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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.

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.

In defense of Al Gore’s history lesson

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The Wall Street Journal kept up a group blog during the D conference. Here’s how it characterized my post below about Gore’s talk:

  “I went into the hour-and-a-half session hoping that Gore would run in 2008, and by the end I was hoping he wouldn’t,” Mr. Rosenberg wrote, adding that after Mr. Gore’s talk, he sees more potential for him as a media player than a politico.

Thanks for the link and all, but this is just wrong, distorting a positive posting into a negative review. I said that Gore’s critique of the media was so powerful and delivered with such passion that I thought it might be even more important for him to dedicate himself to “changing the very structure of the media landscape” than merely to run for president. In other words, I’m not talking about Gore as a “media player” but rather as a media game-changer. I think anyone who read my admittedly lengthy post could see that.

While we’re on the subject: It was amazing to hear how people — among the crowd at D and the Journal people covering it (like Alan Murray, here), and even the conference hosts, Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher — responded to Gore’s discussion of the history of media. What I found a familiar but valuable review of how we got into the media-political mess we’re in today was, apparently, unbearable to many others.

Let’s put this in perspective: Gore wanted to explain the motivation behind Current.tv, and to put today’s Internet-shaped changes in a historical context stretching back to the middle ages. He talked about how literally cloistered monastery libraries were, and how Gutenberg changed all that, making books and ideas accessible to a much wider slice of society, setting the groundwork for the great public arguments of late-18th century America that shaped the founding of this nation. He pointed out that the rise of broadcast TV in the mid-20th century limited the political conversation to a stifling, one-way communication, and described how the Internet — and, in a related way, Current.tv — offers some hope of getting more people involved once more in public dialogue and self-expression.

In other words, Gore spent maybe five minutes of a 90-minute conversation reviewing a little history. It wasn’t unique or earth-shattering, but neither was it inordinately detailed or arcane; it wasn’t that different from what you might hear from bloggers like Jeff Jarvis or Dan Gillmor. Maybe the manner was a little professorial, but so what?

And this, apparently, was taxing. This was intolerably dull. To Alan Murray, a writer whose normal beat involves the scintillating fluctuation of interest rates and stock averages, this was cause for “stacking Zs.” This was more, it seems, than the brains of the D crowd — an unabashedly elite concentration of the corporate and media class — should be asked to bear.

I don’t get it. Maybe we’ve grown so accustomed to brain-dead leaders, anti-intellectualism in high places and the assiduous scouring of historical knowledge from the corridors of power that when a public figure dares to display some actual perspective and tries to communicate it, we respond with a barrage of sarcasm and cynicism. Mocking politicians who talk about history may give some of us a little jolt of solidarity with the people we imagine as “regular folk” — and that commodity may be precious at a conference where an unusually high percentage of attendees arrived by private jet. But it doesn’t help us improve the quality of national leadership.

I, for one, would have felt a lot better, for instance, if a president who tried to lead us into a war in Iraq had been able to talk, extemporaneously, for five or ten minutes about the history of past interventions in Iraq, and how, exactly, ours was going to be different. History isn’t dead knowledge — it’s the best foundation we have for peering into the future. Making fun of Gore, or any other leader who tries to bring history to bear on our problems today, isn’t just unfair; it’s head-in-the-sand dumb.

Gore for president? He should aim higher

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The most interesting aspect of hearing Al Gore talk tonight here at the D Conference is that I went into the hour-and-a-half session hoping that Gore would run in 2008, and by the end I was hoping he wouldn’t.

Oh, he’s definitely in good form — impassioned and funny. Kara Swisher kicked off by asking him “Are you not not running?” and he parried, “That completely dismantles my defenses. I guess I have to resort to full candor now.”

He talked, of course, about global warming. He also talked at length about Current.tv, the cable network he started that focuses on videos submitted by the public. He delivered a mini-lecture about “information ecology and the structure of the marketplace of ideas” from the medieval monastery through Gutenberg and on to Tom Paine and the Founding Fathers, and argued that the broadcast TV era was an aberration, a throwback to a one-way media universe in which “the individual could not join the conversation,” and then pointed to the Internet as the next turn of the wheel, back towards the individual.

Of course it would be a refreshing, even astonishing thing to elect a president who actually understood all this and was capable of explaining it to people.

But as Gore talked more and began answering questions from the crowd it became clear that his analysis of today’s political mediascape is even deeper and angrier. Someone asked him why we couldn’t just kill the canard that “there’s still scientific debate about global warming” by getting the science faculties at 100 universities to sign a letter expressing their consensus. With weary determination, Gore explained that there have been lots of letters, including one signed by dozens of Nobel Prize winners, but few in the room would have heard of them, because they didn’t get covered. They didn’t matter — because truth (or what we might call consensus reality) in the Bush era has ceased to be a product of rational discourse and instead come under the sway of political propaganda.

Gore went on: On the eve of the Iraq war, something like 70 percent of American voters believed that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the 9/11 attacks. And when Sen. Byrd delivered his jeremiad on the Senate floor at that time, few of his colleagues were even in the chamber. Why? Because, Gore declared, no one pays attention any more to what’s said on the floor of the Senate — except for each senator’s political opponents, who might find some quotation to use against the incumbent. Meanwhile, the senators were out at cocktail parties raising checks to build war chests so they could purchase TV commercials during the next election cycle. Our reality is then shaped not by the deliberations of our elected officials, but by these TV barrages — “short emotional messages that are repeated over and over again by those who have enough money to purchase the time.”

I found Gore’s acid-sharp anatomy of this devastation of the political landscape even more terrifying than his now-familiar arguments about the environment. Because it’s this legislative paralysis and political bankruptcy that has left us utterly unable to respond to the warming crisis. How can we make smart choices when reality itself is a target of political subversion? What’s the point in repeating that there is overwhelming scientific consensus about global warming when we remain stuck with a media that’s still willing to publish nonsense like today’s Holman Jenkins column in the Wall Street Journal?

Jenkins says “it wouldn’t be too surprising if tomorrow’s consensus were that CO2 is cooling, or neutral, or warming here and cooling there.” That, Gore said, is like saying, “Gravity may repel us from the earth’s surface; it may repel us in some places and hold us down in other places. It’s an open question.”

Gore argues that the challenge of responding to global warming is this generation’s version of the World War II generation’s challenge of defeating fascism — and that we can, as they did, earn moral authority and find our strength by meeting it. “What I have on my side here is reality,” he said. In our denial of the evidence on warming, “we have been living in a bubble of unreality.”

Gore’s fierce dedication to his quest, which he rightly defines as a moral and spiritual issue rather than a political one, left me thinking that a run for president on his part would be a waste. Gore should take his anger and his understanding and dedicate it not just to the specific, overwhelmingly important environmental cause he has chosen to champion, but also to changing the very structure of our media landscape so that it can support a “reality-based community” once more. He’ll need to do the latter, anyway, if he is to get anywhere with the former.

D: Howard Stringer, Terry Semel and Martha Stewart

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Wednesday highlights and tidbits from the D conference:

Sony CEO Howard Stringer was the hit of the show so far — funny, disarmingly modest, and willing to talk forthrightly about his company’s (many) past mistakes. He says his goal is to move Sony from operating primarily as a hardware producer to thinking of itself more as a software outfit. In Japan, though, the software guys are all the younger generation, and the older generation calls the shots. He’s trying, carefully, to change that culture: “We’re going to transform Sony quite radically in the next 12 months.”

He defended the new Playstation 3’s $500 price tag, saying that the company intends for it to serve as a digital hub: “It’s got more bells and whistles than a 747 cockpit.” (I’m not sure that sounds like a plus to me; today, I’d rather hear that a product is thoughtfully designed to do a few things well.)

He’s also putting his energy behind a new e-book reader that was later demoed here: It’s about the size of a trade paperback, weighs under two pounds, will sell for $2-300, and uses a new “digital ink” technology that’s super clear and uses very little power (but it’s only black and white). Looks like Sony hopes to do for e-books what Apple did for digital music. But it’s unclear that the publishing industry will cooperate by lowering prices the way the record labels did for Steve Jobs. Sony says that the new ebooks will sell for anywhere from “a few dollars” to “$15-20,” which sounds like an awful lot to me.

At the end of Stringer’s talk, Martha Stewart stepped to the question-line mike with a tote bag and, after a deadpan routine pulling out one power cable and battery charger after another — for digital camera, cellphone, laptop, Blackberry and so on — challenged Stringer to find a solution. He admitted that the components division is Sony’s most profitable, then promised that better power management was “on the list of priorities.”

Comcast’s COO Stephen Burke says he supports net neutrality — “Once you start screwing around with things, slowing things down or speeding them up, the consumer will hand you your head.” But he’s leery of legislation mandating net neutrality for fear of late-night lawmaking and unintended consequences.

Yahoo’s Terry Semel offered a pair of justifications for Yahoo’s delivering user information to the Chinese government that it has used to prosecute citizens for dissident behavior. Semel says Yahoo has no choice but to obey the law in countries where it does business, and that by sticking around in China and providing the people there with good information services, Yahoo is helping change China for the better. But in response to Dan Gillmor‘s question about why Yahoo keeps its mail servers inside China (it could run them from somewhere else in order to avoid having to comply with government demands), he also disowned responsibility for Yahoo in China since the operation is now a joint venture with Alibaba, a Chinese company.

I’m afraid Semel wants to have it both ways: Yahoo’s saying, on the one hand, “We’re influential enough to do good in China so we should stay there even if it means we have to compromise,” but then he’s also saying, “We’re not really calling the shots with our Chinese operation any more.” He should get his rationalizations straight.

Semel also claimed that Yahoo had cooperated with Justice Department demands for large amounts of user data in the COPA case because he was helping fight child pornography. (Google fought back against the government’s fishing expedition.) During the Q&A, I pointed out that, no, in fact, COPA has virtually nothing to do with child pornography — it’s about prosecuting publishers for “indecent” content unless they can verify the age of all visitors to their sites.

I asked Semel how he and Yahoo would feel about being prosecuted unless they made sure every single person who viewed a risque photo on Flickr was over 18. I’m afraid he didn’t really answer, except to say that he was satisfied with Yahoo’s actions and didn’t feel the government had asked for anything unreasonable.

Others blogging D: Dan Farber, Eric Savitz, Jason Calacanis, and an official Wall Street Journal blog.

D Conference: Notes from Gates

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I think the defining moment of Bill Gates’ onstage interview at the D conference tonight came near the end, when the Microsoft chairman pulled a Windows Mobile device out of his pocket and declared, “This is really going to be your reality acquisition device.”

It turned out he was talking about how a good networked mobile device would help you plug into information about your physical location and the status of other people in your network (i.e., your friends, relatives and colleagues).

But the phrase was just pregnant with other meanings. It wrapped together in one phrase the two great forces of Gates’ career — voracious capitalism and awkward geekishness. Others might dream of altering reality (or, as the phrase goes, “changing the world”); for Gates, what really matters is “acquisition.” Once it’s acquired? Then, I suppose, it can be…assimilated.

So when will Windows Vista ship, anyway? “We’re quite confident in the January date.” But with the beta 2 version just out, “we’ll see what we get from that.” So, er, it sounds like, maybe January, maybe not.

Walt Mossberg asked whether Vista will be the last monster version of Windows, with five years and millions of lines of code in one big (and slow-to-arrive) package. Gates didn’t really answer, instead talking about new features of future Microsoft OSes involving “speech, ink and vision.” (So it sounds like the next edition of Windows will be planned for 2010 and will originally promise to include speech recognition, handwriting recognition and face recognition. But as the schedule slips to 2012 and beyond those new features will all be dropped and instead we’ll get a more secure, less buggy version of Vista.)

Gates showed off the new interface for Microsoft Office 2007, in which the entire mechanism of drop-down menus has been eliminated, replaced with an array of tabs that activate toolbars. Hard to evaluate from a quick demo, but I’m thinking that a lot of people are going to hang onto the bloated devil they know rather than risk mucking around with this potentially confusing new paradigm.

Admitting that Google still leaves Microsoft in the dust in search, Gates still knocked his competition for doing “less in the way of innovation than I would have expected a year ago.” For Microsoft in search, he added, with shameless bravado, “there’s more upside than downside at this point.”

Asked about the excitement surrounding Web-based applications and, specifically, Google’s acquisition of Writely, Gates sniffed,
“The text control in Asp.net has more features than that. Or even Wordpad.” Web apps are too limited in responsiveness, Gates said; “You want to take advantage of the fact that it’s not time-sharing” and use the power of your local CPU. “The cloud” — the stuff out there on the Web servers your browsers talk to — is more useful for storage and backup.

Finally, Gates talked in very broad terms about TV/Internet convergence and Microsoft’s “IPTV” initiative. What, Kara Swisher asked, does that do to the broadcast model? Gates “It’s gone. It was a hack. People want to watch what they want to watch.”

California court: shield law applies to anyone who gathers and disseminates news

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The decision in the Apple v. Does case, in which I am proud to have participated in a tiny way (as signatory to an amicus brief), just came down, and it is a win for the wider universe of bloggers and other Internet-based writers and self-publishers.

See Lauren Gelman’s report. Here’s the ruling (PDF). Here’s a release from EFF. More after I’ve had a chance to read in full.

This appears to be one key passage:

  We decline the implicit invitation to embroil ourselves in questions of what constitutes “legitimate journalis[m].” The shield law is intended to protect the gathering and dissemination of news, and that is what petitioners did here. We can think of no workable test or principle that would distinguish “legitimate” from “illegitimate” news. Any attempt by courts to draw such a distinction would imperil a fundamental purpose of the First Amendment, which is to identify the best, most important, and most valuable ideas not by any sociological or economic formula, rule of law, or process of government, but through the rough and tumble competition of the memetic marketplace.

Any judge who uses the phrase “memetic marketplace” seems to have immersed himself fully in the subject!

More on iPod premature mortality

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Check out the comments on my iPod reliability musings below. We’ve got two extremely thoughtful considerations of planned obsolescence in consumer electronics today: “Quality sucks everywhere. I think of it as a very pernicious form of inflation. Companies discovered that consumers would buy on price and features, and that usability and reliability were not important. They had no choice, really but to eliminate quality.” Then, in comment #3, from Walter A., we have a vivid illustration of the point. Walter castigates me for daring to expect that my four-year-old first-generation iPod should still work. “Who the hell still owns a 1st gen iPod, anyway, let alone wastes everyone’s time and patience by whining about its flaws?”

Well, pardon me for expecting that a $500 device not disintegrate in a handful of years! I guess Apple (and everyone else in the device marketplace) has done a very good job of training the public to expect short-term failure. People (including me) continue to buy iPods despite this failure rate, and that, I suppose, is an indication of its many other attractive qualities. But it doesn’t exempt Apple from reasonable criticism.