Eye on Winer

Dave’s on a rant recently about how poor Dave’s not so welcome in all the places he thinks he should be.

I was talking with Mike Arrington yesterday about Microsoft’s upcoming web conference, Mix 06. The same people who spoke at Etech are speaking there, as at SXSW, even though the Microsoft people told me straight out that it was going to be Microsoft people talking to developers (which made me think it was not a conference I wanted to go to). Then last week I found out that lots of people I know who don’t work at Microsoft are speaking there, and to my surprise, that includes Mike.

Hmmm lots of good reasons for this. Perhaps there will be people at the conference that want to get work done instead of listening to debates about how Winer’s Way is better? Or then again, perhaps there’s just a desire for those at the conference to learn something. At any rate, Winer goes on to whine:

I did a lot of work for them for free. That’s finished, not going to be doing any more of that. So embarassing.

Them is Microsoft in this case. Now take a moment and think about this. There are a few possibilities. One of the first is that narcissistic Dave is going around giving away his services to multi-billion dollar companies just to see his name on their marquis. Another might be the possibility that there are contracts between Microsoft and Scripting News or even Dave’s former haunts of Userland that he’s working under and not being paid. It doesn’t take much of a business person to figure out that this is a bad deal. Indeed maybe this is what is So embarrassing. One would think, however, if this were the case that Winer would spread as much Microsoft venom as he does with the Adam Curry tirades. Then again, perhaps it’s easier to spread rumor and innuendo with an entity that is not so well defended as the Redmond behemoth.

Perhaps, however, the best approach is to apply Ochham’s Razor to the situation. In that view then Dave really isn’t working for free for anybody. Instead Winer’s doing what he wants, when he wants and as he so often writes with free ideas on his blog, sharing freely with other people who just happen to be smart people finding creative ways to build on the ideas of the past. Somehow a much simpler proposition. The saddest part of all is that Dave with his good ideas could get invited to many more conferences if he managed to work well with others and recognized his role more appropriately. Imagine for a moment the scene presented if Shakespeare showed up at the Academy Awards and bellowed before each award that he actually wrote that story before anybody else and they should be giving him credit for the idea that upon which he “worked for free”.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 29th, 2006 at 1:02 am and is filed under Dave. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.