Fascinating interview of Bill Gates by Jon Udell at the PDC. My favorite quote: “There’s only really one metric to me for future software development, which is — do you write less code to get the same thing done?” By that metric, Microsoft ought to be following Ruby on Rails closely! (For that matter, they should be putting more emphasis on all of the so-called “scripting languages”, which have been demonstrated to do more with fewer lines of code.)
A lot of good discussion of the importance of RSS.
One great bit–Jon notes that “somebody had a nice quote that RSS is the human face on Web services. I kind of like that a lot and related to that is something that I’ve said a few times, which is that human beings are the exception handlers in all workflows.” Very nice. (By the way, does anyone know who the someone was who said that originally? I tried googling for it without immediate results. I’m sure I’m going to be quoting it again, and I’d love to acknowledge the original source.)
Also some fascinating discussion of the future of RSS. Gates: “Corporation A puts an RSS notification on the directory of Corporation B, there’s just too much data. You don’t want to send all that data. Every data thing in the… People are acting like — oh, this is all solved. We’ll just put subscriptions onto every piece of data in the company. Well, the amount of stuff that’s going to flow and the need of IT to be able to log and filter and have rights and all that stuff, it’s just not going to work. So there’s an RSS naivete today that is wonderful, but cannot last.”
On that, I’m not sure I agree with Gates. In the next paragraph, he himself refers to the battle between C and Pascal, where the Pascal proponents were saying this untyped stuff can’t last, but we know who won that battle. The web succeeded because it broke the rigorous connectivity assumptions of the original hypertext theorists. Loosely coupled works for a class of problems that bog down under the weight of complexity when you try to manage everything. I do believe that there is a need for a richer notification technology, but I also believe that there will always be a place for simplicity. There are cases where you want coordination and specificity, but in many other cases, where there are massively redundant data sources and possible connections, “good enough” is good enough.
That being said, I’m totally with Gates that mechanisms for helping us choose what to pay attention to are critical for the future of the net. In fact, attenuation, focus and attention is the theme of the next O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. (David Beisel, whose blog led me to the Gates interview, has more to say about attention and personalized communication.)