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Actually, it is still technically in the future tense. The day the music dies will be August 31, 2008. [...]

So what happens on August 31, 2008? On that day, Microsoft will turn off the servers that they maintain for the sole purpose of validating that the songs that people have already "purchased" through MSN Music are still theirs to play. Those people (hereafter "the victims") will not notice the change right away. The victims will only notice it when they purchase a new computer, or when they upgrade the operating system on their current computer, or when the hard drive in their computer dies and needs to be rebuilt/reinstalled. At that point -- transferring the music files they have "purchased" to another drive or a new computer -- the Microsoft music player running on the victim's PC (like iTunes, but all Microsoft-y instead of Apple-y) will make a call to Microsoft's validation servers to verify that the music files were legitimately purchased. This call will fail, since the servers are not responding, since Microsoft has intentionally turned them off. The Microsoft music player will then conclude, incorrectly but steadfastly, that the music files were downloaded illegally and that the victim is a filthy pirate, and it will refuse to play them. In this case, the left hand knows exactly what the right hand is doing: they're both giving you the finger.

Mark Pilgrim, The day the music died.

I also love this quote :

Bruce Schneier, a famous cryptologist -- or at least as famous a cryptologist as cryptologists are likely to get in this century -- once described attempts to make digital bits uncopyable as "trying to make water not wet."

Don't buy anything that is protected by any DRM that a vendor, anywhere in the chain, can lock up at will or by simply getting out of business.

Brief notes from the Enterprise 2.0 Summit in Hannover. Warning: those notes are very partial and may be innacurate, I tend to forget about or miss stuff that's obvious or not exciting for me. The shortness or lack of notes isn't in any way a measurement of the quality of the speaker!

Looks like it's the first event on the subject in Europe, there's definitely place and interest for more.

Simon Wardley (who loves ducks) kicked off the summit by showing us how yesterday's hot stuff becomes todays boredom (see ya at Web 3.0 / E 3.0 soon ;-).

Dion Hinchcliffe -- How Web 2.0 Technologies revolutionize the Enterprise
E 2.0 comes from Web 2.0, rise of social media. Shift from institutional control to consumer control. Network effect: occurs when a good or service has more value the more that other people have it too (postal mail, phones, fax, email, IM, web pages, blogs anything that has an open network architecture). Reed's Law for social networks. E 2.0 applied successfully -> pronounced gravitational effect. Intranet: move from central production (institution) to peer production (communities of individuals) -> unpredictability, variety, volume. Main E 2.0 platforms: blogs, wikis, social networking. Andrew McAfee's definition of modern socila computing (E 2.0): emergent, freeform, social applications for use in the enterprise. E 2.0 Checklist: SLATES--Search, Linking, Authorship, Tagging, Extensions, Signals. Richer outcome (think of what's stuck/hidden in mailboxes). Rod Boothby's E 2.0 Communication Continuum: non-interruptible and leveragable (gosh, do I hate this word!), async apps that do not interrupt your work have more value. Open communications, shared knowledge, anyone can participate, web oriented, emergent/freeform/social.
100% guaranteed way of doing E 2.0: Do nothing, get out of the way, keep the energy levels up (from Euan Semple).
Common challenges: IT's "Maytag Repairman Syndrome", the "empty quarter (senior people with technophobia), the 2% troublemakers (who can use it negatively as a megaphone), the 9x problem (tools must be 10 times better before users have enough incentive to switch), concerns about productivity and security, managing management resistance.
Key Success Factors: start small, keep expectations low...
Future: Suites are coming, will go prime time, grassroots adoption continues, missing "enterprise context" arriving in 08, semantic web will meet E 2.0.

Euan Semple -- The Quiet Revolution
BBC intranet tools (I think it's the 3rd time I attend Euan's presentation and it's always a pleasure ;-). Forums used 7 years ago, because of frustration with email, did a lot for internal discussions for an investment of... 500€. "Connect", a social directory. Blogs (MT). Wikis (Confluence, cool way of putting up web pages without crying for resources to get a webmaster), RSS aggregator (Google Reader), external web 2.0 services like Flickr with use of tags, deli.icio.us, last.fm, Plazes, Twitter, Facebook, Innocentive.

Jeff Schick -- IBM, Lotus Connections
My own take: he pronounced a long litany of dreaded words as "features": control, workflow, retention rules, check-in/check-out etc. Scary! Well, folks who cannot buy E 2.0 without every conceivable lock built-in for total control should not waste time looking for shiny new 2.0 tools (including Lotus Connections). They already have them, these are the "traditional" KM tools that already power their intranets, and we all know how successful they are ;-). OK, I admit it looks nice and I should find out more if there's more than a new coat of paint with sexy tag clouds on top of a good old top-down portal-bloat-ware entirely controlled by IT.
OTHO I might just have got his presentation completely the wrong way.

Kenneth Lavrsen, Motorola A/S -- Collaborative Publishing advancing ISO 9000 Quality Management
Using Twiki for QM. Seen activity grow from less than 2 modifications and comments a year to a document, to 70 times more modifications and 30 comments per doc. Some problems with reluctance to change (erk, a new tool), Twiki has so many features and had no WYSIWYG editor at launch. Nice idea: an effective QM system is one that is up-to-date, and the wiki helped improve that.

Wieland Stützel, Fraport AG -- Skywiki - Making use of the corporate knowledge ressources
Launching a wiki at the Frankfurt Airport (Wikimedia?). Preparation: no start without content and authors. They exchanged experience and opinions with the Club Wikipedia e.V. Deutschland. Biggest challenge: enthuse the employees. Getting mgt board to participate is time consuming. No incorrect use despite possible anonymous usage (anonymous usage? why such a choice?). 340+ users signups (1300 people, half blue-collar) in 7th months. Generate mgt acceptance (kill big discussions), get a small group en convinced companions together, advertise, get new inputs, talk to potential authors personally, take time to properly setup the wiki (otherwise don't bother). Co-admins: IT, HR, KM and several cross departments at the airport.

Dr. Willms Buhse, CoreMedia AG -- Paradigm Change: Enterprises as Social Networks
Promised to publish their presentaion on their website. Willms has also written a book that looks very interesting about the art of letting go, unfortunately it's in German only.

Olivier Creiche, Six Apart -- From Corporate Blogging to Social Networking
Presented several business cases on using their products as CMS and social software (e.g. Huffington Post).

Jenny Ambrozek, SageNet LLC -- Design for Network Effects: Architecting participation and leveraging the space between the tools
The think that doesn't change is the people. Why the Andrew McAFee-Tom Davenport debates REALLY bother me! 4 reasons: 1) it's an AND BOTH world, 2) omits discussion about value creation fundamentals: people, relationships & interactions, 3) ignores how the calue of collaborative working is captures and revealed, 4) their time could be better spent. The org challenge: direct control decreases as social technology increases. E 20.0 SLATES impact: organizational boundaries inside & out less bounded. (Funny slide where shee takes on Simon's ducks: Simon sees ducks, but consider the pond, ponds connected -> watershed ecosystem.)
Viewing org as networked people ecosystems (orgs as networks). Activity stats tell an incomplete story about interactions and how people use social tools. Open innovation increases as direct control decreases. Prediction markets adoption (The Wisdom of Crowds as a trigger). Architecting participation, using multiple tools created value, structural holes and space between the tools. Participation is individual & complex (Ross Mayfield's power law of participation, April 2006). Changing patterns of participation: real and virtual work worlds are one. Using those tools is messy, pay attention to you org's structural holes and the space between tools: 1) business purposes, 2) network thinking, 3) diverse minds, 4) connected intelligence, 5) success recognized. P.S. Jenny has posted some notes on her session, as well as her slides.

Cedric Blum, Société Française de Radiotéléphone Service Client -- Mass Collaboration brings Customer Service to a new level
Here I'll bug my dear client to get the presentation ;-).

Diego Gianetti, BTicino S.p.a. -- Sul Campo - Community of Practice innovates Sales and Marketing
Sul Campo = On the Field. Web 2.0 space for the community of BTicino sales force (350 salesmen) with 3 purposes: make useful info available in a common env, open a comm channel to collect (from network and clients) feedback related to market, products & competitors, to spread experience, skills, best practices.

Thanks to Skype, now I know why each time I type my name (François) correctly at the end of an SMS, its length limit suddenly drops by 91 chars: because certain chars (like ç or €) cause the SMS character set to switch from GSM to Unicode. With the former set an SMS is limited to 160 chars, while it's only 70 with the later.

It's by a search bot (!) that I found trace of my friend Cyril Fievet's new blog: ALLROBOTS.com, a blog/webzine on robots, robotics and Artificial Intelligence.

574.8 km/h, i.e. 357.2mph. Wow!

And this on a regular line, with the next generation of TGV that will hit the rails in 2009. With a safety margin of 200 km/h, we can expect commercial speed raising at 350 km/h then. I love those trains.

I wish I had a Wave Bubble ready for traveling quietly (especially for enforcing the "no mobile phones" rules in some trains here). It could almost get me back into soldering, although I can see things have improved (and miniaturized) quite a lot since the last time I used a soldering iron and chemicals to make my own circuit boards. (It's a bit like biking, I lapsed for 20 years and it's a whole new world out there.)

You have more details on O'Reilly radar where I spotted it, This is My Space:

The resulting device, which Limor admits is illegal to operate, will disable nearby cellphones.

Actually a few months ago, I was riding on Amtrak with a certain well-known blogger/hacker. It was late in the evening. A few rows ahead of us a woman with a loud voice recounted her day in excrutiating detail. This fan of Limor's pulled out a fake cigarette box and fiddled with it. Almost instantly, the woman's cellphone had dropped its connection. Oh my. What a shame there's such bad reception.

In today's talk, Phil and Limor speculated that maybe we ought to declare that we own the air space immediately around us. What if others could not violate this air space with cellphones? If they did, then my device would disable their device. Come too close and I'll turn off your cellphone.

A whole new definition of My Space! ;-)

The scandal of electronic voting in Europe continues with a new episode: Jan Groenendaal, head of the Nedap/Groenendaal consortium which builds the Nedap voting machines, is apparently threatening the Dutch governement. Read the whole article, it's really enlightening.

As machines unreliability and lack of security are being exposed, and therefore banned, one could see this coming as obvious. I hope this whole mess falls apart quickly across Europe, and everybody get back to their drawing board, politicians first for playing fools with democracy.

As for our American friends, I'm not sure they're getting it:

The state of New York is currently contemplating buying 28.000 Nedap voting computers (sold as "LibertyVote") and accompanying software (appropriately named "LibertyControl").

I hope they're getting LibertyFries with that! :p

Go read Steve Jobs’s Thoughts on Music.

John Gruber tries to read between the lines of Steve Job's open letter:

Steve Jobs’s “Thoughts on Music” essay is really quite a good piece of writing, and an intriguing and aggressive strategic move on the part of Apple.

Is it a challenge to the major record labels? An answer to the increasingly hostile European governments (Norway, France, Germany) that are pressuring Apple to “open up” the iTunes Store? A message to the press to clarify Apple’s stance on DRM? A big fuck-you to Microsoft?

It is all of these things.

The main points are, in redux:

• DRM protections were forced by the music industry upon those who sell music online
• Because of the demands of the music industry, DRM technologies are extremely difficult to control even for a company that has an extensive control over the whole distribution-player chain, and impossible if that control is shared among lots of different actors — That's why Apple doesn't license its DRM technology “FairPlay”
• Therefore, Microsoft does exactly the same as Apple, music sold from the Zune music store plays only on a Zune player — a big departure from the open model of licensing their DRM (“PlaysForSure”) to others
• The music industry sells 90% of its production on DRM-free CDs
• On average, only 3% of the music stored on an iPod comes from Apple’s music store. The rest comes from elsewhere (most notably from already owned CDs)
• DRMs haven't worked to halt music piracy, and may never work as the technology itself is broken and fixed in a permanent cat-and-mouse game
• The way out is to get back to what has been the model for decades: music that is free from DRM — The music industry will benefit from that, and Apple will switch to a DRM-free model in a heartbeat
• Most complaints come from Europe, luckily Europe also owns the majority of the big four music giants — Job can’t be blamed for passing the hot potato back.

Steve Jobs’s message is that there are only two options: status quo, or no DRM. Apple wouldn't suffer at all from such a switch (they make their numbers on iPods, not music sold), but others would, or would simply disappear, such as those based on subscription. And in my book, that’s precisely the ugly hidden agenda behind DRM: prevent you to own your music and listen to it when, where and as much as you want, but force you to continuously pay for the privilege of listening to the same things over and over.

By the way, my iPod is shock-full of music ripped from the CDs I’ve bought, some of them 20 years ago. Do you think you’ll have a chance of being able to listen to your DRM-locked music 20 years from now? Me neither.

To finish on a positive glimpse of what a good online music shop can look like, just go see Linn Records. They have an outstanding catalog for lovers of classical, baroque and jazz, and they sell DRM-free music in different formats, including CD-quality downloads. Those guys know how to satisfy the audiophiles (my hifi equipment comes from Linn).

Second Life escapists told to wake up:

The World Development Movement (WDM) has loaded a digital counter into Linden Labs' virtual world which tallies the number of preventable child deaths since it was first opened in 2003. A child's life is lost every three seconds.

The wake-up call comes on the same day a chilling survey reveals almost half of Americans who use "virtual communities" believe events there to be just as significant as those in the real world.

The WDM's Peter Taylor said: "Millions of people are now spending more and more of their time in Second Life or similar virtual environments. We are here to remind them that they can't escape the problems of the real world."

I think it's first time I mention Second Life. I was just waiting about something worthy to post about ;-).

I wasn't expecting Microsoft to come out with an iPod killer, but I wasn't expecting to see so many bad reviews about the Zune either.

I just saw a Zune, and guess what? Its a piece of shit, by David Galbraith:

Zune manages to take the very few features of the iPod and over complicate or ruin them. For example, the navigation copies the iPod's in the way it looks, and for absolutely no reason, because the way the navigation works does not require the scroll wheel design. This tell tale sign of unergonomic design is known to product designers as a skeumorph, it's why cheap hifi equipment has lots of flashing lights to look 'pro'.

Avoid the loony Zune, by Andy Ihnatko, Chicago Sun-Time:

Yes, Microsoft's new Zune digital music player is just plain dreadful. I've spent a week setting this thing up and using it, and the overall experience is about as pleasant as having an airbag deploy in your face.

Zune, so you want to be an iPod killer? MacWorld:

The iPod is beautiful, sleek and simple. Microsoft will never sell a media player that is more elegant than the iPod. That's just not going to happen, given the DNA of each company. What isn't inconceivable, however, is that Microsoft could create a Zune that's more desirable than the iPod. After all, the Mac is more elegant than Windows, but most people prefer Windows. And that's how Microsoft can kill the iPod: make the Zune more like a Windows PC.

Zune, Creative Commons Don't Mix, by Eliot Van Buskirk, Wired News:

To see the insanity of the music industry's antipiracy paranoia look no further than Microsoft's Zune.

Trying Out the Zune: IPod It’s Not, by David Pogue, New York Times:

At the very attractive but dog-slow Zune store, for example, you can either buy songs ($1 each) or rent them (unlimited songs for $15 a month). But Microsoft’s store doesn’t sell TV shows, movies or audio books. The music catalog is much smaller — 2 million vs. 3.5 million on iTunes — a fact that Microsoft ham-handedly tries to conceal by listing stuff that it doesn’t actually sell, like Beatles albums.

Installing the Zune... sucked, by Ryan Block, Engadget: a complete description with screenshots of a pretty usual MS software experience with as many useless dialogs and crashes as you can get ;-). Note that googling for "zune installation crash" returns about 596,000 results already!

Zune Swoon, by John C. Dvorak, PC Magazine:

If anything is doomed to failure, it is the Microsoft Zune. I have no idea who is marketing this device within the company, but from what I can tell, this is going to become a major turkey in the product mix. As far as I can tell, Microsoft should simply turn over all its marketing to the Xbox 360 folks—at least some of the people in that group have marketing skills.

Now, hacks are starting to appear:
- Zune has its own 100% MS-Windows (but not Vista yet) + Zune store ecosystem (excluding MS own PlaysForSure format, which gives a sour taste to their marketing slogan "Choose your music. Choose your device.
Know it’s going to work."), but people are already trying to plug it on their Macs: One small step towards Zune use on the Mac...
- Gizmodo tells How To Bypass The Zune's WiFi Sharing DRM

Barry Ritholtz takes a look at the sales stats from Amazon and see that the iPod continues to dominate:

Apple has all 5 first slots, 9 of the top 10, 11 of the top 15.

Microsoft Zune?

# 18

(Sophie notes in the comments that it's now at #76!)

There's a Zune page on Wikipedia.

BTW, I hear from the press here that Vista sales are looking bad, and that Seattle is expecting record monthly rain falls for November. I don't think those are related though :-p.