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|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

The Internet stock bubble never burst, as Bob Metcalfe predicted it would in these pages last year. “Burst” implies explosiveness. As an investment category, the Internet looked more like a hot air balloon that ran out of heat and sounded more like a whoopee cushion than a POP!

Preferred metaphor notwithstanding, the wind left the dot-com sails far more quickly than I predicted last year, when I said we’d see a year of increasingly frantic and bizarre business models before the craze ended.

We may not have seen a proliferation of ever more weird e-businesses, but we sure did see a proliferation of just plain weirdness. For example:

  • After buying the movie rights for Harry Potter, Warner Brothers got stupid. Instead of embracing the hundred or so Harry Potter fan club sites put up by children around the world, its lawyers sent threatening letters to shut them all down. If you’re ever in a position to influence your own business in a similar situation, point out that fan clubs give you free publicity, and while threatening letters from your lawyers to children also give you free publicity, it isn’t the good kind. (The Register (www.theregister.co.uk) has covered this story extensively. In particular, look for a hilarious letter from Groucho to Warner Brothers defending the Marx Brothers’ right to call their movie A Night in Casablanca.)
  • Amazon.com, intent on destroying every bit of customer goodwill it created during its startup phase, adopted an arrogant “privacy policy” (as Ed Foster revealed, its amounts to collecting customer data now and using it according to privacy rules it reserves the right to rewrite as and when it pleases.) On top of this it tried out “dynamic pricing,” charging different customers different amounts for the same product. Microeconomic theorists defended the practice on the grounds that since products hold different value for different customers, companies should charge them different amounts.

    Memo to microeconomic theorists: Business theory states that sales to loyal customers cost only a fifth of what it costs to attract new ones. Charge one customer more than another for the same product and he’ll feel swindled. Then he’ll take his business elsewhere and tell everyone he knows what rotten people you are. Dynamic pricing may be good microeconomics, but it’s lousy business.

  • The German Finance Ministry decided people who use work computers for personal purposes should be taxed, figuring it amounts to an employee benefit. The Wall Street Journal quoted Andreas Schmidt, head of Bertelsmann AG’s e-commerce division, as saying German bureaucrats never run out of ideas to prevent economic growth.
  • And finally, in the Faux Porn department: www.blackplanet.com, through its diligent use of software filtering to prevent inappropriate language on its site, refused membership to LA attorney Sherril Babcock.

    Here’s a clue for Internet filtering software providers: Match to whole words, not syllables, and only flag sites or messages that include at least two words on your bad-word list.

Before the World Wide Web, the Internet had a reputation for weirdness due to some of the bizarre news group discussion threads. In a way, it’s nice to see the Internet return to its roots.

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|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

This week, InfoWorld celebrates the best technologies of the past year.

But that’s way too obvious: It’s XML — simple, elegant, and its adoption has been fast, broad and deep.

Boooriiinng. It took no insight to figure this out. It barely required a pulse.

So we’re going to focus on worst ideas of 2001. InfoWorld’s focus is on technologies this year, not individual vendors and products, which means I won’t get to (for example) include:

Palm for its complete lack of innovation. When all interesting innovation for this platform came from Handspring and Sony, for shame.

Novell for its Al Gore-like ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Never has such superior technology (NDS that is, although Gore’s animatronics were phenomenal …) suffered under such consistently inept marketing.

Microsoft, of course, also deserves opprobrium for releasing Active Directory as catch-up to NDS rather than leap-frog technology, but that’s really a 1999 carry-over.

Apple, which still hasn’t figured out that when you’re a market underdog you need marketshare and mindshare, not margins. Macs need to cost less than equivalent Wintel PCs, not twice as much. Despite the superiority of Mac OS X, Apple still deserves to fail.

UCITA’s backers, for stuffing it through an egregiously biased process. If you have any doubt that we’ve entered an era where big-lie propaganda is business-as-usual, read the press releases defending this bag of muck, and try not to gag.

But our focus is on bad technologies, not individual products or companies. The clear winner would be Fat Network Architectures (the more accurate name for “thin client”), only that’s an old issue. Fat network architectures provide convenience to providers while diminishing usability. They’re only appropriate for applications whose deployment is broad but whose use is occasional.

Another candidate is Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) security. EAI itself is incredibly important right now. But with few exceptions, EAI systems must have superuser privileges, which means they add yet another, independent layer of security administration. (Incredibly, Microsoft seems to have gotten EAI security right in Biztalk, which reportedly passes through already-established access rights.)

The runner-up is the Application Service Provider (ASP). ASPs, which were never anything more than rehashed timesharing service bureaus retooled onto fat network architectures (not a promising start!), never figured out that technology is now built into the core of the modern enterprise. Integration — a critical business priority (the reason EAI is so important) — is hard enough when a business runs all of its systems on its own computers. The ASP model makes it nearly impossible.

The clear winner, though, is Internet Attached Storage (IAS). At least fat network architectures are sound engineering. IAS, on the other hand, separates data storage from data processing, connecting them through the Internet at speeds and latencies that are a tiny fraction of LAN, bus or channel attachment.

I’m quite certain IAS is a winner when viewed through the distorted lens of Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). I’m equally sure that if you move a production database to IAS, what used to be overnight batch will turn into something quite different.

Between now and the time it’s finished running, you’ll have had time to fix the Y3K bug.

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