Meryl Streep won the Oscar for Sophie’s Choice, a film that hinges on (spoiler alert) a woman having to choose which of her children will live and which will die. Microsoft is for that kind of choice. In a blog post later copied to GovLoop, Microsoft’s Dan Kasun lays it out. “Choice has been one of Microsoft’s strongest messages for years,” ... [
Once again, Google has bought something only to open source it. This time it’s ReMail, first acquired, then put on Google Code as open source under the Apache 2.0 license. (It previously did the same thing with DocVerse.) ReMail was more efficient in terms of system resources than Apple’s own mail.app, it offered full text searching, and it had other neat ... [
Apple’s suit against HTC could end one of two ways. Either Apple becomes the next SCO, which ran itself aground claiming rights to Linux, or it becomes the next Microsoft, which is prospering while claiming to own Linux. The answer depends on how hard Apple presses its case. You can get a clue by looking at who Apple has sued. While ... [
The low-hanging fruit in the renewable energy business still lies with efficiency. Cutting your energy use without crimping your lifestyle gives you a faster payback than turning into Ed Begley Jr. It’s still good to be a little Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) on energy use, even if your politics are to the right of Rush Limbaugh, because there’s money in saving, ... [
The 311 service has been a “red headed stepchild” for American cities practically since it was launched in the mid-1990s as a phone service. (Picture from Moonbattery, a conservative blog.) The idea was to make 311 the 911 for non-emergency calls. A burning building call 911, a burning question call 311. But that charge was so broad that most cities did ... [
In all the talk about New York financier Paul Singer’s plan to go all Gordon Gecko on Novell, one word has not been mentioned nearly enough. Microsoft. Microsoft needs a viable Novell, and Novell’s Linux business was on the verge of becoming viable when Singer’s Elliott Associates swooped in with an offer to break up the company, seize its cash, split ... [
Dries Buytaert of Drupal and Acquia is warning that Software as a Service is becoming a threat to open source and that clouds could create the same vendor lock-in customers sought to avoid with open source. (This is Dries at last year’s Drupalcon in Paris, in a close-up of a photo by Pedro Lozano. From buytaert.net.) Even where SaaS companies let ... [
That first step is interoperability. Getting proprietary gear to work together, to transform reports among proprietary standards, is the first step on the road to an open world. The HIMSS show takes that step every year with what it calls its Interoperability Showcase. At this year’s show in Atlanta it occupied the whole end of one hall of the Georgia World ... [
The announcement by Twitter that it is switching to Cassandra for its database lookups puts new attention on a project that has yet to reach Version 1.0. Cassandra had been underway long before Oracle bought Sun and mySQL. Facebook first launched it in 2008 to power their inbox search feature. It was released on Google Code in 2008 and became an ... [
Today Matt Asay urges government buyers to support open source, open data and open standards. Why? Because it’s better. Because it promotes competition. Because it gives government flexibility. But after watching government on every level, in various countries, for over half my lifetime, I can tell you the last thing any government wants is to make a decision its successor can ... [
Since I began writing this blog in 2005 I have watched open source move from a fringe idea to something embraced by the IT mainstream. But there are still extremists out there who want to destroy open source. Some of their names may surprise you. What they have done is retreat into a group where they seek not to be identified. ... [
No. Matt Asay hits the nail on the head. In full “knock this board off my shoulder mode,” the Ubuntu COO dares Microsoft to sue Canonical, or Google, or someone else over its Linux claims who might fight back. To torture my recent analogy (analogies can’t fight back), Microsoft isn’t Neville Chamberlain. It’s the guy on the other side of the ... [
In response to my piece yesterday, my Italian friend Roberto Galoppini referenced a piece he did last August called the Open Source Innovation Backbone. Packaged software companies may just use open source to build a common base on which they can innovate. Or they may copy a proprietary product, competing against it together in order to drive out a competitor’s monopoly ... [
Open source may become the default position of customers, but it is still not the first option when a market is new. This is a point open source executives like Matt Asay continue to struggle with, one that closed-source advocates continue to hammer on. (Picture from the Breakthrough Institute.) Open source is shared freeloading. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. ... [
Another day, another Microsoft patent deal. This time with Amazon. And more whining from Linux advocates that this is a “Microsoft tax” aimed at making Linux users pay Microsoft for the open source operating system. I have thought that too. But let me play devil’s advocate a moment, using as my text Marshall Phelps’ Burning the Ships. Isn’t Microsoft just buying ... [In the late 70’s and early 80’s, CB Radios {Citizen Band} were hot. Everyone had one in their car. Some even had base stations in their homes so they could be on the CB even while at home. There were literally millions of CBs sold in the US during those years. At one time, the CB was the most stolen item in car thefts across the nation.
CBs started more or less as a tool used mostly by cross country truckers. They used them to communicate about road conditions, restaurants, speed traps as an aid to their fellow truckers. Cross country trucking is a long lonely profession and having someone to talk to once in a while really helped pass the time and make the profession a bit more enjoyable.
Then came John Q Public. They came in droves. They chatted about everything they could think of to anyone who would listen. There were millions of them, perfect strangers, socializing about everything and nothing. Didn’t matter, they were committed!
There were so many people using CBs during this period that there were even movies done like Convoy that featured over the road truckers using CBs. Seemed weird at the time and looking back on it, seems even stranger that it happened at all. Kind of surreal when you think about it.
Then, all of a sudden, CBs were over. Just like that! The fad died a silent but quick death.
So what happenned?? My sense is that people just got tired talking with total strangers about nothing. In addition to being almost a complete waste of time, using a CB was actually very time consuming. People grew up and got busy. They no longer had hours and hours to spend talking with people they didn’t know about things they didn’t care about. It was over.
The only people that continued to use them were the truckers who originally had a legitimate use case for them in the first place.
And now we have Twitter! Yikes!!
I’ve been using it a bit the past month and I have to say, the parallels are amazing. If you use a tool like Tweetdeck, you even come out of a session feeling like you’ve been using a CB. Actually, it almost sounds like a CB too, except there’s no talking.
Twitter is growing just like CBs did back then and I suspect Twitter will share a very similar fate unless they come up with a use case model beyond what they have now. The good news for them is there are a lot of developers writing apps for Twitter which will hopefully morph it into something useful.
What Twiiter has now is little more than a glorified CB. They have a long way to go.
1 response so far ↓
1 Tom // Jul 1, 2009 at 10:49 am
I totally agree. You did an excellent analysis of this twitter phenomenon
.One of the other parallels of CB to twitter is the spreading of false messages and rumors. I remember the profane chatter, confrontations and fights stimulated by the anonymous nature of CB. It seems the same thing is happening on twitter as people put false rumors on celebrities or even pretend to be the celebrity. I can’t see how this twitter can be any more than a passing fad. Hopefully, whatever replaces it with better security and fact-checking, will have a better name than twitter.
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