One of the things that sucks about the tech industry is that the assumption is that creative work is done by employees. Imagine if music or movies worked like that. #
And the employees will resist the company working with individual outsiders, the equiv of musicians in this area.#
If you know anything about my career imagine what a barrier this has been. Their first inclination when they see an individual or small company doing what they think they should do is -- this -- CRUSH.#
It's hard to escape this. Upton Sinclairsaid --“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”#
If you go to your boss and say Dave says we should improve what we do with RSS, and not invest in AT Proto compatibility or wait until there's some functionality on their side of the API. You're helping the competition to add more vapor to their vaporware. How is that consistent with your strategy, and btw what is your strategy?#
This has actually happened. And before it many years ago Microsoft unilaterally changed the logo for RSS. They had the courtesy to give me a heads up, and I told them it wasn't theirs to change and a lot of thought had gone into the one we had, and the one they want to use looks like every other internet logo. They let me finish my sentence and went on with other parts of the presentation.#
Lots of other examples. It's very rare when they don't try to erase your work at Big Companies (or BigCo's).#
The problem is this -- the web needs individual developers to survive and grow. The fact that we've been suppressed by the the BigCo's has meant we haven't built out the web the way we could have if we understood that tech is more than a business model for VCs. Other creative areas managed to get past this, why didn't tech? And can we change that? I want to. #
If one of the Big Companies decided they want a real ecosystem for an internet-level standard, and hopefully have a product with lots of users that supports it, and if it's an area I know, i'm up for at least talking about how to get an open dev community growing around it. #
PS: I wrote this on EMX and decided it also should be here. #
You know those obnoxious sites that pop up dialogs when they think you're about to leave, asking you to subscribe to their email newsletter? Well that won't do for Scripting News readers who are a discerning lot, very loyal, but that wouldn't last long if I did rude stuff like that. So here I am at the bottom of the page quietly encouraging you to sign up for the nightly email. It's got everything from the previous day on Scripting, plus the contents of the linkblog and who knows what else we'll get in there. People really love it. I wish I had done it sooner. And every email has an unsub link so if you want to get out, you can, easily -- no questions asked, and no follow-ups. Go ahead and do it, you won't be sorry! :-)