Cisco just announced that they are open sourcing their network access control client (known as Cisco Trust Agent.) While on the surface it might seem like a generous move, Alan Shimel (at one of my portfolio companies – StillSecure) has a somewhat different point of view.
I’ve noticed an increasing trend of large companies embracing the open source movement by “open sourcing” their lousy software that doesn’t work very well and that has little to no adoption. An optimist would say “this is good – at least the open source community can fix that crap.” My view is that this just pollutes the efforts of companies that are legitimately trying to work effectively with open source communities. “Open sourcing orphaned software” as a marketing strategy just doesn’t feel effective or useful to me.
Great video on the essence of the web today from Michael Wesch – an Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University.
I love the title – The Machine is Us/ing Us. The neat question, of course, is where is the web going to be tomorrow? At the end, Michael suggests that we need to rethink a few things, including copyright, authorship, identity, ethics, aesthetics, rhetorics, governance, privacy, commerce, love, family, ourselves. (Thanks Bruce for the pointer.)
I’ve been talking about, dealing with (in a “user-generated content context”), and thinking about spam a lot lately. As an investor in email related companies going back to the mid-1990’s, I started experiencing spam as a real problem around 2000. Chris, Ryan, and I spent a lot of time thinking about it and ended up investing in two companies – Return Path and Postini – which have both been very successful companies on the good side of the war against spam.
I was trying to remember when the first spam appeared (I had early 1980’s in my mind) so I went to the source of all knowledge (Wikipedia) and looked up spam. I turns out the first official email spam was in 1978. The ramp of spam – especially in the last three years – has been incredible.
Due to the magic of Postini, I see none of it (although according to Postini I’m now getting over 2000 per day on average.)
Brad Burnham of Union Square Ventures has an important and thought provoking post up titled What’s next? Whenever Brad writes something, I read it carefully – not only because he has a fantastic first name – but because he usually nails something important.
Brad’s description of the progression of the “central value proposition” in the computer system over time – from hardware, to systems software, to application software, to networks, and ultimately data is a great framework. He asserts that the next layer of value will come from governance.
If you are an entrepreneur or an investor in tech companies, it’s worth a slow, meditative read.
Over the holidays I read a magnificent book titled Designing Interactions by Bill Moggridge. It’s an incredible collection of history combined with interviews from many of the great computer interface designers and entrepreneurs from the past 30+ years. The stories are superb, the interviews well done, and the pictures are incredible. It’s a must read for anyone serious about designing computer software of any sort. It’s a big book – I petered out about two thirds of the way through it as Moggridge shifted from storytelling to predicting the future – but I fault myself for trying to consume it at one time (and expect I’ll go back and try some of the later chapters again.)
The other day, as I pounded away on my keyboard and moved my mouse around the screen clicking away feverishly, my mind started wandering on the “there must be a better way theme.” My mind wandered to an afternoon that I spent playing Guitar Hero with my friend Dave Jilk and it occurred to me that there have been three companies that came out of my fraternity at MIT (ADP) that have built companies commercializing unique models of human computer interaction.
Guitar Hero from Harmonix Music Systems is the first and one that Dave and I were both involved in early in their life. While the first person shooter video game metaphor has been around forever (think Asteriods and Space Invaders – the category was NOT created by Doom – just made more fun and bloodier), I eventually wore out on video games because I got bored of killing things. When Harmonix came out with Guitar Hero, I got a copy but didn’t do anything with it. A few months ago I finally started playing with it and immediately became addicted. So have a bunch of other people as it became one of the top ten games of 2006. Interestingly, much of the buzz around the Nintendo Wii has been similar – rather than using a joystick to move a killing machine around a fantasy world, we get to interact with games much more physically – through a different interaction metaphor.
The Roomba from iRobot is another example of this. Colin Angle and his partners ultimately created a consumer based robot that does one thing extremely well – vacuum your floor. Metaphorically, they’ve simply wrapped a bunch of software in a consumer device that enables a radically different and fascinating human computer interaction model. If you’ve got a Roomba and a dog, you’ve also learned that the animal computer interaction model is a blast to observe.
Oblong is another company that came out of someone’s brain that resided at 351 Mass Ave in Cambridge (yup – it must have been something in the water.) The best way to describe Oblong is to ask the question “do you remember Tom Cruise in Minority Report? Remember the wall sized computer he controlled with his hands. That’s what John Underkoffler and his partners at Oblong have created.
It didn’t dawn on me how important this was until I started putting the pieces together that our current UI metaphor – which started at Xerox, was popularized by Apple, and mainstreamed by Microsoft – is starting to grow long in the tooth. I’ve been using a T-mobile Dash for the past few months and while I love the device, the Microsoft UI is immensely frustrating. I’ve trained myself to be incredibly efficient with in (and largely control the phone functions with speech), but the iPhone bashed me over the head with the current level of fatigue that I (and I expect others) have with their current UI metaphors.
While Amy likes to ask me – when she gets frustrated with Windows – “what was wrong with DOS and the command line anyway?” it prompts me to wonder why I’m sitting at my desk pounding away at a keyboard. There are – and will be – better ways. It’ll be fun to look back N years from now and say “boy – that WIMP UI sure was quaint” kind of the way we think of “C:\>” today.
Update: This morning, as I was reading the Wall Street Journal Online, I saw Walt Mossberg’s review of Enso from Humanized. Excellent retro stuff – now I get to type “Run Firefox” to run Firefox.
I’ve written plenty about patents in the past, including a provocative post titled Abolish Software Patents. I was having a conversation with John Funk, a partner in Evergreen Innovation Partners, at the end of last year after a catch up lunch. We got into a serious conversation about the fact that so much of the software patent good vs. bad rhetoric seems like it’s more about opinions, anecdotal experience, and agendas – rather than a comprehensive review of the facts. So – we decided to take it up a level and see where the conversation went.
Now – John and I have some interesting history around this. We have been colleagues (I was an investor in Exactis (fka Mercury Mail / Infobeat – his first company), adversaries (Infobeat sued a company I co-founded – Email Publishing – for patent infringement – which was eventually settled for $1 and a cross-licensing agreement between Exactis and MessageMedia (the company that acquired Email Publishing)), and once again friends and colleagues (I’m an investor in John’s latest company, Evergreen IP.) While we’ve both struggled personally with an emotionally charged issue, we’ve ended up friends.
Interestingly, given the wide range of experiences we’ve each had around software patents, we have pretty similar views. So – John fired off a long email to me which I’ve edited and broken up into several posts with the following premise: What if we attempted to craft a social policy hypothesis that would defend the existence of software patents, and then we went about creating an experiment that would attempt to disprove that hypothesis? Hmm – social science – disproving a null hypothesis – how academic!
Let’s begin with this: Patents in general, and software patents in particular, are a government conferred monopoly that rewards the public disclosure of a software method or program. The rationale for patents is anchored in (1) public disclosure accelerates innovation because future invention rests on prior patent disclosures (e.g., innovation is a chain that builds on prior building blocks), and (2) conferring a patent monopoly will encourage innovation that otherwise would not occur due to perceived risk/return (e.g., in absence of patents, competitors will trounce new entrants by rapidly copying; therefore monopoly is needed to be able to raise capital and take the risks).
More coming in part 2 – same bat time, same bat blog.
When Snap Preview came out, I tossed it up on both Feld Thoughts and AsktheVC the day I noticed it. About a week ago it started to annoy me. While it has shown up on plenty of blogs (Snap claims over 40,000 already), I just can’t figure out the value. I noticed that Fred and Bijan both took it down, so I followed suit and just disabled it. Maybe I’ll try again on their next iteration, but for now I’m Snap free. In addition, in two weeks I’m going to put up another widget from one of my portfolio companies that is a lot cooler and I think they’d clash.
Welcome to 2007. You did make that copyright notice thing a variable or an include, didn’t you?
I ran an interesting experiment the past 30 days. I simultaneously used three different desktop configurations – my traditional Windows XP three monitor setup (at home and work), Mac OS X running on a 30” Cinema HD display (at my house in Keystone), and Vista running on a new Lenovo X60 laptop (wherever I went.) The surprise winner – at all levels – was Vista running on the Lenovo X60 laptop (with Office 2007.) It just blew away the other two configurations for performance, ease of use, configurability, and integration with all the stuff I work with (my home network, my office network, my data / music / pictures which live on both, the Internet, all the crap I have stored all over the Internet, stability on all the Internet access points I use (including wireless and EVDO), and all the stuff I play with every day.)
I was completely surprised. I expected to fall in love with OS X running on a 30” monitor on a smoking hot Mac Pro. I ran Firefox on each of the machines with Google Browser Sync so for the 33% of the time I spent in a browser, life was basically the same (hmmm – important double message there.) I had Parallels and CrossOver running on the Mac so I could run Windows apps when I needed / wanted to. I suffered through Entourage for a while (man is that a shitty program – I completely blows my mind that Tasks don’t sync and what’s with the new mail window always being in the top left of the screen), tried Outlook in both Parallels and CrossOver (ok but not great), but spent way too much time in front of the Mac fighting on the margin to get the computer to do what I wanted it to do for me.
In contrast – and surprisingly – Vista and Office 2007 just worked. Maybe it’s the way my brain is wired, but I was massively more productive on the Vista laptop – with the tiny screen and one window in focus at a time – then I was on the beautiful OS X machine with multiple windows open. On the Mac, I couldn’t find stuff, things didn’t work quite right, the apps were limited, and when I tried to change the config, I occasionally went down various rabbit holes. On Vista, things just worked the way I expected them to. And yes – in addition to the normal Office desktop apps, I use browser-based versions of them (OWA, Gmail, and Google Docs & Spreadsheets.) The rich desktop still rules (I prefer FeedDemon over everything else, I like to blog offline – I went back to BlogJet because Windows Live Writer had a few nasty bugs, and email / tasks / contacts / calendar – at least for me across my little universe – is way more fun in Outlook than anything else.)
Fortunately, all is not wasted. I brought my Mac Pro with the 30” monitor back from my place in Keystone this morning and deposited it on Ross’ desk for him to install Vista on it (alongside of OS X). I’ll continue to play with OS X and experiment with it, especially when I can run a side by side comparison with Vista on the exact same hardware, but I have a gut feeling I know what the outcome will be.
Today, someone forwarded me John Milan’s article on Read/WriteWeb titled “Changing Climates for Microsoft and Google, Desktops and Webs.” I’m waiting patiently for part two of the article as it’s nicely provocative. While Google / Apple are much more trendy than Microsoft these days, there’s something deeper going on that shouldn’t be overlooked, especially in your friendly, neighborhood global corporations. As Amy likes to say “what happened to DOS – it was good enough.” Call me a heretic.