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1. The level of reliability of Linux or *BSD.
2. Configurability. I have made this point before. Open source opens up hooks for other people besides the core programmer or team to tailor the program without changing the code.
3. Access to the source to get bug fixes and enhancements done.
4. Peer review. Which helps achieve items 1 and 3.
5. Portability. What does Linux run on? Emacs? gcc? Windows?
6. File formats and interfaces that are easily manipulated with existing tools.

The Internet is a wild card. A lot of us aren't listening to what we are being told we will be doing. I've already considered McCain and Bradley. I won't bother to go into a lengthy discussion of them here. It isn't relevant.

I am not a statistic. I am not a number. I am a minority of one and so is each and every person reading this. Don't let the pollsters tell you what you are likely to do. Go out and read the candidates' web sites. Read the candidate comparisons that are going to appear all over the web over the next 10 months. And make an intelligent decision.

Too many media outlets pretend that nothing matters in a presidential race each the Democratic and Republican Party nominees and the photo ops. They don't dig. They tell the stories that will attract the biggest audiences. The net not only doesn't have to do that, there is really no way to constrain it to do that.

I suggested it here before, and I'll suggest it again. It would be interesting to see Slashdot polls about how Slashdot readers will be voting. I would be particularly interested if a few of us, and I'll volunteer, post links to useful web sites with analyses by a variety of interest groups of the candidates' positions. I'm as interested in what the people I wouldn't trust with a soggy match think of the candidates as I am in what the people I like think of them.

Let's give them participatory democracy and see what happens. I bet there are candidates who will love it. It will attract the underdogs, and probably the lunatic fringe as well... but what a show.

"There are no secrets. The networked market knows more than companies do about their own products. And whether the news is good or bad, they tell everyone. "

"Companies need to realize their markets are often laughing. At them. "

Companies need to come down from their Ivory Towers and talk to the people with whom they hope to create relationships."

"Public Relations does not relate to the public. Companies are deeply afraid of their markets."

"By speaking in language that is distant, uninviting, arrogant, they build walls to keep markets at bay. "

"Companies make a religion of security, but this is largely a red herring. Most are protecting less against competitors than against their own market and workforce. "

"Paranoia kills conversation. That's its point. But lack of open conversation kills companies. "

"As markets, as workers, we wonder why you're not listening. You seem to be speaking a different language. "

"Maybe you're impressing your investors. Maybe you're impressing Wall Street. You're not impressing us."

"If you don't impress us, your investors are going to take a bath. Don't they understand this? If they did, they wouldn't let you talk that way."

"We have better things to do than worry about whether you'll change in time to get our business. Business is only a part of our lives. It seems to be all of yours. Think about it: who needs whom?"

There is a big difference between the thanks he has earned from the Hotmail users and from Microsoft. He did something nice for the other users of Hotmail. Microsoft on the other hand, is a corporation. It cannot be grateful. Gratitude is a feeling. Perhaps he should tell them that he really wanted to see something in a red hat for Christmas.

I don't mean this to suggest that corporations should be taken advantage of, defrauded or such. But the only gratitude they can show is that of the people they represent: share holders, employees or customers. The share holders and customers should be grateful in this particular case. I suspect that there are some employees who are not grateful at all.

Even though your post has a tongue in cheek sort of feel, you address some vital issues.
Im sure that a lot of the people in power right now are wishing that the Internet genie would get back in the bottle. The free exchange of information and the quality of digital recordings is what makes this possible. Think back even just ten years. Trading tapes would be pretty much confined to a circle of friends. To do it on a large scale would take a dead tree mailing list and some sort of coordination. A BBS might have helped out, but there is still a rather limited number of participants. All of this adds up to being too much trouble unless you are trading bootlegs. Burning CD's was not a consumer technology back then. To some extent we needed the record companies to distribute the music. The empire of recorded music was pretty much unassailable, and they got fat on the profit.

As we have seen over the past few years, the Internet changes things. Now we don't need a record company to distribute music. Really, record lables are finance and marketing outfits, and they charge way too much for their services. Lawsuits are part of their last stand to hang on to the old way. Its not Napster that has made these changes, its the steady march of technology. You are right, we are getting to the point that the facilities for distributing music are ubiquitous. Hell, you could probably hack together something in a weekend to serve a similar function. Sorry Mister Record Label Man, we dont need your technical services anymore, the barrier to entry has been removed.

The sooner that you labels wake up to the reality of the situation and quit these shenanigans, the better. There really isnt a secure way to distribute music electronically without black box hardware. And no, we wont buy the black boxen, see what happened to DIVX if you dont believe me. If you want to continue to distribute for money, you have to make it so easy that the added convenience is worth the money. Make it too hard or restricted and I will go elsewhere. Time to realize that you arent really needed as distributors anymore and focus on what you do well. The cluetrain is pulling into the station, are you going to take delivery or play on the tracks?

-BW

furthermore:

"There are ten record companies" sounds to me like someone is taking the industry structure for granted when the underlying technology changes. Which (oh yeh, MBA-boy?) is often the worst business forecast you can make.

Currently there are ten companies (actually, I'd count fewer than this if you're talking Sony-scale). That's because you need to have a lot of money to produce, promote and ship a CD in the volumes which a big artist needs. And the start-up costs for breaking a new band are huge.

What does the Internet do? Oh yeh, simplifies distribution and reduces start-up costs in a variety of businesses. It burns Sony's ass that Rancid Records of Podunk, Illinois are on the same Internet as them! and get their CDs delivered by the same Amazon.com as SONY! And they're reacting to it by trying to shut everything down with lawyers. Which is (at our current best guess) the non-clue thing to do.

My guess is that Sony are dead. The big guys are never going to agree to this in contract renewals (do you see Celine Dion giving this one away? Or Tina Turner? Or anyone with a half-decent manager?). And the new guys are never going to sign with Sony anyway.

jsm

PS On a factual note, does anyone know if this "standard Sony contract" applies to the "faux-indie" labels in which Sony has a majority stake? Like Creation Records et al?

Bring on the open hardware alternatives, as well as increasing numbers of companies who remember customer goodwill and think in the real long-term, instead of this short-sighted, attention-deficit, post-modern "non-thinking" that gets taught to everybody in this day and age.

So few companies are on the cluetrain that I want to buy from this company without even knowing what they make! How refreshing to hear a human voice on a corporate website.

AMD needs to hit Cluetrain and take what they have to say there to heart. The only thing I learned on the AMD site is how much a manufacturer can expect to pay in lots of 1000 (And that it'd probably cost about the same to buy two 500's and an SMP motherboard as it would to buy a 600.)

I want nice solid technical information/ I want to know who's selling SMP motherboards now. I want to know where I can get 200 MhZ RAM for the system. I want to know where I can get a couple of chips. I want some real figures on the alleged floating point performance. I want a comparason not only against the Pentium III but also against the G3 PowerPC and the top of the line Alpha. I want to know the price per MIPs break down. I do not want this marketing fluff. If I wanted fluff, I'd be buying Wintel. Just who are they trying to attract with this crap, anyway? The dead end luser doesn't care what chip's in his computer, his bottom line is the price tag. The PHB will still buy intel because they have some Pavolian brand-name drool sequence going. That leaves us technical users and this sort of thing just pisses us off.

Wake up, AMD!

Agreed; it's always more interesting when you can hear the voice of an an author or an editor, rather than the bland predigested output of a committee. The Cluetrain manifesto is a good argument that companies shouldn't be homogeneous and faceless on the Web.

Reading this article reminded me of something else I saw on the Web the other day: the cluetrain manifesto.

Companies need to lighten up and take themselves less seriously. They need to get a sense of humor.

Getting a sense of humor does not mean putting some jokes on the corporate web site. Rather, it requires big values, a little humility, straight talk, and a genuine point of view.

Already, companies that speak in the language of the pitch, the dog-and-pony show, are no longer speaking to anyone.

In just a few more years, the current homogenized "voice" of business--the sound of mission statements and brochures--will seem as contrived and artificial as the language of the 18th century French court.