Joining the Tivo meme, my problem with Tivo is the cost. Not for the hardware, but for the service. I really hate to take on the $12.95 per month subscription. And given the current rate of hardware obsolescence, does anyone really think $299 for the product lifetime is a good deal?

If you ask me, Tivo hasn’t figured out if they’re selling a product or a service and they’re going to be in trouble unless everyone figures it out. I’m willing to buy a PVR to get real time delay and replay. I’m not willing to buy into the service yet. But I might buy into a trial if my hardware didn’t turn into a pumpkin without it – or a recommendations service without a hardware buy. But jam the two together and I’m a balky buyer.

Scoble asks how do you get people to buy something they don’t know they need?. Start by letting them go back, rather than trying to lock them into a trunk.

Stanford falls one short in its attempt to be the first Pac-10 team to go 18-0 in the regular season. Looking at the bright side, it means they can take the undefeated target off their back. And I would think that the experience of handling the pressure will serve them well in the pressure cooker of March Madness.

Looking forward to a healthy Justin Davis and a deep run into April.

Well, the other shoe was a doozy. Champ Bailey gets $18 million in guarantees and $27 million in the first three years and replaces Ty Law as the highest paid cornerback in the NFL. Bailey is the cornerback that the Broncos have been looking for ever since Louis Wright retired. But with the salary cap just over $80 million, this contract scares me.

The Rocky Mountain News reports that Bailey’s cap number this year is only $1.5 million. And the Broncos had better win the championship - with $27 million in the first three years, Bailey’s cap number in years two and three must be huge. Success under the salary cap is all about roster management. It’s telling that the Patriots are trying to renegotiate the Ty Law’s contract. It’s just too much money in one player.

I’ve been watching Survivor since the beginning. For me, the first half of the season is learning who the players really are, the second half is following the political machinations and the middle half, where the two collide, is really the best part. You’ve had time to judge the players, it’s still anyone’s game and there’s a lot of wheeling and dealing going down.

But Survivor: All-Stars just isn’t doing it for me. I already know who everyone is and so do the players. Agendas seem to have been set very early on, the voting seems to be more about past performance than what is happening in the current game, and the players don’t seem as mentally tough. Fast-Forward is what keeps me going.

One of the problems in working with software is that you start to see the world in binary terms: 1 or 0, good or bad, black and white. When the reality is that most everything is a shade of gray. And the same is true of Open Source.

There is no outrage when someone decides to start a consulting practice. So why all the vitriol when someone decides to start an open source practice? The money is made in the same way. The open source practice simply markets its abilities by participating and contributing to the community.

Those who believe that open source is taking money out of their pockets need to look in the mirror. If open source is taking your market away, then you probably weren’t responding to the needs of the market or your market has insufficient barriers to entry. Every market has a low cost provider, open source takes it to the limit. Successful products have vibrant volunteer user communities; Microsoft has MVP’s and AOL had unpaid community leaders. If open source can build a community in your market and you can’t, then who is to blame?

But Open Source is not a silver bullet. It will always be best at commoditizing existing markets. Until the first solid release, an open source development team in a new market will be working part time, limited to grass roots marketing and without substantive customer feedback. Even strong teams with good ideas will have high infant mortality under those conditions.

Last week, I asked would crossing the chasm marketing work for smalltalk? Alex Peake says yes in my comments. But the more I think about it, the more I doubt it. Software sales is a popularity contest. Back in the day, no one ever got fired for buying IBM. Today, no one ever gets fired for buying Microsoft. Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm provides a road map for attaining a similar position.

The critical step in crossing the chasm is achieving dominance in a strategic market. A strategic market is one that you can win, one that is worth winning, and one that provides a stepping stone to related markets. Once you get the herd moving in your direction, it’s easy to sell to the followers in the herd.

Smalltalk’s problem is that the herd has already started the move – in the wrong direction. It’s going to be tough to find a market not already moving away from Smalltalk that also provides a stepping stone to other markets. And without that stepping stone, it’s hard to break out of the niche.

Wow, Clinton Portis will sign an eight-year deal that is worth $50.5 million and includes $17 million in combined signing and option bonuses. What was Dan Snyder thinking? Given the average running back career of 2.7 years and Portis’ lack of negotiating leverage (two years left on his rookie contract for less than half a million per year), this is a great deal for Portis and his agents. We still need to see the structure of the deal, but I have to think that Washington is going to have a serious salary cap problem in a couple years.

Of course, now I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop. What will Bailey’s new contract look like?

James Robertson is taking on the curly brace nimby crew in support of Smalltalk [and lisp]. I wish him luck – our inability to expand our horizons is a major factor in slowing the evolution of software development. But he’s got a tough row to hoe ahead of him.

It’s hard to learn a new programming paradigm. Twenty years ago, I knew good Fortran programmers unable to transition to C because they couldn’t get a good handle on pass by value vs pass by reference. Ten years ago, I knew good C programmers unable to transition to C++ because they couldn’t get a good handle on objects. I’m willing to bet that there are good Java and C# programmers out there who will stumble over a transition to Smalltalk. And I’m sure that all of them would deny that there would be a problem before the fact.

There is a risk in adopting Smalltalk. And I think that Smalltalk would be better served by increasing the developer pool than by downplaying that risk. It’s not enough to make the language freely available. Provide tools and incentives to actually learn it.

The real question is whether it would be too little, too late? Would a Geoffrey Moore Crossing the Chasm marketing push still work? If you could somehow create a critical mass of people with both Smalltalk and domain skills, then you could really make some inroads.

Scoble pledges to market [Microsoft’s] current products better. I hope this means he’s also going to keep an eye out for people who can help us use and develop on what we’ve got. Longhorn is still a long ways off and corporate adoption will lag by a few years to boot.

BTW, Why isn’t there a low cost upgrade from XP Home to XP Pro? With hardware prices being what they are, I don’t blame manufacturers for preloading XP Home. But for those of us who want XP Pro, the XP upgrade pricing means a $100 penalty on mid-range laptops – an upgrade from Home to Pro is typically $100 when available as a preload, but $199 if you buy a preloaded Home and then upgrade.

According to the rumor mill, Denver will send Clinton Portis to Washington for Champ Bailey and a draft pick in a trade largely motivated by contracts. Portis has two years left on his rookie contract and wants a new deal. And Bailey is going to be a very expensive limited free agent.

Denver is betting that there are more running backs where Clinton Portis came from. And with Terrell Davis, Olandis Gary, Mike Anderson and Clinton Portis for a track record, they just may be right. And I suspect they want to send a message about not renegotiating contracts.

But this trade worries me. I think that Denver is reading too much into their playoff drubbing at the hands of the Colts and not enough into their drubbing of the Colts just a few games before. Denver is tantalizingly close to the Super Bowl. And it’s easy to believe that one player can be the difference. But I think that championships are won when teams lift their game as a whole.

It will all come down to Bailey’s new contract. If Denver gets him with a cap friendly contract, then it’s good. And if not, then I think that it will be Mike Shanahan’s swan song as “The Mastermind”.