Category Archives: Business

Abandoning the Vista Ship

Dell started supplying Linux (without Windows) to its customers a while ago. Now it’s started supplying XP instead of Vista. What does that mean?
What happened is the OEMs revolted in the background and forced Microsoft’s hand. This is a big neon sign above MeII saying ‘FAILURE’. Blink blink blink. OK, MeII won’t fail, they have OEMs whipped and threatened into a corner, it will sell, but you can almost hear the defectors marching toward Linux. This is a watershed.

— Microsoft admits Vista failure, By Charlie Demerjian in Beijing, The Inquirer, Saturday 21 April 2007, 12:20

Demerjian says another big sign is that Gates went to China and announced a $3 price for Vista, down from about $300. Continue reading →

Truth is a Property of Networks

Dave Weinberger types out of a drug- and fatigue-induced haze:

Truth is a property of networks.

I can only guess at what I mean, starting with the obvious: Rather than thinking that truth is a relationship between the propositions we believe and the way the world is, such that the propositions represent the world, in the networked world the truth is argued for and connected via links. For all but the most mundane of truths, the network of conversations gives us more shades, nuances, and reasons to believe. Which leads me to think that if truth isn’t an emergent property of networks, then understanding is.

—Networked truth, Dave Weinberger, Joho the Blog, 13 April 2007

I think he’s right, except it’s not either/or: it’s both.

Continue reading →

Sentimental Education

Regarding Blogger Civility, I’d like to add that where there are real threats, of course the person threatened should complain, and if the threatener can be tracked down, there are already laws that apply. Also, some people think that technical subjects aren’t contentious enough to provoke threats; those people apparently haven’t yet gotten crazy rants from people who incorporate technology into their conspiracy theories, or who fear technology because it might help people oppose their favorite policies, or who don’t like technology because they’ve always been afraid of people who understand it, or who don’t like women/gays/blacks/whites/southerners/foreigners/whatever participating in it. And there are people who think the blogosphere is unusual in harboring threats; those people apparently don’t get out much. I wonder what sort of mail somebody like Condoleeza Rice or Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama or John McCain gets?

Anyway, the idea of a blogger code of conduct reminds me of something else:

A technique to detect favorable and unfavorable opinions toward specific subjects (such as organizations and their products) within large numbers of documents offers enormous opportunities for various applications. It would provide powerful functionality for competitive analysis, marketing analysis, and detection of unfavorable rumors for risk management.

— Overview, Sentiment Analysis, IBM Tokyo Research Lab, accessed 13 April 2007

Yet another artificial intelligence scheme; ho hum. Or is it?

Continue reading →

Critter Corn as Risk Management

Here’s a small business using the Internet as a marketing, sales, and customer support medium:
“I have had a Web site for 10 years, http://www.crittercorn.com,” Nyffeler said. “It is not a big moneymaker — most of my bread-and-butter business is from supermarket chains — but it gets my name out there.”

He said some of his larger sales have stemmed from businesses seeing his name on the Web site.

In addition to attracting customers from California to Maine, Nyffeler said, he uses the Internet as an effective communication tool with clients.

— Some farmers counting Internet as farm asset, By ADRIAN SANCHEZ, Columbus Telegram, vi AP, 3 March 2007

No more telephone tag. Nyffeler says now everybody uses e-mail, “and the messages are short and sweet.” Continue reading →

Software Vendor Liability

Bruce Schneier calls for software vendor liability:
Fundamentally, the issue is insecure software. It is a result of bad design, poorly implemented features, inadequate testing and security vulnerabilities from software bugs. The money we spend on security is to deal with the myriad effects of insecure software. Unfortunately, the money spent does not improve the security of that software. We are paying to mitigate the risk rather than fix the problem.

The only way to fix the problem is for vendors to improve their software. They need to design security in their products from the start and not as an add-on feature. Software vendors need also to institute good security practices and improve the overall quality of their products. But they will not do this until it is in their financial best interests to do so. And so far, it is not.

Information Security and Externalities, Bruce Schneier, Schneier on Security, 18 Jan 2007

Turn an externality into a liability, and software vendors will do something about it. The usual objection is that this would do in free software. I don’t see why, since it should be easy enough to craft liability laws that factored in profit, chronic nature of bugs, etc. so as to distinguish between big commercial vendors and free software volunteers. Meanwhile, many users and even governments are applying their own kind of software liability by moving away from the biggest commercial vendor to smaller ones or to free software.

-jsq