| |
| Writings Discussion Authors Help Search Home |
Flame people for money By: Mark Morgan on 7/14/2000; 10:05 PM Dave Winer pisses me off sometimes. There, I've said it. I mean, attacking Jim Roepcke (and again) for daring to disagree with him, and preemptively dropping him from whatever the "Support Associate" program is, is uncalled for. For all I know Winer was right and Jim was wrong, what do I know? But it was poor sportsmanship. For those of you who are utterly lost, Dave Winer is a software publisher whose flagship product is Frontier, which runs on servers and presumably you can then do server things with. The old version of Unreason over on EditThisPage ran on Frontier, using a Content Management System called Manila that Dave bundles with Frontier. Conversant (which runs Unreason now) is built on Frontier, although it's my understanding Macrobyte is moving away from that platform and putting Conversant on something else. Technical matters aside, Dave also has strong opinions, and people tend to have strong feelings about him, because he doesn't have any qualms about telling people off. He also has the "delete flames" policy I refuse to adopt here, and he's why. He's often accused of deleting anything in his discussion group he doesn't like, and in at least one case (mine) it keeps people from participating. I have no ability to guess what will set the man off. This will, if he ever sees it (which is as likely as the moon hitting my house but there you go). That said, Charles Cooper needs to get a day job and stop writing tabloid trash for ZDNet. Do they actually pay him for character assasination? How can I get a piece of that? I can flame people for money. I'm not proud. If anyone sees any actual journalistic value to Cooper's writing, you let me know. I just can't stand it when someone whines about how horrible the Internet has made writing, then indulges in exactly the same garbage writing they're complaining about! Are there pen and ink writers out there still moaning about that newfangled typewriter thing? The Internet, especially the web, has lowered the cost of entry to almost zero, give or take a thousand bucks worth of silicon. So we get Geocities with pages that could destroy the minds of lesser beings (I'm tough, but the Overlord refuses to even touch anything asscociated with TCP/IP, it dictates directly to Elroy the iMac instead). We get exciting entries like, um, "This guy sent me a link so go to his page." And we get paid for, supposedly journalistic garbage like this little flame of Cooper's. It all comes out in the wash, folks. (Brian Carnell has written a longer, thoughtful piece on this.)
RE: Flame people for money By: Brian Carnell on 7/15/2000; 4:57 PM Interesting, Mark. I hadn't see the Roepcke stuff before. I think Winer is on the opposite side of the continuum as Cooper. Whereas Cooper cowardly trashed Winer and Userland without making it possible for people to form their own opinion, Winer has a nasty habit of making every little thing that bothers him a public issue. Forget being a customer for a moment, I'd hate to collaborate with him on any project since he has this habit of posting e-mails to and from people that I think any normal human being would consider private. I don't know how often you reading scripting.com, but there was an exhange a few months ago where he had a person e-mail a third party regarding a possible collaboration and Winer didn't like how the other person described the whole thing to the third-party and posted copies of the e-mail he sent regarding the whole thing, which weren't very flattering to say the least, on Scripting.Com. The stuff on Roepcke's site is a fascinating example of that. I think Winer clearly has some great ideas (though Udell's book really blows everything else away as far as "getting" it), but man if I were a company or individual wanting to do business with Winer I'd have to think five or six times if I were reading scripting.com regularly (I'd certainly never send an e-mail to him). I mean if you go to a Fortune 500 company you will always find a few extremely smart, capable people who are outside the main loop largely because they don't get along well in a team environment. I've seen people I thought were geniuses get shown the door because although they had the vision and could have made millions for the company, there ideas never went anywhere because nobody wanted to work with them. Winer is the archetype of that personality. That's the article I *wish* Cooper had written -- sort of a "When Primadonnas Run Software Companies."
|
|
||||||||||||||||
| Copyright Notice | Privacy Policy | Contact | |
 |
|