I had afternoon meetings at the World Trade Center, so I got a one day fun pass at the Broadway and 86th subway station. Started on a 1/9, switched to a B/D and got off at Rockefeller Center. Grabbed a cup of decaf and a toasted bagel with egg and bacon, then cruised up to the office.

I was slogging through the morning e-mail when my brother called from Colorado to tell me that a plane crashed into the WTC. I somehow assumed that it was a small private plane and went to my email. It wasn’t until my brother called back about the second plane that I realized that it was jet airliners.

I tried to get some work done. But it basically amounted to moving paper from pile A to pile B and back to pile A while waiting for CNN to load. My co-workers from New Jersey and Brooklyn were figuring out how to get home. But I didn’t have broadband or TV at my apartment, so I planned to stay plugged in at the office. Looking out the windows to the south, I could see the smoke over downtown.

I decided to head home around 3. Madison Avenue, usually so full of people and traffic, was deserted. I caught a north-bound bus up to 86th. No cross town buses, so I started walking across Central Park. Once I was across, there was no point in going to my apartment. So I went into a local bar, got a beer, and settled in to watch the news.

At some point, I tired of watching the news. It was only raising questions for which there were no answers. A recent transplant from Northern CA, I had already become accustomed to the energy and vibrancy of NYC. But today, the city was deflated.

In the following days, I learned that everyone I knew was safe. Not many New Yorkers could say that. But I hadn’t been there long enough to know many people outside of work.

Slashdot has an interesting thread on the rise of Fantasy and the decline of Science Fiction – prompted by Spider Robinson’s concern for the future [of his chosen genre, his country and his species]. Since I have met the enemy and he is me, here are my two cents on the subject.

First of all, is this the chicken or is this the egg? Show me someone who is writing SF that is of the caliber of classic Heinlein or Asimov and I’ll start buying. But I’m don’t know how new writers get started any more – the short story market seems to have disappeared. Once I found new authors in short story collections and magazines. Now, I find new authors when they appear on the shelves of the local libraries and bookstores.

Second, it seems to me that it is much easier to recycle the characters and setting of a Fantasy novel than of a Science Fiction novel (Robinson lumps the SF franchises of Star Trek and Star Wars in with Fantasy). With the current writing market, I’m sure that the financial prospects for a new novel in an existing setting with an existing audience are much greater than for an new novel. Perhaps the current trend towards self-publishing via the web will provide the new breeding ground for authors. But until then, it’s going to be a tough row to hoe.

Finally, is this really an issue? One of the major appeals of software is the ability to conceive and build logical abstractions. I wonder just how many SF fans find that to be true and how much SF dreaming has been diverted to software dreaming.

Tom Warwick provides a web form for customers to request lost registration codes and wonders why others charge for lost software registration codes. This is fire your bad customers run amuck. Technology makes it possible to determine the profitability of individual customers. Unfortunately, some use this information incorrectly and proceed to fire their bad/unprofitable customers.

Customer profitability data should be used to increase the profitability of all customers – by identifying cross-selling opportunities and by identifying how services are used and where service needs to be more efficient. Firing customers should be a last resort. But in a short term world where employee layoffs are a common means to boost company value, the last resort often comes first.

And remember that the so-called bad customers often get that way because they are the most passionate about using your service. They are often the best source of information on what is and isn’t working in your business – information that is lost to you once they’re fired.

In the case of the lost registration codes, I suspect that those who find it onerous to provide replacement codes already suffer from broken business practices. Either they don’t have an easy means of identifying existing customers, or it’s a pain to generate registration codes. Fix those problems and those bad customers you were about to fire start looking pretty good.

[via Scoble] Microsoft: Hated Because It’s Misunderstood – I don’t hate Microsoft. But I do resent the heck out of them. And while evil might not be the right word for them; ruthless, paranoid and self-centered come to mind.

Microsoft thinks of itself as the leader. But leaders tend to their followers and protect them from harm. Microsoft will have a much better claim to leadership when it demonstrates an appreciation for the mutual good. Without such an appreciation, it’s just a bully looking out for itself.

If you’re a sports fan in the Tri-State area, then you know Chris Russo, the Mad Dog, from his radio show Mike and the Mad Dog on WFAN. He has a new book out, The Mad Dog 100: The Greatest Sports Arguments of all Time, that poses 100 sports questions followed by his answer and the grounds for that answer. I have fairly parochial attitudes about sports, so I was quite surprised to find that I only take issue with 3 of his answers.

First, the ground rules. I didn’t expect to agree with him about the order of the top 5 anything. I did expect to see all my contenders in his list (top 5 plus also rans). And some questions I just didn’t care about (boxing and golf). So with that said, here are my problem questions.

Hoops Hierarchy: Which is the greatest NBA team of all time? His answer: 71-72 Lakers, 66-67 Sixers, 62-63 Celtics, 82-83 Sixers, 85-86 Celtics, 90-91 Bulls. My beef: Where are the 76-77 TrailBlazers? This was one of the most beautifully constructed teams of the modern era. If Bill Walton had sturdier feet, then they would have won a couple more titles. This is a one season question, and they’ve got to be in the mix.

Making Book: What are the all-time best sports books ever written? His answer: A Season on the Brink, Bums, When Pride Still Mattered, Hogan, Sandy Koufax: A Lefty’s Legacy, The Jordan Rules, Summer of ‘49, and Joe DiMaggio: A Hero’s Life. My beef: What about The Breaks of the Game? This is one of the great examinations of the inner workings of a pro sports franchise and remains my favorite sports book of all time. And yes, I’m aware that this is closely related to my beef with the Mad Dog’s greatest NBA teams.

The Hatfields and the McCoys: What are the ingredients for a great sports rivalry? His NFL choice: Raiders-Chiefs. My beef: it’s the Raiders-Broncos. The Raiders-Chiefs rivalry has lost some fire since it’s heyday in the AFL. But Raiders fans still complain about the Lytle non-fumble in the 77-78 AFC Championship game. Raiders owner Al Davis fired Broncos coach Mike Shanahan. Shanahan sued Davis for the remaining money on his contract. This is a rivalry from the top to the bottom.

Three complaints out of one hundred – not too bad. It’s definitely worth taking a look if you’re a sports fan.

September – it’s been a bit dry here on the sports category, but things are about to start winding up. Baseball is heading down the home stretch with nice pennant races shaping up in the NL Central and AL Central. The NFL regular season starts this weekend and college football is already underway. The A’s have started their end of the season push to the playoffs and my Football Teams (Denver Broncos and Stanford Cardinal) are undefeated. It’s looking like a good fall season for the sports fan.

Sam Stevens, tab extraordinaire, checking out the New York Times – in support of Charles Miller’s Cat Pictures Day.

Long time readers may have noticed that I spend a lot of time thinking about marketing for a technical guy. If your company has a direct sales force, then they’ll insist that they are where the rubber meets the road. If you have a installation/consulting arm, then they’ll insist that it’s them. And ditto for customer support. But for my money, marketing is where the action is.

Yes, they all spend more time working with customers then anyone in marketing. But where everyone else is focused on just a few customers at a time, marketing is wrestling with concepts that cut across the entire customer base. So I’d like to send out a belated welcome to the blog roll to Thomas Warfield, who’s living the Shareware Life.

Tom may have the Greatest Job in the World, but he’s also out there by himself. The decisions are his own, as are the consequences. So I’m glad that he’s decided to blog about them.

Nothing is better than getting paid to do something that you would do anyway. There aren’t many professions that you can say that about, but I think that’s still true of IT. IT lives in a junction of logical thought and creative expression that stretches and challenges your mind like few other things can.

Yes, IT is under attack from outsourcing, foreign competition and a poor economy. But what isn’t? And while outsourcing support looks good on the bottom line, it’s often more of a cost shift than a savings - fine when shifting costs to your customers but not so good when shifting costs to your business units.

So I think that it would be a mistake for Tim Bray to guide his son away from this profession. He should make sure that he has exposure to other careers. But if the kid has the knack (he certainly has the genes), then I wouldn’t fight it.

To my way of thinking, RSS is most effective as a broadcast medium while email is most effective as a narrowcast medium. When we’re broadcasting, we’re trying to generate buzz - an awareness of who we are, what we do, and why we’re good people. We’re interested in the aggregate effect: how many readers, reader retention, and the like. But when we’re narrowcasting, we’re trying to elicit a specific reader action. Our focus is on the individual response.

In 1-to-1 Marketing, we want to take members of our broadcast audience and convert them to narrowcast and eventually customer. The evolution from broadcast to narrowcast to customer necessitates a loss of anonymity. We develop more information about individuals so that we can target information and proposals for them.

If RSS is to play a significant role in that evolution, then it needs to distinguish between readers and become part of the process of learning about individual readers. Returning to yesterday’s request for a standard block of [anonymous] IDs, many people won’t want to be a part of that process. It’s best to recognize that and provide a mechanism that works within your overall marketing effort.