“Dave Sifry, one of the founders of Linuxcare and its CTO, took
me to task for my article about web services. First off, he
criticized me for not checking in with Linuxcare before publishing
the article, since he felt that it misrepresented their business.
Second, he pointed out that Linuxcare was in fact doing many of the
things that I was talking about in my article, and that I should be
using them as a good example, not a bad one….”
“Overall, though, Dave’s comments also made me realize that I
was trying to do too many things in that article! I was using the
current news about Linuxcare as a starting point for some “big
picture” insights that I wanted to share. That’s all well and good,
but to the extent that I made Linuxcare look bad by implication,
that was not a great jumping off point. Further, to the extent that
collab.net and Digital Creations also employ professional services
as part of their business model, I further muddied the water.”
“My key point was that professional services need to be part
of a bigger “solutions” framework. In particular, I wanted to
share my enthusiasm for the idea that (as I said in my original
article), “In the age of the net, ‘services’ doesn’t just mean
professional services, it means figuring out how to build
frameworks for automating activities that used to require human
labor.”