Month: March 2004

Because "market share eroder" doesn’t sound as nice

Why must everytime a new tech gadget seems to somewhat compete against an existing gadget, the press goes wild and calls it a “[insert predominant product’s name] Killer”? Imagine if other products were sensationalized in this way – you’d see headlines screaming, “Campbell’s is the Lipton’s Cup-of-Soup killer!” :nono:

So with great fanfare it is announced that Microsoft is preparing an ‘iPod killer’ for Europe. (Neowin discusses these news.) As per Microsoft’s “kitchen sink” philosophy, it plays music, movies, and photos; basically it does everything except get a job to pay off its $800 US pricetag.

Considering that, according to Gizmodo, this so-called “iPod killer” is “three times as thick…and roughly twice as long” as Apple’s prodigy child, one would have to assume that this “portable” player will be killing them ‘Pods by sitting on them.

When not to be open

Phil Windley lists certain scenarios when developers shouldn’t embrace OSS:

  • Product is a control point for the company
  • Product should go obsolete
  • Cost does not justify benefit
  • Misdirection and defocusing of resources
  • Intellectual property risk cannot be justified
  • To compete against open source community
  • Just because its cool technology
  • Technology direction doesn’t match strategic goals
  • Time to market is critical

Generally, going proprietary is more advantageous when you are developing a software product which research costs exceed its maintenance/support costs. Such products include specialized systems such 3D game engines, and biometrics. Of course, as time goes by and your product becomes more commoditized, it may be prudent to reevaluate the open route. For example, the once-revolutionary Quake, Quake II and Doom engines are now under the GNU general public license.

Is it obvious? Is it novel?

Patents: do they encourage or discourage innovation? Dare Obasanjo offers a low-level perspective: you might as well file, since “there is a lot of incentive to file patents for software innovations if you work for a company that can afford to do so. However the measure of degree of innovation is in the eye of the beholder [and up to prior art searches].”

The problem with patenting software in my mind, is that most of the stuff that’s been patented is fairly obvious. Of course, “obvious” is a subjective term – something that seems to go without saying to one person can be considered ingenious to another. Typically, as the folks in Law attest, the inventor is often too close to his/her invention to subjectively gauge how “obvious” their innovation is.

Software patents especially vex the free software community, because to them they’re seeing common public algorithms being snatched up by private individuals or organizations. It goes against the open source philosophy of commoditizing software.

Call it “patent squatting.” The worst kind of patent owners are the kind who patent everything in sight then start charging people for what was originally free, and then sue those who don’t pay up. It happens more often than you think. Lawyers and patent agents are not always proper barriers; they may lack the technical saavy to smell a rat.

After the whole “eBay patenting the one-click buying method” debacle a few years back, Jeff Bezos presented an open letter call for patent reforms to limit the amount of time to file and keep a patent.

Some changes are now underway, although naturally some entrepreneurs are objecting to certain reforms.

The packet always rings twice

Linux Journal has an innovative way of remotely accessing your otherwise firewall’ed-up server – port knocking. This trick is accomplished by using a pre-arranged sequence of connection attempts to a unique set of ports within a unique time interval as a method of authentication. In other words, like knocking in a certain pattern on a locked door of a speakeasy. A daemon can be set to monitor the firewall logs for this secret “knock”, and open a port (say, port 22 for secure shell login) when the sequence is played. The beauty of this system is that the host firewall can still be silently blocking all ports.

Converging towards the mind

Knowledge management consists of two key components: codification, and personalization. Codification is the act of amassing and archiving data and information. In this day and age, that means digitalization, databases and search engines. Personalization is the act of spreading knowledge through communication – email, blogging, wikis, plain ol’ social networking.

Nova Spivacks sees a near future where these two worlds will converge into a phenomenon he coins the “Metaweb”. Information will increasingly rich in content. With the inroads e-paper is making, one can conceivably have an interactive, immersive newspaper, or a televised videocast that can be observed from multiple angles and multiple personal perspectives.

Other products Spivack predicts are personal portals or “lifelogs” that record ones personal life experiences (leave it to Microsoft Research to be already working on this one in the form of the SenseCam).

Unified communications with persistent relationship management will be the norm (the Holy Grail, Universal Personal Telecommunications: one person, one phone number).

Corporate collaborative KM tools will also be so sophisticated, they function like a group mind. Other predicted creations are intelligent marketplaces (the descendants of eBay and Expedia) and decentralized, emergent communities (a higher form of today’s social software?).

metaweb_graph.png
Chart by Nova Spivack

Indifferent to Instant Messaging

The primary reason companies don’t like IM is because most managers see it as yet another distraction from “real” work. If you think about it, it makes sense. When they come home, what do they see? Their teenage kids yammering away on AIM or ICQ.

Unlike telephones or email, the early adopter of IM (and blogs, wikis and SMS “texting” for that matter) was the Internet-saavy Generation Y. Ergo, for many businesspeople, IM = idle chitchat.

The second reason is a company’s obsession with controlling communication. I remember talking to the president of a small firm a few years ago about upgrading his single 56K Internet connection that was struggling to serve over ten employees. His response? The 56K stays: all the better to keep staff off eBay or career sites. In the same way, managers don’t trust IM.

The third reason is plain computer ineptitude. Most workers can barely use email and Office. It doesn’t help that instant messengers are often have very non-standard GUIs compared to typical Windows apps; it still throws my mom in a loop that she has to double-click the ICQ icon in the system tray to open the contact list, while all other programs are only one click away on the TaskBar.

My company used to employ Lotus Sametime, but that effort faded from lack of use. A new initiative has sprung up, this time using Windows Messenger and MS Live Communication Server. This way, employees can talk to each other within the encrypted internal IM network, and talk to outsiders using the public .Net Messenger Service (although IT will not support it). It is still a small movement, but hopefully it will gain momentum.

The antigen to ozmosis

If you press the right mouse button in the game Max Payne, your on-screen persona (the aformentioned Max Payne) experiences what the manual describes as “bullet-time”: Time seems to slow down, allowing you and Max to do the impossible, such as dodge bullets and deal out semi-automatic vengeance at lightning speeds.

Did you ever feel like that while working? The sensation that time stands still, and when it is all over, a feeling of refreshment and accomplishment? Such is the concept behind Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Of course, in the book, they call it “flow”.

Curt Rosengren summarizes the book. The concept is pretty similar to the FISH! philosophy. Basically, by giving employees control and feedback, employees will be able to find meaning and value in what they’re doing. And when you understand that, you get flow.

I cannot count the times that I was working on some order that I knew would make the difference of clinching a major deal with a customer, but to the order department, I’m just order #3470931. They need to understand what is going on so that they care.

Another man’s utopia

“There isn’t much to watch on American TV now unless you are into violence and/or canned laughter. Did you know that most of the laugh tracks they use are so old that the people you hear laughing at the sitcom are mostly dead? It seems appropriate.”

The Guardian interviews sci-fi author Ursula Le Guin. Sadly, my only exposure to Le Guin was a mini-series of her novel Lathe of Heaven on A&E, an American television network.

It was a good concept: a man whose dreams can alter reality, and his psychologist who finally decides to use this power to his advantage. In the interview, Ursula explains that Taoist philosophy was the primary inspiration.

Under the <table>

Richard McManus comments on the now legendary HTML tables vs. CSS layout debate. Web designers should use CSS layouts instead of hacking tables together. Sure, tables are easier to understand and set up, but CSS is easier to change, easier to migrate to new formats (think portable devices), and makes more logical sense.

TABLE is an ugly hack, back when there was no real way to display column layouts on the web. Their intuitive nature is probably why they replaced frames as the way to place content adjacent to each other.

So really, both camps are right. Either implementation is transparent to the user, so they shouldn’t care. But developers should care. CSS will make your jobs easier.

There are some reasons for sticking to tables, however:

  • support for Netscape 4.7: Sadly, it’s still around, especially inside companies.
  • workaround for IE’s multiple CSS bugs
  • you are too lazy/too busy to concentrate on laying out a CSS layout, and this web job is just a one-time deal.