Not a retreat, just Hegelian synthesis…
Much jubilation through the blogvines today, with the news that Microsoft has canned its infamous Hailstorm initiative.
The New York Times piece, in particular, has some choice quotes: "There was incredible customer resistance," said a Microsoft .Net consultant, who spoke on the condition that he not be identified” and “…after nine months of intense effort the company was unable to find any partner willing to commit itself to the program.” No, really?
Hailstorm failed to gain support for one simple reason: the 'Net selects against centralization.
The bullshit rhetoric of the original Hailstorm announcement included this masterpiece of MSFT doublespeak: “HailStorm is designed to place individuals at the center of their computing experience and take control over the technology in their lives and better protect the privacy of their personal information”
What a crock. Hailstorm was never going to be user centric, it was Microsoft-centric. Just another attempt by the Borg to seize absolute control over the ‘Net.
But the ‘Net. Cannot. Be centralized. That would totally defeat the design, the point, the purpose and the potential of the thing.
If Hailstorm had succeeded, if Microsoft had pulled together widespread support for this thing and ended up with a single humungous central store of user profile data, rack-mounted in some “secure” Redmond facility, all you’d have would be:
1) the first single point of failure in the history of the ‘Net, and;
2) one great big honeypot to attract hackers the world over.
The quiet death of Hailstorm is a moment for hope, proving that no one was easily fooled as to Redmond’s real intentions. As Salon’s Scott Rosenberg said at the time of the original announcement, Hailstorm’s real raison d'être was to “put all your data in one convenient place -- and leave Bill Gates with the keys.”
A scary proposition, indeed. As their behaviour with Hotmail has clearly demonstrated, Microsoft has a unique and interesting definition of the words “privacy” and “personal”. First, they open up Hotmail accounts to become a spam-for-all playground; then, after allowing your account to bloat out with all those “mortgage rate alert” and “herbal viagra” messages, practically guaranteeing you’ll always be running right up against the 2MB inbox limit, they start auto-purging your personal email for failure to comply with their account size limits.
Microsoft: One degree of separation between our methods and the Mob.
What right thinking person would entrust their detailed personal profile information to any company with such a loose grip on the concept of online privacy?
So Hailstorm is dead. Good thing. Yet as we’re all now switching to gleefully discussing Hailstorm in the past tense – Hailstorm R.I.P. – perhaps we should not be so easily fooled. My bet is that this bad boy’s just going underground for a few months. I’d fully expect it to resurface in the not-too-distant future, rebranded and snuck in under cover of some new Microsoft altruism – another of Bill’s big shiny gifts to the free world.
Perhaps the combined impact of the antitrust conviction and the sweeping moral cleansing wrought by Enronitis, will lead them to get it right next time around. Dave Winer’s Scripting News piece hints at the key behaviour modification they need to make first:
"Microsoft can still become the statesman of our industry, the evangelist of developers, the enabler of markets. They can have the lion's share of the growth, they just have to give up on the concept of control. It's just an illusion anyway, they don't actually have any control, and as soon as their strategy reflects this, we can all get productive at building the next layer of the Internet, including Microsoft.”
Final thought on this: as a proud card-carrying flack I have to confess a certain delight in the nebulous spin attempted by Microsoft’s Charles Fitzgerald defending this ignominious defeat: “We're sort of in the Hegelian synthesis of figuring out where the products go once they've encountered the reality of the marketplace.”
Launch a braindead product idea, then try to figure out where it fits within the “reality of the marketplace”. Yet another case where a little Marketing Aforethought could have saved them months of grief.
I love Fitzgerald's suggestion that stupid product ideas never die, they just undergo “Hegelian synthesis”. Riiight. Have to remember that one…
Much jubilation through the blogvines today, with the news that Microsoft has canned its infamous Hailstorm initiative.
The New York Times piece, in particular, has some choice quotes: "There was incredible customer resistance," said a Microsoft .Net consultant, who spoke on the condition that he not be identified” and “…after nine months of intense effort the company was unable to find any partner willing to commit itself to the program.” No, really?
Hailstorm failed to gain support for one simple reason: the 'Net selects against centralization.
The bullshit rhetoric of the original Hailstorm announcement included this masterpiece of MSFT doublespeak: “HailStorm is designed to place individuals at the center of their computing experience and take control over the technology in their lives and better protect the privacy of their personal information”
What a crock. Hailstorm was never going to be user centric, it was Microsoft-centric. Just another attempt by the Borg to seize absolute control over the ‘Net.
But the ‘Net. Cannot. Be centralized. That would totally defeat the design, the point, the purpose and the potential of the thing.
If Hailstorm had succeeded, if Microsoft had pulled together widespread support for this thing and ended up with a single humungous central store of user profile data, rack-mounted in some “secure” Redmond facility, all you’d have would be:
1) the first single point of failure in the history of the ‘Net, and;
2) one great big honeypot to attract hackers the world over.
The quiet death of Hailstorm is a moment for hope, proving that no one was easily fooled as to Redmond’s real intentions. As Salon’s Scott Rosenberg said at the time of the original announcement, Hailstorm’s real raison d'être was to “put all your data in one convenient place -- and leave Bill Gates with the keys.”
A scary proposition, indeed. As their behaviour with Hotmail has clearly demonstrated, Microsoft has a unique and interesting definition of the words “privacy” and “personal”. First, they open up Hotmail accounts to become a spam-for-all playground; then, after allowing your account to bloat out with all those “mortgage rate alert” and “herbal viagra” messages, practically guaranteeing you’ll always be running right up against the 2MB inbox limit, they start auto-purging your personal email for failure to comply with their account size limits.
Microsoft: One degree of separation between our methods and the Mob.
What right thinking person would entrust their detailed personal profile information to any company with such a loose grip on the concept of online privacy?
So Hailstorm is dead. Good thing. Yet as we’re all now switching to gleefully discussing Hailstorm in the past tense – Hailstorm R.I.P. – perhaps we should not be so easily fooled. My bet is that this bad boy’s just going underground for a few months. I’d fully expect it to resurface in the not-too-distant future, rebranded and snuck in under cover of some new Microsoft altruism – another of Bill’s big shiny gifts to the free world.
Perhaps the combined impact of the antitrust conviction and the sweeping moral cleansing wrought by Enronitis, will lead them to get it right next time around. Dave Winer’s Scripting News piece hints at the key behaviour modification they need to make first:
"Microsoft can still become the statesman of our industry, the evangelist of developers, the enabler of markets. They can have the lion's share of the growth, they just have to give up on the concept of control. It's just an illusion anyway, they don't actually have any control, and as soon as their strategy reflects this, we can all get productive at building the next layer of the Internet, including Microsoft.”
Final thought on this: as a proud card-carrying flack I have to confess a certain delight in the nebulous spin attempted by Microsoft’s Charles Fitzgerald defending this ignominious defeat: “We're sort of in the Hegelian synthesis of figuring out where the products go once they've encountered the reality of the marketplace.”
Launch a braindead product idea, then try to figure out where it fits within the “reality of the marketplace”. Yet another case where a little Marketing Aforethought could have saved them months of grief.
I love Fitzgerald's suggestion that stupid product ideas never die, they just undergo “Hegelian synthesis”. Riiight. Have to remember that one…
