“Somehow you still believe that the reason for Microsoft’s inability to make IE standards compliant has something to do with a lack of competition. I’ve read their posts in your mailing list. I know better. You do, too.

Standards have had nothing to do with Netscape’s declining market share, and if you can show one statistic that says otherwise, I’d love to see it. The reason for Netscape’s declining share is nothing more than Microsoft’s monopoly control over the browser marketplace. I would venture that half of the “86%” of users who are using IE now have never even seen Netscape’s browser. Remember, in the past two years, more and more people have come on the ‘Net — what’s that percentage? half of the current Internet users? — and the first and only application they use is IE. Even if some have made the effort to switch to Netscape, the fact remains that the integration of the IE browser into the Operating System has played more of a role in the decline in Netscape’s market share than any “standards compliance” issue. To deny that is to take a myopic view of the browser wars.”

“The WSP has taken exactly the wrong attitude. Instead of heaping scorn on Netscape (and, by association, the Mozilla effort), you should be supporting — nay, advocating — the standards compliance that Mozilla and Netscape 6 will bring to the market. You should be advocating for Mozilla’s standards goals that you so quickly took credit for a year and a half ago.

You should be encouraging the work of the many developers who are fighting an uphill battle against a monopolist. You should be encouraging the WSP members who are putting a serious effort into the Netscape and Mozilla product.

The WSP so easily turned its back on Netscape and the Mozilla effort. Do you know what your goals really are?”

“MSN and all the other Web properties in Microsoft are incredibly irate at the IE team for the cookie catcher feature. They claim they talked to MSN about the feature. Well, they did, *after* they had already implemented and coded it and Brad Chase and his team gave them an earful.

“What doesn’t come out in the Wired article is how obtrusively the third-party cookie notification feature is implemented. If you enable this feature (and right now it’s enabled by default), every time you hit a page with a banner that sets a third-party cookie, a warning dialog pops up. Every page. That’s not a behavior that anyone’s going to tolerate. And the all the Web sites will not be able to respond, even if they’re willing, quickly enough.

End result: users will turn off the feature.”

“This giant selection of systems to choose from may be great for keeping out of work open source programers fed, but it will hurt the “information” being shared. One of the big features for any of these
networks is the ability to quickly find whatever content you’re looking for. When it was just Napster (and just mp3’s) you could fire up your client, search for Van_Morrison-Brown_Eyed_Girl and *boom* you’d find every type of file under the planet available, things are much cloudier.”

“As more distributed filesharing systems are deployed, the value of all the systems will drop (there are various Laws of nature and the Internet to back up this kind of statement). Either Darwin (survival of the
best network) or standards will have to be the saviour. And winning via Darwinnian methods can be a painful process.”

“It is both a community hangout where hackers cluster, jotting down daily tidbits of info in publicly accessible diaries, and a forum for discussion, like Slashdot. There’s also an extra twist: On Slashdot, readers can rate the value of posts as part of a not-always-perfect filtering mechanism. But at Advogato, people rate one another.”

“What’s revolutionary about Advogato’s model is that like the Net itself — and unlike VeriSign’s top-down bureaucracy — it’s self-organizing, self-repairing and therefore hard to corrupt or otherwise compromise. “In all previous systems, once you get a certain number of wrong certificates, the whole thing falls apart,” says Levien. In Advogato, at least in theory, the system should continue to function even if abuse is widespread.”

“1.Initial enthusiasm (people introduce themselves, and gush a lot about how wonderful it is to find kindred souls).
2.Evangelism (people moan about how few folks are posting to the list, and brainstorm recruitment strategies).
3.Growth (more and more people join, more and more lengthy threads develop, occasional off-topic threads pop up).
4.Community (lots of threads, some more relevant than others; lots of information and advice is exchanged; experts help other experts as well as less experienced colleagues; friendships develop; people tease each other; newcomers are welcomed with generosity and patience; everyone — newbie
and expert alike — feels comfortable asking questions, suggesting answers, and sharing opinions).
5.Discomfort with diversity (the number of messages increases dramatically; not every thread is fascinating to every reader; people start complaining about the signal-to-noise ratio; person 1 threatens to quit if *other* people don’t limit discussion to person 1’s pet topic; person 2 agrees with person 1; person 3 tells 1 & 2 to lighten up; more bandwidth is wasted complaining about off-topic threads than is used for the threads themselves; everyone gets annoyed).
6.Finally:

1.Smug complacency and stagnation (the purists flame everyone who asks an ‘old’ question or responds with humor to a serious post; newbies are rebuffed; traffic drops to a doze-producing level of a few minor issues; all interesting discussions happen by private email and are limited to a few participants; the purists spend lots of time self-righteously congratulating each other on keeping off-topic threads off the list).

OR

2.Maturity (a few people quit in a huff; the rest of the participants stay near stage 4, with stage 5 popping up briefly every few weeks; many people wear out their second or third ‘delete’ key, but the list lives contentedly ever after).”

“My real feelings is that content management is going to be the basis for all future operating systems. We have too much information stuff, and we want all of our personal information sphere to interoperate will our environment. We need something to manage all this. And we need it to work in a way that doesn’t require a call to an engineer to make changes. ”

“The basic message to that article is that you’ll be better off writing a custom Content Management System for your company than you will be if you use one from a vendor like Vignette. Those tools (pre-packaged CMS’s) require so much customization that you end up writing most of a CMS anyway, they claim.

What I think the author misses is that it’s a lot of work to write the underside of a CMS. Sure, Vignette’s system has a lousy reputation among those who actually use it, mainly because their workflow system sucks… but what so many companies will find is that it’s an awesome amount of work to try to develop the services that Vignette provides in your own in-house product… and then you have to try to support it. If IT staffs were static, that would be fine, but they’re not.”

“”Most Internet entrepreneurs treat the users’ attention as a Third World country to be strip-mined,” said Jakob Nielsen, a Silicon Valley expert on software usability.”