Wednesday November 17, 2004 Sorry, I don't Fink so
It's great to see Martin Fink from HP blogging. Or at least it would be, if he was. I'll leave others to comment on his content - I'm amazed by the poor judgement on the medium. If Martin seriously wanted to engage the blogging community in the way thought-leaders have done then I would have a huge amount of respect for him, especially given HP's self-serious conservatism. But sadly Martin Fink's site has all the hallmarks of a cheap PR stunt run by HP to try to ride the wave of Sun's announcements on Monday.
Why do I say that? Well, I spent a few minutes doing some web site forensics. First I looked at the page source (what a great retro look by the way). It was edited with Adobe GoLive - which is part of Adobe's pro suite for graphic designers & has no Linux version - and that includes the "blog" page. As David Berlind notes there's no syndication feed and more importantly no permalinks, and the whole page (which is contained in a framed scroll box) is called "FBlogNov04.htm" suggesting this was a static site designed purely for the purpose of attacking Sun in November '04. The service is hosted on Linux, probably on a Dell system, by a hosting company, not by HP. It went live Monday so was planned well beforehand with that (well-publicised) date in mind. Go mining in NetCraft and you can find this all for yourself.
The 'blog' text doesn't have a blog 'tone' - it's classic competitive-attack-team copy (for example the fact that Solaris uses a single source tree so his dichotomy of just making Solaris x86 open source is false, or the fact that ZFS in endian-neutral so his problem of SPARC and x86 sharing data is avoided). I recall seeing plenty of this in a lame and embarrassing (if playful) competitive site that Sun ran in the dark days - but at least that owned up to what it was and played for laughs.
I'd love to see Martin walk the talk and run a blog - the industry needs more of it - but that involves speaking in an authentic voice. I know Jonathan Schwartz writes his own stuff, that blogs.sun.com is run using open source software (which HP could use too) on Sun's domain. Sun is actually trying to rejoin the conversation, and it's paying off, as HP proves here. But to play copy-cat, HP will have to do more than publish brochureware. The market is now a conversation and this sort of soap-box stunt belongs to the past.
Posted by webmink
( Nov 17 2004, 04:02:55 PM PST )
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