Today marks the one month anniversary of the beginning of this blog. During that period I've put up a ton of content - really I've used it more as a straightforward CMS than a blog (my prior manual content management process was a mess, and this is just a world better). I've been very happy with the process and the feedback, and the excellent response I've seen from the community, and I most certainly plan on continuing: One nice thing about constantly mulling over ideas, and being able to type quickly, is that it only takes a few moments a day to maintain this.

Furthermore, a robust comment system is in the testing stage and will be live imminently, and hopefully it will give users a lot more of a voice to agree or (more likely) disagree. It will probably make it a lot more entertaining (for both readers and myself).

Thanks for making it worthwhile.

Dennis

After some pretty rampant speculation, it turns out that the big Google/Sun announcement was much ado about nothing. Basically they announced some strategic partnerships and cross-promotional agreements, for instance the Google Toolbar being bundled with the JVM (ignore the fact that this sort of thing usually disenfranchises customers). Zzzzzzz.

The world didn't change today, and it turns out that my use of the word "baseless" a couple of days ago was entirely on the mark. Phew, I was worried that I would look pretty silly about that.

What I find remarkable, though, is the things that people thought that Google would pull out of their hat today: From an amazing AJAX-enabled web Office Suite that would eviscerate Microsoft Office, to a full-scale operating system (again to attack Microsoft...all things revolve around Microsoft). The expectations were super-sized. While Google is undoubtedly a very technically capable firm full of some extremely clever people, and they've got a brilliant business plan that allows them to put more money and resources into web apps than just about anyone, the leap from Google Maps and Google Mail to an Office competitor is colossal.

Of course we've seen this sort of ridiculous over-estimation of Microsoft's competitors before. It's been the Year That Linux Takes The Desktop for half a decade now (isn't Microsoft supposed to be dead by now?), and the great Java Office suite is always just a little ways from being viably competitive, and of course the most famous of all was Netscape: Here was a company that put together a piece of software of a complexity level comparable to Windows accessory applications, and suddenly they were perceived as the company that was capable of anything - toss together a full-scale, feature rich operating system and all supporting applications? Why not! Netscape, despite delivering a couple of fairly simplistic applications, could accomplish anything in the eyes of many. Well, actually they couldn't, and their browser codebase started to rot until they were irrelevant, with scavengers picking at the corpse. Whoops!

I root for no side in the great Google versus Microsoft fight, and ultimately I hope the competition serves the consumer very well, however there needs to be some realism in the expectations that people are setting.

A psychology study performed in 1977 - The College-Bowl Study (Ross, Amabile, and Steinmetz, 1977) - demonstrated a fascinating piece of human psychology, which was that people would over- or underestimate people's intelligence relative to their own, attributing undemonstrated qualities to them, based upon role or situation. They called this an "attribution error".

In the study subjects were split into two groups: the quizmasters and the contestants. The quizmasters were tasked with coming up with some challenging-but-not-impossible questions, which they then presented to the contestants as pairs. Invariably the contestants did poorly, as the quizmasters naturally relied upon their own unique proficiencies for material: Whether they quizzed about classical music, famous art, the Altair 8800, or chemistry, their knowledge (and thus what they thought was "challenging but not impossible") differed greatly from the contestants, as should be expected among a diverse group of people.

Amazingly, when asked afterwards about the intelligence of each other, the contestants overwhelmingly estimated the intelligence and knowledge of the quizmasters as greater than their own. Similarly, in a follow-up study an observer was added, and again the observer believed the the quizmaster was more intelligent than the contestant.

Of course this was a completely ridiculous conclusion: Not only were they randomly assigned arbitrary roles, but general knowledge tests applied across the group showed no correlation between role and intelligence. Logically it seems probable that there is a tremendous bulk of knowledge that the contestant holds that the questioner does not, but because it wasn't demonstrated it was unaccounted for. Out of "sight", out of mind.

This basic human tendency is pervasive, and it goes both ways: Some of us underestimate ourselves because we don't have the (often artificial, superficial, or temporal) domain knowledge of others ("I just saw an episode of Numbers, and boy do I feel dumb now..."), while others under-estimate people who don't share their particular grab-bag of facts ("Boy that guy is an idiot! The guy didn't even know what OPML is!". Us nerds are particularly guilty of this, discounting the incredible array of knowledge and skills that people in other fields have, instead judging them on their knowledge of Linux distros or esoteric Windows shortcut keys. This is a tremendous vice).

Take advantage of this human trait! The next time you're having a big meeting, bone up on fringe facts and edge questions for your peers. Learn some irrelevant facts about an uncommon area - for instance beetles or metallurgy - and bring it up at every opportunity. I just took advantage of this myself, talking about the fairly obvious observations of a 28-year old study. Aren't I clever.