by Al Massey
With a nod and a wink to their Napa neighbors, the Silicon Valley is rapidly becoming home of the “whine” industry. Everyone in the valley of sand, from Netscape and Oracle to Sun Microsystems, has spent the better part of the last two years preaching on the evils of Chairman Bill and Microsoft. They have even brought in Bob Dole and Judge Bork, commonly referred to as the Dorks, to cast doubt and blame in Microsoft’s direction.
It makes me wonder what all these geniuses could have accomplished if they had devoted the same energy, time and money to their own products and marketing plan that they have on the Dark Duke from Redmond. Whine and moan all they want, Microsoft just keeps churning along like the little engine that could.
Speaking of Microsoft; in the era of modern technology, no other company has embedded itself in the public awareness as successfully as Microsoft has. Certainly no other figure has assumed near-mythological status as deftly as Bill Gates.
Jennifer Edstrom, daughter of PR guru Pam Edstrom, founder of Waggener Edstrom, and known far and wide as “Gates’s Keeper has teamed up with Martin Eller, one of the lead developers of the original Windows software to pen a book. “Barbarians Led by Bill Gates: Microsoft from the Inside,” is an inside at the world of Microsoft and Chairman Bill.
The portrait of Gates and his company is certainly not one of organizational brilliance, but neither is it corporate evil. It’s more like a hilariously damning story of life inside the belly of the beast. Life inside Microsoft would be more like a Dilbert cartoon if it weren’t for the really serious reality of Gates’s persistent, and uncanny, ability to come from behind to crush whoever’s on top.
Barbarians Led by Bill Gates, from Henry Holt and Company, ISBN 0-8050-5754-4. Pick it up if you want to learn how interrelated, or unrelated, Windows 95 and Internet Explorer are.
“98 in Win98 stands for: The percentage of people who will have to upgrade their hardware’.
I have had a number of emails from users and phone calls from vendors lately urging me to jump on the Modem Bonding Bandwagon. After reading the hype on this “exciting new technology,” one poor soul even rushed out and purchased several hundred dollars worth of new hardware only to discover that his ISP would not support bonding.
A WORD OF WARNING! Do not spend your money on something you do not understand and aren’t sure of.
In the past several months more than one vendor has attempted to interest me in this “exciting new technology,” and I have had the same message for all of them. There is nothing new or exciting about it. The idea of bonding two or more modems together to achieve a bigger, faster connection has been around almost as long as modems themselves.
In theory, if you think of a phone line as a pipe through which data flows, then the most obvious way to get more data is to get more pipes. You just combine multiple modems operating over separate phone lines so that the available bandwidth becomes the sum of all individual capacities. In theory as many phone lines can be used as are needed to achieve whatever speeds are desired. It’s always interesting to take a theory out of the lab and try to make it work in the real world.
I don’t want to get into a technical discussion here on why I won’t jump on the bandwagon. I will point out that every modem ties up a phone line at both ends of the connection. That’s not the most compelling reason to forego modem bonding though. No, the real reason is that it’s just another attempt to keep the user in an analog world. Wake up people, we’re in a digital environment. Don’t spend money on Old World solutions to New World problems.
If you are privy to a super-fast connection to the Internet at work, you may be particularly upset by slower speeds at home. There are clear indications that fast access might be slow in coming to the home market. If you make your living on the ‘Net as I do this is more than a bit frustrating.
Bandwidth can be defined as the amount of data transmitted over a given length of time. A Web page that may take 45 seconds or longer to download with a 28.8 modem can be downloaded in the blink of an eye over a T-1 connection. Companies are flocking to the ‘Net and building businesses around some mythical “faster Internet.”
While the “times, they are a changing,” faster might be slower than we would like or be led to believe. The Telcos and Cablecos are in test phase now for DSL (Digital Subscriber Line) and Cable Modems and anticipate wider deployment of these “exciting new technologies,” sometime later this year. Both of these on-ramps to the info-highway are fraught with potholes however so don’t join the rush to try them. I will devote more space to both of them soon so we can explore their good and bad points.
Business models that are largely dependent on multimedia and video will require sub-second response times before the Web will provide meaningful returns that will warrant the investment.
Before I signoff on this topic for now I need to say a few words about DirectPC and the Hughes Network Systems, Inc. My file of complaints on these twins is growing by the day. The complaints range all over the map from spotty service, unanswered complaint calls, no service to extremely slow download times. Before you go this route investigate. Access speeds seem to be the chief complaint, with most of the users complaining they rarely, if ever achieve the touted 200 to 400 bps speeds.
My intent here is simply to get you to investigate each of the above services before you buy into it. They can be very costly.
“98 in Win98 stands for: The percentage of existing programs that won’t run in the new operating system”
Around 150 representatives of Internet companies, trade associations and public interest groups gathered in Reston, Va. recently to establish an organization that will govern the Internet’s domain name system. Over the next few months several other meetings will take place in Europe and Asia.
Currently the Internet is managed through an address system that includes names like .com, .org and .edu. In order to bring some order to the chaos created by the current naming system a 15-member international non-profit organization has been proposed to take charge by September 30, when the U.S. Government contract with Herndon,Va. based Network Solutions expires.
The creation of a competitive market for domain name registration is the most radical change contemplated in the new plan. “The meeting in Reston is likely to be the most raucous,” said Mike Roberts of Educause, a group that works on issues related to technology and education. That’s because “Americans feel most strongly that the organization should be built from the bottom up,” he said.
Disagreements remain among all the stakeholders concerning who gets to vote, oversight and accountability, and transfer of government authority to a still unknown authority. With a billion users around the world, the Internet is becoming more difficult to manage. “The old order is changing,” Roberts said. “It’s causing a generational upheaval.”
“At first blush, the prospects of creating the future organization as a self-regulatory body seem dim,” said conference chair Tamar Frankel, a professor at Boston University’s School of Law, who specializes in corporate and financial institutions. The conditions that usually drive organizations to self-regulate are not apparent among Internet groups, but other characteristics bring them together.
The area of most agreement among the Internet businesses, public interest and trade groups is that “they’d rather be regulated by their competitors than by the government,” said Frankel. AMEN!
Al Massey is a HAL-PC member who can be contacted at almas@hal-pc.org.
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