The Tuesday Grab Bag: Something’s Afoot at the Circle K

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It’s been a weird week. First, the Vegas cab driver who believed that most of our current technical capability – my iPhone presumably included – was the product of a downed and captured alien aircraft stored at…yeah. Then, the still unexplained fast forwarding of said iPhone’s clock by 17 minutes, for a period lasting around an hour.

Oh, and a bunch of massive investment banks that have been around for a few hundred years combined ceased to exist, as the economy melted down in a manner that everyone predicted but no one saw fit to prevent.

As hundreds of thousands watched our economy wrap itself around a tree in a mere three days, tens of thousands wondered where they’d be working. Millions wonder where the bottom might be found and when, and precisely nobody seems comfortable answering that one. Which is understandable, as rational concerns over fundamentals have, inevitably, given way to an irrational and fundamentally dangerous loss of confidence.

My father says it’s the worst carnage he’s ever seen, and he’s been on The Street longer than I’ve been alive. My brother, for his part, has been walking me through the process of preparing me for an uncertain future, financially speaking.

So much for a trip to Ireland this year.

Anyway, for the curious, I will have a full VMWorld commentary. Maybe even a Q&A. I went into the show looking for hints of future direction; I leave it frankly startled at the audacity of some of the plans outlined. But more on that later.

In the meantime, a return to an old tradition of this space: the Grab Bag. Items which may deserve their own posts, but aren’t getting them. Enjoy.

• App Engine:
  VMWare, in discussing the various cloud platforms, was quick to differentiate itself on so-called application compatability. Their point being that for many enterprise workloads, App Engine is a non-starter due to the constraints of the platform, be they language, database, or SLA related. Or all of the above.

  Which I don’t think the people from Google would argue. I certainly wouldn’t.

  But at least one prominent technologist I had the good fortune to connect with recently argued that Google had gotten nearly everything right in their design. Which begs the question: will we see enterprise workloads make the jump, architecturally? Most won’t, of course. But will we see a new class of enterprise applications that are designed, from scratch, for App Engine like platforms?

  I don’t know. But it seems at least possible. Not everyone is convinced, however.

• Dropbox:
  Largely on the basis of Ryan’s glowing review, I’ve been giving Dropbox a whirl recently. My experience has been generally positive – they’ve done a marvelous job of making the user experience seamless – but it’s not truly useful to me yet. The problem is one of use cases. The only thing I really need to share and push to other machines is my music, where I tend to download on one machine and sync to another. Dropbox would be perfect here. Except that it’s 2 GB cap is ~68 GBs short of covering my music collection. Also, I’d rather point Dropbox at an existing directory than have to move the existing files.

  As for the idea of sharing documents or pictures, most of the content I would need to share is in email or Google Docs. Not all of it. There’s some RedMonk material I’d love to seamlessly push out to every machine I might conceivably use, but not a ton.

  Still, I highly recommend looking at Dropbox if you’re a user of multiple machines. It’s a great piece of work.

• RIAs:
  Six months into the experiment that is AIR on Linux, I remain personally unconvinced of the RIA value proposition. Not in terms of what they offer, technically. The apps I’ve tried are shiny and would be difficult to duplicate in the context of a browser.

  But the path of least resistance is still, for me, Firefox. The only AIR application I remain a user of is Twhirl, which is an excellent Twitter client. None of the other apps I’ve tried, such as DestroyFlickr, Doomi, Muxmaster, Snackr and so on, has had staying power.

  In many respects, it’s a mirror of my experience with my iPhone. On that platform, I seldom use the more functional rich applications like Twitterific, for the simple reason that I have to exit the browser to use them. Instead, I can tab on mobile Safari through RedMonk mail, Twitter and more without ever using the home button.

  I am not trying to argue that RIAs are not important, nor that they don’t have a place. Rather that I am skeptical that they’ll be as dominant as some seem to feel they will be. The browser doesn’t win because it’s the best looking, the fastest, or the most capable. It wins because it has the lowest barrier to entry, and it’s the most versatile.

• VH1 for ESPN:
  I have no idea if this remains the plan, but my understanding at one point was that viewers were always intended to “graduate” from MTV, which is aimed at a younger audience, to VH1. So here’s my question: is there a VH1 for ESPN? If not, could they create one? I can’t pinpoint the precise moment at which I ceased to be part of their target demographic, but it’s clear that ESPN and I have grown apart. Sportscenter is borderline unwatchable now, what with all the non-sports tie-ins, the hyperanimation of the production and graphics, and the up and down quality of the hosts.

  If it makes me sound like Burgess Meredith, Jack Lemmon or Walter Matthau, so be it, but I miss the good old days. Give me the VH1 of ESPN.