interesting fact the other day when I looked at a fundraising prospectus: last year, the Beastie Boys were relatively important contributors to Santropol Roulant, a local Meals on Wheels service. Santropol Roulant is very cool – they’re based just up the street and take their name from one of my favourite restaurants in town, where I’ve been going for over a decade now. They are “intergenerational” which means that a specific part of their mandate is for young people to do the work – cooking, packaging, delivering, fundraising, etc. – delivering meals to the elderly. It’s almost poetic. And it’s one of the largest such services in the city.
Archives for June 2000
I don’t normally post
about sports here, but then this isn’t really a sports story for Montrealers: Molson’s is selling the Canadiens.
I missed this
the other day: Mindjack (a really nice web magazine) reports that Shift Magazine‘s future is uncertain. Frankly, it’s not a surprise, although the magazine is excellent and its publisher (former?) Andy Heintzman is a good guy (or so I recall – we were casually acquainted in University). A quick look at Shift’s parent company’s history tells the fuller story, no matter what spin he’d put on things.
That was a bit
of a rant this afternoon and glossed over lots of stuff – in the post about MS. So let me clarify one or two things. First, yes, I do think it’s a complete smokescreen, that MS has no real intention of doing any of this, at least in the complete, all-encompassing way they are trying to sell. Second, for 99 percent of companies in the world I agree that it’s a GOOD thing not a negative that there are tons of others in this space already. Microsoft just doesn’t seem to be one of them, based on past performance. Third, if they were really serious about this, practically the whole presentation would have been about wireless. dot-NET type systems only make sense when you’re talking about a radically different landscape made up of massively-deployed wireless networks using standards-based protocols like IPv6. Microsoft has a good record with their browser to date, but I don’t see them betting the farm on external standards. Which means, to me, that it’s either not serious or will never happen regardless.
Boring news of the day (II)
OK – this isn’t news today. But this whole Microsoft dot-NET thing – uh, a bit behind, aren’t they? I think it’s bs masquerading as a strategy. Let me repeat – I think it’s total bs – everything about it. It’s ONLY there so that if the Supremes do break them up, they can “legitimately” say, “well, see, we had this whole revolutionary strategy, but you bastards in gov’t won’t let us do it so it’s all your fault”. They’re simply trying to up the ante a little bit – or a lot – to make it harder for the Supreme court to uphold Judge Jackson’s decision.
That might sound cynical, but it’s not – it’s simply realistic. Two things. One, if MS wanted to make this work in “the MS way”, even a little bit, their actions would make the stuff that’s already been ruled illegal look like jaywalking. That’s why everyone else is having so much trouble in this space – it’s a very delicate thing to get a system like dot-NET working. Second – everyone else is already there. Netscape/AOL – been there for a year or more. Sun – been there for years, spent hundreds of millions already (can you say ‘Jini’?). Nokia/Motorola/Ericsson/etc – they’re there already, taking baby steps. Apple is there, in a way. WAP is there. Userland (and particularly Dave Winer) is there, and has been for ages. IPv6 – something like dot-NET is precisely what it’s about – only more ambitious, more open, and maybe even more realistic. Oh – don’t forget Loudcloud, Andreeson’s new-ish project – which definitely treads on similar ground.
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