Related link: http://www.infoworld.com/articles/hn/xml/01/12/19/011219hnmslibertyrepost.xml

According to InfoWorld’s Matt Berger, “Microsoft warms to growing Liberty Alliance.” In this article, Microsoft on Tuesday indicated that it could join the Liberty Alliance Project. Several other companies have indicated that they will join the effort on Wednesday.

What do you think?

Related link: http://www.sdtimes.com/cols/javawatch.htm

SD Times’ Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols says, “Ever since Microsoft decided that Web services provided by .NET were the next big wave for software development, all too many developers have gone gaga over Web services.”

What do you think?

Rest in peace Computer Literacy Bookstores. As of Dec 1, Computer Literacy Bookstores closed the last of its two retail brick and mortar locations in Sunnyvale, CA and San Jose, CA. When Barnes & Noble bought Fatbrain.com and its Computer Literacy Bookstore holdings, you knew things would change. And they did. I just didn’t expect this.

Speculation was that B&N would change Computer Literacy Bookstores to B&N Tech or even Fatbrain. Unfornately, given the current economic environment in Silicon Valley, B&N realized that costs had to be cut. So, there it is. Computer Literacy was cut. Perhaps, when things pick-up, we will see B&N Tech or something like it.

For those who are looking for techical bookstores that they can actually visit by foot, stay tuned… I hope to find some myself.

If you know of a great tech bookstore to visit, please share with us. Thanks.

Related link: http://techupdate.zdnet.com/techupdate/stories/main/0,14179,2832087,00.html

ZDNet’s Eric Knorr dispells the myths, and offers the realites to the C# programming language for Web services in this article.

What do you think?

Related link: http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,5100479,00.html

Several states proposed a remedy solution in the Microsoft antitrust case, which would require Microsoft to carry Java with Windows. According to ZD NET’s Joe Wilcox, “AOL Time Warner, Sun Microsystems and several trade groups backed by Microsoft, such as ProComp, rallied behind the states filing the proposal. The remedy would compel Microsoft to open the source code of Internet Explorer, carry Sun’s Java with Windows and sell a stripped-down version of the operating system, among other things.”

What do you think?

Related link: http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1003-200-8080360.html?tag=mn_hd

CNET News.com’s Stephen Shankland reports that American Express has joined the Liberty Alliance Project on Wednesday, boosting Sun Microsystems’ effort to counterbalance the MS Passport authentication system.
American Express, which is already allied with Sun for its Java-based Blue credit card, joined the Liberty project just a day after AOL Time Warner did.

Share your thoughts on this.

Related link: http://techupdate.zdnet.com/techupdate/stories/main/0,14179,2830142-1,00.html

Sun CEO Scott McNealy talks about SPARC vs. Intel, .NET, national ID, and what keeps him up at night, in part 2 of an exclusive interview with ZDNet’s Tech Update editorial director David Berlind.

What do you think?

Related link: http://techupdate.zdnet.com/techupdate/stories/main/0,14179,2829098-1,00.html

Sun CEO Scott McNealy talks about his vision of IT for the 21st century, the WebTone concept, and more, in an exclusive interview with ZDNet’s Tech Update editorial director David Berlind.

What do you think of this interview?

Related link: http://my.yahoo.com/

Who owns your online identity? Do you? Most likely, you don’t — almost all Web sites that have a concept of identity do (and badly want to) maintain an identity profile for each of their users. At the end of the day, that identity belongs to them, not you. A note I recently received from Yahoo illustrates this nicely, and serves as a good warning for users of online identity systems.

I started using Yahoo when my friend Nelson Minar pointed it out to me in late 1994. In early 1996, when the company launched its excellent personalized site, ‘My Yahoo!’, I quickly signed up with the username ‘hedlund’, and My Yahoo became the page I used as a home page more often than not. Over the years, I have been happy with the services Yahoo provides, and I’ve extended my user account to use travel services, mapping tools, instant messaging, online games, movie listings, and other resources. Yahoo has done a great job of making their services more and more useful to me, and at the same time, incrementally building a larger and larger set of profile data on me. This was useful to me itself, and it seemed well worth trying the Yahoo version of some new service before any other, since it allowed me to avoid entering the same personal information again and again.

The other day, I found this in my mailbox:

From: Yahoo! Account Services <idmerge@yahoo-inc.com>
To: marc@precipice.org
Subject: Please change your Yahoo! ID

Dear [user],

We are improving our service by merging pools of user names from
different countries into a global community.  You'll get access to
more people around the world through such services as Yahoo!
Messenger and Chat. 

Unfortunately, you will need to choose a new Yahoo! ID, as there
is another person currently using [user].  Your personal
preferences will be saved and transferred to the new Yahoo! ID you
select below.  We apologize for the inconvenience this may cause
you. 

[...]

The note went on to explain that Yahoo would transfer my personal data over to a new account, that my instant messaging buddies would receive a “change of address” notice for me, and that for the most part this name change would be smoothed out however possible.

When I wrote to complain, I received this in reply:

[...]

We know that you've been an active, loyal user for a long time, and we
consider you a very valuable user.  The other person using the same name
is also a very active, loyal user.  We had to look at the way each of
you were using Yahoo!, and determine which of you could be migrated more
easily.

Unfortunately, it turned out that it was easier to transfer the
properties you are using to a new Yahoo! ID.  In no way was this a
reflection on your value to us as a Yahoo! customer.  Again, we
apologize for the inconvenience, and we appreciate your patience and
understanding.

[...]

I’m guessing, but I would imagine that what has happened here is that someone in Sweden (where my last name is fairly common) registered with Yahoo! Sweden (which launched in November, 1997) using the name ‘hedlund’, and that merging the Swedish profiles with the United States profiles created a namespace conflict. Since I don’t use ‘hedlund’ as an email address at Yahoo, perhaps the other person does and the merge falls in their favor as a result. (One executive from another online provider once told me this process was called profile ‘harmonizing’ in their company, and that their engineers liked to joke, “We put the ‘harm’ in ‘harmonize’.”) Maybe in 1997 it seemed like a good idea to keep the namespaces seperate, but now the namespaces need to be merged for some business reason, and if there are a few bumps along the way, such is life. Yahoo likely assumes that if they can minimize the pain of transition, almost all users would go along with the change — and this is probably a good assumption.

I’ve decided not to go along with the change. Instead, I’ve decided to delete my Yahoo account (you can delete your Yahoo account by visiting <https://edit.yahoo.com/config/delete_user>), and use their services anonymously or not at all. I would have preferred that they use a “first-come, first-served” policy in merging profiles, since this would likely have benefitted me; but that just shifts the problem to some poor Swede, so I wouldn’t want that, either. More to the point, I am put off to have such a clear message from Yahoo, such a strong statement that “we own your name — not you.”

The Web has grown to the point where many of the functions at which Yahoo excels are provided by more than one good source; and in any case none of the services I get from Yahoo are essential. In some cases, the services available elsewhere are better — for instance, MapQuest, which powers the maps.yahoo.com site, provides a richer interface and better tools on their www.mapquest.com site. In other words, competition exists. In the realm of aggregated profiles, at least two large competitors (MSN and AOL) vie with Yahoo for users, and each succeeds by different metrics.

Unlike a particular service such as map display, however, identity is meaningful and important to online interactions, and the switching cost for identity is much higher. We use our email addresses and instant messenger names to identify ourselves to our peers, and they in turn use these names to sort out personal messages from a flood of spam and other unsolicited marketing. In some contexts, such as PGP encryption, our email address is used as a key for positive identity confirmation. When we select an account name, it is something of a commitment for us — we have to remember it and re-enter it to access new services or reconfirm who we are. These accounts in turn are supposed to protect our credit cards, addresses, purchase records, and the records of what we do on the Web. As Yahoo’s profile was useful for me, many times this aggregation can create convenience for users. On the other hand, sites that try to control your identity are certainly not doing it for your benefit — AOL doesn’t allow you the convenience of forwarding your email because they know email is their best hook to draw you back to their service every day. (Instead of “You’ve got mail,” they should really say, “We’ve got your mail!”)

I appreciate that Yahoo is in a bind, here — they made a mistake four or five years ago, and now some market pressure is forcing them to correct this mistake with a move that will disconcert some of their users, as it has me. Even if this is not the result of a mistake in namespace planning, the same issue will arise when companies like Yahoo acquire other companies like GeoCities, which maintain separate namespaces and which need merging (or ‘harmonizing’) into Yahoo’s business. Though caught in this bind, Yahoo made substantial efforts to smooth the transition, no small challenge.

That doesn’t make me any happier to receive a forcible name change in the mail. What, then, is the lesson to consumers? The lesson should be clear: you cannot entrust your online identity to a business if that identity is meaningful to you. If you want or need your online identity, you must maintain it yourself.

I learned this many years ago with regards to email addresses. Rather than using an employer’s domain name, or using an ISP’s domain name, I registered my own domain and I have all mail sent to that domain forwarded to me. (Cool trick: when you register for an account at, say, Shockwave.com, give your email address as “shockwave.com@<mydomain>”. That way, when Shockwave.com sells your address to spammers, you’ll get spam sent to that address, and you’ll know not to do business with shockwave.com again. And yes, shockwave.com really did this with my account…) All of the ISP’s I’ve ever used have long since been acquired, and I’ve changed jobs several times, so maintaining my own domain has let me stay in touch with people I might otherwise have lost in transition. (Interestingly, Earthlink, an ISP that has acquired a great many other ISPs, continues to maintain the original domain names of the companies they’ve acquired, avoiding the need to harmonize and letting their newly-acquired customers keep their old addresses. Nice job, Earthlink.)

There is an opportunity for software businesses that would put identity control directly where it belongs: in the hands of consumers. Some products, such as AdSubtract, already are succeeding by making the Web easier to use while returning control over personal information to users. There are, however, plenty of other uses for a user’s local hard drive, and the successful companies will find a way to combine privacy (which tends not to be a great selling point) with performance and features (each of which do sell).

Conversely, consumers should look at the new wave of identity management services with some suspicion. The most famous of these, Microsoft’s Passport, offers identity and wallet management across a range of sites. While the benefits to the company are clear, the benefits to users are much more murky when compared to keeping their identity in their own back pocket.

Related link: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,186660-1,00.html

Ginger/IT, the mysterious, world-changing invention surrounded by speculation, is revealed as “Segway,” a personal transportation device. The hype machine revs up again with this Time article that opens more questions than it answers.

The article is a great read, providing some entertaining vignettes of user reactions, mostly from technology industry leaders. The not-so-subtle point is made that Segway enthusiasm doesn’t require Steve Jobs’ effusion or Jeff Bezos’ ebullience — even Andy Grove is giggling now. But much more is said about the Segway gestation and the Segway experience than the Segway machine. What should we make of this as a piece of technology?

Hard to say from a couple of breathless articles. It sounds, though, like Segway is notable as a perfect exemplar of Don Norman’s thesis from The Invisible Computer. What’s the user interface of this machine with “three PCs’ worth of juice […] and software so sophisticated it puts Microsoft to shame”? Well, it doesn’t have one — or rather, the interface is exactly as complex as a car ignition key. The position of the key determines the maximum speed; the rest of the interface reacts, Kamen would have us believe, to thought. Think about stopping, you stop. Think about going backwards, you do. Simply by letting you lean but not fall, Segway takes you where your posture indicates you want to go. (Perhaps we should brace for a Weebles resurgence.)

Gyroscopes are cool and all, and I’m certainly in favor of less cars, but computing devices that require no learning and no interface — well, that’s really neat. That, indeed, is software that puts Microsoft to shame. And the rest of our software industry.