|
Re: Tossing out something for discussion...
|
Kevin Jamieson
|
Feb 08, 2001 23:37 PST
|
| | This is good stuff. My own take on it (with pointers to this list,
along with Kevin and Tim's posts) is here: http://doc.weblogs.com.
|
Ok, time for a more involved response to this - I didn't have time earlier
today, lamentably.
I am tired and cranky and have just gotten home from working for twelve
hours or so... goes to show that even in this all-talked about 'dotcom
slowdown' that I still feel like pulling long days now and then.
Leadbeater here really is selling some pie in the sky vision - it is a layer
of abstraction that completely leaves the technical arena and launches off
into some weird whacked out 'wouldn't it be nice' territory. I mean,
seriously; he's proposing things like broadband wireless, limitless access
to The Second Internet(1) from any device, etc. That's fine. But when he's
saying that _infrastructure_ has been holding all this stuff back, he's
trying to drive a car with no gas in the tank.
To quote Leadbeater via the posted article:
"The page-based internet is boring. People want genuinely
interactive experience, with drama, excitement, games and jokes. The first
Internet spent little on content and charged nothing for it. The result:
hosts of bored consumers using a medium designed for geeks and nerds."
If he's figured out what the hell people want online, then we'll never see
him on fuckedcompany. He'll be the richest goddamned man alive, and I will
rightfully bow down to him when that time comes. In the meantime, I want to
sick a coked-up Jakob Nielsen on him and let them duke it out. Let's break
it down statment by statement:
"The page-based internet is boring." The page-based internet of which you
speak is called the web. Or Web. Capitalize it if you want. When I
managed to get gopher in 1994 running a telnet session to LambdaMOO, I
thought I'd died and gone to heaven. Little words dancing across my screen
with people god knows where typing them. That was more interactive than
most web pages, and more fun in a lot of ways. MUDs and such are still
around, and some of them went graphical and turned into Everquest and
Asherons Call and whatever else it out there now. If you want to talk about
one of the great early albatrosses of the web, look at VRML - a solution in
search of a problem. Thank god walking through virtual shopping malls in a
web browser tanked long before e-commerce did (or is, depending upon how
close you are to, say, SoMa on any given weekday.). VRML was immediatly
replaced by something better looking, more interactive, and more fun - its
called Quake. You want fast glitzy interaction, don't look on the web, look
at almost anything else that uses a TCP/IP stack and runs under Windows.
This is not to displace the web as Grand King Sucker Of My Time - because it
is, most certainly. The web offers closer to the 'broadcast' experience
that Leadbeater thinks is the future - our future. But, webboards have the
advantage that a conversation can take place over a protracted period of
time between different people with different schedules, especially people in
different time zones. I discovered this in 1992 when I put up my first BBS.
Yay.
Wow, and I've only gotten past _one_ statement of his. I must be touchy
tonight.
Next:
"People want genuinely
interactive experience, with drama, excitement, games and jokes. The first
Internet spent little on content and charged nothing for it."
I dunno what people want. If people want interaction, they're getting it -
he mostly seems to be fixating on a passive experience; treating the web
like television where we pay large corporations money every month to throw
things at us. Look to interactive movies and see how much people want to
work to be told a story.
Drama, excitement, games, jokes - NONE of these have to have anything to do
with technology OR Big Media Ventures. This is people _talking_ to each
other. This is what the net already provides. It's providing me the
opportunity to go off in email right now to anyone who's reading this...
Pretty damned interactive, overall.
The Internet spent little on content as a whole because the content that was
up was put there by people interested in sharing the information. And yet
somehow, without Big Ecommerce Dollars sloshing around, the Internet managed
to get popular. Imagine that.
Also, take a look at all of the sites that have a lot of content out there -
and then exclude the newspaper sites. Then exclude newspaper type sites
like Slashdot and Fuckedcompany. Then exclude anything that's just a
personal hobby/educational site. Ok, what do you have left?
All of those goddamned boring e-commerce failures. YAY.
Leadbeater was trying to get across the idea of "What's Next", but it really
comes across as a kind of pouty, spiteful, "Why Didn't It Work Out Like I
Wanted?" article. He disregards the entire concept of infrastructure and
pisses upon the idea of its importance in the past or in the future. Sorry,
but it IS importance. And like the Ignorance Management articles, you don't
have to understand it - just because I don't fully understand all of the
technical aspects of earthquakes doesn't mean it didn't feel like a four
hundred pound man threw himself into the side of my apartment the other day.
(3.5 in Alameda, I heard...)
Before closing, I'll talk about _my_ bias:
I just spent the majority of the day building out a new machine room at the
office. It involved a lot of sweating and cursing, but things are looking
pretty good now. Had to string a handmade bundle of 75 foot cable, had to
wrestle a 300 pound rolling APC cage rack off the back of a truck, cut
myself racking in one of our Sun boxes, and got some of our servers
transitioned over. So, you'll excuse me if I'm a little bitter about
someone pissing on infrastructure, considering I was actually building a
very tiny piece of it today...
Now to bed,
Kevin
|
|
 |
|
