Information Manager Journal

Ed Foster: the customer's champion

Few technology journalists fought as tenaciously or consistently for so long for the average IT customer as Ed Foster. It was my privilege to work with him at InfoWorld in the 80s and 90s. Ed was one of the best, and the comments pouring in for him at InfoWorld's Web site, in the wake of his death last Saturday, are a lasting testament to the impact Ed had in an industry that needs to be reminded that customers are more important than vendors.

P.S. Ed deserves his own Wikipedia page. I'm always startled by the lesser tech journalists and would-be tech journalists who somehow have gotten this recognition.

P.P.S. The Wikipedia page now exists.

Declaring blog & book bankruptcy

This is hard to write.

Every day, people declare "blog bankruptcy," stating that they are no longer able to keep up with the blogs they're reading. I'm declaring that today. But there's a bigger declaration in this case.

For six years, I've been laboring to write a book. The research became a monster that took over and choked off my common sense. Rather than trying to limit the scope of the book to a discussion of software development trends back then, I went for a grand vision, trying to sum up three megatrends: what was happening to open up computing to provide more choice, what was happening to try to thwart that, and how security concerns threatened the current and emerging models of computing.

After five years, my book collaborator Howard Pearlmutter, after having tried valiantly to inspire me to finish writing based on some visionary notes of his from 2002, said five years was enough time to finish. He was, of course, right, but I had become obsessed with nitpicking every little assumption Howard had made in his notes about how he saw things playing out. Howard's a great guy and I'm afraid in the process of an argument last year with him, I did an injustice to our friendship by becoming too concerned that this world-renowned programmer and architect would send me a bill for his time. I'm so sorry, Howard. I appreciate all you did for me.

But I compounded my error by deciding to soldier on without him. I recast my book with a new title and three themes, instead of one. It would be a history of this decade's computing: Everybody Has a Share: Myth, Madness and Momentum in the Digital Decade. The last third was titled momentum. Here I made my last error. I assumed that by 2010, there was still a chance for the existing PC and client/server-based computing models -- best represented today not by Microsoft Windows but by Apple's OS X -- would emerge bloodied but viable, more open and more secure, as they faced the challenge from software-as-a-service. My rationale was that the service levels and quality we expect from PCs and servers would never be exceeded by cloud computing -- or at least the differences wouldn't change for a very long time to come -- and that privacy concerns would slow down wholesale migration to keeping all our data and applications on someone else's computers -- some small group of service providers each with massive facilities.

This week I realized I was wrong on all three counts that would make my book an essential read. The current computing model is giving way, slowly but inevitably, to a cloud computing model. Does it exceed the service levels of running apps on your PC? No, not yet, but work is now well underway to fix that. Is your privacy assured? No, but that hasn't stopped millions from adopting Google's applications or a host of other Web 2.0 offerings, and now you can move entire databases and applications to services such as Amazon's EC2 and soon similar services from Microsoft, and ultimately Google. Moreover, with the planet's global warming crisis, it makes ever-more sense to millions to save the planet by shutting down their own energy-wasteful PC servers and data centers and hand over everything to service providers who can squeeze every watt out of computing.

While open source remains a triumph of developer will over commercial greed, it is now being ingested by every aspect of what remains of the software industry. My eternal admiration goes to Richard Stallman, who I thought was kind of kooky when I first heard about GNU at the Hacker's Conference in 1984. If not for him, politics and the law today wouldn't recognize the ability of creators to disseminate their works in the new ways that make Linux and Firefox and so much more possible. Kudos also to all the open source committers and supporters whose actions spoke louder than words and finally created an effective counter to Microsoft's world-dominating ambitions.

Open standards are another thing. They too are being ingested, but in the process, all the old tricks and schemes of software capitalism are being brought to bear. Is CalDAV an open standard? No, because it's being tweaked behind closed doors. But I celebrate the efforts of CalDAV's working group because they will have beneficial interoperability when all is said and done. Most customers still only care about interoperability, not standards, and software companies have been playing the interoperability game as long as there's been software, giving information only when forced to by customers or governments or rivals. And by the time the most important standards reveal themselves to developers, that computing model has morphed enough that it just doesn't matter as much anymore.

Yes, there's a book worth of standards madness to be written, but it's not an essential book looking forward (someone please prove me wrong!) and anyway, the problem of how open proprietary data is isn't going away any time in the indefinite future. Don't believe me? Try to move your Facebook contact list over to some other social network, spam your list to get them to join the new network, and release their personal details to a bunch of strangers on the new social network. Sure, standards make it possible, but they don't make it right.

As for the momentum, that book is now out. It's Nicholas Carr's The Big Switch, and he was willing to say what I wasn't, that cloud computing is all that matters moving forward. Yes, he's a bit early on the adoption, but the trend is inevitable. The most telling quote was this one I read in Information Week:

Q: If companies are starting to use the Internet for data processing, is security a huge problem?

Carr: I don't think it's a huge problem. The onus is on the suppliers to prove their reliability and security and earn the trust of the buyers, but my own feeling is that ultimately the utility model will offer greater security than we have today, because today our IT system is incredibly fragmented. Some companies and some individuals are very attuned to security and are very good at it, and others aren't.

Carr is absolutely right. I wasn't a big fan of Carr's first book, because I do think strategic thinking about IT does matter, and makes a huge difference to success or failure of business today. But this security thing will sink any computing trend that smashes into it. That includes email, which all these years later still hasn't solved the spam problem.

None of this means that I think that classic personal computing or client/server computing will just disappear next week. But the writing is on the wall and the trend is accelerating. I personally will continue to guard my own information's privacy more than the average person, but that's me and my generation. The next generation is still concerned about privacy, but is more willing to use cloud computing services despite their concerns. And as far as reliability, or availability, who's lost more data in the past twenty five years -- service providers, or personal computer owners whose flaky hardware and bad backup habits conspire every day to erase millions of files by accident?

To all those who have waited patiently for this book, and cheered me on, my heartfelt thanks. To my family, my message is, tomorrow morning Scott's going to focus on using his abilities to tell stories for money again. Or whatever I end up doing, since that whole landscape looks nothing like it did six years ago. Calendar Swamp will continue on a limited basis, because it represents the community of calendar-sharers like nothing else on the planet. The focus is squarely on interoperability, not open source or open standards, and that's where it will remain.

And to you reading this, keep up the good fight for open, secure and private computing, but remember the words of George Eliot, which still adorn my old domain's home page:

Blessed is the man, who having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact.

When I do have something to say that relates to this blog's past themes, I will say it here, at least for now. I'm definitely a wiser man for all I've tried to achieve, but now I need to get back to work.

Bott: Blame the crapware, not Vista SP1

The original release of Windows Vista was certainly buggy. There were jokes about it even from speakers at this week's Microsoft Office Developers Conference. But as Vista Service Pack 1 comes out, could poor performance be laid at the feet of the "crapware" -- trial programs and advertising, also known as "craplets" by sources such as Wikipedia -- pre-loaded on PCs by their manufacturers? Ed Bott believes so. A clean install of Vista works wonders for performance, agreed many of his commenters. I think Bott's got a point here. Here's where Apple really shines -- they just don't allow this stuff -- and desktop Linux is vulnerable to the same thing happening as it grows in popularity. Does anyone know of a Web site that rates various PC manufacturers' crapware problems, and how easy it is to do clean Vista installs?

Stretching it thin

Am I the only one amused by this headline at CDW.com?

"Thin client computing: Heavy on features"

Google Calendar: GoogleBase + ?

This makes sense, hoax or not: A general-purpose free database to be hosted by Google, upon which loads of different applications, including calendars, can be built. A big drawback of every Web 2.0 calendar application I've looked at is, the company creating the calendar controls the schema. If Google builds in flexible data export, we can drain a large portion of the swamp and really open up computing.

Technorati tag: GoogleBase

PDC dis-connectivity disease

Many folks who took their PCs to Microsoft's Professional Developer Conference last month found when they returned to the home or the office that their PC's connectivity had been mysteriously crippled. I too was bitten by this bug and only came across the solution today. So far, I haven't seen any comment on any of this from official Microsoft-dom.

Technorati tag: PDC05

Second anniversary

Today marks the second anniversary of Information Manager Journal. By far the most popular post during that time is when I wrote about Infocard, Microsoft's new identity management technology designed by Kim Cameron. Amazingly, that posting is still the top result for the "Infocard" search on Google.

A big thank you to my regular readers as well!

I'm also celebrating the high listener ratings being given to my talk with Asterisk uber-geek Brian Capouch over at IT Conversations.

WinFS may still be Vista-only

While the press at PDC fixates on Microsoft Office "12," the most interesting thing I've heard so far is Microsoft's Shishir Mehrotra revealing that Microsoft still doesn't know if the final version of WinFS will run on Windows XP or only Windows Vista. Ironically, the first beta of WinFS, being distributed to developers here, runs only on Windows XP, not on the Windows Vista beta also distributed here.

Technorati tag: PDC05

Microsoft PDC online calendar: ugh

After JavaOne and OSCON, I'm spoiled by conferences that provide their agendas, including descriptions of breakout sessions, in downloadable calendar format. Microsoft's PDC Web site has a clunky old-style session list in HTML or (ugh) Excel format. I emailed Robert Scoble on Tuesday. "Turns out we don't have an Outlook/iCal schedule," he replied. "We'll see if we can make one. Sorry about that." With four days until the conference starts, I'm not holding my breath.

The PDC attendee list in OPML format is cool though. (Note: PDC is sold out.)

UPDATE: To Robert's credit, he pointed me to this page, where it's possible to build a calendar and apparently export it to Outlook. It's klunkier than being able to view all the sessions at once within Outlook. I think I know why they did it this way, however. The system requires a login, and saves the calendar on Microsoft servers, so PDC organizers can get an idea of how many people might attend a session. So that's the tradeoff: Harder to find the session you want, easier to find a seat once you get there, if Microsoft moves sessions around to the appropriate-sized room in response to advance interest.

UPDATE #2: Sessions you pick have to be added to Outlook ONE AT A TIME. It's nearly as slow as cut-and-paste.

Technorati tag: PDC05

Blogger? Journalist? It's all about who gets the press passes

I don't begrudge any hard-working journalist who earns a press pass to a conference. I've seen lots of them practically begging to be admitted to some show or other. But to me the debate over who's a blogger and who's a journalist boils down to who's going to get those press passes. I've worked hard to maintain such credentials. You have to have a continuing, credible body of work to point to, and I believe that I do. Also, I don't own any tech stocks or take money from PR outfits. Recently I was approached to write something "on spec" and receive money from such a PR agency, then get it published somewhere. I never got as far as finding out if I would have to disclose to the "somewhere" that I wrote it for pay. I walked away. That's not my style. But perhaps I'm being old-fashioned? Consider Peter DeLorenzo, the Motor City blogger who's the subject of a two-page star treatment in Business Week. He sometimes admits he gets hired by the companies he writes about. Then he even appears to turn on them when they stop paying him. But with 65,000 readers of his blog, I'm sure he has no problem getting press passes to auto shows. It's true there's always been some wiggle room where it concerns who gets a press badge and who doesn't, but here's an extreme case of someone who stretches the public's trust in writers to its limit. Ultimately, DeLorenzo's ethics, or lack of them, erode the trust placed in anyone who wears a press badge.