Welcome to Orcmid's Lair, the playground for family connections, pastimes, and scholarly vocation -- the collected professional and recreational work of Dennis E. Hamilton

 

Listening to the Gang

IT Conversations: The Gillmor Gang - May 21, 2004.  This is an audio feed with Steve Gillmor, Doc Searls, Jon Udell, Dana Gardner, and guest Mary Jo Foley.  I wanted to hear some of these voices, and Scoble provided the link.  I like that Scoble links to a great variety of viewpoints and, even though he may have rebuttals to offer (e.g., about Mary Jo's previous prediction of the waning support for the Tablet PC), all perspectives are acknowledged. I'm using this lead to observe how those voices work together on the air.

Dana Gardner provides a nice review of the RSS mention by Gates and how that may fit into the concern for attention and finding a range from e-mail (very intrusive) to web sites (very passive). There is also an opportunity for profiled aggregation based on user's behavior, which is not picked-up on much.

Lots of discussion of how this is strategic or not.  It is agreed that Gates' speach is raising the level of attention.  Jon Udell sees a fundamental shift and an amazing experiment in transparency at Microsoft.  Jon sees the video of Ward Cunningham and what is happening in MS Development as remarkable.  There is speculated to be a tug-of-war in Microsoft and, while the panel can't assess it, it is noticed that this experiment is something that no Microsoft competitors are doing. (Tim Bray, at Sun, may be the champion there, but we have seen nothing like Channel9 at this point.)

Foley sees the MS blogs as great sources.

Death of the Tablet PC: Foley sees re-evaluation of how they are coming at the tablet market.  The slate model was the focus originally, now it is looking at a blended function.  It looks like Bill Gates still uses yellow legal pads, and not Tablet PCs.  Questions about Apple in the home/personal and Microsoft needing a business solution to feed itself.  I think that there is still confusion between the Tablet PC as a particular kind of configuration and how the support for Tablet functions are incorporated in Windows distributions.  The tablet as a differentiation from laptop may disappear either way.

BEA is opening up via open-source and wants to attract eyes to their Java run time and their application server. Doc Searles sees this as the progression of making peace with open-source, then getting strategic, then becoming aggressive with it.  The BEA move is seen as one of dueling frameworks, and this duel is being fought on open-source territory.  It is pointed out that only Microsoft has not found an open-source strategy yet (although it seems to me that the open-source is evil direction is being softened).

Discussion moved to the anti-spam and identification proposals with authentication of e-mail.  Jon Udell sees the cryptographic approach as a potential opportunity.  Gillmor sees PKI as just beyond the coherent level of understanding of 90% of users.  The Yahoo proposal allows for individual identities to be handled.  Google is noticed as a candidate for that (though I don't think so).

It is noticed that DNS is extensible, but the extension mechanism is not what these identity proposals are using.  There's an object lesson about extensibility in general and how successful practical extensions often work off of informal and ad hoc approaches, not the one that is designed-in.  There is a missing trusted, neutral third-party to operate the necessary registry..  Google is mentioned as a candidate for that (though I don't think so).

Jon sees two distinct questions around identity.  One has to do with authentication.  And to find out something about a party, there is a different avenue.

posted by orcmid at 5/25/2004 08:20:30 AM