Sound off

I realized the other day, just as I was falling asleep, that I link far too often to official “media” and far too rarely to other bloggers. And I don’t comment on other people’s blogs nearly often enough. And I certainly don’t respond to comments on my own blog very quickly. Which may explain why sometimes I feel like my only audience consists of my friends and the SiteMeter stats page. It’s just that I spend too little time trying to get to know the rest of you. And I know you’re out there.

So, consider this an open thread. If you find this site interesting, and you blog, and you’d like a link, and especially if I haven’t blogrolled you already, please post a comment. (Note: I know part of the problem is that comment links generally fail on my static site. So if all else fails, try commenting here—though you’ll have to register to do so.)

Sleater-Kinney, back and blogging

In happier music news, Sleater-Kinney released their seventh album (wow!) (and their first on Sub Pop) yesterday. In checking out the publicity for the release, I made my way to their official page, where I found the Sleater-Kinney blog. Yep, all three members of the band writing about touring, Revenge of the Sith, breaking feet (get well, Carrie), being interviewed, and other fun stresses of the road. No comments, alas, and no RSS, but it’s definitely a start. Notes on the album when I actually get a chance to listen to it. (I love my new company, but the open floor plan isn’t the most conducive to rocking out.)

Get well, Alan

I somehow missed this, but Low’s Alan Sparhawk wrote on the band’s forum at the beginning of the month that the band has cancelled its shows for May and June (and probably beyond) because he is coping with undiagnosed mental distress, probably depression. As much as it hurts to see someone go through this, I’m really glad that it’s playing out this way and not with a police report, as it did for Elliott Smith. Alan, take all the time you need to get well. We can wait to hear the music.

Schooled by Scoble, and my response

Scoble commented on my piece yesterday on MSN Virtual Earth and gently points out, through a link to the Channel 9 interview with the team behind Virtual Earth, that there’s considerably more to the new offering than following what Google did with Google Maps. I agree; certainly the eagle-eye view is impressive (if not destined for the first release; it would be rude to call it vaporware, though), as are the hybrid view and the UI work. I probably misspoke in calling this a “me-too” release; several of the features are brand-new to the market. I’m not sure that changes the main point I made, though.

Launching a product isn’t just features, it’s time to market. Shimon commented that there’s no question that Microsoft will keep innovating in this space and lap the competition. My question, as in my first post, is what took so long? Certainly the first feature, combining satellite and map in the same interface, is something that Microsoft could have done years ago. But from all appearances it took the arrival of competition for the company to deliver that value to customers.

My point is that the competition is good—for customers, for the company, and for its shareholders. And that brings me dangerously close to a hobbyhorse that I’ve been on and off for a long time. Microsoft can’t be the only company in a space and still deliver maximum value, because it generally does its best work in response to competition. That’s not a reflection on the company’s technical skills but on its great organizational strength: the way it responds to a challenge.

Mapping: When being a smart follower isn’t enough

Microsoft announced that they will debut a new mapping service, MSN Virtual Earth, this summer (thanks to Slashdot for the link). The service combines satellite images with map data, provides Sims-like isometric views, and allows layering information about businesses and services atop the search results.

This isn’t a surprising move. After all, MSN Maps have been around for a while, and Microsoft has had Terraserver since 1998. What’s different is that Microsoft’s announcement has a feel of desperation and me-too-ness about it, coming several months after Google debuted satellite images in their slick Google Maps service.

Integration of maps and satellite images is a natural incremental feature that provides radical amounts of value to users. It’s just the sort of software that you used to expect Microsoft to release. Embarrassing, then, that they got beaten to their own punch by a company that had no prior competence in mapping or imaging.

The good news in this scenario is that customers are getting a choice, as Microsoft feels the sting of competition. The bad news—for customers and for its investors— is that the most highly capitalized software company in the world isn’t capable of turning all its resources into bringing products like this to the market faster.

Lawnboy

How is it that, even with all the work I put in over the weekend on our back yard, I don’t suddenly look like Jesse Metcalfe, the lawnboy on Desperate Housewives? As Larry Niven would say, TANJ. I should at least get the abs from all the exercise.

But to take a step back: we were essentially rebuilding our back yard from scratch last week. It all started with tree removal. We are planning to do some additions to the house over time, and one of the three large maples in the back yard was too close to the house. When we decided to remove it, that started some wheels in motion, and we ended up taking down two more. I have really mixed feelings about the tree removal, but we are planning to plant smaller fruit trees in their place, and by adding a lot more sunlight to the back we can eliminate the sea of patchy moss that used to dwell there.

So Friday and Saturday we bagged the leftover sawdust
from getting the stumps ground out; tilled the whole back yard;
spread something like 25 cubic feet of compost (not enough, but a
start); and put out about five pounds of grass seed. Just in time for
some more heavy rains.

Correction: InfoCard federates

Johannes Ernst, whom I linked from my piece on InfoCard last week, wrote in to point out that I erred in my quick description of the service. He says that in InfoCard:

…the PC does not actually store the identity information, only pointers to it. The actual identity information is stored by identity providers, who are the “3rd party” in the system (the other ones being the relying party, such as a website, and the PC component).

This makes InfoCard much less like Apple’s Keychain (or for that matter the existing Windows saved password feature) and more like, well, a federated identity system. Interestingly, this is consistent with what I remember from the discussion of the future of Passport back in 2001 with MSN execs.

Good wines of Virginia, oxymoronic no longer

As a newly minted oenophile traveling around my home state in the mid-nineties, I discovered two things:

  1. Virginia had wineries, many tucked into scenic ruins like the Jeffersonian house at Barboursville.
  2. Many of them made wine that only a mother could love.

I was always a fan of Barboursville, but felt the winery did best with its blends and with the lesser-known sweet grapes (Malvasia, for instance), and had a ways to go on its core reds (though its Sangiovese and Cabernet Franc held promise). Other wineries were equally variable: Lisa and I enjoyed our first date at Naked Mountain, but found its chardonnay undrinkable a year or two later as our palates matured. And often the best thing that could be said about tasting wines from other vineyards in the annual Virginia Wine Festival was that it got you out of doors.

An article in Friday’s New York Times suggests that the wines are significantly improving. Might be worth visiting again soon, particularly now that the shipping laws are (might be?) changing.

Getting things done: Tiger Mail

I didn’t have much chance to do anything with Tiger last week while I was on the road, but this morning I finally started playing with Smart Mailboxes in Mail, which is one of the features I most eagerly anticipated for this upgrade. And it is fantastic, even with just one or two smart mailboxes created.

Originally I had anticipated replacing some of my 150+ mail rules (I have a hierarchical mail folder structure that takes a lot of care and feeding) with smart mailboxes. While I may still investigate doing that, I found that the first smart mailbox I implemented is probably the most useful one I’ll create: Unread Mail. The mailbox has a single condition: collect all unread mail messages. This is great for me because of all the mail rules I’ve implemented, which spread a typical day’s mail across a bunch of different mailboxes. That’s generally a good thing for scoping messages for later retrieval, but less good if I just want to read my 30 or so new mail messages at one sitting without changing context between ten different folders. The Unread Mail smart folder allows me to just read all the mail without worrying about filing it, because it’s already filed. I used a system like this on Outlook when I was running Office 2003 at Microsoft, and that folder plus one for flagged mail completely revolutionized my workflow.

I’ll be playing around with some more smart mailboxes in days to come, including one for recent messages (everything sent or received within the last week). It’s nice to have some tools that actually improve my productivity.

Roadside Tut

roadside Tut

Spotted a little after 8:30 driving south on 128: a car carrier with an Egyptianate gold-plated longboat and two giant King Tut heads.

Really.

After I passed it the first time, I got stuck in a non-moving line of cars waiting to exit, and was able to grab a photo (albeit blurry).

Man. I knew traffic in Massachusetts was weird, but I had no idea it was this weird.

Here’s hoping we’ll meet now and then

Howard Anderson at Technology Review: Good-Bye to Venture Capital. Howard, who was one of my professors at Sloan and who cofounded YankeeTek Ventures and Battery Ventures, says he’s getting out of the VC business because “technology supply is bloated” (i.e. there’s more technology available than people can buy); “the hype machine is broken” (i.e. executives are no longer spending money on tech like their hair was on fire); and “the financial markets for technology companies are no longer exuberantly irrational.” So Howard is getting out of the business and won’t be raising any more funds.

Part of this, I know, is Howard being Howard—controversial and blunt-spoken. But how much of his analysis is on? Is there really no way to make the big returns any more? Or, as an anonymous colleague of mine puts it, is he taking his marbles and going home because it didn’t work out for him?

(Update: the comments on this BusinessWeek article and from A VC and Brad Feld suggest that it might be the latter.)

Google google google, google google google.

Three Google items:

  1. The new personalized Google interface has arrived, prompting cries of “Oh God, it’s a portal.” Good: the default interface is still clean and uncluttered. Bad: for now.
  2. Google Desktop went out of beta.
  3. Google AdSense for RSS feeds launches (see fellow Sloan class of 2002 grad Shuman Ghosemajumder’s post on the Google Blog for other links). I’m really of a mixed mind on this; on the one hand, bully for all those small publishers whose sites are supported by AdSense revenue, because they just got a way to make their RSS feeds pay for themselves. On the other, AH GOD GET THE ADS OUT OF MY RSS AHHHHH!

Geez. Even writing this post, I’m feeling a little too much like John Cusack. Malkovich malkovich? Google google google.

ITxpo: Keynote with Eric Schmidt of Google

The keynote interview with Dr. Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, was as interesting for what he didn’t reveal as what he said. Eric has a bracingly dry sense of humor about his business and the industry, but he is deadly serious about the company and its responsibilities and challenges. He is also skilled at the art of offering insightful answers that do not directly answer the questions he is asked, so be forewarned as you read my notes. (Unless noted, everything below that is not a question is a paraphrase or direct quote of Eric.)

Q:Has the Internet leveled the playing field such that the dominant players in the industry can’t exercise their power? A:You know, “dominant” has a specific legal meaning…

There have been a lot of changes in the industry over the last 10-15 years. Back then, email was something you had to get in the car and drive to the office to do. I’d drop my daughter off, go to the office, do email, finish email and then hop in the car and go home…

(On how Google solves the performance and responsiveness issues that other companies might face online:) The problems are easier for Google because our data tends to be more static and lends itself to being replicated, as opposed to transaction based data that changes frequently.

(On Google’s internal systems🙂 When I got to Google we were going to build our own financial system because we were frustrated with the limitations of Intuit’s Quickbooks and its five-user license. Seriously. So I said that isn’t going to work exceptionally well when it comes to Sarbanes Oxley and auditing. We implemented Oracle Financials and put it in a box, and said “we aren’t going to change this.” Then we built a system around it to manage the business’s contact with it and we change that frequently.

Our focus is on personalization and comprehensiveness. For instance, you can see Google internet search results, your intranet (with the Google search appliance), and your hard drive all in one results list. Of course that brings in the issue of privacy, and that is where the “don’t be evil” corporate culture comes in. …Anyone can pull the ripcord and say “that’s evil” from an end user perspective and stop the train. [And no, Dave, I didn’t get a chance to ask him about autolinking, and he didn’t volunteer an opinion.]

We’re not in the information technology business, we’re in the information business. We have only digitized a very small percentage of all available content. There is a lot of room in the market.

(On advertising🙂 We don’t run the business as an advertising business. We run it based on end user satisfaction. If we keep our users satisfied, we keep our ad inventory up, which keeps advertisers happy. Q: You’ve taken away ad revenue from magazines and other traditional content players…. A: I prefer to think we’ve grown the market. There is a growing shift to more contextual ads and we are playing in that market. Q: You also seem to be important to a very large base of very small companies…. AIt is scary to understand that you are fundamentally in the revenue chain of a small business. We disseminate that information across the company and use it in planning products.

Q: You hired the lead developer of Firefox. Are you going to build a browser? A: We decided a long time ago that we would pursue a browser independence strategy, so that our services would work well on all browsers. These people, like the one you mentioned, are working on that, and do important work with the open source community as well.

Respecting your customers

Catching up on non-ITxpo related topics this morning, two things caught my eye. First, my delayed reaction to the announcement that the New York Times will be putting some of its content, notably op-ed columns, behind a for-pay wall starting in September. This is of course brilliant because the Times’s editorial opposite number, the Wall Street Journal, has its constellation of right wing editorial columnists available for free. So now there will be even less of an opposing voice online. What’s most depressing as a user and reader of the Times is that this move comes after a history of reader-and-blogger-friendly decisions, including RSS support. So long, NYT, we’ll miss you. Is there an editorial forum out there that wants to stay on the record, and stay in the conversation? (For straight news, the BBC is looking better all the time.)

Second, the announcement from Microsoft about their new ID infrastructure, InfoCard. On the surface, the announcement sounds a lot like Apple’s Keychain; a local system solution to hold identity information such as login names, passports, and certificates. The difference is that InfoCard, like its failed Passport predecessor, can also hold credit card information. The shift in Microsoft’s identity management strategy, from central control to user application, represents a clear victory for Microsoft’s customers, and may be a pretty good indication that Microsoft is doing a better job of listening than it was four years ago. (More information about InfoCard, including a description of the user experience and some underlying technology notes, courtesy Johannes Ernst.)

Connection? Your customers will be the people who tell you whether your new business plans will succeed or fail. Learning to listen to them is an essential skill that must be mastered if you are to compete.

—Which gets me nice and warmed up for the final session I’ll attend at ITxpo, Are Your Customers and Users Revolting?, where three Gartner analysts will discuss customer collaboration and communication technologies and the implications for enterprises. I’m going to see if I can arrange some sort of connectivity in the room so I can blog the session, but otherwise I’ll take notes and post later.