[Previous entry: "HTML O' the day"] [Next entry: "Marketing bullspin 101"]

09/17/2004: "The horror. The horror."

So Microsoft appears to be retracting its position on blogger RSS bandwidth. Really now, this couldn't have been about bandwidth, the company sends HUGE binary patches out to its base of dope-addicts on a regular basis. Compared to that, a bunch of RSS feeds are sprinkles on icing on the cake. No, this had to be about the marketing department's sudden awareness that they were no longer relevant.

On other fronts, I had a great meeting today with some of MSDN's site managers. One of the interesting things that they pointed out is that in general, the blog entries that we host on our dev centers get more click-throughs than our headlines. Now, headlines are the holy grail at lots of websites - we put lots of time and energy into thinking about what we headline. It's the topic of much (heated) debate, and it often takes several people several hours to decide on all the headlines for a week.

Blogs written by the well-informed can break the back of a corporation. (Comment on spineLESS corporate management hereby referenced and omitted.) The corporate types can get in a complete WAD about a current or former employee who "leaks" the corporate secrets in full view of the public. I know of one company who has new text in their employment and contracting agreements that attempts to stop this practice. All I can say in response is that tightening one's fist is entirely Napoleonic in nature and stature.

Why is it that despots are typically short, and always fear freedom? Is it just short man's syndrome?

Occasionally, an alternate response takes root. From the "anything they can do we can do better" deparment, corporate blogs attempt to the repurpose the one-to-many leverage of the weblog into more traditional marketing. The result is oft too heavy-handed, and smacks of PR and spin. Occasionally though, it reveals the true extent of the terror present in the mind of the blog-author

Back before SPARC completely ran out of steam and Sun found itself behind the curve of Moore's law, Sun pushed/promoted SPARC as the only viable microprocessor architecture. They predicted 1.5GHz UltraSPARC by 2002. In 2002, after UltraSPARC managed only 1.05GHz, Sun confidently predicted UltraSPARC would go to 3GHz. As of this date, the fastest UltraSPARC IV is 1.2GHz, and UltraSPARC V was canceled in July.

The timing couldn't have been worse, with Sun already suffering with the hangover of the dot-bomb crash. While Sun claims to still be pushing SPARC forward, the truth is that the architecture ran out of steam, so Sun started its step-n-repeat fork of the SPARC architecture. Multiprocessing is so in-vogue today that even PeeCees are getting it. Both Opteron and Intel's next-generation are due for multi-core chips, and IBM's Power5 CPU has it as well. Sun's strategy seems to be that since SPARC can be implemented in fewer transistors, they can fit more CPU equivalents on a chip.

But this was a blog entry about corporate blogs.

IBM recently decided to go linux-only for its (ahem) "low-end" servers. In repsonse to IBM's latest move of inexpensive (for them) Power5 hardware that ships with linux, Jonathan Schwartz has previewed the resultant part and early boards in his blog. Mr. Schwartz claims that the part is "alrady running Solaris". The unanswered question, of course, is "does it run linux?"

I bet it doesn't, for now.

The interesting thing for me is that here we have the president and COO of Sun, directly answering critics and showing off hardware still in the lab. Talk about your De-cloaking and getting personal

As predicted in Cluetrain and elsewhere, the companies that fight this will die.