megaduck

It doesn't matter that he's wrong. What matters is that the media has gotten a hold of this, and isn't going to let go any time soon.

Facebook is rapidly losing control of the narrative. They need to do some PR damage control quickly, or they're going to see this kind of fearmongering metastasize into something truly harmful to their business.

Just wait until a 'facebook allows sexual predators to stalk your children' story pops up and goes viral. I give it a week, two at the outside.

At this point, it looks like a consensus is emerging: The death of the general purpose computer is greatly exaggerated.

The iPad is a great tool for consuming information, but not so good at communications or creation. A month in, I've never heard of anyone doing serious work on an iPad despite Apple's efforts to shoehorn a full office suite into the thing.

However, people love it despite the limitations. The iPad's a device that's just plain fun, and that counts for a whole heck of a lot. Apple will probably sell millions of them, and it looks like they have a good shot at creating an enduring category.

As moe has pointed out, you're not going to instantly displace entrenched software, especially in businesses. So, you need a migration path. People already have bucketloads of documents, and many of them are locked up in bizarre proprietary systems (I'm looking at you, Blackboard!). Some kind of bridge is critical, and email is the prime candidate.

I would also figure out some precise user scenarios and workflows, then build a tool tailored for those. If you have clearly defined targets, it should become clear where you can insert a new product.

For a great example of how not to do it, look at Google Wave. Wave is fantastic, magically engineered, and has all sorts of way-cool properties. Search, tagging, collaborative editing, document uploading, you name it. I've used it on a three person project, and it was the best documentation/communication tool I've ever used. I love Wave.

However, I never use it anymore because it's got some deep problems: Wave depends on everybody using Wave. There's no good way to hook into other services. You're confined to the web client, which is a big turn off for some people. Finally, people don't really understand it. What is it good for? Google's answer is "everything", but that's not really an answer.

Using Wave is like being trapped on some technological Galapagos, where everything is cool and exotic but totally detached from the rest of the world. That's the kiss of death, especially when you're a startup looking for traction.

That's my two bits. Good luck to you, and congratulations on getting into YC!

...achieve ramen profitability.

My startup is currently developing a new ticket tracking system named Tracker, and it might be exactly what you're looking for. Tracker's focus is helping you do email support for external customers, but it also works well for internal company support.

Tracker is lightweight, fast, and has exceptional search and email integration. The web interface is quite quick and has some nice features, but you can also perform most functions (replying to customers, creating tickets, commenting) straight from your mail client.

We're currently in private beta, but if you're interested you can email me at dave AT madwombat DOT com, and I'll set you up with an account.

Asana. It's a little noisy, but otherwise fantastic.

We're currently bootstrapping, so I do work wherever I can grab power and wi-fi. Today it's a teahouse in downtown Santa Cruz:

http://i.imgur.com/fYBKA.jpg

Palm shot video of everything at the Developer Day, and should be posting it online soon at http://developer.palm.com.

If you're interested in taking a look, the Webkit/V8 MVC bits are all there today. The upcoming part is the ability to create event-driven javascript services of your own. At the moment, you're limited to the ones that Palm provides.

They've also got a lot of other really net web tech in the pipeline, including things like a pluggable data service on the device that automagically syncs to CouchDB servers in the cloud.

Also check out their Ares web-based development environment, which reached 1.0 recently. Very, very cool.

HP's getting a hell of a deal here. They're now a major player in the mobile devices market, overnight.

Palm has current relationships with the three biggest American cell carriers, plus channels in Canada, France, Germany, UK, and Mexico. Palm also has an extensive patent portfolio, many of which Apple is infringing upon.

However, the real prize is WebOS. I just got back from Palm's Developer Day, and their technology stack for their next OS version is pretty damn neat. It's a high performance event-driven javascript architecture on the back end, with WebKit on the front, all programmed through a Rails-ish MVC model. As a web developer, it looks shockingly easy to program for.

Of course, if you want to program the phone in raw C/C++ and SDL, you can do that too. It's incredibly flexible.

What Palm has been lacking is cash and time. The WebOS development stack won't be fully built out until Fall, and they haven't had the resources to push new phone models out as quickly as they need. This deal gives Palm much needed juice, and gives HP all the things they need to go head-to-head with Apple.

If HP is smart, they'll start tossing WebOS on tablets as soon as they can. I'd buy an HP slate with WebOS in a heartbeat.

I think you just proved my point. While Beijing definitely has advantages, there are other places in China where you can do business for a heck of a lot cheaper. An order of magnitude cheaper.

Even in Beijing, you don't have to get a massively expensive office in Wudaokou or the CBD. I'll also guarantee that you can get pretty good Tsinghua and Beida graduates for 15k, although I'll concede that finding talent is one of the top challenges in China.

Microsoft China spends money like it's going out of style. They're not really a good baseline, although they are a magnet for talent because of the big brand name and outsized salaries. You can get in bidding wars with them if you wish, but it's not strictly necessary.

Bottom line is that the only reason to spend that kind of money is to impress the hell out of people. However, that kind of impressiveness is necessary, which is why you almost certainly need such a large investment.

$2 million is an astounding amount of money in China. You can get engineers for $10-15K a year, and designers, sales, and marketing people for a lot less. Equipment can be a little more expensive than the U.S., but office space is dramatically cheaper, as is virtually everything else.

I imagine that the high level of funding is to impress the hell out of potential partners and new recruits. For a variety of reasons, many people in China will shy away from a new and risky business. In order to get employees and partners on board, you need to give the impression that you are large, in charge, and not going anywhere.

I think it's worth pointing out here that the most successful (largest) companies are full-stack vendors that have as few external dependencies as possible.

Look at the histories of Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, eBay, Adobe, IBM, HP, etc. All of them had complete, standalone products right out of the gate. More to the point, they took the revenue from that product and then moved to ruthlessly and consistently 'fill gaps', displacing other businesses along the way.

If your business depends on somebody else's "platform", then you're quite likely living on borrowed time. It might be okay as a way to bootstrap, but I'd recommend getting as independent as you can, as soon as possible.

I think you've just proved the point. I never use the form helpers, and do most form-like things through custom javascript and AJAX calls. Including form helpers is a waste of space for me.

Not everybody builds Rails apps the same way. I think that this flexibility is one of the framework's strengths.

I've been using a Dell Mini 9 as my primary development machine for over a year now. There's more than enough power to fire up emacs, chrome, and a jvm (we're a JRuby shop). I love the amazing portability, and the ergonomics are adequate.

'Piece of Junk' is in the eyes of the beholder. In my experience, a $300 netbook has been the most productive machine I've ever owned.

edit: Sorry about the dupes, for some reason my phone freaked out and sent this three times. Fixed now.

JWZ had a Pre when WebOS was kind of half-baked. They've made significant gains in responsiveness since then, and solved most (all?) of the things he complained about.

That being said, the system doesn't feel as 'instant' as the iPhone or a fast Android phone. However, you can often get things done faster than competing platforms because the workflow is so streamlined.

Moving to a 1Ghz processor like the Snapdragon would probably bring responsiveness up to parity with other systems.

Whoever buys Palm is getting a real prize. First of all, they get the entire Palm patent portfolio, many of which Apple is infringing upon. Palm's been doing the smartphone thing longer than almost anybody, and they've built up quite a bit of IP along the way.

Palm also has sales channels with the three biggest US carriers (Verizon, AT&T, Sprint), as well as carriers in Europe like SFR and O2. Bell (Canada) gets tossed in for flavor.

Finally, there's WebOS. While WebOS launched rather immature, it's been developing incredibly rapidly. The OS in its current state is incredibly capable, and a joy for both developers and users. It's more usable than Android, more capable than the iPhone (even after OS 4), and blows Blackberry out of the water in almost every respect.

What Palm's missing is solid hardware and enough runway to get developers online. They won't have all their developer tools up until this summer, and it's questionable whether they've got enough cash to get past fall.

I hope that whoever acquires them doesn't kill WebOS. I'm an extremely satisfied Pre owner, and I dread the prospect of having to jump to Android or the iPhone (shudder).

Basically this boils down to "don't build apps with similar functionality to twitter.com". While that may sting some developers, at least it's a pretty clear and unambiguous signal.

One nice thing is that they're spending time and effort to talk to their dev community. Much better than the Apple approach, which is to make large disruptive changes without warning or explanation.

If you view the iPad as a replacement for a laptop, then it falls short. Text entry is difficult, you can't print, can't use USB devices, can't use flash, can't videochat, etc. People who have extremely limited computer needs will find it sufficient, but that's a niche market.

However, as an adjunct to your computer, it's quite nice. Certain kinds of web browsing are much more pleasant. Curling up on the couch with ABC video is comfy. Comics are fantastic. Within narrow domains, it's better than anything else on the market. That being said, a laptop or phone does all of those things, just not as well.

The question is, which way are people going to see it?

I'd like to call a moratorium on iPad speculation until the damned things actually ship. You know, wait for some concrete data, rather than bullshit hypotheticals.

Our imagined use-cases are usually wrong. Telephones were going to be a broadcast mechanism. Java was going to be an embedded systems language. Wave was going to replace email.

Sorry to be such a grump, but I feel like all useful analysis has been exhausted. Wait until people actually buy (or don't buy) the device, then we can talk some more.

I'm eagerly awaiting my copy. Brooks' previous work, 'The Mythical Man-Month', is still one of the best books ever written about building software. I re-read it every few years, just to keep those lessons fresh.

For those of you who aren't familiar with the book, Brooks was the manager of IBM's huge OS/360 project in the 60s. The system eventually shipped, but it was massively overbudget and late. He took the lessons he learned from the debacle, and wrote 'Mythical Man-Month' in 1975.

It's shocking how many of his insights still apply: Adding people slows down projects. Keep teams tight, and structured around your most productive programmers. It often pays to think deeply about a problem before you tackle it. Don't overbuild.

It's true that dynamic programming languages, tools like git, and rapid prototyping have made some of his examples feel dated. However, the underlying principles are still solid.

Hopefully 'The Design of Design' is a similar goldmine. Even if it's only half as good as MMM, it's still earned a slot on my bookshelf.

My company (Mad Wombat Software) is building software that would be perfect for you. All customer mails go to a single mail address, and you can manage it from there. Every 'ticket' is owned by someone, but you can set up custom views to simulate a shared queue.

It's got a nice web front-end, but you can manage everything completely through email. We'll be going into beta shortly, and we'd be happy to set you up with an account. Contact me at dave@madwombat.com.

As somebody who has lived in both countries, I don't think this argument holds any water. While the U.S. government does indeed engage in propaganda, it's like comparing a candle to a forest fire.

The Chinese government controls every news organization in China. Every single one. All television is state-run, and shows hours of pure propaganda every day, as well as entertainment programs that push certain agendas. Every book published requires government approval, and many are written for the sole purpose of propaganda. Opposition stances are strictly prohibited, across the board. Virtually every street on every town has large red banners and posters pushing the 'message of the day'.

This digital form of propaganda is no different. Yes, the United States engages in abuses. However, they're not even close in scale, and therefore qualitatively quite different.

Oh, and if anyone wants to see what this digital astroturfing looks like in the wild, I had some of it show up on my personal blog a while back:

http://www.varvel.net/david/?p=9#comment-19

We chose our company name (Mad Wombat Software) because it's easy to spell, easy to remember, and the domain name was available.

I can't tell you how many other names we had to discard because we couldn't get the domain. I now feel quite strongly that domain name squatters should go die in a fire. They made the process way more painful and distracting than it should have been.

I wonder about this, given that other non-primate species seem to have an innate sense of fairness. Culture almost definitely plays a part, but it's probably not the whole story.

Here's another study, showing that dogs have a sense of fair play:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9794478...

It's interesting that he called out Medvedev as a voice of reason. Outside of Russia, Medvedev is often seen as a simple puppet of Putin. I'm reminded of a joke I heard a few years ago:

One day, Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev went out to a restaurant for a fancy dinner. Putin, naturally, ordered first.

"I'll have the steak."

The waiter replied, "Very good, sir. Now, what about the vegetable?"

To which Putin answered, "He'll have the steak too."

It's true, they've still got massive market-share and piles of cash. If you're competing in the enterprise software space, they're a major contender.

However, it used to be that every new technology venture had to consider 'the Microsoft problem'. As in, 'How do we avoid getting squashed by Microsoft?' That's simply not true anymore. When was the last time you heard someone seriously discussing Microsoft as a competitive threat?

Outside of games, operating systems, and office suites, MS has been largely de-fanged. Unless they turn things around, they're going to turn into another Oracle. Big, but not a powerful force outside their narrow domain.

Google and Apple used to be bound together in a common goal: break the Microsoft hegemony.

However, they had two fundamentally different reasons for doing so. Google wanted a free and open web, where they could develop awesome server-based applications. Apple simply wanted to replace Windows computers with Apple computers. Those two goals are increasingly incompatible.

Now that they've managed to make Microsoft widely irrelevant, these vicious fights look inevitable. I think it's healthy, actually. Hopefully they'll keep each other honest.

While I agree with your sentiments, it should be pointed out that Steve Jobs had nothing to do with the 'look and feel' lawsuit against Microsoft.

'Apple Computer, Inc. vs. Microsoft Corporation' was filed in 1988, and finally resolved in 1994. Steve Jobs was at NeXT the whole time.

We've been here before.

After the implosion of the Japanese asset bubble in the early 1990s, Japan set effectively 0% interest rates in an effort to stimulate the economy. This led to what's known as a 'carry trade', where investors would borrow free money from Japan, and then invest it in higher-yield investments abroad.

After the collapse of the American equity markets in 2001, higher yields were hard to come by. So, all that liquidity went looking for a new home and largely landed in mortgage-backed securities, credit default swaps, and their associated derivatives. Of course, a lot of these investments yielded only a few percent, so investment funds would often leverage up 20x-30x to get a respectable rate of return.

When those investments started to unwind, they unwound hard. The end result was that the Japanese carry trade contributed to the eventual devastation of the American financial system. Which, ironically, means that we now have 0% interest rates. The great cycle continues.

Now, the Japanese carry trade certainly isn't the whole story, and there's a lot of other factors that were in play. However, there's no doubt in my mind that the BOJ's 0% interest rates helped us dig the hole that we find ourselves in today.

I think he largely misses the point. Like many other sci-fi pieces, Avatar is a fantasia and not a serious look at our possible future.

Much of the human technology was obviously modeled after current American military tech, and that was a deliberate choice. This approach allowed Cameron to tap into current feelings and cultural currents. If things had been more 'realistic', then it would have been alien to modern audiences. Really, properly modeling the future would have made the story far more difficult to tell.

It's darned hard to make a story that's universally accessible. 'Avatar' is a pretty decent sci-fi movie that's understandable to people all over the world. It will also revolutionize cinematography and filmmaking from this point onward. Any proper analysis of the film should keep those points in mind.