OneMind

AOL has announced it will no longer support Netscape as of Feb. 1. In one of the longest and least surprising death spirals in an industry heavy laden with such sagas, the Netscape browser succumbed to competition from other Web browsers.

While Microsoft, with its anti-competitive foray into the browser market with its first free Internet Explorer product in the mid 90′s, is the prime mover in the Netscape browsers’ demise, Netscape’s own bold adventure in Open Source also gets part of the blame/credit. Under intense economic pressure and public focus, Netscape created the open source Mozilla project so it could also provide a free browser to compete with IE. Mozilla has become wildly successful and in point of fact, Netscape’s browser of late has been nothing more than a very slight repackaging of Mozilla.

While I do not mourn the loss of the browser, I worry a bit at the message underlying this whole ugly process. Netscape was founded by Marc Andreessen and friends. That team took a project dubbed Mosaic out of the UIUC Supercomputing Center and parlayed it into a company that zoomed to a multi-billion-dollar dominant player in the Web browser space. If Microsoft had not (illegally as was later determined by the courts) eaten Netscape’s lunch by poisoning the entire space of Web browsers with its free and vastly inferior (but bundled) IE product, we might well be looking at a Netscape that would be as big as Google and Microsoft today.

Companies with technologies that appear to be good candidates for open source development and treatment will undoubtedly continue to cast a jaundiced eye on that possibility after studying the Netscape anti-phenomenon. And in the long run that could turn out to be bad for everyone concerned.

My favorite candidate for the White House, Ohio Democratic Rep. Dennis Kucinich, has a bright, articulate wife (who also happens to be very attractive). Here’s my favorite quotation from Elizabeth:

“The only thing that can make Dennis unelectable is an electorate that doesn’t believe in itself, that doesn’t believe in the power of democracy and the power of the individual vote.”

In today’s San Jose Mercury News, sports columnist Ann Killion suggested that the 49ers ownership needs to move quickly and decisively to fix the problems revealed by this year’s horrible performance. She recommended that they start with a clean slate, firing Head Coach Mike Nolan and replacing him with a “competent, experienced, innovative coach”, something she doesn’t seem to want to hold her breath over.

I’ll go her one better and suggest a coach who is not only competent, experienced and innovative but who already has a good working relationship with the anchor of the team’s future, QB Alex Smith. The Niners should do whatever it takes to bring back Norv Turner and give him the top job as Head Coach and GM. That won’t be easy. Turner took the San Diego Chargers to a 10-5 record and a playoff berth this season, his first after leaving the Niners where he was the second of three offensive coordinators that Smith has had to work with. He has a four-year deal in San Diego. The weather’s nicer in San Diego. But the Niners need Turner and they ought to pull out all the stops to get him.

Why Turner? Simple. Smith is the future of the Niners. He is, despite all appearances to the contrary, an intelligent and teachable kid with all the tools. Because he came to the NFL as a college sophomore, he’s just now reaching the age when most rookies join the NFL and he’s now seasoned by two lousy years capped by a nasty injury. The team has far too much money tied up in him to give up now. And the fact is, it would be tough for any QB, even an established veteran, to work under three different offensive coordinators and three different systems in three seasons. Turner was the most successful of those OCs, at least in terms of how he developed his young signal-caller.

Turner’s not a great head coach. But he’s offensive-minded, knows the Niners personnel, gets along well with Smith, and has a rep for dealing well with young talent. He might or might not get the Niners to a Super Bowl but he’d sure get them out of the toilet bowl where they’ve been living the past three years.

The Mike Nolan experiment has proven to be an unmitigated disaster. He has two huge failings which, when combined, make for a bad situation. First, his judgment about coaching staff is pathetic. Jim Hostler is almost certainly the worst offensive coordinator in the league. He’s young and bright and he’ll make a good OC one day, but the Niners don’t have time for OJT in this key spot with a young QB. You’d have thought that Nolan wouldn’t need a great OC since he’s so offense minded himself but that is obviously not the case. Because his second big failing is that he makes the worst game-day and game-time decisions of any head coach I’ve seen in a lot of years. He doesn’t have his head in the game. You can decide where else it might be firmly lodged.

So my recipe: keep Smith, elevate Shaun Hill to backup, move Trent Dilfer to QB coach and assistant OC, bring in Norv Turner as the new head coach and offensive coordinator. Keep Ted Tollner around to whisper in Turner’s ear as Offensive Consultant. Greg Manusky is a solid Defensive Coordinator.

It will still take 2-3 years to develop Smith and surround him with the talent to get to the playoffs consistently, but at least those years will be interesting and competitive.

My new good friend Tobi Lytle sent me this link to a marvelous 20-minute presentation on “The Story of Stuff” that provides some outstanding incentive for us to reconsider the economy of obsolescence and consumerism into which we have developed.

You don’t have to watch it all at once; it’s chapter-ized into manageable bite-sized chunks. But please do take the time to view it and, more importantly, to decide how you can help be part of the solution in 2008!

It turns out I’m not the only person on the planet who’s had it up to here with the crappy, maddening, dangerous and environmentally disgusting “clamshell” packaging that manufacturers are using so much of these days. There’s even a name for the behavior people often engage in as they wrestle with this garbage: “Wrap Rage”.

Manufacturers claim they have to use this stuff that you need jackhammers and blowtorches to open so that they can reduce theft of merchandise from inside the package. Poppycock. They’re too lazy and cheap to solve the problem in some way that doesn’t horribly inconvenience their customers.

Hey, numbskulls! You put a bar code on the outside of the package. You often have retailers who can determine when a package is being removed from the store without the formality of checkout. How about this idea? Put that anti-theft stuff inside the stupid package. Why do you want to let the bad buys win again by turning their propensity for thievery become a reason that thousands of Americans slice their fingers, lose patience, embarrass themselves in front of children and grandchildren, and generally hate you?

Makes no damn sense to me.

Ron Paul is getting a bit of a bump in publicity and media attention these days and frankly I’m a little bewildered.

Paul is a dark-horse candidate for the GOP presidential nomination but in a field full of gray steeds, his dark isn’t as dark as it might be if the party had a single great candidate. It doesn’t, so Paul’s candidacy looks less marginal than, say, my main Democratic choice, Dennis Kucinich.

He’s a true Libertarian who is running as a Republican because people on the Libertarian ticket are lucky to get 1% of the vote in most races. He ran as the Libertarian candidate for President a few cycles back. I have nothing against Libertarians or their philosophy. At least they have a philosophy! But Dr. Paul doesn’t seem to me to have thought some of his plans through very well.

Just for example, he says the way to fund what he envisions as a much, much smaller government after he eliminates the income tax and the IRS, is by bringing home the U.S. forces scattered all over the world, thus saving hundreds of billions of dollars. But how much savings is that really going to accomplish? Those troops still need to be employed (unless, of course, he just releases a few tens of thousands of them to the unemployment lines), housed, fed, trained, equipped, etc. We’d certainly end up with debt for bases abandoned overseas. The cost of shutting down operations and bringing that many troops home would be staggering.

I really agree with Paul that having troops stationed in dozens of foreign countries makes no sense. It hasn’t for a long time. He points out that we stayed in Korea after the war ended (and we won, at least on paper) and look at the mess there. But we pulled out of Vietnam after that war ended (and we lost, on paper and everywhere else) and that country is now unified, stabilized, and moving toward acceptance among the nations of the world. In a modern European Union, just who is it our troops are defending against?

But bringing home most or all of our troops from overseas does not, on the face of it at least, result in the kinds of savings it would take to offset the loss of half the government’s revenue source that killing the income tax (a move I also support) would cause.

I also disagree with Paul on almost all domestic issues: education, health care, Social Security, etc.

And yet, one of my usual progressive favorites, Rob Kall of OpEd News has given Paul his semi-endorsement. (He says in today’s column) that Paul is the most progressive of a reactionary (my word) GOP field, that his candidacy would be good for American win or lose, and implies pretty strongly that if Clinton is the Democratic nominee he might vote for Paul instead.) The response to that column on the Web site has been largely positive from a pretty progressive crowd.

As I said, I’m bewildered.

A sad but satirical twist on “A Christmas Carol”, updated as it happens to our selected leader, George W. Bush.

It’s a little on the predictable side, but nicely sardonic.

This came across my desk today courtesy of Mark Hurst’s GoodExperience newsletter. A bunch of professors at Penn have recorded lectures summarizing the key teachings in their areas of specialty. The goal was to create a lecture of 60 seconds’ length. Most go a bit over but none egregiously so and they are often quite fascinating.

(Unfortunately, the lectures are in Real format, which may not be easy for you to locate and install, but it’s probably worth it despite that bad decision.)

In complete contrast to my experience with Ambrosia Software a few days ago, today I had a need to re-install Adobe Acrobat Professional which I purchased in June 2005. I went to the Adobe site and, sure enough, there’s the serial number. I launch the program, type in the serial number, and am informed that this is a serial number for an upgraded version, so it has to find the one from which the original upgrade two years ago was made. As it turns out, the hard drive on which that version was stored was damaged, so I can’t recover it. Apparently, I failed to register that version as well. My bad.

In a conversation that lasted 20 minutes and began quite cordially, I get one of those infuriating people who can only follow a rule book. Because we couldn’t locate the serial number for version 6 Standard of the product, the only solution they can suggest is upgrading to Version 8. Who do they think they’re bullshitting? You know if I buy Version 8 and try to install it, it will look for an installed version 7, not find it, and I’ll be right back where I started.

After about 12 or 13 minutes, it became clear this first guy wasn’t going to be able to figure out how to help me so I very politely asked to speak to his supervisor. He refused, repeatedly, on the grounds that, “It won’t do you any good. There is no point. I have done all that can be done.” I finally had to scream at him to get him to connect me to his floor supervisor. The new guy wasn’t a lot more helpful but he said he’d look further into it and email me in the next 48 hours. Right.

Here’s an interesting contrast. I paid something like $50 or $60 for SnapZProX and their support for a lost serial number was flawless. I paid several hundred bucks for Adobe Acrobat Professional and they can’t (or won’t) do anything to help me.

(BTW, this isn’t the only Adobe/Macromedia product I’m having trouble installing on my new configuration. Even though I have serial numbers for some of their software, they have a separate “activation” process that absolutely sucks and that gets in the way of completing installation of, e.g., Contribute. Adobe’s always been arrogant about who owns the software and the system, at least as bad as Microsoft. It just galls me.)

You tell me which company I’m going to do more business with and recommend and which I’m going to bad-mouth and avoid at all possible cost.

UPDATE

Today’s (Monday, 12/17) newspapers carried a story out of LA that said, “Dozens of striking writers are negotiating with venture capitalists to set up new companies that would bypass the Hollywood studio system and reach consumers directly with video entertainment on the Web.”

I’m finding myself increasingly intrigued by and sucked into the so-called “Digital Convergence” technology trend. Not that the trend is new but it seems to me to be gathering steam on a lot of different fronts, prodded by a number of different initiatives.

One current development I think could have a tremendous impact on the acceleration of the video-over-Internet as a replacement (in some part at least) for broadcast TV is the current writers’ strike. The media companies that are resisting paying the deserving writers anything for their contribution to the success of the digital distribution of their wares may find themselves looking at the rear end of a rapidly vanishing bus if they keep up their greedy ways.

I can envision a number of new Internetworks coming together and hiring these writers to produce original content for which they are handsomely rewarded. Then, when the broadcast TV industry finally comes to its senses and does the right thing by the writers, the latter won’t really care to work for the slave wages and under the exploitative conditions they have been content with for far too long.

I’m surprised, as I reflect on it, that Net video hasn’t already supplanted even more of broadcast TV, given its tremendous advantages:

• Everything is or can be on demand.
• Length of shows is content-driven rather than time-slot driven.
• Interactivity comes along almost for free.
• The ability to create successful narrow vertical networks that build around and enhance community is almost unfettered.
• “Subscription” models can guarantee revenue levels.

I’m sure I’m overlooking dozens more. This is a space that is set to explode in the next six months and if the writers’ strike continues, I think it accelerates the process enormously.