Friday, March 03, 2000

5/23/96: "Embrace & Extend means that Microsoft Word reads WordPerfect files. Excel runs Lotus spreadsheets. It means that Windows runs DOS applications. And Microsoft Internet Explorer emulates Netscape where ever possible."

Tim O'Reilly: My Conversation with Jeff Bezos.

Talk to us on the Web. "O'Reilly made a very strong point in his initial essay. Amazon and all of us have been the beneficiaries of a mountain of free ideas. Amazon's improvements to the Web, while useful and innovative, are tiny little bumps on the mountain, yet they they stand in the way of its growth. That is what Bezos must respond to."

Andrew Wooldridge: Anthem Jr big update. "I have something really cool in store for you today."

WebMonkey: Adding Search to Your Site.

Matthew Rothenberg: "Apple is going to have a tough sell to Macolytes who've stuck with the platform largely thanks to their comfort level with its GUI."

Faisal Jawdat: Follow the Money.

Red Herring: Eazel, the comeback tour.

Salon: "When Priceline sued Mircrosoft's Expedia travel site for patent infringement in October 1999, the Net quaked. Suddenly, patents had teeth, and everyone wanted them. Intellectual property lawyers morphed into patent attorneys."

2/4/00: "Jay Walker, the founder of Priceline.Com, has 60 full-time people working in teams to do nothing more than generate patents. No engineering, no scaling issues, no customer satisfaction requirements (although Walker's company appears to be good at this too), they just a file a claim at various patent offices, and wait for the engineering of the Internet to catch up."

Lance Knobel: Tony Blair in Davos.

Problems on Subhonker1 today, there was about a 1 hour outage while I save-copied the big databases. It's back on the air now. Should be no data loss.

Hey I got an email from TBL re yesterday's piece. He took me up on my offer to buy him dinner. Looks like I'm going to Boston.

More namedropping. At the lunch where Tim O'Reilly got the call from Jeff Bezos, I talked with Dale Dougherty about The O'Reilly Network. I wondered then, and still do, if we can join up with O'Reilly, adding our network of sites to theirs, and vice versa. How would you all feel about being part of what O'Reilly is doing? I think some of our sites would be a natural fit, like Zope Newbies, Qube Quorner and Linux Newbies, as examples.

Hey I made #1 on Bloat this week, sharing it with Jorn, which is quite an honor. To truthfully answer the question that's raised there, secretly I do indeed feel that Time could have made a better choice for Man of the Year.

Survey Results: 73 percent of UserLand.Com members will only buy from Amazon competitors, not Amazon.

Cold Fusion News is a Manila site.

Best wishes to Evan Williams for a speedy recovery from dental surgery. Do I have any advice to offer? Well, this particular thing can only happen once in a lifetime. If his life is anything like mine (Bloat predicts it will) you'll spend many days programming like hell to get ready for some event or another. In the long-term all the marathon programming binges will melt into one, but you'll probably remember the pain of wisdom teeth forever. I sure do. (I still have two teeth that need extraction, and I've been putting it off for 10 years!)

Charles Moore on Apple's Acqua: I Just Want To Get My Work Done. "After playing with it for an hour, he concluded that this new OS is a completely new operating system. 'Nothing that you have learned using a previous Mac OS will be of any use to you whatsoever. It doesn't look like a Mac, it doesn't feel like a Mac, and it certainly doesn't work like a Mac.'" But it does run Mac apps, doesn't it??

Virtual China on Bill Gates: "He is a God without personal charm. A genius capitalist. One of his friends said 'Bill can conquer the world but he can't move anybody's heart.'"