Happy Birthday to Dawn

Gosh, you know you are getting old when your kid sister turns 54!

Dawn Henthorn, who edits The Morning Message humor email digest for me and is the Guide for Florida for Visitors on About.com, had to get out of bed at the crack of dawn on her birthday today so that she could host three (!) different realtors bringing people by. They're trying to sell their home in Ocala so they can relocate to the Tampa Bay Area. Is this area big enough for both of us?

It is never too late to send her an email birthday greeting. Send it to dawn@darlcomm.com. You can send all of the jokes that you have socked away in your email client too. She'll appreciate them!

Management Speak

Doc Searls and others have been having a field day with what Doc calls the TechnoLatin on the KnowNow site. It's the kind of management babble-speak that made Buzzword Bingo so popular for a while.

I think the answer to why would anyone bother to put up such garbage-nonsense is simple: The web site was put up to satisfy KnowNow management, not their customers. I'd suspect that their intranet (if they have one) is even more useless.

Someone (was it Jakob Nielsen?) once said: "If the CEO likes your web site, it is not doing its job."

To me, any species that ever would dare to utter "synergies" with a straight face is a part of the problem, not the solution. Management have their own agenda (to make themselves rich at the expense of the bodies that they climb) and have their own vocabulary. The #1 rule for the vocabulary is that there be nothing concrete in it -- one must always leave weasel room.

The only time that management ever wants to deal in specifics is when they are negotiating their employment contracts and golden parachutes.

Microsoft Wins (Sort of)

The appeals court vacates the breakup penalty and says another judge will handle the honors in place of Judge Jackson. But - and it is a big BUT - the Findings of Fact stand.

That means the new judge will be deciding on the new penalties. In theory, that could even mean another breakup order. But don't hold your breath.

Would Microsoft have knuckled under about putting Smart Tags in the upcoming XP had they known of this turn of events? Probably. They are not really yanking the code out; they're just not making it active right now. They will. They never, ever give up. It's best to remember that.

Lose-Lose Decisions

I wasn't surprised at VA Linux's reorg announcement. The rumors had already surfaced on VA's best known web site, Slashdot, last week.

After some thought, VA's decision to halt making Linux hardware and concentrate on their SourceForge Onsite stuff and their former Bendover (as ex-employees of Andover have nicknamed it) web sites makes as much sense as anything they could do.

Which half should they ax? The hardware or the web sites?

Hardware is a low margin business and with Dell, IBM, HP jumping into the Linux hardware scene, the competition is brutal. Web sites, in this ad starvation time, is a negative margin business. Jetson one or the other and you lower the burn rate. But that only means you'll manage a little longer before you run out of money and have to shutter the doors.

I think it was a case of a lose-lose decision. If they kept the hardware and tossed their money-losing web sites, the hardware side would gone south rapidly. Why? One of the web sites is Slashdot. Do anything to hurt Slashdot and the repercusions will be felt - BIG TIME.

So they decided to chop the hardware. And feed the bandwidth hog Slashdot and its (ex?) millionaires.

Kinda gives new meaning to the old phrase "Damn if you do, damn if you don't".

I guess it is time to roll up the sleeves and start to add stuff to this. My excuses have disappeared -- i.e., I have quit as moderator of the I-Wireless digest and I am no longer an About guide.

Now, I'll just have to come to grips and decide just how much I want to say about my previous net gigs. *grin*