Wednesday, February 19, 2003

Microsoft's Open Source Emissary Departs, Offers Suggestions 1:00:58 PM    comment []

Google don't blink. Here's one for the history books. "For all intents and purposes, Google owns the Web, by virtue of its superior and highly popular search engine." I don't agree. Teoma appears to be as good a search engine as Google. Here's how the Web works. If Google starts claiming that they own the Web, and tries to foreclose, Microsoft will buy Teoma and give something away that Google charges money for. Then John Doerr will be forced to decide if he is willing to wage a cash battle with Microsoft. He will blink. Google will be history. If I had to bet, I'd bet that Google is smarter. They're not going to make the same mistake Netscape made -- declaring victory. Instead, they will be humble, and self-deprecating, and set expectations low. (They may have a problem because everyone sees them looming so large.) They will figure out what the users want and give it to them. They may try to act like a platform vendor, and if they do, they will have a historic chance to do it right, one that neither Apple or Microsoft or the W3C has managed. (Or dead ones like Personal Software, Lotus, Borland, General Magic.) BTW, anyone who believes that Google actually owns the Web should remember that Microsoft owns the browser. Google is a good search engine and blogging tool. We don't know how they will connect them yet. I bet they don't either. Note to Teoma. If you want to compete with Google, you must have image search. Adam asks if Teoma should have an XML-RPC API, and the answer is of course. And it should go further than the Google API. Of course the Google API should go further than the Google API too. ";->" [Scripting News] 12:58:27 PM    comment []

New Yorker.  After Iraq.  This article tends to confirm what I suspected:  that the Bush brain trust doesn't have a firm grasp of the potential impact of the conquest of Iraq, nor a solid plan for the US role in rebuilding Iraq. I certainly can understand the roots of the policy that led us to this point.  Mainly, that when we look 10 years out, it is likely that rogue states will have a many more nuclear and biological weapons than they have today (given how quickly the technology is spreading now -- North Korea and Iran are now furiously working on bomb programs) and that terrorist groups will serve as the delivery mechanism for these weapons (a poor man's ICBM that was proven effective in the test trial of 9/11 -- also, our current homeland security efforts are about as effective as the Star Wars program or nuclear civil defense initiatives that featured the famous: duck and cover).  The thinking follows that containment (founded on mutually assured destruction and enforced through active engagement at the edges of empire -- Korea, Vietnam, and Afghanistan) won't work with these nations (as it did with the USSR, mainly due to asynchronous costs/benefits involved) and that only through preventative action we can prevent millions of deaths in the next decade.  The problem is that we need a strategy that goes beyond the elimination of rogue regimes as outlined in the paper "A Clean Break:  A New Strategy for Securing the Realm" -- it has been implied that this short paper, written in 1996 by leading hawks (including Perle and Feith, both part of the Bush hawk braintrust) for Netanyahu, serves as the basis for the Bush doctrine and subsequent strategies.  Given our rapid departure from Afghanistan and its subsequent disintegration, it is likely that a US policy in Iraq post invasion will be similar.  We will invade and abandon.  The conditions and mindsets that gave rise to these rogue states will continue to exist and may result in their re-emergence.  It will also serve as an object lesson to any and all states that are on Bush's list of rogue states to build as many nukes as possible to preclude future invasion. In all, this sounds like a strategy of long term failure. [John Robb's Radio Weblog] 12:56:53 PM    comment []

There is a strategy problem that defines this potential war that is worth exploring.  It is what I call John's "loose nuke problem."  It states that the real thing to worry about in the post cold war world is a terrorist nuke.   Bio, chem, and convential attacks are bad, but a terrorist nuke is the real threat.  I think that calculating the immediacy and likelihood of the threat in the "loose nuke problem", as well as the potential reductions of the threat through military and political action, is going to consume the top military and policy minds for decades.   A similar level of deep thinking was accomplished during the cold war when planners and strategists continously worked on how to contain the USSR without igniting a global conflagaration.  The "containment problem" (inclusive of strategic nuclear policy work) was the most fiendishly complex strategy problem I had ever seen, until now.  I think the "loose nuke problem" will be more difficult. In this new strategy problem we are faced with a model scenario where through military or political inaction (or misapplied action), NYC is destroyed by a terrorist nuke.  The question becomes: should we change the regime in Iraq to reduce the chance of a nuke claiming 3 m NYC victims?  What if the risk was reduced by 20%?  How big of a risk is it?  This is a complex calculus.  The calculations stretch beyond Iraq.  What if fighting a war with N. Korea will cost 1 m lives.  Would it be worth it to fight the war to save 3m lives in NYC?   As you can see, this gets very complex and very dangerous very quickly.  The flip side of the "loose nuke problem" is that the risk is not evenly shared across nations.  There is very little chance that a terrorist nuke will end up in Paris or Berlin.   It is little wonder then that when those governments did their calculus re:their own "model scenario" they determined war wasn't an option.  That added dimension -- a lack of shared risk -- will most likely continue to drive a wedge between the US and the rest of the world for the next couple of decades (the containment problem was evenly shared). [John Robb's Radio Weblog] 12:54:22 PM    comment []