But that trick never works
Joel Spolsky rants entertainingly about Microsoft's next big attempt to get us all to trust them into giving up our computers in return for some utopian webservice world they'd run for us to keep all our data safe and available everywhere and no more need to worry about synchronising and ponies too:
I shouldn't really care. What Microsoft's shareholders want to waste their money building, instead of earning nice dividends from two or three fabulous monopolies, is no business of mine. I'm not a shareholder. It sort of bothers me, intellectually, that there are these people running around acting like they're building the next great thing who keep serving us the same exact TV dinner that I didn't want on Sunday night, and I didn't want it when you tried to serve it again Monday night, and you crunched it up and mixed in some cheese and I didn't eat that Tuesday night, and here it is Wednesday and you've rebuilt the whole goddamn TV dinner industry from the ground up and you're giving me 1955 salisbury steak that I just DON'T WANT. What is it going to take for you to get the message that customers don't want the things that architecture astronauts just love to build. The people? They love twitter. And flickr and delicious and picasa and tripit and ebay and a million other fun things, which they do want, and this so called synchronization problem is just not an actual problem, it's a fun programming exercise that you're doing because it's just hard enough to be interesting but not so hard that you can't figure it out.
Most people don't really need synchronisation services or buy into that whole "the net is the computer" philsophy because most people at most only ever use two computers: their home pc and the one they use at work, with little to no need to synchronise between them. Apart from that, this whole thing is,as Joel puts it, "not fun": too abstract a problem to worry about. Instead we want to be able to read our e-mail everywhere, which we can since almost every ISP now has webmail and if not, there's always G-mail or Yahoo. If we want to keep our bookmarks online we use del.ici.us, if we want quick access to our pictures there's flickr, etcetera undsoweiter. There are specialist, free services for every imaginable thing we need to do online and we don't need to buy into one big monolithic service to do so.
Why Microsoft nevertheless keeps pushing these services is because the company fundamentally does not understand the internet; it never has and likely never will. Microsoft grew big on consumer operating systems and office software, where they could pretty much dictate the environment in which their users work and therefore they keep wanting to do the same for the internet. They're monopolists: it's the only trick they know. Their latest attempt Joel so thoroughly slagged off is basically Microsoft Network (which would replace the internet back in '95, remember?) dusted off for the 21st century, grudgingly accepting the reality of the internet but not liking it.
Tags:
Microsoft,
Live+Mesh,
Joel Spolsky
Posted by Martin Wisse Permalink End of post.
