Month: October 2003

One of the panels at BloggerCon concerned blogs and education, mostly for full-time K-12 and college students.  Whenever people talk about education it seems inevitable that debates will break out concerning what to do about public schools: “Why shouldn’t a kid in the ghetto have the option [vouchers] of attending private school, the same as George Bush’s and Bill Clinton’s children?” and “I worked in the U.S. Air Force for four years before moving to the San Francisco Public Schools and let me tell you that, for a government agency, schools are remarkably efficient.”

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This weekend is the BloggerCon conference at Harvard.  A young audience member had the courage to ask “What should I say when someone asks me what the point of having a blog is?”

Indeed this is a variant of the early 1990s question the first personal Web sites went up “What is the point of having a personal Web site?”

What then IS the point of personal Web site or blog?

Let’s go back to the beginning.  The commercial publishing world supports basically two lengths of manuscript: the five-page magazine article, serving as filler among the ads; the 200+-page book.  If you had a 20-page idea and didn’t have access to the handful of “long-copy” magazines in the U.S. (old New Yorker, Atlantic, etc.), you could cut it down to a meaningless 5-page magazine piece or add 180 pages of filler until it reached the minimize size to fit into the book distribution system (cf. any diet book or business bestseller).

Personal Web sites are interesting because they support 20- or 30-page essays beautifully, with search engines directing interested readers to those essays right at the moment that they’re curious about that topic.

Blogs are interesting because they support the 2-paragraph idea.  It is sort of ridiculous to create a separate .html file for every little aphorism or fleeting thought and it would be a shame to clog search engines with pages that have such a high machinery-to-content ratio.  Blogs and the RSS format make it work.  Everyone can write like Nietzsche or a Marcus Aurelius, even if few people ever come up with enough clever small ideas to fill a 200-page book.

Of course there remains the question of why write at all.  You don’t make any money from writing and wouldn’t it be more pleasant to concentrate on getting full value out of your digital cable TV subscription and luxury SUV?

What did folks at the conference have to say about this topic?  One panelist noted that Benjamin Franklin was an early blogger (personally I prefer Marcus Aurelius as an example).  Emerson, a Harvard alumnus (just like Ted Kaczinsky) was dredged up.  He would have loved blogs (“A chief event of life is the day in which we have encountered a mind that startled us.”).  The journal is a well-respected literary form and the blog is simply a more efficiently available journal.

Some panelists seemed insanely optimistic.  One guy noted that the nation-state wasn’t working.  We are afflicted with racism, wars, etc.  We need a new way to aggregate the wisdom of people and blogs are the answer.  Listening to this, I was struck by a horrifying thought:  George W. Bush must represent the aggregated wisdom of the American people, i.e., us.  Adam Curry compared the Weblog to the telephone in its potential to revolutionize society.  If the early results are mostly lame he related that “the telephone was first used to call ahead to say that a telegram was on its way.”

My personal answer:  my main site (philip.greenspun.com) is there to relate things that I’ve learned so that others don’t have to repeat my mistakes; this blog is here to entertain friends and if other folks stumble across it and are entertained or find their thinking sparked in new directions, that’s gravy.

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According to this New York Times article, Sun seems to be losing a few $billion.  This has caused the stock to crash.  Sun has roughly $6 billion more in the bank to lose, so don’t look for them to show up in bankruptcy court anytime soon.  Still, perhaps there is an analog here.  The record companies are suffering because the only thing that they have to sell is the CD, which was introduced more than 20 years ago and which is a derivative of the 125-year-old Edison cylinder.  Sun is suffering because its main product is a 33-year-old operating system, Unix, that has been only incrementally improved, and the Reduced Instruction Set Computer (RISC), developed by IBM in the late 1970s.  What else does Sun have to sell?  Java, which is kind of a strange mix of 1970s ideas (from C and Smalltalk).  When your products are this old it is easy for competitors to build cheaper knock-offs.  Sun has been remarkably unlucky in that the knockoff, GNU/Linux, was built mostly by volunteers and that its price is $0.

In the case of recorded music the solution is pretty obvious, i.e., some sort of subscription service that delivers music conveniently to the consumer wherever he or she happens to be.  The details might be intricate but it doesn’t take a great leap of imagination to believe something could be built that people would want to buy.  Can we say the same for Sun?

The market for “solutions” to the IT problems of rich and confused big companies would seem to belong solidly to IBM.  The market for complex desktop applications and professionally-configured desktop operating systems would seem to belong solidly to Microsoft.  Slugging it out with Intel in the hardware market seems like a losing game.  In fact, Sun appears incapable of competing in any current computing market.

What does that leave?  How about a completely new infrastructure for computing?  No user would ever have to configure his or her network (a friend went to a dinner party last weekend in which a 70-year-old woman related her 3-hour support call with the cable modem company; “I did a lot of pinging”).  No user would ever see a hierarchical file system with directories or folders.  No user would ever be asked by an application program whether he or she wanted to “save changes?”  People would have access to their data and computing power from wherever they happened to be.  Sun could sell the devices (handheld, desktop, laptop, in-wall).  Sun could sell the servers that made it all work.  It would all be 100% proprietary so that Sun could make some profit.  That’s my best idea.  WinXP, Unix and the MacOS all look extremely similar when you step back a bit from the problem.  The people for whom these are acceptable systems already have bought as much computer as they need.  The big untapped market is among people who aren’t willing to devote a big part of their lives to the care and feeding of this style of operating system.

Perhaps the process would start with Sun buying a cable TV and a cellular phone company in one city and writing code until half of the businesses and citizens in that town were hooked.

Let’s see if the comment section yields some better ideas for Sun…

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