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Microsoft reunion photos

While I'm thinking about Microsoft, here's an interesting bit for computer historians.

Mithun Dhar's MSDN blog has posted a couple of interesting photos from Microsoft history.

There was a recent reunion of the original eleven Microsoft employees where they re-created a much earlier photo taken just before they moved from Albuquerque to Bellevue (which is about 5 miles west of the current Redmond campus).

First, the Albuquerque photo:

That's (top row) Steve Wood, Bob Wallace, Jim Lane, (middle row) Bob O'Rear, Bob Greenberg, Marc, McDonald, Gordon Letwin, (front row) Bill Gates, Andrea Lewis, Marla Wood, and Paul Allen.

And the current photo:

Here we have (top row) Bob O'Rear, Steve Wood, Bob Greenberg, Marc McDonald, Gordon Letwin, Jim Lane, (front row) Bill Gates, Andrea Lewis, Miriam Lubow, Marla Wood, and Paul Allen.

The second photo includes Miriam Lubow who was absent from the first photo. Bob Wallace passed away in 2002 (in addition to his work at Microsoft, Bob invented the term shareware and authored one of the earliest word processing applications, PC-Write).

A Dystopian future according to TED

Have I mentioned how much I love TED? I can't think of a better way to spend a spare five to twenty minutes than listening to important thinkers talk about interesting ideas.

This evening I listened to a couple of recent posts that together paint a dystopian picture of the future. If you extrapolate from one talk to the other, we may quickly have Cylons/Terminator/insert favorite scifi disaster here.

First, a 2003 talk by George Dyson on the birth of the computer. While he entire talk is fascinating and entertaining, you'll need to pay close attention to the section on Nils Aal Barricelli and his universe at the end.

Susan Blackmore is a memeticist, and the first portion of her talk is an introduction to memetics. After this she proposes a new type of meme, a techno-meme (or teme as she calls it), that is self replicating independent of human activity.

Apple, IT, and cloud computing

Apple's front page today links to a ComputerWorld article about the rise of OS X in business computing environments:

June 26, 2008 (Computerworld) - Nearly 80% of businesses have Macs in-house, nearly double the percentage that said they had users running Mac OS X two years ago, a research firm said today.

"Then, we were talking about onesies and twosies," said Laura DiDio, a research fellow atYankee Group Research Inc. who conducted a survey of more than 700 senior IT administrators and C-level executives. "Now the number of actual users is very significant. A number of the businesses said that they had 50 or 100 or even several thousand Macs deployed."

The article notes that Apple makes the advances despite little effort to break into the business marketplace. It goes on with a bunch of usage statistics that completely miss the point; Apple isn't succeeding in the business marketplace because of changes to the Mac. It's succeeding because of changes to the nature of business computing.

If you buy the arguments in Nicholas Carr's new book, The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google, then we are moving to Information Technology as a service rather than a core business function, and we're migrating it to the web.

I'm going to keep my views on the irrelevance of Windows domains to another post, but if you just look at Google Apps' offerings, then you can see how inexpensive and easy it is to move e-mail, shared calendaring and resource scheduling, user provisioning, and file storage/editing to the web. If we're doing that -- and I think that were both are and should -- then all that an end user needs is a browser and a very basic application set.

This is why Apple's business market is growing. It doesn't take an IT department to keep an employee productive on a Mac if their primary application is just a browser. Just hand them a laptop and they're pretty self sufficient.

I know that most organizations aren't there yet, but I'm convinced that it's the future.

Part two of Smart Mobs is up

Part two of Howard Rheinghold's Smart Mobs, Collective Action, Media, and Democracy has been posted on his vlog. I mentioned the first part about a week ago.

On to the video:

 

Howard Rheingold's Vlog

Howard Rheingold has posted work related to his 2003 book Smart Mobs that is as relevant today as his classic The Virtual Community was in 1995

Here's the summary that he's provided:

Smart Mobs, Collective Action, Media, and Democracy, Part 1 In Fall, 2007, James Fishkin's Center for Deliberative Democracy and Jim Lehrer's Newshour program brought together 300 Americans to talk about democracy. By The People, was broadcast on PBS in January, 2008. I was invited to address this assembly. I talked about Smart Mobs in relation to the public sphere--the citizen discourse that undergirds democracy. The following video, first of two parts, courtesy MacNeil/Lehrer Productions. Site implementation by Ideacodes [From Howard Rheingold's Vlog]

And here's the video:

geospacial, social networks, web 2.0, community, Culture, Howard Rheingold