Mittwoch, 16. Oktober 2002

Cluetrain Thesis nr. 96: On Microsoft pulling their switch ad: "Beware the internet. We fact check your ass." [Ben].

Web Service definition: I am musing over a presentation on web services for an upcoming conference and I wanted to start off with a simple definition of a web service that will be expanded on in the presentation. What do you think of this: I am a web service if... You can ask me what I am capable of You can ask me for a description of myself I can understand you - regardless of your mother tongue You can find out where I am You can get to me The answers then being (respectively): WSDL, XML Schema, SOAP, WSIL/UDDI, HTTP. And yes I do know that there is a lot more to a WS than just these points. That's the point of the presentation :).

Happy Birthday Christopher! 8 today.

HP or not HP: A 16 year old German boy has received a nice letter from Hewlett Packard. The boy runs the German website HP-World.de. He offers turorials and information on building your own homepage (HP). Now HP doesn't seem to like this and as kindly asked the young boy to give up the domain. [via Heise] Actually there was absolutely no kindness about the whole thing. HP got a lawer to write the letter. Now that lawer wants the 16 year old to give up the domain and pay expenses: 1151 €. The 16 year old has already provided a redirect to the HPWorld.com site. This sort of thing is currently happening a lot here in Germany - with whole gangs of lawyers writing nasty letters if they think your domain conflicts with any trademark etc.

Open Source and contracting work: Ovidiu comments on my remarks from yesterday and provides an insight into the state of things in San Francisco. I don't know about Germany, but in the San Francisco Bay Area contracting seems to have totally dissapeared. Disturbing news. Germany is always behind the US on IT cycles and so one can assume that the amount of contracting work will drop even further here in the next few years. Many German companies are already scaling back on the number of external consultants they have. After all they need to feed their own first. Ovidiu also says: Luckily, this economic climate forces organizations to re-evaluate their focus on proprietary products and solutions. This can only be a good thing for open-source software. And a great opportunity for companies that can provide open-source services. Introducing open-source to companies that have traditionally had everything tailor-made for them is an interesting (to say the least) experience. I think one of the largest impacts is the way the role of supplier and customer is altered. It is my experience that once a company has decided to go the open-source way then this relationship changes to become a more level affair. And this is really necessary. Markets are conversations (to really beat a cliché). And they work both ways. More here.