 Monday, December 15, 2003
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Today Backwash.com announces the launch of the first social networking site for pets and their owners. Pets, with help from their hominid friends, can now register their profiles on BackwashPets.com and build social networks of all their pet pals and see how many degrees of separation they are from other pets around the world.
Marketwire, via SAP Ventures.
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Simon Phipps has a very picturesque analogy of the difference between Sun and Microsoft:
In a canyon, there's not much room for similar species. Once an animal takes up residence, similar species are unwelcome and may become prey or be chased away - it's live-or-die becuase (apparently) the habitat has limited resources. On the plains, there's room for everyone and animals learn to live together (albeit uncomfortably for prey animals) or ignore each other. Canyon-dwellers want to win - plains-dwellers want to flourish. Plains- and canyon-dwelling creatures have a hard time understanding each other - they are starting from such different places that the basic mindset of the other seems ridiculous. Sun is a plains-dwelling creature and as such is used to co-existing. Microsoft is a canyon-dwelling creature and only total victory counts as success.
It's a nice articulation (I have this image of Simon as a big old buffalo out on the Colorado plains somewhere!), but I don't buy it. For Sun, it seems to me, co-existence means imitation: Star Office and the Java Desktop System, let's say, look strikingly familiar to their Windows counterparts. Sun will say that's all about making migration more painless for their users, but really, it's little better than a technical "me too."
And it'll fail: what really makes users adopt new technologies is something that's earth-shatteringly useful! I helped design the Lotus 1-2-3 user interface back all those years ago, and frankly I was damn annoyed when it got ripped off by competitors. But here's the funny thing: they all failed. Because when you pulled open the hood, there wasn't anything there except the imitation, no added value, so...why not buy 1-2-3?...I think was the market reaction.
Now maybe Sun's new 3D interface will be the key. I have to admit, it looks cool, though I'm not entirely there on its usefulness. Although:
I've tried Looking Glass and the best thing it brings is the ability to clear space on the desktop without dismissing or hiding the windows involved.
We'll see.
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Nov Jan
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