or: “Why I won’t work for a social network.” I’ve had a lot of ideas involving social networking floating around in my head for the past few months. They were finally crystalized into a solid conclusion this week: I don’t want to work for a social networking company. There are really two distinct but related problems [...]
Archive for the ‘essays’ Category
The Future of Desktops and Design of the Workstation OS
I’ve talked about the tablet takeover several times before on this blog. I still firmly believe my previous statement: Ten years from now 90% of people will use something like a tablet or smartphone as their primary computing interface. And the remaining 10% will use a desktop OS on something called a workstation. In fact, [...]
Why 2014 Won’t Be Like 1984
I’ve heard a lot of noise recently about these new fangled smartphones and tablets not replacing ‘real computers’, especially since the announcement of many new tablet products, including the HP TouchPad. That they are just expensive FaceBook machines. I’ve also heard people say that there’s no room in the market for more devices: iOS and [...]
Did Open Sourcing Mozilla Matter?
I finally watched Code Rush this weekend, a documentary about open sourcing mozilla and the sale of Netscape to AOL in the late 90s. There is no doubt that Netscape created the web as we know it. The web changed everything. But I wonder about Mozilla itself. Did open sourcing Mozilla really make a difference [...]
Marketing Your Open Source Project on a Shoestring Budget
Over the years I’ve worked on a lot of open source projects. I’ve also worked on quite a few commercial projects. What a lot of them have in common is the need to market themselves to developers, but without any marketing budget. When I worked on JFXStudio my budget was 20$ a month from my [...]