Stopped making sense

Stumbling around the World Wide Web Consortium site, I came across an overview of the new release of HTML. It (yawn) listed some new features, nothing that hadn't been implemented by Netscape and Microsoft eons ago. But what caught my eye was a seemingly innocuous paragraph:

These [color names] were originally picked as being the standard 16 colors supported with the Windows VGA palette.

Exsqueeze me? Since when did VGA become the de facto display standard? Yeah, yeah, so it sits on practically every desktop in businessland ... this new "feature" probably doesn't sit too well with MacJoe Q. Public. Of course, if we left naming colors to Apple, we'd have to use "Bowling Green" and "Straw Yellow", and these just take too long to type. At least those IBM guys were brief.

What we really have here is the W3 guys bowing to pressure from Microsoft to standardize on their tags ... not too much different than the pressure from Netscape to standardize on their tags. Maybe this explains why Apple is so far out of the loop ... they aren't out there pushing their own CyberDog-specific HTML tags.

God bless 'em, this would be far too petty and short-sighted for Apple, who would much rather work inside of non-competitive standards committees rather than strike out and define their own proprietary technology. Witness their pheonomenal successes with OpenDoc and the PowerPC Reference Platform.

It just sends shivers up my spine to think that this worldwide information retrieval system is being twisted to fit the needs of a single application running atop a single microcomputer operating system. In some ways, that's why I half-heartedly cheer on the Network Computer proposal, even though I don't forsee it overtaking the personal computer. But, if enough of them get out there, then it'll be that much tougher for anyone to justify cramming the HTML spec into the narrow confines of Windows.

In an email conversation with an SGML guy, he mentioned that HTML is progressing quite nicely, and should be self-destructing any moment now. Has that time arrived?

Immeasurable moolah

So, while this little radar blip of mumbo jumbo is still in view, consider the bad craziness going on in the financial world. For some reason, people keep saying that tech stocks were going right down the crapper whilst all the heavyweights were reporting quarterly profits.

By heavyweights I mean the blue chip stuff, like Intel and HP and Microsoft. Nonetheless, while the analysts are all gloom and doom, they're turning around and giving "buy" recommendations on all the new Internet start-ups going IPO. Not that many of these have turned a profit, or even predict coming up in the black any time soon.

So dump all that risky Intel and IBM stock as soon as possible. But, dammit, I'm starting a company called "WebSomethingOrAnother". Gimme a blank check so I can get a T1 and Snapples for the fridge.

If you stand on Zanker Road in San Jose or on Middlefield Avenue in Mountain View in the middle of a business day, and wait for the traffic noise to die down for just a minute (you might have to stand a real long time), you'll hear, ever so faintly, people clinking champagne glasses. The celebration has begun ... companies are rolling in the dough, even if the product hasn't shipped yet. Ah, the savory sensation of capitalism. It tastes a lot like Dom Perignon that's been chilling in an ice chest next to bottles of Molsons and Sierra Nevadas.

You don't have to hang out in the South Bay to hear the partying. Wired Ventures Inc. announced their initial stock offering that values the company at US$450 million. Christ, what are they thinking? This is a magazine, not some biotech startup. You'd think they had just patented water or something. Nope, just a neon-slick rag with way too hip staffers and a back column by future-perfect Negroponte. And a Web site, of which theirs is becoming less and less unique. And yet, in this spate of Internet mania, they will probably do quite well. I'm sure the brokerage firms are going to eat this up.

I used to work at a SCSI adapter company, a start-up that has been trying to go public for a while now. A running joke inside the company is that to get an IPO going they need to re-write the business plan. Instead of making SCSI host adapters, they company builds "Internet storage adapters." Ah, the spectacled underwriters and perfumed suits-and-ties would love that.

Quite recently, I saw some executive-type from @home sitting atop the metal-and-plastic corporate logo-sculpture that adorns their driveway. Feeling cool in his Armani shades and Docker's slacks, he was being photographed by what must have been some journalist for Time or Newsweek.

I wanted to stick my head out my car window to yell at him to stop wasting time and get back to work, but alas, the din of commute traffic was far too tremendous.

The ubiquitous URL

Is it just me or are we living in rather heady times?

The onslaught of the Internet into everyday life is rather amazing. Watch NBA basketball on television, and witness their URL emblazoned courtside. Radio stations, even those of the grunge alternative and easy listening flavors, all include their URL during FCC-mandated station identification. Web search engines are advertising on bus sides and billboard.

Crazy stuff. It's odd to hear those radio announcers describe the URL verbally: "go to h-t-t-p-colon-slash-slash..." It sounds cryptic, something Spock would coldly recite into the sexy-speaking computer on the Enterprise. But it sounds a damn lot better than "type 'go K-N-S-M' at the Compuserve prompt." It's somehow exciting, even (as I said) heady, to realize that a fundamental piece of network identification is entering into the mainstream. People are starting to realize that logging in is a good thing. Timothy Leary's much quoted drop-out and tune-in seems to take new meaning in a world of widespread electronic access, particularly considering the man tuned-in to the Internet and dropped-out of this existance in a haze of cyberglory.

I'm starting a company called "WebSomethingOrAnother". Gimme a blank check so I can get a T1 and Snapples for the fridge.

But, it's worse ... people are starting to expect Internet access, at least in the workplace. At the company I was previously employed, as soon as the ISDN link failed, people would start flocking to the programmer that had drawn short straw for admin duty. The complaint was hardly technical and sent a grating shiver up his spine: "Netscape isn't working!" He had to stop whatever important project he was working on to get on the horn with Pac Bell or the ISP and make everything copacetic.

Whenever I saw the crowd forming around him, torches and noose in hand, I wanted to stand on my office chair and yell at them to get back to work, but alas, the roar of the mob and the crackling of burning effigy were just too tremendous.

Green ACKs and spam

URLs everywhere, Windows everywhere, bandwidth everywhere. Corporations are racing to get you wired up in your home, in your office, on the road, in a plane, in your car ...

Would you surf
in your house?

I would not surf,
in my house!

Would you surf
with a mouse?

I would not, could not,
with a mouse!

Would you surf
with loads of DRAM?

I shall not surf
with loads of DRAM!

In a car, in a boat,
in a truck, on Pan Am?

No! I will not surf
in a house
Nor will I surf
with a mouse,
I will not surf
with loads of DRAM,
I will not surf
on Pan Am
I will not surf
Sam I Am!

There doesn't seem to be a shortage of perceived applications nor a shortage of hungry investors willing to line up and hand over a wad of cash based on a business plan that pretty much reads: "This is a crap shoot. We'll probably be holding 'will work for food' signs this time next year."

Funny thing about craps. Set up a table, roll out the felt and warm up the dice, and people will push, crowd, and shove to get a chance to roll those little red jewels. They won't even complain as their money is shovelled away, they'll just lay out another week's salary on the come line and roll again.

Before investors lay out their cash, maybe they should stop listening to the Sam I Am's of the world and start listening to the smart one of the duo -- the guy a little dubious about eating green perishables. (Who knows? Mad Hen Disease? Mad Hog Disease?). The guy a little dubious about spending thirty bucks a month on top of cable access and VCR rentals for a medium of dubious entertainment value.

In short, quit force-feeding the customers lime-colored breakfast foods and shuck-and-jive marcom hype and listen to what they want, even if they say no.

Where's the vision thing?

Everyone's got an angle, but no one's got the full story. This amazes me. The information revolution being discussed is

• about existing technology that is not yet deployed,
• talked about in terms of months and years, not decades,
• and economically feasible for office or home use.

The small guys have their little angles as well. The wireless people salivate at the thought of, oh I don't know, 10BaseT being declared carcinogenic and completely banned. Content providers think in terms of increased bandwidth to the home and office. They'd better. I mean, is it just me or does anyone else think that RealAudio sounds like a garage-built Radio Shack handheld AM receiver submerged in a bathtub?

Some content providers are happy to bring the written word to the unwashed masses, on the assumption that the newspaper and magazine paradigm isn't completely annhilated in a wired world. But no one out there has proven that Ma and Pa are willing to sit still in front of their Packard-Bell for more than five minutes reading 256-color diatribes (like this one) when the television downstairs is blaring MTV or showing patent-pending Baywatch jiggling.

So the penultimate in bandwidth blasting, the ever-exciting streaming video, is simply not going to be piped into the home or into the office over the Internet until some real radical upgrades are made to the infrastructure. But then what? What is going to be delivered? Live updates of the Coke machine at MIT? Chat rooms, so you can finally see what all those weirdo's in IRC look like? Or is America going to get what its been demanding for all along -- interactive Baywatch, with patent-pending mouse-controlled jiggling?

No one is really driving this rocketship, we're all strapped in thinking the guy in the cockpit know's what he's doing. Wrong -- it's that chimp from Every Which Way But Loose, drinking a can of Coors and flipping the rest of us off.