The Gillmor Gang

The Gillmor Gang on IT Conversations: Happy Birthday Lotus Notes! You're twenty year old today. Well, 20 years from announcement and 15 from the launch of Release 1. In any case, Lotus Notes has left a permanent mark on the history of collaboration software. On this special occasion, The Gang is joined by Notes creator Ray Ozzie (who went on to found Groove Networks in October 1997) and a member of the early Notes team, Peter O'Kelly, now an analyst with Burton Group.

Lotus Notes was arguably the first groupware product, and Ray explains why the company had such a difficult time explaining what it was. That tide turned when Notes was adopted by VARs who created the vertical applications that have made the product so successful. To this day Notes is respected for its rapid-application development (RAD) architecture and its ability to just deploy the prototype.

The discussion goes well beyond Lotus Notes, as Ray and Peter give their big-picture perspectives on collaboration, client/server architectures, and the bifurcation of technology adoption: the difference between deployment within and outside the enterprise.

The Gillmor Gang (audio) on IT Conversations for November 25, 2004. Steve Gillmor (ZDNet), Doc Searls (Linux Journal), Jonathan Schwartz (Sun Microsystems), Dana Gardner (Yankee Group) and Michael Vizard (CRN Magazine).

The Gillmor Gang on IT Conversations: The Gang's guest this week is eBay technology evangelist, Jeff McManus. The company's web-services APIs process one billion requests per month. (That's an average of nearly 2,500 per second!) Hear how 11,000 developers are helping 430,000 people in the U.S. alone make a full- or part-time living via eBay, why the eBay trust system works, and how they're starting to use RSS.

(The Gillmor Gang on IT Conversations)

This week The Gang starts off wondering about Chris Stone's departure from Novell, which he was steering back towards the Linux market. And what about Sun? Are they serious about Linux on the desktop, or is that just a poker chip, a placemark for their real move into software-as-service?

Speaking of software-as-service, The Gang dives head-first into Google. Jon says Gmail is "seductively powerful," but is Google on the path to becoming The Borg? Will we have to turn to turn to (gasp) Microsoft to save us? Or will Google continue to be our best buddy?

The show concludes with a discussion of podcasting: its potential business models and its ultimate effect on Big Media.

Michael Vizard, editor-in-chief of CRN Magazine, joins The Gang this week.

(The Gillmor Gang on IT Conversations). Steve and The Gang may be suffering from post-election traumatic-stress syndrome. They consider the effect of the election on technology and vice versa. Reviewing a clip from a presentation by Thomas Barnett, they ask: Is keeping the peace really a system-administraton problem? The U.S. is clearly divided, even polarized. But is it dynamically stable or will it soon tip in one direction or another? And what is the effect of information (including blogging) on the country and the election process? Is there too much data for most people to absorb and understand?

The extended Gang dives deep into podcasting this week with Dave Winer, Adam Curry and three of the four members of the Firesign Theatre: David Ossman, Philip Proctor and Peter Bergman. Adam and Dave give the history (all eight weeks of it) and the raison d'etre of podcasting, and Steve suggests it's similar to the early days of pirate radio. Is podcasting just a flash in the pan, or a major challenge to big-business radio? Will the impact be similar to that of blogs or something altogether different? What are the implications of Howard Stern moving to satellite, and will legislation like the INDUCE Act inhibit freedom of speech in the exploding podcasting phenomenon? By the end of the show, the Firesign guests not only get it, they're guzzling the Cool-Aid.

The Gillmor Gang: Google Desktop Search is this week's hot topic even though Doc isn't happy that it's not available on either Mac or Linux. No doubt it's a powerful personal tool, but what does it mean for IT departments? If it sneaks in at the desktop level, what about security and privacy? For that matter, what does it mean that "the application sends non-personal information about things like the application's performance and reliability to Google?"

Does Microsoft continue to have a blindspot for search? There were rumors of a pending Google browser. Is this even better for the company and for us? What's the commercial value for Google, and will Yahoo! follow suit? Finally, is GDS just a platform for additional services?

All of this plus the podcasting phenomenon on another chock-full edition of The Gillmor Gang. This week's special guests are Scott MacGregor (Mozilla Thunderbird architect) and Brendan Eich (chief architect) of the Mozilla Foundation.

On The Gillmor Gang, CEO Kim Polese explains what her new company, SpikeSource, is all about: making open source safe for IT by aggregating best-of-breed components. Kim believes this is part of a fundamental shift in the way the software industry works, and many Gang members agree.

Recorded live at Gnomedex 4.0, the Gang digs into audioblogging and podcasting. What's it all about? Is it a fad, a future trend, or here today and to stay? And what about the state of RSS? Is there too much content, a glut of information?

This week The Gillmor Gang tackles a little bit of everything. Sun announced CPU time on demand, but where's the real opportunity? Is it for loosely coupled systems? For remotely hosted on-demand Windows? Technology is advancing fastest for consumers and SMBs, so is that the best place to try new ideas? The iPod platform is suddenly taking off including RSS integration. Does this portend something for the enterprise? Joining The Gang this week are Scott Rafer, president and CEO of Feedster, and Stephen Shankland, senior staff writer at CNET News.com.