Why does everything suck?

Oracle Comes To Rescue, Buys Sun

2009-04-20T08:46:00.001-04:00

According to a joint press release, Oracle has saved Sun. Well, the press release doesn't say much about saving, but does outline the acquisition of Sun by Oracle.

Same thing really. From an outsiders perspective, Sun was such a horribly run company since the 1.0 bubble burst, it could not survive without being saved.

The truth is Sparc was a great thing in the 90's, before Intel really got going. But since then Intel, initially spurred by AMD, has totally blown the rest of the chip market, such as it was, away. This just makes sense. They are the only company that had the resources to invest in fabs (factories) at the necessary scale. No one else could possibly keep up.

This left Sun with this massive customer base and investment in a technology that had absolutely no future. They tried to shift towards Intel chips, but you could tell their heart wasn't in it. Then their once vaunted Solaris operating system got whipped by Linux. Yes there are some things Solaris can do that Linux can't. But Linux was open source, which means it just had more team members. Solaris went open source, but by then it was too late. It was another also ran along with Sparc.

Towards the end, Sun move aggressively to position around software, and specifically Java, even, oddly, changing their stock ticker symbol to JAVA. This was strange since, for one thing, the company makes so little money from Java, and they never executed or even articulated a strategy to do so.

Along they way they bought MySQL for a billion dollars. More folly for a company whose just announced sale price was 7.4 billion dollars to Oracle.

Perhaps it is unfair to blame Sun's failure on bad management. They had great success in the 90's, but the anchors of that success in the 90s - Sparc and Solaris, became anchors around their neck after the bubble burst. Sun is a big company and it is indeed hard to shift away so quickly from all the things that were so recently the core's of your success.

In truth, in thinking about this, I am not exactly sure what Sun management could have done given the hand they were dealt. What do you think?

Sun In The Clouds. I Smell Fail

2009-03-18T10:16:00.003-04:00

I'm feeling pretty dumb these days. Yesterday I said I really didn't get Twine, and today I am not getting Sun's announcement about their new cloud computing offering.

Today Sun announced that they are going to launch a kind of Amazon Web Services competitor.

I am not going to get into the details here. If you want you can go to their announcement website and try to figure out what it is. Good luck with that.

My impression is this. It is an announcement of a bunch of gobbledygook. No specifics. No prices. No APIs. Nothing but some broad crap about how they want to make interoperable clouds. Pages and pages of pure abstract nothingness on their website. I am not sure what the announcement is. I am not sure what I am to do with this information other than sign up for more information when they are ready to share it. I can't figure out how this compares to the offerings of the Amazon 800 pound gorilla.

What a horrific way to launch. I can't imagine such foggy thinking leading to a competitive success against Amazon.

Today it was also announced that IBM is trying to buy Sun. I hope for Sun shareholders they succeed. The stench of fail is heavy with Sun. Or perhaps that is just what decomposition smells like.

I Just Don't Get Twine

2009-03-17T11:20:00.000-04:00

Today there is a very positive article about Twine in ReadWriteWeb. Twine is a semantic bookmarking program that automatically categorizes your bookmarked articles. The ReadWriteWeb piece discusses the fact that Twine may soon surpass Delicious, Yahoo's bookmarking system, in terms of page views.

Now I would like to see Twine succeed. But one of the problems endemic to the semantic web space is the total failure to consider user interface. The last time ReadWriteWeb wrote about Twine, they were brutal regarding the quality of the user interface, but this time they are somewhat more kind.

But I have to say I just don't get it. Perhaps I am just too dumb or too unmotivated. But Twine is a bookmark manager, right? So I just have to ask one question. How do you bookmark something?

I am sure it is there somewhere on the homepage, but I certainly can't see where. Now to be clear this is a bit of a rhetorical question. If I really was focused I am sure I could figure out the steps to add a bookmark. But the point is I *don't want* to be that focused. I, like many people, need to be coaxed into an application. It needs to be easy, and there needs to be some obvious payoff. And I would submit that if there is not some big easy-to-see button on the front of a bookmark manager that says "bookmark" or something like it, then there is a problem.

Or perhaps Twine is just over my head.

The Role of Real Technologists

2009-03-17T08:18:00.002-04:00

I have spent the last several months thinking about the role of computer scientists, technologists, developers and tech entrepreneurs in these modern times.

I have often lamented the short term focus of those of us who create products and services based on bits and bytes. The last decade has, in many respects, been depressing to me. The internet did a great thing in that it made all kinds of services accessible to more people. But it also redefined what "technology" means. Today, a web page is considered tech. And so, Alltop, or Digg or Blahgirls, are considered technology. This kind of stuff, which may have merit, muddies the waters, when it is stirred in the same pot with tools that require serious technical depth to create. The other thing that has happened is that an enormous amount of our focus and mindshare has moved to quasi-entertainment focused tools such as Twitter.

As I see it we need to refocus. While there is nothing wrong with Twitter, we as a community need to get serious. The reason our economy is failing is because we have had what I would call a fake GDP. We have been booking growth where there really wasn't any, or wasn't enough. Real growth, or real wealth as a society is, at the end of the day, measured by the number of people we are feeding and the quality of food we are feeding them. It is measured by our ability to house our population. It is measured by the quality of life that we can offer, not to the wealthiest among us, but to the most regular among us.

And by these measures, we have not been doing particularly well. GDP growth has been an illusion.

And so as information technologists, what can we do about it? Well obviously we don't make food. But we may create a tool that helps farmers increase yield, or perhaps distribute more effectively. We can't build a new power grid, but perhaps we can develop a new modeling tool that helps develop insights into the most efficient way to organize such a grid. We will not, for the most part, be teachers, but perhaps we can develop software that helps increase the efficiency of learning.

The point is that we don't tend to solve the most important problems directly. But we can make it easier for those that are solving the problems to do so. We create tools that increase efficiency, and that indeed may make new more effective approaches possible.

And given that this is what we can do, this is what we must do. We must all be focused on how we can improve the efficiency and the effectiveness of our front line. For those of you that care deeply about your role in this world, and that have the skills and the capacity to do so, solving the important problems is where your focus should be.

Stimulus

2009-03-17T07:45:00.001-04:00

I was reading Business Insider this morning and Joe Weisenthal has an article about the fact that shovel ready projects are not really shovel ready, and that maybe we should be thinking more long term.

I tend to agree that we should be thinking more long term, but I have to say Obama is damned if he does and damned if he doesn't. There is a strong chorus of people that think he should only focus on the short term and that all of this focus on the broader agenda such as health care and education is irrelevant when the economy is broken.

I believe it to be true that the banking system must be fixed, but I also believe it is true is that the reason we are here is because of serious systemic problems beyond banking. And the keys to fixing that include education, health care, and yes, infrastructure.

In the Business Insider piece, Weisenthal suggests that some of the stimulus money should be aimed at the power grid. I agree with that as well. The grid is a huge issue which was reinforced for me this weekend. I read a piece (which I cant find but I am sure someone will help out with in comments) about a new battery invention that, if it makes it to market, will allow us to recharge batteries in seconds. That sounds great, but the problem is that such a technology, which is *exactly* what we need, would cause our current power grid to fall over. I haven't done the math but I would presume that using such technology, charging a car in seconds would suck thousands, or perhaps tens of thousands of amps. In other words it would quite literally melt the power lines into a charging station based on current electrical infrastructure.

Basically, if we are going to move from depending on electricity to power our cars, not only do we need to be able to do things like move the electricity from wind farms in the middle of the country via some kind of smart grid, that new grid needs to be several orders of magnitude more brawny to support the kind of demands that an electricity based mobility infrastructure would require.

And this brings me back to the larger point. I don't know whether it should be called stimulus, but I think we should be spending several trillion dollars on infrastructure over the next five or ten years. We need to catch up with what we haven't spent for the last several decades. This kind of spending should be focused on making us more efficient and more effective. Yes to education, but also yes to high speed rails and new power grids, and repairing our bridges, and building new ones. This kind of spending, properly managed, would not, as some argue, be a waste, and it is in fact what I believe the role of government is. Imagine for example where this country would be without an interstate highway system. These big ticket big vision items are the kinds of things that only the federal government can do, and therefore should, and must do.

Pressing Reset

2009-02-10T22:40:00.032-05:00

I am back.

Well sort of. I am probably not going to be as prolific as I have been, but I do expect to speak with at least equivalent force. I took a pause because, aside from needing to clear out space for more thinking about Kloudshare related stuff, I realized, after the scope of the economic meltdown became clear, that I needed a fresh perspective.

Those of you who read this blog know that last year I wrote fairly extensively about what I thought was wrong with the tech economy and the economy at large. And now the worst has happened, making warnings irrelevant and general admonitions much less interesting. And so I needed a new even more specifically prescriptive perspective, a new message that points the way to a better future. In the coming days I hope to lay out some of those thoughts.

My Blogging Schedule

2008-12-10T09:23:00.003-05:00

Yes, I have been blogging less.

This has not been part of some master plan, but lots of traveling has gotten in the way, along with things heating up around Kloudshare.

Additionally, one of the things I think I don't do as well as perhaps some is multi-task. I am great at handling a small number of regular activities, like coding or blogging. But the more diverse creative tasks you add to the plate the more mental energy, if not time, each of them takes, and at times, something has to give. Writing speeches, and business plans, and conference programs all take mental energy that suck time from thinking about broader industry activity, and therefore blogging.

But fear not! through the holidays, I will probably continue to operate on a somewhat abreviated blog schedule, but I hope to be back to a normal flow by the beginning of the year. Blogging has great value to me because it forces me to think about the world in which we operate and allows me to engage in conversations with people who inform my thinking. Blogging has no doubt been incredibly valueable to my professional efforts in 2008, and so I look forward to a full blogging year in 2009.

The Good People of Go Daddy And Arizona

2008-12-10T09:17:00.000-05:00

Several months ago I was invited to speak to the development organization at Go Daddy about Web 3.0 and the future of the Internet, and last week I had the pleasure of delivering my talk.

I was in Arizona from Wednesday to Sunday, and Friday through Sunday was a little mini vacation. Giving the talk was great fun and I came away with an extraordinary respect for what Go Daddy has grown into. But what was most striking to me about my trip was what I saw in the people I met.

The interesting thing to me was that everyone I met at Go Daddy, but more broadly, everyone I met in Arizona was extraordinarily nice. First, everyone at Go Daddy was incredibly gracious, from the audience, to the President, to the events coordinator. Now you might discount my perspective on Go Daddy since cordiality would be expected from your hosts. But I have certainly interacted with people who were not nearly so nice despite being hosts. So from my perspective the graciousness of the Go Daddy folks was particularly notable.

But what is perhaps a more compelling argument and less situation specific is the response I got from people who had no idea who I was, and who had no particularly specific reason to be nice. This included people on the street in ghost town of Jerome, Arizona, shopkeepers in Sedona, and service workers everywhere along the way that would make extra efforts to say hello, to smile, and to provide unsolicited help, when their peers in New York, or Boston, or the Bay Area would almost certainly not.

I am not one of those people that complain about people not being nice. I think people are generally nice enough. And so it is particularly striking how extra nice Arizonans were. Of course the truth is I have not traveled to that part of the country very often. I have been to Colorado once, but really didn’t have much of a chance to interact with people off the resort we were at. But beyond that I haven’t traveled much to the mid-west or mountain states. I have spent much time on the coasts and in the south, but this is a very different area for me.

This got me thinking about how big this country is and how we develop parochial perspectives about everything. It is so hard to really understand what “Americans” are collectively about. We are so regionally diverse and are driven by so many competing local as well as national factors that it is difficult to really get a clear picture.

All in all it was incredibly energizing to get out and meet and see people outside my regular sphere of interaction. It is so easy to forget how big the world and even the country really is, and so refreshing to occasionally be reminded of that fact.

Walmart’s Black Friday Negligent Homicide

2008-12-01T08:45:00.003-05:00

I have always been incredibly critical of the Black Friday phenomenon whereby major retailers, and most notoriously Walmart, offer a handful of products at insanely low prices to people that are too stupid, or excited to realize that they only stock five of the items per store and the items are “while supplies last.”

I am, perhaps, particularly critical because three or four years ago, I was one of those incredibly stupid people. I got up at 3am on Black Friday to go to Walmart and see if I could get one of those $300 laptops. I live in New York City where we have no Walmart’s, but headed over to the Walmart in New Jersey just across the Lincoln Tunnel.

I had no idea how bad it would be.

Approaching the store from at least a mile away, there was a line to get into the parking lot. Once I did actually get into the parking lot, it became even more clear (if that is at all possible) that we would not get in. It was also clear that despite the freezing weather, the person at the front of the line had waited for perhaps 12 hours.

I turned around and went home, feeling a bit frustrated, but mainly just, well, stupid. But what impressed me was seeing in person just how effective the sales technique was. I needed to see with my own two eyes to really understand how powerful, dishonest, and troubling Walmart marketing is. A statistically insignificant number of people would be able to take advantage of the most attractive sale prices they were offering. These were the sale prices promoted in a nation-wide television campaign and on the front of the millions of circulars that they inserted into newspapers around the country.

In short, the promotions are an incredibly effective fraud. They have structured a sale in such a way that it behaves more like a lottery. They create a demand that, for most people, cannot be satisfied. It is a bait and switch. They offer the $300 computer, which of course they are immediately and permanently out of stock on, but once they have you in the store they know you will buy other less impressively discounted items.

In my view this is a horribly unethical technique. But this last Friday, Black Friday, it became clear that the technique is more than just unethical. It is lethal. And perhaps the “Black” description, previously used as an accounting reference to profitability, will now have an entirely new and more troubling context.

In our most recent Black Friday, a seasonal “security” worker at a Long Island Walmart was trampled to death. He was killed as the early morning crowd of thousands of adrenaline high shoppers forced the locked Walmart doors open and mercilessly, and perhaps ignorantly stomped the man to death in their quests for cheap flat screen TVs, computers, and other discount, limited availability items.

This was a totally foreseeable event. First, there are obviously all of the security measures that should have been taken that weren’t. And this will likely be blamed on negligent local store security procedures. But this is not what troubles me.

The truly predictable part of this is that by hyping things up so much, and by creating such scarcity, they are guaranteeing an over the top emotional state which leads to these kinds of things. Of course the over the top emotional state is exactly what they want. But you can’t have it both ways. If you are going to benefit from the incredible and disingenuous hype then you must also take responsibility for all of its outcomes.

If Walmart really wanted to avoid this kind of thing, there is no reason that they couldn’t have a one day sale, and guarantee that anyone who wants a for sale item on the sale day could have one.

Of course being ethical has its downsides. For example, people wouldn’t be competing to be first in line, making for less excitement. And they’d actually have to sell, probably at a loss, more of those super cheap items to thousands of people. Oh, and, of course, one poor insignificant Walmart worker would probably not be dead. Probably not worth it.

Something is Happening To Our Brains

2008-11-25T09:12:00.001-05:00

There are few who at this point have not heard about the suicide of Abraham Biggs on Justin.tv. There are few that don’t know that visitors to the chat room associated with the Justin.tv video feed egged him on. There are few that are not disgusted by the thought, no, the horror of what happened.

But there is a bigger picture here. And it is not a bigger picture about the horrors of the Internet. Behavior of the type that was displayed in the chat room is, I think, a symptom of a much larger issue.

Something is happening to our brains.

Our younger generations have, I think, become more desensitized to their surroundings. There is a hunger for instant gratification. There is a hunger for stimulation – what some of us might call overstimulation. Through video games, and instant messaging, and texting we are becoming a society of instant expectations. And through canvases like Facebook on which you can, and are expected to, with no shame, share everything about yourself. There is no shame in sharing acts that in the past might have appropriately been considered shameful. Everything that can be shall be. Or is. Or *should* be.

But I am not here, like some troglodyte, to suggest that we should not be playing video games or IMing or using these technologies. They have great value. But unfortunately, we have not yet had time or perhaps the impetus to study the social and psychological implications of the technology that surrounds us. This is critical because it is affecting us in ways that we, on a day-to-day basis, are having a hard time taking the measure of. And so we are not crafting social policy and appropriate frameworks for how we allow technology to integrate into our lives.

For example, what kind of rules *should* a parent impose on their child with regard to technology? How should parents be engaging with their children around these issues? How can schools use technology to maximally enhance brain function and focus?

I recently had a conversation with an elementary school teacher who just returned to the profession after taking off several years to get her masters. In going away and coming back, she has a perspective that because it is not incremental, is particularly instructive. When she left the profession, kids were one way. Now, having returned they are different.

One of the things she said that struck me is that children seem to have shorter attention spans for things that are critical to learning. For example, there is much less interest in reading, and particularly reading history. I suspect the same sort of focused attention requirements that math have are incongruous with a generation with a shorter attention.

When I was growing up, parents essentially forced kids to sit still and study. But there wasn’t that much else to do. There were no computers or cell phones, or IM. The most exciting thing I could do was go outside and play for a while, which at least generally involved running – another thing kids don’t get enough of a chance to do today. The only electronic entertainment in the house was a TV. But there was no cable so there were only a few channels, and I was never allowed to watch it until I had done my homework.

Today it seems as though one needs an extraordinary level of parental vigilance in an era when the economics of the time makes such vigilance even less likely.

And so while I do not believe that technology is evil, I do believe we need to study the impact it is having on our brains. I believe that the desensitization, and the need for immediacy and instant gratification are all changes that are slowly, collectively being made to our cerebral processes. And I would like to figure out how not to throw the baby out with the bath water.

But figuring this out is a task for psychologists and sociologists, and maybe even at this point anthropologists. As I see it, this is one of the most important issues facing our planet. And as far as I can tell, no one is seriously addressing with academic rigor what is really happening, much less what we should do. That really needs to change.

Nothing Is New

2008-11-20T08:35:00.000-05:00

One thing that has always been of interest to me about the tech community is that when some new product or service comes along, there are invariably members of the peanut gallery that will pipe up with the comment that “that’s not new!”

Most recently this came to my attention in the context of an article about some new tires that the military is going to be using. The tires are not based around compressed air, but a type of honeycomb lattice inside the tire. The benefit is that the tires are essentially bulletproof. This is a big deal because all armored vehicles that are not tanks still use regular old inflated tires, which substantively diminishes the defensibility of the vehicle in the field.

What struck me about the article was how amazing it was to me that this problem had not been solved before, but that I was glad they finally had some solution.

The second thing that struck me was a comment by someone that “its not new.”

Now I have no idea. Maybe this tire has existed for twenty years and the military likes having the tires shot out of their vehicles. Perhaps this really is an example of procurement foolishness. I am no expert on tire construction. But my gut tells me these tires are new, and pass some critical threshold of usability and usefulness.

But the larger issue is that almost invariably, with any new product there are people that will say “we have been doing that for years.”

I find these people fascinating.

It’s the kind of people that claimed that C was not new because they had been programming in assembler for years. It is the people who claimed there was no need for graphical operating systems because we already had the “oh so much better” command line. It is the people (like cmdrTaco on Slashdot) who claimed that there was no difference between the iPods and the earliest music generation.

These are the people that invariably have no sense of what most of us care about or why products are or are not useful. And their background chorus at the launch of almost anything interesting is always a curiosity to me.

GM Management Fiddles Too

2008-11-18T09:21:00.000-05:00

What is amazing about GM is that in many respects the standards of competence a small startup would be held to are far beyond the expectations we have had for our major auto companies, and particularly GM.

For example, can you imagine a company surprising investors or other stakeholders with the idea that they don’t have enough cash to last the year?

It appears to me that GM management and indeed union leadership, have labored under the belief that there was just no way for the company to fail, and so they made decisions based on that amazingly foolish assumption. The situation is discussed in today’s New York Times, where they quote and discuss Rick Wagoner, Chairman and CEO of GM.

Stoic and unemotional in public, Mr. Wagoner has been rigidly protective of G.M.’s strategy to expand internationally while downsizing its North American operations.

“This is an issue of the whole auto industry, if that becomes under severe pressure, the impact on the whole U.S. economy will be devastating,” Mr. Wagoner said in an appearance Sunday on a television news program in Detroit.

But the killer is Mr. Wagoner being quoted as saying:

Our basis business is in as good a shape as it’s been for 30 or 40 years.

Truly astonishing stuff. A company that has lived for the last six or seven years on the idea of ever larger and more fuel inefficient cars, a company with labor costs so high that before they start making the car they have to add around $2,000 to fund the pensions of retired workers, a company whose Vice Chairman called the Toyota Prius a “publicity stunt”, a company losing $2,000,000,000 per month has a “basis business” that is in as good a shape as its been since the 70’s?

Heaven help us.

What I would like to see is the destruction of GM, but I think it needs to be done without bankruptcy. I’d like to see the component parts sold off. Essentially, I’d like to see a chapter 7 style liquidation without a chapter 7 liquidation. I don’t think that GM can be reorganized under a chapter 11 style revamp. The people running the ship are not sufficiently tapped into reality. And I don’t think that is just senior management. I think it permeates the company and the union. Liquidating the company is the only way of breaking the back of the wacky union clearing the deck of calcified management and starting to rebuild what we can.

Unfortunately, the trauma of a real chapter 7 would, I think be devastating to the psyche of the country at this time, and would have far too many unintended consequences. But on the other hand, GM certainly cannot continue as it is. It is walking dead.

None of this can happen before a new administration comes in and I certainly don’t want to see GM die before a proper plan can be put together, so something, short term must be done. But the long-term plan must be the liquidation of GM into the hands of other smarter automakers.

UAW Fiddles While Detroit Burns

2008-11-17T08:00:00.000-05:00

I was struck by a paraphrase that I heard recently from a reporter on one of the Sunday morning shows, describing a statement made by the head of the UAW regarding their position on “givebacks” to GM to assist in restructuring the company financially.

As I heard it, and I don’t remember the quote exactly, it was something like “we have given enough.”

I was honestly dumbstruck. And it made me revisit my thoughts about unions in recent American history.

There is no question that there have been times and circumstances where unions have been necessary, even critical to supporting fairness to workers. And though I am no expert on unions, I am sure there are industries where unions are still important and valuable.

But in modern times, more often than not – at least in the high profile scenarios of which I am aware, unions are a cancer on the American economy and, bizarrely, on themselves.

What else could explain the fact that unions are a major catalyst for the entire destruction of the American auto industry? Certainly there is plenty of blame to go around including corporate management, but unions were right there at the table – partners in the destruction of GM, Ford, and Chrysler.

But while their part in the destruction of the industry – through work rules and pensions and all kinds of structures that guaranteed Detroit would lose money – is troubling, what is shocking is that on the eve of the first of “the big three” going bankrupt, they think they have “given enough.” In other words, the way things are now is great. We see no reason to fix anything.

And in a month they will all be out of work.

They are willing to defend their ill-gotten gains while the union-free Japanese automakers, with their happy, fully employed American autoworkers eat America’s lunch.

Certainly, if Detroit goes down, as it looks like the Republican Party is insisting, The UAW will be a full partner in the industry’s demise.

What Will Howard Stern Do At End Of Sirius Contract

2008-11-13T08:24:00.000-05:00

Howard Stern has made an extraordinary amount of money under his current contract with the fading Sirius satellite network . Based on the large equity payment and the subscription model Sirius employed, they were able to pay far more than any traditional media company at the time could have mustered for Howard’s services. Unfortunately for Sirius, the type deal they entered into with Stern is too costly to repeat, particularly with their stock doing so poorly.

My prediction is that when his contract is over, Howard Stern will launch a multi-platform Internet and mobile-based subscription service.

One of the things we learned when stern left CBS is that there is a core audience of several million people that will likely go wherever he is and will pay as much as he asks. If Stern can move a modest 1 million listeners to a new platform, underperforming the several million he moved to Sirius, the profit opportunity would be substantial.

Historically, the infrastructure costs for broadcasting have been high. Whether it was billions of dollars for satellites, or terrestrial broadcast licenses, these kinds of costs require a mega corporation as a partner. But the times and the technologies have changed, and now the most valuable resource is not the ability to pay for infrastructure, but the ability to build an audience. This shifts the balance of power such that someone like Stern doesn’t need a major broadcast partner at all. In fact he can *become* a major broadcast company based on his initial asset: his large and moveable audience.

Presuming a subscription fee of $10, Stern could rake in $10 million per month or $120 million per year. This easily makes such a company worth at least a Billion and probably some multiple of that by the time additional revenue streams are developed. This would allow Stern to get the kind of equity bump he got at Sirius. I can’t see any other strategy making sense for him.

The interesting question is how would the technology work? The easy part is I would expect something that would be broadcast live across the regular Internet. But the more interesting question is what about mobile. I think Stern could offer his service to all of the mobile phone providers offering currently moribund channelized streaming services such as Verizon. He could also partner with someone like Slacker, who already has a mobile Internet device for downloading content over wifi. Then again he could raise private equity and create some kind of infrastructure platform purpose built for the Stern network, though this type of risk and work doesn’t seem to be Howard’s style.

So from a technical perspective there are many good options, and what he chooses will be a function of where he wants to sit on the risk/reward/effort curve. But what is clear is that whatever choice he makes, it almost assuredly will involve leaving exclusive deals with big media behind.

The Insanity of Microsoft BizSpark

2008-11-12T07:14:00.000-05:00

BizSpark is a new business development program from Microsoft targeted at startup web software developers. BizSpark allows young tech companies to get free use of Microsoft’s development tools and platforms for three years. According to Anand Iyer, developer evangelist at Microsoft, who I heard speak at last night’s New York Tech Meetup, the concept is driven by the belief that many entrepreneurs would like to work with Microsoft tools, but they are too expensive.

Eliminating expense as a factor for startups that have excellent free alternatives is a smart thing to do. The problem is that they have made the sign up process so cumbersome sounding that I think it *greatly* limits their potential for success, while creating a truly offensive dynamic.

It appears the lawyers are afraid that too many people will get free software from Microsoft if they are not careful, and so they did what lawyers always do: they introduced stupid barriers. Basically the requirement seems to be that you need a “Network Partner” to sponsor your company. Network Partners appear to be firms and entities that allow Microsoft to feel comfortable that we wily young software companies will not take advantage of them.

But the problem is, at my company, we use Linux and I think most startup software companies do. And I have no interest spending time seeking out a network partner to whom I must explain what I am doing and why I should be approved.

In fact, the situation is entirely reversed. Microsoft needs to convince *me* why I should use their stuff. They need to *sell ME* not get me to beg for access. They are playing this like access to their software is akin to some kind of seed investment from Microsoft. In fact, many if not most of these network partners are in fact VCs, a particularly odious linkage.

The bottom line is I was fine yesterday without Microsoft, and I will be fine tomorrow without Microsoft. I don’t want to apply to their f’ing program for the “privilege” of using their tools, and in truth even if they paid me it might be an uphill battle. In any case, I would certainly need serious convincing. And call me silly, but I doubt I am alone here.

It sounds to me like this BizSpark thing was a great idea until, I presume, the lawyers got to it. Then it just became a big steaming pile.

Where's The UI In The Semantic Web

2008-11-11T07:26:00.002-05:00

It seems to me that one of the biggest problems with the Semantic Web is the fact that no one has thought about, or at least done anything to develop interesting user interfaces or user interface tools. Initially the initial innovation of the Web was HTML which was all about user interface.

Unfortunately, the new work coming out of the W3C relating to the Semantic Web work has been all about structuring data in a more flexible way. This is obviously critical, but it is not enough. One of the things I have thought about is that the HTML world and the Semantic Web world need to meet. And by that I don't mean that we need markers in HTML to allow us to extract semantics from web pages. That is needed, but it is already being done.

What I am talking about is that web page authors should be able to lay down structures, like for example a new type of DIV, that understand data. Imagine if you could *describe* data and have it appear in an object on your page. This would involve pointing the object to data and describing how to display it. Many UI development tools such as Adobe Flex have something in this ballpark known as data binding. But data binding is for binding very old school data, i.e. flat lists of information. But the Semantic Web is all about connecting objects of any kind, and with the linked data concept, across different applications.

The point is that whatever the specifics, it would be exceedingly helpful for HTML to move from a pure rendering system, to something that actually understands the concept of what it is trying to display. Web browsers should understand the concept of displaying data objects, not just the idea of rendering graphics and text.

Are Newspapers Reaching The End Of Days?

2008-11-10T10:05:00.001-05:00

There is little more urgent on the Internet than fixing the web advertising model.

The New York Times is on the verge of going out of business. This is a business with a great and beloved product. And while the economy is indeed tanking, failure of newspapers is not about macroeconomic issues. The Times’ issues are specific to the newspaper industry. The problem is that while The New York Times still has a healthy readership, their readers are moving to the web version of the paper, where newspapers currently can’t make money.

While search based advertising is doing well, display based web advertising on which all newspapers depend, is broken. Actually, that is incorrect. It never really worked, though for some time we deluded ourselves into thinking that it did. The problem is that now, with a failing economy, people are no longer willing to look the other way.

As, Internet observers, we continue to attack newspapers and suggest derisively that they need to “figure out a business model that works.” The problem is that the critique is really aimed in the wrong direction. Of course I guess you could suggest that it is the newspaper industry’s problem since they are the ones about to go out of business, but this issue is far bigger than just newspapers.

The Internet industry has not figured out a viable way to monetize the kind of work that the New York Times does. The browser, in its current form, is an ineffective environment for exploiting non-search advertising. This is problematic because the information media business is incredibly valuable to our culture and entirely dependent on such advertising.

The kind of value that the New York Times creates cannot be produced by user generated content sites like Digg, manual aggregators like Drudge, or small time bloggers. These low cost information purveyors stand on the shoulders of very expensive giants. Like leeches, they attach themselves to, and live off the work of their much larger hosts. In general they leverage and expand upon the vital work the major outlets do, but they rarely act as original sources.

Organizations like the New York Times do real research, rigorous, editing and investigative reporting. That is not to say that they always get it right. But theirs is work that must be done. Real reporting is hard work and it needs to pay a decent wage and stay in business.

And there’s the rub. The media’s advertising based business model is broken on the web, and so the businesses that employ real reporters can’t afford to pay decent wages.

This is a crisis. If the New York Times and other major newspapers go out of business, our culture is in grave danger. We will be watching as a huge part of who we are disappears right before our very eyes.

And so, The New York Times does not have a problem, *we* have a problem. The Times is just the canary in the coalmine for this much larger and more important issue of fixing our tools. This is a problem for the technology industry to solve, and fast. Expecting The New York Times, or any newspaper to solve it is about as reasonable as expecting them to create the next great operating system. They just don’t have that kind of DNA, and we shouldn’t wait around expecting them to develop it.

The core of the problem is that advertising can’t be placed alongside content in a substantively profitable way on the web. It doesn’t work. Or at least, it doesn’t work well enough to pay for content that is expensive to create.

In printed publications, the reader’s eye wanders. A full broadsheet can be fully scanned in a second or two. The reader can focus on ads or headlines that catch her attention. Ads are scattered randomly throughout the content, and so the eye trips over things it might not otherwise see.

On the other hand, Internet advertising is structured in such a way that you know exactly where not to look to avoid it, i.e. across the top and down the side of any web page. And on the web, there is no such thing as scanning a massive page of content to find things of interest as we do with a real paper. Browsing on the Internet is like walking down the street with massive blinders on. You can’t get the kind of super-fast overview that newspaper reading affords, meaning that comfortable serendipitous discovery is much less likely.

The bottom line: display ads on the web are almost totally ignored.

As I have already stated, this is not a problem we can expect the newspaper industry to resolve, but I do believe it is eminently resolvable. And while there are many groups that could develop viable solutions, there is only one that I think has the focus and the sufficient interest in these sorts or issues to resolve them, and that is Mozilla.

As I see it, Mozilla has the right kind of people, the right mandate, and a parochial concern for the well being of the web that makes them the ideal organization to work on fixing this problem. It seems to me we need a next generation browser that allows for much easier scanning and browsing. Just as my eye can zoom in or out on a physical page, and just as I can, in a quarter of a second look at a bunch of articles on a page, so too should such things be possible in the browser.

My browsing experience should be as fast and effective as is reading a real physical newspaper. Today, browsing a paper on the web is nowhere near as fast and fun as doing the same in the real world, but I am confident that, with the right focus, we can do much better. And a side effect of such improvements could very well be the saving of the newspaper business.

Of course other companies beyond Mozilla could step up, but, for a variety of reasons, this seems unlikely. And if no one does anything, in the next 24 months, a huge and important piece of our social structure and system of governance will entirely disappear.

And so, while one may think of this as being an alarmist piece about saving the wealthy scion’s of the newspaper industry, I assure you I have no such narrow concerns. As I see it, saving the newspaper business should be viewed by all of us as a purely selfish act. We cannot afford to lose the valuable service that newspapers provide, and so saving them is entirely about saving ourselves.

President-Elect Obama

2008-11-06T08:40:00.001-05:00

It has taken me a day to digest the concept of a President Obama.

That is not true. A day has passed, and I still cannot fully digest it. That may take months, or perhaps even years. But a few thoughts are starting to coalesce, and so I thought I would share them. I will start with an anecdote that is, I believe, truly reflective of where we are now, collectively, as an American culture.

An Obama campaign worker recounts calling a home in Pennsylvania. The caller was exhorting the resident to vote for Obama. The resident responded positively. “Yeah, I’m gonna vote for the Nigger.”

How bittersweet.

And so, we have, I believe, a framework for a significant slice of the electorate.

We have, in this country, a complicated relationship with the concept of race. The conventional wisdom of this election cycle has been that in these times of economic crisis people will vote their pocketbook over their cultural or social issues, and presumably over their racial biases.

And indeed if that is so, then President Obama’s selection is a reflection of excellence on a grand scale. On the one hand, President-elect Obama’s race and ethnicity is almost certainly a driving force behind the level of enthusiasm for his support. But on the other hand, Obama certainly could not have won without a sizeable number of people that felt the way that our emblematic if not broadly representative Pennsylvania voter felt.

The concept of voting for the best candidate, despite social or racial animus, speaks to a concept that has been, since my early years, pounded mercilessly into my head. The concept is that, as a black person, you have to be far better than your counterpart in order to be accepted and in order to succeed. There is no successful black person of my generation I know that has not been taught that lesson.

And indeed, Obama’s success is driven by an excellence that, at the end of the day could absolutely not be denied. Of course we have no idea whether he will be a great president. But we already know he is a transformative, leader of proportions not seen since JFK or even perhaps before him. Obama has shattered the racial glass ceiling by not just being excellent, but by being an extraordinary, perhaps even a once in a lifetime candidate.

And so, while I am giddy with the symbolism of an African-American president, and while I am joyful about the impact of that imagery for little boys and girls of all races and ethnicities who will truly come to believe in a reality of boundless possibility, and while I am proud of the image a President Obama sends to countries around the world that could never make such a choice, I am sobered by the reality that we still have a long way to go. For I believe Obama had to be as extraordinary as he actually is to have actually succeeded, and as I see it far more extraordinary than any of his competitors.

This sobriety does not diminish my joy for the moment. But I am fearful that we will forget that double digit percentages of the American population have told exit pollsters that, in effect, they could not vote for a black candidate. I am troubled by the fact that having the middle name Hussein, was a powerful disincentive for many. I am frightened by a Republican party that has firmly believed that the only way to win recent elections was not based on ideas, but on subtle racial divisiveness.

To be clear, I am not one that believes that all Republicans or Republican/conservative ideas are bad. In fact I embrace many of the ideals. But the fact that the party has operated for the last eight or nine election cycles based on the belief that their survival is tied, in large part, to a fear of blackness, is shameful. And that such beliefs are still driving tactics in a 2008 election is a reflection of the fact that we still have a significant way to go.

But make no mistake. Today is still a day for celebration. I could never have believed that this country would elect a black president in my lifetime. As is often the case this is one of those beliefs about which I am delighted to be wrong. And while there is indeed still a long way to go, November 4th 2008 will be a day that will go down in history as one of the most important days in the history of our republic.

This historic importance is driven by the fact that, while we have not arrived at the Promised Land, we can now see a clear path to that more beautiful place. Over time, hatreds, and biases will die, if not figuratively then literally, as the inexorable march of time takes from us those from an earlier era, less accepting of a more diverse world. And as our country continues to become more ethnically diverse, it will insist that the corridors of power look like the halls of their workplaces, and the sidewalks of their neighborhoods.

Yes, today is a day to celebrate. We celebrate not because we have arrived at our final destination of broad cultural acceptance, and not even because the train has arrived to take us there. Today is a day for celebration because we are standing on the platform and we have waited a long time. And we can now, finally, off in the distance, see the headlights, and so we know that change is indeed coming.

My Comments Are Down: AKA I'll Tell You What Sucks... Its Google's Blogger

2008-11-04T13:31:00.000-05:00

I have been trying to migrate for several weeks from Google's Blogger to Wordpress. But I can't seem to make that happen.

Why?

Blogger sucks.

There are continuous problems with the commenting system, and today you can't leave a comment at all. Thats not the only problem, but its the only one I have energy to recount right now.

I don't know if this comment system failure is a problem that is system wide or just with my blog, but I have really had it. Actually I have had it a while ago, but Blogger makes it exceedingly difficult to escape. Cue the person who will now tell me if you stand on your left leg with your tongue out your posts will export with no problem. The bottom line is until some brilliant person can tell me what I need to do to get my comments and my posts out of Blogger I am stuck.

So to all of my readers who have had something to say but have been stymied by this HORRIFIC Google blogging platform, I am sorry.

And if you are a new blogger, considering Blogger, just say no.

Who Cares About Open Source In The Cloud

2008-11-04T06:49:00.004-05:00

Yesterday I wrote about the issue of vendor lock-in regarding cloud-based services and how I think developers should think about it. In that discussion, I touched on the open source strategy of cloud computing company 10Gen. After thinking about it I begin to believe that such a strategy may be a serious liability for cloud-based services.

Then, this morning I read an article By Nick Carr where he discussed the significance of open source to buyers. His thesis is that what is most important are the meat and potatoes issues around reliability security, etc. Specifically, Carr says:

We can (and will) have debates about the relative openness of Azure and AWS and Force.com and all the other "cloud platforms" that are available or will be available. And those will be important debates. But in this early stage of the cloud's development, openness means little to the buyer (or user). The buyers, particularly those in big companies, are nervous about the cloud even as they are becoming increasingly eager to reap the benefits the cloud can provide. What they care about right now is security, reliability, features, compatibility with their existing systems and applications, ease of adoption, stability of the vendor, and other practical concerns. In the long run, they may come to regret their lack of stress on openness, but in the here-and-now it's just not a major consideration. They want stuff that works and won't blow up in their faces.

This is very much in line with my thinking from yesterday. Azure is a big deal. No one is going to care about the fact that it is not open source. Basic hosting is going to become a commodity business very quickly, with Microsoft, Amazon, and Google (MAG) competing in the game of creating highly scalable services that use traditional development methodologies. Microsoft is now ahead in that game from a technology perspective. Amazon is ahead in customers, and Google, for now, is left in the dust but can obviously catch up. But I don’t see any of these guys making any of their cloud technology open source, and I don’t think it matters.

I liken open source in this space to DRM in the music business. Its one of those things that a small number of people complain about but will later be proven totally irrelevant to the rank and file buyer. We now have statistics to prove that DRM was irrelevant in terms of sales, and we are beginning to see the outlines of the irrelevancy of openness in the cloud.

The real issue here is that small companies are not going to be able to compete selling basic “get your applications into the cloud” type services. MAG is going to own that business. I think that 10Gen and other companies providing baseline services are going to have a rough time playing that game.

Startups who wish to compete in the cloud business will have to provide great value added services that facilitate unique new application categories sitting on top of one or more of the MAG clouds. The services will have to be hard to copy and/or narrow enough to not attract the attention of MAG.

Given the need to innovate in some unique way, and the need to be interoperable with MAG clouds, I am not at all clear how you can create innovate cloud platform services using an open source business model in a money making way. Being open source in this space is akin to what it might be like if Apple made OSX open source and optimized it to run on standard Intel PCs. Good karma perhaps. Good profits, not so much.

Of course many open source businesses hang their hat on services, consulting and support. I personally hate time and materials type businesses masquerading as scalable software businesses, but my opinions aside, these are by and large tough businesses to succeed at.

In short, while being open source may be politically correct, I fear it may be a grave hindrance towards providing a defensible, unique, money-making offering in the cloud.

Vendor Lock-In and The Cloud

2008-11-03T06:46:00.002-05:00

There is much talk about the concerns over vendor lock-in related to the cloud. People are concerned that the new cloud related application platforms have APIs that are not supported by other vendors. Obviously if your vendor goes out of business or raise prices, or performs poorly that’s bad news.

This is a valid concern, but there are a variety of issues to consider. Microsoft has recently launched Azure , which is essentially a cloud-based version of its impressive existing software stack. While I am not a fan of everything Microsoft does, I have of late been a fan of their Office suite, and I have always been a fan of their developer tools. Though I have never been an active Visual Studio user, I can say with confidence that it is awesome. So if you are willing to commit to the Microsoft back-end software stack for things such as Microsoft SQL Server, and their web server tools, it is a great option. On the other hand, one of the primary attacks on Microsoft is the fact that their stack only runs on Windows, is closed source, etc. and so people are concerned about locking-in to Microsoft.

But in my mind, if you are going to lock-in to someone, Microsoft is not a bad place to be locked into if Azure works well. I have no reason to believe that it won’t given that, as I see it, it is critical to their survival (already hearing commenters groaning and referring me to Vista).

But this type of lock-in is small potatoes as compared to depending on startup X when developing a mission critical application. There you need to concern yourself not just with performance, but with the survival of the service provider.

Some vendors, like 10Gen are attempting to resolve this problem by making their tools open source, so that you can run them not just within the 10Gen cloud, but on any cloud based infrastructure such as Amazon or perhaps Azure with presumably minor modifications. This is a reasonable solution, but I would contend that basing your company on any new project, open source or not, is still risky. Open source does not mean risk-free.

None of this should be interpreted to suggest that I believe that Cloud computing is too risky. On the contrary, I believe it is critical to moving to the next phase of computing. But I do believe that for many developers, the key to cloud computing is leveraging the new opportunities as opposed to trying to port existing, or moderately enhanced development models to the cloud.

For example, Facebook is, in a certain sense, a cloud-computing platform. It is not the same as Azure, or 10Gen which host your applications, but it had when it launched the concept of actually being of real business value to the developers. Of course recently, I think we have come to realize that Facebook may not have as much profit potential for developers as we may have thought in the beginning. But I am speaking here in concepts, not specifics. The point is that cloud computing offers us the potential to think differently about what web applications mean. There will be opportunities, most of which I cannot even yet imagine, to create new types of applications, new eco-systems, etc.

In this context, you embrace the unique characteristics of the platform, which means embracing lock-in. Certainly if you invested a bunch of time in Facebook development, you did so because you felt there was a business opportunity there. No one was talking about “lock-in” around Facebook, because it was obvious that your apps would not be portable, and that lock-in didn’t bother you because there was a perceived benefit in being part of the Facebook eco-system.

And so the point here is that if all you are doing is attempting to get your web application into the cloud, then I think you need to take these kinds of risks seriously. But if there is an opportunity to leverage a given platform to generate real business opportunity, then lock-in should be the last thing on your mind.

Admittedly we are in early days yet, and I am not saying there are any platforms that fit my criteria yet, but I am confident they are coming, and that this is what the real cloud computing revolution will be about, not just saving a few bucks on infrastructure.

Microsoft And Innovation

2008-10-29T12:09:00.001-04:00

In my piece from yesterday, in talking about Microsoft Azure, I said that I was not particularly excited, but that I did feel the announcement was important and the services are needed.

One of my commenters asked what would excite me from Microsoft.

My answer: the unexpected.

It is not exciting when Microsoft delivers something that we have been expecting, or needing for a long time. This may not be fair, because perhaps what we expect from Microsoft is unreasonable. But what excites me, what excites us, fair or not, is software that delights – software that does something impactful in a way that no one else has done before.

But this is hard. It’s hard because Microsoft has so many fish to fry, so many products to complete, and so much cross-divisional impact to manage. They can’t just let a bunch of skunk works go and disrupt their corporate vision with something that does not fit into the family tree.

Microsoft’s problem is that they have this huge franchise that they feel the need to bring everywhere they go. Everything is Windows. And they are porting around many of the same APIs and platforms that they have supported since DOS. Now obviously Windows for Smartphones does not support DOS, but they have tried to bring as much of the API and the UI as they can. They believe that the franchise, and the historical developer support makes it critical that they make changes slowly.

This type of thinking yields a desktop-style Windows OS on a cell phone, which is a bit like trying to squeeze an elephant into a thimble, and in the end it just doesn’t work.

The point is that Microsoft carries both burdensome luggage, and simultaneously has rocket boosters strapped to its back. The Windows franchise is both a curse and a blessing. And Microsoft has to figure out when to abandon it, and when to steadfastly support and embrace it.

But yesterday when I said that Microsoft did not innovate, I have to admit it is not true. They do innovate sometimes, it’s just not nearly enough for a company with the kind of resources they have. And when they do innovate, it almost seems like they don’t even realize it.

As an example of great innovation, Microsoft Surface is stunning. It is a platform that makes everything in the computing space tactile. It is at the heart of the election coverage where states are being shown flying around from toss up to leaning Obama. But there, Microsoft is launching it in this really anemic way, as a part of a $10,000+ computer system, instead of establishing it as a new, broad metaphor for computing. And so even when they innovate, they do it in a way that almost makes you feel like they are ashamed to be doing something that doesn’t say “WINDOWS!!!!”

As I see it, Surface should be the interface to a new operating system. It should be a new computing platform, and not one in $10,000 computers, but in desktops and laptops of today. The iPhone is no more revolutionary than Surface, but Microsoft has a way of convincing us that some of its best work is almost irrelevant.

In short the fact that Microsoft is a laggard and not an innovator is part truth, and part a fiction supported by the fact that they seem to have a hard time, as a culture, figuring out how to trigger an adrenaline rush. And so they just don’t inspire.

Microsoft Announces Web Office... Google Has Decisions To Make

2008-10-28T12:14:00.000-04:00

As I wrote long ago, Google Documents has an inferior user experience because it tries to do word processing in the browser without a plug-in such as Flash. Now, Microsoft is announcing that they will be bringing Office to the browser. Rest assured, that Microsoft's new web Office suite will use Silverlight, their Flash competitor, and will therefore not be hamstrung by the insufficiency of standard browser rendering.

Unless HTML is changed radically, (and given the politics of HTML 5 that seems unlikely in my lifetime) it will be impossible to build a good word processor based on HTML.

Google has been almost religiously opposed to using Adobe Flash for anything but video. But now that Microsoft is about to bring out a web based office suite, Google is going to have to decide what to do here. If they remain on their current, pure HTML-based course, and Microsoft moves to Silverlight, Microsoft will eat Google's lunch. There is absolutely no reason to use Google's platform if Microsoft's web Office does what Google's apps do, but behaves more like real desktop applications - and in fact behaves more like the real office. Google can never achieve this type of user experience with an HTML only strategy.

The stakes here are significant. Google wants to be competitive in the office document business, but adheres to a religious philosophy that almost guarantee's long term failure. But Google has become a very big, much slower moving company. I am curious to see if they can adjust their religious phliosophy sufficiently to play in this market once Microsoft launches their web Office products.

Microsoft's Role Is Not to Innovate... But That's OK

2008-10-28T08:51:00.002-04:00

I was reviewing yesterday's coverage of the Microsoft Azure platform for cloud computing and trying to decide what to make of it. I was admittedly underwhelmed, but I really didn't think that was appropriate to write, because it is obviously a major piece of engineering, and it is indeed solving a relevant problem.

After thinking about it, I realized why I had the reaction I did. I have an expectation that Microsoft *should* innovate. After all Bill Gates talks much about "innovation". But despite the fact that Microsoft presents itself as an innovator, anyone paying close attention knows this is not true. Microsoft is not an innovator. But the truth is they have an important, and perhaps even more difficult job. Microsoft provides more infrastructure for computing than any other company. And infrastructure just isn't sexy.

Azure is perhaps the perfect example of this. Despite a bit of fawning over it from some people that can't help but fawn over all things Microsoft, the truth is it isn't that exciting. But that does not mean it is not important.

Essentially, what Azure is is a collection of web-based services that make it possible to take applications built with the Microsoft stack and move them to the cloud. This is plumbing. It is foundational. But it is not at all exciting. There is little that comes from this that will create new categories of applications, or that will cause us to think differently about what cloud based applications can offer us. But Azure will let millions of people move what they are doing right now onto the cloud.

For me that is not exciting. But that says more about me than it does about the importance of their work. Because for all those people developing applications that want an easy way to get their apps into the cloud, Azure is a godsend.

This brings me back to my core point. Microsoft is not in the business of showing us how to do new things. They are in the business of providing broad platforms for us to do things. These are platforms that can make us feel, by virtue of familiarity, safe and comfortable. And they are platforms that, if you are part of the Microsoft "Visual" religion, are very easy to adopt.

Comparing Microsoft to Apple, they are in very different businesses. Microsoft is about broad ubiquitous platforms, and Apple is about limited but perfected platforms. That's not to say that Apple ever achieves perfection. But Apple is more focused on experience and is wholly uninterested in breadth. Microsoft must, by virtue of its broad customer base, always sacrifice innovation and experience, in favor of bringing everybody along for the ride.

And so Azure, as a platform for bringing everybody along, will be a smashing success. But as a paradigm shifting platform for computing, not so much. As I see it that is a reasonable, even needed trade-off.

Fixing Firefox and Adapting to It

2008-10-23T07:29:00.001-04:00

At Kloudshare, we are developing a platform that, among other things, pushes the web browser further than most applications, and perhaps further than almost any application has yet pushed the browser. When I say push I don't mean in the sense that we expect it to go particularly faster than others do, but that the way that we are exercising it is that we are using things in presumably unexpected combinations.

Up until now, Firefox has been OK, but there had been some visual glitches that we would like to eliminate. This is hard because, as far as we can tell, we are doing everything exactly right in a standards compliant sort of way. The bugs of most concern seem not to have any obvious thread, and most tellingly, they do not appear in other browsers.

The visual glitches are a bit annoying, but can be lived with. But yesterday we hit one that is really weird. When changing the source of an iframe, the browser seems to change its zoom level. Everything gets bigger. When you click to another tab and then come back, everything goes back to normal. This is a real killer for us. Its not just a few pixels intermittently out of place, and so it makes the experience unusable. The problem is not consistent in the sense that on my Mac it seems to happen every time, but on our Linux machine the problem is more intermittent.

The thing I have been struggling with is trying to figure out how to both report this and whether there are ways to work around this. We are not live yet so we can't provide some kind of public link on Bugzilla. We have thought about trying to capture the HTML but many of these bugs require interaction. More troublingly we really want to do more than just provide information that helps make the next version of the browser better, though obviously that would be great. Ideally we'd like to know what is going on internally, and if there is a way to avoid or work around these problems so that we can satisfy the existing installed base without removing important features.

So the real question here is, what is the right strategy to resolve this. Is there a proper procedure for resolving such problems? I suppose we could try to develop a specific use case outside our software that reproduces the bug. But given the highly circumstantial nature, this would be a huge burden on us, given our small size. Another thought is that we could hire someone who is a contributor to see if s/he can reproduce the bug and help us both identify the bug and, if possible, find a work around. The problem with this solution is I am not sure where to find such contributors. I guess I could try hanging out on IRC, but that seems pretty inefficient. Then again perhaps not.

Anyway, this post is more of a call for help and suggestions. Any ideas greatly appreciated.