SJVN is not buying claims that the Microsoft antitrust consent decree has done its job. Of course, that’s his opinion. Personally, I think Vista may do what the consent decree couldn’t… but that’s just me.
VMware’s very own conference, VMworld, is being held this week in San Francisco. And the company has some big news, including an announcement that its VMware ESX Server 3i virtualization software will be embedded in servers from Dell, HP, IBM, NEC, Fujitsu, and other hardware vendors.
But Microsoft is never happy letting someone else get all the attention, so the company has created some news of its own, announcing that it will be previewing its own virtualization technology later this month, when it pushes the first release candidate for Windows Server 2008 out the door.
The Community Technology Preview (CTP) of the virtualization technology, code-named Veridian, is a trimmed-down version of Microsoft’s attempt at keeping up with the VMwares. And it won’t be a real product until at least six months after Windows Server 2008 ships — which, if Microsoft sticks to its latest roadmap, will be in February.
But wait, not enough? Microsoft also announced that the next version of its virtual machine management software, System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2007, will nice with VMware and Xen–when it is released sometime next year. The first beta will be released sometime in the first quarter of 2008.
So, really, there’s not much news there. But it’s the promise of news, and enough to at least momentarily distract some from all the VMware hype in the wake of the company’s IPO.
It seems every time Adobe updates something, it hoses my Mac. The other day, after installing the Flash Player 9 update, Flash ceased to work in any browser. I did uninstalls, re-installs, and all for naught.
Then I remembered what happened after the *last* major Flash update. I loaded up Mac OS X’s disk utility, and sure enough–the disk had become corrupted.
I’m not saying it’s Adobe’s (or the former Macromedia’s) fault that every time I get a Flash update, my hard drive needs to be repaired. I’m just saying it’s a hell of a coincidence.
Google has lately been trying to find new ways to make money off its technology. The AdWords API will soon be metered. Some speculate that the Maps API will follow.
Well, Google’s gotta do something, because right now it’s pissing in its own pool with AdWords and AdSense. Someday soon, the results for many high-value keyword searches will consist mostly of highly search-engine optimized crap carrying AdSense payloads, and the whole value of Google search will be destroyed.
Google’s PageRank is its strength and its Achilles heel. The original idea of weighting search results toward things that people have linked to with matching keywords was a smart hack, and did a good job of leveraging the informational democracy of the Web. But it also left Google wide open for other people’s smart hacks, like Google-bombing. By using PageRank algorithms to determine relevance, Larry Page and Sergey Brin dodged the bullet of having to actually do the heavy lifting of categorization and entity extraction from content to figure out what it’s about. But they also made it possible to game the system.
So, for example, if I wanted to create a perfect Google sandtrap of a site, I would build a technology that watched the Google AdWord auctions, detected the highest value keywords, and then automatically created AdSense (and other context-sensitive advertising) enabled pages optimized for that keyword. At the same time, I’d syndicate links to that site with the keyword to other domains so that they could be picked up by Google, raising the new site’s page rank. Just a little content to make the site legitimate, and a little care about the use of cross-linking, and all of a sudden I’ve created revenue for myself by lowering the value of Google’s searches.
Already, the amount of irrelavent content and spam being yielded by general search engines is being seen as an opportunity for “vertical” search companies, who are seeking to provide search tools that provide high-quality results for very specific topic sets. Call it vertical search, categorized search, community search–these are all about getting better results for searches based on some sort of inherent filtering of result domains.
Google is in a tough spot long-term with click-based advertising. They have to be careful about radically altering the ecosystem they’ve created with their search engine, but they also have to figure out how to filter out the inbound links from automated “spamblogs” and other robo-sites that exist merely to game the PageRank system. Otherwise, their revenue is going to start declining, and will eventually crash because of overgrazing by search-engine marketers.
It’s bad enough that mesothelioma, a cancer caused by contact with asbestos, has affected the lives of so many people (and many in my hometown of Baltimore, where Bethlehem Shipyard once was). And it’s bad enough that their suffering enabled Peter Angelos, a personal injury lawyer who specializes in mesothelioma and related asbestos lawsuits, to buy the Baltimore Orioles. But now, as CyberWyre points out, mesothelioma lawyers and “what is mesothelioma” are the two top-paying keyword terms for Google Adsense. Which is leading, of course, to a lot of people with Adsense writing about mesothelioma.
I had two grandparents die of cancer, so I’ve got to say that the idea of profiting from others’ misery is loathsome to me–especially when it’s clear that the kind of things I write about here (application development, Web standards, and general tech company shop talk) do not have the advertising mojo that they once had. Christ, I’ve made all of $22 on AdSense ads in the last year–and I’ve never even seen that money, because Google doesn’t pay you until you hit $100.
But I digress.
If you’re in the publishing business, as I am, you understand the business pressures placed on editorial operations. We like to think that editors shape the content of their publications, and often they do. But on the Web, where everything is measured and moneyballed to death, advertiser demand often plays a significant role in determining what gets covered (especially on business-to-business sites). At less scrupulous companies, it may even determine how it gets covered, but that’s a topic for another time.
So with a trillion “minipreneurs” out there trying to make a buck off a weblog, is it really a surprise that some people chase the ad words? In a way, it’s the way the free market works at its best: supply follows demand, and eventually the demand is met for a reasonable price. So if there’s really a need for information about mesothelioma out there, the least we can do is make sure people get to the right information by Google-bombing the hell out of the relavent links, and maybe someone will reward us for it, right?
Ah, it’s a brave new publishing world. Now if you’re pardon me, I need to go consolidate loans and consider how a refinancing mortgage could help me pay for a tax attorney.
Everybody in IT has their favorite war story, about that time when they were presented with insurmountable odds, asinine deadlines and insufficient resources, but somehow managed to live to tell the tale—or at least went down with their guns blazing. They’re often told with pride, as well as a little gallows humor; IT professionals, it seems, are happiest when the obstacles are close to insurmountable.
It’s part of our psychological makeup (well, at least mine). I got into information technology for the same reason I think most of us are attracted to it: I like solving problems. There’s an endorphin rush associated with getting a new application to work, troubleshooting a network problem, beating a configuration problem into submission, etc. Sure, there’s the glamor, the big money, and the girls who flock to you when you talk about troubleshooting IP address configurations. But mostly, it’s the buzz from making stuff work.
The bigger the problem, the bigger the buzz. When you’ve had your department taking heroic measures to solve an emergency business requirement, working an all-nighter to beat an impossible deadline that the business side needs to seal that multi-million dollar deal or meet that compliance requirement, development queue and process be damned, the power rush can cloud your ability to reason. You and your team nail it and save the company’s bacon, and prove the value of what you do to the rest of the company.
But what if everything suddenly becomes an emergency?
What if, after seeing that you can pull off miracles without following that precious IT process you’ve created, business managers come to expect you to deliver on every project the same way?
Congratulations, your business execs have become IT co-dependent, and you’re their #1 enabler.
There’s a fine line between being “agile” and being an enabler of a dysfunctional business model. You’re agile if you’ve got a process that incorporates flexibility and plans for “ship early and often” approaches to problem-solving. You’re an enabler if you constantly have to go back and fix implementations you rushed to make business deadlines so that they’ll scale or to integrate them into your architecture so you can support them…or if you don’t have the time to do either of those because of more rapidly emerging business requirements.
In an agile IT organization, IT is engaged with the business side, and watching the road ahead. In a co-dependent company, IT is always heads-down and reactive, trying to sprint to meet emerging requirement because business managers didn’t include IT in the decision-making process. A sure sign that you’re headed toward co-dependency is when decisions about projects that affect the technical aspect of their implementation are made at meetings that don’t have someone from IT at the table–or the IT representative is so junior that he or she ends up being cut out of the conversation.
There’s only one way to break a co-dependency cycle: You’ve got to be assertive. Sometimes it takes more personal courage and leadership to balk at another “Charge of the Light Brigade” style project than it does to get your team to once again jump into the breach. When you finally say “no” (or the moral equivalent of it), be prepared for a lot of screaming.
But it’s better than the alternative. Because eventually, if you’re not taking positive control over the project demands your team is faced with–regardless of whether you’re actually successful at jumping through the hoops that the business side of the company constantly presents you with–you’re going to have to face the fact that you’re not going to be able to sustain the pace much longer. While agile organizations have no problem with retaining good people, the smart people at co-dependent organizations are trying to claw their way out.
And if being assertive isn’t an option, maybe you should start clawing.
I haven’t blogged much lately for a very specific reason–I’m now building blogs at work. The first of my efforts is here.
It’s less a pure blog and more of a mash-up of blog and aggregation portal. I’m using XSL transformations and RSS feeds to create a topical site that combines a regular blogger with all of the “traditional” editorial coverage we do on a topic. And, much to my chagrin, it’s all based on .NET.
One down, nine to go. This month.
Last night, I went to an open house at MICA run by the graphic and digital design group of their Continuing Studies program. I went mostly because Sean Carton was speaking, and he had invited me to come by.
Carton has started writing a weekly column for my day job. Considering he’s now Dean of Philadelphia U.’s School of Design and Media, it was kind of strange on the surface that MICA would ask him to come speak–it almost seemed like GM having Lee Iacocca come speak at a Chevy product launch.
But I was also there to network, and to find out about MICA’s graphic/digital design programs. Plus, it gave me a chance to check out the new Brown Center at MICA, the concrete and glass monster on Mount Royal that’s most famous here in Baltimore for catching a bullet shortly after it opened. And besides, I wanted to steal some ideas from Carton.
And here’s the idea I’m stealing today — to succeed with a product, in bits or atoms, you need to delight.
Here’s the context. After a whirlwind tour through the last 20 years of digital convergence and its impact on culture — and on the amount of available attention people have — Carton talked about how important design has become to the success of a product. Products (be they physical or information-based) succeed because of the total experience people have with them, and much of that experience is a result of design.
The Delight factor is what seperates the iPods, BMWs, Mini Coopers, Muvicos, Googles and such from the rest. People overlook the specs if something engages them in a way that goes beyond just the function of the product.
It’s a dangerous word, “delight.” When I hear managers talk about “delighting the customer”, it usually comes two seconds before they spew out the most idiotic drivel I’ve heard in that particular fiscal quarter. The word itself has lost most of its meaning in daily usage; people just don’t say, “Whoa, dude, this thing delights me.” Typically, it’s used in a sycophantic greeting (”Delighted to meet you!”) or ironically (”I’d be delighted to take that back to the kitchen for you, sir”).
I have a hard time working up to delight. Sure, I covet some of the things that hit the “delight” button hard, like the Mini Cooper, the latest PowerBooks, and so on. But creating a lasting sense of wonder about anything is pretty fucking hard to do. The butterfly on this blog’s header landed next to me on a broken asphalt parking lot…that delighted me, in that moment. Doing stuff with my kids delights me. It’s a real stretch to say that any brand of anything can come close to that level of emotional connection.
And really, that’s the challenge people trying to hack our emotional responses for a buck face these days. Everything has become experiential–everybody is trying to find some way to connect in a scripted, contrived way with the product-consuming public that you really have to do a good job of faking originality to get anyone interested anymore. Everything is derivative of derivative things. To “delight”, you basically have to:
Baltimore has plenty of places that pull that off for me. The fine folks at Atomic Books know how to pull off the experience for their market niche (Yo, Benn and Rachel! And congrats on the Emily Flake book making the Must List in Entertainment Weekly, by the by). The Karzai family has experience nailed at B and Tapas Teatro. WTMD has somehow managed to steal my iPod playlist and make it their programming.
The other key piece of what Sean Carton said is that eventually, the technology or medium used to deliver whatever connection you’re trying to make with people is irrelavant. It’s about making people feel like they belong within the world that the product/website/experience reflects. A cool, makes-you-want-to-come-back web site isn’t just about the graphics, the beveling, the font choices, or demonstrating mad CSS skillz–it’s dependent upon creating a connection with the audience. The content needs to speak to people at a whole level beyond just passing along information.
I look at the stuff my company does. Does it “delight”? I don’t think so. How do you “delight” IT people, corporate executives, etc. with a tech website? It’s hard enough to just suck less, let alone not suck.