I'm in Fortune!
Monday, October 16, 2000 by Dave Winer.
Kool-Aid pushback 
I can't tell you exactly how many emails I got saying that "Drinking the Kool-Aid" was a reference to taking LSD, lysergic acid diethylamide, a hallucinogenic drug popular in the 1960s.
Tom Wolfe wrote The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, an anthem of the hippies, where people drank LSD-enhanced Kool-Aid. Those were happy days! And that was the acid test. Steve Jobs says that Bill Gates would design better software if he had dropped acid in the 60s. I took a fair amount of the stuff myself in the 60s and 70s. Guess I'll never be President of the US?
Anyway I gotta push back. When I say I drank the P2P Kool-Aid, I was referring to the lethal kind, not the fun kind. I know what P2P really is, on October 16, 2000, it's a horde of believers pitching ideas at anyone who will listen, hoping that they can wish into existence a powerful euphoria and capture millions of dollars and recognition and happiness. "P2P is for me," say the hungry developers and VCs.
But it's dishonest for me to jump on that bandwagon as-is, it's lethal to my ethics, because there is so much of substance waiting to happen, for the airwaves to clear. So, along with other friendly coders, I want to steer P2P in a high-integrity direction, one with lots of opportunity for the hungry developers and the VCs, and even for Microsoft who must be pleased that there is a euphoria that's not aimed at a vital organ.
It's as it always is. If you want to go in some direction, you have to fight to get heard, or be extremely lucky. That's the competitive marketplace of ideas in the technology industry. It's cool because in Y2K I have the tools to be heard. Thank you World Wide Web.
I'm in Fortune!
Thank you Fortune too.
http://www.fortune.com/fortune/2000/10/30/dot11.html
The picture is grim. It's not my fault. We took 300 pictures of me guffawing and flirting with the camera, but the photographer made me put on a grim face for two or three pics, and they picked one of those.
Well, it is Fortune, so I guess it's serious.
The title is Money is Boring. Maybe that's it. I'm not grim or serious, I'm just bored.
Here's a quote. "Money is boring. And party conversation about money is even more boring. I want to know what people think, and I want to know what their passions are. I want to be inspired by them. I want them to do beautiful things that entertain me. I want my beautiful things to entertain them. The Internet is a fantastic technology that helps me do these things."
Since you read DaveNet, you know that. There's a lot more. They interviewed seven other high tech people from the Bay Area.
Something changed in Silicon Valley and San Francisco.
What happened?
(Hint: There's more to tech than Dot-Coms.)
Ray Ozzie
I had a lovely meeting on Thursday with Ray Ozzie, the lead developer of Lotus Notes, and the founder and CEO of Groove Networks, Beverly MA. The company has been in existence for three years, working on a new product that they will unveil later this month. I'm under embargo, I can't talk about its features or even what it does until they announce it. I agreed to these terms before receiving the demo.
Ray has a philosophy, a good one, and nice software. I will certainly write about it when it's announced, it could be very big, maybe as big as Netscape 1.0. It's different from what I expected, but I understood it immediately.
UserLand will support Groove. It'll be easy. There are a lot of places where Frontier, Manila and Radio can connect into Groove. I'll do it enthusiastically because I like Ray, he's a smart software guy, and he's bitten off a big one. There should be plenty of places for us to connect our products and users. More later on this, for sure.
Why Bakersfield?
We have a new graphic HTML designer on our team, Bryan Bell of Bakersfield, CA. Located in the farm belt of California, which for some reason has become a central point in our little piece of the Web. That's where Bryan is from.
We're redoing all our sites now, and I think they're going to be the best-designed sites on the Web. Check out the new version of Scripting News and tell me what you think.
More new sites coming later this week!
Dave