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Gates and Ballmer at D: Lament for lost youth

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I’m keeping my head down in my book writing, mostly, this year, but I allowed myself one trip to one industry event, so here I am at Walt Mossberg’s and Kara Swisher’s D conference again. New owner (who’ll be here tomorrow); same friendly proprietors.

Things kicked off tonight with a double interview with Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer. After last year’s psychodramatically rich confrontation between Gates and the other Steve in his life, this event was decidedly more tepid. Gates has had one foot out the door of his company for a long time, of course, but as he prepares to depart fully from active duty next month, he might have figured on taking something of a victory lap here.

No such luck. Mossberg, inconveniently, kept bringing up the Vista fiasco. Gates wryly commented, “We have a culture that’s very much about, ‘We need to do it better,’ and Vista’s given us a lot of opportunity for that.”

Ballmer predicted a release of “Windows 7” — the successor to Vista — by late 2009. (Danger, Will Robinson! Remember the Longhorn slippages! Haven’t they learned?) There was a suggestion that we might get a look at the new Windows 7 interface here; but what was actually on display was some neat tricks involving multitouch interfaces for applications –a la the iPhone’s pinch-and-tap approach to using more than one point of contact on a touch screen to manipulate stuff. (The demo included an onscreen piano keyboard, but nobody actually tried to play a chord, which I’d have thought would be the obvious way to show off multitouch.) All this was neat enough, but not much to go on — and unless Windows 7 fixes a lot of Vista’s problems there will be a dwindling base of users to experience its neat touches.

Ballmer declared, unconvincingly, that he’s not stewing over the collapse of his attempt to acquire Yahoo: “I’m not frustrated at all. They’re great guys, they built a great company. We couldn’t agree on a price.” As he spoke, a blown-up Wall-Street-Journal woodcut portrait of Jerry Yang stared down at him from the wall. (Yang will be here tomorrow.)

Both Gates and Ballmer remained almost pathologically unable to utter the syllables “Google.” Ballmer attempted to explain how he sees Microsoft responding to the Google challenge: “You need scale, and business innovation, and technological innovation. You need breakthrough innovation and incremental innovation. You need it in search and in advertising. You need to bring it all together. And you need it at all levels of the stack.”

Whenever I hear a CEO say, “We need to do it all!” I translate: “We really don’t know what the hell to do here.”

Gates and Ballmer seemed most comfortable, and genuine, in reminiscing about their youth, as Harvard friends and then as partners in building Microsoft from the ground up. Are their best days behind them? They would never admit it, but no matter how brave a face they put on, or how rosily they paint Microsoft’s prospects, I think that on some level even they sense it.

AllThingsD’s John Paczkowski did the live-blogging thing here. No doubt there will be video up soon too.

Yahoo/Microsoft collapse, the morning after

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I thought the Microsoft/Yahoo merger would be a disaster for both companies, but the news of Microsoft’s withdrawal of its offer should not be greeted with cheers in any quarters yet. Most reports of the story have noted the possibility that this is just a feint on Microsoft’s part. I could be wrong, obviously, but I can’t believe Ballmer and company are abandoning the field. It’s just not their DNA. They fight to win. They hate to lose. They throw chairs at walls when they’re frustrated. The antitrust ordeal made them more cautious in public, but I can’t believe they’ve become pussycats in private. If they’re really giving up, it means that Microsoft has become an utterly different company from what it used to be, and I just don’t see that.

Sure, after the last few months they may feel (accurately) that an acquisition would result in mass exodus from Yahoo because of corporate-culture incompatibility –i.e., it appears that everyone at Yahoo hates Microsoft’s guts, and everyone at Microsoft despises their counterparts at Yahoo (I’m talking about the corporate leadership — engineers tend to be more catholic in their perspective, at least sometimes). But what Microsoft wants from Yahoo is market share, not talent, so I don’t think this really matters to them.

Instead, they’re saying to Yahoo, “OK, you don’t like our price? Let’s see how you like what the market does to your share price, what the shareholder suits do to your legal budget, and what the withdrawal of our offer does to the other negotiations you’ve got going.” It’s a smart hardball move, at least in the short term. We’ll see how it plays out over the next couple of weeks.

Other interesting first takes:

Paul Kedrosky — “Yahoo (and maybe Microsoft too) reminds me of that crack suicide squad in Monty Python’s Life of Brian.”

Kara Swisher — “Kind of like Oscar Madison and Felix Unger, but not funny in any way at all.”

Mike Arrington — “Google was the big winner in a Microsoft/Yahoo acquisition attempt, no matter what the outcome. But among the possible outcomes, a broken Yahoo and a frustrated Microsoft almost certainly result in increased market share for Google.”

NY Times: Blogging’ll kill ya?

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Matt Richtel is on the front page of today’s Times with a piece about the tech blogosphere as a 24/7 sweatshop — one that might even be killing some of its (older) practitioners.

“It looks like a desk job, but for some bloggers it is more like a factory,” reads the pullquote.

The piece is, I think, reasonably accurate as a portrait of the tiny sliver of the blogging universe that the commercialized tech-news blog world represents. Where it goes awry is in suggesting that this represents the archetypal blogging experience.

This passage is the problem:

There are growing legions of online chroniclers, reporting on and reflecting about sports, politics, business, celebrities and every other conceivable niche. Some write for fun, but thousands write for Web publishers — as employees or as contractors — or have started their own online media outlets with profit in mind.

“Some write for fun.” I think, realistically, this might say, “Most write for fun.” The emphasis now suggests that “a limited number write for fun, but THOUSANDS write for publishers…” To me even “thousands” seems exaggerated — does the pro blogosphere really employ that many?

Leaving that aside, the “some/thousands” construction suggests that the majority of participants are in sweatshop mode, and that’s obviously wrong. This sentence should really read: “Millions write for fun, but thousands write for Web publishers…”

Achieving more clarity on this point might have made the piece somewhat less appealing to the page one editors, of course.

More: Matthew Ingram says the Times was just “trolling” for links. Doc Searls points out that “scoops are overrated.” And Marc Andreessen mocks the Times with some other headlines we can look forward to, including “The Bloggers have WMD.”

P.S. I will make $0.00 on this post! And I’m at least 8 hours late with my observations. Then again, I got to drink my coffee before I sat down to write.

LATER: Larry Dignan of ZDNet has some sensible observations similar to some of what I was thinking as I read the Times piece:

Let’s put a little perspective on this blogging thing. You could be getting shot at in Iraq. You could be a single mom working three jobs to stay afloat (Happy Birthday mom). You could work in a coal mine. You could be in a life and death battle with Leukemia. You could be doing any one of thousands of high-stress jobs. Sure, the Web has a lot of stress but let’s get real: If you’re stressed out over 5,000 RSS feeds chances are good you’d be stressed by any profession you chose.

And Dave Winer points out in a comment below that there’s an element of professional-journalistic defensiveness in the article’s premise:

Of course this piece is aimed at themselves and others like them. Look, we’re being replaced by crazies who work for nothing, never sleep and die of heart attacks.

It’s like NAFTA for professional writers.

Pro Publica: can investigative journalism thrive with no bottom line?

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As the business model that supports traditional journalism erodes, with digital distribution dissolving the bonds that held together the elements of the old paper and broadcast product bundles, one refrain has been constant: How, ask the elders of the profession, can we protect the most important work that we do — investigative journalism? It’s costly and politically sensitive and hard to justify on the bottom line; it’s also what gives journalists the right to claim a valued and sometimes privileged spot in the civic landscape.

Today the highest profile effort to rescue investigative journalism from the industry’s wreckage is Pro Publica, a not-for-profit enterprise that is gearing up as a sort of rescue craft for in-depth muckraking. ProPublica is led by Paul Steiger, formerly managing editor of the Wall Street Journal, and plans to open a newsroom in New York with 24 full-time reporters. It launched to much trumpeting last October and boasts an “advisory committee” featuring illustrious leaders of the field, including several whom I know and respect.

So why am I skeptical of the undertaking?

Investigative journalism is a peculiar calling that calls to peculiar practitioners. The best in the field that I’ve known have been dogged, ornery, sometimes slippery and occasionally unhinged personalities. Editing an investigative journalist is perhaps the most psychologically challenging task an editor will face.

When investigative journalists go after a story, it’s not like covering a fire or a speech or writing analytical commentary. Their employers are sinking money — sometimes months of a salary — into a project with no guarantee that it will ever pay off. If it does pay off, then the publication faces all sorts of ethical and legal questions on the road to publication. Resolving them most typically pits the company’s business interests (don’t put the owners/shareholders at risk!) against its editors’ journalistic instincts (bring the truth to light!).

In theory, having a nonprofit employ your investigative team should be a buffer against such problems. But Pro Publica’s plan is to fund investigations and then offer these stories to other publications. In practice this means you’ve got extra layers of review and caution that will make it harder, and slower, to get these stories out the door. (Also, the more respected the publication, the more likely that pride of ownership — or the “not invented/reported here” syndrome — will make editors reluctant to publish the work of others.)

And it’s not as if non-profit status eliminates all conflict-of-interest problems: Pro Publica’s money comes from Herbert M. and Marion O. Sandler, identified in the Times story as “the former chief executives of the Golden West Financial Corporation, based in California, which was one of the nation’s largest mortgage lenders and savings and loans.” Gee, there’s an area full of targets for investigation today! Whatever Pro Publica does (or doesn’t) pursue on the topic will be surrounded by questions.

Steiger has said that Pro Publica will be able to protect its projects from bottom-line pressures: “It is the deep-dive stuff and the aggressive follow-up that is most challenged in the budget process.” Maybe so. But budget pressures can help the cause of investigative journalism, too.

The most sensitive and difficult editorial job in an investigative project is getting the obsessive investigative reporter to hand over the copy. Left to their own devices, these reporters will typically — and understandably — want to keep reporting forever. The editor must, sometimes, pull the paper from the typewriter. (OK, image needs updating: the editor must, er, get the reporter to press “send.”)

In my experience of nearly a decade helping handle this sort of project at Salon, I watched these conflicts unfold. And I observed that Salon’s hunger to break stories, as an independent company struggling for financial stability, worked to the advantage of our investigative efforts: it gave editors a basis for bringing projects to fruition (or abandonment), and reporters an incentive to go along. Everyone understood that resources were precious and limited and had to be used wisely. (We had our screwups, sure, but so has every publication, including those with far heavier institutional ballast.)

Will there — can there — be such hunger at an all-star-team style operation like Pro Publica? Will the Pro Publica newsroom (physical or virtual) be the sort of place that puts the kind of pressure on investigative journalists that they need in order to produce? My fear, in reading about its plans, is that it will be a very comfortable place for experienced investigative reporters to pursue open-ended projects without feeling any particular fire to wrap them up.

I certainly wish Pro Publica well. But my guess is that the new models for investigative journalism will come not from this blue-ribbon assemblage but, as innovation usually does, from small operations in left field.

BONUS LINKS: I meant to post these thoughts when Pro Publica was announced. Back then, Jeff Jarvis was cautiously optimistic about Pro Publica’s prospects. Then I meant to post them when it announced its advisory board last month; at that time, Dan Gillmor pointed out that the Pro Publica board isn’t exactly topheavy with digital expertise.

See? On my not-for-profit blog, the stories just sort of linger in the pipeline!

LATE UPDATE: Over the weekend the Times published a column by Joe Nocera about the Sandlers, who are backing Pro Publica, suggesting that they are classic wealthy progressives who believe, among other things, that “The story of subprime is worse than anyone has written so far” — so maybe this won’t be a problem for Pro Publica. But there’s always a tangled string from a project’s financing; if Pro Publica goes after the subprime story, it could be criticized for pursuing the Sandlers’ former competitors. My point is that, one way or another, the sources of funding for a news organization always raise questions, and being nonprofit provides no exemption.

Abandon hope, all ye who unsubscribe here

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For some reason I’m getting some email product newsletter that I don’t want. It’s called “Web Buyer’s Guide Technology Product Update.” Since it appears to be not true spam but what I’d call gray-market — a legit company (Ziff Davis, in this case) that got my email address somehow a long time ago — I figure I have a shot at genuinely unsubscribing.

I click on the “unsubscribe” link at the bottom of the email. First thing I see is an interstitial ad for EWeek magazine! That’s right, I have to view an ad before I can unsubscribe.

Finally, I get to the unsubscribe page. Only that’s not what it is. It’s a long long list of newsletters that I can now subscribe to! Or, if I can figure out which on the list is the one I’m getting — there are several “Web Buyer’s Guide”s — I can check the box and instead press an unsubscribe button.

But I can’t do that unless I can tell them which of my many email addresses to use. They haven’t kept track of this themselves. And of course now I’m giving them my email address on a page that could well, you know, by accident end up subscribing me to dozens of their newsletters.

There are smart and considerate email marketing companies out there today that know how to do this better.

Notes from “Customer Service is the New Marketing”

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Here are some things I heard and learned at yesterday’s “Customer Service Is the New Marketing” conference, which was quite good:

(1) My anecdotal experience of great service and a generally great experience shopping online for shoes at Zappo’s — your order seems to show up at your door before you’ve even finished deciding what to buy — turns out to be the product of a fanatically service-oriented corporate culture. Zappo’s CEO Tony Hsieh presented the evidence. Early on the company learned that offline advertising was mostly not paying off, so it focused on growing its repeat-customer business. The results are evident in the chart of year-to-year sales increases, which are headed toward $1 billion this year. Interestingly, the Zappo’s trend is linear — there’s none of the hockey-stick-shaped mega-growth that Web companies often shoot for. On the other hand, something tells me that Zappo’s is unlikely to suffer as much as other online companies in the next downturn.

(2) Robert Stephens, founder of the Geek Squad (now a part of Best Buy), described how he built his company’s brand identity — they’re the guys in black-and-white cars who do tech-support housecalls — by borrowing bits and pieces of pop culture (old gas station logos, old photos of NASA scientists in black ties and white shirts) to invent a persona for his “agents” that’s some sort of cross between the FBI, Ghostbusters and the Matrix. Stephens is an art-school dropout (“everybody’s creative in art — nobody’s creative in computer support”) and takes a certain flip, almost Situationist pleasure in inverting business norms. (Or maybe he just never outgrew adolescence.) I’ve never imagined I’d never be a Geek Squad customer — I’m pretty much the resident, if uncredentialed, geek squad in my home. But it seems that I’ve been missing a great theater-of-capitalism show.

(3) Marc Hedlund, founder of personal-finance site Wesabe, talked about the company’s decision to provide its CEO’s personal contact information right on the home page. Since they’re asking people to upload financial information, they figured it would help build trust. Turns out that most of the calls the CEO gets are people just checking it out to see if it’s really him at the other end.

(4) Heather Champ of Flickr showed a chart of the site’s “oh crap” moment: in June 2007, when Yahoo shut down Yahoo Photos and moved everyone over to Flickr, the site’s growth chart took a sharp upward shift — it’s now approaching two billion photos, with 3-5,000 uploaded per minute.

(5) Hedlund also talked about finding blogposts about his service and responding to questions or complaints as he finds them on the Web. Of course, he admitted, he’s running a startup with 12 employees and a relatively small customer base today. How do you handle this when you get big?

One thing I’ve seen over and over is that, if you do this sort of job right in the early stage of a service, and you establish a level of openness and responsiveness in the formative weeks and months of your site’s community, you put yourself on a sort of “virtuous cycle” or beneficial trajectory: over time, as you grow and responding to everyone becomes less realistic, other people — your enthusiastic users — pick up the slack for you. Whereas if you screw up the early stage — if you establish a sense that your company or site is unresponsive or inattentive — it’s extremely hard to change that later. So the argument that “being responsive doesn’t scale” is an unhealthy one: Be as responsive as you can for as long as you can!

(6) In the final panel on “customer service as community,” I heard the presenters agree on two different points that struck me as contradictory.

Gina Bianchini of Ning declared that too many people today think that, when they’re posting as employees, they have to “write professional business-speak that makes them sound like an asshole.” People should feel free to express their passions and be genuine — otherwise they sound like corporate tools.

That’s true enough. But only a few minutes before, Patti Roll of Timbuk2 (they make shoulder bags beloved by bike messengers and others) told an anecdote of how easy it is to get agitated and confrontational when people attack your product in an online forum. That doesn’t help your company; you just have to learn to, well, be professional.

Hmmm. The “professional” demeanor in speech (and online speech) — however impersonal, and depersonalizing, it can often be — exists precisely to help people who represent a brand avoid the temptation to scream at jerks (who may well deserve it). So really the challenge in navigating these waters is to find a voice that is personal enough to not sound fake but professional enough to help you avoid getting into a flame fest.

Which is all somewhat more complex, and harder to pull off, than I think the discussion allowed.

Customer service is the what?

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Tomorrow I plan to attend the “Customer Service is the New Marketing” conference that the folks from Get Satisfaction are holding at the Presidio. This doesn’t sound like my normal field but it’s actually a topic close to my heart.

At Salon I was a big believer in customer support as an ambassadorial function for the company. At the site’s launch in 1995, I manned the e-mail barricades, responding personally to most of what came in. (In those days, getting a few hundred messages for a Web site launch was a sign of runaway success.) When we launched Salon Premium in 2001, I handled the customer support myself for the first two weeks. If you’re an executive in charge of a Web launch, there is no better way to get a handle on what’s working and what’s not. And while it’s good to keep developers in the feedback loop as well, you can’t expect them to handle all the response — they’re likely to be busy fixing any of the problems users are uncovering.

Way back in the Pleistocene Andrew Leonard wrote a piece for Salon that I edited, describing a future in which more and more tech support problems could and would be solved by a quick Web search. Today, I don’t even bother attempting to communicate directly with most companies; who wants to navigate phone-tree hell? If I have a problem, I poke around on the Web until I find an answer. If I don’t, I’ll post a question on the likeliest Web forum.

So there’s interesting stuff happening in this area. I’ll see what’s worth reporting on tomorrow.

Microsoft plus Yahoo? The sum is less than the parts

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I don’t know whether Microsoft will win its unsolicited takeover offer for Yahoo (AP story here, on Yahoo) — the legal and financial road for such hostile bids is always unpredictable. But I do know this: it is a path to failure for both companies.

The business press is going to go into paroxysms over this move: it combines the frisson of a big tech-industry acquisition story with the raw testosterone of a hostile-takeover battle saga. In newsrooms everywhere this morning, you can practically hear the salivation. Don’t get distracted. These big takeovers — AOL/Time Warner was the biggest — are always about failure in the present and fear of the future. And they nearly always end badly.

To understand what the takeover would mean for Yahoo, just look at the fate of the previous company to end up in this circumstance. When Netscape, then a dominant portal site and purveyor of a declining but still widely used Web browser, got bought by AOL a decade ago, we heard all the usual pieties about the strength of the brand and the value of its franchise. But AOL’s acquisition of Netscape meant its doom: the remaining talent headed for the exits, and its assets were quickly cannibalized. AOL itself entered another disastrous merger a couple of years later, and today it is a shadow of its former importance — while Netscape isn’t even a phantom.

Similarly, if Microsoft wins Yahoo, you will see most of Yahoo’s smart people depart, and its customers gradually parceled out to attempt to bolster Microsoft’s ever-faltering efforts to build an online business. Much of the talk in the business press surrounding this deal will be about Yahoo’s ad business, and it’s true that Microsoft will find it useful, but it’s hard to see what new power a combined Microsoft and Yahoo business will have to challenge Google that the two companies didn’t have as separate entities.

For Microsoft, this move is a final admission of the utter failure of the company’s effort to build an online business for itself over the past decade — in services, advertising or content. Winning Yahoo would surely bolster Microsoft in this area in the short term. But in the long term, these efforts at lashing together two failures in hopes of sparking a success have never prospered. For Google, the target of Redmond’s chess move, there is really no danger here. Google today needs to worry about the drag on its stock from the broader market troubles, and the drain on its brainpower by the lure of new startups. Microhoo is hardly a threat.

UPDATE: Kevin Kelleher has an amusing take over at GigaOm:

[Ballmer] finally called Yahoo on the Oz-like illusion it’s been fostering for a couple of years: “You had a year. You lost. All your base belong to us.”…

Yahoo has been admirably laissez-faire with Flickr and del.icio.us. Will they be preserved or folded into to services we’ve all eschewed? How will Yahoo mail accounts be reconciled with Hotmail accounts? Will those of us who use Yahoo Finance and all its features adapt to MSN Finance? What is MSN Finance?

A 62 percent premium, hmmm –- we Yahoo users have a new choice: Learn to love life under Ballmer, or migrate to Google.

Not hard to guess where that choice will fall…
[tags]microsoft, yahoo, takeovers[/tags]

Stimulus plan — rebate or bonus?

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The president and Congress are falling all over each other to hand money out to Americans in some vague hope that we will spend it and thus avert a recession. Economists tell us that the only people who actually spend these “rebates” are people who are poor enough that a few hundred dollars makes a big difference to them. Unsurprisingly, the Bush administration is not interested in giving money away to poor people. The only way Bush can stomach the notion of giving people money is to call it a “tax rebate,” so, as in 2001, tax rebates are what we are going to get.

An op-ed by a behavioral psychologist in today’s Times reports his research demonstrating that when you give people money and call it a “rebate” they don’t spend it. When we hear “rebate” we think we’re getting back money we already spent, and we’re most likley to sock it away. On the other hand, if you call it a “bonus,” our wallets open — it feels like found money and can fuel a splurge.

It would indeed make sense to call the sort of bales-of-bills-out-of-helicopters stimulus that Congress and the president support a “bonus.” But then Bush and his party couldn’t clothe their handout in the protective coloration of a “tax cut.” “Bonus” sounds too close to what’s really going on — the government handing some cash to its citizens — and such forthrightness has certainly not been a Washington priority during the past seven years.

This is politics, not economics, and it matters far more to the Bush administration than the minor issue of whether or not the measure actually achieves its goal of boosting consumer spending.

“Bonus” also carries echoes of a distant time when Army veterans thronged the capital demanding that the government make good on its promises while banks collapsed and markets panicked.

And nobody in either party wants to think about that. They are fortunate, in any case, that the Depression is receding from living memory, and few Americans have studied its history.
[tags]recession, economics, tax rebate, stimulus plan[/tags]

My review of Carr’s “Big Switch”

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I return to the pages of Salon tonight with a full review of Nick Carr’s new book, “The Big Switch”:

“The Big Switch” falls neatly into two halves. The first, which I can enthusiastically recommend, draws an elegant and illuminating parallel between the late-19th-century electrification of America and today’s computing world. In the less persuasive latter section, Carr surveys the Internet’s transformations of our world, and questions whether we should welcome them. His questions are good ones; indeed, any treatment of this subject that failed to explore them couldn’t be taken seriously. But in his eagerness to discredit “techno-utopian dreamers” and expound a theory of the Internet as a technology of control, Carr fast-forwards to dour conclusions that his slender argument can’t possibly support.

I had a variety of quarrels with Carr’s book (here’s the official site), but it’s most certainly an important contribution to today’s debate about the Web’s cultural sway. I remain more of an optimist than the author, but he presents the darker view with more heft, more care and more credibility than many others attempting to make this case (like Andrew Keen and Lee Siegel).

One of the points I didn’t cover in my Salon piece was the great comparison Carr makes between the “millwork” of Victorian-era factories and the complex custom software products today’s developers build for contemporary information factories. Millwork meant elaborate, Rube-Goldberg-like devices, unique to each location, designed to transfer the power from some source like a water-wheel to the factory’s machinery. Once electricity came along things got simpler, but each factory still ran its own plant — until the electrical grid rendered that whole approach obsolete.

In one of the best parts of his book, Carr argues, pretty definitively, that today’s custom software work is destined to disappear, as the old millwork did, once the Web-based software-as-service grid really takes off. I think Carr may discount a little too readily the difficulty of building effective and reliable Web-based services; even after you outsource your infrastructure and “mash up” your tools and so on, this stuff doesn’t happen by itself — somebody’s got to write the code to put it all together, and somebody’s got to fix it when it stops working. But Carr is plainly right that much of what we’ve taken for granted as the stuff of corporate information management is about to go up in smoke.

In an amusing coincidence, I was listening today to the first of Mitch Kapor’s lectures about “disruptive innovation” — the one in which he talks about the early days of the PC and his role as one of its most spectacularly successful software entrepreneurs. Kapor tells a hilarious tale (if you get the audio file, it starts around the 59:00 mark) of being summoned in 1983 to visit the office of Ken Olsen, founder of the Digital Equipment Corporation. Kapor’s company, Lotus, and the new IBM PC its products run on, are beginning to worry the minicomputer industry establishment. So Olsen sends a helicopter out to whisk the young upstart to Digital’s HQ. Olsen proceeds to deliver a mad rant to Kapor. What is he so miffed about? The flimsy construction of the IBM PC’s case!

It’s a curious instance of fiddling in the face of an inferno. But the detail that stuck with me was Kapor’s mention that Digital’s headquarters, in Maynard, Massachusetts, occupied a grand old mill building.
[tags]nicholas carr, big switch, mitch kapor, technology history[/tags]