[conspire] (forw) [Pigdog] This makes me smile...

['Rick Moen']

Quoting Bill Lazar (bill at billsaysthis.com):

> His post is getting a lot of play and commentary in the blog world. I just
> saw a post on Gadgetopia (http://www.gadgetopia.com/post/5382) discussing
> it, there have also been posts by John Gruber, Robert Scoble and Tim
> Bray to highlight the different camps. 

Just to follow up:  I may have inadvertantly done a disservice to the
above-mentioned people, if Gruber's very thoughtful and useful post is 
any guide.  Recommended, also: http://daringfireball.net/2006/06/and_oranges

Doubly impressive because Gruber expresses regret for having
inadvertantly encouraged pinhead comments on Pilgrim's blog, and 
politely & lucidly explains to the pinheads where they've erred.
Triply impressive because he articulately restates the argument of
someone (Pilgrim) whose overall view he doesn't even share.

Well done, Mr. Gruber.

(Blogging tends towards either circlejerks or rhetorical freakshows,
in my opinion, and the comments sections in particular are often
outright painful.  However, sometimes you find main-contents essays
that are enlightening and worthwhile.)


Eye-opening comment near the end of Gruber's piece, revealing that some
of the Church of Steve's less-endearing habits persist:

   But there are things that could be better, should be better, but
   aren't, and it's hard to ascribe these [Apple Computer, Inc.]
   policies to anything other than management that is, at best,
   indifferent to issues related to openness.  Cf. Tom Yager's report in
   Macworld yesterday [link] of being invited to Apple to discuss his 
   InfoWorld column on the closing of the x86 version of the Darwin 
   kernel; the gist of Apple's response was to tell Yager that he 
   shouldn't have written about it because no one cares, which response 
   is rather painfully tone-deaf PR-wise, in that the reason Yager 
   wrote it in the first place is that he obviously thinks his 
   readers do care.

(Yager's earlier column had called the world's attention to Apple having
very quietly taken Mac OS X's "xnu" kernel proprietary instead of open
source.)


Bray is always good.  Sample quotation, right on the money as usual:

  The real problem, it seems to me (and I think this bothers Mark more
  than he says), is Apples paranoid communication culture [link]: it 
  is forbidden to say anything except what it's compulsory to say. 
  Apple's exterior is polished, shiny; and entirely opaque. Personally, 
  I think their success has been about shipping good products, but 
  I think they believe it's a consequence of the tightness of the lip. 
  I'd rather do business with a company I can talk to.

http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2006/06/15/Switch-From-Mac

(On cultures of extreme secretiveness, see also:  Google, Inc.)


Scoble:  Oh, _that_ guy.  I once lavished ten minutes on his site and
regretted the loss.  It's not that he's a Redmondian ("technical
evangelist"); it's that he seemed to show really poor judgement in
practically everything, his prose style tended towards semiliterate pap,
and that an abysmal S/N ratio resulted.  Skimming more recent posts
shows nothing as twit-like as before, but also very little that's
interesting.  (In fairness, personal tastes and all that.  But I've seen
much more skillful and stylist trolling elsewhere.)