Disqus - Latest Comments for michaelocc

Re: Dinosaurs Attack Billboards For Creation Museum

michaelocc — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 13:59:54 -0000

>>I'll applaud it as I drive past in my atheist bus.

*snort*

Re: Dinosaurs Attack Billboards For Creation Museum

michaelocc — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 13:17:16 -0000

Are you kidding me? Did you just get punk'd or did we? Perhaps you're just being even-more-than-usually dry, but the line "Interestingly, and unlike many other museums, the Creation Museum touts the idea of natural selection versus evolution and downplays the "molecules-to-man" line of Darwinian thinking..." sounds a lot like something clipped from a flack's pitch.

For a different perspective on the absurdity of the Creation Museum, it's worth reading this AFP piece: http://bit.ly/2YW2e

Sample quotes:

...
"It's sort of a monument to scientific illiteracy, isn't it?" said Jerry Lipps, professor of geology, paleontology and evolution at University of California, Berkeley.
...
Its presents a literal interpretation of the Bible and argues that believing otherwise leads to moral relativism and the destruction of social values.
...

The billboard is indeed good, but so was a lot of tobacco advertising in the 80s.

Re: Why Microsoft will never win

michaelocc — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 22:41:37 -0000

A resounding "amen" to all of this, including mikepk's comments and excellent related post.

I lived through a very, very similar nightmare a number of years ago, while working for what was, at the time, one of the biggest software firms in Canada, a darling of the TSE.

We’d been blisteringly hot for a few years, have risen to the top of the market on the back of the corporate shift to Windows 95/98 and client-server networks. Our main competitor had got stuck supporting an old, DOS and Netware-based product and a big installed base. We were the nimbler, more innovative company that had its Windows-native product out first.

Somewhere around about the middle of ’98, though, a few of us were starting to get really worried. Almost 40% of our annual revenue was coming from maintenance contracts at that stage. We were comfortable, in other words; too comfortable. The company had developed something of a bloated, complacent, bureaucratic feel.

Our biggest concern, from a product perspective, was the rise of the Web. We had been trying to squooge our product into something vaguely Web-ready for a while, but it was basically a trainwreck. We learned the hard way: you just can’t slap a new coat of Web paint on a clunky old piece of client-server code. Remember when software firms used to describe their products as “Web-enabled”? What a crock that was.

There was a big 2-day management off-site meeting that year. At one point, in the midst of a lengthy debate in which we were trying to come to consensus around precisely how screwed we really were, I floated the suggestion that the only solution to our problem was to take some of our best people, fund them, and cut them loose to hire a brand new team and grow their own thing.

Get them to start up a completely new company, unencumbered by any of our problems but with the experience, knowledge, and collective expertise we had developed over 15+ years in the market. The core of my idea was: let’s create our own best Web-based competitor. Let’s cannibalize our market share, before someone else comes along and drinks our milkshake for us.

Alas: much argument, no agreement, and – in truth – not enough corporate cojones to commit to such a madcap scheme.

Meanwhile, one of our very best resellers – a company that had built their entire (very successful) business by developing add-on tools and custom solutions around our core product, was secretly developing a pure, Web-native competitor to our cash cow. They did precisely what I’d proposed – setting up a separate, arms-length company to launch this thing once it was built (keeping their hand in the whole thing well hidden from us).
Then they took two years to slowly slim down (and ultimately close) their original business, with almost all of the people they “downsized” coincidentally getting hired by this new kid on the block.

You can guess the rest. We slipped slowly into the doldrums, only to be put out of our misery a year or so later through an acquisition.

The upstart competitor went on to greater and greater things, ultimately converting a sizeable chunk of our former client base to their much shinier new product. They were, in their turn, also acquired for an almost indecently large amount of money, and the founders all got very rich.

Meh.

Re: Looking back at mesh 2008

michaelocc — Sat, 24 May 2008 11:40:47 -0000

Wow - "the excellent"! Thanks Mathew. Certainly makes a change from "that pain in the arse" :-)

I'll tell you what was really excellent though - mesh was. Great organization, speakers, mingling, networking, and outstanding content - as always. I wish it could be mesh every week.

Re: Facebook: Whose data is it anyway?

michaelocc — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 14:34:03 -0000

A hearty "hear hear" Mathew, for picking up on the key question at the heart of this little kerfuffle - whose data is it? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

I've been fretting and gnashing my teeth about this particular issue for a while now (see here foe example: http://snipurl.com/1vjwn). One of the worrying, unresolved issues in the whole social media space is the grey and fuzzy area of business models predicated on mining other people's info. This is not an issue unique to Facebook, btw - and they're certainly not the most blatant of the YASNS providers out there.

I'll spare you the full, rambling thesis here, but in short - User Generated Content makes money; just not necessarily for the user themselves. Build a popular social network and get enough punters to participate willingly (signing up to a ToS they probably didn't even read that gives you the right to do whatever they will with your contributed data), and you can build yourself a nice little revenue machine.

I wrote about this recently both on the blog and in a mailing list I'm subscribed to.

One of the responses I received compared the wonders of the UGC space to the pyramids:

"It seems to me that the social network buildup is similar to the great wonders of the world (bear with me)...Just as the pharaohs were not the ones who actually built the pyramids, the network owners are not the ones building the primary substance of the networks. And yet, the pharaohs are the ones who get the credit and majority of the reward much like the owners get the credit and the reward."

OK, so that's a bit of a stretch, perhaps, but it's an entertaining conceit.

So - what's most worrying in the ToS violation is not what Robert was doing that broke FB's rules, but the rules themselves - and the fact that we're all blithely accepting such rules of data ownership without giving them too much extra thought.