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Just Say YesApril 27 2008

Back in the good old days, big software companies did big things. Little companies tiptoed around in the shadow of the platform makers, gaining enough speed to liftoff and attract enough attention to survive long enough to be acquired. Like the old movie studios of the 30's and 40's, the technology studios of the 80's and 90's built stars and played them off until the inevitable decline.

So it went with Microsoft, as the seeming invulnerability of Gates' machine accelerated to the boundaries of global saturation. Though we tend to think of Google as the conqueror, the reality is that Microsoft has struggled most with itself, the victim not of decline but of lack of fuel -- the very customers who created the megalith in the first place.

Everything changed with the Net. The platform wars, the browser wars, the widget wars -- they're all really battles in the grappling with the living, breathing, swarm that is the Web. Even the argument over whether Office is dead is bogus, a joke that became a conference that begat a series of endless reiterations of the first O'Reilly Peer-to-Peer conference known as Web 2.0. The stuff that went over the wire now goes over the air; the stuff that used to persist solely on the client now comes from G@d knows where in the Cloud.

I pick on the conferences because they are an easy target, whether large and self-important like the Web 2.0 Expo this past week in San Francisco or small and private smoke-filled rooms like th

The Gold RushApril 13 2008

Bob Dylan once made a record called Self Portrait, full of some of the most bizarre recordings of his career. Among these clunkers - mostly clunkers - was one called Days of 49. It had a tight groove, sort of post John Wesley Harding meets Nashville Skyline, and it concerned the Gold Rush of (for the post-boomers) 1849.

I can't remember the words, or need to look them up on Google. But I can feel the rush of excitement, the same one that woke me up this early Sunday to proclaim why this is history repeating itself: Businesses are moving faster than the services we're inventing.

You can call me what you want, Zimmy even, but the reason Salesforce is going to rock our world on Monday when they announce whatever Google linkup they can is because the users are ahead of the algorithms. The collective disruption of the iPhone, Twitter, Silverlight, and even this MacBook AIR with its USB 3G card I'm using mandate a speed of adoption that will dwarf the transitions of the past.

In a gold rush the cost of anything surges to meet the demand. Some call these events bubbles, but the real price of a hamburger in SIlicon Valley today is how much you can get done while eating it. Take Twitter, the steam engine of this revolution. It's an iron horse of infinite speed, streamlined to take text and tiny urls and push them onto the bus through the Gtalk pipeline.

Value is created not by the mechanism of sending but the algorithm of receiving, a hybrid filterin

The Enterprise Bill of RightsApril 6 2008

I've been immune to Bruce Springsteen for more than 30 years. Tonight, that is over. I'd heard so much about the power of his live show, the legend of Clarence Clemons, the Soprano jaunt of Little Steven, yadda, yadda, yadda. Nothin. Nice guy, man of the people, power anthems that never really connected.

The harbinger for me was an appearance on Today a few months ago, where Springsteen and his E Street Band debuted an anti-war song with the most startling spoken intro that the veeps at GE must have blinked through like a sip of tart limeade. Living in the future, well, you should get the record. Tonight, I finally did.

For me the secret unfolded about an hour into the 2:45 show, when Living in the Future returned. Before then, I was doing the usual stuff, eating a hot dog, sipping beer, watching the blue collar crowd like some astronaut from wherever it is I think I'm coming from.

We'd been given earplugs by a knowledgeable friend that I'd tried then abandoned, then tried again. The effect was something like the lesson I'd learned at Shea Stadium all those years ago, to push my fingers into my ears just hard enough to filter the screams. There, almost like being underwater, a secret world where the sinews of the music were exposed: the backbeat, oh wait, the cymbals, the several guitars, all of it surprisingly clear in this muddy soundscape.

The earplugs bought me time to get over myself, a process I was unaware had begun. A process of lear

NewsGang Extra - Vizard & Gillmor on the Mobile shakeoutApril 3 2008

Mike Vizard and Steve Gillmor on Intel's new Atom chip, the iPhone shortage, Microsoft's Albany project, IT shutting down the Gtalk, and what Mike calls "our social contract with the government." Recorded Thursday, April 3, 2008.

NewsGang Extra III 04.03.08

Calming UpApril 1 2008

For some months now, the proto-blogger of the blogosphere has been focusing on two subject areas: Twitter and the presidential campaign. Dave Winer correctly anticipated the power and growth of the real time messaging platform, building several applications around the Twitter API and its identity namespace. And his political analysis has jumped from Scripting News to Huffington Post to a series of Sunday morning interview podcasts that capture and harness the pulse of the new real time network.

I say "new" because social media has rapidly advanced from a metadata honey pot to the nexus of such signals and a microchunk form of content creation. As Net celebrities such as Robert Scoble and Jason Calacanis move their brands from blog posts to short bursts of text and video, the resultant youtubing of the A List has set off a feeding frenzy. Before we dismiss the relevance of this trend as navel-gazing, we should pause to remember that much of the rest of the world is just now incorporating the blogging wave into business, family, and the living history of this time.

But the argument over the differences between blogging, podcasting, and professional media has grown stale as we focus more on the stories being told than the tools used to deliver them. When the top stories on blogging's Techmeme Top 40 charts these last weeks were about the business of blogging, the natural conclusion was that nothing was going on - that the purity of the citizen revolution was g