I wrote a little while ago about Apple failing to live up to the standard of an Open Company. It pains me to admit, but Microsoft, thanks to their top-down commitment to blogging and Robert Scoble, is kicking Apple's ass in this department. Letting me see (Channel 9) and talk to (blogs) the people building Microsoft's products is one of the smartest things they have ever done.
I am forced to admit that there are good and smart people working for Microsoft, each of whom is trying their best to make the right decisions and build the best software. It has caused me to think of Microsoft as something other than a monolithic, monopolistic predator out to dominate every industry, destroy all competition and force me to use poorly designed software. Of course, I have to remind myself that Microsoft is actually both of these: good people and a monopolistic predator. But we should try to work with the former without letting our guard down against the latter.
Apple's lack of transparency probably doesn't come as any surprise to those of us who follow the company but DrunkenBatman's post about Apple's stone-aged bug reporting policy brings their failures into sharp relief. You should definitely start by reading the original post. I'm going to elaborate further on the points he makes.
The essay argues that Apple needs to "engage their users and bring them into the process, not shut them out." In short, Apple should become a more Open Company. Needless to say, I rather agree. Let me start by answering what seems to be the most common objection: Apple can't afford to be a more open because they must practice the utmost secrecy in order to introduce phenomenal new products with maximum effect.
Apple does depend on its wow-inducing introductions, its Jobsian PR bomb-dropping. But communicating openly and honestly about existing products does not mean that Apple has to tip its hand about upcoming products. Steve has created a culture of fear that prevents Apple from telling the difference between what should be kept secret and what should be shared.
Jason Kottke points to Memory Alpha, a 8200+ page fan encylopedia of the Star Trek Universe. This is absolutely brilliant — as Jason points out, a perfect use for a wiki. It appears to be running on the MediaWiki engine.
Memory Alpha has a following disclaimer in its footer: "Star Trek and related names are trademarks of Paramount Pictures, and are used under "fair use" guidelines." I doubt if this really qualifies as fair use, and I imagine that if Paramount wanted to come after them, they could. I hope they don't, because as Ron Moore points out, with Enterprise canceled and no new series or movies in the works, Star Trek is (for now) in the hands of the fans. And I think that's a good place for it to be.
I played around with MySpace yesterday. I signed up last year at the urging of my friend Ashley, but I never used it for anything besides responding to her emails. But I read on Friday how MySpace has just raised $5mm from RedPoint Ventures, so I decided perhaps I should give it another shot.
After spending an hour or so looking around, I've learned three things: 1) There is an interesting and attractive (though young and LA-heavy) crowd on MySpace. 2) The interface is god-awful, made worse by the fact that people are able to customize their profiles in all sorts of terrible, GeoCities-circa-1997 ways. 3) They are a closed ecosystem.
JWZ's post about Groupware is the funniest thing I've read about software in a long time.
If you want to do something that's going to change the world, build software that people want to use instead of software that managers want to buy.
When words like "groupware" and "enterprise" start getting tossed around, you're doing the latter. You start adding features to satisfy line-items on some checklist that was constructed by interminable committee meetings among bureaucrats, and you're coding toward an externally-dictated product specification that maybe some company will want to buy a hundred "seats" of, but that nobody will ever love. With that kind of motivation, nobody will ever find it sexy. It won't make anyone happy.
Too right, mate.
Here's a great presentation from Nick Finck, Mary Hodder and Biz Stone called Enhancing Internal Communications with Blogs, Wikis, and More. This does a great job of explaining exactly why you'd want to use a blog or a wiki in the first place, particularly in an organizational context.
I've been prowling around the JotSpot application gallery lately. I'm beginning to see how powerful their concept really is. They've got some really useful apps in there. My current favorite is the Recruiting manager.
I've been interviewing developers recently, and I've been forced to keep candidate data in an Excel file on a shared drive. Having a drop-and-go candidate tracking web-app would be most useful. And since interviewing is a collaborative activity, it makes total sense to share the information among the team. On the other hand, there is information in a candidate's resume that might be considered private: addresses, salary history, &c. Personally, I think all salaries should be public, but I doubt most HR departments would agree.
JotSpot's drop-in applications really make it something qualitatively different than a wiki. I don't know if that is going to translate into a more effective sales-pitch. But I do know that the open-company test is going to be particularly important in this context: it is crucial that it be as easy to get data out of the app as it is to get it in.
JotSpot is presenting at DEMO this week. I worked on a DEMO demo a couple of years ago. I didn't have to give the presentation, but I remember how nerve-wracking it was for everyone involved. I also remember how completely insane were the two weeks leading up to the presentation (which was on February 8th: a deadline burned in my memory forever). We were coding around the clock to finish our app in time. Man, that was fun.
In conjunction with their moment in the spotlight, Jot* has announced a handful of new features via a press release on their website. Unfortunately, the new features aren't available to the beta accounts yet, but they promise them "over the next few weeks."
I put together a mockup of how I think diff should work in a Wiki, implementing most of the ideas I talked about here. I'm interested to hear your thoughts for changes or additions.
Take a look at the diff mockup.
Unfortunately, it only works properly in Firefox, but I didn't have enough time to debug the javascript in all browsers. All apologies.
David asked a good question today: Why isn't there an IMDB for books & authors? Amazon (which, interestingly, owns IMDB) has become the de facto reference database for books, both in-print and out-of-print. And they fulfill this function well. Unfortunately, they don't maintain good information about authors. Compare this listing for Martin Scorsese to this one for J. D. Salinger. Amazon needs to step up and give us a better view of its authors — a real bibliography, instead of this messy and redundant search-results list.
Jonathan Nolen 