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Essay for the 20th Anniversary of the PC: "[In 1983] I was working on the Apple II, and totally confined by its 48K memory limit and 140K floppy drives. When I got my first PC it was a huge feeling of liberation." Talking Moose: "Let's assume I had $100 million to invest. Where would I put it?" The Head Lemur: "Photoshop, Illustrator and Pagemaker are very good tools. But they are not the only tools out there." IBM UDDI Registry is a "UDDI-compliant registry for Web services in a private intranet environment." MP3 Newswire: Napster Clones Crush Napster. "Ever since Napster started filtering songs from its service, users began exploring alternative file trade programs." Phil Jones explains what the Genoa protests are about in terms that make sense to me. Thanks Phil. One thing I've learned in the last few years is that the US is viewed in Europe much as Microsoft is viewed here, that's why Phil's analogy works so well for me. Like a random Microsoft employee we're supposed to know more, our brands dominate, there's much resentment of us, and our errors are amplified. And like Microsoft, there's a diversity in the US that may not be easily visible if the only sources of information are the BigPubs. They love to put bloody bodies on the home page, but often dumb-it-down to omit the real issues, which seem, these days, to revolve around freedom. Surprise: "The thousands of peaceful men and women, who came not to destroy but to demonstrate, are used by people who are driven by hate. The peaceful demonstrators have become living shields for them. The police has a very difficult task. All the important questions around globalisation have become secondary. Violence is first. Why and again why?" Now about Microsoft and the diversity it contains, I've been emailing with David Bank, the author of Breaking Windows, which is due out next month. The book was written from transcripts of emails that were made public in the antitrust trial, and offer a glimpse of how Microsoft works, in the words of Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, Jim Allchin, Brad Silverberg, Adam Bosworth, Paul Maritz, Ben Slivka and hundreds of other Microsoft people, while the wars with Sun, Netscape, and the US government were raging. Sometime in the next couple of weeks an excerpt of the book will appear in the Wall Street Journal, and David has kindly allowed us to run an excerpt on Scripting News after that. Now I've been working in the same ecosystem as Microsoft since 1979, and even so, this book opened my eyes in a new way. I gave my review copy to a friend I trust, who also watches Microsoft, and his eyes opened too. Now I have more meaningful conversations with current and ex-Microsoft people. I have a better idea of how their sausage factory works. But most people outside Microsoft remain as clueless as ever. In many ways Bank's book is a clearer roadmap of what awaits the technology industry than any keynote given by Bill Gates. If you want to understand how the technology economy works, it's a must-read. I started a new mail list to discuss Bank's book. Wired: Adobe Tries to Quell Protest. "Even if Adobe has a surprising change of heart, the U.S. Attorney for Northern California would need to be convinced to drop the charges. He happens to be Robert Mueller, President Bush's pick announced earlier this month to succeed Louis Freeh as FBI director." Patrick Scoble: "Welcome to the Internet Hut."
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© Copyright 1997-2005 Dave Winer. The picture at the top of the page may change from time to time. Previous graphics are archived. Previous/Next |
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