ɔimoɈɒ

Wil Shipley is crazy.

He’s still someone I totally respect – though I’m not up there on the “man love” thing. Jobs is still my role model but Wil is such a good writer that I think it’s terrible for the rest of us that he can write prose as well as code.

Today, he’s displaying his crazyness by challenging Bill Gates to a bet. Call me picky, but the bet is a bit of a sure thing and I don’t reckon that Wil will have to pay out a single dollar of the $10000 bet that Vista will not ship by January

Vista is a shambles. Downloading the beta LEGALLY and using it for a wee bit just showed me how much of a shambles it is. Already they’re tweaking the UI alone just so that if you don’t have a kick-ass graphics card it doesn’t look like mud splattered your screen.. The new theme isn’t much better to be honest but then again when have we ever turned to 4000 engineers to ask them what constitutes good UI design. What did they do to fix it? Turned the grey to blue. Whoop-de-doo.

I don’t have $10000 to wager and to be honest, that’s a kind of vulgar way of making a point. Vista may ship on time but it’ll be awful. We know this.

On the other hand, in true retaliation for calling him out, BillG could just redirect all of his daily spam for a single day to Wil’s main email account. Can you imagine?

I spent the last week on vacation with my family (mostly in Disneyland Paris) and arrived back yesterday. I’m hoping that over tomorrow, Saturday and Sunday we’ll get our server organised and everything set up ready for the SyncBridge beta. As long as we announce before Omni announces their new product I’ll be happy 🙂

A sobering thought allows me to riff on Scoble when he talks about what he deleted when he left Microsoft. Thousands of emails – knowledge that a successor wouldn’t have to time to sift through. It’s kinda cool that I still have some mbox files from when I was in Nortel and we moved from COCOS to Netscape Mail – we had the choice for a couple of years to go to Outlook and that would therefore mean that old mail was simply lost. After those couple of years, the choice was removed. It was Outlook or nothing. Of course, those of us in the know made sure we could still use Mac OS X Mail….(which brings me to an argument that PC admins are more likely than UNIX admins to be lazy….but that’s a blog for another day.

I wondered aloud the other day about the knowledge in my head that wouldn’t transfer if I was hit by a bus. What passwords do I keep in there and not share with the team. What knowhow is exclusively mine and isn’t replicated by the other guys. When you consider the value of such information and the damage it could cause to the company if the worst happened, then I guess it’s time to start doing things about it. Business Continuity Planning is not just for big companies which have too much budget and not enough consultants wandering around.

Anyway.

Scoble and his wife Maryam each have a post about their new gig at Podtech. Both of them comment about how Patrick, the mini-Scoble was a little surprised at the Podtech offices (2000 sq ft in a office park) when he was used to the massive Microsoft campus.

Maryam spent a little time talking about her sleek silvery love – no, it’s not Robert in a futuristic catsuit – they gave her a new MacBook Pro.

Robert blogs about how working at a startup is exciting. I couldn’t agree more. He mentions using GMail and Google Calendar (because it’s smart to outsource functions like that which aren’t your core business) and also mentions running out of places to sit because their people have now exceeded their space for seating.

He should try being Bedouin 😛

The Scobleiser wrote on Thursday about what he considers to be business card best practises.. Admittedly we were trying something different when we tried something new with our new business cards.

Again we’ve had no negative feedback on our cards unless you count a merciless slagging from Guy Kawasaki which I don’t mind as he states in “Art of the Start”, – DON’T LET THE BOZOS GET YOU DOWN.

Anyway, it shows that Scoble is still capable of doing great posts despite not working for Microsoft anymore.

We’re a Bedouin company. We have registered offices but they’re not offices. We have no telephone except mobiles and some seldom used VOIP lines. We have no fixed abode. Sometimes we’re working from one place, sometimes another.

It’s notable that Wired’s Jargon Buster for June 06 had the following entry:

v. Downsizing a business by eliminating all but the core assets; employees and the communications links between them.

A company that has gone completely bedouin lacks a physical location, operating simply as a network of engineering, sales, and support staff connected 24/7 by Internet and cell phone.

Of course, it’s not just for companies as this post over in think:lab proves – bedouin is a potentially interesting goal in education. This is kind of how I see a lot of the Steiner education process, but I digress. As an example of how it works, my friend Kevin Callahan, a talented programmer and classical guitarist, offers guitar lessons over the web using iChat AV. How cool is that???

Today we spent some time walking through Belfast and I can honestly say that being Bedouin is a lot more fun during an Irish summer than it would be at any other time of the year. We really do need to bring raincoats every day though. You can never be too sure.

Now, Bob Pritchett over at FireSomeOneToday has an interesting post regarding HOVs (Home Office Vehicles). He says:

“I found the home made, the nicely done, and the one I would really like.”

Woah.

Are these not defeating the purpose of Bedouin? I suppose not if there’s no geographical location but some of these examples just seem beyond the scope of Bedouin. They’re more like a military operation – the aircraft carrier of mobile office transports.

We’ve been laying the groundwork for our transition to full Bedouin behaviour. We still need to scope out the best places for coffee and then see if they have WiFi (and if they don’t, we’ll install it).

Sounds like a plan.

Technorati Tags: broadband, bedouin, wireless

I’m really tired tonight. I helped my sister move house and even though we had the help of two neighbours and three work colleagues, I’m absolutely shattered. So tired I can’t even face looking at the ever mounting paperwork which I need to get through. It didn’t help that we were given 3 hours to empty a house…

The new house seems smaller, now that everything is still in boxes. The telephone is STILL not connected and it’s 23:20 and BT promised they’d get it connected today. If it’s not connected by midnight, someone is getting a phone call in the morning. This lack of connection holds up the installation of broadband at the house (though I’m 99% sure that I never want to do any more business with BT ever again due to poor customer service and may just get a Wireless Broadband link from NTRBroadband, assuming that Lisburn is within their coverage). I am, frankly, sick to the teeth of BT and yes, I know it’s the people. They just lie and lie and lie. You’d think they still maintained a monopoly and didn’t give a damn about their customers. Duh!

On Tuesday, one of my employees at Mac-Sys, Wayne, leaves for pastures greener in Minnesota where he’s joining his lady love. She’s American you know. While I may question the sanity of anyone moving to the USA these days, I can understand that it’s a great opportunity for him and I really hope it works out. I have no wish to visit Minnesota but it’s nice knowing people all around the world.

Anyway, this is the last blog post for 1H06. See you on the other side (and Sunday is my birthday so I doubt I’ll blog :))

Technorati Tags: blogging, broadband, wireless

I was mailed the other day by a Google recruiter, asking if I was interested in working there. My first reaction was to say no (and that’s been my final reaction too) but I took a bit of time to examine why. This actually started out as a comment on MJs recent post and has turned into a bit of ramble.

I’ve always been a bit *thingy* about Google. I think it’s because I worked at Inktomi during the “search engine wars”. Google came along and stole the Yahoo! search engine provision from Inktomi (which consequently went against Yahoo! – everyone started using Google directly instead – ironically, Yahoo! ended up purchasing Inktomi in 2003).

During 2001/2002, Inktomi ran a few marketing campaigns designed to win back the Yahoo! account – I remember seeing a big truck with a poster board on it driving around Santa Clara saying “Yahoo! – Google is stealing your customers” or “Do you, uh, Google?” For a while, Google actually blocked Inktomi employees from using their search engine while at work. We could all access Google via dial-up or some other subnet, but anything that was specifically Inktomi had been blocked.

So why did I turn down the possible job? (This wasn’t an offer of employment, just an expression of interest). I think it was because I was intensely loyal to Inktomi – they gave me almost 4 years of a great career and let me live in London, Boston and San Francisco while really learning a shedload about the IT industry. I still see Google as a large reason why Inktomi ended up going under (the other large was reason was the 2001 post-dot-com recession), and thus a reason why I ended up not being able to stay in the US (my visa ran out when my job did). Seems silly when I write about it, but at the same time I still feel it – even knowing it’s silly.

Today I use Google for searching due to lack of any real alternative – given that I use Safari for browsing and I can’t change the search engine used in it, and that nowhere else that I know of gives comparable results. I don’t use Google Maps because their coverage of N. Ireland is poor. I occasionally use their image search, although I’ll just as often use Altavista for that. And I don’t really use anything else they have – Orkut, Gmail, Gcal (if it can be called that). I still feel like a bit of a sell-out for using them.

Once OmniWeb 5.5 comes out in Universal (or when I switch back to PPC mac – OmniWeb on my MacBook is a bit flaky) I’ll be able to try out using other search engines again. I know it’s a bit of a cop-out (I could after all just bookmark Yahoo! for example) but the convenience of typing in the search box means I’ll not switch till my browser supports it.

Update:Thanks to Zimba™ for pointing out that I could change my default search engine in Safari (and also pointing out I’d missed out the paragraph explaining why I didn’t want to work for Google).

Dave Winer riffs off Google Checkout being “baaad mmkay” because one day his “idea of Google soured, it was an instant flip”. He says they started to act like Microsoft. I’m wondering when they started this and in what ways. I know people have a lot of opinions about Microsoft and their success has certainly brought them contempt (and Dave is absolutely right that their success made them arrogant and left us with browsers that were malware-riddled as well as behind the times.)

Google on the other hand doesn’t seem, in my opinion, to have done anything like Microsoft. I don’t hear stories of Eric Schmidt throwing a chair across a room in a fit of rage. We don’t have embarrassing videos of Larry Page dancing around at a developer conference. Google have not been convicted of leveraging a legal monopoly to illegally destroy competitors. Or did they bundle Orkut with Sketchup and Google Maps so that we’d be forever nagged at to use their branded products?

Dave makes it out to be a trust issue. That he doesn’t trust Google. I don’t trust Google either. Nor do I trust Microsoft. I don’t even trust Apple (and that’s the devil I do know). And I certainly don’t trust Dave Winer. Never met the bloke.

I just get the feeling that Apple dominates the headlines when they’re popular because everyone wants to see them and the iPod take a fall. Similarly with Google we have some wanting to be the person who predicts their downfall.

If you’re going to criticise a company, be less vague. Does Google Checkout mean that Google wants to be the identity czar of the Internet? Dave really complains about companies being untrustworthy.

It’s not the companies, Dave, it’s the people. If someone doesn’t pick up the hotel bill they promised, it’s because a person didn’t do their job. It’s not a big conspiracy. There might be a reason – maybe you pissed off the CEO. Maybe someone who looked like you hit on his wife. There’s always reasons and it boils down to people.

Anyway. I just realised I totally missed the summer solstice. It must be all the world cup fervour. I can honestly say I’ve spent less than 5 minutes watching some men kick an inflated bladder around a field and that it was more than enough.

Technorati Tags: google, trust