Ray Ozzie's Weblog "Interesting factoids from Groove usage analysis aggregated across a very broad statistically significant anonymous sample set. I did this in order to empirically validate some intuitions related to some UI design enhancements that I'm considering.
The analysis does indeed validate that the 2-25 design center of the product is precisely the sweet spot of where it's being used in practice: approximately 35% of shared spaces are between a single pair of individuals, 60% of shared spaces are between 3 and 25 individuals, and 5% of shared spaces have more than 25 individuals. Amazingly to me - given the design center of the UI - I found that within this 5% there are actually hundreds of spaces with 100-250 members each; I'd surely never have expected this.
One other incredibly fascinating tidbit: 25% apparently use shared spaces with only themselves as a member, using Groove as a "briefcase" to transparently and securely synchronize files across multiple computers that they own - e.g. Office documents being synchronized between home and office PCs."

.Net Server's new name suggests delay - Tech News - CNET.com Makes for a provocative headline, and the article includes a useful summary of the history of Windows .NET Server 2003, but there is no news in it

Last Task at Andersen: Turning Out the Lights "The only significant, certain revenue source for Andersen in the future will come from its onetime sister consulting firm, now known as Accenture, which was separated from Andersen by an arbitrator's decision two years ago. Partners on the consulting side did not want to share profits with their less-profitable accountant brethren. ... Accenture now has more than three years left on a five-year contract to send more than 10,000 employees each year to what is called Andersen University, the Andersen training campus in St. Charles, Ill. A spokeswoman for Accenture did not disclose the value of the contract."

O'Reilly Network: The Death of EJB As We Know It? [August 30, 2002] "People are starting to recognize some of the frailty implicit in the EJB specification. In particular, the emphasis on vendor-neutrality within the EJB specification leads to a number of inefficient ways of developing enterprise applications. In order to work around these inefficiencies, developers are forced to adopt "design patterns" that create more work for the average developer, arguably more work than if they'd just abandoned EJB altogether and started from a core architecture of just servlets/JSP and JDBC. ... Developers seek simpler alternatives to EJB for a simple reason: EJB is not only way overkill for most enterprise applications, but it also represents a huge learning curve for the average Java developer. The goal of "making enterprise applications easier" for developers (a stated aim of the EJB Specification) has been sacrificed on the altar of vendor-neutrality."

O'Reilly Network: Netscape 7.0 - A Winner! But for who? [August 30, 2002] Interesting perspective, but being a well-managed open source project doesn't make the result a marketplace winner

WebServices.Org - The Web Services Community Portal - Portal Syndication with Web services and Cocoon Very useful overview

The Register: Netscape plans comeback tour with v7.0 "... But the campaign will stop short of marketing the browser to AOL's 34 million subscribers, all of which use a proprietary client built on top of IE. AOL has a test version of its client based on Gecko, the same rendering engine as Netscape 6 and 7, in circulation, but has not yet said if future versions of AOL will use the browser. ... "AOL is committed to Gecko," the Netscape spokesperson said. "They're now using it in AOL clients for Mac OS X and on their CompuServe internet service... For the time being AOL has not decided to switch out IE for Gecko in 8.0."

Netscape usage down to 3.4 percent [global market share] "This is a steep decline from the 13 percent share held by Netscape at the same time last year, said Geoff Johnston, vice president of product marketing for StatMarket, WebSideStory's Web site design and software developer service. Rival browser Internet Explorer (IE), owned by Microsoft, holds an estimated 96 percent of the market, up from 87 percent a year ago, according to WebSideStory, in San Diego. ... "There are pockets of resistance in certain countries, but unless AOL makes a move soon, Netscape may find itself battling Opera for the last 1 to 2 percent of the market," Johnston said."

The iMac-Like PC "The PowerMate is remarkable for another reason, too: It's a "green" computer. According to NEC, discarded PC's will exceed newly purchased PC's this year, adding 220 tons of computers to the landfill — including toxins like lead, barium, boron and cobalt. The PowerMate, on the other hand, is built without any such elements. The plastic case isn't sprayed with toxic flame retardants, as are other PC's, and it sips only a laptop-like 31 watts of electricity (compared with 150 watts for a typical desktop machine)." Let's hope it's a trend-setter in this regard, at least...

WordPerfect Gets New Life in Deal With 2 PC Makers Certainly a boost for Corel's sickly stock, but not a customer-driven switch by HP and Dell (know many WordPerfect or Quattro Pro users these days?).

When the Cellphone Is the Home Phone "In what may be the start of an alarming trend for the nation's largest telephone companies, the total number of business and residential telephone lines declined last year for the first time since the Depression — to 192.3 million at year's end from 192.6 million a year earlier, according to the Federal Communications Commission."

Big Airlines Cut Service and Add Fees New case study in customer disservice; Southwest and other more customer-focused and cost-efficient airlines will only get stronger as UAL and other dinosaur-brained airlines attempt new scams to extract cash from customers.

Ray Ozzie's Weblog: Publishing is Dead Hardly, but I like Ray's suggested feedback mechanism: "Comments? Please reply on your own blog, and point back here"; Dave Winer, for one, has already juxtaposed Ray's one-line summary with a one-line rebuttal (links included, of course), so Ray et al. are providing useful examples of the power of weblogs, but I for one don't expect traditional publishing to fade away real soon now; I think weblogs and books/magazines/etc. are as persistently complementary as, say, Groove and Notes...

JBoss > Sun's J2EE Standard Needs JBoss "Marc Fleury, founder of JBoss and President of JBoss Group LLC responds: On the contrary, I would argue that Open Source and JBoss in particular are already Sun's best defense against Microsoft .NET. Only Open Source has proven uniquely resilient to a Microsoft onslaught. In the same way that Linux has prevented MS NT from dominating the server operating system, JBoss will prevent .NET from making serious inroads into the application server tier, the crucial gateway to enterprise software applications."

DDN | Big Brother hiding inside cars’ airbags via Dave Farber. Be careful what you do (and later say?...) in your shiny new vehicles; your insurance company and local police may be recording...

Notes is dead As you may have noticed, I've generally refrained from commenting on articles/themes in the Notes/Groove/MSFT intersection zone (since I worked for both Lotus and Groove, etc.), but this column is way over the top and warrants a comment.

Groove is very useful in many contexts, and has strong synergy with Microsoft's products, but it's outrageous for Steve Gillmor to assert that Notes is dead because Groove added superficial Notes integration and because Ray Ozzie has been sharing his weblog thoughts on his (excellent) weblog. Anyone who has used Notes effectively (i.e., for anything beyond basic email and document sharing) understands that Microsoft (and even Microsoft + Groove) still has a very long distance to go before it catches up to Notes functionality (which is not to say that Groove and MSFT don't do useful things Notes does not do, or vice versa; they're partially-overlapping circles on a Venn diagram), and IBM/Lotus is certainly not standing still in the meantime. Gillmor does Ray a major disservice by distorting Ray's diplomatic and precise comments about Notes.

The Seattle Times: Business & Technology: Amazon expands free shipping: $25 purchase is all it takes now Another cool Amazon feature: if you order CDs via Amazon, they set up a "digital library" from which you can stream your purchases (after authenticating) -- they time out after a while (quite reasonably), but performance on a couple CDs I ordered yesterday (after noticing the free shipment for >= $25 headline...) has been good. More smart innovation on Amazon's part.

Gateway: Think Smarter, Not Different Interesting controversy -- story also hit today's Boston Globe business section in a generally hostile article, but either way Gateway is getting lots of free press via the ads...

Xbox Brings Early Holiday Cheer With Free DVD Movie Playback Kit As someone mildly annoyed about MSFT giving away something I paid $30 for: Xbox is not an ideal DVD device for two reasons: the hard disk makes enough noise to be distracting, unless you have the console in cabinet you can close, and using DVDs means you can't plug the Xbox in through your VCR, as many people would otherwise default to doing (as DVDs won't play well, since the entertainment oligopoly was able to make it undesirable to record DVDs onto tape via VCRs). I'm pleased with my Xbox overall, in any case (in part because I have it in a cabinet I can close to reduce hard disk noise without overheating risks etc.); it's an adequate DVD player and a great game machine.

Microsoft PressPass: Server Appliances: The Right Tool for the Right Job Positioning challenge: assert message about being better than Linux from a total cost of ownership perspective, but don't cannibalize full Windows server licenses...