Article:		The Future of Technology and Proprietary Software
Subject:		Agree, Mostly
Date:		2003-12-25 11:31:34
From:		kwporterfield
As is usually the case, I agree with most of what you're saying here Tim, but there are a couple of things in this piece that bother me. In your Google example, you refer to the data available on the Internet as a "huge distributed knowledge repository". Three out of four ain't bad, but you seem to be forgetting Sturgeon's Law. Over the last year or so, it's been my experience that finding information (in my view, it isn't knowledge until it's organized and vetted) on the Internet is becoming increasingly difficult. In terms of the traditional information retrieval triumvirate, search engines like Google do very well in relevance and recall, but perform abysmally on precision (percentage of returned documents that are relevant). Even with well crafted search terms, users have to wade through pages and pages of irrelevant crap to find the nuggets they're looking for. The procedure that seems to work best for me is to use Google to find a site or two where "this guy knows what he's talking about", then follow the links I find there -- most of which will not appear in the first 20 pages of Google results. There's something fundamentally wrong with this picture. Yes, we've come a long way. How cool was the debut of Alta Vista back in 1995? Since then the WWW has grown by a factor of 500, but the search engine model hasn't really changed. I won't go off on a full-blown metadata tirade here, but I do think it's interesting to note that a Google search on "topic maps" produces a "Work at Google" text ad. The other thing that caught my eye was your use of proprietary software to produce the Paradigm Shift presentation. Rather ironic, don't you think?

Showing messages 1 through 1 of 1.

• Agree, Mostly
  2003-12-25 15:00:31  Tim O'Reilly | [Reply | View]
  
  
  Obviously, search engines could get even better...but I still do find google near-miraculous. It's very easy to take for granted what happens on the net, but it's worth putting yourself back into the world of ten years ago, and reminding yourself just how far we've come.
  
  As to using PowerPoint for a presentation on Open Source being "ironic", no, I don't think so at all. If you've followed my thoughts on open source over the years (or even just the "paradigm shift" presentation), you will see that I consider the licensing angle (free vs. proprietary) relatively uninteresting, especially when used as a litmus test. I have always advocated using the handiest tool for the job. And for presentations, Powerpoint and other proprietary tools work just fine. Useful software gets created under both free/open source and proprietary models. Just because I'm fond of pointing out to proprietary software vendors the many benefits of open source software development models, doesn't mean that I believe it's the only way to produce software.
  
  Would you consider it ironic that I used a piece of desktop software to make the case that the really interesting things in software are network-related? Sure, I think that amazon and google and itunes are more interesting than powerpoint, but that doesn't mean that I won't use a good piece of desktop software when I need it.
  
  We need to get past either-or. To me, the whole open source movement was about recognizing some things that were under-valued, not about saying that anyone who doesn't already know these things is bad. Frankly, I see proprietary software vendors learning a lot from open source, and open source vendors and projects learning from proprietary software. The best of breed systems these days (whether Amazon, Google, or Mac OS X) actually tend to be a melange of proprietary and open source software.