fuzzyraygun

I had a very nice B-Day on sunday. Alanna and I played some Rayman: Raving Rabbits for the Wii. Then we played some golf at the little pitch and putt in Golden Gate Park. After a little rest at home we went for a nice dinner at Antica.

Saturday we were out at Todd Lapins birthday party on the Jerimiah O’Brien, a huge liberty ship in the SF bay.

Check out Alanna’s Pics >>

I have been talking about this for a while, but why can’t any of the major online players get their act together when it comes to giving users a one-stop location for all the stuff they want to do online?

Here is the mantra folks. Mail, calendar, Address book, File Storage, photos, and maybe for the business folks some hosting and collaboration. Is this so hard? It seems like they have all been working on the same thing for so long.

Yahoo! has had a nice email service for a long time and yet they have never been able to get the other things like Calendar, Storage, Address book, and online collaboration off the ground. They have all these APPs, but they are poorly designed and integrated into the user experience. Their IM product has a few of them built in, but once again they are poorly integrated to where they are nothing more than links to the browser APP, which all look and behave differently. Yahoo! spent all that time to make an IM client that works in HTML and hasn’t touched their file storage APP in years. We don’t need any more Tech News blogs or GeoCities updates.

I guess there is always .mac, but I want to talk more from a PC perspective because, well… Most people are on them.

Here is what I want from a business owner and individual perspective.

• Hosting: I know that Yahoo! does this, but in such a half-assed way that it is ridiculous. I currently get more storage, more throughput and more email with my nice small ISP at a cheaper price than what Yahoo! offers. How is that possible? Don’t they have like 20 thousand servers all over the world? This is more of a mom & pop hosting environment and I think even Homestead does this better. The biggest thing that they can offer is the use of their email client. And if you think I am just picking on Yahoo!, Google is nowhere to be found on this topic and neither is MS.
• File Storage: I got one word for you Briefcase. 25MBs of space? That is retarded. Enough said. Google DOCs? Not very intuitive at all. It’s not like you have to reinvent the wheel right? Google DOCs is more of a document and spreadsheet handler, exactly what it says. You are better off going with Box.net, xdrive.com or maybe even strongspace.com but then once again you are using a file storage APP that is not connected to anything else.
• Calendar: Yahoo calendar has not changed in years and Google’s calendar looks like Yahoo!’s looked like 4 years ago. Most of these online calendars are nice but do little for collaboration and online sharing. They are hard to share and easy to get fed up with.
• Address Book: I don’t mean a regular address book. I have ten thousand of those. That is the problem. None of them interact and none of them are shared. Can you imagine a family address book that is shared with your family? How about a central contacts manager for your small business? You don’t have to get Outlook and Exchange to get this going.

My company has gone from a Outlook exchange model, to a outsourced Exchange model and now we are using a Zimbra client and it gives us a little freedom, but no file storage and the same shared calendar and address book problems that all of them have. Are we just doomed forever?

So here are more pics of my arm which I just got out of the cast again today. It’s getting harder to tell the pins from the bone.

SCO, the retarded OS folks from Linden Utah, got their day in court but didn’t count on how it ended. Summary judgement against them. Nice.

For a little back story, SCO is a company that was suing IBM for all it could get because it said IBM put part of its UNIX operating system into the open source operating system called Linux. So after 3 years of litigation and SCO unable and unwilling to show IBM what exactly what was copied from one to the other, it turns out SCO doesn’t even own the UNIX source code it was suing to keep out of Linux. Novell owns UNIX and all the source code as well as the Linux distribution SUSE.

So now they lost their lawsuit against Novell and of course since they do not own UNIX they cannot sue IBM for something they do not own. Effectively killing any hope they might have had as a viable company. Great going Darl!

I have been following this story for 3 years, this is super geeky shit.

I spent a lot of time last week trying to install Adobe CS3 on my computer at work and I ran into some frustrating install problems. After I had already tried to rip out every Adobe install and Macromedia install that I had on my machine, just like they tell you to, I installed my copy of CS3 web premium. The problems began at the end of the installation when it said it did not install Illustrator CS3. Ahhhh, I kinda need that program, so I tried to install again and after another 1 hour install it says the same thing. Cannot install Illustrator CS3.

After a bunch of reading and more install attempts I found some people talking about extension permissions in the windows registry. Some people seemed to be having problems with certain extensions like .svg or .svgx. The best advice I got was to go and look in the windows installer log when you can find out what your specific problem is.

You can find your installer log files here:
C:\Documents and Settings\[User name]\Local Settings\Temp\MSI***.log

My specific problem was a Error 1401 and it revolved around a totally different extension file than other people had been having problems with. [.pcx] If you go into the registry (which I would not recommend unless you know what you are doing) and right click on the file you can change the default system permissions for this extension.

Once this is done you can once again try to re-install. Kinda funny that Adobe’s own products are the things causing problems for installing CS3.

There is a couple of great articles around the web right now about the 2.0 bubble, most by VC bloggers themselves, this is a nice article from Atlantic monthly online.

My own opinion of social networking sites is a bit more complex. I think the idea is inherently flawed because it seeks to wall off a section of the internet and then monetize the contributors. AOL started this trend, but they just charged you a monthly fee. How did that work for them? Who do you know that is still using them?

These new sites will simple become the “Geocities.com” or “Broadcast.com” of the new bubble. Yahoo! paid $5.7 billion for Broadcast.com in 1999 how much do you think Yahoo! is using that technology these days? Friendster.com was the biggest thing ever a few years ago. They even spurned Google as a suitor. They are probable kicking themselves for that one now.

These sites that rely on ads and traffic will simply shrivel up and go away. There will always be some new site that is hotter and more “with it”. People will flock to the new sites with veracious speed and you will hear a huge sucking sound as the AD revenue for the previous site will dry up.

Besides this bad revenue model, which in the long run is erratic and unsustainable, I think it encourages peoples idea that they know about the internet when in affect they know very little about how the web works. It wasn’t long ago that every tard with a Geocities.com webpage thought he was a web designer. Are we poised to send a whole group of people out into the workforce with this as their knowledge base?

Granpa Simpson: “I’m afraid of the future.”

Dave Winer has a good post on his site today as well.

I rest my case