Wordyard

Hand-forged posts since 2002

Archives

About

Greatest hits

Alan Kay: “Generate enormous dissatisfaction”

by

I am entering the final sprint of completing a first draft of my book between now and Thanksgiving or so, so pardon my general bloggy sluggishness. My plan is to resume somewhat more active blogging in December and return in full blast by January.

In the meantime, here’s something that caught my eye:

One of the computing pioneers whose work I’ve had the pleasure of digging into for my book is Alan Kay. In the course of my research I had occasion to read Kay’s epic account of The Early History of Smalltalk. Smalltalk is the object-oriented programming language Kay created in the early 1970s at Xerox PARC (while he was also inventing much of the rest of modern computing). The paper is full of interesting stuff, but this observation near the end, about how to motivate yourself to tackle difficult challenges, jumped out at me:

  A twentieth century problem is that technology has become too “easy”. When it was hard to do anything whether good or bad, enough time was taken so that the result was usually good. Now we can make things almost trivially, especially in software, but most of the designs are trivial as well. This is inverse vandalism: the making of things because you can. Couple this to even less sophisticated buyers and you have generated an exploitation marketplace similar to that set up for teenagers. A counter to this is to generate enormous disatisfaction with one’s designs using the entire history of human art as a standard and goal. Then the trick is to decouple the disatisfaction from self worth — otherwise it is either too depressing or one stops too soon with trivial results.

“Generate enormous dissatisfaction” with one’s work — well, gee, that’s something most ambitious people know how to do, one way or another. But such dissatisfaction quickly blossoms into neurotic self-doubt. Ergo Kay’s careful recommendation to “decouple the dissatisfaction from self-worth”: that’s genius. And, I might add, really, really helpful to anyone laboring over a big project like, say, a book.

Of course, this means that you have to figure out other bases for self-worth than the work one has generated enormous dissatisfaction with!

Web 2.0 jottings

by

Today I had to get some writing done, so I stayed away from the final sessions of Web 2.0 — where apparently, among other things, Google announced a new RSS reader (which was totally slammed and unreachable when I tried to visit earlier). But here are some notes from yesterday’s sessions.

I hadn’t heard of Writely before; it’s another Ajax-style Web app transposing a traditional software function into web-based software — in this case, word-processing. I’m putting it in the “check out when I have time” bin.

By many accounts, Zimbra was the hottest product to launch at the conference’s 13-company “Launchpad,” which featured plenty of other interesting debuts (Jeff Jarvis has good notes on the others). Zimbra is an Ajax-based Outlook replacement (e-mail, calendar, contacts). Its apparent homage to an old Talking Heads song was duly noted by whoever was running the music at Web 2.0; “I Zimbra,” the cryptic lead track from “Fear of Music,” could be heard between panels.

At the open source panel, Sun’s Jonathan Schwartz tried very hard to persuade us that what was really important about open source software isn’t that the code is open or that anyone can improve it but simply that it’s given away free. Mozilla’s Mitchell Baker did an excellent job of debunking this point of view, not by directly disputing it but by explaining exactly what’s so great about Firefox: “Our goal is to make things easy to change,” she said. “It’s easy to try things out. You can try things out quickly. We can try 15 or 20 things at once and see which work.”

And, she added, that “we” there? “It isn’t us.” That is, the people trying out 15 or 20 things aren’t sitting in the offices of the Mozilla Foundation or even part of the core development team; they’re all over the Web. And they can try those things out because, er, the code is open, not because the product costs zero dollars. Sure, most Firefox users aren’t programmers and can’t do anything with the source themselves. But they can benefit from a much broader set of improvements and options made possible by the open source model.

Jeremy Allaire debuted Brightcove, which looked basically like a content management system for video — not that interesting for end-users, but more for video producers or large-site managers looking to integrate more video. Still, pretty impressive as a well-thought-out approach to bringing more commercial video content onto the Web in ways that don’t totally freak out the “content owners” yet are not entirely hostile to the medium.

Jason Fried of 37signals offered a ten-minute rant on the virtues of “less” as a competitive advantage: “It takes three people to build anything online these days: if you have more than three people, you have too many.”

AOL’s Jonathan Miller told an amusing story of how, when he took over the company in the depths of the dot-com doldrums, he handled the resentment he found at various divisions of Time Warner, where employees and execs were disgruntled about how the AOL/Time merger had gone — they felt they’d been snookered by AOL. He told them about having his car towed in Manhattan, and visiting the godforsaken place you go to get your car, and waiting in line forever, and getting angrier and angrier, and finally getting to the front of the line and seeing a sign that read: “The person here did not tow your car. They are here to help you get your car back. If you cooperate, you will get your car back faster.”

That’s what he told the unhappy Time campers: “I did not tow your car.”

Mickey Hart was on stage at the end of the day Thursday, talking about the history of the Dead and the “tapers” the band allowed to record their shows. He pointed out ways in which that community was similar to today’s file-trading hordes, and ways that it was different. But one thing he said stood out for me: The Dead played for pay and they played for free; “we always played better when we played free.”

Diller’s tale

by

Barry Diller was the kickoff interview here at Web 2.0 yesterday afternoon, which was more than a little odd, because Barry Diller does not appear to have anything to do with Web 2.0 — if, by Web 2.0, we mean, as conference hosts John Battelle and Tim O’Reilly said, an approach that involves innovation on the Web platform, an “architecture of participation,” lightweight business models, Web services with no lock-in, and so on.

No one has been smarter than Diller about rummaging through the broken and disused parts of old-Web flameouts and using them to assemble money-generating machines in relatively dull markets. And yet he has had no success — maybe even no interest — in creating innovative services or bringing new ideas to the Web. His company is a sort of Night of the Living Dot Com Dead.

Diller does not suffer fools — or interviewers — gladly, and he reserves a special sardonic disdain for tech-industry hype. That can be refreshing. I first heard his digital-skeptic act over a decade ago, at a panel at the old Intermedia conference in 1993, where he shared the stage with Bill Gates, Apple’s John Sculley and cable mogul John Malone. While the other spouted visionary platitudes, Diller simply fumed at their disconnection from his reality. (I wrote about the event for my old paper, here.)

Today, Diller is still wearing his skeptic’s hat; at Web 2.0 he turned it on those among the new wave of Web visionaries who have dared to dream that our new publishing and searching technologies might help bring a wider conversation into being beyond control of the broadcast world’s gatekeepers. “There’s just not that much talent in the world,” Diller says, “and talent almost always outs.”

On the one hand, Diller likes the Web, because it makes it easier for people to strut their stuff, if they have any: “If you have an idea, you can get it up and out, and good ideas resonate.” On the other hand, don’t expect some sort of renaissance of creativity to happen when the Web allows us to tap the talents of a wider swath of humanity: “I think that entertainment — TV, movies, games — I think it’s going to be a relatively few people who do that, simply because there is not enough talent, and it is not hiding out somewhere…”

For Diller, in other words, the Long Tail has no snap. Putting the tools of creation and distribution into the hands of the 99 percent of humanity who have hitherto had no access to them won’t fill a bigger pool of culture; the existing talent scouts of Hollywood and its equivalents have already done perfectly well, thank you, at tapping all the talent that’s there.

I’m sorry, I worked for 15 years as a theater and movie critic, and I know that Diller is wrong. Sure, I did my time working at a theater reading the slush pile of unproduced play submissions; I spent too many hours watching the awful 95 percent of movies that do manage to get produced and released. I don’t have any illusions about repealing Sturgeon’s Law.

But the promise of the Net, still not fulfilled but hanging there hopefully before us, is that a free, open, teeming network can actually provide more opportunity for “talent” to “out” than a handful of overworked script readers, slush-pile combers and A&R men. To think otherwise — to think that the existing corporate cultural system is the most efficient mechanism imaginable for the identification of artistic talent — is pure arrogance.

Based on what he said here, I think Barry Diller believes he is someone who understands the Internet because he knows so well how to make money through it. But I don’t believe he understands the first thing about what makes it anything more than just a money machine.

Pop the bubbly

by

John Battelle and Tim O’Reilly opened the second edition of the Web 2.0 conference this afternoon with an exchange along these lines: Battelle said that last year, the mood at the conference was simply, “We made it” — we survived the Internet industry’s dark winter. This year, he said, it’s more like, “Something really important is going on — let’s not screw it up.” O’Reilly added: “We are definitely running the risk of another hype cycle.”

I’d say it’s no longer a risk, it’s a reality. It’s too late in the evening to post too much about what I saw and heard today at Web 2.0 — more tomorrow. But let’s just say that the whiff of bubble-mania that was in the air at the conference’s first edition a year ago has now blossomed into a heady eau de dot-com.

The conference mixes up idealistic developers who have worked themselves half-blind coding the next super-cool but not-quite-usable-yet Web applications with sharp-eyed financiers looking for the next big thing that they can flip fast for a killing. In this regard, Web 2.0 — both the conference and the vague but real thing it is named for — is like the bastard offspring of the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference and the tech-investment gatherings of yore.

I do not know what will come of this not-so-holy union, but from the feel of things at the Hotel Argent today, it seems likely that a certain number of people will get rich, a certain amount of money will be wasted, several important new companies and technologies will emerge and some indeterminate number of investors will be fleeced. So that means it’s probably too late, John and Tim — the hype-cycle wheel is already in spin, up, up, up.

Manifesto destiny

by

My old friend, game designer extraordinaire Greg Costikyan, has been ranting about the depressing state of the games industry recently. Tonight he announced that he is getting off his rhetorical duff and going to try to do something about its problems. He quit his job and is forming a new company called Manifesto Games.

  Its motto is “PC Gamers of the World Unite! You Have Nothing to Lose but Your Retail Chains!” And its purpose, of course, will be to build what I’ve been talking about: a viable path to market for independent developers, and a more effective way of marketing and distributing niche PC game styles to gamers.

Greg is also planning to write about the whole process of launching the company on his blog. Since he’s argued that one of the roots of the industry’s malaise is its business structure, he intends to write publicly about the fascinating game of financing his startup. He’s a sharp writer and he doesn’t suffer fools gladly, so that should be…fun!

Deja vu all over again

by

Those of us who lived through successive waves of the media industry’s infatuation with the Internet from 1996 through 2000 or so may have thought we’d seen every possible folly that can arise when people mistake the Web for a broadcast medium. We had Webshows and Netshows and Netcasts and all manner of awfulness from MSN and AOL, Time-Warner and the TV networks and Disney. (I fumed in Salon about this profusion of “channels” on the youthful Web back in 1997.) When the dot-com bubble broke, it seemed we could finally bid farewell to the delusion that you can “program” for the Web just like you program TV. Through all of that nuttiness, Yahoo was one of a small handful of companies that seemed to understand the fundamentally un-TV-ish nature of the Web, and it profited steadily from that understanding.

So I nearly sputtered out a mouthful of coffee Saturday morning when I read the New York Times’ piece about Lloyd Braun, the former TV exec who is now running a big chunk of Yahoo.

  As chairman of ABC’s entertainment group, Mr. Braun had a penchant for big offbeat concepts like “Lost,” which won the Emmy for best drama. At Yahoo, why not create programs in genres that have worked on TV but not really on the Web? Sitcoms, dramas, talk shows, even a short daily humorous take on the news much like Jon Stewart’s “Daily Show” are in the works…. So Mr. Braun’s job is straightforward: invent a medium that unites the showmanship of television with the interactivity of the Internet.

If you read the entirety of Saul Hansell’s piece, it seems clear that Braun and his boss Terry Semel aren’t entirely ignorant of the nature of the medium they’re working in. They know that Net-based video comes in little pieces, gets remixed by the multitude and spreads virally. But I guess they can’t shake off the habits of their professional lifetimes, because it sure sounds like they’re saying something remarkably similar to what we’ve heard from the discredited peddlers of “Net shows” past: Move over, all you amateurs and geeks, and let some real broadcasters teach you how it’s done! They may be publishing material on the Web, but they still think in terms of big-splash Events and boffo shows.

I know that a lot of smart people who deeply understand the way the Net functions work at Yahoo. The company made a savvy move in bringing on Kevin Sites to lead their first real effort in original content — he’s a versatile journalist who’s been living in the online cross-currents for several years now. Maybe Yahoo will prove my skepticism wrong, and its programmers will be the first of the multitude to go down the road labeled “Let’s make the Net more like TV” and find that it’s not a dead end. But it seems more likely to me that we’ll be reading headlines in two or three or four years about Yahoo shutting down a lot of its experiments in this area, just as its predecessors did.

Dell and the megaphone

by

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

by

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.

Google follow-ups

by

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

by

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.