28 Apr
Someone sent this link as a “great article about Live Mesh” ... and it was so bad, that I just have to rant about it. Your 9th grade English teacher would have flunked you for this … it’s just a horrible example of the Anguish Languish.
Steve Gillmor has an analogy or a metaphor for everything (and I mean literally every paragraph). Most of them are bad, but some of them are truly awful, so I’m just going to pick on a couple to vent steam.
So it went with Microsoft, as the seeming invulnerability of Gates’ machine accelerated to the boundaries of global saturation. Though we tend to think of Google as the conqueror, the reality is that Microsoft has struggled most with itself, the victim not of decline but of lack of fuel — the very customers who created the megalith in the first place.
The who, did what?
megalith — [noun] ( ‘meh gE “lIth ) 1. a huge stone, esp. one used in prehistoric times as a monument.
First of all, megaliths are erected, not created. Secondly, they don’t use (or lack) fuel. Thirdly, they’re a bad counterpoint to “conquerors.” If you wanted to use that many metaphors in one sentence, you should have said something like this: though we tend to think of Google as the conqueror, the reality is that Microsoft has struggled most with itself, the victim of a decline like that of the Roman empire, and yet Google has still not dared challenge the megalith of Windows, propped up as it is by millions of customers around the world …
The microbigs can seem transcendent like Facebook or possessing the lifetime of a gnat like a thousand forgotten startups or neverwases (sic), but nowhere are the range of possible outcomes more encapsulated than Twitter.
First of all, “can seem transcendent” works, but “can seem possessing the lifetime of a gnat” doesn’t. But more importantly, if Facebook is your example of transcendent, then the “lifetime of a gnat” takes on a whole new meaning — maybe you meant to invoke the branding of Hotmail, or Yahoo!, or SlashDot. Finally, “Neverwases” might be okay in poetry, but isn’t this still a technology magazine?
Yes? Yes. So what you’re saying is that Google is a microbig. Yes, did I say that? No, but I didn’t ask that either and the answer is still yes. Bottom line: Microsoft can’t gain and retain traction with Mesh unless the answers are yes.
What?! Exactly who is he having this conversation with in his head, and why did he write it down on paper?
I hate to ask, but, what is a “Coke Classic question” ... and how did “When’s the Mac version?” get on any list of classic questions? Why are you asking questions without question marks? What is a “Net-grappling” product line? Incidentally, the mental image conjured by combining “flailing” with “grappling” is rather frightening. It’s a no wonder that there are so many comments on this post that say things like “what is he talking about?”
Steve claims that “orthogonal and complementary” is “MicroBig language” (by the way, can we get a little capitalization consistency on your made up words please?) but I’m pretty sure that these are terms usually used by the (it hurts to write this) BigBigs to assuage fears of internal competition, as in: Microsoft’s advertising assets and aQuantive’s complementary expertise… or Yahoo! is complementary to Microsoft and so on. The so-called MicroBigs are usually more concerned with disruptive and revolutionary.
Bah. Anyway.
Part of me is excited and interested to see that Arul Kumaravel has written a PowerShell book for developers — it looks like just the book I need!
But another part of me is loudly grousing. It wouldn’t bother me at all if there were accurate and complete documentation of this stuff on MSDN (Microsoft Developer Network). But there isn’t. Big shock, here comes another one of the development team members with a book about it to fill in the gaps. Too bad Microsoft couldn’t pay someone to put some of this documentation on MSDN.
I don’t really begrudge developers the right to make some extra money on the side selling a few books, and I assume they’re writing these on their own time. But on the other hand, it’s very clear that the team and Microsoft have (I won’t say deliberately) left a gaping hole in the documentation big enough to drive a truckload of books through. Or rather, big enough, as Jeffrey Snover (the team lead) would say, to stack a tower of books in.
If there’s anyone left on the team that hasn’t written a book yet, can I humbly suggest that documenting the XML schemas would make a nice booklet? It might not be a 300 page tome like this one, but I’m sure there’s a market for it. .
This “Web 2.0” nonsense is still ridiculous, and I thought I’d just throw this out there to express my annoyance. The one thing you’ll notice here is that at no point do we get a new version just because you started using the same old tech for different purposes. Water does not become Water 2.0 just because you use it to wash your car instead of drinking it, nor because you put it in bottles and pretend it’s worth it’s weight in gasoline. Neither does the web get a new version just because some corporate muckety-muck discovered blogging, nor even when someone finally notices XmlHttpRequest and dreams up a new acronym for “fetching data from a webservice via a javascript in a web page”. What we can do is change the version number when we make a significant change in the underlying technologies.
And at some future point in time …
In the Social Web, browsers become true portals, with integrated identity management, instant messaging, contact management and feed aggregation. Micro-formats are one of the supported standards, and browsers can parse them and store and track their information. When you comment on a website, your OpenID is tracked with a microformat vcard, plus your browser offers to ping your OpenId enabled tracking service so your friends can follow a central feed of all your comments and forum participation across the whole web (based on your anonymous OpenID). All of this happens without third party plugins that nobody installs.
So yeah … Web 2.0? The Social Web? No. I think not.