Chris Blanc: Play and Projects: Blog

Backup is important, and you can’t always count on the IT department to do it for you, often through no fault of their own. If you’ve ever tried to keep a backup system running for a hundred machines of different types and configurations, you know that even the best solutions work “mostly,” and if a crisis comes when machine 73 of 271 failed its backup, problems occur. I put client data on DVDs several times a week, and before I hand it to them, make sure they have a place for it that isn’t on a desk corner under sales reports and Doritos bags.

Recently I found InfraRecorder which is in pure fairness a clone of Nero, the first CD-burning program to be intuitive enough and to have the right default settings for the average user to quickly be burning CDs. I like InfraRecorder. It’s snappy, stable, and the interface is mostly a clone of Nero’s. I’ve been using InfraRecorder to burn CDs all morning and will use it to replace Nero at home, since I don’t want to pay their software fee.

However, this shows us a dark side of open source software, which is that most of it clones existing software. OpenOffice is a Microsoft Office clone, InfraRecorder clones Nero, Linux clones UNIX, certain text editors that won’t be named clone their commercial variants. The problem I have with this is that what Nero did to CD-burning should reward those who do it, or we’re going to see fewer people wanting to do it. There were CD burners before Nero, but they were disorganized. Their interfaces were awkward, arbitrary or primitive. They didn’t offer sensible features like asking the user certain questions, assuming some things by default and making others that were rarer into menu options. Nero put it all together into one package. Seven years later, InfraRecorder clones that package, adding a few touches of its own, some of which are improvements, some of which are dumb, and some of which are the software interface equivalent of using synonyms to avoid plagiarism.

You and I, dear Reader, probably share some apprehensions about the ownership of property. The fact remains that most of the world is impoverished, and what motivates us to keep striving is the thought that we can carve out a niche of our own and avoid that grim fate. I believe in Open Source, but I also see its dark side, which is that when cloning becomes legal, fewer people are going to be motivated to do the kind of things that got us Nero, Photoshop, and other groundbreaking apps in the first place.

For a company that mostly stays out of the news, Yahoo! was stepping out this week. First there were rumors of a Microsoft buyout, then a rejection, and now Yahoo! appears to be looking for another knight on a white horse to save it from bankruptcy.

I can’t help but think this is unnecessary. Although Google and its guerrilla armies Wikipedia and Firefox are huge, they also can benefit Yahoo. Yahoo! also has many services, like its ubiquitous groups and Flickr, which are as widely-used as Google’s stuff if not more. Yahoo’s services, pound for pound, don’t have quality interface design and seem to suffer more glitches. These things can be fixed.

What Yahoo! really lacks is an integration strategy as fundamental and simple and flawed as Google’s. Google’s idea was that measuring the popularity of a link should determine its fitness as a search result, or at least get close enough. On top of this Google built the idea that search results for a keyword mean advertising dollars for that keyword, and built the first distributed advertising technology — cutting out all those media buyers and agencies.

Interestingly, although both of these companies have changed the way the world works, traditional media, mainly magazines and television, continues to influence the net more than any other factor. If it’s on TV, or in specialized magazines like People, National Geographic, Harper’s, Forbes and so on, it will be big on the net, and whoever is mentioned in those articles will inevitably get many people linking to them because they read about it or saw it on big media.

I think Yahoo! should return to its original model of doing things, in which it created a directory where real humans picked sites on the basis of expertise. This was from the Yahoo!-era of the net, before Google, when things were more idealistic and simpler. The reasoning goes that the links that are most popular are those that are easy to pass on to others because they’re funny, or introductory, or use one technology over another. At Yahoo!’s directory, what mattered was depth and mastery of subject matter. Its job was — like Wikipedia — to distill the net down into as few centralized data sources as possible. It’s still in many cases a way to get better results than a search engine, any search engine.

Google liked it so much they took over Mozilla directory, dmoz.org.

I hope Yahoo! pulls out of this tailspin. I think mostly what has got them is the monkey chatter factor, which happens when everyone around you is predicting doom and after hearing it for the six-hundredth time, you start to believe it. In other words, Yahoo! is depressed.

To me, Yahoo! is always going to be the friendly directory where you got results that someone spent brainpower on. Until our AIs are better, it’s still the model I prefer, even if it is more costly than Google. Then again, with so much advertising money riding on it, it might be worth it for Yahoo! to return to its original model and expand it while integrating its more recent services. They could take advantage of the ability to tag sites with classifications, like sales sites or reference sites, or goofy humor. They could even integrate some pricewatch-style type recognitions, so that people looking for products find products, people looking for reference find in-depth material, and so.

I don’t think the game is over for Yahoo!, if they’ll take the initiative and re-organize to fight back. Sure, it’s a long haul, but I can’t think of any other company in tech that’s more worth it.