Ascription is an Anathema to any Enthusiasm

… Google no longer provides automatic links to the definition of search terms that end in S … Gary speculates, among other possibilites that “At Google’s heart, the regex !^(?i)[a-z]+s*$ has lost a slash, banning all pluralization!”

via Mr. Weinberger

Meanwhile 5 kind people have provided fixes for typos on my blog in the first 12 hours. Thanks!

I didn’t get a job once. Have I told this story? They had me in for the interview. But I think that was just because they wanted to tell me the bad news. My letter wasn’t folded correctly. There is, it appears, a correct way to fold and insert a letter into an envelope. The CEO told me this right at the beginning of my interview.

Later, a different job. It was my first day on the job and I cheerfully informed this company’s CEO that I was dyslexic. The look on his face would have frightened others. I’d seen it before so I shrugged it off. People seem to get over it. The next day they instituted a three writing sample requirement on all new hires.

I was terribly amused by a scene in the movie Lemony Snicket. One of the good characters is deeply committed to the value of good grammar. When the vile count forces her to pen her own suicide note she leaves a coded message in the text. Each letter of the coded message marked off with a spelling or grammatical error. Of course the evil person, like myself, would be blind to these.

I’m aware that this handicap drives some people absolutely crazy. Good news. In the best traditions of leveraging the contributions of the many I have now added a way you can scratch that itch. Below each entry there is now a “Typo” button. Hit it and you can send me your corrections! Talent Scrapping

Update: Two fixes so far on this one. Thanks!

I pushed the button on the microwave this morning and there was no breakfast in there. Breakfast was in the toaster. I feel the microwave let me down. Or possibly I’ve gotten the means confused with the end, or maybe it’s the distribution channel with the good’s distributed.

I love eBay or Google because of what they help me find. It’s easy to get confused about that. It’s not that they made those wonderful things and surely they deserve only the slightest credit for the pleasure I get from the things I find. While it’s not fair to blame this morning’s microwave for failing me it maybe fair to blame the intermediaries for similar failings.

I get a certain pleasure when I find a new rich appliance in the net that can feed me tasty things so look at some things I found recently and see if you can see the trick. Here you can buy 8-12 frogs legs. Here you can buy some sausages. You can get a thousand kinds of stamps over here. Need supplies for your revenge fantasies? Or maybe your ears are cold?

We need better ways to search, maybe the microwave wasn’t empty.

Our stove has been a disappointment. We bought it when we remodeled the kitchen. We had the repair guy in at least five times during the warranty period. I have disassembled the entire thing at four times. The grills don’t fit. Few of the exposed plastic bits remain unbroken. One of the bits of plastic in the control panel broke so you couldn’t turn off the oven. That control panel captures spills and then stains. etc. etc.

So I wrote a review at epinions. In the days after I wrote the review nice members of the epinion’s community rated my review as “somewhat helpful.” My reaction was ‘what!’ I write a review that should save people a thousand dollars and these folks think I should have included more information about the stoves dimensions and features!

Actually, I recognize this pattern. It is a good thing to keep your community positive. Maybe they just wanted to send a signal that I shouldn’t be so negative. Luckily other people have since piled on and written similar reviews about this poor stove.

This story is about some guy who has gone to court because he’s upset about the ratings people are giving his apartment complex If the guy that ran this place was more clueful he’d have gone to the web site’s community leaders and urged them to work harder to keep the tone positive.

Cause you know - negativity - it just turns people off! No money in that.

The benefit of owning a standard is that you get to control the fate of it’s community of complements. With luck and hard work you can use your whatever you want to call it, (ownership, leadership, power) to do a number of things. You can use that control to shape where the market goes. You move the immovable, i.e. the installed base forward. That’s key because it helps you to avoid being displaced by tech. innovations. Of course in the best scenario, for you, you get to draw off a tax from the market that spins up around your standard. Owning the land a city is built on, so to speak, and charging some rent.

So you get land grabs, attempts to move really quickly to define a standard and get a community of complements to appear around it. For some entrepreneurial startups this is the whole business plan. It’s a pattern that can demand a lot of capital, so it’s synergistic with the VC approach. Sometime this approach goes like a firework and nothing is left but an echo. Sometimes you get the walking dead. Sometimes you almost make it. Palm is a beautiful example of almost making it.

So you get war. War to control the land where an market is emerging. The wars tend to unfold more slowly. To get a standards war you need some big players who are locked in. On the one hand they need a huge installed base that ties them down. On the other hand they must see that movement is inevitable. Finally you need a rich prize, or at least the impression that big prize is in play. It makes for interesting times. Handheld computing has just this structure.

So Palm managed what the other fast movers didn’t. The Newton didn’t make it. Go didn’t make it. Magiccap didn’t make it. The first N rounds of Microsoft’s tablets haven’t. None of the calculator companies crossed over. None of the phone vendors have managed much.

Palm created a standard for how to keep your handheld in synch with the rest of your junk. A rich network of complements emerged around it. They pulled off that rare success, the land grab.

But this that standard is the slow moving kind. The cell phone industry, in particular, but also the rest of the consumer electronics industry, have huge installed bases which they can’t walk away from. So they have to fight it out.

These gorillas’ response was Synch ML. Slowly but surely they have been winning. So it’s a forgone conclusion that Palm would be forced to capitulate at some point. And now they have.

It’s curious how what was once their treasure becomes their albatross. They need to force the migration of the existing community of compliments without laying waste to their installed base. Few companies know how to do that.