Jeffrey McManus

Link: Already, Obama and McCain Map Fall Strategies

In a sign of what could be an extremely unusual fall campaign, the two sides said Saturday that they would be open to holding joint forums or unmoderated debates across the country in front of voters through the summer. Mr. Obama, campaigning in Oregon, said that the proposal, floated by Mr. McCain’s advisers, was “a great idea.”

A bit part of the unusual-ness is that this campaign is seeing the final few nails driven into the coffin of corporate television news.

It seems likely that the decision to do unmoderated debates could have also been informed by the three-ring circus that George Stephanopoulos turned the last debate into.

People have been talking over the weekend about the failed Microsoft/Yahoo takeover talks. As a Yahoo shareholder and former employee I’m disappointed that it’s going to be quite some time before we get our money out of that stock (note to self: in the future, always sell ESPP shares the day you leave). I empathize with my many pals who work for both companies — however you feel about the takeover, it sucks having to go to work every day under a cloud of uncertainty.

But as someone who has also made his living on the Microsoft platform for years, I feel like I’m in a position to think about what Microsoft — the company that has been desperately casting about for a cogent internet strategy since 1995 — might do next.

When I was at the Web 2.0 Expo week before last, I was talking to a guy who asked me what I thought of the show. I told him I was disappointed — there were a lot of companies who were working on “me-too” social networking products, and a lot of old school companies that really had no business being there (Disney, Oracle). But I didn’t see anything really exciting or disruptive. I told the guy that I had yet to see the next company that was going to put 100,000 people out of work. What I meant was that I didn’t see anything industry-changing.

The ultimate type of business disruption — and the one that is ultimately the most difficult to achieve — is to disrupt yourself. I’ve said for a while that one of the reasons why Microsoft has failed to build a compelling network of web properties is because they are afraid of disrupting themselves. If you want to make a great leap, you can’t serve two masters — and in Microsoft’s case, they’re serving both the Windows master and the Office master. It’s pretty obvious that this is the case when you pay attention to Microsoft’s words and deeds — calling your maps product “Windows Live Local” probably isn’t the most egregious example, but to me it’s a clear sign that whoever named this thing isn’t really thinking about kicking ass, they’re worried about not upending the status quo.

Well, sorry guys. The web will continue to be about upending the status quo for some time to come. You can either play it safe and be upended, or be the one doing the upending. For companies like Microsoft and Yahoo!, there’s really no middle ground.

At the same time, many people in the past few years have said that the “nuclear winter” atmosphere for technology IPOs can’t last forever, that there should be some alternative for web startups short of an IPO. Some people have referred to this as the “rollup” — one well-heeled company that would go around developing products, or acquiring companies as needed, much in the way that Cisco used to do.

Microsoft should create a company to do this. A new company — an independent subsidiary — not beholden to anyone in Redmond. This company would have the mandate to acquire and create great web properties that people actually want to use and that will make money. No one inside Microsoft would have day-to-day control or authority over this company (aside from the sort of high-level oversight that you’d expect from a board of directors).

The new company would have to be based in Silicon Valley. It would have to reward its employees with equity that actually means something. The company must have the freedom to use the best technology to create the best solutions — and if that means Linux, or whatever, so be it. The new company should be permitted to do whatever it takes to attract talented workers from wherever it needs to — including poaching employees from Microsoft itself, if that made sense.

The new company would have an opportunity to throw off all kinds of bad habits, not only those practiced by Microsoft, but by large and small internet companies everywhere. Experiment with new ways of selling software online (not just licensing, and not necessarily advertising-driven). Put in the effort to make everything you do accessible from any mobile phone on the day it’s launched. Support stuff like OpenID and give users the freedom to add and move their data around freely. Dare to release a new product each month (as my team did when we were at Yahoo) and let the marketing and PR people catch up with you if they can. Reinvent web email in a way that makes Gmail look like a childish joke. Dare to sell products that will sell 1 million copies at $20 each instead of products that will sell 1,000 copies at $2,000 each. Provide standard APIs and interoperate with competitors’ products — not just as a way to kill them, but in a way that serves the ultimate interests of users.

Because that’s really what this is about — realizing that your customer is not the IT manager of a medium-sized midwestern insurance company, but the 120 employees of that company. Forgetting the user in favor of the IT manager (or your competitors) is why most users hate most enterprise software; I assert that it’s also why a lot of people have been frustrated by Microsoft today.

A big part of this would also be staffing the right people into the right roles. Microsoft’s geographical location (i.e., far away) and its historic resistance to hiring senior people from the outside (i.e., people with experience running large internet properties) act like a giant anti-talent force field; the new company would not have that problem. People would want to work for this company for the same reasons they wanted to work for Microsoft in the 80s and 90s — to get amazing things done and to have an impact.

My intuition has always been that Microsoft should have created this company ten years ago, and that they might have actually done so if they weren’t in the middle of some fairly profound legal problems. But Microsoft should not let its antitrust problems of the past prevent it from doing this. Just because the federal government tried to break up Microsoft in the past does not mean that spinning out an independent web subsidiary is a bad idea today.

Creating a new and independent web product organization could finally put Microsoft on the map with respect to the internet. It would take a few years, but it sure as heck wouldn’t cost them $45 billion.

Update: In an interview yesterday, Bill Gates said that Microsoft won’t be pursuing any new acquisitions to make up for not closing the Yahoo deal. He also said “now at this point, Microsoft is focused on its independent strategy.” Wait a minute: Microsoft has a strategy? When did this happen?

Hello, there, Yukimi Nagano, you very groovy Japanese/Swedish/American reincarnation of Billie Holiday. Your band, Little Dragon, just released a full-length album, but you’ve been playing gigs for some time, haven’t you. Yes, you have. You’ve also made quite a few cool videos which we can enjoy on the YouTubes. Like these, f’rinstance:

Little Dragon MP3s on Amazon.com

Link: Shh! In British Library Reading Rooms, Flirting and Even Giggling - New York Times

Researchers have been grousing about the boisterous atmosphere and crowded conditions at the British Library for years. But the dispute — a philosophical battle, really, over who should be allowed access to a great national library — spilled out in public last week when The Times of London published an article quoting various distinguished figures complaining about the out-of-control mood over spring break.

The article described how the author Lady Antonia Fraser had been obliged to wait for 20 minutes in freezing weather just to enter the building, and another 20 minutes to leave her coat at the mandatory check-in desk.

It described how another writer, Christopher Hawtree, had been “forced to perch on a windowsill” because he could not get a desk.

To my way of thinking this has far less to do with British schoolgirls annoying people by giggling in a hallowed institution of learning and far more to do with the way that academics seek to impose their mores on students. It is a fact today that most students have mobile phones and a lot of them have laptops. Would it be unreasonable to adapt to this? It seems natural that the “net native” generation would turn to collaboration more readily than previous generations (and why is this necessarily a bad thing?). The problem isn’t these boisterous kids, it’s that our academic institutions (once again) haven’t caught up to the way that people want to learn, communicate and collaborate. The institution of the library clearly isn’t serving these students’ needs. That doesn’t make it automatically the students’ fault; it may not even be Lady Antonia Frasier’s fault. It seems more likely that we are actually in need of a new kind of institution, one with some aspects of a library but without its monastery-esque structure and mindless bureaucracy.

I’m running into this kind of thing myself as I take a community college class this semester (which I know I haven’t mentioned here yet — I’m planning on saying a lot more about this once the semester is over). Suffice it to say that when you see a huge sign outside a campus media center that says NO COMPUTERS ALLOWED and doesn’t permit students to photocopy out-of-print texts under the principle of academic fair use, there’s something fishy at work there — it certainly isn’t the interests of students that are being served.

swim

Originally uploaded by jeffreymcmanus

Had a spectacular afternoon at the pool with my son today. The pool was crowded but the weather was perfect. And taking him to the pool is always a joy because this kid loves to swim. He jumps into the pool with no encouragement and he loves to dunk himself under the water (particularly amazing since he’s not quite two years old).

Link: Bowling 1, Health Care 0

Did you, for example, ever know a single fact about Joe Biden’s health care plan? Anything at all? But let me guess, you know Barack Obama’s bowling score. We are choosing a president, the next leader of the free world. We are not buying soap, and we are not choosing a court clerk with primarily administrative duties.

Link: Microsoft could keep XP if customers want it: CEO

Setting aside the absurdity of the headline (last time I checked pretty much every company is in business to sell customers stuff they actually want), this would seem to be the strongest indication yet that Vista is becoming an evolutionary dead end, and that Microsoft will take another crack at this with the release of Windows 7. I don’t feel, as Gartner analysts recently stated, that “Windows is Collapsing” — after all, the Roman Empire took hundreds of years to collapse after it became moribund. But it’s clear to me that the part of the Windows franchise known as Vista is already finished.

If Windows 7 appears in 2009, as Bill Gates suggested, the OS franchise might be preserved and Microsoft might be able to end-of-life XP. But does anybody really expect that Microsoft will be able to deliver a new version of the operating system within a year? Didn’t think so. Microsoft will have to extend support for XP until Windows 7 is in its first service pack, probably in 2010 or later. (The operating system should be stable enough to plug into a space probe in time to send Roy Scheider to Jupiter.)

Back when Vista was first released, I was talking to a guy who worked in corporate strategy for one of the companies I’d done some work for. He said that they were projecting that 2009 would be the year when Vista would reach its tipping point, when more than 50% of IT managers would be either evaluating or deploying it. I told him that it would be 2009 before most IT managers would even start evaluating Vista. And now it seems that even that estimate was conservative — if Windows 7 goes into beta next year and it sucks even a little bit less than Vista, IT evaluations of Vista will be a waste of time and most corporate IT managers will just skip it.

Our home/office LAN, which at one point boasted as many as six Windows desktop and server machines, is now down to one dedicated Windows machine. (This machine runs Windows XP and will never not run Windows XP.) These days, that machine is used almost exclusively for gaming and media storage. Our laptops are all Macs now, and I’ve switched to an iMac (the best desktop machine I’ve ever owned) as my daily work machine in the home office. When I need to use Windows, it’s Windows Server 2003 running in a virtual machine on the Mac. I’m sure that our situation isn’t typical, but as a guy who built his career on Microsoft technology and is now spending the majority of his time on Linux and the Mac, it’s safe to say that I’m a bellwether at least.

Unless you are French, in which case it is an abomination before God, since this year France’s Eurovision entry is sung in Franglish.

I’m thinking that the French should be counting their blessings that their song isn’t as bad as some of the tripe that comes out of Eurovision every year, but apparently some of them are getting bent out of shape at the fact that the song isn’t completely in French.

I dunno. I think that entering a song in an international song contest that can only be understood by a bilingual audience is an interesting choice. It says a lot about culture and class. In a way one could argue that singing in two languages is more elitist than desperately trying to defend your language/culture from cross-pollinization.

After literally years of trying, I’ve finally succeeded in getting the VSLive folks to let me do a pure open-source talk at the conference. The talk is called Codeplex’s Greatest Hits. The idea is to take a bunch of different cool open-source projects and provide descriptions of them as well as working code demos. The talk is 75 minutes long, so I imagine I’ll have time to do quick demos of between 6 and 8 different projects, of which I already have three or four picked out.

In the spirit of open source, I’d like your help on this. If you’re a .NET developer and you have a favorite open-source tool, post a link to it in the comments. (The tool doesn’t have to be hosted on Codeplex, but it does have to be open-source.) It would help if you also explain why you like it, what you’re using it for, etc. It is totally OK to recommend your own project.

This talk will take place at VSLive Orlando, May 12-16. Once again, the good folks at the conference have provided a discount code for lucky readers of this blog; use the code SOMCM when you sign up for the conference, to get a Gold Passport for $300 off.

We’ve been paying attention to the launch of Google App Engine over the past day and a half and we will continue to keep an eye on it on behalf of our consulting clients. As is often the case with paradigm-challenging products, people often try to characterize the new thing in terms of what they already know. But we don’t believe that Google App Engine is directly competitive with Amazon EC2 today, although it could be in the future. We also don’t believe, as a few people have asserted, that it’s competitive with social networks like Facebook either. Here’s why.

Amazon EC2 is one of the most open platform products in existence today. When you spin up an instance of an EC2 server, you get to make all the choices regarding operating system and software. You log in as root. You can write applications on an EC2 instance using any language and tools you want. You pay only for what you use.

Google App Engine, on the other hand, is a walled garden. In the words of Tim Bray, if you go the App Engine route, particularly if you choose to use Google authentication, you are essentially a sharecropper, working on Google’s farm. You write the application, but Google owns the infrastructure and, more importantly, they own your users.

Ah, you say, but it’s certainly true that closed platforms can be spectacularly successful, at least some of the time. Look at Facebook, for example, one of the most popular walled gardens in existence today. Facebook exerts a great deal of control over what applications running on its platform can do through frequently-changing terms of service and rules enforced in its technology stack. But the difference here is that Facebook asks you to trade off openness and control of your application in exchange for something valuable — its users’ attention. The deal you make with them goes something like this: give me access to your millions of users, and in exchange I’ll adhere to your terms of service and accept your proprietary application framework — I’ll even go so far as to learn the only programming language that you really support well (which in Facebook’s case is PHP).

Google App Engine is neither fish nor fowl. It requires developers to write to their framework without the commensurate benefit of access to a huge built-in audience of users.

Google is providing access to App Engine for free for now, although traffic and storage is limited and we haven’t seen information about commercial licensing, which is troublesome and probably a deal-killer for all but the most trivial applications. It’s true that in many cases “free” can trump “open” or “complete”, but in the case of Google App Engine we believe that “free” won’t make a huge difference. It may attract experimenters and people writing demonstration applications, but virtual hosting (through EC2 or fixed-price virtual hosting providers such as Slicehost) is so close to free today that the “free” part of Google App Engine should not make a difference to anyone who is looking to write a non-trivial application.

The design choices that Google made with this product are pornographically good news for Python developers, who now have their own dedicated application server and a way to build web applications using their language of choice. This may well put Python on the map (as the second language of choice alongside Java, PHP and C#) as one of the Languages That Matter. But it’s also important to remember that consumers don’t use Python (or any other programming language), they use applications. In this respect, Google App Engine is one of many Google products that seems to have been created with technologists, as opposed to consumers, in mind.

On the consulting side we’ve been getting a ton of inquiries from customers regarding strategies and tactics for virtualization on platforms like Amazon EC2, and we’re in the process of adding a formal software development practice dedicated to supporting Amazon’s EC2 and S3 products. That doesn’t mean that we wouldn’t support something like Google App Engine if a client asked us to and there was a good reason to, but for the reasons we’ve described here, we’d prefer to take a wait-and-see attitude towards this and carefully weigh the drawbacks and limitations before devoting serious time or development effort to the platform.

All that having been said, we still believe that Amazon has missed an opportunity by positioning EC2 as a developer product as opposed to a hosting product. If the Google App Engine product were to make a dent in EC2’s momentum, we’d recommend that Amazon provide better support for multi-server scalability scenarios. Amazon recently started moving in this direction with the release of new features intended to give administrators the ability to assign IP addresses and machine instances to specific data centers, but providing explicit support for an adaptive clustering package like Scalr would give EC2 a vital edge, particularly for professional applications.

Link: CBS Said to Consider Use of CNN in Reporting

CBS, the home of the most storied news division in broadcasting, has been in discussions with Time Warner about a deal to outsource some of its newsgathering operations to CNN, two executives briefed on the matter said Monday.Broadly speaking, the executives described conversations about reducing CBS’s newsgathering capacity while keeping its frontline personalities, like Katie Couric, the CBS Evening News anchor, and paying a fee to CNN to buy the cable network’s news feeds.

Another possibility, these people said, would be that CBS would keep its correspondents in a certain region but pair them with CNN crews.

Taking all bets that “certain regions” will include such world hotspots as London, Paris and New York, while “not certain regions” will be roughly congruent with Iraq and Afghanistan.

Link: Not-So-Alter Ego of Kenneth the Page, Still Soaking It In

As a star of “30 Rock” (whose new episodes resume on Thursday) [McBrayer] has somewhat brighter career prospects. He recently appeared with the pop singer Mariah Carey in her video for “Touch My Body” playing a nebbishy computer repairman who arrives at Ms. Carey’s mansion. Shot in a single day and directed by the filmmaker Brett Ratner, the video was a surreal experience for Mr. McBrayer.“To hear Brett Ratner say, ‘O.K., now walk more slowly with the unicorn’; ‘O.K., Mariah, spank Jack more,’ ” he said. “What is happening to my life?”

Here’s the video. Once you get past the unlikeliness of Mariah Carey answering the door of her mansion in an unbuttoned shirt, it’s an absolute scream.

Update: I took the video down because Mariah’s record company apparently isn’t into the idea of “sharing”. Too bad!

Congratulations to Amy Harmon for winning the Pulitzer prize for explanatory journalism for her amazing series on genetic testing.

We became acquainted with Amy when she did a story on a conference I host on The Well many years ago, back when she was still reporting for the LA Times. It’s terrific to see someone who’s as hard-working and smart as Amy get the recognition she deserves.

Link: You only get to lose your virginity once

However, I can’t imagine that I, as an entrepreneur, would choose to roll out my product at either conference. They’re both shitty deals for entrepreneurs. At TechCrunch50 there are 50 products. At DEMO there are 70. Since they’re happening the same week, at best I’m one of 120.

Dave Winer nails it. I’d take it a step further, though: I say, death to all dog-and-pony-show conferences that pointlessly pit startups against each other in a rabid scramble to appease “influencers”.

I just downloaded and installed Firefox 3 beta 5. The first thing I noticed was that they did away with the Home button (and when you run Firefox 3 and Firefox 2 on the same Mac, the home button goes away in Firefox 2 as well).

I’m sure this change was discussed and debated before it went in. I’m sure that somebody thought it was more logical to have your home page be “just another bookmark.” But this change is going to cause more confusion than it will resolve; I contend that it won’t help a single user. It certainly won’t save much useful real estate on the toolbar (there’s plenty of room for the home button if you nudge the URL box over a few pixels).

Having no home button will cause users like me more annoyance since we’ll have to re-add the home button back to the toolbar on every machine we use.

More importantly, though, this change will really just disintermediate Yahoo, since Yahoo gets a bunch of traffic from deals with telecoms and ISPs that set users’ home pages to Yahoo by default. If a user’s browser doesn’t have a home button at all, that user will be forced to navigate using search (which on Firefox is set to Google by default) instead of hitting the home button.

Update: The speedy and perceptive Mike Beltzner chimed in to say that this was a change that happened in earlier betas of Firefox 3 and has been reverted in beta 5, so it should no longer be an issue. If you’re like me and you installed an earlier beta, you can resurrect the home button using the toolbar customization menu.

Link: FDA Regulation of Tobacco a Step Closer

Congress moved a step closer to handing the Food and Drug Administration broad new authority to regulate tobacco products, despite concerns voiced by many lawmakers that the agency cannot handle its current workload.

Now let me get this straight. Tobacco — you remember, that thing that kills more than 100,000 Americans a year — shouldn’t be regulated because it seems like it would be a lot of work?

Even though I was frazzled and exhausted after battling airlines and airports trying to get home yesterday and today, I arrived for VSLive exactly eighteen minutes before my first scheduled talk, which was on using .NET to build Facebook applications. The talk went pretty well and was decently attended but it was challenging to cover the material in a 75-minute talk. If I do this talk again, I’m going to reorganize the content somewhat, maybe include a few diagrams and definitely some more code examples.

My afternoon talk, Data-Driven ASP.NET Ajax, was an updated version of a talk I gave at VSLive NYC last year that was very well-attended and well-received. Here are the slides and code for that talk. Because I used System.Data.SQLite as the database, the demos require no setup or configuration; just open the web site in Visual Studio and peruse to your heart’s content.

Link: British Pomp Greets Sarkozy And Wife on State Visit

“Bystanders were thrilled at the spectacle.

“‘We came down specially from the north so the kids could see the Queen,’ said Mark Stickles, accompanied by one son waving flags and another with a Darth Vader light saber.”

These guys are pretty much my all-time favorites. You can sample tracks from their new record on Amazon and buy it online in MP3 format.

Here’s a performance clip from the tube-o-mo-tron: a classic, “Rock Lobster”. I remember hearing this song for the first time when I was in seventh grade and it seems like yesterday, even though it was approximately four hundred years ago.

Update: Holy jeebers Wordpress screws things up when you try to embed a YouTube video. Wonder if Wordpress 2.5 will fix this? Just needed to install the EasyTube plugin, nice.