Chris Blanc: Play and Projects: Blog
Archive for March, 2008
Thursday, March 13th, 2008
The hype over SaaS, driven by the legion of people who earn a living from Google’s advertising, has reached a fever pitch but like all trends it is starting to show its hollowness.
Looking at your thousand-dollar PC as a glorified text terminal is not only insulting, but also makes you less likely to upgrade. Innovation is driven by reward, so that insult could have long-term repercussions.
The thought of working around your corporate IT department is rewarding, because most of them are both overloaded and run by people who have nominal degrees and even less experience. Higher-ups starve IT, and the result is a frigid, timid creature. But the nice thing about IT is that it keeps us all on the same page, and can apply resources like a sledgehammer. At some point the “I’ll do it all on Google docs” model breaks down.
The next, next big version of the operating system, currently dubbed Windows 7, is likely to be a 2010 baby. Meanwhile, the previous iteration, XP, remains an option for some new PC buyers. In fact, Microsoft only recently released a version of SP3 for XP. It’s a fair bet there’ll be more service packs for Vista in the future. ^
What I’d like to see from Microsoft is a real implementation of network computing. Of course the software should run on our PCs. We could benefit from having a record of that software, and our operating systems, at Microsoft so when crashes happen, they could restore us. We have these nifty registries, can’t we export them? Of course, MSFT would have to get over some trust issues with their clientele, many of whom are never going to pay $500 for software they use at home and so are pirating it, but that could be overcome with a visible change in management direction.
When you install Windows, the installer should give you the option to test memory and disk and to see if drivers exist for your hardware. Simple, and from a user point of view, calming, but it’s not there. Why?
MSFT could make a killing selling software. Why: buy it from us, we add it to your cache on our servers, and if you have a system crash or need to reinstall, we’ll re-install it with the operating system.
We have software that can store a system state. Microsoft could pull an Iron Mountain and charge you to backup your restore points to servers in Redmond.
Opportunity abounds, and people are too busy being neurotic over Vista (which is an improvement) and SaaS (which is only good for GMail) to notice.
Posted in Information Technology | 6 Comments »
Wednesday, March 12th, 2008
Apparently Tom Wolfe is returning to literature after disappointing sales but rave reviews for Charlotte Simmons, a book I personally enjoyed because the heroine is so admirable and brave it makes you want to cheer her on from your seat. He’s now tackling an issue most of us in the wealthy nations find squeamish: while we are debating whether or not our policies and institutions are moral enough, the rest of the world has cast morality aside for tribal allegiances.
So, my people, that leaves only our blood, the bloodlines that course through our very bodies and unite us. “La Raza!” as the Puerto Ricans cry out. “The race!” cries the whole world. The Muslims? Their jihad? Their Islam? All that is nothing but a screen, a cover story. What they are, is … Arabs! Forget the rest of it! Arabs! — once the rulers of all Asia and half of Europe! Once the world’s reigning intelligentsia- — and now left behind in the dust of modern history! Back to blood, muhajeen! They, like all people, all people everywhere, have but one last thing on their minds — Back to blood!” All people, everywhere, you have no choice but — Back to blood!^
I’m not sure what I think of it yet. I like everything I’ve read from Wolfe so far, in content at least, and ignoring his often atrocious bombastic style. I never feel like he takes a point of view, as much as observes in advance, using his knowledge of sociology and the rigid link between self-identity and moral relationship to society at large. In his realism he may be closer to the future than the past of literature.
What’s more interesting to me is that his ideas here resemble the predictions of one of the greats of political science. While I find much of his work also provocative and alarming, he’s also the most cogent predictor of how the world will react during the next decade. This thinker is Samuel Huntington, who in his latest opus, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, predicts a similar outcome to the one Wolfe decides above, except Huntington has more vectors of tribal identity to discuss.
Peoples and countries with similar cultures are coming together. Peoples and countries with different cultures are coming apart. Alignments defined by ideology and superpower relations are giving way to alignments defined by culture and civilization. Political boundaries increasingly are redrawn to coincide with cultural ones: ethnic, religious, and civilizational. Cultural communities are replacing Cold War blocs and the fault lines between civilizations are becoming the central lines of conflict in global politics.
During the Cold War a country could be nonaligned, as many were, or it could, as some did, change its alignment from one side to another. The leaders of a country could make these choices in terms of their perceptions of their security interests, their calculations of the balance of power, and their ideological preferences. In the new world, however, cultural identity is the central factor shaping a country’s associations and antagonisms. While a country could avoid Cold War alignment. it cannot lack an identity. The question, “Which side are you on?” has been replaced by the much more fundamental one, “Who are you?” Every state has to have an answer. That answer, its cultural identity, defines the state’s place in world politics, its friends, and its enemies. ^
Wolfe has delighted in exploring taboo topics in the past, most of his intent seeming to be to pierce our “fiction absolute” of living in the best way possible than really taking us into a partisan view of the situation. As with his other books, this new one will involve a careful study of class, gender, ethnic and religious tensions in America and how they create an otherworldly environment that destabilizes us. That Tom Wolfe — he’s half Noam Chomsky and half H.L. Mencken.
Posted in Literature | No Comments »
Tuesday, March 11th, 2008
In all of my years of management, the best thing I ever did was give my teams more room to breathe. I’d put my hours worked in my career against anyone and I can assure you that I’ve lost a lot of great chances with great people because of putting work first always. Jason should consider it as well if he wants his team to stay on. Short term his strategy works, but won’t in the long run. Burnout comes quick and with all of the current opportunities out there, people will leave when they are burned out. And when they leave, it will be at the worst time. ^
Let me tell you a tale of two offices.
In the first office, the new manager has just been promoted from his previous role as a developer. Knowing like most of us that those without money suffer, he is glad for his new salary. He is also determined to make some changes and be a success. He is also determined to be well-liked.
As a result this new manager is very gentle and deferential. He always asks the employees for their input. He is understanding about re-arranging their schedules to avoid personal life needs. He is always accessible, and answers any question. He tries to show an interest in their lives.
 Knowing that he’s so easy-going, he puts into place controls and metrics to make sure he knows what’s happening. He offers suggestions right from the start of any job. He creates spreadsheets, processes, and formalized meetings to keep track of what each worker is doing, and makes sure strict time accounting is in place.
This manager is far from inaccessible. Every day, he checks in with each employee and makes sure they have the proper amount of censures and kudos. He gets everyone together for face time. He uses his charts to predict how much time is required for any project, and if it overruns as it often does, he is there late at night along with the team.
When end of the year reviews come, he explains to each employee what they have done right and what they have not done well at all. He shows them all of his statistics. He explains metrics. And if they have any critique, he counts on them to know without being reminded that he has worked more hours than any of them, spending up to twelve hours a day in the office and another six on the weekends.
In the second office, the manager has a little more experience because she has worked her way through multiple roles and not just one. She has been a developer, a copywriter, and an accountant. She is fairly cynical about the business world, and while she likes her job when she compares it to others, she knows that no one wants to be at work. They have to be there.
As a result, she does not make radical changes when she comes to a new job. Everything works as it is, albeit at what she estimates is 40% efficiency for a reasonable expectation of the time and resources which can be committed, which is not unusual for an office. Instead, she starts dropping requirements which serve no function.
She replaces metrics with her own arbitrary personal assessment. She begins to delegate more tasks. She deliberately pads these tasks with extra hours, but makes it clear that she expects a higher quality of work. She does not attempt to be accessible. Instead, she tasks one person with writing her department’s documentation and dictates to him for an hour a day for her first three months.
When the end of the year reviews come, the first manager is rated more highly than the second — by the people above him. He runs a tight ship, they think. His employees mention how friendly he is. The second manager, on the other hand, has no mention of friendliness in her review. She’s more like a boss than a friend. However, her department retained more of its talented people than the other manger’s did.
We, as those who see management structures everywhere we shop or work, are accustomed to think of managers in two modes: lazy freeloaders, or tight-minded fascists. The truth is more complex and it crosses over both roles. A manager is not a manager until he or she takes charge of the work process, adjusts it to its maximum reasonable efficiency, and then takes care of the many day-to-day questions and tasks only a manager, who centralizes the knowledge of his or her department, can do. But in order to do so, he or she is going to have to motivate people and even order them around.
The first manager in our study tried to use a measurement of the job as the way he would make it succeed. He worked on his public image. He worked on his statistics. He made sure that he was buzzword-compliant, “approachable” and responsible. It fooled the people above him, but that’s not too hard to do, for the first year. His employees knew a different story: he was nice, but almost mincingly so, and not much fun to work for.
Since he is a workaholic, the only behavior he will reward is workaholism, which means that those who work more efficiently get dinged for not spending as much time slaving away on problems. Worse, because this manager decided that control mechanisms like metrics and incentivization were necessary, he misdirected people from their actual jobs into an endless cycle of working on boring support tasks. He tried to soften the blow, but with his hands-off school of management, he can only reward more work because he is averse to efficiency. Although he’s a nice guy, he’s a management tyrant.
The second manager in our study is a management realist. She knows that the only way to do the job was to engage with the job, not try to control it with statistics or personality. So she discarded all the useless face time and the metrics, and instead concentrated on delegation and accumulation of knowledge. She is less fun, and more fascist, but because she is more realistic, the job gets done quickly and better. She is both a tyrant, in her powerdrive toward the end goal, and a reformer, because she recognizes the reality of being an employee and accomodates it.
Management realists know that human beings do not fit machine profiles, and neither for that matter do machines. Reality does not conform to the rigid categorical logic that would like to be able to divide time algebraically, make people that are interchangeable parts, or have every task be as straightforward as the “to do” list for it would seem to be. Things come up. People have stuff they have to deal with. A management realist plans for this, and gives people more individual flexibility at the cost of having firmer deadlines and higher expectations. A management realist also knows that talent beats out subservience.
When I was a consultant, and I went into many companies as an observer of brief time frame, I saw a lot of this dichotomy between people who try to use the appearance of work (metrics, face time, hours in the office) to make work happen, versus those who simply got in and organized the process by dealing with the realistic constraints of people and offices. The former approach was far more prevalent, and leant itself to a kind of “fake work.”
Fake work takes different forms:
* Managers who dally over writing and re-writing emails that are of dubious quality, or where the time spent on their edits produces dubious reward.
* Workers immersing themselves in metrics, meetings, training, desk organization, phone calls and other busywork.
* Teams overstating how deeply in trouble their project is, then working several weeks of pointless overtime.
* Individuals who claim they’re “swamped” and “busy” every day of the year and can’t take on new work, but are producing existing work slowly.
All of these in my experience are signs of bad management and bad individual work ethic. Eight hours a day is a lot of time. If you’re doing more than that, you need more people or it’s bunk, but either way, the signs of burnout will soon appear. An intelligent manager steers away from potential burnout by avoiding any kind of late work unless a radical, unexpected, and unforseeable change to the project arrived in the last third of the production schedule.
 Most people try to do what is expected of them. If that is defined as spending extra hours there, doing low-impact tasks that do not achieve any steps to the goal of the company, they will do that and if they’re judged on it, will do it in preference to effective work. The sad thing is that most commonly this situation arises from employers trying to place nice, but also trying to babysit. Like the cube farm, it’s an idea that looks good but causes secondary effects which make it negative.
The management realist alternative is to delegate as much as possible, and to keep an eye on the quality of output from each person. When quality flags, you can tell apathy or confusion is reigning in that particular chair, and you need to intervene. Realists work both harder and smarter in preference to working longer. They move quickly and aggressively, get incidentals out of the way, and return to slamming away at what tasks either bring in ROI or support it one level removed.
Just like an overzealous micromanager will cow employees into tacit submission and acceptance of whatever they say, and so will create a prevailing sense of apathy in the employee pool, a manager who slips into tyranny will get what he or she asked for — mediocre work that expands to fill the time required per day. It’s the path of least resistance.
When I go into a new restaurant, the first thing I do is try to get a look into the kitchen. If I see giant piles of plates and pans waiting around, and people moving in a disorganized way, my faith in that restaurant goes down. Someone is cracking the whip without bothering to think. If I see less frenetic motion, but it is more coordinated, I’m probably about to sit down and order the lasagna.
It’s the same way with offices. If when you walk in, everyone is smiling and happy but moving with urgency toward no particular goal, back up and run. They’ve been seduced by a management tyrant. On the other hand, if people are more serious but less frivolous, consider overcoming your initial objections and working with these people. They won’t waste your time.
Posted in Management Science | No Comments »
Monday, March 10th, 2008
Many of you who create online help for your products will run into this problem.
When Microsoft gained world domination sometime in AD 2002, every black hat larcenous computer criminal wannabe started gunning for Windows XP, which had just become the de facto world standard operating system. It’s still on 90% of the desktop machines out there.
Microsoft’s response was a flurry of disorganized activity, since the real problem was Internet Explorer’s habit of loading helpful ActiveX controls and BHOs. You can easily lock up a Windows system with a firewall or combined firewall and new application monitor like ZoneAlarm, but you can do little about a browser that serves as an open door for any malware wanting to impregnate it. Backward compatibility, you know. It’s a legitimate business reason and the purpose of this article isn’t to criticize it.
After the consequent security updates, Internet Explorer took a more rigorous approach to security zones. For the purposes of this article, we’re going to look at one of its most dramatic changes, which was to lock down the ability of the browser to load local HTML files, and secondarily, to cripple those from running JavaScript. If you try to load these pages, you get an annoying yellow bar at the top of the page requiring you to click OK to load the page.
Knowing that this would cause problems for many of us, and not least of all their own systems, Microsoft created a work-around called “Mark of the Web” or MOTW. This is a small token placed in the header between the DOCTYPE and the HTML open element:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<!-- saved from url=(0014)about:internet -->
<html>
...
The MOTW format is a HTML comment with “saved from url=”, the number of characters of the URL to follow in parentheses, and then the URL, which can be either a domain, a specific page, or the sneaky work-around of a work-around above which is a generic field.
There are two of these work-arounds of the work-around (WOTW) that you can use. The first allows the HTML to be run in Internet Explorer’s Internet Zone:
<!-- saved from url=(0014)about:internet -->
The second will run the HTML in the Intranet Zone:
<!-- saved from url=(0014)http://localhost/ -->
For an explanation of security zones, see Setting Up Security Zones and How to use security zones in Internet Explorer.
Naturally, there are some problems with MOTW:
MOTW pages will not load HTML pages without MOTW.
MOTW pages will not load other types of files (PDFs, DOCs).
Every page must have the MOTW, which can be time consuming.
You have three alternatives (WOTW^2):
Build an HTML application instead of HTML files
Create a program that launches the browser and feeds it a default page that uses a meta refresh or JavaScript refresh to load the first page of your local site.
If you need to link non-HTML files from your MOTW’d pages, link first to an HTML file and use the EMBED or OBJECT tags to place your non-HTML content in that page.
It is the last of the three we’re going to focus on here, specifically, how to link to a PDF file from a MOTW-enabled HTML page. PDF files cannot have embedded MOTW, so any link to a PDF file does not work (in that icky way that Internet Explorer now forces on us, where no error message or indicator lets us know the click didn’t work; it’s the computational equivalent of the silent treatment).
For each PDF file you have, create an HTML file that can EMBED it, following this template:
<!-- saved from url=(0014)about:internet -->
<html style="margin:0;padding:0;">
<head>
<title>PDF</title>
</head>
<body>
<embed src="test.pdf" width="100%" height="100%"></embed>
</body>
</html>
This will load the PDF inside the HTML window, and not trouble you further.
Additional resources:
Local zone registry fix – edits your registry to allow HTML content in the local zone.
PDF embed script – run this script to create an embedding page for all PDF files in a directory
Posted in Technical Communications | 5 Comments »
Monday, March 10th, 2008
Three companies unveiling Eee clones Acer, MSI and Asus are following up on the Eee’s success (yes, Asus is one-upping itself). Intel’s Atom to be the basis of many devices.
PC users fooled by progress bars Show people a fake indicator that doesn’t correlate to the actual progress of a task, and they’ll rely on it, because it’s all they have.
To Aim Ads, Web Is Keeping Closer Eye on You Why Microsoft wants to buy Yahoo, and why Google is declining. Google’s ads catch the underpaid overclicker, and Yahoo’s ads capture demographic information and allow targetted responses. In short, Google may have always been hype in the ad biz.
The information transmitted might include the person’s ZIP code, a search for anything from vacation information to celebrity gossip, or a purchase of prescription drugs or other intimate items. Some types of data, like search queries, tends to be more valuable than others.
Yahoo came out with the most data collection points in a month on its own sites — about 110 billion collections, or 811 for the average user. In addition, Yahoo has about 1,700 other opportunities to collect data about the average person on partner sites like eBay, where Yahoo sells the ads.
How Microsoft Is Fighting a War on Three Fronts Insightful analysis into which groups Microsoft is trying to lure into its fold: consumers, developers and enterprise managers. I think “fronts” would better describe SaaS, advertising, consumer/SOHO desktop real estate, and interop development, but these audiences are also part of the picture.
Owning a Cat Cuts Heart Attack Risk by One Third Amazing how it is that learning to love something and make it happy makes you think outside of your self alone, and so you see some beauty in life, and are less likely to self-destruct.
The Internet Should be Communitarian Borrowing a piece of logic from Aristotle, expert Jonathan Zittrain argues that the net must be retaken from the masses, the governments, and corporations, and returned to the small, expert-driven communities that allowed it to thrive in the first place.
JZ’s taxonomy of organisational forms.
Polyarchical/top-down
is where the market lives. Polyarchical in that competition means that there are many ways of achieving almost identical ends. Top-Down in that the control structure within the firm is pretty centrally directed …it is also the space of federalism, where may equal units of government, each of them moderately centralised, come together to coordinate joint problems.
Hierarchical Top-Down
Is the space of most our politics–representative democracies establish a single structure of control, with, in reality, little choice between them
Polyarchical//Bottom-up
is where the techno-libertarians and anarchists live: each individual–or at most small ad hoc groups–pursues projects and purposes frequently exercising the right (and real option) to secede and fragment. Pirates, and some parts of FOSS live these lives.
Hierarchical/Bottom-up
is the home of the communitarians. Communities coalesce around projects–like Wikipedia–and follow strict rules that establish hierarchies and distinctions amongst participants. The difference between the top-down and the bottom-up hierarchies is that the top-down ones make a claim to the total organisation of affairs. The bottom-up hierarchies emerge as ad hoc, purposive, but not totalizing. Wikipedia is only an encyclopedia, not a way of life …The Hierarchical/Bottom-up is often monopolistic–there is just one Wikipedia–and often competes with all the other quadrants. Wikipedia runs up against Britannica, it poaches energy from the cyber-anarchists who might become contributors and it provides the sense of meaning and belonging–or a part of it–that is the most powerful offering of the top-down hierarchies.
There Is No Such Thing as Intuitive Technology One of the more important essays on interface design to come out recently.
Revenge of the Experts “The individual user has been king on the Internet, but the pendulum seems to be swinging back toward edited information vetted by professionals.” About time: another wisdom of crowds site populated by badly rephrased plagiarized information mixed with pop culture memes and I’ll vomit
No shortage of IT and science workers“‘No one who has come to the question with an open mind has been able to find any objective data suggesting general ‘shortages’ of scientists and engineers,’ said Dr. Michael Teitelbaum, vice president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, in testimony to Congress last fall.” They’re there, but they’re more expensive than imports.
Posted in Linkpost | No Comments »
Friday, March 7th, 2008
No longer are they relying on company technicians, or information technology (IT) administrators, to choose the software needed to get the job done. They know how to pluck tools right off the Web.
Industry observers use the term “consumerization” to describe the phenomenon whereby office workers are less likely to wait for the IT folks to equip them. ^
This article turns into a promo for Google, and for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) which are applications run through a web interface, but the basic point is true and has been true for over 20 years. IT departments are encumbered by the baggage of each person’s territoriality, so they tend to be — well, “conserative” isn’t the word, but maybe “rigid” or “calcified” is. They are risk-paranoid in the way that presumes that picking an industry favorite saves everyone’s bacon.
Some will blame Microsoft for the stodginess of in-office tools, but I think the problem is inherent to corporate culture. If there’s one way Steve Jobs succeeds, it’s through sheer selfishness. He designs tools he wants to use. Since he’s a power user, but also a slightly flaky individual, his designs turn out appropriate for the end user.
There’s this giant pyramid in software of people all following whatever they perceive the dominant paradigm to be, and until one person gets the power and the will to suggest something else, they following it like lunging lemmings. This is why industry upsets occur where no one realizes how important a search engine can be, or how much the hard drive will change software, or even how pornography will drive changes in the chipset market. They are thinking in terms of whatever their position on the pyramid is, and not looking at the whole context, which is that industry makes tools for people to use.
This tool selection is natural selection. The best tools over time are selected out, with one key caveat: the end-user has no idea of the implications of the tool use over time. This means they are blind to quality, and so buy iPods even though they’re in the shop more than a FIAT. They aren’t aware of secondary and tertiary consequences, so they buy the more convenient interface (the appalling Microsoft Outlook) and ignore the solution that requires customization but is better on the whole (IBM/Lotus Domino/Notes). This is why we need leaders, journalists, editors and CEOs to guide us to better paths. The process of the market by itself is slow.
Microsoft is attempting to adapt strategy to a world of SaaS. They’re embracing open source. They’re acknowledging community standards, even though they’re as flawed as Microsoft’s homebrew stuff. In this way, they’re learning from Apple who in the 80s and 90s made their own version of every standard they encountered, forcing their users to buy mountains of adapters and converters.
Ultimately, I don’t think SaaS will be the new world people want it to be. First of all, the software is only as solid as the network connection, and those still have a way to go. The software is also only as good as its designers, and both open-source and closed-source software products are for the most part incompetent. Do we acknowledge that most software “works” in the narrow definition of “can be forced to complete the task by the user adapting to its eccentricities and remembering them”? But we’ve had a standardized interface for some time now. Software is still pretty bad. The SaaS software I’ve played with seems the same way. Very little is as nearly-flawless as Gmail.
On the other hand, some of the best software ever has come out of the period of desktop standardization brought about by Windows 3.1 and its descendants. Many tasks, like audio and video editing, are best done locally. Many of us prefer the limited control we have over our data when we keep it on our own machines. The problem we encounter is the pyramid of rigidity, which is caused by people in fear of losing their jobs becoming phobic of any ideas that don’t fit the current paradigm, whether those ideas are new or old. They nickle and dime us to death with this paradigm, and then five years later decide it wasn’t right after all. It is frustration with this pyramid, in which IT departments and software companies alike participate, that drives us to download and install software, or run it through the web.
The study illustrates that heavy clickers represent just 6% of the online population yet account for 50% of all display ad clicks. While many online media companies use click-through rate as an ad negotiation currency, the study shows that heavy clickers are not representative of the general public. In fact, heavy clickers skew towards Internet users between the ages of 25-44 and households with an income under $40,000. Heavy clickers behave very differently online than the typical Internet user, and while they spend four times more time online than non-clickers, their spending does not proportionately reflect this very heavy Internet usage. Heavy clickers are also relatively more likely to visit auctions, gambling, and career services sites – a markedly different surfing pattern than non-clickers. ^
I am going to go out on a limb and claim that SaaS is one of these trends. Google, while it has taken a big hit on the news that most internet clickers are not its target market (see above), is still the industry leader. It has built giant data centers for its search and ad delivery business, and now wants to leverage those by applying Gmail to all other software. While Gmail is a winner, it’s a limited function winner, mainly because it super-simplified a task that most need simplified but an elite cadre of power users do not.
The solution has been as it always should have been: keep the user in mind when designing anything. You have to be aware of the limitations of that user’s knowledge, because if given the choice, users will cram software full of features and then complain it’s bloated. You have to show leadership skills and be vigorous about simplifying the workflow, excluding the unnecessary, keeping use cases to provide easily for what 90% of people do but give the remaining 10% a language for understanding what they have to do. No software is intuitive, but the best software is self-consistent in its design, and it comes from these principles.
Intuitive is the big buzz word that everyone likes to use. Folks describe this product or that technology as intuitive or not intuitive. I say go to Botswana Land and find a native who doesn’t know what electricity is, drop a computer in front of him, boot any software you want, and see what’s intuitive about it. Nothing, that’s what. There is no such thing as “intuitive.” We copy the actions of that which we observe. There is nothing natural about any of it, especially when it comes to technology. ^
For now, there is no broad revolution in IT as this article wants us to believe. People have been downloading shareware to work around the limitations of their IT departments for decades. One of the biggest attractions back in the day, since IT didn’t provide them, were screensavers. Before that it was text editors, so we were spared the horror of using a word processor to edit text files. Before that, it was probably NetTrek.
My point is that what makes these “new applications” exciting is not their delivery method, which is what SaaS-fanatics want you to think it is. It’s control and price, which are directly linked. A free application is entirely under the user’s control in that they do not need to invest an opportunity cost of either shelling out themselves, or justifying it to a company when it might fail. It’s “free” as in beer so whether it sinks or swims, they’re clean.
The oddity is that SaaS has spurred the open source, freeware, and shareware authors of the world to think harder about their software. Initially, they seemed to think that because it was free, that was enough, and bad interface, horrible configuration process or flaky runtimes weren’t a big deal. The open source community literally spent years fighting rabidly against anyone who suggested their software was inferior, where in many cases, it was pathetic. They seemed to think “free” and “open” overcame its limitations magically.
In this sense, the open source community was as much part of the pyramid as IT. The whole question of software distills to how well someone addresses the user’s needs. The user, unlike those in the pyramid, has no allegiance to the latest trend dominant paradigm. SaaS may attract the clueless masses coming online, just like AOL did. How long will it last?
Posted in Information Technology | 1 Comment »
Monday, March 3rd, 2008
The same goes with authors: They come in every form and background imaginable, and the only way to judge them is by their writing. As I say in the book, the sole common denominator in great or successful writers is: none was born a congenital idiot.
{ deletia }
AC: You describe two key ways an editor can fail a book: through a defective sensibility and a lack of craft.
{ deletia }
In short words, if the editor is a fool — run. Say you need to think about it, and try to find someone better. If the next forty publishers turn you down, go back to the fool, courteously resist his foolish suggestions, and hope someone else in the house chain-of-operation recognizes the real value of what you’ve done. That someone could be the editor’s boss, or someone in sales, or, most likely, someone in subsidiary rights. ^
Thomas McCormack, the author of these quotations, worked as an editor for 25 years before returning to his chosen love, playwrighting. As both an author and a publisher, he captures the balance of the trade in these brief quotations. Avoid idiots. Write what you know. Practice how you write. Inspiring.
Posted in Literature | No Comments »
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