Wow, I can’t say I disagree with much here but for a former employee Joel really goes after MS. Who cares if you agree, the writing is enough to make it worth the read. He takes a bit of a glancing pass at google as well. Make sure you stick around for the last paragraph. I will add that I agree for the most part, however, the problem they’re solving’s already been solved, the astronauts just want to compete for the over complicated version of the solution.

When I read David’s post on livemesh, I really did try to stay interested but it quickly sounded like, well exactly what Joel’s describing, something built by architecture astronauts that I would never contemplate using.

Bottom line, I know nothing about livemesh beyond what David’s written about but in any case ‘controversial Joel’ is good reading.

“Windows Live Mesh is not just a way to synchronize files. That’s just the sample app. It’s a whole goddamned architecture, with an API and developer tools and in insane diagram showing all the nifty layers of acronyms, and it seems like the chief astronauts at Microsoft literally expect this to be their gigantic platform in the sky which will take over when Windows becomes irrelevant on the desktop.”

“It’s Groove, rewritten from scratch, one more time. Ray Ozzie just can’t stop rewriting this damn app, again and again and again, and taking 5-7 years each time.

And the fact that customers never asked for this feature and none of the earlier versions really took off as huge platforms doesn’t stop him.”

“It sort of bothers me, intellectually, that there are these people running around acting like they’re building the next great thing who keep serving us the same exact TV dinner that I didn’t want on Sunday night, and I didn’t want it when you tried to serve it again Monday night, and you crunched it up and mixed in some cheese and I didn’t eat that Tuesday night, and here it is Wednesday and you’ve rebuilt the whole goddamn TV dinner industry from the ground up and you’re giving me 1955 salisbury steak that I just DON’T WANT.”

Well look who’s competing on price now. First there’s rumours of actually making coffee again, now reasonable prices?

While it’s fun to poke fun at the giant I have to say, this can’t be a good sign. I don’t know much about business but I do know that the buck’s have done a great job of making a cup of coffee a non-commodity. People rarely thought of the cost when they hit up a starbucks, it was about the beans, the cushy chairs, the whole experience man… It seems a business such as starbucks would be difficult to keep up if they compete as a commodity.

Chris, Ali, Jevon and Jonas launched StartupIndex this evening. I believe the launch was meant to coincide with StartupCampToronto2. Have a look around when you have time and check out what’s going on with Canadian startups.

A new ubuntu release, hardy heron, is out, lifehacker review.

I know I’ve said this before but synaptic, and apt-get, is the coolest piece of software I’ve come across in years. Finding, installing and maintaining software is a magnitude simpler on ubuntu than any other os. An example is this recent release. I’m about to download, install etc with one click of a button while on a wireless network. A dream.

I like this quote from Jeff Bezos, found link from Mark:

“Communication is terrible.
When Jeff Bezos’s people said they needed to communicate more within the company, he shocked them by shooting back: ‘No, communication is terrible.’ To promote his decentralized vision of the company, he created ‘two-pizza teams’: highly autonomous task forces with five to seven people — no more than can be fed with two pizzas — who innovate and test new features.”

The key for me is the “highly autonomous” part and I’ve seen that overlooked a lot when this approach is tried. Almost every company I’ve worked for has tried some form of 2 pizza teams, however, none have stuck with allowing them to be truly been autonomous. I’d hazard to guess that a highly autonomous 6 pizza team is still better than lipservice autonomous 2 pizza teams.

You should really check this out. I’d suggest headphones or loud speakers. From Mark.

I installed flock today. This isn’t my first time installing flock. In fact it may be my third, fourth, or fifth time. While flock has come a long way, I can’t help but think that articles like this one written last week remind me a lot of one a tiny one I wrote over 2 years ago.

What’s my point? No clue, maybe just gratuitous links to old posts of mine? Or maybe something about how disruptive technology isn’t about taking over an industry as much as challenging and building community. Flock’s better because firefox’s better because IE’s better because flock’s better….

The trick to building smart software can be counter-intuitive. It requires that you have the utmost respect for human intelligence NOT software intelligence. Look at wikipedia as an example. Smart software right? Well not quite.

Wikipedia is a great example of a small group of smart humans piloting a massive group of humans using software. “All these people, thousands of people, there must be no rules! But there is a very ornate and well-defined structure of participation.”, link. It doesn’t work because of machine intelligence, it works because of human intelligence. The same applies to highly successful foss projects such as bsd, ubuntu, etc:

“The FreeBSD Core Team is the nine-member elected management body of the FreeBSD Project”, link.

As a designer/developer, you can’t get lost in technological hubris. You must respect and leverage human intelligence. Failing to do so will lead you into the dark sad corner. Actually it’s a busy corner so you’ll meet a lot of similar minded folks, which could be nice?

As mentioned, We’re looking for developers. I just wanted to say this explicitly, while it helps to have experience with a dynamic language such as python, that’s actually low on our list of requirements. We hire for people first so if you are missing some of the particular skills but interested in working for us then make sure you contact us. I hate the idea of people not contacting us because they haven’t dabbled in python or django.

A recap of some recent news of related to people who have demo’d at DemoCampGuelph. While you’re at it sign up for DemoCampGuelph6 which will likely be in July and contact me if you’re interested in demo’ing or have questions about the event.

• AideRSS partners with NewsGator
• Well.ca funded
• BrainPark selected to CIX