Saturday, June 19, 1999

A quick check with the search engine reveals that our links into the archives of InfoWorld.Com are broken. Ouch!

WSJ: "Poor Microsoft Corp. Even when things go sort of right in its antitrust battle against the federal government and 19 states, they quickly go wrong again."

CNN: Netscape Co-Founder Re-Lives the Revolution. In an audio clip linked to this page Clark says that Microsoft "basically put Netscape out of the browser business." Only in Clark's mind! At the time they gave up, Netscape had larger market share than Microsoft. Imagine a football team that walked off the field mid-game, while they were ahead. That's Netscape.

PC WEEK referees a Linux-NT server faceoff. Microsoft is blundering here. There's still a major disconnect at Microsoft, they think they can "win" in competition with the Internet. We saw it in Office 2000. The web is actually bigger than Microsoft. We don't want a single-vendor world. Goodbye to the Monolithic Do-Everything Hand-Holding Platform Vendor. The more they try to treat Linux as just another OS, the more Linux will swamp them.

Advice to Microsoft: View Linux as you viewed the Mac in 1983. It's a puzzle and a curveball. You don't own it. Find out what developers want to do with Linux, then provide tools that make that easy. Create bridges from Microsoft desktop apps to servers running on Linux. Invest in WINE so Windows developers have a clear path to Linux without creating new source code bases. I can hear Bill Gates now saying Never! But until he embraces the Internet, in its latest incarnation (Linux), without trying to own it, he'll keep losing. They keep looking for a company to compete with. The Internet is not a company.

NY Times: "The booths at Buck's are upholstered in ocher Naugahyde and the menus have the feel of political-action newsletters and the owners are mighty proud of their coffeecake."

A couple of weeks ago I installed a virgin copy of Frontier 6 on a Mac running an old version of System 7. I use this server to offload tasks from the NT server, things like batch-loading of the RSS files for My.UserLand.Com and sending Scripting News bulletins.

This morning I had breakfast at Buck's with Doc Searls and Phil Hughes of Linux Journal. A snippet from this morning's conversation. Doc says he admires Microsoft for being able to "turn on a dime" to embrace the Internet. I realized that Microsoft had not turned at all. What's actually been happening is that Microsoft is exerting tremendous energy to stay right where it is. Such a waste, they could be kicking back and stay right where they are. The real opportunity now is to look at ways MS can move without exerting any energy. Be positive, confident, powerful. I think when and if that happens, MS really will have turned the corner.

New channel: A boy and his basement.

Todd Sternisha asks for feedback on his new weblog.

Edd Dumbill has an XML-RPC client for PHP. Beta.

Edd also does the Pharmalicensing channel.

TidBITS: Putting URL Access Scripting to Work.