Everybody Has A Share

The wrong time to find out

"The problem with services is that you never really know what you're buying until something goes wrong." -- Peter Coffee, eWeek Infraspectrum podcast, August 25, 2006

Microsoft vs. Google: Your choice

"Microsoft gives you an integrated stack but all the moving parts are anchored on a single company's vision. Google frees you to work out the bits yourself, but you must rely on your own smarts or those of your chosen tools." -- Gavin Clarke, June 2009

Smelling those leaky abstractions

"Vendors will never genuinely embrace standards, until IT decision makers demand standards compliance of them, by demonstrating a penchant for smelling out "leaky abstractions" embedded within product implementations." -- Kingsley Idehen, May 2005

Easier to change the browser than all Web pages

"I find the [Live Clipboard] as conceived by [Ray] Ozzie a little silly myself. Why can't this just be a built-in function of the browser? Why do we need to modify every page to enable the transfer of specific chunks of data" -- Adam Green, March 2006

Mobile, but not as open

"As much fun as it may be to tweak Microsoft, or dream of open source breaking the Microsoft monopoly, the fact remains that mobile monopolies are tighter, bigger (in terms of units) and under much less threat from open source programmers." -- Dana Blankenhorn, August 2005

That throat you're choking may be your own

"Reliance on a handful of vendors may not be in your best interest...IT departments should hedge their bets." -- Laurie M. Orlov, January 2008

Power vs. simplicity

"But the question Google, Facebook, and Mozilla have not finished answering is how the power of open can be balanced with the simplicity of closed." -- Saul Hansell, June 2008

Who are you? Who, who? Who, who?

"Keys can get lost. They can get stolen. They can be misused. How do you authenticate that the user of a key is the person who is entitled to use the key?" -- Dana Blankenhorn, October 2007

You say hello, but how do you say goodbye?

"There's a security problem with many Internet authentication systems that's never talked about: there's no way to terminate the authentication" -- Bruce Schneier, February 2005

Digital identity: A meta-standard at best

"Assuming that there will ever be a single digital identity standard - is wrong...we (at best) can at least hope for some sort of meta-standard." -- Marc Canter, December 2004