Michael Dell: “We love Linux, and we’re doing our best to support the Linux community. We see lots of opportunity there. If the Linux desktops could converge at their cores, such a common platform would make it easier to support.”
Yahoo Mail Beta sucks
Actually, I have no idea whether it sucks or not, because even though I signed up for the beta program months ago, I’ve yet to hear word one from Yahoo, not even a “thanks for your interest, we’ll get back to you”.
In many ways, this is the inverse of what Joel Spolsky wrote about a few weeks ago, namely holding your cards too close to the vest.
Now, I understand why Yahoo is being extraordinarily deliberate about rolling out such a radical UI change to the general population (after all, Yahoo Mail is used by millions of “ordinary” people), but I’m technically savvy, an early adopter, and willing to endure spotty service from time to time to get early access, not to mention that I want to give my feedback on how things can be improved for all those ordinary people. Why on earth doesn’t Yahoo want to take advantage of my offer of free labor?!
So, while I have no idea whether Yahoo Mail Beta sucks or not, the very fact that I don’t sucks in itself.
Ah well. I’m no longer interested in being a Yahoo customer anyway, since they’re apparently the phone company now.
Speaking of not hearing word one, I haven’t heard a peep from Yahoo about that earlier post either, not even from Yahoo’s voice in the blogosphere (who also didn’t respond to email on the subject), and not even after getting a link from Doc, which no doubt got my sob story in front of many more eyeballs than would otherwise have seen it. So, it would appear my friend is SOL. I’m sure all those people who are emailing him at Yahoo will understand why he’s ignoring them. And I’m sure the years worth of data he’s accumulated at Yahoo can be easily recreated.
Technorati Tags: softwareasaservice, web20, yahoo
Demagoguery prevails, xenophobia at 11
Daniel Griswold: “This will send a chilling signal. It is just assuming that if a company is from the Middle East it is de facto disqualified from investing in the United States, and I think that is a terrible message to send.”
Technorati Tags: flatworld
Google and Blackberry: Taste great together
I did get that Blackberry the other day, and while I don’t have time to write an extensive review right now, I can say it’s all I hoped it would be and more. Somewhat surprisingly, it even reconciles properly with Gmail, surprisingly because Gmail’s POP implementation is a bit messed up in how it handles reconciliation on standard POP clients (and, as a result, there are still issues with reconciliation when I delete mail in Gmail or Thunderbird rather than the Blackberry, but I’m still experimenting and will post details in another post).
Even better, Google Talk for the Blackberry was released today, so I now have an open standard IM solution (i.e., my contacts don’t have to be inside a Google silo) that integrates across my desktops and mobile. Now, if Google would only use the Blackberry client to do over-the-air synchronization of my Google address book and Blackberry contacts (oh, and over-the-air Google calendar synchronization while you’re at it would be nice too :-)). Google Local for the Blackberry is an amazing piece of technology too.
P.S. – Google just acquired Writely. Yep, Google Office is coming together quite nicely.
Well said
Martin Michlmayr: “I think that one of the biggest problems Debian is currently facing is the inability to make decisions. There are so many endless, completely futile (and repetitive) discussions going on. We need someone who comes in, tells people to shut up and makes a decision on behalf of the project. A decision people will follow, even if they personally disagree with it.”
Blackberry blues
I dropped my cell phone a few months ago, and it ended up with a large crack across the LCD, which to me became the perfect excuse to finally get that Blackberry I’ve always wanted. However, given the uncertainty about the outcome of NTP v. RIM, I decided to hold off on my purchase till after the hearing last week, which was widely expected to provide some closure one way or the other as to whether RIM would be allowed to continue its service in the U.S. Unfortunately, there was no such closure to be found. So, I have a quick question to those more in the know than I: When the media talks of a “Blackberry shutdown”, I assume they’re just talking about a shutdown of the push email service, not a shutdown of all access to the Blackberry network? In other words, if Blackberry is shutdown, I presume I’d still be able to access the web etc.? Or would my brand new Blackberry become little more than an expensive paperweight?
Constant In Opal
I’ve just returned from Istanbul where I spoke at Özgür Yazılım ve Açık Kaynak Günleri 2006 (Free Software and Open Source Days 2006). I was last in Istanbul in 2004, and as then, I had an amazing time. Photos will be appearing in my Flickr photostream over the next few days. Thanks again to everyone who took the time to show me around and otherwise entertain me, especially Boran Puhaloğlu, Sinan Tunalıoğlu, Nazlı İpek Mavuşoğlu, Çağıl Uluşahin and Haldun Bayhantopcu.
Ahead of his time
Matt Asay: “Years ago, [Caldera founder] Ransom [Love] was vilified for saying things that we now take largely for granted. He wanted to charge a per unit license charge, arguing that support was not a good enough business model (or, at least, not the only business model for open source), and was classified a ‘parasite.’ Today, Red Hat has created a fantastic business with a per unit license model. (Yes, they call it ‘support,’ but it’s really a license fee.) Today, SugarCRM, Alfresco, etc. etc. etc. all essentially charge this way, though we’ve become creative in how we get there. Today, we’re heralded for our foresight. Ransom was trashed.”
Yahoo?
As regular readers of my blog should know by now, I’m a big fan of SaaS (software-as-a-service). I’d go so far as to say it’s the future of software.
Like all things, though, SaaS has its drawbacks, the biggest of which are questions of reliability, as the recent outages of salesforce.com have made painfully clear to its customers. It’s great if your data lives on the network, but what happens when your data isn’t available, either because the network isn’t available or because the servers it lives on are down? (The rhetorical question brings to mind Leslie Lamport’s famous observation that “a distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer you didn’t even know existed can render your own computer unusable”.)
Security and trust are important too. Prime example: saleforce.com’s less than forthright acknowledgment of the recent outages. Another: Just today, Google launched version 3.0 of its desktop search software, which gives users the incredibly useful ability to search their local documents from any computer in the world. Of course, it does this by storing the index (and, apparently, the documents themselves) on Google servers. Hmm. Do I really want my business plans stored somewhere on the web outside of my direct control? Then again, an increasing number of people keep their email on the web, so chances are, if I’m collaborating with someone, they’re already there.
As much time as I’ve spent thinking about SaaS, though, this was a new one:
A friend of mine managed to get himself locked out of his Yahoo account, and after hours on the phone with Yahoo support, he seems unable to convince the Yahoo bureaucracy he is who he says he is so they will let him back in. He even offered to fly to Sunnyvale to present his driver license. Apparently, the zip code Yahoo has on file is different than the zip code he’s had his entire life, and the support staff say they can’t unlock his account until he gives them the right answer, which he’s already doing. (Apparently, the best one particularly dim bulb in Yahoo customer service could come up with is that he call back each day with a different guess till he gets it right.)
In short, there seems to be some sort of an immovable object/irresistible force thing going on, and he’s not sure how to break the deadlock so he can get back to his data. The most pressing problem is that he’s got some tax related information in his email account, and on the current path, there seems to be no way for him to get to it by April 15.
So, I pose two questions here: First, if you work at Yahoo, how in the hell can my friend get his access back? As already stated, he’s spent hours on the phone to no avail. I’ve tried inquiries on the backchannel but have received no responses. Second, for the larger SaaS community, if our data lives on the network, what happens if Google, Yahoo and the like become the phone company?
Release early, release often is no panacea
Joel Spolsky: “Listen, I know that everybody is saying that the cool thing to do these days is Ship Early and Often, but when you ship half-baked ajax calendars that don’t do much and then get Scoble to go nuts about how great they are, well, you’re going to have a lot of people like me checking it out and realizing that, for example, no thought whatsoever has gone into printing, which is fine, it’s a 1.0 release, but you know what? I’m not going to look at 30 Boxes again — I’ve spent enough time evaluating it. G’bye. I’ve talked about this before — it’s the Marimba phenomenon — when you get premature publicity, lots of people check out your thing, and it’s not done yet, so now most of the people that tried your thing think it’s lame, and now you have two problems: your thing is lame and everybody knows it.”
“Release early, release often” is a strategy that works because it allows for incremental improvement—you don’t have these “big bang” releases every few years where you try to anticipate what your users will want, because your users are telling you what they want every step of the way while the thing is coming together. That said, Joel makes some very good points, and companies following the “release early, release often” formula would do well to consider them. In short, for “release early, release often” not to backfire, its proponents need to do a better job differentiating between the users that want to actively participate in the development of a new product and the users that are simply looking to solve a problem, because that latter group is ultimately going to be disappointed if the thing isn’t fully baked.