In which we continue being conservative

I’ve finished a workable first draft of the article for the DJ, so the burden of that has temporarily moved to others, although it will be back eventually for further editing. So that’s done, mostly. It was work. I’ve almost forgotten what that was like.

The NDCA conference is next week, and I will try to catch as many relevant workshops as I can, although they are promising that they will also eventually be online. No one will probably be interested in my warnings about Zoom, in any case. I do not claim that it will go away; I just claim that it isn’t exactly here, and while it might be the ad hoc program, there is no guarantee that it will (or won’t) become the default or the standard. This wouldn’t matter much if there wasn’t money involved, but I have a fear that people desperate for something to do debate wise will buy in too soon, and get stuck. I’ve seen that happen in my other world. For years people were coming to us at the DJ with great solutions to this, that or the other problem, and almost inevitably their proprietary solutions, which did in fact solve, couldn’t match the solutions found in more general software. If you have Word, for instance, you are running the de facto default program available to (and understood) by all. If you are dealing with writers in-house and freelance, they all not only know how to use Word but are probably using it all the time. So some other writing solution would somehow be better than the installed and understood base? I don’t think so. The benefits of already being installed and understood are hard to overcome. What we’re looking at in debate software is analogous but not quite the same. We now live in a universe where Google and Microsoft were beat out of the gate by Zoom, despite having their own solutions. Google and Microsoft (and who knows, Apple?) have been beat out of the gate before. But they’re still very much in the race, and it’s the final stretch that matters most. Bet your money on the proven runners, I say. Long shots win occasionally, but not as often as the favorites. Trust me on this.

Reading: Master of the Senate
Listening (book): Lathe of Heaven
Watching: The Magicians (season 3 and I still don’t know if I like it or not)
Listening (music): Elvis selections for the tab room playlist (found a couple)
Listening (podcast): David Tennant
Cooking: From James Morton’s Brilliant Breads (about the thousandth bread book I’ve tried and definitely the best; he was a Bake-off finalist)