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Thursday, February 21, 2002 |
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Business 2.0 Erick Schonfeld. Future Boy doesn't get the concept of desktop Web Services. He, like a lot of pundits and analysts think that Web Services are a Big Co issue and that Web developers and smart end-users need not apply. Wrong! To quote Jean-Claude Van Damme with his Belgian accent: "Big mistake. Huuuge mistake." Technology revolutions almost always happen at the grass roots level. That is where the muscle of 400 m computers and and equal number of active brains are. I believe the essential overlooked point in the web services argument is the one John Robb makes above in the section I highlighted. The hidden issue, and threat to organizations, is that in a knowledge economy everyone is starting to realize that they bring their brains to work and that they ought to begin using them. This is fundamentally contrary to the underlying and unarticulated assumptions of most industrial organizations. They operate on Henry Ford's old complaint - "why is it that I get a brain when I hire a pair of hands?" I don't believe that many organizations have really begun to grapple with the implications of telling everyone that they are expected to think. In the near term we're in for a lot of cognitive dissonance as the implicit and explicit messages collide. But John probably has it right that the active brains sitting behind all those personal computers will dominate in the end. |
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homoLudens II : 02.10.02 - Everything discussable. Quote: "So is Radio limited to a single workstation or not? This article by John Udell of Byte.com has me salivating. And then on his own blog he reflects on writing and blogging in a very BAWP-fellow traveller way" The source for Udell's comments that I just posted |
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Jon's Radio: "Sam Ruby and I have been having this oddly indirect discussion here on Radio, and it's made me think. At first glance, the indirectness seemed like a flaw in Radio. Were it a discussion system, like Manila and countless others, we'd be talking back and forth directly, and others would doubtless be chiming in too. Many believe that every document on the web -- even every paragraph or sentence -- should be, at least potentially, the root of a threaded discussion. I have thought so too, for a long time. But now I'm wondering whether this "bug" in Radio is really a feature. Writing for Radio feels different than writing for discussion groups. It feels more like writing for publication. It makes you want to think through what you say more carefully, and not shoot from the hip. I've been a writer all my life, and one of the lessons I've learned is that the process of writing -- done slowly and reflectively -- is closely related to the process of learning. I don't really know something until I can explain it, and I can't really explain it until I can write it. In this age of instant communication and message overload, it gets harder and harder to find time to think things through. Maybe every document on the web shouldn't also be a conversation. Maybe we also need some quiet places in which to think and write." Very insightful. For a long time (two years now at least) I've maintained the equivalent of a private weblog on my laptop. I've run a copy of Frontier on the machine with a Manila site. For much of that time I've used Radio in its various incarnations, primarily for its outliner. It's only very recently that I've begun to maintain a weblog publicly. I find myself frequently debating what to keep local and what to push out to the web. Like Jon I use writing to figure out what it is that I'm thinking. For many topics I need time to work things out. I'm not generally ready to put all that out in the public. Perhaps the answer lies in thinking of layers of visibiity that ideas can percolate through. That's essentially the process that much writing goes through anyway. One attractive feature of Radio and the Userland suite of tools is that ideas can migrate thorugh those layers without much friction. |
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David Reed. Attack of the middleboxes. This is something that has me worried too. I recently ran into this with Verizon (my ISP) when I found out that they had shut down all SMTP traffic that didn't route through their servers. My e-mail now upwards of 1-3 minutes slower a roundtrip than it used to be! (?). The reason? Spammers. Individuals with connections to their network were being recruited to send spam, so, rather than police the activity, they took the opportunity to block all unauthorized and unmanaged mail traffic. This challenges an assumption that many of us have about the Internet: that it is and will remain a simple system. The rise of the Internet scared the telcos. They lost control. They are not going to let that happen again. Get ready for the "last mile lock-down." [John Robb's Radio Weblog] |
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Retrofuture Today. The Retrofuture is a concept based on a simple question: what happened to all that futuristic stuff which was supposed to change our lives by the year 2000? Stuff like rocket belts, flying cars, food pills and inflatable homes. I'm still waiting to buy that flying car and I want to take the Pan Am shuttle into orbit. But I'll never give up ice cream for food pills! |
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The Other Road Ahead: "This article explains why much of the next generation of software may be server-based, what that will mean for programmers, and why this new kind of software is a great opportunity for startups. It's derived from a talk I gave at BBN Labs in Cambridge, MA, earlier this year" Looks like another smart person (Paul Graham) that I need to start paying attention to. |
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