As part of a very good series on sustainable software, Gianugo Rabellino writes:

The market couldn’t care less about your developers’ kids in need of new sneakers or your VC craving about his next Lambo: the argument that someone has to pay for software development is one of the biggest straw man of Open Source – the market pays for value, and if you build very little, guess what, you won’t get more than peanuts.

This isn’t just limited to Open Source software or even software in general. Far too often people make the mistake of thinking that company expenses justify the price of goods and it’s simply not the case. Value to the consumer decides what something is worth and if that happens to be below the cost of manufacture that’s the company’s problem, not the consumer’s. If that means the company stops making the product, consumer’s won’t care because they’ve already decided to go without.

The base of this problem is the idea that everyone has the same point of view as yours, or that they can be made to care about your point of view. The reality is that they’re so busy dealing with their own point of view and the challenges that brings that they don’t have time or energy to care about yours too. This leads to a long line of misconceptions based on the same idea:

It costs nothing to reproduce software/music/digital goods so all companies should provide them for free. This is effectively the opposite point of view from Gianugo – the idea that it didn’t cost the company much to produce doesn’t inherently make it less valuable to consumers. Maybe you individually don’t value it that much, but if enough other people do, you’d better be willing to go without. Cost of production simply has no relationship to value for consumers.

The company had a bad year so employees get reduced or no bonuses. This might be important for the business to survive, but it doesn’t mean employees will be at all happy about it. If they did their best, met their goals etc, why shouldn’t they get rewarded for it, if they’d wanted to bear the risks of business they would have started their own. The key to understanding this is not to think that business should pay bonuses even if it sends them broke or that you can’t have compensation tied to overall company performance (e.g. stock options) but that employees view this from a very different perspective to your own and you need to make it worthwhile and justified from your employee’s perspective, not your own.

DRM restricts user’s rights. Not really, DRM reduces the value to clients but if they’re happy to pay it so be it. Consumers not only get to decide value, they get to decide what rights they want for their money too. Sometimes these rights get coded into law without the possibility of waving them, but not often. Many companies use the rights they offer as a key point of differentiation – car manufacturers offering longer warranties, stationary companies offer unconditional return policies, airlines providing more flexible tickets.

The key to successfully arguing for or against something is to understand who it is you’re trying to convince and arguing from their point of view. Arguing from your own point of view is just whinging.

I love the fact that I can read my feeds in NetNewsWire and on my iPhone seamlessly, but there’s one really annoying aspect that’s almost driving me to turn off syncing for a large number of feeds: NewsGator is days or weeks out of date for many feeds.

When syncing is enabled in NetNewsWire it no longer downloads feeds directly, but instead gets them from NewsGator which is how all the syncing magic works. This leads to much faster sync times but also means that you can’t actually refresh your feeds to find what’s new. All the refresh button does now is check NewsGator and there’s no way to check directly with the site itself.

A little while back I read, and now can’t find, an article about how NewsGator decides when to sync new feeds based on how often they change and how popular they are. This is a terrible algorithm to apply – any personalized feed winds up very out of date. Good luck to you if you happen to have something that’s important but infrequent coming through a personalized feed – I’ve seen it take a week or more to pick up new items.

It’s a real shame because the syncing is fantastic. Here’s hoping someone like Google buys them out and teaches them a thing or two about crawling the web at a reasonable speed.

Going through the process of setting up a new apartment in the UK, I've found myself Googling a whole bunch of things that normally I wouldn't need to. For instance, where can I find a desk and chair to set up a home office? Back in Australia I know of a bunch of different stores that would have that kind of thing so I wouldn't bother searching for it. Here though, I wind up searching for "home office furniture" and get a whole bunch of online only retailers of widely varying reliability. Even if they're all completely legit – why doesn't something like IKEA turn up when that's what all the locals recommended (somewhat grudgingly admittedly)?

Now I'm trying to find a teleconferencing provider that offers at least UK dial-in numbers – preferably a range of European countries and all Google's turning up is a bunch of "free" providers that seem to offer free calls if you just call into their premium number. Seems to be about as free as calling a psychic hotline… Maybe they could at least tell me where to find some decent furniture…

The impression I get is that if you're looking to buy anything or are generally looking for information on anything commercial Google will just feed you a bunch of spam. I'd revert to the yellow pages but it doesn't seem to know the difference between teleconferencing and telecommunications since it's categories are so broad. I've found the same problem when I've been searching for information on various printers and digital cameras – nearly all the results were from online stores rather than less biased reviews and experiences using the products. I guess those SEO guys really do have an effect – sadly it seems to be a bad one.

The realization that there is valuable information in users attention data is a wonderful thing – it leads to so many really useful features like Amazon's recommendation system. I've seen a lot of really good uses of this kind of data where systems use fuzzy logic to improve a users experience or make recommendations of things they'd like. It appears that Microsoft has noticed this trend as well, but somehow I think they missed the point:

There's a number of things going horribly wrong here:

1. Despite having an automatic update system, Windows doesn't actually apply useful updates. This is stupid – get control of your quality and ship patches to everyone instead of making users put up with bugs that Microsoft has actually fixed.
2. I'm really not sure that people are that interested in other updates that Microsoft were too chicken to send to automatic update.
3. "Update for Windows Vista (KB9871987398274592759)" may mean something within Microsoft but it's completely meaningless to users. Is it so hard to come up with a vaguely meaningful title for updates?

I think I'll keep this as my quintessential example of try-hard Web 2.0. To commemorate I've added a fancy shadow to the screen shot – now this post is as Web 2.0 as Microsoft…

Here's a really simple golden rule for anyone thinking of adding auto update to their products – never ever include any user identifiable information. There's simply no reason you need to know who is checking for updates, you only need to know what version they have. Given the infrastructure of the internet you will wind up getting their IP address, your policy should be that these aren't stored.

It comes as no surprise to me that the WordPress mob broke this rule with their new auto update – they always seemed shifty to me. Tell me why exactly you need the URL of the blog to determine if a new version is available? Exactly what use to you is blog.ephox.intra going to be? Oh well, I'm already removing all the pointless blog entries they spam the dashboard with and those weird technorati partner parameters so I guess I'll be asking for updates from wordpress.com or something too….

UPDATE: I posted this before the inflammatory and completely wrong slashdot article. I'm aware it only sends your blog URL and I've already patched my version so it doesn't. Of course they can still identify me by the static IP and the replacement string I put in instead of my blog URL but it's the principal of the matter more than anything, at least it's clear that I don't agree with deliberately adding personally identifiable information to an update check.