Monthly Archive

Well, I’m in Portland.

For those o you who’ve never been there, the old town is great, trolley-cars (trams in other parts of the world) are great, and in central downtown they’re free.

We’ve had a number of keynotes, from the likes of Mark Shuttleworth (Ubuntu), Marten Mickos (MySQL), Doug Fisher (Intel), and many others.

Of these, something Marten Mickos just said has stuck in my mind. It’s about innovation and the costs of innovation:

“I’ve don’t believe money can create innovation. I do believe that innovation can create money.” Marten was referring to keeping “frugality” on top of the list when considering innovation: just throwing money at R&D is not successful. True innovation is borne of a need to survive. He used SUN as a good example: while they were on top of the pile, they didn’t innovate. When the money almost ran out, they did some of their best work.

The same is of course true of early Microsoft work, done in the times of frugality, it was innovative. Now they buy the results of innovation elsewhere: Are they struggling internally to innovate dispite the huge amounts of money they spend?

I’m not sure. There is much that parties like Microsoft Research do that can easily be put into the innovative box. The issue I believe is more around vested interests.

Vested interests are the reason why Sony Entertainment and Sony Electronics; although owning both parts of the pie that Apple eventually ate; the content & the hardware; they just couldn’t get their differing vested interests aligned.

Similar issues surround the whole entertainment arena with their getting to grips (or not) with digital media.

So what’s the issue then with Linux? What are the vested interests currently undermining the future of it?

In the short term we’ll see. Ubuntu is and has been the most popular Linux distribution for the last few years. It’s so popular that some magazines are having difficulties keeping the coverage of ubuntu DOWN in order to keep their readers on-board.

The next few months will be key. As popularity and newsworthy events increase in the Ubuntu arena, we’ll see what vested interests other parts of the Linux community have. If they are smart, they’ll figure out how to combine the vested interests, nont use them to fight one another.

 from Portland, Oregon, USA,

Pauwl

I’m off to the US soon, to Portland to  the Ubuntu Live event.

Now I have family living in the US, so I thought I’d book a flight from Paris to LA, then do the Portland leg as an internal US flight, stopping in LA a few days on one side of my intercontinental trip.

Easier said then done. It took me quite a while to get the right-priced tickets going at the right dates/times to make changing flights OK. Conceptually, it’s simple. This is what I wanted:

1. Fly from Paris to LA
2. Connect and fly through to Portland
3. Present at Ubuntu Live 
4. Fly back from Portland to LA
5. Stop over a few days, surf a bit, do the Californian thing for a while, then get a flight back to Paris

Now I can’t be the only one wanting to do something like this, but do you think it’s possible in any of the systems like Expedia, Lastminute.com etc? Not a chance. Not only does it want to offer me a full set of nights’stay in hotels in LA (I might want the night before the flight back, but not the rest), but I also have to manually sync up my departure & arrival times.

Of course the fact that I booked the flight for 1 person only, but made 2 seperate bookings means I need to select which itenerary I want, although, to me, it’s just one single trip.

 So I started thinking about all the other things that we have as services that are not quite there yet.

One of the other on-line services I use a lot are the bookstores. I most frequently use Amazon and Barnes&Noble, although I’ll shop anywhere if they can get me the latest Harry potter a day earlier.

Now what really impresses me about those sites is that in most cases (as long as you’re buying from them and not a 2nd hand seller via them), you can chop and change your order, add books or CD’s to it up until the day it ships. I’m pushed to think what more I’d want from them. (I know, out-of-print books - but that’s the hobby thing)

Now how can I have such a good experience with cheap articles (books), and a much worse experience with more expensive ones (the flights/hotels)? Surely there’s something going wrong here. I can’t believe that flight planning is more complex than shipping books, particularly as it’s the airlines themselves doing the difficult part of airplane maintenance. All Expedia needs to do is check prices, availability, and go. It’s not like they need to schedule the flights in themselves (although, wouldn’t that be nice?).

I suppose this is a plea to anyone thinking about providing any online service to, once you’ve built it, actually go and look properly how people are using it. And by that I don’t mean checking out the usage statistics, and seeing how browsing habbits change if you move the banner from the top to the left. I mean actually physically going out there and looking at what people do with what you give them.

We all have different ways of doing things. That makes us more interesting as a human race. Don’t force us into an unnatural pattern because the IT systems work better with it. Fix the problem.

Make machines work more human for us.

Pauwl