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 Friday, February 28, 2003
 Wall Street Journal:RHC Media Inc. has decided to shutter its Red Herring magazine, according to a person familiar with the matter, ending a 10-year period in which Red Herring was a pioneering force in the market for "New Economy" magazines.
3:41:41 PM 
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Thursday, February 27, 2003
 The nearly last of the true New-Economy believers, Red Herring, is being shopped around after restructuring in December, reportedly for a $2 million asking price--when its owners once apparently rebuffed offers of 100 times that by Time Inc. (before Time bought Business 2.0.
Herring once boasted issues with 682 pages(that's a lot of lutefisk). I don't know how many pages it is now; I let my print subscription lapse long ago, around the same time Rafe Needleman got the heave-ho (though there's no particular connection between those two events).
RH survived the demise of Upside and The Industry Standard, but is apparently destined for the recycling heap. Fast Company and Wired seem to have transitioned from the New Economy zeitgeist with some pain, but in better shape than the spawning redfish, which now appears to be completing its lifecycle. Maybe they should have called the magazine "Red Salmon"--it seems to be getting devoured by the Bears like one.
1:16:19 PM
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A lot of folks in thetech media, including yours truly, have speculated about the fate of Sun Microsystems. As someone who's dealt with Sun on many levels over the past 12 years, I think it's safe to say that Sun is not going to just roll over and go under the horizon anytime soon--it's just not their style, and they have too much cash in the bank to go out with a whimper.
The problems Sun faces are nothing new--they're just magnified by the current market climate. Somehow, the company managed to generate enough forward momentum during the dot-com boom to grow its business dramatically. But the company has never done an effective job of selling software. Now, with so much of its future riding on software,that's become a real big problem.
I drank the Java Kool-Aid a few years back when I took over a Java developers' magazine. J2EE did it for me; it was my belief in 1999 that the desktop was becoming more and more irrelavent from a business software point of view, and that Java offered the best path to the Web for business developers. But I never really completely bought Java as a desktop technology outside of a limited cross-platform development domain, and I didn't hold out much hope for Java on mobile devices and cell phones either.
Scott MacNealy firmed up my thinking for me when he dissed software as a business. "You don't buy software to control your right turn signal," he said at a Gartner conference. Sun software execs winced.
MacNealy has never "gotten" software. He's a hardware guy. Java wasn't a product--it was, in the automobile industry's language (which MacNealy is so familiar with) "content"--another feature that would help Sun sell servers.
For all its work on Java, Sun never successfully produced a good set of developer tools for Java on its own--because, quite frankly, its development tools have always sucked (as anyone who has used Sun Workshop dev tools can testify to). This is why most Java development in the first few years of Java's history was done in vi (or, for the wannabes doing Java on Windows in the early days, Notepad). Sun acquired developer tools from Netscape, Forte (and Forte's tool is pretty good), but then it didn't know how to market them well.
To put it bluntly, as one Sun employee once said to me, "This company couldn't market its way out of a wet paper bag." While it captured developer mindshare with Java, it failed to turn that mindshare into a lasting commercial relationship; instead, it has to rely on Java licensees to generate most of its Java bucks.
Then came XML, which, despite Sun's claims of intellectual authorship of XML, it failed to capitalize on XML or web services quickly. Theopen source community (and IBM) did much of the grunt work of making XML and web services connect to Java successfully. Software politics, intellectual property concerns, and plain old intrangisence managed to keep Sun away early and lock Sun out of the WS-I later.
Now, as Sun tries to deal with the threat of commodity hardware and software (in the form of Linux and Intel), it's selling itself as a systems integration and services company. To succeed, Sun needs to change its nature. Like a star that's spent all its hydrogen, Sun has to find something else to keep it burning. If it fails to do so, it may have to look outside for its continued survival, or go out with a big bang.
10:36:40 AM
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Tuesday, February 25, 2003
So, I'm off early next week to the BEA e-World conference in allegedly sunny Orlando. There Sunday night through Tuesday morning. We'll see whether Java is really as endangered as Sun makes it out to be in court.
5:15:53 PM
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Thursday, February 13, 2003
 My son, Kevin, age 12, has a dream. He dreams that Nintendo will use the ideas he is feverishly developing with a team of two other 6th graders, an 8th grader, and his nearly 9-year old brother for a future incarnation of the Zelda series of video games. And all he asks is that he get a free copy of the game when it's done.
He sent an e-mail to Shigeru Miyamoto (he googled his e-mail address) outlining his ideas. He plans to storyboard the entire game concept; he has assigned friends to design different elements of the game, including bosses and mini-bosses, weapons and landscapes. He has mapped out an island, and has written a central narrative. And he is hopeful that Shigeru-san will respond to his e-mail, and eventually adapt his ideas into 3-D rendered virtual reality.
My son dreams big.
I've tried to lower his expectations somewhat, without dashing his obvious enthusiasm. My wife was more blunt. "Everybody's so negative," he said to me in tearful frustration last night. "I'm not getting any support." So I tell him that it's good to dream, that he should keep it up, and have fun with it. But he says, "What's the point if it's not going to happen?"
My son has yet to experience the collapse of a dream as big as this. He's had some smaller dreams fulfilled, and others turn out to be less than what he expected when he actually got to execute them. He complains that his two weeks away with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation this past summer were too hot, and the bugs too bloodthirsty.
There are few things that I can get him to muster any enthusiasm about. But this one, he's latched onto it. He's in charge, directing others toward his vision. And he can't stand to think that it won't work out.
So what do I tell him?
I can only offer him my support, and advice. Anything else, he sees as tearing down his dream.
There's something so 1997 about all this.
4:14:12 PM
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Monday, February 10, 2003
I was talking to the president of a magazine and paperback distribution company today about the evils of scan-based trading--that peculiar financial/technological relationship that retailers like Wal-Mart, Target and Kroger's (as well as KMart, if it ever pulls out of its death spiral and deploys it past the stores piloting the technology) use to squeeze the blood out of the supply-chain stone .
Here's how it works:
Once upon a time, a distributor or supplier would deliver goods to a retailer, and invoice them for them. The retailer would take ownership of the goods, and sell them; the two parties would negotiate compensation for unsold or damaged inventory, but the inventory was carried on the retailer's books.
With SBT, a retailer doesn't take ownership of the goods until they're sold; the distributor doesn't get paid until a product gets sold and is scanned at the the register. An invoice gets generated when the scan info is sent to the supplier/distributor by an electronic message at the end of the day.
This is great for retailers--they lose the financial risks of carrying inventory, and pass those costs back to the supplier. They don't pay for anything that doesn't get scanned (so anything that gets shoplifted, mis-scanned or otherwise leaves in an undocumented fashion gets deducted from the supplier's take). And the retailer can see daily what's selling, using that information to drive supplier restock and cut off products that aren't making their numbers.
Often, the retailers also place display responsibility on the suppliers too--they have to come in and set up displays, handle restocking and otherwise maintain their products in-store.
So WalMart and Target are effectively in the real estate business--they take a cut of the sales on products for letting them sit on their shelves.
You could see where this could be unpopular with suppliers. It gets even more unpopular when the retailer's software doesn't correctly credit them with sales.
More to come on this....
5:25:28 PM
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Friday, February 7, 2003
Another reason to hate Internet Explorer.
The CSS I put together for several sites renders perfectly in Safari, Mozilla and Opera. But it gets hosed in IE--and it gets hosed in different ways, depending on whether I'm using IE for Windows 2000, XP or Mac. It's like someone at MS said, "Which way should we break stylesheets for this platform?"
11:30:30 PM
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Thursday, February 6, 2003
I got the following teaser about a product announcement today from an eager PR professional. And hell if I know what the product is. See if you can guess what it does:
We are announcing a new technology platform called [product name].
This will provide customers with unprecedented flexibility in adapting
[company name] solutions to both their initial requirements and to adapt to
changes that are occurring at an ever-faster pace in the marketplace. This
enables faster implementations, easier adaptation to changing business
requirements and a lower total cost of ownership. The new platform combines
existing leading edge technology with new capabilities.
5:21:27 PM
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Apologies to Eddie Vedder.
Jeremy Allaireannounced on his blog that he is leaving Macromedia to take a job with a venture capital firm. The Allaire founder became CTO of Macromedia after it merged with the company two years ago. The question is, is he leaving just because he's got a job in VC, or is he leaving to avoid becoming a Microsoft employee?
12:25:16 PM
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Once more, I've made a minor adjustment to the CSS for buzzword; there seems ro have been a bug with the way the last one rendered the body text layer that made it looked clipped at the bottom. Can we fix it? Yes we can! (Sorry, too much toddler exposure).
11:08:20 AM
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As expected, my column in the January issue of Baseline did not go over well with some folks at Sun Microsystems. Maybe it was the headline. In any case, Sun sent me the PR love note I've posted below. I've put it here on my blog for the purpose of extending this conversation between Sun and me out to you--does Sun's response reflect how you perceive them?
From: "Sabrina Guttman"
Date: Mon Feb 3, 2003 2:33:25 PM US/Eastern
To: sean@dendro.com
Subject: Comments on "Partial Eclipse of the Sun..."
Hi Sean --
I am writing to you in response to your recent article in the January issue of Baseline entitled "Partial Eclipse of the Sun; Intel and Linux Have Driven Sun to Switch Strategies. Should You Buy it?" In your article, you claim Sun is being forced to switch strategies away from "proprietary" hardware platforms in the face of increased pressure from Intel and Linux. I would like to point out that Sun is a *systems* company which means we sell the best hardware and software solutions to meet our customers' needs at every level of their IT infrastructure.
To your point that Sun's hardware is "proprietary," the UltraSPARC family of processors are one of the industry's ONLY open systems processors as they are designed on the open architecture and standards set by SPARC International, Inc.[tm] -- an independent, non-profit organization. Unlike Intel, Sun builds compatibility into its entire line of server products. This means ISVs can port their applications onto different generations of UltraSPARC without having to recompile them and customers can mix and match processor speeds for the best investment protection in the industry.
Furthermore, might I remind you that UNIX, like Linux, is based on the X/Open 1170 Standard and our Solaris Operating Environment is the best implementation of that standard in the INDUSTRY. The reason our competitors are flocking to Linux is that they failed in creating the robust operating environment we have been offering our customers for years.
Sun is all about open choice and open standards and that's why over 12,000 business applications are currently readily available on our SPARC/Solaris platform. Can Lintel manufacturers say as much? Sun is also about innovation and providing value to our customers and that's why we are now offering Solaris and Linux on x86 architectures at the edge of the network where it makes the most sense.
Please let me know if you would like to speak with us further about any of these points or just generally about Sun's strategy.
Regards,
Sabrina Guttman
*************************************
Sabrina Guttman
Sun Microsystems, Inc.
Public Relations | PNP | N1|
10:58:38 AM
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Wednesday, February 5, 2003
I've given the templates on buzzword-compliant a bit of a tuneup, courtesy of Dreamweaver. They're still a work in progress, but they're a damn sight better than the butt-ugly table-based template I built in PageMill two years ago.
10:10:18 AM
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Tuesday, February 4, 2003
As part of my review of the latest version of Macromedia's Studio MX, I've been working with Dreamweaver MX to fix some of the really crappy CSS I had hand-coded, and generating some graphics with the beta of Freehand MX. I am, thus far, friggin' ecstatic. Of course, since the last pseudo-WYSIWYG web tool I worked with was GoLive 5.0, that's not a hard state to put me in.
Still, I'm really impressed thus far with the CSS editing capabilities of Dreamweaver. It makes me all that more nervous about the rumors that Microsoft is planning to acquire Macromedia.
A more fully fleshed-out review is pending; watch for a link here.
5:08:50 PM
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Since I've been consolidating hosting of some of my domains, I ran into a little bit of a problem; I had three domain names pointed at the same host, and I wanted each of the domains to have its own home page. So, 10 minutes of PHP coding later, my problem was solved.
I inserted a simple redirector based on the $HTTP_HOST and $REQUEST_URI server variables in PHP, which capture the URL that the user has requested. The rest is just sending standard HTTP redirect headers, so that the user will be forwarded to the page they've come looking for.
I reused a code-snip from an earlier project that creates a string variable that stores the fully-expressed URL of the site, just in case I decide to add some other options later.
The switch uses the stringsearch function "strstr" to find the text for which domain the incoming request is pointed at, then sends back a header to redirect users to the corresponding directory for the homepage of that site. Extending this, I can now on a single host maintain as many domains as the provider will let me point at the site, and as storage will allow.
To build a home page that redirects based on the incoming URL, (if your site supports PHP), use this code and substitute your own domain names. If you've got more than three, just repeat the "if" statements as many times as you need to. (It's not pretty, but it works.)
<html>
<head>
<?php
$url = sprintf("%s%s%s"," http://";,$HTTP_HOST,,br>
$REQUEST_URI );
if (strstr($url, "INSERT DOMAIN NAME #1 HERE")) {
?>
<title>Forwarding to INSERT DOMAIN NAME #1 HERE</title>
<meta http-equiv="Refresh" content="1; URL=http://DOMAINNAME#1.com/DIRECTORYOFHOMEPAGE/";>
<?
}
if (strstr($url, "INSERT 2ND DOMAIN NAME HERE"))
{
?> <title>Forwarding to 2ND DOMAIN NAME Home</title> <meta http-equiv="Refresh" content="1; URL=http://www.2NDDOMAINNAME.com/DIRECTORYOF2NDHOMEPAGE/";>
<?
}
else { ?>
<title>Forwarding to 3RD DOMAIN homepage</title>
<meta http-equiv="Refresh" content="1; URL=http://www.3RDDOMAIN.com/index2.html";>
<?}
</head>
12:06:55 PM
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