Telirati

In this dispatch, I give a very postive review to .NET, which was, at the time, the best archiecture for multi-tier Web applications, and which, if Microsoft had executed on the potential to use .NET to tie desktops to Web services, could have enabled Microsft to dominate Web applications. Four years later, Microsoft still can't seem to unholster the .NET gun, which could make Google's JavaScript hacks look pathetic compared to the level of desktop integration that mail, calendars, and search that employed .NET could provide. Telirati Newsletter #53: What C#, .Net, SOAP, and NGWS Really Means Microsoft holds some kind of world record for inept naming schemes for what is really pretty simple stuff. The whole COM/ActiveX nomenclature swamp, for example. It all refers to various levels of interface conventions in the COM distributed component system. (And you thought DCOM was the distributed version, eh?) That’s it. Now that you understand that, be assured the Microsoft no...

In this Telirati newsletter the question of when to follow and when to lead is addressed. Telirati Newsletter #52: Imitation, Flattery, Competition The Telirati do not do product reviews. In this case, examining some of Microsoft’s new products indicates company direction. Mostly, it is the right direction. Microsoft is revamping MSN. You may not like the result, which is a customized browser with plenty of Internet dumbing-down, like big colorful buttons you can hit two drinks after your friends hide the car keys. But this is what was needed long ago as AOL was carpeting the U.S. with disks. The new MSN is exactly what one expects from Microsoft: aggressive pursuit of a market leader with a high-quality implementation of a flatteringly similar idea. The main lesson here is that marketing strategy is mainly a question of when to follow and when to lead. If you follow, your results will be predictable. In a growing market, achieving results similar to those of a market...

In this number, I kick sand in the face of Y2K alarmists, having successfully predicted nothing would happen. The meanstream media was wrong about Y2K, and blogs like Slashdot got it right, presaging the current "discovery" of the blogoshpere by the mainstream media by nealry 5 years. Telirati Newsletter #50: Why Too 'K? No accidental nuclear war. No food riots prompting the imposition of global government implemented by U.N. zombie soldiers in black helicopters. Did you even get a fax dated 1900? Y2K went more than just OK, it went swimmingly OK. But then, this was predictable (and predicted in the newsletter entitled "Why Tu Que?") Before returning to rubbing it in, let's look at why this was so predictable. First, and most important to those of you in the computing and telecom industry: the number of mission critical systems is vastly overestimated. Most systems hardened against failure and operated by a team o...

Four years ago, the specter of content protection stalked the PC. Four year on, it's still out there, threatening to turn the magic of a general machine into something more like television. Telirati Newsletter #49: Content protection: diabolical, or just evil? First, we start with the good things about content protection: (let me know if you come up with any). OK, now let’s get into what is wrong with it: Content protection is the end of personal computing. This may sound a bit apocalyptic, but it really only means that the reasons the personal computer is popular could all be extinguished through content protection. The personal computer became popular because it was completely under the control of the individual who owns it. Subsequently, in the name of orderly corporate computing environments and other supposedly worthy causes that control is eroded. But, still, you can purchase a computer, a completely general machine, capable of any function, programmable ...

This newsletter, written 4 years ago, describes a lesson still valid today: New technologies have to be an improvement over what they replace - a lesson VoIP has only now applied with the superior sound quality available with Skype. Telirati Newsletter #48: What Roger Ebert Can Teach Us About Telephony What can a movie critic, a fat man in a tweed jacket, teach us about telephony? A lot, as you will see. Telephony, because it is so widely used, is about what people want, much the same as making and showing movies. In a recent column, Roger Ebert, a noted movie critic, takes his gaze away from the screen and looks into the projection booth. There he finds digital cinema technology trying to make an unwise leap and landing under the wheels of the juggernaut of refined existing systems: I have seen the future of the cinema, and it is not digital. No matter what you've read, the movie theater of the future will not use digital video projectors, and it will not beam the signal d...

In this newsletter, written in 2004, I made a number of predictions. My scorceard looks like this: Apple did make a UNIX my mother could use. But now they face the task of taking advantage of, rather than being run over by, the coming desktop Linux wave. Microsoft, after the huge technology achievement of Windows 2000, did face the challenge of remaining relevant, and largely failed. Microsoft isn't moving fast enough, hasn't had a break-out into new product categories - with the possible exception of XBox, and hasn't created any new product categories to dominate. Until recently I was right about VoIP being irrelevant because incumbent networks could comfortably drop prices. Cisco is finally getting some traction (by default) in VoIP CPE, and Skype has discovered pricing and a business model that (probably) works. I was thuddingly wrong about VoATM. Never heard of VoATM? Yeah. Anyway, DSL and VoATM are wrong and deserve to lose. VoIP will set you free to buy se...

Every now and then I would reach pretty far in my newletters, and this is a case in point: I analyize David Cutler's influence on Microsoft. Ambitious, but perhaps also useful in that the influence of people like Cutler is one reason why Windows seems to move so slowly to respond to the threat of Linux. He shaped Microsft, and his influence, and the momentum of what he set in motion, is still strong. Telirati Newsletter #46: Cutler on the Couch One thing that makes Microsoft great is that titanic personalities can still mold large parts of the company in their image. David Cutler, the father of NT, is one such titan, and his worldview is about to start shaping your desktop computing experience. What a strange world it will be. In a recent interview Cutler gave in a Microsoft newsletter distributed to the Windows 2000 beta test community, he made some telling remarks. The interview itself was a puff piece, and the writer was in awe of her subject. But Cutler reveals more tha...

Overall, I find it eerie to reread what I woute five years ago. For an industry that supposedly moves at lightning speed, the predictions presented below are remarkable mainly for the fact that their outcomes are still unfolding. Still, it is possible to tell that most of these predictions have come true. Moreover, it is also possible to say quite clearly that Microosft has failed to use the previous five years to take actions that would have been effective in minimizing the competitive threat from Linux and other open source software. One can also see that the importance assigned to these threats has held up: Price hasn't dislodged Windows from the desktop, where Windows pricing is low enough to fail to deter any customers. It is the other attactions of open source software that matter more. Telirati Newsletter #45: Categorizing the Linux Threat (Opportunity) How much of a threat is Linux to Microsoft? What are the main opportunities for Linux? In answering these...

Five years ago I wrote this newsletter, and I came not to praise speech recognition, but to bury it. In the subsequent five years, speech recognition lives on as a novelty in mobile phone handsets and cards. One of my colleagues recently demonstrated his new Honda's abilities. "Take me to the nearest whorehouse!" he exclaimed. And, dutifully, the navigation system displayed nearby hospitals, in anticipation, no doubt of him catching some STD. My prediction here is that speech technology providers would continue to bark up the wrong tree, and they have maintained that course with stubborn steadfastness. Interdisciplinary approaches are still left uninvestigated, and products are only slightly less of a laughingstock than they used to be. Telirati Newsletter #44: The Shock of Recognition Speech recognition is a curious beast: Sometimes it appears to have been tamed. It jumps through hoops on the trade show stage and once again we are drawn to believe. Perenni...

In this newsletter I take a shot at the server craze of the time. Over the years, server software has remained a very active area of the software industry, but Linux and other free and open source software has cooled the gold rush mentality. Recently, tools like distcc have brought distributed omcpilation to Linux, confirming my prediction that software development would be one of the first targets for workgroup clustering. But the real importance of this is in striking a blow against the TV-izing of the Internet. The less distinction between a user's node and a server, the better. An interesting example of the virtualization of server software in use today is Skype's distributed directory. A contining trend in this direction is all part of the return of the Internet to its network-of-servers roots, and it is a Very Good Thing. Telirati Newsletter #43: Servers, Re-centralization, and the Promise of the Personal Computer A wave of servers is sweeping over the ...

I predcited in 1999 that Microsoft would start to sort out the winners and losers from their Internet ventures. As with many other things that look like an action plan for a year, maybe two, at most, this process continues to drag on, and Microsoft is, still, part owner of an also-ran cable TV channel portal hybrid, among other oddments. Telirati Newsletter #42: Species of Internet Ventures There is no one kind of Internet startup, and it is a multidimensional space in which they exist. But at least one axis of this space can be mapped out, and it is to our benefit to do so since we can then place Internet ventures along this axis to see what type they are. And, more usefully, if they appear not to be in the right place, it can tell us which way they ought to be going. At one end of this axis are companies that have business models enabled by the Internet. These include Ebay, PriceLine, and every company taking a new whack at direct sales based on the prospect of the Interne...

Here in the archives of the Telirati we have a classic tragedy of bad management. It is as current as ever in informing the process of management selection in small ventures. Telirati Newsletter #40: Care and Feeding In the ecosphere of the enterprise there are two species that require special care and feeding: engineers and salespeople. Salespeople are, to me, a delightful mystery. They live eat and breathe interaction with customers. Yet, the last time I had the pleasure of sharing a car ride with three of them, they were volubly discussing the role of Altoids in White House affairs while I was on the phone with an important investor and potential customer. Engineers, on the other hand, are more my cuppa. Companies that keep their engineers happy reap worthwhile rewards. They skate over the perils of product transitions, they build high walls around their markets, erecting a thicket of features that are hard to duplicate. They acquire a halo of high touch that can sustain ...