Sunday, March 27, 2005

Texas bids to enter Telecom Hall of Shame: Jim Baller has just posted the latest members and nominees for the Telecom Hall of Shame. (Via isen.blog.) The sad example of Pennsylvania seems to have encouraged the ILECs to lobby for even more drastic anti-competitive measures elsewhere. The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania caved in to ILEC bullying and promises of better access for communities and schools. The reality is that even in Center City, Philadelphia, the quality and pricing of high speed access are mediocre. The supposed lowest cost providers (Comcast, Verizon) are expensive if one includes bundling requirements with cable or local phone service, and impose various restrictions on IP addresses and ports. 8:38:15 PM

Tomorrow was yesterday: Si la France avait suivi son plan de numérisation des livres, sa culture serait la plus présente sur la Toile. If France had followed its plan for digitization of books, its culture would have the biggest web presence. (Via Language Log.) Mark continues his excellent review of the debate in France on creating an European search engine for digitized books as an alternative to Google Books. Today, he summarizes and comments on an editorial by Jacques Attali in L'Express. As Mark notes, Attali was a Miterrand advisor, and thus hardly an impartial critic of Chirac's administration. Nevertheless, Attali scores good points. Yet (as Mark also suggests), we doubt Attali's claim that the situation would be different if lots of government money had been spent on digitization rather than on a new national library building. Large government efforts in information technology have a way of failing to deliver even a fraction of what they promise. The reasons are complicated and varied, but one of the main ones is mission creep: since a large project involves many constituencies, all of which have different concerns, and all of which can stop or slow down the project, the path of least resistance is to make the project a union of the requirements from all of those constituencies, regardless of whether the requirements are compatible, or fit within the project budget. This happens too in large, established corporations with many power centers and legacy systems. In addition, such projects are often managed by institutions involved in standards that are too fond of complex designs that are supposed to increase modularity and interoperability. The end results are often a bureaucracy of objects and interfaces -- plumbing -- with very limited actual functionality. In contrast, all successful information access projects I know of started with a clear goal and a few simple (but not necessarily obvious) design ideas, created and managed by one person (arXiv, ...) or a small team (CiteSeer, Altavista, Google, ...). Early success puts demand pressure on such projects that helps steer their growth in useful directions. In contrast, large bureaucratic projects spend most of their resources in pre-deployment design, planning, management, and conflict resolution, with the result that they do not acquire an early user base who advocate for the project and help make it better before the money runs out. 2:55:59 PM