The site is back up after two days of downtime but if my theory is correct then no one noticed. Our records indicate that 95% of the (20) people reading this site do it via a proper RSS reader, so no one should have noticed a difference between the site being down and me just going on a quiet spell for a few days. The other traffic comes from search, and seeing as how my pages look almost flawless coming from google’s cache, I don’t see why I have to care about downtime all that much. Which is good because this site runs on and old P300 GNU/Linux box off my cable connection and has been since 2003 (talk about the ‘ilities!).

Anyway, cha-changes… I usually don’t get very personal in posts — tending more toward commentary on larger issues — but there’s so much going on right now that I have to write some of this down if just for the archives.

One of the things I never talk about here is my day job. This isn’t because it isn’t related (most of my posts on technology are at least relevant to my day job) but because my employer had no formal policy on public discourse. That combined with the fact that I really enjoy being able to say whatever the fuck I want here led me to keeping work completely out of the picture.

But today, while waiting on The Exit Interview With The Human Resources Department, I was reading over my non-disclosure agreement when I noticed that it was fairly sane, forbidding only the disclosure of confidential company information. Me being employed there isn’t confidential so I guess it’s okay to say that I was employeed by Sterling Commerce from March 2000 until about five hours ago.

Sterling has been around a loooong time for a tech company. This PR blurb does a surprisingly good job of providing some actual information on the company’s background:

A pioneer of electronic data interchange (EDI) and secure file transfer technology, it has provided business process automation solutions to Fortune 500 companies and the world’s largest banks for 30 years. Formerly a division of Sterling Software, Sterling Commerce became an independent corporation in March 1996, through an initial public offering. The company quickly grew to become one of the world’s largest independent providers of multi-enterprise collaboration solutions. SBC Communications acquired Sterling Commerce in March 2000.

They’re one of the few NASDAQ tech companies that didn’t pop with the bubble. I attribute this mainly to the fact that they actually did something: boring old valuable-as-hell EDI and other tough business integration tasks. Most of their current initiatives involve doing the same boring old valuable-as-hell EDI stuff but this time over internet pipes instead of bisync modems.

I won’t say much more about Sterling because talking about it is still gray to me and I don’t want to piss anyone off (at Sterling). I really don’t even know if I can talk about talking about it.

I would like to mention one product I worked on there because it was a kind of epiphany to me. The product was Webforms (rebranded Web Forms it seems <sigh>). It’s just a web app that let smaller Mom-and-Pop shops talk EDI to all the big boys running them thar' expensive mainframes and bisync modems.

Now this was an important situation for a couple of reasons. First, Webforms was an extremely functional web app for the time (~2000). The web was all about animated GIFs, Java applets, <blink> and <marquee> tags, and was just very oh-we-can-make-money-by-just-looking-really-cool-ish in general. And these guys show me this plain old ugly white pages with big forms all over the place web-app. Maybe you’d see a small company logo here and there, maybe not. Fuck it, your company logo isn’t helping anyone with their orders.

It was the plainest, most vanilla piece of pure gold I’d ever seen. Clay Shirky figured out the internet in 1996, I figured it out in 2000 while at Sterling Commerce. The internet is here to do the exact same shit we did before the internet was here but cheaper, broader, and with less fuss. ROCK ON! Let’s do it. I’m pumped.

Unfortunately that leads me to the second reason Webforms was an enlightening experience. It was developed in a company that really hated the web. We owned a massive EDI VAN and we had desktop Windows and UNIX products… that let you talk to the VAN. This is what 2000 people at Sterling knew and understood. Combine that with the following snippet from whatis.com’s definition of VAN:

… Before the arrival of the World Wide Web, some companies hired value-added networks to move data from their company to other companies. With the arrival of the World Wide Web, many companies found it more cost-efficient to move their data over the Internet instead of paying the minimum monthly fees and per-character charges found in typical VAN contracts.

And then these Webforms guys go and plop a web app down in the middle of all this – it wasn’t pretty. Needless to say, excitement about the product never really made it out of development for the years I worked on it but seems to finally be picking up a little now.

So the other big thing “I got” about the internet was that providing real value would usually require being extremely disruptive, which would require pissing a lot of people off, which I will now dub Tomayko’s Law of The Internet:

To provide value on the internet, you must piss someone off.

Cue:

  • Napster / RIAA
  • Wikipedia / Britannica
  • RSS / Journalism
  • Skype / The Entire Phone Industry (holy shit!)
  • Free and Open Source Software / Microsoft (the whole industry is being flipped on its head in case no one noticed)
  • BitTorrent / Television (yes, bittorrent will replace your television stations whether you like it or not).
  • Google / Yahoo <snark>
  • Corey Doctorow / Disney
  • And the list goes on…

All provide value by pissing someone off.

Notable exceptions from this list are AOL, WS-*, Semantic Web, Java Applets, RealAudio streaming, Microsoft Passport, top posting, and DRM. Each of these technologies piss everyone off; this somehow lessens the value dramatically. So the trick is to find a group that’s roughly the size of, let’s say, an industry and piss them off as much as possible.

That’s an insanely brief description of what I’ve learned at Sterling and this one is already running long so more on the ch-changes later.