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Dell and the megaphone

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Over in Slate, Daniel Gross has this to say about blogger Jeff Jarvis’s now-celebrated chronicle of “Dell Hell”:

  Dell had the bad luck to tick off a very powerful blogger. The company is justly known for its fantastic customer service. But any time you engage in tens of millions of customer contacts, there are bound to be errors. It was Dell’s misfortune that one of those errors affected a person with a huge megaphone, blogger Jeff Jarvis. Jarvis’ blow-by-blow account of his Dell hell has become an Internet phenomenon.

Sorry, I don’t buy it. Set aside the idea that Dell is “justly known” for great service. Known to whom? This sounds like boilerplate from an analyst’s report or the company’s own marketing literature. I’ve never bought a Dell computer. But in my circles and reading — an admittedly totally subjective smattering of hearsay, but what else does “known for” mean? — Dell is known for being a giant corporation that hands over its customer service to bored, ill-treated, underpaid people desperate to move on to better jobs.

Still, that’s not really the point. Maybe you have a circle of friends who have all had peachy-keen customer-support experiences with their Dell boxes. The point is, Jarvis’s experience was not a fluke; if it had been, his tale would never have made waves.

Gross is wrong because what gave Jarvis’s complaint wasn’t the size of the blogger’s megaphone — it was the chord of recognition his message struck with his readers. If Jarvis started bitching about Dell and his experience really represented a statistically insignificant lapse in an otherwise exemplary service record, then Jarvis’s readers would have stepped in and said, “Jeff, stop whining, it’s too bad you had a bad experience but we all love Dell! Dell’s done great by us!”

Instead, a lot of people read Jarvis’s account and said, “You know, that sounds familiar.”

Bel canto

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Opera, the Web browser I’ve happily used for the last five years or so, is celebrating its tenth anniversary today. (It’s just a couple months older than Salon!)

If Firefox had been around back in 2000 I’d probably have adopted it, but Mozilla, back then, wasn’t ready for prime time, Internet Explorer was a joke, and Opera was great. It offered deep and wide configurability, and tabbed browsing at a time when most people hadn’t even heard of it. It’s always been super-speedy. Since my mode of work often involves keeping open multiple windows each of which might contain a dozen or more open tabs, it’s long been important to me that the browser keep a good record of those open windows — so that, in the event that some other application crashes (Opera almost never does) or the machine freezes up, I can return to my universe of open tabs. Opera still does the best job with this — to get Firefox to do the same thing, you have to add a special extension.

I’m sure the tide of open source will eventually carry Firefox beyond where Opera is today. But there’s something to be celebrated about a small Norwegian software company that sticks to its guns, stares down the giants and keeps improving its product. Opera is normally free if you’re willing to see some ads on the screen, or you can pay a reasonably low fee to make the ads go away, but today, the company’s giving away free registration codes.

Here come the blind commissioners

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There’s a colossal farce taking place over at the FDA. A group of commissioners there, faced with unimpeachable evidence of the reasonably safety of the emergency contraceptive known as Plan B, are desperate to find a rationale for delaying yet again a decision on approving the drug for over-the-counter sales. They’ve come up with a remarkable dodge.

We’d approve the drug for grownups, say the hapless commissioners, but we want to require women under 17 to get a prescription. And how could we possibly enforce that? “We cannot have an inspector in every pharmacy,” complains FDA Commissioner Lester Crawford. So let’s keep the drug, which has awaited approval for two years, away from everyone for a good while longer.

And yet…

Strangely, the government has not banned the sale of gin and rum to adults because it lacks the manpower to supply every corner store with a full-time ID checker. We do not despair of enforcing the age limit on driving, even though the government has yet to put a G-man in every back seat, demanding a birth certificate before you can turn the ignition. Homeland Security does not dispatch squadrons of troopers to every movie theater to enforce the R rating. Yet somehow, we muddle through.

Is it possible that our FDA commissioners have something else on their mind besides the welfare of those 15- and 16-year old girls? Is there a constituency to be placated? Are there evangelicals to be appeased?

Or, perhaps, do the legions of anti-abortion activists sense that a safe and easily obtainable emergency contraceptive pill could do far more to reduce the number of abortions in the U.S. than their own protests could ever accomplish — and hate the idea of losing that fire-up-the-base issue?

Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh

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I attended neither the Foo camp (not invited, that’s ok!) nor the Bar camp (loved the idea, maybe next year?). Hey, every weekend is camp in a household with two five-year-old boys! But I did learn a lot about the notion of the self-organizing conference space that both these events built upon from this post over on Martin Fowler’s site.

Apparently there’s a methodology and a history to this approach, summarized in a 1997 book by Harrison Owen.

This approach seems to make sense for almost any event that aims to move away from the yawn-inducing broadcast-style conference — speakers on stage, audience on hands, interesting stuff in the hallway — toward a true live-event manifestation of the many-to-many model that a lot of people are now embracing online.
[headline courtesy Allan Sherman]

Google follow-ups

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In my enthusiasm for the advantages of browser-based application development in my post about Google and Microsoft yesterday, I neglected to include the necessary counter-truth known to all web developers (one I have some experience with from my work at Salon): that when you develop for the browser, you’re actually developing for a whole mess of different browsers, each of which behaves just differently enough to make your life miserable. This seems especially true with the new wave of Ajax-based apps, that rest on a variety of technologies implemented differently by each browser producer (and each generation of product). Thanks to David Czarnecki for supplying my forgotten caveat.

And over on her blog apophenia (look it up! add it to your vocabulary! I just did), danah boyd offers a parallel argument about Windows-only development, suggesting that “you don’t have the right to espouse open standards if you continue to only build on top of only one closed one… Openness isn’t simply about open protocols concerning one application, but about open choice to mix and match layers through and through.”

Google’s Windows-only world

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Jason Kottke’s intriguing review of the current status of the Web-as-platform question (are Web apps now good enough to threaten the primacy of a certain desktop operating system monopoly? will they ever be?) is only the latest in a long line of musings on this theme that stretch all the way back to Netscape’s heyday. The dream of rendering individual users’ choice of desktop operating system irrelevant by getting them to move all their significant work into the browser was what fueled all those death-march development cycles during the browser wars.

Microsoft cut off Netscape’s air supply — with plenty of help from its victim’s own asphyxiating mistakes — before the browser company could complete building all the parts of this new computing world. Java was supposed to be an alternate road to the same destination; it turned out to be good for some other things, but not for that.

So we lost a few years there.

More recently, the Web-app universe has come roaring back, as GMail, GoogleMaps, Flickr and other Ajax-based Web interfaces have provided users with something speedier and more interesting than the old, slow, click-and-wait world of Web computing. It is possible, today, to begin moving more and more of one’s work and data into browser-accessible stores and programs. This is all great, and it’s unfolding with a kind of inevitability.

For a while there, during the downturn years, it seemed like the Web-based future might arrive without any one company driving it. The new structure of our technology would simply be built by a swarm of lilliputian enterprises that would gradually overwhelm the Gulliver of Redmond.

Suddenly, though, it looks like we’re back in the land of corporate showdown. In a wave of media reports, Google is being cast as the new Netscape — reluctantly, to be sure, since Netscape showed how dangerous it is to say to a company with an effectively bottomless warchest, “Bring it on!” Rather prematurely, I think, a lot of people quoted by Gary Rivlin in this morning’s Times suggest that Google is already the new Microsoft — that the company with the “don’t be evil” motto has morphed into a new evil empire.

Wherever you place Google on this spectrum, there’s no other way to read Google’s latest moves than as part of a broad effort to bring users onto Google’s platform so that, one day, they can be moved off Microsoft’s. That day is doubtless far off. But not unimaginable.

Google’s decision to raise $4 billion more on Wall Street, timed almost certainly not coincidentally to coincide with its release of two new software products (a new desktop application and a new “Google Talk” IM and voice communicator), reinforces the message first sent by GMail: that, when Google defines its mission as “organizing the world’s information and making it universally accessible and useful,” “the world’s information” very much includes your own personal information.

Which leads us to the paradox here. There is one little weakness in the theory that Google is setting out to challenge Microsoft. For some reason, each time Google releases any software that is not browser-based — whether it’s Google Desktop, or Picasa, or the new Google Talk — it has offered only a Windows version of the product. No Mac versions, no Linux versions.

Maybe Google feels that the Mac already offers a rich software environment for geeks (with good desktop search already built into the latest OSX) and Linux isn’t a big enough desktop market. Maybe they just target Windows because, to paraphrase the old bank-robber line, “that’s where the users are.” Or maybe they’re targeting Windows users precisely because they want to woo Microsoft addicts on their own turf.

No doubt, it would take a lot of extra work to release editions of Google software for non-Windows platforms. Cross-platform development is enormously difficult: that’s a fact of software life. (Browser-based software is so attractive because you don’t have to worry about writing different versions for different operating systems; the browser makers have already done that heavy lifting for you.) I always understood this intellectually, but now, after several years of following the work over at OSAF for my book, I feel it in my bones.

But Google has assembled a vast reserve of computer-science horsepower. It is, if Rivlin’s story is to be believed, sucking Silicon Valley’s software brains dry. Surely, with all that coding prowess, Google could set aside some cycles to offer non-Windows users equal access to the cool toys it is providing. If the Googleplexniks are serious about that phrase “the world’s information,” they need to look beyond the realm of Windows. The world doesn’t stop where the “Start” menu ends.

Inelegant design

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I had thought there was no way to top The Onion’s brilliant parody of Intelligent Design — “Evangelical Scientists Refute Gravity With New ‘Intelligent Falling’ Theory.” But the Web’s hive brain has now done it, with the rise of the Flying Spaghetti Monster meme.

This “Open Letter to Kansas School Board” appears to be the source-point of the new cult of Pastafarianism (Wikipedia has more):

 

Let us remember that there are multiple theories of Intelligent Design. I and many others around the world are of the strong belief that the universe was created by a Flying Spaghetti Monster. It was He who created all that we see and all that we feel. We feel strongly that the overwhelming scientific evidence pointing towards evolutionary processes is nothing but a coincidence, put in place by Him.

It is for this reason that I’m writing you today, to formally request that this alternative theory be taught in your schools, along with the other two theories. In fact, I will go so far as to say, if you do not agree to do this, we will be forced to proceed with legal action. I’m sure you see where we are coming from. If the Intelligent Design theory is not based on faith, but instead another scientific theory, as is claimed, then you must also allow our theory to be taught, as it is also based on science, not on faith.

Darwin/Fish bumper-sticker designs on the Flying Spaghetti Monster theme are proliferating at an alarming rate over on BoingBoing.

CMOS. CMOS run. Run, CMOS, run!

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I seem to be out of the hardware woods, at last. After my old box died, I thought carefully about its replacement. My computer has, among other things, become my chief music library and source; it’s also where I edit family videos. The old computer, an Athlon system I’d rebuilt twice and extended with far too many expansion boards and IDE devices, whirred and hummed like a dilapidated helicopter. This time, I thought, let’s get something quiet. (I know, ye Mac fans, Steve Jobs has promoted silent computing for decades! If it didn’t mean moving 8 years of data and investing in an entire new set of software applications, I’d have switched.)

So I ordered a system from EndPCNoise.com, whose site impressed me as a source of reasonably honest and detailed information about “silent PC” products. I paid a little more money than I’d have spent on a vanilla box, but after my experience with the slow decay of my Athlon system, that seemed a reasonable trade-off for higher-quality components.

I had only one problem: after I installed my old sound card, an M-Audio Delta, the new system seized up with the fast-four-beep distress signal on boot. I did what I knew how to do, which was to roll the system back by removing everything I’d added; no good. I knew enough to pop out the CMOS battery, which should have allowed the motherboard to return to its default settings; no good. I began to fear that I needed to return the system, but a brief conversation with the folks at EndPCNoise solved the problem: to reset the CMOS on my particular motherboard, you have to move a jumper. That, along with a few reboots and trips into the BIOS configuration, did it — everything worked again. (It turns out that this particular kind of professional sound card is highly picky about which of the five PCI slots you put it in. Or I guess it’s the motherboard that is picky. Or the software that configures the interrupts. Anyway, it’s a bit of a Russian roulette game with your system until you find a slot that works.)

I find it highly amusing that, almost 25 years since I first messed with jumpers on a PC motherboard, I’m still at it. Plus ca change… On the other hand, for under $1000 today, I have a system with a gigabyte of RAM, hundreds of gigs of disk space, and more processor speed than most of my applications know what to do with. Now I can get back to work!

Friends like these…

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Some of my friends are up to good things.

Chad Dickerson, who was the chief force behind moving Salon into the modern age of computing back in 1998-99, and from whom I learned a great deal about technology and its management, is leaving his gig as InfoWorld’s CTO to take up a position at Yahoo, which is apparently opening a new research enterprise of some kind right here in Berkeley. Many congratulations to him.

Greg Costikyan, who I knew long before there was a Web, has posted the slides to a recent talk he gave titled “Death to the Games Industry. (Long Live Games.)” It’s a tour of the debased state of game development in an era of ballooning production budgets and distribution chokeholds, along with a call for a new model for developing games and a new “Indie Gaming” aesthetic. I have zilch time these days to keep up with the world of gaming, but reading Greg keeps me feeling at least a little clued in.

David Edelstein, a movie critic whose work has dazzled, provoked and enlightened me since we hung out together in the (long since renovated but then delightfully dingy) halls of the Harvard Crimson, is interviewed here on rockcritics.com. You can read David’s stuff all the time in Slate, and you can hear him every week on Fresh Air, but this is a more rambling personal conversation that feels a little like having a beer with David, something I don’t get to do often enough now that we live on opposite ends of the continent.

And, finally, Josh Kornbluth — hilarious monologist, oboist, mathematician manque and my former bandmate — will be hosting his very own interview show on KQED public television here in San Francisco starting this September 12. I might actually need to turn on the TV. (One of these years I will actually need to buy a new set; the one I’m using now was purchased 20 years ago with “scrip” from my job at the Boston Phoenix, which was an odd program the little paper had of letting employees take their pay in the form of heavy discounts on advertisers’ merchandise. Something tells me the technology has advanced since then.)