In 2009, the word that finally got on my nerves was “space”, as in “our product is in the X space” or “the space we are going after is X.”  It seems like the word “space” managed to find its way into every paragraph.

The annoying word of 2010 appears to be “platform”, as in “we are going to be a platform for X” or “our platform for X will solve the following problems.”

In my little corner of the world, the word “platform” is a lot more precious.  There are very few platforms.  You aren’t a platform until you have a zillion users (well, at least 100 million).  Until then, feel free to call yourself a “junior platform” or an “aspiring platform.”  Or, call yourself an “application”, which is what you most likely are.

I definitely make this mistake myself (e.g. “Company Y is a platform for X”) and I’ve been self-censoring lately and now saying “Company Y aspires to be a platform for X”).

Ok, I feel better now.

I’m been fighting through one of the worst colds I’ve ever had.  I started feeling crummy on Friday, spent the entire weekend in bed, suffered through work on Monday, and had the entire experience crest with the worst headache and one of the longest pain filed and sleepless night ever.  I finally am feeling better today, but man that was a nasty 27 headed viral monster.

I’ve never been a fan of handshakes.  While I get the formality of it, I hate germs and – in a parallel universe – would probably spend all my time with my extremities wrapped in saran wrap.  I’ve had a running joke of it with some friends, including Paul Kedrosky, who also thinks handshakes are stupid.

Today, Paul and I decided to start a movement – “No More Handshakes in ‘09"’.  Fist bumps, elbow bumps, and hugs are fine – just no handshakes.  Join us!

I do this every year just because it’s a pet peeve of mine.  It’s now officially 2009 – time to update all those copyright notices if you haven’t turned the ending year into a variable.  What’s the point of these stupid copyright notices on the bottom of every web page anyway? 

Kudos to Matt Blumberg at Return Path for (a) reminding me about this and (b) having his copyright notices automated.  Google – not so automated.  Microsoft – not so automated (although Live appears to be).  Yahoo – automated!  Ask – not so automated.  Ebay – not so automated.  IBM – not so copyrighted!  I could go on but it’s time to go have lunch with my partners.

Oh goody, they are here.  Every magazine, newspaper, and most of the online publications known to man are putting together their “2008 year in review” and their “2009 prediction” editions.  What a fucking waste of human energy.

This has been one of my pet peeves for 20+ years.  For a while I managed to ignore them completely.  At some point I started getting asked for my predictions and succumbed to my ego for a few years and participated in the prediction folly.  At some point I realized that there was zero correlation between my predictions and reality and that by participating, I was merely helping perpetuate this silliness.

The energy that goes into the “year in review” and “prediction” stuff seems to be significantly greater in “extreme” (both good and bad) times.  The prognostications become stronger and bolder.  The analysis by hindsight intensifies.  I don’t think this benefits anyone.

Over dinner recently, I was having a discussion with a friend. The conversation took place in a very full and busy restaurant.  At some point the discussion turned to the sentiment throughout the United States right now and how the level of anxiety, negativity, pessimism, depression, and downright panic seemed at an extremely high level and appeared disconnected from general reality.  We talked about what “general reality” meant for a little while – both “our realities” (which are different) as well as our view of the “actual general reality in the United States.”

As we rolled through some of the discussion, I made the offhand comment that I thought much of the sentiment that existed started near the end of the summer a few weeks before the DNC.  As I thought about it more, it made sense.  For the 90 days prior to the election, all we heard and read was “things suck in America.”  Oil hit $135 / barrel and was going to go to $200 / barrel (it’s $35 / barrel today.)  Gas was going to be $10 / gallon (it’s under $2 / gallon in Colorado today.)

I was on vacation in England the week Lehman went bankrupt, AIG melted down, and Merrill Lynch got bought by Bank of America.   Amy and I rarely watch TV on vacation (other than movies) but since CNBC’s Closing Bell was on about the time we were crawling into bed, we watched it as though it was a sporting event.  Over the course of the week, we must have seen 100 different people predict 500 different things.  485 of them were wrong.  Oh – and I read Taleb’s The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable during this week and just could stop bursting out with cynical laughter each evening.  Over the 90 days we heard over and over again how much America sucked.  How many problems we had.  How everything was totally screwed up.

Of course, the financial markets have been a disaster in Q3 and Q4.  The housing bubble has finally officially exploded (doesn’t explode sounds more dramatic than burst.)  Unemployment is rising.  Credit is frozen.  Retail sales are massively off this Christmas.  All companies except Walmart are having a tough Q4.  Blah blah blah.  And now come the 2009 predictions.

My prediction for 2009 – the vast majority of the 2009 predictions will be wrong.  Ignore them. Find a Dharma that fits your Karma (more on that when I review Strategic Intuition: The Creative Spark in Human Achievement (Columbia Business School) by Bill Duggan, which I read last night.)  You get a finite number of years on this planet – make the most of all of them, no matter what is going on around you.

Matt McAdams has a clever blog up titled Up next: telesoftware!  He discusses the rise of our favorite new buzzword (hint: it’s "Cloud Computing") and spends some time harkening back to its origin (hint: it’s the "Application Service Provider.")

I was around at the birth of the ASP as the co-chairman of one of the early ASPs (Interliant) which started out life in 1996 as a "web hosting company" (how passe) and evolved in 1997 into an Application Service Provider.  I clearly remember the tech media latching onto the ASP label at the end of the 1990′s right alongside prefixing everything with a lowercase e and postfixing everything with ".com". 

The cynics were simple minded – they simply referred to the ASPs as the return of mainframe – or even better – timesharing.  Interliant enjoyed rapid growth and a brief period of what looked like success before being decimated during the collapse of the Internet bubble.

Platform-as-a-Service has emerged suddenly with a vengeance.  IBM System/370 anyone?  The S/370 had this nifty thing called "virtual memory", which evolved into VM, which lives on today as the great new "virtualization" trend.

Telesoftware?  Nah – that sounds too much like Telemedicine (what ever happened to that one?)  I think we are going to be talking about "planetary computing" once "cloud computing" runs its course since "Sun computing" has already come and mostly gone.

I have seen my lifetime supply of slides like the following:

My good friend Bruce Wyman – the Director of Technology at the Denver Art Museum – has a thoughtful post up this morning titled Simplification of Things, Part 1 of Some.  In it, he shows us a better way to communicate what this slide doesn’t.

I have a handful of chronic grammar problems.  I received the following email yesterday:

You seem like an intelligent guy.  But you insist on referring to your friends as, "that."  If you’re not just trying to fit in by using bad grammar (as everyone else seems to do), show everyone how smart you really are.

"To all my friends that are . . . ."
"Since they are the ones that . . . ." 
"(Name) that is . . . ."

How about using the word, "who" instead of "that" when you refer to people?  "My friend who will be . . . ."  "To all my friends who are . . . ."  "Since they are the ones who . . . ."

To which I responded:

I have 12 grammar problems.  Then / than, who / whom, accept / except, …., and that / who!  Thanks for calling me out on it – I’ll try harder but given that I’m 42 and can’t seem to get my brain wired for these few things, I’m probably screwed for life.

Thanks oh vigilant grammarians for keeping me on my toes.

While I’m usually amused by the copyright gaffes I see, I laughed out loud when I saw that Google News was still Copyright 2007 (thanks to dschwartz for the tip.) 

Dear Mr. Google: It’s almost February 2008.  Oh – and make the date a variable! 

I guess I should be nice since I’m sure some of the companies I’ve funded haven’t fixed (or variable-ized) the copyright dates on their site.

I almost managed to not to write my annual "please update the copyright on your website" post.  Matt Blumberg even called me out for being off my game this year.  But this morning, after seeing the 5,323rd Copyright 2007 message of the year, I decided I could no longer resist the urge to shout at the top of my lungs: "It’s 2008 – update your copyright."  Oh – by the way – you are a software or web company – there’s a way to do this so it gets automatically updated – it’s called "using a variable for the year."

This has now been a pet peeve of mine since 1980.  Did you know that the use of the copyright notice has been optional since 1989 as a result of the 1988 Berne Convention Implementation Act?  Think of what you could use all of those pixels for.

I spent 45 minutes this morning desmegmafying three new Xbox 360 controllers, three new Wii controllers, a Wii charger, and a bunch of videogames.  Thanks to everyone that suggested Wii and Xbox 360 games to me – BioShock ate my morning (after I got the controllers out of their packages.)

My experience reminded me of Mark Cuban’s brilliant post from 2006 titled Seagate Leaves me bloody…  My right index finger is now sliced, my left palm has a cut on it, and my left index finger is still bleeding a little – five hours later.  But I’ve liberated the controllers from their plastic jail, inserted the batteries, and gotten my butt kicked at Wii Table Tennis.

When I looked at the damage I had done (including scraping up over 50% of the brand new controllers I’d gotten, including one particularly gruesome two inch long scratch in the black plastic of a brand new Xbox controller), I pondered the pile of crumpled and useless plastic that will take 154,792 years to decompose.

I spent some time on Wikipedia trying to figure out the type of evil plastic that is used for this stuff and got bogged down in common plastics and their usages.  I now know more about polycarbonates, polystyrene, and acrylonitrile butadiene styrene than I thought I’d ever want to know.

Why, oh why, do consumer products companies insist on using this shit?  There has got to be a better way.  I’m sure I would have done better at Wii Table Tennis if I hadn’t damaged my hands.