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It's apparent that Dave Karakker hasn't read The Cluetrain Manifesto. Or he's read it and doesn't care. I hate spin, marketese, the corporate arrogance and belief that I can't understand something without a marketroid to interpret for me. Sony doesn't have a clue, really.

The Cluetrain Manifesto says it best. Look, especially, at #74.

Sending it back with a link to http://www.cluetrain.org/ would be a great first step. Then if the same mess comes back, post the correspondence between parties, allowing the world to see that Blizzard doesn't speak to people, it speaks to "markets." With enough negative word-of-mouth like this, revenue decreases, and marketroids get fired.

As a side note, marketroids *must* be hit directly in the face with negative publicity, otherwise they won't learn. I speak from experience in a dev organization; developers, product managers, et al. were never allowed to talk to "press," customers, etc. without a marketroid present (and after being heavily coached). Net result was that the press and customers never trusted a word we said.

And no, I didn't work for a certain Redmond software company. But when marketing controls a company, this behavior is commonplace.

Corporate blogging. Why? Read the Cluetrain manifesto and it will make an awful lot of sense. Corporate blogs are ways to create communities.

People do this all the time, in message boards and on blogs, usually with a standard disclaimer that opinions expressed are not of their employer.

There are so many examples of this... Look at how many Microsoft employees have blogs like Scoble or Don Box, or Oracle's Tom Kyte, or IBM's Kyle Brown, or BEA 's David Orchard (I work for BEA as well) , or Google's Bosworth.. Do you really think these people are vetted by PR? How many employees post to newsgroups or public tech support forums... I see people get into public flamewars too.

On the other hand, there is a problem here with what constitutes a company's "voice". Bosworth, for example, gets into controversy for people confusing his opinions with Google's (or BEA's , previously).

Frankly, I tend to side with the cluetrain. As long as you don't claim to hold the "official" position, and don't talk about internal confidential information, it's beneficial to the company, its investors, customers, and prospects for employees to engage in open and honest dialogue with others.

I guess it depends on how paranoid you are about your company firing you for speaking your mind. Generally I don't get too concerned about it, if they did such a thing, I wouldn't want to work for them anyway.

Another example is with the current CoolPix 8800, the filter thread is 53.5 mm, which is frustratingly close to the 55 mm they could have made it, but oh no, they want to force me to buy their lame-ass filters. I can't even buy an ND8, or an ND64, or a conkin converter because of the wierd size.

I'm fed up, I'm going to get a Canon, or Sony next time. Nikon technology is great, but the company sucks, they need to get a clue.

--Mike--

The Cluetrain Manifest

Bingo! A copy of the Cluetrain Manifesto, would be the ideal holiday gift for the **AA executive on your holiday gift-giving list.

"I know its almost but not quite ready for primetime on the desktop, and at the cusp of being the best thing out there for servers."

Depends on what you do. Other than Second Life (see Sig) I play no games on my computer at all. Once SL comes out with it's Linux version later this year there will be absolutely no reason for me to keep a Windows system.

Everyone I know who feels a "need" to run Windows is using it primarily to play games, other than that we are dealing with people who just don't know any better. For these people, the Clue-train is just pulling into the station. But for non-gamers, Linux is the better desktop now. I prove it almost every day by helping some Windows user get "unstuck".

...it's really not that hard to interpret Marketsp'aek positively

A business web page is not for advertising. Get a clue. Retail store? I want your hours, I want to know what you have in stock and how much it costs so I know whether to go an hour out of my way to pick something up from your store today. Hardware manufacturer? Give me specs, make it easy for me to buy your stuff, and I'll cut out the middleman and give you more of my money. But I don't give a shit about your branding or your partners or your fucking synergy. It's just a few little bits I want, the basic stuff of doing business with you.

I can relate because I'm financially in about the same boat. Little retirement funds, house but little equity (yet), and little confidence that those greedy boomers will leave anything for the rest of us. Don't get me started about our recent tax cuts (not to be US centric, or anything). I'm not whining (or a 'winger' to quote our friend from down under), but I am hopping mad about all the greed.

Fortunately, I have about 20 years experience in the right technologies, and my earning potential is excellent even if it isn't as good recently. I'm well aware that the squeeze is a lot tighter for some, but it is also clear that the outlook is bleakest if you follow the conventional wisdom. Find a way to express your creativity and take care of yourself. Reduce your needs while you take the road less travelled. I'm constantly seeing people who did this, and have been richly rewarded. Not always in money, but they have what they need.

If things keep going the way they have, I'll still be working at 70 to pay the bills and I won't be able to afford to retire, but that's fine with me as long as I can still do it, and I am doing something that interests me. I'm not that worried.

A guy I worked with who is a bit older was trying to convince me that we are in for a long term downturn when the boomers start to retire in large numbers during the next 10-20 years. The argument is that there is a big loss of experience, and there just aren't enough coming up behind to take up the slack. I say hogwash, let them go. Sure, you are going to lose some very talented people, but I think the generations that are coming on are a lot more clueful about the important shifts that technology and the new social networks made possible. If Gates retired now, we would all be a lot better off, and that goes for most of the leadership of large corperations.

He may have a point about the other end of the size scale, and I think there will be tremendous opportinity in small to mid-sized businesses. IMHO, the way out is to start now to empower people working in these organization to use their vision to keep up with all the shifts. The best business people will do this no matter what generation they come from, and the ones that don't will mostly fail and be replaced by new businesses with vision long before they get a chance to retire.

My claim is that the dotcom bust isn't what it first appears, a conventional bubble (although, it was that too). You have to look more closely at the survivors, and you have to be careful about what conclusions you draw. Sure, Gates and company are still making a fortune, but it is on a dead business model. IBM was making a fortune still when I was in school on the same dead business model and it didn't save them. If I'd learned Cobol (actually, I did, but I knew not to go that way) I'd have had a good year or two leading up to Y2K and I'd be desperately trying to catch up now.

It is an open future, and those that understand the importance of creativity and its relationship to freedom are going to shape it.

I've always liked this phrase, and I think it applies here: "When the going gets strange, the wierd turn pro". I think I've just found something to put in my sig.

What the media provide is superficial familiarity -- images without context, indignation without remedy. The problem isn't just the content of the media, but the fact that while images become international, people's lives remain parochial

The author is (I think) talking about passive media here: sattelite broadcasts and CNN.com. The real value of an interconnected globe will only be realized when individuals worldwide are engaged in creating the media discourse, not merely consuming it.

As has already been noted the current "golbal media" is more like a series of biased propaganda machines with a global scope than anything else. I can read kavkaz.org and get a different viewpoint from CNN.com, but I don't know where I can log into a chat room and actually talk with a real person "over there".

It goes all the way back to the cluetrain: until the people are interconnecting and building the discourse with their own hearts and minds and stories, we will never create a social fabric that can resist being torn by demogaguery, be it from facistic leaders or bias news outlets.

Hopefully this interconnection is already happening, but it's going to take time. We (America/The West) are fairly settled into our consumer culture mode. Unless we really decide to take it upon ourselves to become citizens of our own nation and the world, we're not even going to be able to approach the utopian ideal of a global community.

Check out the first chapter of the ClueTrain Manifesto here. Interesting reading, especially his thinking processes about publishing online. I'm a devoted subscriber of his newsletter - tends to shake me out of my thinking most of the time.

A franchise is a pretty simple business structure held together by common image and business processes. Normally a franchise owner pays a tithe to the franchiser in exchange to access to IP and in some cases a place to operate. Franchises are all geographically focused. That's why you can have lots of them and they all pay their dues to the slush fund at the top that grants them their right to exist.

The view from the top is pretty good. The franchiser gets to burn the advertising bucks and get to snort the coke off the stripper's tits and carry on like a mega corp exec., or whatever.

i have been trying to imagine an open sourced franchise. say for example a really cool team with some really cool software and really cool ways of developing software and tools etc decided that they'd provide the overall branding and infrastructure, and for no fee, but enforced compliance, people could adopt your franchise and your cool tools, processes, etc and your billing systems etc, and make good money or not as they choose, but rather than contribute money upstream, innovations and enhancements are fed through to all memebers of the franchise network.

a client would know that when they hire one franchise team they are getting a whole network of teams that work in very very similar ways, but with local enhancements that if generally accepted as beneficial, get accepted by the network of teams.

tools such as CVS and then sourceforge allowed open source projects to flourish. similarly tools such as p2p project management tools and billing systems, as well as automated unit testing ala JUnit, and a host of other eXtreme Programming widgets will allow teams to gather around a brand for the accelerating benefit of all. I think the so called open company manifesto, an amateur regurgitation of the main tennents of the ClueTrain Manifesto, missed the point entirely. The Open Cola experiment is a sham and a marketing gimmick. I quote "An important note: this is *not* the recipe for "OpenCola" -- that is, the canned beverage from OpenCola that you may have received at a trade show, or other venue or outlet. Making canned cola requires millions of dollars in abstruse gear and manufacturing gizmos. It's easier to make nerve gas than manufacture cola. This is a kitchen-sink recipe that you can make all on your own. It is *our* kitchen-sink recipe. We figured it out somewhere between coding the COLA SDK and debugging the Linux build of the clerver." [from their recipe].

But there is no reason why the philosophies surrounding the open source movement cannot have direct impact on the way a multinational runs, as well as the legal system, education, health care, prisons, terrorist networks, and even the military. an open sourced army? be the first on your block. :-)

Answer: to get something for nothing.

No, perhaps it to get something instead of nothing.

There are plenty of things that just don't exist anymore in my local music stores. For example, trying to find any particular versino of some techno remix of a song in a brick&mortar location is an exercise in futility.

Not so in the digital world. However, in order to acquire my tunes, I am forced to "pirate" the music. Doesn't matter if I use fairtunes (if the artist exists), and pay for it. I'm still a "pirate"

Plus, given historical examples, it's pretty clear the the music industry will not go digital, until they're sure that they can make even more $$$ than they are now.

Fuck them. Their time is up. If they don't evolve, they will die, and I'll be happy to see someone with clue in their place

I think a comment from the Cluetrain might be good here: Do not limit who gets to talk to the reporters. The more sources of clear, honest information available, the less chance that you will be seen as a faceless corporation. Reporters like people they can call for a quick quote or a good conversation.
A second comment, from "Contented Cows Give Better Milk", is to be more strict in your hiring than in your internal control. Once you have good people in a good situation, you don't need to worry about what they'll say: it will be the truth, and everyone should hear it, especially you.

The instant you gain outside investors, Nervous Nellies who will try to destroy your company at the first hint of bad news, it becomes extremely tempting to place controls on who may speak and what may be said. I suggest that at that time you perform an internal review of personnel. If everything looks fine, just keep on keeping on; your good people will do right regardless of outside comment. If there's something wrong, make sure you know why it's wrong before you attempt to fix it by throwing out the good with the bad.

But that's one man's opinion, and he has only philosophy to guide him.

It's not referring to Intel's *chips*, it's referring to Intel's factories.
Try this for a breath of fresh air.

Hi. The consumer calls IBM or goes to IBM's web site and purchases the
product take back for $29.99. The consumers pays. The consumer receives a
kit with special label for UPS. The consumer packages the PC and takes it
to UPS. UPS ships it to Envirocycle in Hallstead, Penna., for recycling or
donation. Hope that helps. Best.

So, I clipped the address lines off the bottom (because I didn't ask for permission to post, but it seems reasonable to quote them). This area of ettiquite is still up for grabs, IMHO.

This seems like a reasonable sum to include shipping, and to find a good home (I hope) for all of the hardware that works, but I don't want to have to support if it breaks because I gave it to a person.

Mike Warot, Hoosier

OK, let's see here:

• So many CAPITAL LETTERS whenever he's REALLY CONCERNED that you DON'T GET HIS POINT. The guy reads like Robert McElwaine. You know, "UN-altered REPRODUCTION and DISSEMINATION of this IMPORTANT Information is ENCOURAGED."

• Abysmal English skills. This guy's a CEO?
  • "reversed engineered"?
  • "intellectually property"?
  • "we loose any remedies"?
  • "the Linux Community could of inadvertently" Could OF?
  This in just two paragraphs. Jesus H. Christ, I've seen kids in grade school with better English skills. Call FuckedCompany now!

• "if we don't PROTECT our IP, we loose any remedies under law to PROTECT our IP"

  No, you dipsticks, that's trademark law. If I create something called the CueCat (without the dippy colon in front of the "C"), and it's a plastic cat-shaped barcode thingy, and he doesn't sue me, he stands to lose the right to use the word ":CueCat" to describe his plastic cat-shaped barcode thingy.

Netpliance (with the I-Opener and the resulting arms race of BIOS upgrades and anti-hack measures they wasted time with) missed the clue train, but at least can claim they faced a genuine threat. And even they didn't try to sue anyone.

But these guys, good Lord, they haven't just missed the Cluetrain, they aren't even at the friggin' station!

In closing, I'm pretty sure think there's more than one reason the "threatening letter" was merely a vaguely-threatening letter and not a real cease-and-desist.

1) As flamed ad infinitum on /. last week, any case against the developers of :CueCat(tm)-related hacks is likely to be extremely weak.

2) If Digital Convergence doesn't even have proofreaders, what the fuck are they using for corporate counsel?

3) And on that corporate counsel, if they do have corporate counsel, could one of them kindly bitchslap their management team and explain the difference between trademark law and "whatever the ring-tailed rambling fuck" (that's waht I'm calling it, because they've utterly failed to explain it - again) they're trying to use as grounds to sue an open-source developer with a funny domain name?

"Thank you for your recent message to customer support. Please be advised that there will be a seven to ten day delay while our legal department reviews our customer support staff's reply. Thank you for your patience while we reduce our legal liability."

I don't think the original poster's point was that companies should start major development projects based on what the enthusiasts were doing, just to be "ahead of the curve". He's just looking for customer service, and he sees no reason why the customers most excited about a company's products are the ones the company seems least interested in keeping.

My take on it is that they figure they have to do less to keep you as a customer, because you're already really psyched about their product. Of course, if the companies were more encouraging to the enthusiasts, they might get a competing company's "enthusiasts" to jump ship. And if customers paid attention to the way these companies treated loyal fans, they might be a little leery of committing their business to a company whose level of service varies inversely with how intersted the customer is in the product.

Ah, well. One more reason to get on the clue train.

phil

He's basically saying that he sees the big picture, and the bones tell him that something else is coming, but he can't say what. Why sweat the details, right?

The self-importance reminded me more than a little of the Cluetrain Manifesto. Did anybody else get that impression?

Perhaps rather than writing angry letters to Fuji TV and threatening a boycott, (as one slashdot reader suggested,) we should instead take a cue from apogee and offer them a ride on the cluetrain, so to speak. Apogee has developed a license agreement laying out strict rules under which fan sites can use Apogee trademarks -- perhaps the reader remembers when this came up on slashdot a few days ago. While the Apogee license in its current form is admittedly problematic, the concept seems pretty groundbreaking. Fuji TV doesn't need to issue half a dozen cease and desist letters to protect its rights, it can simply issue terms under which fan sites may or may not use Fuji TV property... hopefully the terms will tend toward allowing fan sites the freedom to celebrate their object of admiration, while protecting the rights of the trademark owners to conrol how those marks are used.

This situation reminds me of the best observation I heard about the whole Napster/Offspring situation -- if Napster were really cool, like Offspring had hoped, they would have sent Offspring a licensing agreement rather than a cease and desist as well.

Re: the Devcorner 100 programme. The interesting thing for me is that I haven't signed up yet. Two reasons:

1. Lack of trust. This is a company that (although it appears to be backing off from such agressive tactics) still did the following:
   • Billed me for my first month's service, even though the units never phoned home, and I ordered before this policy went into effect. When I ordered on the phone, I had verbal assurances that there would be no charges until the units phoned home.
   • Attempted to persuade me to send the units back when I called to cancel the ISP and ask about the charges. I was told that "the new thing" (the $500 policy) didn't apply to me, but that "we can't do anything" about the other $20-odd unauthorized charge. At this point, seeing as how NPLI was threatening to charge $500 and apply their new TOS retroactively, I figured I'd eat the fraudulent loss and be done with it. I'm still not convinced that three months down the road, I won't see a $500 bill on my card. They've given me verbal assurances before and gone back on them.
   • Used fear tactics - "may be illegal" (likely in reference to FCC regs) to mod the units? Puh-leeze.
   • Used bait-and-switch tactics - deliberately withholding orders, and then attempting to force the March 31st TOS on customers who had ordered before March 31st, but who inquired as to where the fsck their IOs were.
   • Used bait-and-switch tactics II - claimed it was a "new model", when the only changes had been to either clip some pins on a mobo connector, or apply goop to the BIOS ROM. Whether this constitutes a "new model" or not is sufficiently ambiguous that it would probably have had to go to court sooner or later.

   Will I attempt to develop stuff for my IOs? You betcha. But given their actions towards the community, will I contact them until after I've done something cool? No way.

2. The Devcorner Catch-22:
   • If joining the Devcorner 100 means I get a free IO before I develop something cool, NPLI has the problem of people joining only to get the toy.
   • I might join after I develop something cool, but then, I already own an IO for far below its cost, why try to get another? :-) I'd be happy to give away whatever I developed for it whether or not NPLI gave me a free unit in exchange.
   There's a catch-22 here, in that you either already own one, and can prove your worth on it, and thereby join the programme. Or you don't own one, in which case, how can you get started, however good your idea is, after the first 100 units are given out?

   On to other things - things I'd ask NPLI.

   1. Why didn't you write up the TOS of March 31st and apply them on the 17th? If your goal was to stop the bleeding of red ink, it could have been done just as well then as the 31st.
   2. Why did it take you so long to get on the clue train and back off from your policy of attempting to pressure customers who ordered before the 31st into your new TOS? You'd already seen the effects of people talking amongst themselves; we know the hardware under the hood of that thing better than you did. Did you not think we'd talk amongst ourselves and that word of those pressure tactics would spread equally as fast?
   3. To what extent is the recent change in policy (particularly with regard to orders received before the 31st) the result of threatened legal action, or the result of a fears of a PR backlash among geeks that had started to spill onto CNet and Wired?

      (No, you don't have to - and probably can't - answer that one publicly. It's just something to think about. You'll note that nowhere on that list is "it was the right thing to do". We're not that naive.)

   4. My preceding negative comments aside - it's clear that you're learning. Why you're changing Doing The Right Thing is less important to me than the fact that you ARE Doing The Right Thing.

      Your shareholders' interests are protected in the future by the new TOS, and the interests of the community have been protected by a decision to Do The Right Thing for customers who ordered before the new TOS.

   5. So, my next question: What's next?

      We have lots of questions about this product. You have lots of answers. We know what it can do running our operating system of choice; heck, we even know what it can do running Windows :)

      Can you create a space for us where we can talk and share information with each other and with your techs? It looks like you're interested. We're very interested.

   Finally - four minor bug reports, and some product requests for the future:

   Bugs:

   • Reports of phasing issues with the speakers. If true, the fault might be on the motherboard. Can one of your techs confirm or deny?
   • Reports of BIOS-socket unreliability caused by curing of the epoxy goop. Can one of yours (or Quanta's) failure analysis experts look into it?
   • Hardcoded root passwords appear to be identical from unit to unit. There's a telnetd running on the machine. Please ensure (at a minimum) that root cannot telnet in from the network. It's been long enough that a brute-force attack could be close to breaking the root password. Yes, we know it uses a nonstandard crypt algorithm. Yes, source for it has already been posted.
   • That [user]@netpliance.com password for the initial dialup. It might be wise to find ways of embedding that information somewhere less likely for us to find it. Security through obscurity isn't security.
   Requests:
   • Line-out. Lots of people want MP3 players. Even your intended audience may want headphones, particularly those who are hard of hearing.
   • Broadband. This has already taken care of via the USB jack. I can see you're thinking ahead. Sweet.
   • Dig into the MP3 market. Rather than spending a fortune to populate that CF card slot and limiting yourself to memory-card technologies, consider selling (via the partnership arrangement you already have with the mouse/printer vendors) a USB-based CD-ROM, and including some software to play back MP3s on a CDROM. This could be done in three ways:
   • CDROM hanging out the back of the USB port. COTS hardware, small software cost.
   • Sell a new base for the unit with the CDROM embedded in the base. Sell it as an upgrade kit to turn it into a stereo.
   • Sell an optional IR upgrade kit, as above.
   • For ultimate sex, swap out the "mail" LED for an IR sensor and associated circuitry. Sell a remote control, or include "learning" software to make it work with existing remotes. You now have a device that competes on price with the Brujo or other "stereo component" MP3 players, but yours weighs less, looks better, and has a flat-screen display for funky visualization. There is abso-freakin-lutely NOTHING on the market today that matches this. Do a market study on it - I'll bet you there's a market segment who'd pay $500-800 for one of these without blinking an eye.

"Customers... able to influence big company's decisions"!?!?!?

This is what the Cluetrain Manifesto is all about. In fact, a review of the book just appeared here on Slashdot.

Maybe the RIAA will get a clue.

BTW: Does anyone know when pigs will fly? (c:

getting on the train, perhaps?

It's often irresistible -- how can one reasonably expect an adolescent (or older) music lover to refuse to acquire a 1,000-song playlist she couldn't possibly afford to buy in the manner the recording industry prefers to distribute it?

Right cause, wrong effect.

This is the new economy, www.cluetrain.org and all that.

They SHOULD be monitoring the internet for comments on thier products. They SHOULD say, HEY! here is another market! And they should slap a model with a 2.5" HDD and Linux bundled and sell it for $199!

I mean, I hope they get a clue!

-Jeff

The effect of Open Source is just one aspect of the effect of the 'net as a whole on closed corporations.
The Third Wave is coming, either surf it or wipe out.