresses most of the time will limit the damage but I can't be the only person who saw the email and thought, "Hmm, I wonder how long it would take to set up a cron job to do that every day until the 10th March?"
If you find a very, very slow server at 9:00:10 GMT tomorrow, don't be surprised. And Friday? I don't think it's going to be pretty.
Posted by Chris at 09:45 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
What a difference a slogan can make
First, an apology. This is a post about Google. I'm sorry I couldn't help it. The guff about Google doing the same thing tonight as it does every night ("Wozzat Brain?" "Why Pinky, take over the world of course.") is getting to me. I have visions of blog posts rising up like a great tide and crushing every meme in their path. And this is another one. So, I'm sorry.
Like the Brain, Google has been trapped by its own catchphrase. Wannabe corporate management take note. Don't come up with a company slogan that is impossible to live up to but easy to pick holes in. It would explain why almost all corporate mission statements are in equal measure bland and impenetrable. In coming up with "Don't be evil", Google sought to set itself apart from all the other corporations that populate the IT (and most other) sectors. As a private company, the policy might have been possible. The trouble is Larry and Sergey made a promise they can't keep. As a public company, it's the shareholders that own the company, not the management. And, I'm afraid to say, shareholders tend to like evil - not too much, but just enough to keep that share price rising.
So, what we have now is the ugly spectacle of people saying: "Look, Google is just like all the others. They're going to take over the world just like Microsoft, and IBM, and err...the other companies like that. And they're not doing it nicely either."
Giving BMW.de the heave-ho from the listings for an outrageous piece of cloaking was just one of Google's apparent crimes. People are now worried about Google's "accountability" - that it is judge, jury and executioner for its own search listings. Bloggers, in particular, fear the power of Google and so fret about it in public. Curiously, Google is not the primary carrier of traffic to blogs, even though blogs come off bizarrely well in search rankings. Maybe Google will get even more aggressive about protecting the integrity of its search results and I think that concern is uppermost in bloggers' minds when they write about abuses of power at Google.
I think some of their concerns will turn into reality, but only so far as search engines need to deal with the imbalance between blogs and regular websites in the rankings. The situation was probably not helped by the purchase of Pyra Labs and the growth of Adsense on blogs - that will have encouraged Google to allow blogs to maintain higher rankings than they really deserve in search results. But sooner or later, the first pages are going to be stuffed with blog entries that force down pages that people are really going to be looking for when they use a search engine. Which is a bit of a problem when the medium benefiting is getting plenty of real traffic by other means, such as RSS, Technorati or direct links.
Next up in the Google crime department is the arrival of more ads to the search pages. I don't know if you've noticed but Google makes its money off advertising. And it needs more. And more. And more. I think this is the point where Google will begin to lose its shine among users. Google has been a good site to use because it is not cluttered. Advertising clutters pages. But it pays for them as well. Somewhere there is a middle ground that people will accept. But while it finds that middle ground, some users will drift away. And Google's attempts at search dominance take another knock.
I doubt that MSN, AskJeeves or Yahoo will knock Google off its perch. They broadly have the same business model and the same problems. I suspect the challenge will come from one of two directions (maybe both combined). One is improved AI from a new challegner. That is not to say that Google has not been doing a good job of adding its own. Over time, Google has added natural language processing features such as word stemming to improve searches. You no longer have to use the OR tag to find different forms of a word. I would imagine some level of context analysis to provide close synonyms is on the menu at some point. Let's face it, Google has a fantastic corpus for doing that kind of processing. It is way beyond any of the standard corpi that the independent researchers have been using for that kind of work. However, maybe one of the researchers has something a bit special up their sleeve and, like Larry and Sergey, a bit of encouragement or latitude from their supervisors.
The other direction is P2P. I have noticed Yacy, a P2P search engine that I have yet to get my head around turning up in the referrer logs. I remember the old days of the Interweb (that is, ten years ago), when agent-based searching was going to rule the world. Something like Yacy may be the next stepping stone to that. I have no idea whether it will be Yacy as I don't yet know enough about it. But I have a suspicion that the ultimate competitor to Google will be distributed. It's just another turn of the cycle - IBM - server-centric computing ; Microsoft - client-based computing; Google and Ajax - server-centric computing; SearchX - client-based computing.
And SearchX should have the slogan "will work for food" or something less ambitious than "don't be evil". Because Google's epitaph will probably be: "But I couldn't help it."
Posted by Chris at 09:27 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 21, 2006
It's official: no zeitgeist to be found at Google
SearchEngineWatch dug out a bunch of documents to do with the attempt by the US Justice Department to obtain a million random URLs generated during the course of a day to try to demonstrate the constitutionality of the Children's Online Protection Act. In the post, Gary Price quotes a sentence from Google's declaration in which the search engine company's counsel argues why Google should not co-operate: "It is against Google's competitive interest to be viewed as completely reflecting the world-wide web."
Think about that sentence for a minute. Not only does Google not reflect the state of the web, it's not even in the company's competitive interest, according to one of its lawyers. It's an interesting position for a search engine with a massive catalogue of websites and which was, until recently, working through a process to digitise and index every book on the planet. Or maybe Google is just concentrating on reflecting the world.
There is plenty more to read over there and the documents show that the "Google backs privacy" meme that is clogging up the blogosphere has less to do with this case than trade-secret protection.
Posted by Chris at 11:18 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 06, 2006
Bye bye print
As a primarily print journalist, one question I often get asked is how long do newspapers and magazines have left? I have given the same answer for the last ten years: as long as it takes to get an electronic reader with the visual quality of paper, that weighs no more than a thin paperback, with the battery life of an alarm clock and costs tens of dollars to buy. Actually, the battery life can come down a bit: a couple of weeks is just dandy, thank you. When all those things come together, you have the effective death of mass-produced print. It's difficult to think of any reason why you would not use an electronic reader over paper with those features other than stubbornness or vanity. However, vanity is powerful motivator, so I give books - some of them at least - a much longer lifespan.
Printed paper is no more than a distribution mechanism. As Mark Cuban pointed out, it is a distribution mechanism that is becoming prohibitively expensive compared with the alternative: electronic distribution. I disagree: print has always been expensive. It just happened to be cheaper than hiring town criers or minstrels to spread your words. Oddly, printing and distributing paper media has never been cheaper (well, barring some rises in paper costs recently). Go into a bookstore like Borders and just look at the racks and racks of mags. Many of them come from small independent operations, not just big publishers with deep pockets.
Individual circulations might be declining in a number of cases, but the number of titles remains higher than 20 years ago. Maybe even 10 years ago. Some news magazines have seen circulations climb, not fall, at the expense of other titles. However, the main gainer has been online news - not a big surprise. There are many bloggers who believe this shift provides an opportunity to remake the newspaper in their own image - that the change in distribution mechanism provides an opportunity to throw out the old ways of researching and publishing stories.
For printed newspapers, brand loyalty is important. That's how you get the money. People buy your paper everyday because, in the main, they like it more than the other ones out there. With a big enough circulation, you get advertising. And everybody's happy. Online, there is no brand loyalty. Just the stories that look interesting at the time. This makes getting serious money for your product a whole lot more difficult. This is why Cuban and others suffer "an onslaught of ads, popups and intrusions". Each one is cheap: having a lot might just pay for your staff, if you're lucky. It's no surprise to find that publishers are happy to continue working in print when the trend is towards online. It might be a decline, but it can be profitable, managed decline if they play their cards right. If not, you just lost a good newspaper and wound up with a collection of old press releases.
Personally, I reckon there will be a split in online publishing. Newspapers and mags that survive the transition best will disappear behind payment screens and only a fraction will make the necessary leap. These will be operations that can break their own stories. The others will sit in a ring around these and will be mixtures of blog and mag, in various proportions. They are those that can live off Adsense and its successors.
The effect on the book market, however, might be even more dramatic.
Posted by Chris at 10:09 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Ebooks: not quite déjà vu all over again
My favourite comment from Gizmodo's coverage of Sony's e-book reader, launched this week at CES, was Tom of MusicThing's "Yay EBooks! Party like it's 1999!". And 1989, for that matter - anybody remember VC Hermann Hauser's Active Book? The design mutated into the EO tablet computer before the whole project disappeared along with Microsoft's first tablet efforts and as Apple's more famous Newton PDA flamed out. But the e-book reader is one of those concepts that just won't lie down and die.
It is not so much that the ebook reader has suddenly, and once again, become an attractive proposition in and of itself: the story is all in the display and what that means for what could be one of the highest volume niches in portable computing. Companies have been striving to find a killer appplication for handheld computers and keep coming up short. It's not just because a lot of the software sucks. They have lacked the two major requirements in any device that seeks to replace paper: the ability to run off a couple of AAA cells or maybe even coin cells not just for hours but for weeks; and a display that does not make your eyes water after a couple of hours.
The story is really about electronic paper: a display that keeps everything visible even when the power has been turned off. That makes for dramatic improvements in battery life for the computer behind the display. It only has to wake up to do the equivalent of a page turn. It can then have a good long snooze, with the merest trickle of battery keeping a clock going or to sniff the airwaves to look for any updates for content you have downloaded. The designs of the 1990s only had liquid crystal displays (LCDs) to work with. They would get no battery life advantage over other handhelds and the contrast ratio was nothing like paper: a non-starter in an environment where displays are still too tiring to read for any length of time.
In the latest crop of products, electronic paper looks as though it might finally be viable in mass-production devices, at least from a reliability and readability standpoint. There is still some way to go before the displays genuinely rival paper, but it is now possible to see a path from where ebook readers go from being curiosities to the one device everybody uses.
At several hundred dollars, Sony's reader is way too expensive for the market the company expects it to serve. But, this is the wild and wacky world of electronic gadgets. This is largely a concept design that is only just about ready to make it as a niche product that a few will fork over several hundred dollars, or rather, 40 000 yen to get hold of. In the Netherlands, a Philips spinout, Irex Technologies, has a more or less equivalent design that the company has decided to aim at business users - namely subscribers to expensive information services. Those early adopters might be enough to give display makers such as E Ink the necessary experience with mass production to start bringing down costs to where people will think, "what the hell, I'll get one".
I don't see a price north of $50 being viable for an ebook reader if these things are to ship millions a year. This is not an all-singing, all-dancing PDA-phone that can command anywhere near a higher cost, and as I argue in another post, there is no subsidy model for an ebook reader long-term, or even medium-term. But the nature of the electronics inside one of these things should make a sub-$50 price target, even sub-$20, possible quite quickly as long as there are no gotchas in the large-scale production of the display technology. The device could well piggyback off a phone for Internet access and other more complex functions. The ebook reader does not need a lot inside it. But the display has got to look right, it has got to be light and it has got to be cheap.
That's the good news. The bad? It depends on your perspective. There are many people who regard newspapers as no more than "dinosaur blogs". This is the device that will put the lid on the coffin of print, an argument I've been making for what must be ten years now. For those who want to see print newspapers wiped from the face of the planet, this is your dream machine. But, anyone planning to get rich off a bestseller should find themselves an advance and a publisher pronto.
Posted by Chris at 08:42 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 25, 2005
Stunning phrases
If a company told you it made "electronic control devices", you'd probably think it specialised in thermostats or the computers that manage a car's fuel injection system. In fact, this description is so anodyne that when one company used it, I wondered whether I was looking at the right company. A provider of "electronic control devices for use in the law enforcement, military, private security and personal defence markets" in the boilerplate of a statement narrows it down a bit. Yet the name of the company, which is fighting delisting from Nasdaq for not filing its third-quarter 10Q on time, gives the game away immediately: Taser. I wonder how long it took the publicity people to dream up "electronic control" as an alternative to "stun gun".
Posted by Chris at 02:15 PM
October 11, 2005
The sound of silence
Whereas the Palm LifeDrive is burdened by its own complexity, the same cannot be said for the breathtakingly expensive E4c earphones made by Shure. But they really do work. Shure didn't bother with all that active noise cancelling malarky in making the E4c arguably one of the best earphones for wearing in an airplane: they just took the concept behind sound-isolating earplugs and added speakers.
Having a lot of experience with producing in-ear monitors for stage work helped a lot. Despite being severely wallet-lightening compared with most high-street earphones, they are still a lot cheaper than the pro versions and manage to avoid having to have a cast made of your lugholes. But they succeed in wiping out most of the noise from an aircraft cabin. If you can stretch to buying them, get some and you need not worry about the imminent introduction of cellphone services on commercial services, crying babies or engine noise. Just don't wear them on the street: they greatly increase the risk of getting run over.
Posted by Chris at 12:22 AM | Comments (1)
LifeDrive
I had a rush of blood to the head on a recent trip to Boston and picked up a Palm LifeDrive on the way out at the Duty Free store. This is one of those products that looks a lot better on paper than it really works in real life. In making their machines take up more PC-like functions, Palm seems to be giving their PDAs all of the PC's niggles as well.
Hardware-wise, I don't think there is all that much wrong with the LifeDrive but this beast is seriously in need of a software update. I've never seen a PDA crash so often. Even after installing the WiFi update, the network at MIT made the thing freak out so badly that it rebooted itself when it tried to log on. And it refused to do anything useful with the WiFi at the Cambridge Galleria, although the hotel network (at the Tria near Alewife) worked just fine. OmniWeb on the Powerbook gave a clue as to why the MIT network tripped it up - a strange security certificate - but that's no excuse for the PDA equivalent of a Blue Screen of Death. And that was not the only thing to make it crash.
Speed is an unexpected issue on the LifeDrive. Things that used to be near instant on a Tungsten now take several seconds as the device seems to fetch a lot of stuff from the built-in Microdrive. I can understand the reasons for the sluggishness, but Palm seems to have forgotten why people use PDAs rather than little handheld PCs for some things.
I didn't buy the machine for its MP3 capabilities as I used an iPod Shuffle on the trip: the Shuffle is so unobtrusive that it's one of those devices you can take anywhere. But, I had a load of stuff that I could download from the Powerbook and gave the LifeDrive a whirl. Like a number of other users, I found the music playback from the bundled MP3 player to be scratchy at best. The end of each track was accompanied by a burst of crackling that suggests the decoding software is not what it could be. And certainly no reason for Apple to be concerned about converged devices eating the company's lunch just yet.
I didn't expect Palm to have improved their Mac software and I wasn't disappointed. I guess the company knows Mac users are not going to be buying Windows CE machines but I don't reckon that is a good excuse for giving them host software that makes synchronisation take about an hour to sort out (and that is for someone who had to do it before for an old Tungsten).
In short, the PDA does all the things you'd want. Unfortunately, it does them fairly badly. Hopefully, this is down to poorly debugged software and a later update will fix the issues. However, given Palm's recent track record on software updates, I won't be holding my breath.
Posted by Chris at 12:00 AM
August 18, 2005
Enterprise IT vendors to find excitement in their demise
A few weeks, Tom Foremski at SiliconValleyWatcher complained about how dull the subject of enterprise IT has become. John Gallant, editorial director of Network World, who is involved with the forthcoming Vortex conference in the US, disagreed with Foremski's analysis: that enterprise IT is going to see some major shifts and is therefore far from moribund. Exciting? Maybe not exciting in a "get in on the ground floor and cash out soon" sense. To be honest, it's more a bloodbath waiting to happen.
Having been researching a forthcoming piece on service-oriented architecture (SOA) for Information Professional (don't expect to find the article there just yet), I can see Foremski's point. Trying to pick apart the guff the vendors come out with, I think it's a miracle anybody can make sense of what the vendors are trying to sell. The market figures for various bits of enterprise IT are not encouraging for anyone planning to invest in a vendor in many of its sub-markets. And that is where the problem lies. Enterprise IT has been sliced and diced into progressively smaller chunks by some of the analyst companies, which each group of vendors ending up in ever more obscure product sectors.
This endless division of a large market runs counter to what the users themselves are up to. I worked out quickly that to do anything sensible on SOA you have to more or less ignore the vendors and go straight to the users, unless you find articles explaining the fine differences between enterprise service buses and integration servers compelling. Years of marketing conditioning have resulted in vendors having to have some niche that they can head, even if nobody cares much about the subdivisions. That makes the enterprise IT somewhat tedious to report and does little for the perception of vendors among users.
The desire for segmentation does not go to the heart of the enterprise's problem. Almost all big companies have a large selection of broadly incompatible systems bought over the years. They would like to glue them together with as little fuss as possible. The Web has made it possible for them. I don't believe in magic bullets, so it was a bit of a surprise to find one technology turning up again and again.
Web services is quietly transforming enterprise IT as users realise they can buy a few bits and pieces that let them access software buried on a mainframe from more or less anything fitted with a browser. Not only that, once that initial connection phase has been dealt with, they can start to bolt a layer of software onto the front that lets them package different server applications and offer them to third parties or customers. The problem for the enterprise IT vendors is that much of this work has to be done by the customer or by a service company, such as CSC or IBM. Packaged software does not fit neatly into this environment although there are gaps that the software can fill.
The emphasis is more on breaking up the packaged software into components that can be offered up to users separately, as individual services. As the users do this, they are finding that they have a lot of duplication in what they run. Gradually, they are going to reduce this additional fat and align the system around a few core components. That is not good news for vendors, unless some of them decide to live with lower licence revenues and fully the embrace the idea of turning their offerings into components and glueware in order to displace more expensive incumbents.
The trouble is that, right now, many of the software companies keep plugging away at a business model devised 20 or 30 years ago, pretending the packaged software business is alive and well. They just want to sell users something big, shiny and new, not just some glueware for the old bits. At the same time, the service companies have cottoned on to things such as open-source frameworks for providing the glue. That is cheap after all.
Foremski used the example of enterprise IT to describe how the Fortune 500 companies will fall prey to 'new rules' companies. But many of those big companies are not paralysed by their systems. They are getting hold of what it takes to update their systems. Some will inevitably make a mess of it but many others will make the transformation work. The whole Web services setup has given them a better escape route than what the same technology does for those 'new rules' entrants. The people desperately in need of the new rules are the IT vendors using a technology and marketing strategy straight out of the 1980s and 1990s where it was OK to confuse your customers because you were going to tell them what to do anyway. Now, those customers are going to be getting their own back and licence fees are firmly in their sights. Microsoft's decision to aim at the medium-sized companies for much of what it is doing looks to be a much safer bet.
Posted by Chris at 10:04 PM
August 16, 2005
People can understand RSS and still not like it
Nielsen NetRatings has come up with some research on the use of RSS among blog readers and the findings have troubled some posters, such as Steve Rubel.
People are getting perhaps a little too worked up about the findings, seemingly believing that not having RSS take-up will develop into a problem for blogs and that this research points to an ease-of-use problem. It's OK, you can stick with the orange logos and cryptic syndication messages: the problems are obscurity and lack of need.
In the Nielsen study, 11 per cent of blog readers said they use RSS to keep up with postings. The others didn't use RSS (or Atom) for a variety of reasons. But only 16 per cent said they did not understand RSS. Close to a quarter said they understood RSS but chose not to use it. Half said they had not heard of RSS at all.
Most of the hand-wringing is over the 66 per cent who do not understand RSS. I would have expected a larger number to be honest. The figure that interests me is the 23 per cent that chose not to use it. This points to a way of users managing blogs that runs counter to what bloggers believe they should be doing. Rather than choosing a discrete set of bloggers they monitor via a feed aggregator, they are presumably surfing to sites directly. Why would they do that? As Robert Scoble pointed out, they probably don't have a large collection of sites they want indexing.
That 25 per cent probably use Boing Boing, Fark or Engadget or one of the other big blogs as shared indexes to find stuff then just go surfing around. There is probably a good proportion buried in the other categories who would choose to use blogs in that way. As RSS support becomes a standard feature of browsers, maybe more people will use it. But I wouldn't get too worked up about ease of use. Once you've figured out what the orange logo is for and whether to left- or right-click on it, it's easy to remember.
However, I did decide to scrap the logo as I didn't feel it made life any easier for people. Browsers like Safari 2 pick up on the presence of the feeds directly and littering the page with three near identical logos for the different formats didn't make a lot of sense. Sometimes just having a description is just as good.
Posted by Chris at 11:28 PM
August 04, 2005
If it wasn't for other people, I'd get some work done
Email overload is worrying a lot of people, not least the people that run Microsoft. It is even being used to drive the direction in which Office is being pushed, according to comments made at the company's recent shindig with financial analysts. At the meeting, Chris Capossela said the company is concerned about emailing eating into sleep time and that the company is doing something about it. Exactly what is unclear, but it's probably got an orange logo and is spelt R.S.S.
Having helped to make people permanently contactable, Joe Wilcox of Jupiter Research pointed out that more whizzy new communications technology is not going to solve the problem and that helping to separate work life from home life is something that companies should focus on.
I've got a great email productivity tip: don't read it. Or, if you are Bill Gates, get someone else to do the reading for you.
However, ignoring things only works for certain classes of email. If it's really important (or rather someone else thinks it's really important) whoever sent you that email is going to ring you, or IM you, or Skype you. Tomorrow they may load the personalised RSS feed they created for you with messages screaming: "WHY ARE YOU IGNORING MY EMAILS???" Changing communications formats is not going to help the situation all that much. And adding new formats is probably going to make matters worse before it gets better.
Tom Foremski pointed out that there are now too many conversations he wants to have. Blogging has meant we can talk to many people simultaneously but with none of them overhearing each other, except after the fact. And only if they go looking. So, it looks like RSS is not the weapon the email-overloaded need. It's just the CC email born again.
Last week, we saw poor Robert Scoble beating out the flames around the bush fires his spat with The Register's Andrew Orlowski ignited. Unfortunately, he seemed to be using a petrol-tipped beater as the more he pleaded his innocence of sending an email, the more some people doubted him. So, he posted more and more comments before finally taking a break and perhaps realising that possessing proof of something is not the same as being able to demonstrate it to someone else who cannot see it. It was perhaps the counter-example that his blog-book with Shel Israel, Naked Conversations needs rather than being one of the examples of how blogging can help extinguish negative publicity that the current draft contains.
Other blog-related conversations are going to be more enjoyable than Scoble's recent and unfortunate experience. But they all take up time.
In most jobs, you can't do without other people. It certainly doesn't work well for journalism. Obtaining stories does tend to involve talking to people in whatever form they like unlike you like subbing press releases. And I have yet to meet anybody who really enjoys subbing press releases. But there are going to be conversations we have to ignore, if only to make sure we get enough sleep. Holding the conversation in RSS or some other form of XML isn't going to do that job.
Posted by Chris at 09:41 PM
July 28, 2005
How to completely misuse a report
One of the more unseemly sides of the Windows versus Linux war is the use of research to bolster the position of each side. We get releases describing how report X shows up the weaknesses of Windows and report Y that shows how expensive Linux to run even though its core code is ostensibly free to use. Some of the claims even match up to what the original report said. Not the latest claim from Red Hat.
Red Hat claimed yesterday the SANS Institute had published a report that said only two of the top 20 defects listed by the researchers affected its operating system. Because of that, the company claimed: "Linux network security [is] higher than other platforms". I had to check with Red Hat which report the company was using to back up its claims, because I couldn't find anything out of SANS that came close to the claim made in the press release. Even after finding out, making the connection wasn't much easier.
The release apparently referred to the Q2 update of SANS' Top 20 Internet security vulnerabilities. This is where Red Hat's claims begin to fall down. It turns out that, according to the SANS criteria for the Top 20, Linux bugs could not account for more than 50 per cent of vulnerabilities in the report in the first place. This is not because the SANS Institute is fall of Microsoft-hating zealots but because the Top 20 was never meant to be used as a way of counting up who has the most bad bugs in their code. It is just meant to provide advice to sysadmins who want to know which holes they should plug first.
As SANS points out: "This SANS Top-20 2004 is actually two Top Ten lists: the ten most commonly exploited vulnerable services in Windows and the ten most commonly exploited elements in UNIX and Linux environments. Although there are thousands of security incidents each year affecting these operating systems, the overwhelming majority of successful attacks target one or more of these twenty vulnerable services."
Now, you can argue that Windows gets special treatment because it has more bugs than bin full of three-week-old raw meat. But this is not the report to use to make that point. You will just look either a bit stupid or just be treated as trying to make out everybody else is stupid. To a large degree, the Top 20 does not name and shame unpatched flaws but the things that tend to exhibit problems and which tend to get attacked. The Q1 and the Q2 updates issued this year did cite specific faults, but they don't add up to 20 and they also have the Windows and Other Platforms split. The Q2 document contained six named flaws in the former category and eight in the latter. Some of those affect Linux. So, you might get to the "two bugs that have been patched" claim from Red Hat.
The company might as well have claimed Linux is more secure "because my dad said so". I look forward to the next installment when someone uses the prophecies of Nostradamus to show that Windows has fewer bugs per thousand lines of code than Linux.
Posted by Chris at 08:40 PM
July 27, 2005
A strange Vista
When Microsoft announced that it would give the name 'Vista' to its forthcoming version of Windows that had, up to then, been referred to under its codename of Longhorn, it did not take long for people to spot that a nearby company was using the same name.
The Seattle Times reported the comments of Vista's founder John Wall. "We're going to consider our options and talk to them," said Wall.
Wall is better known as the founder of PC-to-mainframe comms company Wall Data. He resigned from the company in 1999, shortly before it was sold to NetManage after Wall Data started to rack up heavy losses. Wall founded Community IQ, which would do business as Vista.com, in 1999. Vista has kept a low profile since then and the name would not have meant much to a lot of people. But its role in a curious set of dealings with SCO meant that the name Vista rang more than a few bells when I saw the Seattle Times story. SCO is not famed for its generosity but seemed to make an exception in the case of John Wall and Vista during 2002 and 2003.
Back in the days when SCO was called Caldera, August 2002, the company that would become the Linux community's bete noire decided to buy a licence to "web services solutions" from Vista. An exclusive licence no less. However, rather than off-the-shelf software, Vista's main business was, and still is, turnkey web hosting for small businesses rather than software. The company had a deal with Yellow Pages company YP.net to provide web hosting for some 250 of YP's customers and Vista's own site lists a smattering of small businesses that have their sites built and operated by Vista.
The deal between SCO and Vista would see the creation of the SCObiz unit, designed to give SCO's resellers a way of providing their small-business customers a quick way of building and running websites. SCObiz was not a runaway success.
For this licence, SCO forked over $100 000 in advance royalties and another $250 000 as a way of guaranteeing that SCO would be able to buy more than 3 million Vista shares for $500 000. At the same time, Wall provided SCO with a bond worth $1m in exchange for 800 000 SCO shares and $100 000 in cash. Vista was meant to pay back the $1m in mid-August 2003 plus 8 per cent interest. If SCO decided to take shares instead, it would wind up with 20 per cent of Vista.
In January 2003, SCO made good on its promise to buy the 3 million shares and paid over the remainder of the $500 000 . So, by this time, SCO had provided $700 000 in cash and 800 000 SCO shares, with about a 10 per cent stake in a startup to show for it. For his part, Wall had 6.5 per cent of SCO's shares, making him the second largest shareholder in SCO, after VC firm Canopy Group. At the same time, SCO signed a deal that would provide it with 70 per cent of Vista's shares in exchange for 2.5 million SCO shares. If SCO converted the existing $1m bond and fulfilled that deal, it would have wound up as the owner and sole shareholder in Vista.
The same month, Wall signed an IOU in exchange for $100 000 in cash. Again, it bore 8 per cent interest and could be converted into Vista stock: another 5 per cent. So, SCO had managed to sign deals that would give it 105 per cent of Vista, in theory.
Yet, SCO provided more cash and, in the meantime, filed an S3 document with the SEC that announced that Wall would be selling his 800 000 shares. At the time the S3 was filed, the shares were worth $1.28. They would rise to more than $10 after the company announced its lawsuit against IBM.
In April, SCO extended the payment date for the January IOU to the end of that month and provided another $100 000 for a second IOU, with the same terms as the first, also due at the end of April. By this time, SCO had paid $900 000 in folding stuff and had bought rights to 110 per cent of Vista. By the end of July, however, both of those IOUs were still outstanding and were, according to SCO's 10Q filing with the SEC for its third quarter of 2003, "in technical default".
By September 2003, SCO had decided it was time to call it quits. The company "restructured" its deal with Vista. Although Wall had registered to sell all his shares earlier that year, it seems he was able to return 100 000 shares to SCO in exchange for the bond and two IOUs. SCO cancelled the accrued interest that had built up and wrote off the deal to the value of $250 000.
In 2004, the CFO who was in place while these deals were done moved to the position of vice-president of corporate development before retiring later the same year. But he didn't stay retired for long. As well as setting up an investment firm called BayHill Group, Bob Bench got another CFO position...at John Wall's Vista.
Vista remains privately owned although the company signed a deal with an small oil and gas company called Source Energy earlier this year. Under the deal, Source would buy Vista, with the Vista management taking over the running of Source. As Source is a company that trades its shares over the counter, it would give Vista a position as a public rather than a private company without the pain of doing an initial public offering. The deal has, as yet, not been consummated. But I can see Vista's name popping up again in SEC filings sometime soon, and not just because Wall might be having a chat with Microsoft.
Posted by Chris at 11:47 PM
