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“Reading the discussions of individual bugs provides an interesting glimpse into the workings of the Mozilla open-source process, and into the interactions between Mozilla and Netscape. In a number of cases, Mozilla engineers have fixed standards-compliance bugs and have had their patches to the source code reviewed twice by senior engineers. Even when the patches are extraordinarily simple ones, and the engineers are convinced that they pose no risk of introducing other bugs, their requests to include the fixes into the Netscape 6 release are denied by the Netscape Product Development Team (PDT) out of fear, apparently, that accepting these patches would cause the release schedule to slip.”

“As I write this, Netscape’s 5.0 web browser is almost two years late. Partially, this is because they made the suicidal mistake of throwing out all their code and starting over: the same mistake that doomed Ashton-Tate, Lotus, and Apple’s MacOS to the recycle-bins of software history. Netscape has seen its browser share go from about 80% to about 20% during this time, all the while it could do nothing to address competitive concerns, because their key software product was disassembled in 1000 pieces on the floor and was in no shape to drive anywhere. That single bad decision, more than anything else, was
the nuclear bomb Netscape blew itself up with.”

Jakob Nielsen, maintainer of www.useit.com, has published a hardcopy book entitled Designing Web Usability. This article asks “What can we learn from this book?”

Nielsen writes for a broad audience of decision-makers, HTML designers, graphic designers, and programmers. Nearly all of the examples are from e-commerce, corporate, or commercial sites. ArsDigita Systems Journal has a narrower audience in some ways. Nobody comes to ASJ to learn about HTML or graphic design, for example. But our audience is interested in a broader class of Web services than those treated by Nielsen. In particular, ASJ readers aspire to build sites that are collaborative, sites that use computing technology in an effective way, sites that have a dramatic impact on the users’ perceptions of how the Internet can be applied. We do have readers that would like to sell a few more widgets from their catalog ecommerce sites, but on balance we’d like every article here to be worth the time of an MIT computer science senior taking Software Engineering for Web Applications (http://philip.greenspun.com/teaching/one-term-web).

The goal of this article is to pick out the most interesting stuff from Nielsen’s book, leave out stuff that would be obvious to our readers (e.g., “frames suck”), and tie Nielsen’s material to related ideas.”

“I have a certain tendency to think of Michael Moore as a funny, slap-dash kind of guy. I think it’s because time dulls the memory of how dark Roger & Me and Moore’s later TV shows were — they were funny, but whistling-in-the-dark funny. From reading his latest letter, however, it sounds like he’s stopped whistling, and started shouting.”

“In my hometown of Flint, 32,000 GM jobs have been lost since you and Clinton took office. That’s 5,000 MORE GM jobs than were lost there during the ENTIRE 12 years of Reagan/Bush! Are you even aware
that two-thirds of the school children in Flint live below the federal poverty level? And you wonder why the race in Michigan is so close! These people you left behind had nowhere else to go EXCEPT to Nader — unless they choose to just stay home on Election Day, which is what the majority of them will do.”

“Another boy band? Hardly. 2gether is sort of a Spinal Tap for the turn of the century. The group was “created” as a parody of such boy bands as N’Sync. A mockumentary called, 2gether, aired on MTV earlier this year and a strange thing happened. The parody band generated 300 fan Webster; the soundtrack hit the charts; and Britney Spears asked the parodists to open for her last tour. It gets weirder. The musicians have started to take themselves seriously.”

“Currently there are three levels of response to coercion, which can exist simultaneously in our culture. Some of us are readily fooled by the simplest of manipulative techniques. These people, who I call “Traditionalists,” are the sort of folks who are emotionally moved by politicians’ speeches, dedicated to their local sports teams, and ready to believe that government agencies would prevent us from being duped by misleading advertisements.

The next group – who marketers like to call “sophisticated” audiences – feels they understand how the media hope to manipulate them. These “Cool Kids” respond to coercive techniques that acknowledge their ironic detachment. Their television remote controls and video game controllers have changed their relationship to the television tube. They like to deconstruct every image that is piped into their homes. But they fall for the wink wink, nudge nudge plea of the modern advertiser or salesperson who appeals to their media-savvy wit. As long as the coercer admits with a sideways glance that he’s coercing, the Cool Kid is likely to take the bait. He is being rewarded for his ironic attitude.

The last group has graduated from the culture of cool and is just plain fed up with everything that has a trace of manipulation. The “New Simpletons” want straightforward, no-nonsense explanations for what they’re supposed to buy or do.”

“The concept of Web services is the beginning of a new service-oriented architecture in building better software applications. The change from an object-oriented system to a service-oriented one is an evolutionary idea that sublimated from the global Internet and Web system. To understand how to build Web Services into your computing architecture, you need to carefully understand the role they play. This article details the software engineering concepts behind the Web Services architecture, how it has evolved, how it is structured, and how it can be brought into your existing computing infrastructure”

“The semantics of services — what they do and what data elements they manipulate mean — is the key issue. Business value results from B2B collaborations that do the right thing. If they do something else, the damage may be dramatic. How, then, do we trust that a service does the right thing before it is used? And how do we make that determination at Internet speeds?

In small-scale OO systems, interface compatibility usually implies semantic compatibility. That is, an object that implements the right set of messages with the right types of arguments probably does “the right thing.” This is true, in part, because small-scale systems tend to be built by a small team of programmers with shared understanding of how the system operates and, in part, because small systems offer little opportunity for ambiguity. However, in large-scale OO systems, the semantics provided by a given class cannot be reliably deduced from the message interface alone. Clearly, in an Internet populated with many thousands of services offered by thousands of different companies with very different agendas, compliance with some specified message set will not be sufficient to deduce the semantics of the service.”

“For many of Napster’s users, the main benefits of its file-swapping
service are that it provides music conveniently and for free. Some
people will be prepared to pay for the convenience and for good
quality downloads, provided the price is right. That means the
main challenge facing Bertelsmann and Napster is to produce a
paid-for service which people would rather use than free sites
which could copy Napster. Some of these other file-swapping
services will be harder to police. Services such as Gnutella and
FreeNet allow the swapping of music files between personal
computers but without the use of a central service, like Napster’s.
This makes it much more difficult for courts and regulators to act
against them. By teaming up with Napster, Bertelsmann has
accepted the inevitable: Internet distribution of music is here to
stay and likely to grow enormously. But the deal does not mark the
end of the music industry’s piracy problem. Music companies now
have to show they have more to offer customers than free
web-based services.”

“For a moment there, as Napster’s usage went through the roof while the music industry spread insane propaganda about the impending collapse of all professional music making, one could imagine that the collective will of thirty million people looking for free Britney Spears songs constituted some sort of
grass-roots uprising against The Man. As the BMG deal reverberates through the industry, though, it will become apparent that those Napster users were really just agitating for better prices. In unleashing these economic effects, Napster has almost single-handedly dragged the music industry into the Internet age. Now the industry is repaying the favor by dragging Napster into the mainstream of the music business.”

“PC Data’s latest survey of the buying habits of some 120,000 US home-based Net surfers shows that Napster users soon cut the number of albums they buy, once they get proficient at downloading songs from the MP3 sharing service.

The company measures sales through online stores. It found that “new Napster users are just as likely to purchase music at cdnow.com after initially downloading Napster software. However, 90 days after downloading Napster software, consumers’ online music purchases plummet”.”