Link free or die
Some readers suggest reports of Notes’ death may be greatly exaggerated, but save the obituary just in case
See correction below
REMEMBER THE browser wars? Weren’t they something — a titanic struggle for control of the Internet operating system.
Now it’s the run time wars. Microsoft bootstraps Internet Explorer and NT’s IIS (Internet Information Server) to launch the Web services stack. In the courts — well, you know that song. Microsoft: “I just want to inn-o-vate.” Sun: “It’s my party and I’ll sue if I want to.”
Meanwhile, SOAP wins. IBM teams with Microsoft to hijack the standards process with WS-I (Web Services Interoperability Organization). Investment and innovation grind to a halt as Wall Street goes back to ignoring information technology.
But wait, you say, innovation is not dead. There’s peer-to-peer, the mobile client, Weblogs. No, says Hollywood gatekeeper Jack Valenti of the Motion Picture Association and his trusty sidekick Hillary Rosen of the RIAA (which should stand for Restrict Innovation Association of Americans). There is no peer-to-peer; it’s property-to-property. No, you misunderstand: It’s fare use, not fair. No, you can’t have it your way; it’s our way or the highway.
That leaves Weblogs, the last bastion of free speech. Or is it? Once again, we are held hostage by the gatekeepers. The strategy: Shut down the peer protocols and slap a dongle on content creation. The vehicle: our old friend Internet Explorer and its DRM (digital rights management) checkpoints.
Here’s how it works. Say you have an idea, a thought you want to share with a friend, a group, or a business partner. You can use the phone to communicate the idea point-to-point or, with a little more difficulty, in broadcast mode via a conference call. The gating factor for broadcast is knowledge of the event and access codes.
Forget for a moment that phone communications are rapidly being absorbed into the digital domain with VOIP (voice over IP); in analog form voice communications are still largely unregulated. But move to e-mail or corporate instant messaging — anything that goes through a server — and the data stream can be captured, parsed, and audited.
In a business context, we are willing to cede this control to an authority in trade for compensation: salary, status, benefits. In our “private” world, we are willing to trade control for compensation of a different order: entertainment, information, education. Enter the IE add-ons: Outlook Express, Windows Messenger, and Windows Media Player.
Microsoft proposes a barter deal: control for features. Windows Media Player produces cleaner, faster video and audio, but only if you eat this DRM chip first. But where does Microsoft make money on this circuit? Some of the revenue comes from selling off eyeball access via advertising and marketing, but peer shift devices strip much of that value.
Increasingly, the answer is in content creation. Attract the customer via the free, thin browser, but force them to thick Office to create, enhance, and distribute the content. Here’s where Weblogs return to center stage. The Weblog architecture relies on the crippled IE edit control for its content creation tools, and it chokes off the virtuous cycle that is at the core of the Weblog tsunami.
As Don Box discovered and Jon Udell shared with the Weblog community in pseudo-code ( ):
while (true) {
ScanRSSFeeds();
RantAboutStuffYouSawFromRSSFeeds();
ExposeYourRantsViaRSS();
}
RSS is an XML syndication standard authored by Dave Winer of SOAP fame, and currently mired in a standards struggle that extends to even what the acronym stands for. Winer’s Radio UserLand Weblog authoring tool both aggregates and emits RSS objects that can be consumed by other Weblogs in a modular and deeply viral way. But IE’s crummy editing tools slow down the cycle by forcing bloggers into repetitious cut-and-paste fests to keep the ideas flowing.
The result: competition between a virtuous cycle and a vicious one. Microsoft wants to drive users to Office and its rich-client DRM hooks, to SharePoint Team Services and its IIS-centralized DRM hooks, to the .Net run time and its unified storage DRM hooks. And let’s be honest: I want my MTV. I’ll sell myself down the river eventually if no one else steps up to the plate.
Two possible players: Scott McNealy and Steve Jobs. Next week McNealy (this is only a theory, mind you) will open source J2SE. After Sun’s Linux announcements of last month, a free “Windows” will sit cozily together with Star Office, databases, the Sun ONE (Open Net Environment) app server, and Mozilla.
How much more investment would it take to build a blogging editor on top of this stack, one free of DRM limitations? And who better to partner with than Apple, the last remaining engine of innovation? Jobs’ Pixar studios leveraged Linux and p-to-p rendering farms to send Disney to the showers in the animation playoffs, after all.
Whether it’s Sun’s Linux boxes serving the edge, or Apple’s Xserver in the cloud or iPods on the hip, a DRM-free zone is possible. Let’s face it: There will be a DRM solution. Jobs has a foot in both Hollywood and Silicon Valley, and McNealy has shown resiliency in the face of the IBM-Microsoft axis.
They don’t call it a representative democracy for nothing.
Exercise your right to vote at InfoWorld’s Next Generation Web Services II conference Sept. 18 through Sept. 20 in Santa Clara, Calif. Go to to sign up and plug in priority code XV73002 to get a special discounted registration price of $895.
Correction
In this column, we misreported who authored the XML syndication standard RSS. Dave Winer, among others, authored the XML syndication standard RSS.
