Anyway, it’s very depressing and bewildering to me. Obviously I understand what Verizon gets out the deal. Under this proposal there will be no network protections for wireless access of any kind, which unless you think the future of the internet is shoving the same amount of bits over telephone and cable lines, is probably the most important thing to give protection. As if that isn’t a big enough loophole, there will also be no protections for anything referred to as “additional services”, which is vague. The examples given have been, so far, a lot of bullshit. FiOS TV, healthcare monitoring, 3D (seriously!) have been thrown around. Guess what? Those all work with TCP/IP. What this amounts to is anything new won’t have protections. Anything you can think of that isn’t being done on the web now could be called an “additional service”, why not! Twitter is new right? or does it have to be something that is not in a browser to fool the misinformed that there is some magic happening there? Maybe Apple’s app store, or Amazon’s video rental system, or Roku boxes. Are those “new”? I mean they run over the “public internet” and TCP/IP just fine now, but imagine a fun new world where Verizon could argue these are new functionality and should be excluded from protections.

Google is fundamentally misleading people with this. TCP/IP is a dumb, generative network. They know this of course, the person that helped create it, Vint Cerf works there now. As Doc Searls and David Weinberger said in their essay, “Adding value to the Internet lowers its value”. The value of the internet is that it is a dumb network with all the value at the ends. You can, now, create an app store, or Twitter, or FiOS TV, or healthcare monitoring, without changing the network or involving the carriers. This allows for rapid innovation. Can you imagine if Twitter had to meet with every ISP in the world before rolling out? It might be similar to how it was for them to get SMS support, which is still spotty by country, and occupies a huge amount of time and effort.

There is no reason to pretend that we need to draw some imaginary line in the sand and say that everything over this line is some “new service” which net neutrality would inhibit. Quite the opposite, net neutrality allows rapid innovation. Changing how the internet works and having everyone get into business arrangements with ISPs will slow innovation. Of course, the idea that Verizon cares about innovation is also a ridiculous lie.

What I really don’t get though, is what is in this for Google? People say, Verizon is a huge carrier for Android, but Google doesn’t really make money on Android, and even if they did, why make such huge concessions in the wireless space? It’s not like Verizon has any serious leverage, are they going to stop selling Android phones, and watch everyone switch to AT&T? Google’s whole plan for Android isn’t to make money by most analysts estimation, it’s to commoditize the smart phone OS. That goal is achieved no matter what Verizon does. Android offers the only practical response to the iPhone that Verizon can also fuck up and brand however they want, I really don’t see them abandoning that. Apple will simply not allow any proprietary rebranding or labeling, and will likely just sit it out in US markets until Verizon concedes (and maybe also moves on to LTE while they wait). The only other option is Windows Phone 7, which Microsoft seems to be working with AT&T for, but even so that is a gamble, and Verizon just got burned pretty badly with the Kin. So, seriously, what is Google getting out of this?

The reaction so far has been very positive I think, but there has been some negativity. Most of it seems to be along the lines of, “that’s nothing new”, or “it’s just fancy chat” etc. I think a lot of this is missing the point from a perspective of technological superiority. Sure, it might not be anything that different if you are the kind of person who can set up a wiki, and a mailing list in a few minutes. Most people aren’t like that. Most people have never used a mailing list. Most people that use computers have never used a mailing list, or a wiki. It’s just too hard, and not something they are interested in. People that forget this I think, may just be (enviably) isolated from that level of user.

The inbox metaphor is something that people get. If I can send you a wave, that is also a wiki page, and a chat, and a shared document all in one that is a lot of hurdles I have crossed in getting you to use modern software. Currently I have to talk you into a wiki, train you to use email correctly. (no reply below what i said!) and convince you that chat isn’t just for your kids.

From what I have seen the initial user interface will be easy enough for everyone to just get, without having to be talked into it. That ease of use is based on the email metaphor. The actual protocol though is not similar to the email metaphor at all, and is another source of excitement.

This system is lightweight and simple enough for it to very easily grow into things that are not planned now. The system of waves, wavelets, and blips, allows for a really simple access control system, and versioning. As more clients and tools support this I think we will really start seeing some uses for the tech crowd that look very little like email.

I hope use of this spreads quickly. Microsoft seems like the big loser here. Of course they could implement this in whatever is after Exchange 2010, but somehow I think they would resist out of pride.

It’s a form system that stores the data in xml, for use by web applications, or more realistically Sharepoint Server. Businesses need to make forms, and Sharepoint only has limited support for this, so obviously the answer is another application to create forms, that will interface with Sharepoint. Because no one has thought or had this problem before, right? No one has ever needed to make a form on the web until Sharepoint came along, and helped everyone.

It’s just weird. Maybe this is a textbook case of escalation of commitment. The idea that you need to throw up some web form, and that infopath is the tool for you seems like a huge weird leap to me. You have to have it installed (even to fill a form out!), and it’s not free, you probably need Sharepoint, which is also not free, and functionally does everything much more poorly than, say, mediawiki, or knowledge tree. So instead of a simple server side client-agnostic approach, you would take the exact opposite, and sacrifice functionality?

Now for the meditation. People use this.

Anyway, through all the yahoo crap during the buyout, and even the account renaming fiasco I always kinda knew, well at least they are still there so nothing terrible will happen. Not anymore. I still think it’s the best photo sharing site, but I no longer have any loyalty or trust. I guess yahoo would rather fizzle into nothing than be bought by microsoft.

The big irony is that, by doing this, Microsoft have set up the ideal conditions to marginalise their own browser. Clueless developers won’t know about this behaviour so every new site they build will automatically be rendered as IE7. Clued-up developers will use this as an excuse to freeze support for IE and turn their attentions to better browsers. Users will see less benefit from upgrading and will be more likely to turn to other browsers. In fact the only people to benefit are the small minority of web standards developers who use Internet Explorer as their primary browsers.

I think that’s mostly right actually. I wrote the first paragraph of this post before reading his discussion. When I said convenient, it was very clearly in my mind meaning locking sites to ie7 and never looking back. The part I would disagree with though is that this what a lot of corporate people want.

In large companies the intranet people are not on the cutting edge of anything. The intranet people aren’t even the IT people, often different departments, using some crazy content management system. Microsoft isn’t shooting themselves in the foot, their customers are. Microsoft is only accommodating them in a way that doesn’t fuck them over also. Microsoft can still keep making better browsers, like ie8, ie9 etc, while letting their slow corporate customers sit happily in 1998. Whether anyone is interested in good browsers from Microsoft is another very real question though.

Update: better link to the atlantic article, thanks Evan!

Remember kids, when someone asks why mac and linux don’t have so many viruses and serious exploits the answer is that not as many people use them, so they are less appealing to hackers. The answer is not that stupid insecure features like animated cursors embedded in web pages have system level access. Seriously, can we stop with that meme?