I haven’t posted in a couple days because of work issues that took up most of my time.  We’re trying to implement some improvements and running into some last minute resistance. 

You see, the problem with most Enterprise IT is that it is deployed for one of two reasons: to monitor process or to save money. 

Sure you hear a bunch of nice buzz words and fancy marketing like “bringing people together by making the computing environment collaborative” but in the end that really just means “trying to make more money by getting people to waste less time” 

Where this becomes a problem is when you get to the actual managers in each of the departments you are trying to improve.  Businesses, even non-profit agencies, are about making money (though in the case of non-profits it’s usually “to stay in business” rather than “to make the stock holders happy”).  But managers, unless they are really good ones, are not necessarily focused on making money and in fact are usually more interested in costing the company money if it means they can stay in their insular world and not be monitored in any way. 

This is an important point; IT is nothing but a curse to a manager.  It accents their flaws while taking all credit for improvements it makes.  So unless you have a stellar manager who really does care about the company more than themselves you are going to face resistance when implementing technology.  Computers are the ultimate tattle-tales. 

Anyway, in the future I’ll try to have some pre-canned posts ready for days when the world takes too much of a toll on me (good thing no one’s reading this yet). 

I made a post a little while ago which brought up a sore subject and now, I think we need to have a talk. 

You see...I don’t like Dave Winer. 

It’s hard for me to write this post because I am very much against talking against anyone.  If anything I feel that the blogosphere talks too much about individual personalities and not enough about individual ideas. 

That’s the blogosphere I want to be a part of, the one where people share and discuss their ideas without petty squabbling over who likes who and who doesn’t like who.  But that’s where I get caught. 

Ideas are ideas no matter where they come from and if I come across an idea that I find interesting I’m going to comment on it which is what this blog is all about.  But when I do that I want people to be able to take my opinion and not have to wonder if I have other motivations which means I have to put all the factors that might make me partial on the table. 

I’m lucky in that I’ve been kicking around the blogosphere for a few years now and I really don’t dislike anyone out there…with one exception.  That exception is Dave Winer.  I don’t really want to spend a lot of time detailing why I dislike him because I don’t think that’s fair to him and I know that’s not the type of person I want to be. 

Bottom Line: I feel he’s unnecessarily mean to people in that he’ll have an argument with someone and then continue to bash them even after its long since past and even when its not related to anything else (e.g. he’ll bring it up rather than it being something that’s relevant to a current discussion) 

Beyond that I’m not going to say anymore about it.  I’m not asking you to dislike Dave Winer (you should make your own decisions about people) and I’m not trying to attack him (I’d be fine if he never read this blog) so there’s little reason for me to detail individual issues I have with him. 

Anyway, I put a lot of thought into what to do about this.  I thought I could get away by just not reading his blog and not reading any blogs about him but he still comes up via other people and again, I love ideas.  If someone presents an interesting idea I’m going to comment on it regardless of its origin. 

So this is my solution, one post that I’ll link to whenever I comment on one of Mr. Winer’s ideas that gives people my bias in what I hope is the most benign way possible and then is done with it.  Thanks for putting up with the personal nature of it. 

Now back to ideas…

Scoble has a post about how Digg has become a (as he puts it) “stream of noise” and how it would be better if there was a Digg type site that featured the picks from a select group of people (a point taken from a larger post by Dave Winer)

My first thought after reading Scoble’s post: ”wasn’t that what Slashdot was?”   

The answer there is that yes, that is exactly what Slashdot was but the Slashdot guys got lazy and/or too selective so people moved on to a better group (which is what the initial Digg users were) The solution to this problem (imho) is one of those that is easily identified but hard to accomplish.  Someone needs to make software that (a) makes it easy for people to share what they want to share and (b) makes it easy for other people to aggregate their friend’s shares in to a mix they prefer.   

The first point is a biggie.  If Scoble reads a bunch of personal blogs by friends and family I don’t necessarily want to see that and I doubt he necessarily wants to show it to me.  Any solution that hopes to accomplish the above has to come up with some way for users to pick which tags they wish to share and any software that tries to make this work needs to find a way to allow the users to pick without making it tedious.   

As I said, easy to identify but very hard to do. 

I have to say that Fortune’s various “Lists” have made it all but impossible for me to take the magazine seriously.  Today’s article on the “25 most powerful people in business” is as perfect an example of this as any.  In it they name Steve Jobs of all people the “most powerful man in business” 

Here’s the quote… 

Since returning to Apple in 1997, he has changed the dynamics of consumer electronics with the iPod, and persuaded the music industry, the television networks, and Hollywood to distribute their wares with the iTunes Music Store. With his hugely successful Apple Stores, he gave the big-box boys a lesson in high-margin, high-touch retailing. And this year, at the height of his creative and promotional powers, Jobs orchestrated Apple's entry into the cellular telephone business with the iPhone.

That's five industries that Jobs has upended - computers, Hollywood, music, retailing, and wireless phones. At this moment, no one has more influence over a broader swath of business than Jobs. 

Upended?  Really?  Because last I checked all those industries were still working in pretty much the same way they always had.  Did Apple really “destroy, overthrow or completely change” these industries or does someone at Fortune just need to consult a dictionary?   

Don’t get me wrong, I’m obsessed with my iPhone and the only thing stopping me from getting an iBook before Christmas is my good judgment (since I already have a relatively new notebook) which doesn’t stand much of a chance against my gadget lust.  But Jobs is a guy who still runs a relatively small computer company (albeit with an extremely large market valuation) and whose other businesses are dependent on a group of people who have all but turned against him.   Those “other” businesses being iTunes and that group of people being the heads of every major media company who all seem to think Jobs is getting too much power in their industry.  Heck, if Murdoch alone (#2 on the list btw) decides to pull his support from iTunes then Apple is all but out of the TV business.   

I’m not saying that Apple isn’t doing well or that Steve Jobs isn’t more powerful than he’s ever been (and certainly more powerful than most people in the business world) but they still have a ways to go before they conquer the world.  This Fortune article seems to think they’ve already having done it. 

One of the great joys in my life has always been reading a good Raymond Chen post.  I've linked to Mr. Chen's wikipedia entry but I feel the need to also mention that he is the creator of an old Win '95 utility called TweakUI.  That isn't listed in the Wikipedia article but to people who used TweakUI way back when it's probably what distinguishes him the most.

Anyway, one of his trademarks is that he posts about technical decisions made in Windows that seemed to make no sense and goes to the trouble of explaining why that choice was made.  In this case he tackles .ini files and why Windows started using a registry.  I was never a fan of the Registry and still lament the death of .ini files but after reading Mr. Chen's explaination the decision (as always) makes perfect sense.  Check it out!

I don't dislike Doc Searls but I've never been his biggest fan either.  He's one of those guys that get off by "feeling" like they're making a difference without making any attempt to "actually" make a difference.

So you get things like the Cluetrain Manifesto which everyone pays a lot of lip service to but which is entirely impractical and which has never gained any real traction.  Some people like to site changes made by companies like Ebay and Amazon but the truth is these companies were on their current track well before Doc Searls et. al ever typed a word. 

In the end the Cluetrain Manifesto was just a few guys throwing theoretical and completely unsustainable ideas out there and then patting themselves on the back for having been "visionaries".   So I'm understandably unimpressed when I read this in one of his posts…

For too long we’ve lived with “relationship management” that’s asymmetrical and one-way. Creating the grounds for symmetrical relationships cannot be the job of Facebook, Google, Microsoft or any big company. They can’t do it, and they won’t. We can’t petition those lords with prayer, blogs, or anything else. (Well, we can, but it won’t be enough.)

We need to create our own new rules — ones that protect our privacy while making us better members of the social and business systems we create together. I say “better” because that’s what we’re bound to be when we cease being eyeballs and start acting like whole human beings.

My reaction…"Oh Goody, Doc Searls' is going to write another useless Manifesto to make himself feel good".   Now let me make my point clear, I'm not against theoretical discussions nor am I against people putting their ideas out there.  What I AM against are people who make no attempt to subject their ideas to real world Scrutiny.   That's where the attitude above comes from, "we're the users and we'll decide what we want and force the companies to do it that way"  

Well no, you won't….

If you really want to bring about change you need to bring the companies you want to change into the fold and find a way to create a situation that serves them too.   Change is made from Compromise not random pontification on one side's part.  No problem was ever truly solved by one side bullying the other side into submission and Doc Searls certainly isn't going to be the first to make that happen.  

So I'm back, brighter and earlier than I would have liked but I guess that was inevitable after 4 days away.  A few things that caught my eye over the (rather slow) weekend...

Sometimes I think everything in this world is controversial to someone.   Case in Point, Glenn Reid has an interesting post about XML where he says...

XML does not deserver its "ML", or even its "X". But first, the "ML" part.

I am one of the world's leading experts on markup languages. I'll start there. I'm a 20-year veteran of desktop publishing, am personally related to the author of one of the very first markup languages in the world (Scribe), and have actually used SGML, MML, HTML, and most of the other markup languages that came along decades before XML.

So I know what I'm talking about. XML is not a markup language.

Well, ok then.  I don't really know how to respond to that to be honest.  He may very well be right but (a) it really doesn't matter what you call something and (b) XML is easily the most widely adopted markup language in existence (if you count XHTML) so I would think that would be enough to change the definition (if we're brining it to a vote). 

Anyway...

In other news Scott Watermasysk of Telligent has a post asking "Are Trackbacks (still) Worth It?" and I have no real answer for him.  They do seem to be causing a lot of spam lately and though they're a good idea in theory I rarely see them used in any useful way.  That said, from his perspective and the maker of blogging/community software I don't think we're to the point where you can drop it from the feature list and expect everyone to accept that. 

Finally, on the "just kind of cool front",  Greg Dolley posted on how he converted Quake II to managed C++ in the latest version of Visual Studio.  It's a good post but the part I found most interesting was this...

On modern computer hardware and the commodity-priced video cards out there, it’s difficult to come up with speed comparisons between .NET versus native C++ when running Quake II. What I mean is this - pretty much all computers with a decent 3D video card run the game at its maximum frame rate anyway regardless of whether native or managed mode is used. However, I did see a difference in performance when I turned on just software rendering and used a high resolution. The speed differences weren’t that much - the .NET version was about 9% slower (94 FPS in native versus 85 FPS in managed).

However, non graphics related things, such as initializing the game and loading maps between levels were noticeably slower in the .NET version. I would wait about seven to ten seconds for the game to load in a managed build versus about two seconds in native mode. The same amount of slowdown was noticeable when switching between levels.

The truth is that very few people need the graphics power behind Quake II as it is so the fact that managed code is performing that well tells me that you are probably safe doing 99% of things in a managed environment.  If you are planning the next Halo on the PC you are probably better off with unmanaged code but if you're planning the next Halo in this day and age you probably aren't targeting the PC anyway. 

A *very* welcome addition to .NET 3.5, which just went RTM for MSDN subscribers and trial for the rest before general availability early next year: System.ServiceModel.Syndication.This namespace, which lives in the System.ServiceModel.Web.dll assembly which provides the WCF Syndication functionality, contains useful classes for working with feeds and items. I won't go over the Architecture of Syndication, How the WCF Syndication Object Model Maps to Atom and RSS, How to: Create a Basic RSS Feed, How to: Create a Basic RSS Feed, How to: Expose a Feed as both Atom and RSS or the basics of Syndication Extensibility. All those links provide enough to get you started.

Two points here…

1. It’s fantastic that Microsoft is integrating this technology into the framework and allowing users to easily work with feeds.  Supporting existing technology in a way that makes it easy for .NET developers to use is what Microsoft should have been focusing on the whole time.  The strategy of trying to define new standards for their technology that no one else supports just doesn’t work and I very much expect huge parts of Microsoft’s current Web Services Strategy (for example) to fail.  But allowing me, as a developer, to use the technology everyone else is using in a way that only takes 12 lines of code instead of 1,500 (which is what I think it would take to parse every different kind of feed in a language such as php)  is what will keep me coming back to .NET
2. That said, Microsoft really needs to get the version numbers and product delineations under control.  The fact that C# 3.0 is part of .NET 3.5 which contains WCF, WPF, WCS and WWF et al. which don’t have version numbers at all.  So when I see Windows Communication Foundation Unleashed on Amazon will it teach me how to use feeds like the above examples?  (It won’t)  C#, the .NET Framework, VB.NET, and all the various Wxxs should all share one version number and should all be released in tandem with each other.  All these different names and version floating around is just confusing. 

Anyway, back to vacation.  See everyone (again no one) Monday.

I'm going to take Mike Arrington's advice and take a break for the next few days so that I can (a) explore Visual Studio 2008 and (b) enjoy the Thanksgiving Holiday (or at least the vacation that comes with it, I'm not a huge Thanksgiving fan to be honest).  I'll see everyone (which means no one since I'm still doing this blog privately) Monday.

I will leave you with one thought though and that is this.  I LOVE my iPhone, but not even I wouldn't pay this much.

The book selection sucks. There are big gaps, even for well-known bestselling books. Having worked in the book industry before, I put most of this blame in publisher’s laps. They’re just a nightmare to deal with, and paranoid about their content. Apparently they don’t want my money or yours, and even Amazon doesn’t have the weight to make them see reason. Shades of the music, TV, and movie industries, anyone? This must be incredibly frustrating to Jeff and everyone else at Amazon.

 Now selection is of the utmost importance to the Kindle’s success and I think everyone realizes that so I won’t spend any time on it.  What interests me is the idea that the publishers are holding up the process.   

There has long been a debate as to how much influence illegal file sharing had on the music industry and specifically on the industry’s caving in to services like iTunes.  This reaction from the publishing industry seems to point to the idea that file sharing was instrumental in turning the tide towards digital media.  Look at the facts, here we have an industry that basically works under the same principles (e.g. selling content on physical media) but which sells a product that is hard to reproduce in digital form (scanning a book is much harder than ripping a CD) and that industry is fighting tooth and nail to not go digital (hence the lousy selection).    

So the question I now have is “does this justify illegal trading?”  I’m no radical but any historian will tell you that breaking the law was sometimes necessary to bring about change (see the Boston Tea Party allusion above).  Maybe it’s just my old guilt over file trading as a kid but as someone who has bought his music legally since that has been an option I feel a little validated by this.