Tuesday, February 19, 2002

I'd like to write an article about the foolishness of treating standards efforts as exercises in altruism.   The sad truth is that the only time you get honest cooperation is when cooperation is the selfish choice for all the companies involved.  In other words, almost never -- it's almost always the case that some people see no standard as being a better outcome than an outcome where the standard levels the playing field and provides state-of-the-art functionality on a commodity basis.   They are faddish now because people see them as the magic that makes technology adoption happen.  That is bogus:  Standards are neither necessary nor sufficient for adoption of a technology.   And when they do play a role in adoption, it's usually questionable whether the market that results is really an attractive one to be in for suppliers.   Building a strategy around altruistic participation in standards efforts is noble but foolish -- better to focus on being so good, everyone buys your product and you become the de-facto standard. This may be hard to believe, especially for technologists who really want to see their products work together.  It almost seems too devious to believe that big companies manipulate standards efforts to acheive selfish outcomes that hurt the standard or the standards process.    It really happens though - any time I've been in a position to observe it (SET, SDMI, SOAP), it was readily apparent. Information Rules, by Shapiro and Varian has an excellent couple chapters on the economics of standards -- they're equally pessismistic about the likelihood of success. 10:50:04 PM

[ZDNet Tech News] Be stings Microsoft with lawsuit. Operating system maker Be said it is suing the software maker for 'the destruction of its business as a direct result of the illegal and anti-competitive practices of Microsoft.' I doubt this will fly... still, it would be interesting if Microsoft lost. Think of the shitstorm it would unleash for them 5:23:59 PM

[IDG InfoWorld] Entropia to bring grid computing to PC fleets 5:21:51 PM

[Daypop Top 40] Brits Storm Spanish Beach by Mistake (washingtonpost.com) you'd have thought this kind of error would have disappeared with the introduction of GPS... must have been quite shocking to see commandos storming your beach 1:01:00 PM

[IDG InfoWorld] IBM eyes education as means to Web services in addition to their general software evangelism work at devWorks, they're doing a site specifically for WebSphere. 10:04:04 AM

[John Robb's Radio Weblog] NYT.  IBM wants to put Web Services into their Grid technology.   I certainly can see why the Big Co's want this type of technology.  They have cast their greedy eyes on the 400 m computers people are using that aren't under their control.  There will be 140 m computers sold this year with 1 GHz processors and 40 Gb of storage.  That dwarfs the current installed based of centralized hardware by any measure you want to use.  Every year that ratio moves in favor of PCs.  So, the solution here is to build apps that can run on these machines and pay people for their contribution.  Unfortunately, I think they would rather come up with a flashy app that people will download that would then allow them to sneak unused compute cycles out the back door.   I still don't believe in grid computing.   Its cool; its theoretically possible; but neither of those make it a viable business.   Transistors are cheap and getting cheaper.   The cost of powering and maintaing old transistors and the cost of coordinating between various parts will keep this from ever being truely attractive (except for people with a good cause and no money :) ). 8:53:32 AM

[ZDNet Tech News] Blue lasers sharpen new DVD standard. Sony and Matsushita lead nine companies embracing a new DVD standard based on blue lasers which have a shorter wavelength and can read and write more data in a smaller space. 8:42:43 AM

[Douglas W. Burke's Radio Weblog]  NY Times: Protecting Intellectual Property. that competitors have access to it, of course. But many companies say the competitive risk is outweighed by the benefit of making it difficult for someone else to win a patent -- a patent that could give the holder the right to demand licensing fees from all other users of the technology or technique. [Tomalak's Realm] A very interesting IP strategy.  We may consider this for Simile. 8:40:21 AM

[The New York Times: Opinion] Taking the Fifth Too Often. In Enron's Congressional hearing, the Fifth Amendment is being used for the wrong purposes.  I thought this was going to be an article that said Enron bigwigs were using the 5th to maintain a conspiracy -- not just protecting themselves but also their co-conspirators with the shield of the 5th.   Instead it's about compelling people to testify -- while attractive and this and other settings, I think this kind of thinking is a mistake.  Governments have a long and bloody history of being the worst abusers of power.  The US government was deliberately bound and hobbled by the constitution to prevent that from happening here.   One side effect of this is that it makes it really hard for the government to enforce it's law on the people.  A crying shame in the case of Enron, but keep in mind that Enron's crimes pale in comparison to the crimes of governements gone bad.  8:35:10 AM

[IDG InfoWorld] RSA: Securing Web services 7:22:26 AM

[IDG InfoWorld] RSA 2002 I'd probably swing by to see this, but it is in San Jose again this year (after a brief return to SF last year). 7:22:05 AM

[Hack the Planet] I got Mozilla to see the Java VM on Linux thanks to a tip from Charles Miller. 7:18:25 AM

[Scripting News] On this day last year: Internet 3.0. "First we need easy-to-program financial services available through SOAP and XML-RPC. A bank implemented in software." Surprisingly as far as we can tell, none of this has deployed, a year later, after all the hooplah about Web Services, esp as it relates to financial transactions. If it had, we'd be able to get an XML-RPC call back from Digital River when a user pays for a new feature or tool, and automatically enable corresponding services on the Radio community server. Without this, we're limited in how we can grow our business, and in the money-making opportunities we can offer to Radio developers and designers. We are not, and do not want to become, a bank. We made a bet, we built an egg, hoping a rooster would have come along by now. Any roosters out there?   6:48:18 AM