Global Nerdy

Like “Jason” from the Friday the 13th movies, old but widely-adopted programming languages stubbornly refuse to die, as shown in the ComputerWorld article Cobol Coders: Going, Going, Gone?.

It's counterintuitive in a field like high-tech where “new” is practically synonymous with “cool”, but when it comes to applications, “older” often means “better”. Older applications have the advantage of more real-world use and maintenance, which typically means that more of their design issues and bugs have been worked out.

The drawback is that they've been written in hoary old languages that lack a lot of the programming niceties that we've developed since the 1960s. If you're “lucky”, those niceties have been bolted on in Frankenstein fashion. Ruby and Python developers may turn up their noses at Java and call it “Object-Oriented Cobol”, and they'd probbaly consider working with actual Cobol as akin to coding with stone knives and bearskins.

Nat Torkington at O'Reilly Radar managed to find two humorous footnotes to this situation:

• 25 years from now, we'll be complaining that nobody under 50 understands all the Java code running banking applications, except possibly all those Indian developers from the offshoring boom (who need the money for Chinese lessons).
• 5% of the marketplace will say this of the hot language of 2031: “Of course, this was first done more elegantly in Lisp.” We call them weenies.

In these days of Web 2.0 services that rely on quick customer adoption, the strategy has become so common that VCs have coined a term for it: freemium.

Nothing new here; “give away” the handle to sell the razor blades, etc. Despite the time-tested nature of the strategy, I have no doubt we'll hear how this “freemium” talk signals the peak of a bubble.

One wrinkle I'd like to add. The strategy of having a free, and useful, version complemented by for-pay upsells is far more effective, in my opinion, than offering users time-limited access to the full thing. At the very least, it keeps lightweight, non-paying users around until such time as they need the advanced features of the for-pay versions of the product.

It seems to be working for companies like 37signals.

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And here I thought all MySpace pages were ugly. I guess in the hands of the right people…

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Technorati Tags: iPod, Apple, marketing, MySpace, design

Mike "TechCrunch" Arrington uses a minor Google gaffe—a Google employee mistakenly posts a story bound for her personal blog to an official Google blog—to cast a critical eye on Google's security:

Google is pushing full steam ahead with their office strategy, and their hope is to convince a lot of individuals and businesses to trust Google enough to store their documents on Google’s servers instead of their own computers, or servers under their control.

The fact that unauthorized document access is a simple password guess or government “request” away already works against them. But the steady stream of minor security incidents we’ve seen (many very recently) can also hurt Google in the long run. Running applications for businesses is serious stuff, and Google needs to be diligent about security.

I'm not one to downplay security, but some perspective here:. Microsoft has struggled with security, with much broader exposure, for years. And Oracle recently announced patches for 101 vulnerabilities in their products this quarter alone.

Still, a note of caution is appropriate; whenever one vendor's platform dominates, it creates a monoculture that works against security. It wouldn't improve things much to trade a Microsoft monoculture for a Google one.

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Tags: security, Google, Microsoft, monoculture

Grid-Server: This service from Media Temple offers a monster shared hosting package that promises to grow with your sites' needs, all running on a grid infrastructure. Just by way of comparison, this service promises 20X the storage and 5X the data transfer of my current hosting plan, for only 2X the price. Yowza. [via TechCrunch]

Tags: hosting, grid

After a long (and occasionally interesting) article about how big brand marketers have tried to use MySpace, Friendster, YouTube, et al to reach buyers, an ad exec offers this story:

Sometimes marketers find that in the end, the unplanned is what works best. Crispin Porter placed a new crop of Volkswagen commercials on YouTube and a handful of people watched them. Then a user uploaded a grainy version of one of the same commercials. It has been viewed more than 1.7 million times.

“You can’t explain this,” said Mr. Benjamin of Crispin Porter. “Someone passed it on to a friend, who passed it to others, until eventually it gets in the right people’s hands. You just can’t predict what will happen.”

More than anything, this exposes traditional marketing for the house of cards it is: we've never been able to predict how an audience will react to a message (or a messenger), but the blunt instruments for measuring mass media have always allowed enough wiggle room to let a strategy appear to be successful.For over a century, advertisers haven't been able to tell which half of the dollar they're wasting.

Marketers have to let go of the idea that they can predict, and embrace the good news that, for the first time, they can actually measure. It's nice to feel you know what will happen, but it's huge step forward for marketers to be able to know, definitively what has happened.

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Tags: advertising, social software, YouTube, MySpace, Friendster

The mainstream shouts out to Technorati:

Corporations are growing increasingly conscious of the power, and potential pitfalls, of blogging. A favorable review from an influential blogger can help generate the kind of buzz around a new product that traditional advertising struggles to achieve. A negative write-up can help doom a product before it even hits the market.

Now many American brands, and some brands in other countries, are starting to include blogs in their marketing plans, and are catering to them at a much earlier stage.

Blogs are like the Marines: a brand can have "No better friend, no worse enemy," and companies whose key buyers live online are wise to tune into the conversation. The blogosphere isn't just an information-rich environment for marketers, it can also serve investors too. As VC Ed Sim points out, companies like Monitor 110 are attempting to use blog chatter as a Distant Early Warning for institutional investors.

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Tags: blogosphere, Technorati, Monitor 110, intelligence