Microsoft playing catchup to Jini?

I just saw The Ray Ozzie Experience and almost ROTFL.

"A world of many devices, all connected and managed by the Web".

Isn't this what Scott McNealy was telling us like eight years ago? Remember "WebTone"? Welcome to the party, Ray Ozzie.  Sorry that you're so late! M'afraid the beer's justabout finished...

Isn't this exactly what Jini was designed for? (And I'd infinitely sooner bet my life on technology as mature and carefully designed as Jini than on anything MS is ever likely to come up with.)

Why is CSS so damn HARD?

Seems to me that the whole CSS model is pretty poorly designed.  It shouldn't be so damn hard to implement a website design.  I'm not talking about bleeding-edge Zen Garden stuff; I'm talking about very simple layouts.

For a start I prefer liquid layouts: That graphic designers coming from more traditional media hate fear and loath the concept, I understand.  Its a mindset - the user has partial control over how a thing looks - and many graphic designers have trouble dealing with their inability to guarantee pixel-perfect alignments.  Perhaps the user wears hectic prescription glasses, so 18pt fonts are a reasonable default for them.  Get over it.

Secondly, I'm no n00b at CSS.  Whilst I'm hardly a professional CSS designer, I think I understand the concepts and details pretty well, and I've fumbled my way around a fair number of web designs using CSS with results that have attracted fair compliment from people who do that stuff professionally. (No, this blog is not currently an example! That's what I'm working on.)

But its still so damn hard!

One of two thing I think are needed: either

1. a redesign of CSS that works to a "springs 'n' struts" layout model, or alternatively a "springs 'n' struts" model that can get compiled to CSS2 (possibly on the fly as a filter), or
2. the additional of another "position" mode in CSS - "absolute-relative" positioning - absolute positioning of an element, but relative to the containing box.

Number one is unlikely (except maybe as a translated/compiled language), but number 2 is possible without breaking existing CSS-based layouts.

It would sure make simple layouts a hell of a lot simpler to implement.

Reports of the Death of Email Greatly Exagerated

So there have been a couple of surveys among college students indicating that the surveyed population mostly uses IM to keep in touch with their social circle.  They only ever use email to contact companies and "old people" like their parents, and view email as "old fashioned".  This has led some commentators to pronounce the Imminent Demise of Email as communication channel in the Internet.

Horseshit!

Social Networks are Killing Email? - I think not! What we are seeing here is the confluence of two things:

1. Younger people have more time on their hands, and so are more inclined to spend some or much of that time in online communities, or social networks. (Newsflash: Social networks are nothing new.  We've been doing social networks since before we fell out the trees!)  As a result they tend not to use email, preferring IM, as email lacks an immediacy - we're seeing the impatience of youth.
2. As one ages, one's priorities, as well as the demands on one's time, change.  Therefore, the preferred modes and channels of communication one favours are likely to change with age.  Duh.  Why do I love my cellphone more than my landline?  It does voicemail.  I can disconnect without missing anything.  There are times - many times - when I prefer to disconnect.  I truly won't miss anything important in the endless torrent of attention-grabbing shit, and I need time to myself.  Time to stop and think. Time to reflect.  And I'm not insecure about it.

So, in a nutshell, we see 1) the impatience of being young, and 2) the insecurity of being young, reflected in some surveys that say that young people don't much use email.

And from this, people are extrapolating Email is Dead?  Let's see the same surveys done on the same populations 5, 10, 20 years from now, and lets see how their channels of communication have changed then.  Perhaps then we can begin to draw some conclusions, instead of this bogus pseudo-science.

Otherwise I will stick to my premise: Death of Email Greatly Exagerated.

Disclaimer: I am in my mid-40's and have two sons who fall into the "youth" category, one at Rhodes University, the other a hotshot Software Developer.  As such, my views may be biased.

Why Advertising is Broken

Brad Feld started it with his Three Constituencies post.  Stan James followed up with some very interesting insights on the model set-up by Brad.  Go! Read them; I'll wait here.

In thinking about this model and all it implies, I started drawing a diagram to keep the value-flows straight in my head, and suddenly something I've been mulling over for some time popped clear in my mind:  Why Interruptive Advertising is Dead.

For awhile, now I have held it as an article of faith that interruptive advertising is dead, just the body hasn't stopped moving yet.  (And if you think the Death Throes of the RIAA/MPAA business model has been messy and ugly, you probably ain't seen nothin' yet!)  For example, I never see popups (very interruptive stuff!) because Firefox blocks them with the preferences I have set.  The Adblock/AdblockPlus plugins block most other advertising that might reach me, and the recently-installed Flashblock plugin catches the remainder.  Do I hate adverts?  You bet!  I find them consistently irritating, irrelevant to my purposes, intrusive and obnoxious.  I've yet to find any exceptions.

Ya, ya!  We've all heard the bullshit: "Advertising informs you about products and product choices..."

Well, if there's something I want - a new house, a new car, some food, a holiday, a PC - I go out and shop for it.  Then I'm still not interested in adverts because they lack the substance I need to make a buy decision.

With the recent availability of Explorer 7beta3 (if you are so hooked into MS products that you simply can't give them up) every major browser now has ad-blocking.

What about TV?

Yes.  What about TV?  Its mostly boring and irrelevant.  The programming is mostly apalling, the news banal.  I doubt whether I watch an hour of TV a week any more.  I'm getting the content I want elsewhere.  If there is the occasional show I want to watch, chances are I'll timeshift it anyway and skip the ads there, too.

I truly believe that interruptive advertising is dead.  Permission-based advertising, and something I'll call Entertainment-based advertising, though is a whole new bundle of opportunities!

My diagram, based completely on Stan's blog explains why:

See the problem?  All around the value chain there is a fair exchange of value given and received (or something like it.)  Except when we come to the advertiser's relationship with the consumer.  One way only.  No wonder most of us resent and loath ads.

Thank you Brad and Stan for paving the way to this understanding of precisely why Interruptive Advertising is Broken.  The fact is that your interrupting me is a form of force: you believe you have to force your content onto me since I probably wouldn't want it otherwise.  And you're right!  I wouldn't.  I don't.  You give me nothing in return.

The truth is that interruptive marketing has always has been broken.  It's only recently that we consumers are in a position to do something about it, and we're doing so with a vengeance!

"There is no such thing as a problem without a gift for you in its hands"
- Richard Bach, "Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah"

There's a hell of a lot of opportunity in getting beyond the "need to interrupt", too, and it hinges on the advertiser giving back fair-value to the consumer in turn, but this post is already too long.

When Funding Falls Through

Just received email to the effect that the funding deal we were hoping for has fallen through.  Again.

I confess I'm rapidly losing faith - not to mention running out of money to keep the roof overhead.

We've been trying to get funded for about six months now, with a conspicuous lack of success.  I freely admit that for part of the time we were simply not trying very hard: the deal on the table was too tempting for us.  We were close enough to the investor that we had no need to draw up a very formal business plan for pitching (though we certainly did have an internal operational/development business plan) so we were pretty lackadaisical about the whole thing.

A couple of months into the negotiation it became apparent that the amount of money we were negotiating would be insufficient to get the business as far as "revenue generating", and the amount we would really require was more than the angel-group were willing to invest; "Too rich for our blood!"  Fair and reasonable; indeed the right decision for all concerned, since we would otherwise be throwing money at a venture doomed before it started.

So we then had to spend considerable time working up a reasonable (I think!) "pitch" business plan for another angel investor.  They're the ones who have turned us down this morning, and I can understand and sympathise with their reasons - essentially they feel that the market we wish to tackle is just too tough, and we are neophytes in the space.  We agree.  We've known it all along, and addressed those problems in our business plan, but evidently it wasn't enough to convince them to part with (about) USD 1million.  That amount will get us about to public-Beta in a timespan of about 4 months.

So.  Anybody know of an angel/venture group wanting to get into the social-web space in a venture that has real-world revenue streams (i.e. We're not planning on ad-revenue) in a USD45billion/year industry? (And Yes, that's a "b", not an "m".)

Anything New Takes Time

I recently added "Crossroads Dispatches" to the ever-growing list of blogs I keep an eye on.  I liked the fusion of touchy-feely and hard-nosed reality.  Something like my lifestyle that attempts to fuse web entrepreneurship with self-sufficient living and growing my own food.  Something like Sushi - the blandness of Rice with the Bland/Salty fish and the BITE of Wasabi.

In Crossroads Dispatches: Living Takes Time, Thinking Big Takes Time, Ms Rodriguez writes about how many fast-paced people discover that going more slowly really enables them to go faster, but only after some (often severe) personal crisis.

This brings to mind the oft-touted common wisdom of Internet startups: "If you can't get something up and running within a couple of (days|weeks|months) you probably don't have anything. You probably don't understand what it is you're wanting to build."

What horse-shit.  Frequently this comes from people who are not programmers, and who have no clue of all the intricacies and complexities involved in designing, building, debugging, deploying, managing and enhancing an application; least of all a distributed application.  Now try this all by yourself. You get to do everything yourself.  There's nobody else to lean on to put together the graphics or to install the database or to spot the stupid mistake that's going to take you half a day to figure out by yourself.  There's no-one who will listen to your ideas and tell you when you're spouting crap or just in love with the smell of your own shit.

Its hard work, and it takes time.  Lots of time.  And you're better off going slowly than trying to meet the bullshit expectations of some alleged common wisdom. 

As you may gather, I have been working on a new New Venture for some weeks now (which also accounts for the sporadic and irregular blog posting) and am about halfway through the development cycle.

Goodbye (again!) to Flash

Finally I got pissed-off enough to remove Flash from all my PCs.  For a long, long time I resisted installing Flash, because all I had ever seen was annoying animated ads that bypassed my Adblock and Image-download restrictions through the use of Flash.  Then, along came broadband, and a few things worth watching on YouTube and a couple of other places.

So having had Flash installed and enabled in my browsers for a couple of months, now, I have come full circle back to my original position: It is just not worth it.  For the one or two worthwhile videos or whatever that I want to watch I can manually re-enable Flash.  For the rest I say , "Away with You, Worthless Rubbish."