Ray Ozzie's missive to Microsoft.

Well now, what was I saying about app-stores for PCs?

Apple did it.

Ray Ozzie drops out of Microsoft.

Frankly, there's not a lot of point kicking M$ any more when things look this hopeless.

Update : Hold on. I just noticed. Microsoft are migrating their blogging platform customers to WordPress????!!!!

I mean, WP is absolutely great. And on the one hand, this is a good sign for M$ the company. But what does it say about M$'s aspirations as a web-service provider that they're moving people off their technology onto a PHP-based, open-source competitor? How hard is it to write blogging software?

As far as I can see, the only real hope for Microsoft in the smartphone market is to buy RIM (Blackberry).

There is no pure software market in selling mobile operating systems. Just as there wasn't in selling operating systems for web-servers.

As with web-servers, the only os likely to gain traction is one which is effectively free like Android.

Or you make your own handsets.

Buying Blackberry would give M$ a handset manufacturer, a valuable enterprise brand, and the headache of merging its engineers and software with RIM's. Nevertheless, I suspect that the latter is a price worth paying for the first two.

Ideally, forget the "Windows Phone" brand and concentrate on using M$ muscle to promote the Blackberry with enterprises, carriers, retailers etc. Then merge specific interesting new M$ technologies, apps, UI innovations, engineering teams into Blackberry.

Won't happen, of course, as long as the "cult of Windows" remains dominant at M$.

On Quora : what should printer companies be getting into?

Over on Quora I answered a question about "Why have "personalized news" startups failed?"

Here's a question. Why shouldn't Ubuntu's Synaptic package manager / package store count the number of people who are using each package? Or allow people to vote for packages that they find good / useful?

Over on Quora, we're discussing who would benefit from buying Yahoo.