DaveNet: Tuesday, September 30, 1997; by Dave Winer.
Chuck Shotton Summarizes
Chuck Shotton, cshotton@biap.com, was listening to the webcast of tonight's DaveNet Live at Moscone and he summarized what happened in an email:
- I had my hand raised for a long time. How come you didn't call on me? ;)
- Underdogs. Cheer for the losers. It keeps the winners from looking like bullies and keeps us from feeling guilty because we all want to side with the winners.
- Gil. Did he have a tie on?
- Privacy. Why is this a question the government gets to answer? Why do we let them?
- Glitches. We have lowered expectations for software, thanks to the frantic release pace of Internet software. PGP is pretty nice compared to a lot of other stuff but you still have to be a geek to puzzle it out.
- Over their heads. Congress exists in a perpetual state of being in over their head. People who spend 2/3rds of their professional life as fund raisers can't know anything else.
- Secure/Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions. More Netscape FUD.
- E-mail == Cell Phones, not telephones and not paper mail.
- It's NOT the first time we've had private communication. Before electricity, all conversations were private. If you could ensure that the only people in earshot were the people you could see around you, the conversation was private.
- Microsoft acknowledges that "lots and lots" of people want write once, run anywhere, but they don't care.
- Cornelius doesn't have a good answer. He lost.
- Free the Mac O/S! Nobody knows how.
- Boring commercial. (I missed it! Saw the beginning and ignored the rest because it didn't catch my eye.)
- Hysteria... The nerds got bored and went back to coding.
- Jobs said it himself, the problem with Apple is bad engineering management, not marketing.
- Some old O/S religon BS. Move on! (Or, "It's dead, Jim.")
- Gil admits he had no idea what he was walking into. Did he have one when he left?