Dave Kearns

or, as some like to call it, the advertising business.

Land Rover is running a series of TV ads for the mid-priced LR3 model. One of them starts by showing a washed out road, with voice-over saying something like “The odds of mother nature having a bad day, 9 to 1.” What this says, statistically, is that 9 days out of 10 will be bad days for mother nature, only 1 will be a good day. They then show the LR3 driving up the hill around the washout while the voiceover intones “LR3, created for the 1.”

What this literally says is that the LR3 is only good on mother nature’s good days (the 1) and rubbish on the bad days!

Either Land Rover are idiots (quite possible) or it really is a “not for off road” car and they hope their customers won’t notice. Either way, they do seem to think their potential customers are morons.

Just another P.T.Barnum moment.

We went to see Avenue Q this weekend, which one publication billed as “Sesame Street meets South Park.” This clip (of the song “Everyone is a little bit racist”) will give you some hint of why. (Other tunes include “IF YOU WERE GAY” and “THE INTERNET IS FOR PORN”)

I prefer, though, to think of it as a remake of “the Muppets Take Manhattan,” updated and re-set in Bed-Sty. The irreverent book, the catchy tunes and the wonderful cast make this a delight – the funniest musical we’ve seen in years.

The power went out this morning at 8:15, just as I was writing a post to the Virtual Quill. Since it was, at least in theory, timely I needed to find a place that would let me connect to transfer it (I’ve recently switched to using the laptop all the time, so it just meant ‘hibernating’ it until I found a hotspot). We do have municipal wifi here in Sunnyvale, and I can usually get a connection from the patio behind the house, but no luck today. Since the WAP is only a half block away, I guess it lost power too. So into the car and drive up to the local Starbuck’s (I have a Hotspot account for airports and days like today). Lot’s of people milling about outside, no lights on inside – don’t even stop there! I hear that a 75′ tree has toppled over about half a mile away – guess it took the power lines with it! So I head south on El Camino Real and find a Starbucks with power (and a T-mobile store next door!) where I’m sitting right now. There are times I do love the 21st century!

…everyone else is getting younger. I didn’t appreciate reading in this morning’s newspaper that an “elderly” man’s body had been discovered south of San Jose. He was 61! Today is my 62nd birthday – how depressed did that make me feel?

I note that now the on-line version of the headline has been changed to “Deputies call death of San Jose man in Morgan Hill suspicious” certainly a better (from my perspective, if not the victim’s), more neutral news headline. I wonder if it was the editor, or the reporter who considered 61 to be “elderly”?

This is on the heals of another news story from a few weeks ago where two firefighters were killed trying to rescue a couple from a burning house. The 67-year-old man and his 61-year-old wife were described as “an elderly couple” both in the paper and on the TV news for a couple of days before a correction was made.

I can handle “senior citizen” and wince (but suffer through) at “golden ager” but if we call sixty-year-olds “elderly,” wha’s left to characterize the 85 year old?

Eric Norlin, over at the Defrag blog, talks about “The user as the alpha and omega:

the idea that “users” are bringing their patterns of usage into the enteprise and demanding that IT shops conform. We saw the first wave of this happen with SaaS

But this behavior goes back well before SaaS (i.e., the last two years!) – over 15 years ago, when I was an IT manager, users were coming to me demanding a graphical user interface (GUI) for the computers on theirdesktops. Some wanted Windows, some wanted Desqview - and one poor, benighted marketing exec wanted me to add his Commodore 64 to the network (note – it could be done!) Ten years before that, savvy users were putting their own IBM PCs in their offices and bypassing the corporate mainframe terminals (as well as the glass-room high tech high priests) Indeed most of the innovation on the enterprise network over the past 25 years has been user driven, not IT driven.

But it’s only the history and the timeline that I disagree with Eric about, I fully subscribe to his thought: “This tidal wave of change is going to blur all of the lines between what we think of as “enterprise” and “consumer-focused” IT companies – and that will alter everything from investing to implementation to acqusition. Big stuff here.” It’s why I said in another place that Microsoft’s CardSpace was going to revolutionize the use of identity data within the enterprise.

It’s August. Know how I can tell? It isn’t the heat (it’s been one of the coolest summers on record here in the bay area). All I have to do is look at the baseball standings – the AL East to be exact. You know it’s August when the Red Sox lead begins to drop like a dot com dog food stock. From leading the majors in winning percentage (and holding an 11-game lead on the Yankees), the crimson hose lead has dropped to a meager 4 games over the bronx bums. It’s a long way from here to October, but baseball is a very traditional game – and tradition says my Yankee-loving neighbor will be holding the World Series party this year…

Global Warming itself is not a myth: the earth is getting warmer, our climate is changing. Some of the pressures bringing about that change are human-created carbon emissions. But, contrary to what Pacific Gas & Electric would have you believe, we cannot stop global warming! Still, the energy company insists on putting a tag line on it’s TV ads for energy conservation claiming (or, in some cases, alluding to) the consumer’s ability to do just that.

Reducing carbon emissions is a good thing to do. So is conserving energy. But even if we stopped all carbon emissions today, all over the world, climate change would still come.

History shows that those organisms which can survive global climate change are those which are the most adaptable. But to be considered “adaptable,” we’re going to have to either plan for mass migrations as the climate changes, or work to keep our microclimates livable through the use of energy-efficient, low-carbon-emitting changes to our way of life – adding heat or cooling, irrigation, flood-control, and other non-natural impediments to nature. Science fiction talks about humans going to other planets and “terraforming” them – “…deliberately modifying its atmosphere, temperature, or ecology to be similar to those of Earth in order to make it habitable by humans” – but we’re going to have to perfect ways of terraforming the changed Earth first!

UPDATE: I’ve just come across an excellent essay by physicist Freeman Dyson (the inventor of the Dyson Sphere) on this issue. Be sure to read thru to the end where he also tells how he almost set back the course of biology a generation!

Poor John Dvorak. He’s only been writing about, and accurately foretelling, the story of computing for over 20 years. But he recently had the temerity to suggest that another internet bubble is about to burst. He cites the proliferation of so-called “social networking” sites, video-sharing sites and alludes to the eventual crash of Google’s ad-supported search philosophy. He is, of course, instantly attacked – especially by those too young to have suffered through “bubble 1.0″ (less than 10 years ago). One of the more thoughtful disputations was mounted by my friend Eric Norlin (“Because I’m a Sucker“) but even he overlooks the primary reason for the upcoming burst while alluding to it as a benefit: “The last ‘bubble’ occurred around public equity markets, as they provided the liquidity and transparency needed to really drive a mass bubble.” This next bubble will be driven in the same way, but via the Merger & Acquisition market. Google, for example, whose stock is already so vastly overinflated that it alone could fuel a bubble burst, continues to buy up new ventures whose sole business plan is “let’s do something catchy then sell out to Google, or Yahoo, or whoever bids highest.” None of them, from MySpace to Flickr have the remotest concept of a path to profitability – but that doesn’t stop the portal players from throwing money down their drains.
In just a couple of years Dvorak will have been proven prescient once again.

David Recordon (from Verisign) just pointed me to Trusted Opinion, a startup in the social networking niche whose “hook” is about gathering opinions concerning just about anything. Opinions are then weighted based on the “degree of friendship” with the user (friend, friend of a friend, etc.). As they describe it:

“ Imagine if all your friends had a place that combines their top picks into one shared list. No more strangers. Just reliable recommendations from your circle of friends and their friends, and friends of their friends…“

But I don’t value my friends’ opinions higher than strangers because they’re intrinsically better. I value them because I understand my friends’ likes and dislikes, prejudices and preferences. In other words, I can put my friends’ recommendations in context – something I can’t do with the opinion of a stranger.

I do (and you do, too) the same thing with so-called “expert opinion.” I value the reviews of the San Jose Mercury theater reviewer more than those of the San Francisco Chronicle reviewer because I’ve read much more of the Merc’s reviews. That means I know exactly where my opinion and the Merc’s reviewer’s opinion coincides and diverges so that I can evaluate her review in light of past experience.

Trusted Opinion might become the basis for an engine to be used within another social network (Facebook, say, or whichever one is the “hot” meeting place of the moment) but as a stand-alone system, it has very little potential.