Hilarious email from HP today:

"On Thursday, April 17th, HP suspended operation of the HP Upline Service. We fully anticipate that suspension of the Upline Service will be temporary and short in duration, and will notify you when the Upline Service is operational again.

Please accept our sincere apology for this unanticipated interruption of your access to the Upline Service. We appreciate your patience as we launch this new service, and are working hard to minimize inconvenience caused by this service interruption.

If you are a resident of the United States, your subscription will remain in effect and you will be able to continue using the Upline Service for the duration of your subscription period once the Upline Service is operational again. Thank you for your patience, and we look forward to providing you with the HP Upline Service.

If you are not a resident of the United States, we regretfully must inform you that the initial launch of the HP Upline Service was intended for United States residents only. Unfortunately, our filtering tools did not adequately screen for subscribers residing outside of the United States. We thank you for your early adoption of the Upline Service, and look forward to being able to provide the HP Upline Service to you when we launch it in your country of residence. Since the HP Upline Service is presently offered for use within the United States only, we will be discontinuing your current subscription."

So let me get this straight. Any fledging start-up worth its salt goes global right out the door, but a behemoth like HP can't? FAIL. Memo to HP: stick to hardware and stop embarrassing yourself on the web. Too bad, I was considering subscribing.

In August 2005 I wrote The Microsoft Office I Really Want. When I tried to engage Robert Scoble at the time on the topic, he showed he relied too much on speed reading to properly address my points and/or was quickly out of his depth (I'm betting on a combination of both factors). I don't want to turn this entry into a personal attack, my point is the openness and dialog through corporate blogging act is hard to get right. Nonetheless the conversation at the time really pushed me to pay attention to Salesforce.com, which we finally adopted in December 2006 (we've been real happy customers ever since). SFDC recently added inline editing which speeds things up and helps deliver on the product vision I had outlined at the time.

There's also a new generation of software companies that try to push the envelope when Microsoft is sleeping, such as Tableau, Blist, EditGrid or Proto. Watch the demo, I'm glad to see Blist delivering on my half-baked high level spec from 2 years and a half ago. I tend to think it's not a coincidence that it's led by a former Microsoftie who probably got tired of the lack of progress within the behemoth.

As an aside, two of these four companies are based in Seattle, one in New York and another in Hong Kong. Atlassian is kicking ass out of Australia. People who think you have to be in the Silicon Valley to innovate crack me up. The truth of the matter is that the Valley is currently producing a wave of useless crap almost as high as the one it delivered a decade ago. If Twitter is the best they can do... not that Twitter is necessarily a bad application, but I've been using it and I'm not overwhelmed by the value creation there (unlike Blogger, which I instantly liked). We're past the time when people confused products with companies, we now see people confusing features with companies, and not very compelling features at that. Businesses start with customer problems and needs, end of story. I know Salesforce.com is in Nocal, but it's also eight years old. Silicon Valley is a washed out whore with occasional flashes of brilliance (Splunk comes to mind). It's too focused on consumer fads and reflects the extractive mentality California was build upon. You get 100 gold diggers for one builder. That's fine. What's tiring is said gold diggers self-portraying themselves are entrepreneurial geniuses. The only people you guys are fooling is your peers and the occasional gullible journalist.

Lately we've been struggling with Wordpress and its HTML shenanigans. Not that they are new but we're more actively pursuing a number of bugs that have been open for a while. Even after you remove TinyMCE, WP will insert closing paragraph tags within an entry if the visual editor checkbox is selected in user settings. Not cool, Wordpress. Then there's the whole concept of the Loop, the way WP filters things in the background, and poor documentation. And don't get me started on plugins or security.

Besides, and this is more important for us, Automattic is pulling a SixApart circa early 2007. It's all about pageviews at Wordpress.com and how they're one of the biggest sites in the universe. Look, decide once and for all whether you want to be in the GeoCities business or the software business. It's irritating when giants such as Microsoft or Google pretend to be everything to everyone, but it's downright ridiculous from start-ups, even if they're well funded (how can a company get so much funding when it doesn't even know what it wants to be when it grows up boggles the mind). I thought we'd throw ten grand at Automattic for a support contract but got cold feet when I saw them starting to chase consumer social fads. At least SixApart divested LiveJournal, got a new CEO and seems to be tightening their focus a little bit these days.

We're just starting to research options to complement WP for some projects, and maybe replace it altogether eventually (no, Anil, we're not going back to MT!) On that front, I like the philosophy behind ExpressionEngine:

"This is really a philosophical issue. Should it happen when a page is rendered or when it is delivered into the database? I’ve always considered it a bad idea to have formatting inserted into the database. If you need to re-purpose content for some other platform, say RSS, then you need to have clean content to deal with."