Kindle

Amazon.com has released the Kindle, a hand-held reader. Kindle works with electronic versions of books. Amazon.com would like you to purchase books through them, but Kindle allows for books in Mobipocket and plain text formats, and Amazon.com provides utilities to convert HTML, MS-Word, JPEG, GIF, PNG, and Microsoft BMP to its proprietary format.

Now, let me say that the name 'Kindle' strikes me as a poor choice for anything to do with books, and an especially poor choice for the elimination of paper books. Yes, I know that Amazon.com want to 'kindle new ideas' but this is not the market for that name. The name 'Kindle' conjures up visions of book-burning.

While Kindle includes The New Oxford American Dictionary, it's not clear that it comes with a copy of Bradbury's Farenheit 451. (Its also not clear that F451 is even available for the Kindle. Amazon.com has set up the Kindle web site to allow searches by bestselling, price, customer review, or publication date, but not by title or author. Possibly searching by title or author would emphasize the limited number of titles available. Amazon.com needs to fix this.)

I suspect that the true audiences for the Kindle are college students and textbook publishers. Certainly the younger crowd is faster to use new tech and adopts it more readily. (But they also may have higher expectations, be more critical, and be more likely to reject a 'dud' technology.)

Textbook publishers win in several ways. They have a shorter time to market and reduced costs. They can sell new versions of their books every year. They also shut down the used textbook market, driving up annual sales.

Losers in this scenario will be the students who buy used textbooks. Since you are not allowed to transfer Kindle books (at least the Amazon.com-proprietary ones), students will have to pony up for the full cost of a new book.

Losers may also include society in general: People other than students buy used textbooks. I have purchased old, used textbooks, because they present information better than today's textbooks. (And because they are cheap.) Textbooks (and other books, and printed items in general) are our civilation's collective memory. If textbooks move to the electronic format, we lose a bit of that memory. Paper lasts longer than electronic patterns and requires less maintenance. I can read books from ten, twenty, fifty, and even one hundred years ago. Will we be able to read Kindle-2007 format books ten, twenty, or fifty years from today?

Microsoft's view

One of Microsoft's advertisement for its Visual Studio product bothers me. For a while, didn't know why. After a bit of thought, I may have identified the cause.

The advertisement (a two-page ad) has in large, all-capital letters: "IT TOOK A THOUSAND YEARS TO BUILD ROME; YOUR DEV TEAM HAS A MONTH" In smaller type, it says "DEFY ALL CHALLENGES" "Your challenge: finish big projects eons faster." "Defy it: communicate and collaborate better with Visual Studio Team System."

I will overlook the grammatical and idiomatic errors in these claims. Instead, let's see what this advertisement tells us about the thinking in Redmond.

The ad shows a view of four modern-day individuals (one assumes that they are project leaders or "software architects") overlooking the construction of two large buildings in a city that one is apparently supposed to believe is Rome.

The "project leaders" are viewing the work from an elevated platform. They are high enough to see all of the work, or a broad scope of the work. They cannot see details. While Microsoft has armed them with a laptop and a cell phone, they have no telescope or binoculars to get a detailed view of the work.

The work is performed with wooden scaffolding, ramps, ropes and pulleys to move heavy stones up the ramps, and cranes with large-scale hamster wheels in which men walk and thereby power the crane. Individuals doing the work are small, numerous, and indistinguishable.

Here's what I get from this advertisement:

- Projects are big
- Managers are important
- Managers must see the work being done (but they don't need to see details)
- Managers use modern tools
- Managers ought to be at high levels

OK so far? Here's the next batch:

- Workers use primitive tools and methods
- You need few managers for many workers
- Workers are interchangeable
- Individual workers are unimportant

The ad repeats the 'think big' philosophy that Microsoft has had for some time. Microsoft has focussed on solutions for large companies and has lost the mindset (and the ability) to deliver solutions for small teams.

I thought that this attitude was driven by greed and arrogance. Greed, in that larger companies can afford larger and more expensive technologies. Arrogant, in that Microsoft was walking away from the individuals, the hobbyists, and the small companies that made them successful.

But perhaps Microsoft did not discard the ability to provide solutions for small teams. Perhaps it was taken away from them. Small teams can use open-source tools and technologies (Linux; Apache; MySQL; and Perl, Python, or PHP) and deliver effective solutions. They don't need Microsoft, and Microsoft is hard-pressed to compete with those technologies. The small guys may have been the ones to walk away, leaving Microsoft with nothing but the big guys.

If that's the case, then it is not greed and arrogance. It is desparation.