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“Microsoft’s latest announcement, called Microsoft .NET, while touted by the likes of Fortune Magazine as a huge “revolution”, is really nothing but vaporware, and I think it proves that something has gone very, very wrong in Redmond.

With vaporware, you promise all kinds of features and products that you simply can’t sell because you don’t really have them. Of course, Microsoft doesn’t have one line of .NET code. But .NET is worse than vaporware. In their blasé loftiness, Microsoft isn’t even bothering to provide the vapor itself.”

“Ya see, the bright side of vague documents like the .NET white paper is that they are a kind of Rorschach test. People read them with preconceived ideas, and since the document is so vague, they think that Microsoft is reiterating their ideas. Dave Winer, president of UserLand software, has many
interesting, innovative ideas about software. When he read about Microsoft .NET, he assumed that Microsoft was finally recognizing the same ideas that he’d been talking about for two years. Dave, you give them too much credit. They are completely clueless compared to you. They are playing the
trick of psychic hotlines and newspaper horoscopes: by feeding you cloudy, meaningless generalizations, you fall into their trap of thinking that they read your mind. “Today the planetary alignment is such that you will take a big step forward to achieve your goals.” The difference is that Dave has real, concrete ideas that can translate into real software, while Microsoft is still in the kind of lalaland they were in 6 years ago when they were talking about how “Cairo” would provide “Information At Your Fingertips,” a vision that the Internet fulfilled and Cairo didn’t.”

“I’m absolutely certain that Net devices will become ubiquitous and will change our relationship to computing and to information. However, I’m just as certain that the industry suffers from a surfeit of hype, which is to be expected in any new, explosively-growing industry.

International Data Corp. (IDC) says there are currently only 560,000 wireless Internet subscribers in the U.S. This is a trivial number given the hype wireless Internet has received. Even if this number were twice as high, it would barely cover early adopters.

CIDCO recently bragged that its MailStation e-mail appliance has sold a total of 17,400 units through the second quarter. The device has been on the market for a year.

While Net devices will eventually become ubiquitous, the devices, applications and content still aren’t mature or compelling enough to capture the broad public’s interest. Sorely lacking are multi-purpose devices with sharper displays and killer apps. Besides personal information management, telephony and
e-mail, we need acceptance of applications such as device-based payment systems,PayPal, and e-books before broad-based acceptance can occur.”

“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).”