The Open Road

Twitter has become an excellent way to quickly scan headlines. It's terrible at just about everything else. It's hard to have a coherent discussion in 140-character soundbites, and even harder when the architecture of Twitter is set to "broadcast" rather than "discourse." But maybe, just maybe, Twitter's not to blame. We are.

After all, Twitter is simply a creation of our society, and reflects our priorities.

Not all of society, of course. After all, as The New York Times reported, teenagers, usually technology's early adopters, hardly use Twitter at all, with only 11 percent of people aged 11 to 17 using the service. They are, however, heavily into Facebook, preferring to share with friends rather than talk at strangers.

A generational thing?

Perhaps. But I think the technology we build and use says a lot about society.

Competition from Bing, Ask, and other search engines is just one click away and likely equally good for Google users, yet we stick with Google. Why? Because it's fast, free, and has never disdained its users with a cluttered interface. Many of us were with Google early on and continue to reward its early respect for its customers. We're a loyal people that likes a crowd.

This phenomenon is hinted at in personal computers, too. While I'm part of a rising group of people who prefers the Mac to Microsoft Windows, I'm also in a distinct minority, according to data from Net Applications. The reality is that most people look at their computer the way they do toilet cleaner: necessary to get a job done but not anything to get worked up about.

Contrast this to personal entertainment devices or phones like the iPhone/iPod. Here, Apple trounces Microsoft's Soviet offerings and Dell, a leader in enterprise computing hardware, has to go all the way to China to even register a design win. Apparently, we want to differentiate in our communications and our entertainment (iPhone/iPod), but not our work (computers).

Back to business. As well as open source is doing in enterprise IT, the reality is that CIOs and CTOs don't get too worked up about freedom and such. There's a very good reason that IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft dominate enterprise software, and "choice" is not it. These vendors simplify purchasing decisions by providing limited, but still good, choices.

Business, in other words, is business, not religion. OpenOffice is nearly as good as Microsoft Office in most ways, and better in a few. But it still captures anemic market share because it's simply not worth the bother for most enterprises or consumers. (Firefox, on the other hand, is, and continues to gain market share because we value the increased options its add-on library brings us.)

Open source is absolutely getting adopted, but only where it accomplishes tangible goals like cost reduction and increased productivity. As a society, we don't seem to want to waste hours of the work day fighting ideological battles. We just want to get work done.

Well, except for when we're furiously friending on Facebook during work hours, costing employers as much as 1.5 percent of productivity. You see, we're not all work and no play.

Which, incidentally, suggests that there just might be something to attempts by IBM and others to marry social software with enterprise IT. Our work lives are increasingly blended with our personal lives. They're just about the same thing.

All of which must increasingly be done in real time, as Twitter, instant messaging, SMS/texting, and other immediate or near-immediate technologies suggest. Even e-mail, which used to be considered "fast" communication, has moved to mobile devices so that it's omnipresent and, hence, that much quicker.

All of which raises the question, "Why are you still reading this post?" After all, you've spent 3,000 characters here in which time you could have already plowed through 21 tweets. Think of all the headlines you could have read. :-)

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

There are times when I think open source is an unstoppable force. And then there's OpenGoo.

OpenGoo declares its mission to be to "make the best Web Office. Period." But then it proceeds to undermine every benefit that a true Web office productivity application, like Google Docs, provides to its users. Like the Web, for starters.

That's right. The first thing that struck me when trying to use OpenGoo (aside from its rather unfortunate name, which is yet another reminder that marketing is an essential function, not an afterthought, for open-source projects) was the download page.

Download page?!? I thought this was a Web office productivity suite. Why would I want to download an application?

I never found out. Once I had downloaded and unzipped the file(!?), I was greeted with this:

I tried finding the application launcher, but couldn't. More pertinently, why should I? It's a Web application, right?

I finally gave up and used the demo, instead. It works fine, though it's nowhere near as polished as Google Docs, and still left me wondering, "Why do I care, as a lay consumer, that this is open source?"

Yes, there is value in having access to source code should OpenGoo go down (particularly as it appears one is meant to install and run OpenGoo inside the enterprise firewall, which sort of defeats the purpose of it being a "Web Office," but...). But would open source make OpenGoo a more resilient service, in the way that some are (wrongly) claiming open source would make Twitter more impervious to denial-of-service attacks?

Of course not.

The OpenGoo site brags that by using OpenGoo, "you are free of vendor lock-in." But I would gladly trade a little lock-in for some ease of use.

There is tremendous value in open source, but the OpenGoo developers have mistaken where it begins and ends. Open source should be invisible to the end users that care about a Web-based office productivity suite. By making it a feature, OpenGoo demonstrates misunderstanding of its audience.

Zoho also uses a lot of open source, but it doesn't sell open source as a feature. This is probably why you've heard of Zoho but, until this article, you likely hadn't heard of OpenGoo.

UPDATE @ 12:12 PT on 8/18/09: My post above was written in some haste, which prevented me from adequately explaining my points. I apologize for the confusion. I understand (and clearly implied) that OpenGoo is not a direct competitor to Google Docs, as it's meant to be run behind the firewall (i.e., it's an on-premises installation, not a cloud application).

But this, as I noted, is its biggest deficiency (well, after the name). It is neither fish (locally installed Microsoft Office) nor fowl (cloud-based Google Docs), and so it's unclear what value, if any, it provides, simply on architecture/installation alone.

No one is going to beat Microsoft Office with a light upgrade in deployment options, least of all OpenGoo, which I continue to find underwhelming in its UI and feature set. Open source is unlikely to improve on this. Given how much OpenOffice has struggled to attract significant development from outside Novell and Sun, in part because the development community isn't interested in rebuilding Microsoft Office (why would it? I doubt many developers have a Microsoft Office "itch" to scratch).

So, OpenGoo isn't Google Docs and doesn't want to be. What does it want to be? The premier Web Office, according to its website. It's not, as I note above and underline emphatically here, because it's light on Web and not innovative in its approach to Office.

I apologize for my hastily written post, but OpenGoo doesn't get any better on further reflection.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

All the hipsters in Silicon Valley talk about PHP, Twitter, and Web 2.0. But recent surveys show that kids can't be bothered to use Twitter.

Meanwhile, COBOL, one of the industry's oldest programming languages, still "equates to 80 percent of the world's actively used code," according to Stephen Kelley of Micro Focus.

COBOL? Really?

Yes, really. COBOL keeps chugging because, as John Willis suggests, it continues to power the boring (but essential) software like CICS (Customer Information Control System). Not very sexy, but when you think about life for more than a nanosecond, most of what makes life work is the transportation, finance, health care, etc. systems that don't make waves but do make our lives more efficient.

This is why the hot jobs in the cold economy center on "old" programming languages like Java and .Net. They're not cool. They're essential.

I've grown to love Twitter, but I'm not waiting for it to change the world. My demographic (25- to 45-year-olds working in technology) believes it's changing the world, starting with the ushering in of a new age of Iranian democracy. But as Foreign Policy points out, Twitter does as much to help crush dissidents and spread misinformation as it helps to remedy things.

In other words, it's really no different from the old technology, except that it does a better job getting into the news.

In sum, forget the hype. While we think technology runs at breakneck speed, the reality is that technology adoption does not. It's simply impossible, especially for enterprises, to adopt new technology at the pace at which it is developed and released.

This is why, for example, companies pay Red Hat to make Linux move more slowly with an 18-month release schedule. Innovation is great, but many enterprises prefer to get innovation on the drip.

Even when people, usually consumers, do quickly adopt technology, this is often a sign that it will be dropped quickly, too. Consider MySpace. Once on top of the world, it's now hemorrhaging market share to Facebook, which in turn will likely evaporate in the face of The Next Big Thing.

I suspect that the longer the adoption period for technology, the longer it tends to stick around. If I invest a lot of time and money in an IT purchase, I'm less likely to drop it quickly.

I'm not suggesting that Web scripting languages like PHP aren't big, or that Twitter is irrelevant. I'm just saying that the reality of what sells today is often very different from what gets funded today in Silicon Valley.

Linux is now old hat and safe, which is precisely why the value of Linux skills has risen 50 percent in the job market. The same holds true for open source, generally: now that it's old hat, enterprises can't adopt it fast enough.

If you're looking for funding from customers rather than from VCs, you might want to consider that boring, old technology that keeps the lights on but doesn't light up the sky.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

At the Oscon conference this week, Tim O'Reilly repeated something he has been arguing for years, but that resonated powerfully given some of the rancorous debates currently raging in the free and open-source software community. O'Reilly cut through the misguided logic of free-software advocacy with a simple statement:

I don't care about free software. I care about freedom...Architecture of systems matters more than licenses.

An open-source software license doesn't necessarily make you open. An open-source license doesn't guarantee freedom, either--at least not in the broad sense of the word.

For example, O'Reilly indicated that he uses proprietary Twitter instead of open-source Identi.ca for at least two reasons: 1) O'Reilly's preferred microblogging (Twitter) client, Seesmic, doesn't support Identi.ca (this will soon change) and 2) Twitter actually has a very open platform, as can be seen in the diverse and deep developer community growing up around it, something that is not true of open-source Identi.ca.

Twitter, in other words, with its closed license, may well be more open than Identi.ca, at least in the areas that most people care about (development community plus the ability to use tool of choice).

Sometimes we in the open-source community forget that licensing is a means to an end, and not the end itself. Licensing does not create a community: there are plenty of open-source projects that completely adhere to the Open Source Definition and yet are effectively closed to outside developers, while Microsoft and others have shown for years that they can attract significant outside development around their platforms.

Free-software advocates, despite their calls for freedom, can sometimes achieve the opposite, as Linux kernel founder Linus Torvalds declares:

I may make jokes about Microsoft at times, but at the same time, I think the Microsoft hatred is a disease. I believe in open development, and that very much involves not just making the source open, but also not shutting other people and companies out.

There are 'extremists' in the free-software world, but that's one major reason why I don't call what I do 'free software' any more. I don't want to be associated with the people for whom it's about exclusion and hatred."

Open software...but closed minds? What counts as open, and why do some believe the conversation begins and ends with a license? Which breed of openness do you, as a developer or as an end-user, care most about?

It's similar to the current calls for transparency in government. Transparency is a very good thing, but it is a means to an end. It is not the end itself, and creates significant costs, as Andrea DiMaio notes:

While increasing momentum on transparency consolidates and creates further political capital, it will also cause significant stress to the machinery of government. Processes will have to create and expose more data to comply with additional requirements. Executives, managers, and other government employees will be held accountable against a much larger set of metrics, and their decision-making processes will be potentially under scrutiny at every single step.

Some will say "To hell with the cost or difficulty! Just do it, and do it NOW!!" But these are the same sort of people who demand that all software be completely free forever, and right now, because they've never had to make payroll or, if they do, it's for a small consulting business whose industry impact is constrained by its own ideology.

Microsoft Corporate Vice President and Deputy General Counsel Horacio Gutierrez suggests that "taking purely ideological positions does not work in real life. Instead, flexibility and nuanced approaches to complex problems will tend to win the day over dogmatic approaches."

He's right, even if Microsoft doesn't always measure up to this "flexibility" and "nuance" he prefers. But then, none of us really do live up to our own hype.

Which is why, as Glyn Moody writes, we need to be careful in how we engage in discussing various strategies of openness:

Ad hominem/ad feminam attacks are not just irrelevant, they are harmful. They can lead to abiding rancor that poisons discussions and decisions for some time, and that helps no one--neither purists nor pragmatists--and certainly not free software.

As we broaden the conversation in the open-source software world to focus on freedom, and not necessarily free software, we'll find that there are different mechanics to accomplish this goal. Sometimes this will include open-source licensing. Sometimes it won't.

So long as it's the customer that takes center stage in the debate, I'm convinced we won't go wrong.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

Cisco Systems CEO John Chambers calls video "the killer app," but apparently, he hasn't been paying attention to trends on the Web, or even to his company's own emerging-collaboration story.

Video, while great, takes too long. We e-mail, instant-message, and tweet for a reason: it's short and to the point. Who has time to watch a video each them they want to communicate?

Perhaps even more critically, as Hampus Jakobsson pointed out to me (over Twitter, no less), video "requires full attention--the scarcest of all resources."

Cisco gets this. At least, groups within Cisco get this. That's why Cisco Senior Vice President Doug Dennerline's WebEx team has been adding presence and instant messaging through Jabber, e-mail through PostPath, and more to its Web-conferencing suite.

It's also why Cisco will almost certainly add some form of office productivity suite to WebEx, despite protestations to the contrary from Alex Hadden-Boyd, director of marketing for the collaboration software group at Cisco. (Apparently, Hadden-Boyd didn't see the memo from his boss, Dennerline.)

Zoho, anyone?

Zoho is a leading competitor to Google Apps and, in many areas, actually surpasses Google Apps. While some of Zoho's applications directly overlap with Cisco's current products, the sheer breadth (and, in some cases, depth) of its office productivity and collaboration story must be intriguing to acquisition-hungry Cisco.

Some suggest that Google will struggle to make it in the enterprise due to security concerns with Google Apps. Cisco doesn't have that problem. Its brand oozes "enterprise." As such, it may well be Cisco that changes the face of enterprise computing...by initially changing the way we communicate and collaborate within the enterprise.

Just don't hold your breath for video to part the waters. Video has its place, but it's a highly verbose form of communication, and the Web's most popular technologies increasingly teach us to speak sparingly.

Indeed, I think that we'll see Cisco acquire Control Yourself, the company behind open-source Twitter lookalike Identi.ca, before it changes the world through video.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

Just when I get consumed by the "destruction" in Schumpeter's "creative destruction," I stumble across something like this note from a new indie band on Dave Kusek's "Future of Music" blog:

TOTAL MADE THIS MONTH USING TWITTER = $19,000 TOTAL MADE FROM 30,000 RECORD SALES = ABSOLUTELY NOTHING.

In part, this is a testament to the power of Twitter, but it's primarily an example of how new technology can upgrade old business models, as Kusek points out.

These new tools, such as Twitter, will help the entire music business scale much, much better. Very popular musicians such as Radiohead will still make a lot of money. But relatively unknown artists, by promoting their work and selling stuff directly to the fans, using free or inexpensive online tools, will be able to make a better living than they do right now. The future might not be very bright for the big record companies, but it is indeed bright for the artists.

It's not about a wholesale replacement of the old world with the new. It's about making the old world more efficient through the Web.

Yes, some businesses will absolutely get bulldozed by the power of the Web. But not most. At least, not yet.

For example, Jason Hiner is likely right to suggest that Microsoft's enterprise dominance is unlikely to wilt in the face of Google in the near term, though I continue to believe Google has the upper hand in the long run.

This is particularly true when you track the executive departures from Microsoft to more agile competitors like eBay (Yes, even eBay is more agile than Microsoft), Google, Facebook, etc. Steve Ballmer was quick to call the death of offline media, but has been slow to move Microsoft to an online existence.

Regardless, there's still plenty of time for software companies and record labels to adapt to the power and potential of the Web. But the transition must start now.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey has suggested that "Twitter's a success for us when people stop talking about it," perhaps particularly its business model (or lack thereof). Unfortunately, either it's a success and I didn't get the memo, or it still has room to improve.

Assuming the latter, here are a few things that I'd gladly pay to have added to the Twitter service.

• The ability to lock in my user name. Facebook just launched personalized namespaces, but added the unnecessary drama of name-squatting. I was early enough to Twitter (and Facebook) that I got my preferred 'handle' on both (mjasay). Given the importance of having a consistent name/brand across services, however, I'd gladly pay for the right to lock in my preferred name. (Speaking of which, whoever it is that has "mjasay" on AIM, I'll buy it from you.)
• Quality of service. Twitter is not a matter of life and death for me, but given how often the service has gone down, I'd be willing to pay for a premium account with a service-level agreement. This likely isn't a standalone feature for which I'd pay but as part of a larger subscription? Sure.
• Quality of experience. Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails recently gave up on Twitter and other social media services due to the prevalence of "Metal Sludge" that hounds him. While I don't yet experience this on Twitter (except once and I simply blocked that person's Tweets and haven't seen or heard from them since), it's a daily fact of my blogging life. I assume it will come to Twitter, too. I'd happily pay to be able to pre-filter commentators that make their points in less-than-diplomatic fashion.
• Private Twitter communities. There are some things I'd like to tweet to friends and/or family, to business colleagues, etc. At present, however, I'm unaware of a service that lets me segment my "followers" to point tweets at certain groups. Rather than bore followers with personal shout-outs and what not, I tend to keep my tweets to lowest-common denominator content. I wish I could send different messages to different groups. I'd pay for that.
• Integrated 'long-form' communication. Sometimes a conversation is best continued beyond the 140-character barrier, but in many circumstances I'd prefer to keep it within the confines of Twitter, rather than giving out my IM or email addresses. It would be great to pay for an extended Twitter service that gives the option to open private chat rooms within Twitter to carry on a conversation that started with a 140-character tweet.
• Commissions on marketing leads. Dell makes over $2 million by distributing special offers through its @DellOutlet. There must be some value-added service that Twitter could provide to companies like Dell to help track leads sourced through its service? While this is something that I, the consumer, wouldn't pay for, surely it's something that Dell would?

I've been a harsh critic of Twitter in times past, but I've become a big fan. I'm enough of a fan that I'd happily pay for premium features that help me get more from my Twitter experience. How about you? What would you pay for?

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

Last week the Web was a'Twitter with news that a court had overturned Proposition 8, California's ban on gay marriage.

There was just one problem with the 'news': it's not true.

As The Los Angeles Times reports, someone pulled an archived story from latimes.com, neglected to check the time stamp, and started a raging wall of tweets and retweets.

Some people have a problem with Twitter's 140-character message limit. I think there's a bigger problem: most people don't seem to actually read all 140 characters, much less click on referenced links, preferring instead to graze on headlines.

Twitter, of course, isn't to blame. There's nothing that prevents people from following links, and there's nothing about Twitter that forces people to be headline-driven.

That's just kind of how we are, or at least, how the media thinks we are, given, for example, the news shows that increasingly depend on fast-moving soundbites with little analysis. (Something that is being blamed for Scottish children's poor attention spans in class.)

What Twitter does is facilitate our participation in the soundbite nation. We've become producers of soundbites (or, at least, regurgitators), and not merely consumers of them.

Is this progress?

I don't know. For my part, given that I, too, get sucked into the retweet/soundbite vortex at times, I'm committed to clicking on links before I retweet. I promise to read at least the first sentence of the linked-to article. I've got to start somewhere. :-)

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay. But focus on those first few characters--the last 50 are always throwaways.

Thomas Hobbes once described pre-social life as "nasty, brutish, and short." He couldn't have described Web commentary more aptly.

Hence, while Nick Carr has pondered whether Google is making us stupid, I wonder instead if the question should be, "Is the Web making us rude?"

I took a position on Twitter's policy change related to @Replies on Wednesday (briefly summarized, "People seem far more interested in complaining about the changes than in paying for the service"), and have been roundly excoriated since. Some have questioned my IQ, while others were content to lob ad hominem attacks, and one summed up the ire of many others by calling my argument "pretty damn silly."

My own experience is mild in comparison to those of others like Kathy Sierra which gave rise to calls for a blogging code of conduct.

What is it about the Web that allows, or perhaps encourages, such strong reactions to such relatively unimportant issues? In the U.S. we have freedom of speech, but should we use this freedom so irresponsibly?

Part of the problem is anonymity. I've written before that "On the Internet, no one knows that you're a dog...Or that you're a jerk." People say things under the guise of the Web's immediacy and anonymity that I'm convinced they'd think better of saying in person. I know I have.

But part of the problem is that the Web lowers the barrier to "fame," and apparently it's OK to abuse the famous. This past season in the English Premiership a debate has waxed and waned as to whether fans have the right to mercilessly boo the players well beyond the pale of good taste. "I pay for a ticket, therefore I have a right to be brutal to the players" goes the thinking.

I find this logic flawed, but I can at least understand it. It's a case of populism wanting to register its displeasure with overpaid and underperforming football (soccer) stars.

On the Web, however, what passes for "fame" usually isn't. Would you consider me famous? I certainly wouldn't. My kids still get excited when they see my picture on my own computer...in my iPhoto application...displaying pictures I took with my own camera. Me, famous? Not even close. Not even close to close.

Never has the bar to fame been so low.

Nor have the stakes been so paltry. Henry Kissinger is often credited with the statement: "Academic politics are so vicious precisely because the stakes are so small." The same is true of much of the debate that swirls around technology.

Let's be clear: no one's salvation is at stake in Twitter's business model, nor its @Replies policy. Open source offers a highly efficient way to produce and distribute software, but the world would hardly end if all software were proprietary. And while Google and Microsoft both seek to dominate the Web, our lives won't change dramatically if one of them succeeds for a few years, and a few years of dominance is about all the leeway a free market and disruptive technology allows. (Did Microsoft's monopoly on the desktop really affect your quality of life that much?)

It's technology, and a few of us like to write about it. But let's not become trolls over the relatively small stakes involved.

Yes, I know that technology does matter. My thesis adviser at Stanford Law School was Larry Lessig, after all, so I'm familiar with the importance of "West Coast Code."

But let's engage in the debate in polite fashion. This isn't a call for a group hug and subdued, milquetoast debate. It's instead a request for civil discourse. The Web should augment our ability to talk openly about a wide array of issues, but instead it too often encourages negative behavior that stifles quality discussion. We can do better.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.