What's with Dave?

We have known Dave Harper for a while. It has always been my personal goal to get to know other people who are in the same space as you are primarily because if you believe in what "we" collectively are doing in a space, there are probably opportunities to collaborate, or disagree, or occasionally just grab a drink and hang out. In my opinion, all boats rise if we are collectively right.

In the digital music space, many of the people I met over time, repeatedly ran into each other down the road. A good example that comes to mind was when MP3.com was acquired and I subsequently ran the various music sites. As the strategy was determined at a corporate level I was required to adjust the companies and change the various approaches of business units. In some respects that was getting rid of people in other cases it was promoting people. From my perspective it was always important to do that with dignity. I can proudly say that most of the people with me would agree and that in general I have a good reputation.

When we started this company we spent a lot of time with some of the people who pioneered mobile data who Shawn had interacted with at Moviso. Guys like Fabrice Grinda and Greg Clayman. We also went out and hung out with people like Dan Melinger from Socialight and Tasso Roumelitos at Wavemarket. We also met Dave because we thought what he was doing is/was interesting and he had been going at it for a while.

This morning while looking over the server logs I saw a referral from Dave Harper's blog where he flames us for misrepresenting that we were first in a number of areas. I am not sure what the source of agita is with Dave and I am not sure what is so important for him to slam us in his blog. For the record though Dave, aside from the semantics, you don't do what we do and we don't do what you do. If our broad marketing speak has you upset then I don't know how to help you. We develop thick client applications. We develop platforms that support thick client applications. We currently support Brew, J2ME, J2SE. We are rolling out Windows mobile, Flash and Symbian. Oh, and we also support WAP and XHTML.

Ultimately the market will tell us who is right and wrong in terms of approach and I think that is more important than claims of first. From my perspective that is actually the more important metric. I feel pretty good about what we see in terms of how the market is developing but then hey, that's my opinion. I don't understand your business, I don't know how you make money and I am not really focused on that. When I look at people who compete with us, I look at the carrier's deck. You are not one of the companies that we think about. If you are on deck and I am mistaken, let me know.

I find it fascinating that bloggers, rather than picking up the phone, or sending an email or even hitting someone up on IM (Dave is on my buddy list), that one would resort to an "open letter" post and not give someone a heads up. I recall at Gnomedex how Dave Winer accused someone about not responding to a post on his blog and how dumbfounded I was that he assumed that we were all going to have a conversation on his blog. Did you ever think that we don't all read your blog?

So Dave, rock on. Best of luck to you and I am sure that we will see each other around. Please continue to post whatever you like but if you want a "conversation" with me, I'd recommend using one of the methods that most readily would get my attention.