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We spent the last week up at Sea Ranch (or “The Sea Ranch” as it seems to be called) on the Northern California coast, watching seals, building sand castles, cooking and entertaining the kids. (They entertained us, too.)

Spending a week offline is a true luxury, for me — a chance to think more slowly and (I hope) deeply, or, alternately, rest the brain cells.

Returned to the Bay Area only to hop a plane for New York, for meetings at my publishers and a long-overdue visit to the Salon offices here. Some catch up posts will follow; apologies for some older links.

Away

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This blog will be silent for a spell as we vacate, estivate and celebrate. Keep the Internets safe, everyone, and see you in about a week.

NY Times research says people don’t want RSS

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From David Weinberger’s report on a panel at an Annenberg Center conference, I find Martin Nisenholtz of New York Times Digital making the following statement (I’m trusting David’s report of the words, but they’re notes, not a news article):

“Our research says that a relatively small group of people want to aggregate RSS feeds.”

I don’t doubt that the Times has such research, and that it is an accurate snapshot of current Net user desire. But it’s a bad predictor, because when you ask most Net users, “Do you want to aggregate RSS feeds?” their likely answer is, “Huh? Aggregate what?”

Imagine it’s, say, 1995, when a lot of us early adopters were already spending tons of time online but much of the world barely knew the Web existed or how it worked. And imagine you did research then that asked people, “Do you want to access Web pages with HTTP?”

Such research would have shown that a “relatively small group of people” wanted to surf the Web. And that research would have guided you in precisely the wrong direction.

Perils of group editing — revenge of the users

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I’m basically a believer in the general value and usefulness of the Digg/Reddit model in which users submit stories and vote on them. The debate over at Edge on Jaron Lanier’s critique of the “hive mind” notwithstanding, I see these services as interesting additives to the old-school editorial world I still work in, rather than as potential replacements, and I enjoy using them.

Now Jason Calacanis (of Weblogs Inc. and now AOL) has revamped AOL’s moribund Netscape.com property as a somewhat modified Digg clone. Digg devotees appear to have taken umbrage, and registered their disapproval by flooding the site with votes for a story headlined “AOL Copies Digg” (Valleywag captured the screen). That story was the new Netscape’s top headline in the day after its launch. Another headline voted up by Netscape users reads “Digg rules…Netscape is utter Crap.”

If you’re going to empower the vox populi, you’d better be ready for, and okay with, its inevitable yen to bite your ankle.

Gates’ departure and a Windows Vista postmortem

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This news of Bill Gates’ plans to step down in 2008 doesn’t really surprise me. From what I’ve been able to tell, Gates was engaged and excited during the early stages of Longhorn/Vista, back when Microsoft was promising revolutionary transformations to the file system and everything else. The following scaling-back and repeated delays of the project must have left him with an overwhelming sense of deja vu. When you’re the richest man in the world, who needs it?

So Gates will ride off into the sunset, and Microsoft will either find a way to reinvent itself, perhaps in the hands of Ray Ozzie, or gradually devolve into maintenance mode.

Given these events, this Microsoft blogger’s report on why the Vista delays happened is even more relevant. The posting was up for a while today, then the blogger, Philip Su, removed it — of his own accord, he says, not under pressure. The heated discussion remains on the page. Here are some extensive, relevant excerpts:

 

…The oft-cited, oft-watercooler-discussed dual phenomenon of Windows code complexity and Windows process burden seem to have dramatically affected its overall code velocity. But code can be simplified and re-architected (and is indeed being done so by a collection of veteran architects in Windows, none of whom, incidentally, look anything like Colonel Sanders). Process can be streamlined where inefficient, eliminated where unnecessary.

But that’s not where it ends. There are deeper causes of Windows’ propensity to slippage…

Deep in the bowels of Windows, there remains the whiff of a bygone culture of belittlement and aggression. Windows can be a scary place to tell the truth.

When a vice president in Windows asks you whether your team will ship on time, they might well have asked you whether they look fat in their new Armani suit. The answer to the question is deeply meaningful to them. It’s certainly true in some sense that they genuinely want to know. But in a very important other sense, in a sense that you’ll come to regret night after night if you get it wrong, there’s really only one answer you can give.

After months of hearing of how a certain influential team in Windows was going to cause the Vista release to slip, I, full of abstract self-righteous misgivings as a stockholder, had at last the chance to speak with two of the team’s key managers, asking them how they could be so, please-excuse-the-term, I-don’t-mean-its-value-laden-connotation, ignorant as to proper estimation of software schedules. Turns out they’re actually great project managers. They knew months in advance that the schedule would never work. So they told their VP. And he, possibly influenced by one too many instances where engineering re-routes power to the warp core, thus completing the heretofore impossible six-hour task in a mere three, summarily sent the managers back to “figure out how to make it work.” The managers re-estimated, nipped and tucked, liposuctioned, did everything short of a lobotomy — and still did not have a schedule that fit. The VP was not pleased. “You’re smart people. Find a way!” This went back and forth for weeks, whereupon the intrepid managers finally understood how to get past the dilemma. They simply stopped telling the truth. “Sure, everything fits. We cut and cut, and here we are. Vista by August or bust. You got it, boss.”

Every once in a while, Truth still pipes up in meetings. When this happens, more often than not, Truth is simply bent over an authoritative knee and soundly spanked into silence.

…Micromanagement, though not pervasive, is nevertheless evident. Senior vice presidents sometimes review UI designs of individual features, a nod to Steve Jobs that would in better days have betokened a true honor but for its randomizing effects. Give me a cathedral, give me a bazaar — really, either would be great. Just not this middle world in which some decisions are made freely while others are made by edict, with no apparent logic separating each from the other but the seeming curiosity of someone in charge.

…We shouldn’t forget despite all this that Windows Vista remains the largest concerted software project in human history. The types of software management issues being dealt with by Windows leaders are hard problems, problems that no other company has solved successfully. The solutions to these challenges are certainly not trivial.

An interesting question, however, is whether or not Windows Vista ever had a chance to ship on time to begin with. Is Vista merely uncontrolled? Or is it fundamentally uncontrollable? There is a critical difference.

It’s rumored that VPs in Windows were offered big bonuses contingent on shipping Vista by the much-publicized August 2006 date. Chris Jones even declared in writing that he wouldn’t take a bonus if Vista slips past August. If this is true, if folks like Brian Valentine held division-wide meetings where August 2006 was declared as the drop-dead ship date, if general managers were consistently told of the fiscal importance of hitting August, if everyone down to individual developers was told to sign on the dotted line to commit to the date, and to speak up if they had any doubts of hitting it — mind you, every last one of those things happened — and yet, and yet, the August date was slipped, one has to wonder whether it was merely illusory, given the collective failure of such unified human will, that Vista was ever controllable in the first place.

Give my regards to Bloggercon

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I was on a panel at the first Bloggercon and led a session at the third. I missed number two, and I’m sorry to say I will miss number four, even though it is right here in my backyard, because my family is taking a long-planned vacation that week. (I seem to be an attendee of odd-numbered Bloggercons only.) Anyway, it sounds like it’s going to be a great event — sorry to miss it.

We’ll be off celebrating Father’s Day and a wedding anniversary and my birthday and the solstice, an abundant conjunction (or syzygy, a word I almost got to use in Scrabble recently!) of happy events; the week also marks the 20th anniversary of my move from the east coast to the Bay Area.

In 1986 I was a staff writer at the Boston Phoenix, writing movie and theater and book reviews. The prospect of moving to California had never been anywhere on my horizon. I thought of California the way Woody Allen’s character in “Annie Hall” did; it was a place inhabited by fecklessly superficial philistines who lived for their automobiles — a place where a native New Yorker like me could never thrive. I’d never been west of the Mississippi, and I had no idea that there might be some distinctions between Northern and Southern California. It was all new to me. San Francisco won me over on my first job-interview visit, and here I still am, unlikely to go anyplace else.

Crimson reminiscence

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I decided not to schlep 3000 miles to attend my 25th college reunion which, shockingly, is happening right now. I’m not a big fan of such events and life is just too busy. However, the students currently running the place where I spent nearly all my time as an undergraduate, the Harvard Crimson, asked me to write an op-ed for the big issue they put out every year at graduation — known as the Commencement issue, because that is the name for the day-on-which-diplomas-are-granted at Harvard (which always has to name things just a little bit differently from the rest of the universe).

So I wrote something. It’s online now — a brief musing about the passing of the typewriter era, the transformation of media over the past 25 years, and a little political deva vu:

The nuclear fears of my graduating class were never, thankfully, borne out. Instead we have lived to see arguments we thought were well-settled reopened, and lessons we thought were well-learned ignored, by leaders whose careers we thought were well-buried. (Didn’t Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld get voted out of the White House when we were in high school?)

The Crimson’s Web site is pretty impressive, and it has done a great job of digitizing vast quantities of its archives back to the 19th century.

Bush isn’t crazy enough to attack Iran — is he?

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I remember hearing, during the run-up to the Iraq war in 2002, the following argument: They can’t be serious about invading Iraq. We still have a war to finish and a nation to build in Afghanistan, and we still haven’t found bin Laden. Besides, they’re moving on two tracks, and diplomacy is sure to resolve the whole WMD mess before things get out of hand.

Of course, we also heard reports of military preparations and looming no-return deployment deadlines, we also accumulated evidence that the Bush administration was twisting intelligence for political ends, and we also witnessed a ferocious disinformation campaign that left 70 percent of Americans thinking that Saddam Hussein was response for the 9/11 attacks. So fears of war as fait accompli weren’t totally unfounded. And as we now know, the “Relax, they can’t be that crazy” contingent were, alas, the ones who were disconnected from reality. Colin Powell was used as a dupe, the American people were deceived, and we’re still paying the price.

Today, we’re experiencing a note-for-note replay of the events of 2002, with only a single-letter change, from “q” to “n.” Sanity suggests we can’t be headed down the same road with Iran that we barreled down with Iraq. That’s the don’t-worry message of Helene Cooper’s Sunday Times Week in Review piece — “It’s Just Like Iraq, Only Different”:

  Was the administration again using public diplomacy for political cover while preparing to use military force? This time, all signs say no.

But if you read the Cooper piece closely, you will indeed worry. The carelessness of its language and the slantedness of its assumptions suggest that some journalists still haven’t learned the lessons of Iraq. Cooper writes: “A connection between the Sept. 11 attacks and Saddam Hussein was never proved.” That’s like saying, “A connection between phlogiston and fire was never proved.” There never was any connection. Everyone in the Bush White House knew that by 2002. But the administration did a great job of blurring the truth to suit its political needs. And its propaganda is still paying dividends.

Then Cooper writes about “the botched intelligence on Iraq’s weapons program.” This parrots the administration line: “We got bad intelligence.” It’s an easy way to brush aside everything we’ve learned since 2002 about how Bush appointees cherry-picked the most extreme bits of intelligence, even when U.S. and allied experts reported they were likely untrustworthy or fraudulent.

The Bush team knew what answer they wanted to start a war, and they kept pushing until they got the intelligence that supported that answer. Calling that “botched intelligence” is a grotesque but convenient act of buck-passing. And Congress, which avidly investigated the intelligence failures surrounding Iraq and 9/11, has never completed its long-promised inquiry into the policy side of the failure.

Cooper concludes that, this time around, Bush is really serious about diplomacy: “If Iran gets closer to acquiring — or acquires — a bomb, policy makers could one day be tempted to think that a military clash is worth risking. But that point hasn’t been reached yet.”

No, it hasn’t. It hadn’t been reached with Iraq in summer of 2002, either, we were then told. But today the intelligence distortion about Iran is already beginning, with the axis of Cheney/Rumsfeld promoting the message that Iran is a terrorist state led by a Hitlerian madman — and even perhaps exaggerating the imminence of Iran’s ability to build nuclear weapons.

Of course I don’t want to see a nuclear-armed Iran. But I don’t trust the Bush administration to assess the threat or be honest about the choice of response. Its record is too nightmarishly bad.

So every time you hear someone say, “They couldn’t be that crazy,” pinch yourself, remind yourself how crazy they’ve been already, and remember how reliably they have turned to international crises as circle-the-wagon moments to boost flagging poll numbers.

We aren’t supposed to say this, but it seems obvious to me: The easiest way for President Bush to transform the political environment domestically and kick over a chess board that’s now stacked against him would be to invade another country. That’s something for everyone to worry about.

Kornbluth’s MySpace nightmare

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Josh Kornbluth, the monologuist and KQED host, has posted an account of a Kafkaesque experience with MySpace that should give any operator of an online business pause.

It seems that some malicious person posted a phony profile under Josh’s name, filled the profile page with gross porn, and then sent Josh’s superiors at KQED outraged emails demanding that he be fired. Josh’s posting offers a painfully vivid account of how hard it can be to attempt to communicate directly with a company that has chosen to make itself unavailable to the public.

MySpace’s meteoric rise is legendary, of course (it claims 70 million users these days). The company is in the crosshairs of the online decency brigade, under pressure from its new corporate owners (Rupert Murdoch) to clean up its act and open new revenue streams, and in constant danger of losing whatever buzz it possesses to whichever site is next on the fickle teen radar.

Still: If you’re doing business, you have to make it possible for human beings to get in touch with your company. Online enterprises always want to shunt all communications into online channels, but, you know, if someone was impersonating you, framing you as a perv and then trying to get you fired, you might want a phone number to call, too.

Maybe MySpace hasn’t consciously chosen to make it hard for people to get in touch with it; maybe it’s just overwhelmed by success. Either way, if Josh’s tale is any indication, it seems pretty clear that MySpace has lost control of its pages — and begun what will doubtless be a meteoric slide into a swamp of spam, phony pages and scammy crap.

The 1870s and today — another history lesson

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Here’s an example of a useful history lesson: Charles R. Morris’s op-ed in today’s New York Times points to the 1870s as a parallel for today’s economy, which shows a lot of strength by various yardsticks and yet has left so many Americans feeling glum.

  If one counts only the size of houses and cars, and the numbers of electronic gadgets stuffed into rec rooms, Americans are probably better off than ever before. But as the 1870’s suggest, economic well-being doesn’t come just from piling up toys. An economy has psychological or, if you will, spiritual, dimensions. A conviction of fairness, a feeling of not being totally on one’s own, a sense of reasonable stability and predictability are all essential components of good economic performance. When they were missing in the 1870’s, in the midst of a boom, the populace was brought to the brink of revolt.

(My bold-facing.)