Life is grand

Every day someone is out there starting a business whose entire goal is to beat the hell out of yours. How cool is that.

Not cool, Mark Cuban, not cool at all.

I dislike competition for competition’s sake. Cuban and businessman like him are not in business to build, they are in business to compete with each other. To go mano-a-mano and see who comes out on top, at the expense of the other. There is no victory without loss in this “sport of business.” You haven’t won if your competitor remains, even if they are #2. You still have work to do, to utterly undermine and destroy. You haven’t won then either as “every day someone out there is starting a business whose entire goal is to beat the hell out of yours.”

Why beat the hell out of your competitor when you could work with them and become greater than the sum of your parts? I suspect ego and “being number 1″ prevents this for people like Mark. They cannot share the podium. Why destroy them when your needs, not wants, can be satisfied alongside theirs? Perhaps because their wants, “being number 1″, become their needs.

This competition eats at the competitors themselves. They will sacrifice their flesh for the win. Sacrifice “4 girlfriends” and think that cutting back to 18 hours a day of work is being generous to their families.

Our world, our humanity and the progress of both are far greater than business. Business as we have it now is a symptom of our limited abilities and resources. Unfortunately it has infected individuals and societies to become a legitimate and worthy pursuit, the end and not the means.

Someone commented that Mark Cuban has “great insight and wisdom” but this is either a severely limited form of insight and wisdom or is the illusion of both. Many a great sportsman has no insight and wisdom; they have a focused understanding of what is required to win in their chosen field.

Unlike a true sportsman however a businessman affects the lives of many and holds in his hands much responsibility. Beware the CEO who would sacrifice this to be #1, to “beat the hell out of your’s.”

I concede business to Mark Cuban, the glory and the power. He can have it and all its trappings. Mark can be assured I don’t wake up every morning wondering how I can beat him.

I wonder whether the historicity of things will be lost in our digital age. When the orders of modern day kings originate on screens and are preserved in 0 and 1 will they be worth anything like the Magna Carta? No, probably not.

What of digitally created art? The original recording of a song, the Photoshop document an artist created or the AVI of a digital movie. A copy of any of these is as good as the original. The original file does not accrue value like a physical object.

I’m not sure it is a great loss. $21 million for something whose original value lies in the words and not the parchment seems a poor use of resources. The Magna Carta has had its affect and its affect is now independent of the parchment it was originally written on. Many a charity, non-profit or even a profit-seeking company would do much more good with $21 million.

Possibly though as we further converge digital and reality we will develop the complexity of digital items to the stage where “original” has some meaning and so we build historicity into them.

If competing with a popular, well-designed product is tough, competing with a popular, well-designed product that happens to be free (while remaining fully-funded) is damned near impossible. And that’s unfortunate, because ultimately, it’s likely to lead to stagnation. The developers at NewsGator have done great work, but the more minds there are attacking a problem in different ways, the more great solutions we see.

While I agree with Rogue Amoeba that a free FeedDemon and NetNewsWire is bad for people making desktop feed readers I disagree on the stagnation front.

FeedDemon and NetNewsWire are arguably the best desktop feed readers in the current market. They do everything you expect from a feed reader, do them easily and do them fast.

But we have barely scratched the surface of feed readers. Innovation in feed readers has been stagnant for a good year or more. Our current feed reader model is a copy of an email reader with a few extra bits tailored to feed reading. Web-based readers are also rather stagnant, adding in features from other software and websites.

We can expect a lot more out of feed readers, a complete break from 3-pane reading and the “1034 unread items in 500 feeds” concept.

So hopefully the news that we can’t compete with NewsGator anymore will force us out of our comfort zone and bring about innovation in feed readers.

Words fail me so I will put it plainly; Fiona and I will become parents in a few months time.

Fiona is 12 weeks pregnant and above is our first scan. Many thanks to Dr. Helen Delaney in Carlow for giving us the first view of baby Watson. It is an amazing experience when you see not only an identifiable human but see her (we don’t know the sex and I can’t bring myself to call her an “it”) moving about in your girlfriend’s womb. Right now she is about the size of a jelly bean and fully formed; toes, fingers, ears, beating heart and a growing brain.

While out walking on Ardmore beach Fi and I stumbled across these strange clam-like creatures clinging to a log that had washed ashore. They were alive, their little fans waving in the breeze, retreating back into their shells when touched. Here is a video of them.

The tubes were a good foot or so long, some thick and opaque, the smaller ones thin and translucent. Very interesting and strange to see.

The sweet sound you hear is the last of the big four music companies ditching DRM. Sony BMG gives DRM the boot. EMI, Universal, Warner and now Sony have finally clued up.

Happy 2008 everyone!

So apparently Plaxo flubbed it and Robert Scoble is a corporate spy. Never mind that those self-same commentators probably used the GMail contact importer feature of Facebook. Never mind that I can go into Facebook right now and hand-copy every one of my contact’s email addresses, birthdates, sexual orientation and favourite colour and type that into Plaxo.

When you agree to a friend request on a social networking site you are agreeing to share your information with that “friend”. Make sure it is a trusted friend or colleague, not just another tick in your march to having the biggest social network.

I am glad this has happened though. It highlights to a larger audience why oAuth is important and why typing your GMail login into Facebook is a bad thing. It also highlights that a bit more thought should be given to how people use social-network sites and more thought given to how social-network sites are constructed. Friend requests are not equal, we need finer grained data sharing systems.

Now if only everyone would take this as a good lesson rather than as a chance to bad mouth Scoble, Arrington, Plaxo, Facebook etc. We should advance from this, not regress to name-calling.

Like this chap the Dock on Mac OS X (Leopard) kept crashing for me this morning. I also could not switch between running applications using the keyboard anymore (that seems to be a function of the Dock app.)

The problem turned out to be a JPG a co-worker had sent. Preview crashed on opening this image file and Finder crashed when generating a thumbnail of the image file. The file was in the new Downloads folder and the Dock was trying to display a thumbnail of it. This crashed the Dock.

This is poor quality from Apple. That a thumbnail feature can crash a fundamental part of the operating system UI is not good. At the least the Dock should ignore the error and not display a thumbnail.

Overall Leopard has been buggy and unstable for me over the past month or so. If Time Machine, the Terminal updates, QuickView and Cover Flow were not so damned useful I’d revert to Tiger.