From what I can tell of the software he’s written, David Winer sure has a good head on his shoulders and really understands the way users want to approach things, but he seems to have a fundamentally basic inability to get along with any other given human being for more any length of time, which is important when you’re considering buying software from his company.
The latest blow-up is Winer getting angry at Tim O’Reilly over the future direction of RSS. Winer started getting upset after O’Reilly invested money in Pyra which Winer apparently thought was a betrayal of trust or something, and now they’re arguing about what role O’Reilly Publishing plays in the development of RSS.
There are two things that always annoy me about Winer’s rants. First, he has a habit of casually republishing on his site e-mail that he receives from people he’s arguing with. In this case he’s got a screen shot of an e-mail that Tim O’Reilly sent him. I think most people have an expectation that e-mail is generally private. I’ve gotten a lot of nasty e-mail from folks but if I’m going to republish it on my site I’ll strip out the identifiers so it’s anonymous or get permission. I’d be very wary of ever sending Winer an e-mail.
Second, often times Winer seems downright paranoid. O’Reilly’s e-mail complains that Winer is distorting the record, and says that,
I’m assembling a list of all the false claims you’ve made against us, and at some point, if you keep this up, it will be published as an expose. When people see both sides, you will lose even more credibility than you have already. You’re lucky I haven’t been waging the kind of PR campaign against you that you’ve been waging against us.
What’s Winer’s take on this e-mail? That,
But it is wrong for the CEO to threaten the CEO of a much smaller company for merely saying what he believes to be true. In all my years in the software business, after public differences with Microsoft, Netscape, Apple, etc, no CEO of any company, or even an executive, has ever threatened me as boldly as Tim O’Reilly does.
Winer can savage O’Reilly all day, but the second O’Reilly threatens to publish a list of false claims Winer has made, all of a sudden it’s a threat. I believe this is from the “can dish it out, but can’t take it” department.
Finally, on an only somewhat related topic, I was a bit surprised to see Winer promoting Chuck D given Public Enemy’s past use of anti-Semitic imagery in their music, including the recent professional reunion between Chuck D and Professor Griff, who was forced out of Public Enemy after he made very anti-Semitic. This isn’t just to pick on Winer, since this is largely the MTV and music journal’s fault, but it is amazing the degree to which anti-Semites can be rehabilitated by the media.