Jeffrey McManus

Link: Handle With Care

Last year, a private company proposed “fertilizing” parts of the ocean with iron, in hopes of encouraging carbon-absorbing blooms of plankton. Meanwhile, researchers elsewhere are talking about injecting chemicals into the atmosphere, launching sun-reflecting mirrors into stationary orbit above the earth or taking other steps to reset the thermostat of a warming planet. This technology might be useful, even life-saving. But it would inevitably produce environmental effects impossible to predict and impossible to undo.

Is that so, glib technologically-challenged scare-mongering New York Times writer? But wait: if the effects are impossible to predict, how can you say with certainty that they’re impossible to undo? If the byproduct of solar mirrors is that a cooler full of banana daquiris magically appears on the doorstep of every American household (for example), I think we’d have a way to remediate that (as they say in the environmental impact business).

To hear the New York Times’ John Markoff and Matt Richtel describe it in their largely fact-free story on the technical integration that Yahoo! and Microsoft will need to do if the merger goes through, you’d think that a Yahoo-Microsoft integration will amount to a cleaning of the Aegean stables.

The writers did take the time to interview someone who did a Unix-to-Microsoft port of a web site after it was purchased by Microsoft, but that port was done eight years ago. And this wasn’t Microsoft’s 1998 Hotmail acquisition (which some people consider to be the gold standard for Microsoft cocking up an acquisition of a *nix-based web property).

So the question is, from a technical integration perspective, could things have possibly changed in the past eight to ten years?

Well, of course they have. The one guy with direct knowledge that Markoff and Richtel interviewed (who now works for O’Reilly and should really know better) was probably migrating from Solaris to some version of Windows NT. One could imagine that LAMP as we know it today was not in the picture. And there are a broad spectrum of software engineering best practices that were not in place back then which go unmentioned in the article.

So ultimately, the piece leaves out several key facts that almost completely scuttle their thesis:

1. Microsoft has worked with Zend to make PHP run well on Windows Server. In my February 1 post on the merger, I theorized that Microsoft did the Zend deal specifically to make it easier for them to digest companies (like Yahoo!) that extensively utilize PHP. The Markoff/Richtel piece does not mention the Microsoft/Zend deal at all. It does mention that PHP’s inventor works for Yahoo, but it’s a fact that Zend contributes far more to the language today and this has been the case for many years. At any rate, a reader of the Markoff piece could come away with the impression that PHP doesn’t run on windows at all, which is totally bogus.
2. The hellacious Unix-to-Windows migrations of the late 1990s often hinged on the ability to get Oracle running on Windows, which was a big challenge then and remains a challenge today. But Yahoo uses very little Oracle in its customer-facing properties; the big database in use there is MySQL, which runs quite well on Windows today. I wouldn’t guess that Microsoft would migrate MySQL-on-FreeBSD to MySQL-on-Windows, but they could do it as an intermediate step if they wanted to get a merged Yahoo! running on Windows. But there is no mention of databases at all in the Markoff piece.
3. FreeBSD, while prevalent at Yahoo!, is not actually the operating system that most companies in Silicon Valley (or anywhere) use. I’ve heard more than one Yahoo! engineer state that the company’s choice of that operating system is a hindrance for a number of reasons. Migrating to Anything But FreeBSD (whether it’s Linux, Windows Server, or Solaris) will have several key benefits — not the least of which being the fact that very few recent college grads are learning FreeBSD today. Another implication for this is that when Yahoo! acquires a company, they acquire that company’s operating system choice as well (all the company’s recent acquisitions, including Flickr, run on Linux, not FreeBSD).
4. Both Yahoo! and Microsoft have made extensive investments in XML web services, both inside and outside the firewall, which should ease technical integration somewhat. You may recall that XML web services were considered cutting-edge and exotic in 1999. There is no mention of web services in the Markoff piece.
5. The Windows Server that Microsoft sells today is not the piece o’ crap that Windows NT circa 1999 was. Period. The fact that Microsoft’s server technologies no longer suck is key, but it’s not mentioned in the Markoff piece.
6. Probably the most ill-informed assertion is that Yahoo! is totally open source or that Microsoft is totally proprietary — or that either of these things would matter on a technical integration level even if they were completely true. But let’s imagine for a moment that someone needed to hack at the kernel of Windows Server to perform some Yahoo!/Microsoft integration task (which seems far-fetched, but let’s just imagine). Are we really to think that getting access to that code would be a deal-killing problem?

Link: Will Success, or All That Money From Google, Spoil Firefox?

"…the Mozilla Foundation has come to resemble an investor-backed Silicon Valley start-up more than a scrappy collaborative underdog. Siobhan O’Mahony, an assistant professor at the School of Management of the University of California, Davis, calls Mozilla ‘the first corporate open-source project.’

The foundation has used a for-profit subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation, to collect tens of millions of dollars in royalties from search engine companies that want prominent placement on the browser. And by collecting that money as a war chest to compete against giants like Microsoft and Apple, the foundation has, at least temporarily, moved away from the typical activities of a nonprofit organization. ‘The Mozilla community has been a bit hybrid in terms of integrating public and private investment all along — its history is fairly unique in this respect,’ Professor O’Mahony said."

Unique maybe in the sense that it’s achieved so much success, but it’s nonsense that the notion of a public-private partnership to create open source products is "unique" or that Firefox was first. If the writer had gone further afield than UC Davis, that worldwide center of excellence in open source, he might have been able to get quotes to that effect. But I suspect what really happened here is that the reporter started with a thesis he invented while sitting with his feet up on a desk in the newsroom ("hey! Firefox makes money somehow!") and then sought out quotes trying to validate the overall amazingness of his thesis. This is a story that’s been around for years and the writer didn’t add much to it here.

For my money, MySQL AB is a much more interesting story of a for-profit company using open source, particularly since they’ve done such a terrific job disrupting the database market (and, unlike Mozilla, could go public soon). Alfresco is also particularly interesting in the sense that it’s comprised of a bunch of pioneers in the content management field who are using an open-source content management product to disrupt their former closed-source companies.

Link: Google and Friends to Gang Up on Facebook

"On Thursday, an alliance of companies led by Google plans to begin introducing a common set of standards to allow software developers to write programs for Google’s social network, Orkut, as well as others, including LinkedIn, hi5, Friendster and Ning, according to people briefed on the plans. Those people asked not to be named because they agreed to keep the alliance’s plans confidential."

We’ll see what this looks like when it emerges, but whaddya wanna bet that the "standard" they come up with walks and talks like Facebook’s API yet is every so slightly different (and incompatible) with Facebook’s API?

And how is LinkedIn supposed to factor in here, I wonder, with their famous opposition to the notion of an open platform?

I’m still willing to accept that this initiative is getting lost in the NY Times’ muddled inability to do a decent and technically accurate story on Silicon Valley technology, but it really sounds Google is trying hard to turn "openness" and "interoperability" into the new "embrace, extend, extinguish" here. Which, if successful, would be quite a feat.

Update: A second-day story on this quoted Joe Krause on behalf of Google. From this one could deduce that Google’s entry into the "open but not Facebook" cabal will be the relaunched JotSpot, whenever they get around to re-launching it.

Update: Marc Andressen has more about this on his blog. I wish he’d posted this yesterday instead of letting everybody get half of the story via TechCrunch. Marc’s post clears things up a bit but I’m still interested in seeing what the bits look like. It seems like this is more an attack on Facebook’s proprietary markup language than anything else. Memo to interoperable social network cabal: there is no such thing as a platform that does not use some kind of proprietary semantics to map out its feature set. You’ll find yourself doing this as well if you haven’t done it already.

Side note to web marketers, PR mavens and evangelists: if you want to ensure that there is an elevated level of confusion associated with your launch, one sure way to accomplish that is to provide an exclusive leak to TechCrunch prior to your public launch. I know it’s virtually impossible to get on TechCrunch unless you give them a scoop, but there’s a cost associated with making those guys your media leak of choice. To put it another way, no product launch has ever failed because the product didn’t brief TechCrunch about it a few days ahead of time.

Update: Michael Arrington’s headline on this today says "checkmate!" which is of course nonsense since the game isn’t even half over, OpenSocial hasn’t even produced anything yet and Facebook could of course join at any time if they wanted. His commenters mostly seem to agree.

Saul Hansell of the NY Times has some less hysterical thoughts on this; he points out that "LinkedIn has also said it may ask for a revenue share from those who
create applications for its network. And haggling over money, no doubt,
will slow down the deployment of many social applications." No kidding. This is my main concern about the path that LinkedIn is going down. Having to ask permission to build an app and then provide a revenue share isn’t a platform; it’s the definition of a walled garden. AOL was successful at this for a while in the 1990s because they were able to bring a mass audience when nobody else could, but these days, that dog won’t hunt, monsieur.

The other shoe has dropped in the Apple/NBC divorce. NBC announced plans to launch its own online video service this fall (which suggests to me that they’ve been working on the service for some time now — without a doubt they had this plan in their back pockets during their negotiations with Apple).

I can already tell you that the NBC store will suck because it does so much less (and, if NBC has their way, will eventually cost much more) than the iTunes store. The NY Times story describes it in these less-than-mouth-watering terms:

"The NBC service, called NBC Direct, will begin a testing period in
October with plans to be operational in November. The service will
allow customers to download full episodes of NBC shows for seven days
on Windows-based PCs. The file will expire after the seven days."

"Seven days on Windows-based PCs" is the tipoff here — the Times reporter doesn’t say this explicitly because he doesn’t want to damage our tender little brains, but seven days/Windows-only only suggests to me that NBC plans to use Windows Media DRM. This means that it won’t work on any other operating system, which means NBC has denied itself access to 10-15% of the U.S. market (and even more overseas).

The fact that the NBC service will be "free" is what the NY Times writer chose to lead with. He buried the real story, which is that this is really a rental service, not a store — it will be a totally different business model from iTunes — more competitive with Blockbuster, really, than iTunes.

Here’s the bit the writer really screwed up, though: the terms under which NBC wants to "sell" you videos are not just worse than iTunes, but worse than every single video delivery system that has ever existed. Consider the alternatives you have for watching recorded TV programming today:

• Taping a TV show to a VHS cassette lets you watch it as much as you like forever and play it back on any VHS player anywhere.
• Recording something to Tivo lets you watch it as much as you like forever on several different devices (if you have the right Tivo model).
• Netflix lets you rent a DVD and keep it as long as you like.
• Amazon Unbox lets you keep a pay-per-view program for 30 days before the movie kerplodes.
• Even Blockbuster is a better deal, since they adopted the Netflix business model and don’t charge late fees anymore.

It’s not even worth my time to download a TV show for free if it’s going to expire in just seven days, honestly.

Update: The Federal Government of News ran a second story about this with some more detail and some more humorous quotes about how scared the network is of nasty evil internet video pirates. This piece discloses NBC’s fantasy price point for video downloads ($4.99!), suggests that they’re going to support Macs and iPods Real Soon Now, and specifies that the free downloads will contain commercials that can’t be skipped. Just what I was hoping for.

Update: This has now launched. All the reviews I’ve read about it say that it sucks just as much as we suspected it would. I wouldn’t know because I’m using a Mac and the service doesn’t work with Macs. Doesn’t work with Firefox either. Pass.

Link: Fixing Typos by Web Users, Without Raising Hackles

"David Ulevitch is trying to turn two numbers into a multimillion-dollar business.

The numbers — each composed of a quartet of digits — are just two of the more than four billion unique identifiers, the street addresses of cyberspace, that permit computers and other electronic devices to find one another on the Internet.

With the cleverness of a Wall Street arbitrageur, Mr. Ulevitch…has figured out how to use the numbers to make a business out of the propensity of Web surfers to make simple typing errors."

Hmm, multimillion-dollar business, you say. I’m very interested in this; tell me more. Just a few digits, you say? Why, this sounds like the kind of business I could get behind. Why, I myself know several hundred digits by heart — surely a few of them could be used to create a multimillion-dollar business. And the great thing about numbers is: if you ever run out, there’s always more where those came from.

I am inspired to erect a thousand-foot-high bronze ziggurat and in it place a set of hand-carved stone tablets containing every news story that attempts to explain DNS to a nontechnical audience. There are few technical concepts that represent a bigger conceptual meat-grinder for the general-interest technology writer. The Times’ normally cogent John Markoff sticks his arm in it up to the elbow on this one, leaving even his technically adept users wondering: are the geniuses at OpenDNS cleverly making dot-com megabux on just two numbers, or four digits, or four billion numbers? (Here’s a hint for our less technically-inclined readers: if internet DNS only comprised of two numbers, the internet would be kinda small.)

Left unanswered is the very valid question of why OpenDNS isn’t just a reincarnation of RealNames, but never mind that. Let’s just take it on faith that these guys are geniuses and move on. After all: there’s lots o’ explainifyin’ to be done.

Markoff goes on to explain in more detail about the intricacies of DNS, but not before attritioning at least half of his readers on that downright painful lede. Mr. Markoff, we’ll be happy to construct a custom-fitted onyx sarcophogus in the Ziggurat of Bad DNS Stories especially for this story if you like.

Link: Apple Releasing a Windows Browser

"Like many of Apple’s strategic moves, the implication of an Apple browser for Windows was not immediately clear, but it is likely that Mr. Jobs is now plotting a broader business strategy that will allow Apple to grow beyond its niche position in the computer market of about 5 percent."

Since the NY Times’ John Markoff can’t imagine why Apple would port Safari to Windows, I’ll suggest one reason why it would make sense. It’s not because, as Markoff suggests, Safari on Windows will help Apple grow market share for the Macintosh (I’m not even sure why it would follow that a Windows user, after using Safari, would want to go out and buy a Mac). Safari on Windows makes sense because Safari will be a development tool and debugging environment for the iPhone, and Apple wisely realizes that developers might not want to purchase a bunch of new Macs just to write software for the new phone.

Link: Putting the We Back in Wii

"As of the end of April, Nintendo has sold 2.5 million Wii consoles in the United States, almost double PlayStation 3’s sales of 1.3 million and closing in on Xbox 360’s 5.4 million sales, according to the NPD Group, a market research firm.

What changed? The secretive company is coming out of its shell. It has made a concerted effort to woo other makers of game software as part of a broader change in strategy to dominate the newest generation of video game consoles."

I rolled my eyes when I saw the headline of this NY Times story on the Wii because it opened with the same tired stats on the Wii’s success we’ve been reading for the past seven months . It also asserts that reaching out to partners is a "new strategy" which of course can’t be true. But if you stick with the piece for a few paragraphs, something new pops out at you: part of the Wii’s success is because of Nintendo’s focus on getting third party developers on board.

I don’t think this is the only reason for the Wii’s success, for sure. Clearly the low price point of the Wii compared to competing consoles is a biggie, as well as its innovative controllers and simple interface. In its effort to uncover new ground, the Times story doesn’t mention these important aspects. But it’s clear that the story of the Wii is a story of disruptive innovation — using out-of-the-box thinking and cooperation with partners to defeat well-heeled incumbents.

Link: Bad Hair Days Lead Pair to Web Incubator and Venture Capital

"[NaturallyCurly.com] is a throwback to the late 1990s, in that it follows the “three C’s” of Web site development — community, commerce and content."

It’s true: you’ll recall that on December 31 1999, internet users suddenly decided en masse that community, commerce and content were no longer interesting. Today, most internet users instead flock to sites offering a lack of community, an inability to purchase anything and no content whatsoever.

Link: Sold on eBay, Shipped by Amazon.com

"Fulfillment by Amazon, in development for the last three years, is one of the oldest efforts in the company’s stable of Web services. Unlike S3 and other recent initiatives, Fulfillment by Amazon involves the movement of physical goods instead of digital information."

I am sure that the Times’ writer is wrong here about the age of the service and they sure as heck aren’t shipping molecules via the web, although that would be a neat trick.

It is one of those NY Times pieces on technology that, as soon as you read the headline, makes you think "oh, God, they’re taking another stab at it," much in the way a dying bumblebee attempts to extricate itself from a maliciously overturned pint glass on a hot summer day. Each time you read one of these stories, you think to yourself, "if this reporter demonstrates any domain knowledge on his subject, he’s going to screw up the story anyway, because he’s going to write as if his audience were comprised solely of retired couples living in Port St. Lucie."

This time the Times is tackling this hot new trend in gaming: you can actually run a game on your PC without even owning a gaming console. Imagine: that same PC that lets you balance your books, send email, and view pornography can actually be used to play hot new games such as Civilization IV. (Which, we should note, was released a year and a half ago and can’t actually be played on any console.)

It looks like the reporter wandered into a game store to get some quotes from real gamers. This is the utterly genius quote the reporter came up with: a stunningly brilliant slice of life from a reformed console gamer who, as a young professional, has now outgrown that greasy kid stuff called Nintendo:

“When I was a kid, I used to like Nintendo and used to play on
consoles,” said Mr. Kirschner, a 28-year-old lawyer. “But right now I
don’t have the time or money to invest in a $400 console and $50 in a
game.”

This is screamingly hilarious on a number of levels. First, is a lawyer (even a first-year associate, as this sharp-witted consumer probably is) really going to respond to a $10 difference in price between one game and another? Second, did no one inform him that the list price of the current Nintendo console offering is $250, not $400? Next, did no one inform him that a bargain-basement PC costs at least 200% more than the average game console? (Maybe from an economic perspective he evaluates the cost of his PC as being zero since he’s using his work PC to play games on nights and weekends — which makes sense, but it doesn’t support the premise of the story.)

But just set all that aside for a minute. This guy, he’s a lawyer, so we understand he’s a busy guy. But he says that one of the reasons why he’s pursuing a PC instead of a console game is because of time. He doesn’t have the time to invest in a console game. But what game is he purchasing? That’s right, Civilization IV, one of the biggest time sucks in the known universe, a game that may be responsible for the downfall of industrial civilization as we know it. So this dude really can’t be bothered to purchase and set up a Wii because he’s got to get home quick, knock out a few angry letters for clients, and settle in with some Velveeta cheese fondue, cocktail wieners, a six-pack of lukewarm Tab to fortify him during his six-hour stint of Civ IV tonight. The Times has spelled it all out for me, and I understand everything now.

I could go on and on, and I suppose I already have, but you get the idea.

I loves me my New York Times but two things that they consistently screw up are news of the West and technology reporting. They blow it on timeliness, they blow it on accuracy, and (particularly for news about the West) they often use a condescending style which is maddening.

David Pogue is not the best technology reporter/reviewer in the world. His review of the IPod nano in today’s edition is embarassingly cloying and extremely poorly edited. In it, he says:

Some music players contain a tiny hard drive, offering huge
capacity. Others store music on memory chips, which permit a much more
compact design. (This type is known as a flash-memory player, or flash
for short.)

What’s so clever about the iPod Nano ($249) is that it merges these two approaches.

Well, no it doesn’t, it’s just a flash player. What Mr. Pogue may have meant to say was that the nano offers the best of both worlds, but this quote implies that the device is somehow both a flash player and a hard drive device, which makes absolutely no sense. I realize he’s trying to hit a non-technical audience, but there are accurate ways to describe the product that don’t bombard the reader with technical details.

He also credits Apple with the "gutsy" move of discontinuing the IPod mini. This is gutsy like falling off a bicycle is gutsy; the mini was their mid-range player and now it’s being replaced with another mid-range player. Yes, it’s gutsy of them to disrupt their own market by coming out with a new product that displaces one of their old products, but that’s how you stay on top (it’s the same thing that Sony did when they released the audiocassette Walkman in the 1980s; everybody said it would cannibalize sales of their high-end audio equipment, but it actually led to two decades of dominance in consumer audio). But the gutsy part didn’t involve taking the old product off the market. So, memo to Mr. Pogue: if you’re going to pontificate like this, read the Innovator’s Dilemma and check back when you’ve found a new copy editor.