Platform Wars

What Pinterest Is Doing That Facebook Isn't

2012-01-31T06:27:00.002-02:00

The Amazon Playbook

2012-01-07T17:47:00.001-02:00

Venkatesh Rao has a very good overview of Amazon's strategy focussing on the coherence and long-term thinking of Jeff Bezos.

Interestingly he discounts Apple as a similarly strategic player, which I think undersells Jobs somewhat. (Though I also suspect this may be a rhetorical trick of Rao's to get a rise out of his readers.) Meanwhile Robert Cringely highlights the parallels, casting Bezos as the natural heir to Saint Steve.

What Is Google+ Really About?

2012-01-05T02:17:00.002-02:00

Vincent Wong's presentation is entertaining and plausibly right.

tl;dr : Applications socialised

Why Do Professional Programmers Use Macs?

2011-12-18T19:28:00.000-02:00

Someone just asked this question on Quora. My answer ballooned somewhat :

1) Historically, Macs were the preferred machines of desktop publishing and graphic designers, then web designers. As the web became an increasingly important platform (relative to "client-server" on Windows et al) individuals and companies who had started in web-design area became more prominent - think of the rise of 37 Signals and Ruby on Rails - and brought their Mac-ness with them.

2) When Apple shifted to OSX they made it a real Unix. In the late 90s, one of the attractions of Linux was that it was the only way to get your hands on a proper command line and Unix tools, and to run the server-side software like databases that you needed. When MacOS became Unix, the Mac could do all that too.

3) At the same time, Microsoft basically fell over. Believing that their birthright was to control every computer platform ever, rather than that their job was to make good tools, they spent the noughties trying to copy first Java (.NET), then Google (Bing), then Apple's iPod and iTunes (Zune), then Flash (Silverlight), then Sony's Playstation (XBox) etc. etc. The result was 5 years wasted on the appalling Vista, and a lacklustre successor Windows 7 (whose main virtue is that isn't quite as bad as Vista). (M$ clearly haven't learned the lesson, so it seems that Windows 8 will just be an inept attempt to copy the iPad while leverageing the rapidly evaporating "lock-in" they think they have in the desktop OS market.)

4) Worse, the commodity PC market that Microsoft (and Linux) rely upon went through some rapid consolidation and price cutting. By my reckoning we expect to pay about a third of the price today for a PC compared to our expectations of the early - mid 1990s. But this didn't just happen in the nice "Moore's Law" sense. Commodity PCs got cheaper and nastier too. Sure they have faster processors, but the cheap bits often don't work together all that well.

5) Despite Linux's maturity, the PC manufacturers have totally failed to get behind it.
Personally, I'm writing this in Chromium under Ubuntu on a beautiful Asus Bamboo laptop. And I'll resist the cult of Apple for as long as humanly possible. But the trend is obvious. Even in 2011, PC manufacturers refuse to support Linux (they won't sell a computer with Linux pre-installed, they won't help to make Linux run well on their machines and ensure that drivers are available for graphics cards etc.)

Asus added a whole bunch of power management software for the pre-installed Windows 7 on this machine when I bought it. They offer no equivalent for Linux, so my machine runs unnecessarily hot (I have shorter battery-life and probably the machine will die sooner.)

The combined result of the Microsoft debacle, changes to the PC industry and the refusal of PC manufacturers to support Linux is that Apple is the only company which now seems competent enough to make a decent personal computer that you can actually use for software development.

Seriously! Think about going out and buying a computer and you think either it will be a substandard Windows 7 machine (packed with slow, buggy "extras" that the manufacturer was bribed to put there, and without the command-line tools that all professionaldevelopers need and use) or you contemplate getting the same PC and having to install Linux on it yourself and, if it's new, having to deal with driver compatibility issues etc. etc. etc.

Or you go out and pay twice the price but get a machine which is of high build quality, you can trust will do everything you need out of the box, and where the hardware / operating system just work together.

6) Oh, and one more thing. You can't develop for iPhones and iPads on a PC or Linux machine.

Microsoft Remembers ...

2011-12-16T23:44:00.002-02:00

Microsoft remembers that it's a software company.

(Earlier thoughts)

The Inside / Outside Dialectic

2011-10-10T16:32:00.000-02:00

Mark Bernstein has an interesting post on Steve Jobs's Apple.

Metro and the Post-Windows PC

2011-09-20T15:33:00.002-02:00

ZDNet has a good article suggesting that Windows 8's Metro stack is going to replace the win32 and .NET stacks of legacy PCs.

It sounds plausible to me. But what should worry everyone at M$ is that it's only the legacy applications which are keeping Microsoft in its dominant position in the enterprise. Metro may be a fine new UI / operating system stack, but without legacy support it's as precarious as WebOS or Meego. Or rather, the only difference between Metro and WebOS or Meego is the inherent conservatism of M$-loyalists in the IT department.

I presume M$ will try to handle legacy apps. with emulation. Which may work on very fast new machines, but I'll be interested to see if this works out on tablets and other low-power / long-battery devices.

2011-07-01T18:59:00.004-02:00

What happens when, suddenly, all these Chinese internet playas start going international?

Everyone is focussed on Google and Facebook and Twitter etc. But Asia is full of equivalents. At some point, one of them will achieve some mainstream success in the West. And then what?

2011-07-01T15:09:00.002-02:00

Another thought on Google+ while I'm waiting for someone to send me an invite (hint).

People are saying Circles are good. Maybe they are, but if they are, how hard will be it be for Facebook to copy them?

Until now, FB have been pretty good at the "steal good ideas from elsewhere" game. Witness buying FriendFeed and reorganising FB to be more like Twitter. If people find that Circles has a better UI than FB for organising your friends into groups, you can bet FB will soon adopt a similar UI. I'm sure they can do that faster than Google can build up FB's userbase.

2011-06-30T05:55:00.002-02:00

Winer on Google+.

That's pretty much all you need to know.

Update :

You know what would have been funny? If Google had made invites computationally expensive like BitCoins. That would have shown the world that they were down with the zeitgeist, still l33t masters of algorithms, and still had a sense of humour. Which is what we want from Google. It's their brand.

Instead, this is a public admission that they're scared of Facebook, a reuse of 5 year old tactics, and apparently it's internally driven by an ex-Microsoft middle-manager.

They're just building a bonfire of their credibility here. And preparing to throw all their great products (Gmail, search, YouTube) onto it.

2011-06-21T22:08:00.000-02:00

The Worst Decision Google Ever Made

2011-06-17T10:38:00.003-02:00

Ben Hyde presents this fascinating infographic showing ratios of employee transfer between different internet playas.

2011-05-26T10:31:00.003-02:00

Slightly off-topic : my answer to disrupting the restaurant industry on Quora.

Update : Bill Seitz is brainstorming too.

2011-05-17T23:33:00.002-02:00

Bill Gates was "behind" Microsoft Skype deal.

Here's a thought. What would it take for Microsoft to pull Gates back from retirement to take over running the company again?

2011-05-10T23:21:00.009-02:00

Finally Microsoft does something exciting. Buys Skype.

You know, I really thought it was going to be Facebook that bought Skype. Perhaps they couldn't afford it.

Anyway, this is really the first good big move Microsoft have made on the internet since buying Hotmail. Cringley thinks it's purely defensive. And it might be, but he makes a good case that even that's a good (or necessary) idea.

But it could be so much more. If M$ don't fuck it up.

Here are a couple of observations :

1) Skype is a great brand.

I always thought that M$ had a good brand in Hotmail, but they proceeded to throw it away, continually trying to turn it into MSN / Windows / Live blah whatever. People still call it Hotmail. They still use that in the address, but M$ did everything they could to confuse and destroy the "Hot" brand.

It will be ULTRA idiotic of them to try to rename Skype as LivePhone or MSN Talk or something. I mean, really, really, really, really dumb.

Contrariwise, Skype is much better brand than anything else M$ has when it comes to cool contemporary internet stuff. Other technologies that M$ are developing could well be moved under the Skype name. For example ...

2) Skype is a social network.

It really is.

Like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. And unlike either Google, Apple or any of Microsoft's previous efforts, Skype is a pretty meaningful "social graph" which can be used for all kinds of interesting experiments in social communication.

At the moment, Skype is very much focussed on synchronous chat / phone call. But it would not be hard at all to add asynchronous capabilities to the client. Some kind of pub-sub, status, wall. Allow Skype users to tag their contacts, or group them into themed lists. And then to watch the posts from a particular list. Let them add photos, links, video. I think within 6 - 8 months M$ could build a fairly plausible and compelling rival to Twitter. Especially if they allowed groups to create private workspaces and channels.

In fact, if I ran Microsoft (here it comes ...) here's exactly what I'd do. Find two or three great programmers and UX designers who are hungry to do something new. Pay Dave Winer to go and talk to them about instant outlining. Pay someone from Google's Wave project to go and talk to them about what they hoped for from it, and what went wrong. Get the designers to mock up some forward looking ideas about how a future Skype client could incorporate asynchronous communication, "narrating your work", private tweet streams, etc.

3) Skype is collaborative work

"Skype" is what people in business say when they mean "conference call".

And Skype could be another chance for M$ to get into collaborative work. Word and Excel need to support shared editing of documents. And it needs to be easy to understand. So bundle the Skype client into Office. (Not exclusively, of course). And have a menu option on Word and Excel saying "Share this document via Skype" which immediately allows you to invite skype contacts to work on a document together.

What if they don't have Office? Well, the Skype client should at least have the free document viewer built into it so that they can follow what you're doing. (I'd go further, why not allow some restricted editing facilities? And yes, this should run everywhere the Skype client runs, ie. Mac, Linux, iOS etc.)

More importantly, hello? App Stores! Have a one click "buy and install Office" built into the Windows Skype client. Make it all work smoothly.

4) Skype is a subscription service

On the subject of one-click buying, remember that Skype is a paid relationship / service. (And likely they already have the user's credit-card number.)

Apple had one of those with iTunes, and look how that worked out for them. Amazon has one, and it's managed to take the Amazon account from selling books to selling virtual servers on AWS. And it's why Amazon are a serious contender to rival Google's App Store for Android. Being able to take people's money easily is an amazingly valuable asset that none of the other social networks (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn) have. Even Google are struggling with this problem.

Get creative here!

5) Skype and Windows Phone

Yes, build Skype into Windows Phone. But I'd go further.

I'd immediately offer a discount on Windows Phone contracts to anyone who's put money into a SkypeOut account. It's a way of paying people to use WP7 that a) might actually encourage some undecideds but b) importantly, doesn't look (too) desperate - it is, after all, a reward for buying into the whole M$ ecosystem. Go further, a single plan for renting a Windows Phone AND SkypeOut calls.

6) More brand extension

SkypePad : it just sounds a hell of a lot funkier than Windows 8 Tablet Edition doesn't it?

Skype 360 : better than RoundTable? (Don't even start me on "Unified Communications"!)

You get the idea ...

2011-04-14T14:01:00.003-02:00

Not updating this blog much. I've taken some time to go back to college, do art and play with a bunch of toys that I've wanted to try for a while. Frankly, my only real thinking about "Platform Wars" happens when I
read ZDNet ... so you might as well get the stories direct from them.

I did wonder whether I should retire this blog entirely. But I know that although I sometimes go on hiatus on some topics, I usually find myself getting interested in them again at some point. So consider this blog hibernating (rather than dead).

However, here's a comment I posted to a mailing list discussion a couple of weeks ago about the opportunities for LinkedIn. Nothing new to regular readers here. But I realise it deserves a permanent home here.

For years I've been asserting that the key for social networks to make
money is to enable their members to form groups that actually DO
things together. And to earn revenue as enablers of doing things.

In a sense, Groupon is a great step forward although a) it doesn't
come out of an existing social network, and b) it seems like Groupon
finds the deals itself rather than lets members find them.

If I ran a network like Facebook I'd add "one click" Kickstarter-like
functionality so that organisers of any event could instantly set up
an account to collect donations, or an escrow account to collect money
for things that only happen if a threshold is reached. In the long
run, Facebook's 500 million members are going to be more effective at
finding Groupon-like deals than Groupon's paid staff.

In the case of LinkedIn, it's slightly trickier, because the essence
of LinkedIn is to NOT be Facebook. By which I mean, LinkedIn's
strength is that it works as as low-traffic, low frequency site for
"serious" uses (as opposed to the fripperies of Facebook). You can't
expect LinkedIn users to be on the site every day (or even every
week).

Here's a personal perspective. I'm an artist / musician and software
developer. I've been paid to write music for modern dance productions;
and I've been paid to write stock-control software to manage
warehouses. And, of course, depending on what kind of gig I'm applying
for, I may want to send a very different CV of my recent projects and
achievements. I basically keep two Word files and manually keep them
up-to-date and in sync. Now what I'd love LinkedIn to do for me would
be to let me create richer CVs with detailed *tagged* sections and let
me generate printable docs based on a selection of tags. Eg. if I'm
applying for an exhibition I want to include five recent bits of
web-art I've done and links to a YouTube channel. But won't bother
mentioning the e-commerce system I built in Perl all those years ago.
For a different potential employer, I may like to generate the
opposite.

I probably wouldn't pay directly for that functionality alone. But I
would spend more time on the site if it was a full CV management
solution. And I'd accept targetted advertising. (LinkedIn would, of
course, have a lot more data about me too, that it could use for
targetting.)

Similarly, people aren't changing jobs every day, but freelancers
*are* pitching for jobs every month. I'm not saying that LinkedIn want
to buy oDesk or should copy it directly. But I am saying that the
growth opportunities for a "professional oriented" social utility will
include a lot more support for people doing short term contracts. And
yes, that means helping people manage outsourcing to freelancers
around the world, letting people manage more sophisticated CVs and
portfolios, keeping a reputation system, facilitating international
payments etc. etc.

LinkedIn still thinks we do a series of "one job after another" rather
than have a portfolio of different jobs, freelance contracts, non-paid
activites etc. which overlap in time. I went back to college this
year, and yet I can't tell LinkedIn that I'm in full time education
again and therefore not to show my most recent paid job as if it's my
current one. The biggest improvement they could make is to keep the
seriousness (ie. don't try to copy Facebook) but to understand that
work is evolving and to help members track and navigate their
trajectory through this increasingly complex space.

2011-02-25T10:50:00.002-02:00

Google lure users away from M$ Office with an Office plugin to socialize Word, Excel etc.

Can it be this simple?

2011-02-02T13:41:00.002-02:00

Dare Obasanjo has a good post up, analysing the failure of several formats and protocols. Useful thoughts.

2011-01-19T15:41:00.002-02:00

Microsoft release OneNote free (as-in-beer) on iPhone in the US.

Slowly crawling back towards being a software company? (As opposed to disappointed wannabe heir-apparent to all classes of computer company)

2011-01-13T20:58:00.004-02:00

Google Wave is dead. But EtherPad (bought and shut-down by Google, but then released as open-source and sponsored as a non-profit by Google) thrives.

What's the lesson here?

2011-01-06T18:34:00.003-02:00

ZDNet : 2011 is the year of the enterprise iPad.

To repeat what I've been saying for a while, Microsoft are utterly fucked if they don't get Excel on the iPad now! They will lose their best and most valuable business brand. And more importantly they'll lose their de facto ownership of the majority of the world's "semi-structured" data.

And once this is lost, the rest of the Office house of cards will come tumbling down too - I "need" Excel because all my business data is in XLS files; but once my business data isn't in XLS files (once its in iPad todo-lists and executive dashboards) then I won't need Excel; and if I don't need Excel, what else in Office do I really care about?

2011-01-06T18:25:00.003-02:00

ZDNet predicts a massacre of traditional Mac developers when the app-store comes online.

Update : this is good too :

Thinking about this, I’m predicting my own behaviour with the Mac App Store. I’ll probably start trying out all sorts of free and low-cost “apps” if they look like they can provide me with instant gratification. (Especially if I can use an external hard drive to store them.) And I’ll probably buy a few “apps” that I can justify, in terms of effort and cost. But I might give up quickly on these if my initial experience isn’t optimal (if the apps in question aren’t worth the cost or effort). And I’ll try different things associated with these apps I do enjoy.

2011-01-06T07:06:00.002-02:00

GigaOm : Has Google given-up on social?

2011-01-05T14:28:00.003-02:00

Amazon cleverly create their own Android AppStore.

This is a smart and interesting move. There's no reason you need to own the operating system to own the appstore. And Amazon as innovative online retailer with size and technical has a good profile to do this.

There will, of course, be a tension between Amazon the curator / publisher and Amazon the network-market enabler. Will they censor content they don't like? Would they exclude a wikileaks app?

It also raises the fascinating question (at least to me), if Android, why not Windows? Is any company bold enough or foolhardy to build an app-store and take the role of curator / gatekeeper of the Windows eco-system rather than wait for Microsoft to lumber up and do it badly in about three or four years?

Some people have kind of been in this game for a while : Tucows, Download etc.

Imagine what some visionary leadership and chutzpah could do with one of these companies at this moment.

2010-12-12T15:38:00.004-02:00

Michael Mace has a very nice post about what you might call "Peak Customers" (by analogy with Peak Oil).

Time passes, and that middle portion of the market gets consumed. Eventually demand growth starts to drop, and you make another price cut. Sales go up again, sometimes a lot. With revenue rising, you and your investors talk proudly about the benefits of reaching the "mainstream" market.

...

What you don't realize at this point is that you're not "reaching the mainstream," you're actually consuming the late adopters. Unfortunately, it's very difficult to tell when you're selling to the late adopters. They don't wear signs. Companies tend to assume that because the adoption curve is drawn as a smooth-sided bell, your demand will tail off at the end as gradually as it built up in the beginning. But that isn't how it works. At the start, you are slowly building up momentum from a base of nothing. That takes years. But by the time you saturate the market you have built up huge sales momentum. You have a strong brand, you have advertising, you have a big distribution channel. You'll gulp through the late adopters really rapidly. The result is that sales continue to grow until they drop suddenly, like a sprinter running off the edge of a cliff.

2010-12-10T10:03:00.001-02:00

More on enterprise iPad :

An informal survey of more than 5,000 Citrix customers point to the popularity of the iPad among businesses and the enterprise, and to the still spotty response by IT management for access to company resources.

Support within organizations appears strong: some 72 percent of respondents said they currently have access to corporate resources.

More than 60 percent of respondents said they were prepared to purchase an iPad for work. Company purchases of iPads came to 43 percent.

The number of people depending on the iPad and using it daily (46 percent) is remarkable given it’s only been on the market for 7 months. In fact 13 percent say the iPad is mission critical for their job. If a business can increase employee productivity and respond faster to customers, the payback can be significant.

The look on the upside is revealing: 88 percent said the iPad increases the means to work remotely, whether at home or “anywhere.” A close second place was the iPad’s help in increasing productivity and computing satisfaction. And more than half of respondents (59.3 percent) said that it allowed access to business applications and documents while keeping data secure. Perhaps this last item is all about the remote wipe capability of the iPad.

Some respondents (32 percent) appear to believe they can do without some other computing devices (likely notebooks). A similar number believe that the friendly iPad needs less tech support than PCs.

2010-12-09T14:54:00.003-02:00

Umair Haque puts out a great post about wikileaks. I'm quoting a chunk here. But read the whole thing.

Consider just how moribund yesterday's institutions are when it comes to information collecting and sharing. Take transparency in corporations. It's built on a set of institutions crafted in and for the industrial age — like annual and quarterly reports. Four times a year, boardrooms publish updates to their accounts, and once a year, a hefty report explaining and discussing them.

Now ask yourself: does that make even a tiny sliver of sense in a world where I can trade equities from nearly any beach in the world, hundreds of times a minute, using my iPhone? It's an obsolete institution, where my demand for information — to analyze, synthesize, and integrate — has vastly outstripped the capacity to supply it. Hence, stocks froth up and down before and after earnings report releases. When I can't get new information from the horse's mouth, I rely on your opinion, the latest rumor, or what talking heads are paid to say. Result: boom, crash, rinse, repeat. But the real question is one of institutional obsolescence. Why, for example, can't we have continuously updated earnings releases — that let us see what companies are earning in real-time — for a continuously connected world?

Sure: there's a balance to be struck between confidentiality and disclosure. But I'd argue that we're not even close to discovering it. Right now, yesterday's organizations — from corporations to Congress — have a gaping, yawning disclosure gap: the how, what, why, how and when of disclosure simply isn't good enough for markets and communities to be able to allocate and utilize resources productively or efficiently. That's why the traditional understanding of everything from GDP to "jobs" to "profit" to "IPO" is limited.

And the result of an undersupply of disclosure is toxic, perverse incentives. A CEO can make hundreds of millions for running a once-thriving company into the ground because he (or she) can earn his mega-bonus faster than you can stop him from earning it. And the systemic result of that is crisis, stagnation, and decline.

My guess is that, like updating GDP for the 21st century, real-time corporate reporting could create new markets, companies, and much-needed jobs. It might ignite novel sources of advantage — while of course creating disadvantage for companies who won't or can't play by its rules. But prosperity is always going to accrue to those who innovate yesterday's rusting, creaking institutions.

(BTW : my personal / political thoughts about wikileaks are on my other blog.)

2010-11-29T22:07:00.005-02:00

Google's high hopes for ChromeOS.

Don't know how to bet on this. Could Google steal the corporate OS market from Microsoft? It's a crazy plan but might it just work? Or is it a pipe-dream?

I still think that the key to unlocking M$'s corporate ownership is the iPad. If the iPad becomes the boss's tool of choice for overseeing the business (corporate dashboard) then we'll see a sudden drop in enthusiasm for Windows. And then ChromeOS (or Linux or anything significantly cheaper than Windows) will turn out to be good enough for the underlings. ChromeOS isn't going to unleash that aspirational energy. Only Apple can.

But there's another joker in the pack : RIM (Blackberry). Could the Playbook be good enough to take that dashboard role instead of the iPad?

What would it take for that to happen?

2010-11-29T21:35:00.000-02:00

Behance becomes a market.

2010-11-17T18:53:00.001-02:00

I'm asking, over on Quora :

In my current search for a new laptop I keep finding what seem to be surprising lacks in the market.

In particular, how come it's 2010 and overt support for Linux from major laptop manufacturers is still non-existent?

It occurs to me, that even if they refuse to supply linux pre-installed, any major laptop maker could at least afford to hire a couple of linux geeks to a) try to get linux working on each of their models, b) blog about the experience (ie. what did they have to do? what drivers needed recompiling? where do you get them? etc.)

As far as I can see, none of the major suppliers : Dell, HP, Sony, Samsung, Asus, Toshiba etc. have anything like a URL ( linux-geeks.dell.com etc.) where you can go and get information about running linux on their machines.

The more I think about it, that absence is pretty amazing. Is there really NO market advantage in supporting Linux users of your machines? Are Microsoft (not so) subtly discouraging them?

So, the question part :

- are any PC makers doing interesting things to support Linux on their hardware (and I just didn't notice)?

- if not, why not? What blind-spots are preventing them grabbing a bit of competitive advantage this way?

2010-11-14T00:30:00.005-02:00

Facebook Mail : Facebook are absolutely rampant at this point.

This has got to hurt Google (and Microsoft). Leveraging Gmail is still Google's best hope of getting some kind of successful YASN off the ground. If FB can puncture that, then Google's fails in this area may start to look as tragic as Microsoft's floundering in mobile-land. (Basically Google would have to buy Twitter to stay in the game.)

2010-10-28T01:19:00.001-02:00

Ray Ozzie's missive to Microsoft.

2010-10-20T20:41:00.003-02:00

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

Apple did it.

2010-10-18T20:39:00.002-02:00

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?

2010-10-15T06:26:00.003-02:00

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$.

2010-10-11T20:06:00.001-02:00

On Quora : what should printer companies be getting into?

2010-10-04T11:07:00.001-02:00

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

2010-10-03T18:17:00.001-02:00

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?

2010-10-03T12:47:00.002-02:00

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

2010-09-21T20:50:00.003-02:00

Nice piece on the founder of Behance.

I really like Behance. Scott Belsky seems to have figured out the idea of a purposive YASN, and is doing some striking things with the community :

1) Selling his "Action Method" (a kind of Getting Things Done for creatives) around it

2) Organizing a conference.

3) Spinning off show-case sites.

4) Plugging into other professional networks like LinkedIn

etc.

2010-09-21T00:19:00.000-02:00

Alex Payne, ex-twitter developer, on #newtwitter.

2010-09-20T08:46:00.000-02:00

There is, apparently, going to be an app-store in Windows 8.

2010-09-15T15:28:00.001-02:00

Another cool demo from the Microsoft world, that would be great to see M$ actually turning into a product.

2010-09-02T21:33:00.003-02:00

This is exciting. Ponoko team up with SparkFun.

The on-line, on-demand making market starts to evolve.

2010-08-28T19:34:00.001-02:00

Paul Graham on what went wrong at Yahoo.

2010-08-28T10:59:00.003-02:00

Diaspora is bizarre, isn't it?

There are so many free-as-in-speech social networking software frameworks out there, what is one more? There is no way on earth that this is going to be even a blip on Facebook's radar.

Having said that, here's why this might be interesting.

If they get a combination of three things right :

a) the encryption / security / privacy
b) the user interface (so it's easy to install and administrate)
c) the hype, to get a critical mass of developers looking at it

If they do, then this could become an interesting basis of what you might call a "Virtual Private Intranet". A cheap way for a small distributed company to securely share profiles / discussions / news-tweets / files across the public internet.

Interestingly, although Facebook lets you create groups, it's not a great tool for say, people who like Dubstep,to set up a space where they can easily share their collections of mp3s with each other.

The trend is for social networks to get more private as they become more serious and more important. And there's plenty of room for growth in what you could call the "darknet" sector. (Criminals and cypherpunks have encrypted p2p sharing networks, but ordinary people and businesses still can't get them very easily.) So, if Diaspora
could make a cheap, easy-to-setup synthesis of Dropbox, LinkedIn and Twitter then they might have something interesting.

Of course, Ampify might get there first :-)

2010-08-26T09:59:00.001-02:00

Why Google has no Game.

2010-08-20T07:10:00.001-02:00

So it's Google and Adobe at the moment.

Makes sense.

2010-08-16T12:14:00.002-02:00

Good interview with head of Google.

Interesting :

Example: Google is obliged to share with Apple search revenue generated by iPhone users. On Android, Google gets to keep 100%. That difference alone, says Mr. Schmidt, is more than enough to foot the bill for Android's continued development.

Yuck! :-(

"I actually think most people don't want Google to answer their questions," he elaborates. "They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next."

Boooo!

Isn't the future of the Internet wireless these days? Isn't wireless the very basis of the new partnership between Google and Verizon, built on promoting Google's Android software? But Google has now broken ranks with its allies and dared to speak about the sheer impracticality of net neutrality on mobile networks where demand is likely to outstrip capacity for the foreseeable future.

2010-08-11T15:17:00.000-02:00

Google's Lotus Notes opportunity.

2010-08-10T22:54:00.001-02:00

Using cloud computing to launch cheap DDoS attacks. It's surprisingly affordable.

2010-08-05T22:04:00.002-02:00

David Weinberger :

So, because Google is growing a TV business, it now gets to decide that TV needs to shoulder aside all other traffic on the Net.

:-(

2010-08-04T19:33:00.002-02:00

Essential reading from Dave Winer on the cycle.

After IBM gave up being the platform vendor, that's basically what they did -- they became a consultancy and investment banker. Microsoft will eventually move there as their investors get fed up with quarter after quarter of flat growth. Google will get there as well, but first they have to get this tidal wave of fear out of their system ...

(I've commented over there.)

2010-08-04T18:46:00.003-02:00

Sweet! LinkedIn just offered me a widget to embed my Behance portfolio.

I like this for two reasons :

1) I'm about to start taking my Behance / artistic portfolio more seriously. (More on that soon, over on Composing.) So it's handy for me personally.

2) LinkedIn and Behance are a good complement. LinkedIn still fascinates as an example of a successful YASN which isn't competing directly with Facebook. And Behance is another example of a purposive social utility which seeks to tie its portfolio hosting to more specific products and services for creative people.

I wonder if this signifies any deeper connection between the two companies, or whether it's just that the OpenSocial Behance widget became available for OpenSocial containers such as LinkedIn.

2010-08-03T10:12:00.002-02:00

Dare Obasanjo on many social graphs. (Or what I used to call "typed links", but will probably start calling "tagged links")

I commented :

Surely it depends if Facebook succeed in getting people to tag (or classify) their social links.

There are ways to do this on FB, but it doesn't promote it much. But someone could write an app. which could somehow classify the relationship between two people based on things you tell it, even what your interests are etc. Then it could export that knowledge to widgets on the Engadget site.

Why not even make this a query option on the widget : "show me things that work-colleagues like", or "show me things that geek buddies like" or even "show me places that friends with higher than 85% similarity to me on the RockYou survey of "best things to do on my day off" like"

2010-07-29T18:09:00.002-02:00

Another package manager for Windows.

How hard would it be for a third-party to build an app-store on Windows that effectively wrapped it? That placed itself and its brand between the customer and Microsoft?

2010-07-29T08:34:00.002-02:00

Disney buying into social gaming.

2010-07-27T20:32:00.002-02:00

Pandas and Lobsters : Why Google Cannot Build Social Applications...

Compare what I wrote here.

2010-07-27T19:04:00.000-02:00

Facebook + Amazon : Social Shopping

2010-07-27T18:00:00.004-02:00

Interesting, ZDNet has an article about Debian / Ubuntu package management.

There are some interesting comments about why this wouldn't work in the Windows ecosystem. They're good arguments, but I think Apple just proved that a closely vetted app-store *does* work.

So, sure, an official M$ app-store wouldn't be the only place you could get Windows apps. Maybe Microsoft would only certify a handful of them given that there's an implied approval. Maybe M$ would have to be able to see the source-code and compile it themselves as part of their approval process. Nevertheless I think the app-store model would be incredibly valuable to Microsoft.

2010-07-26T23:41:00.006-02:00

Question : Why the hell don't Microsoft have an app-store?

I don't mean why they haven't built an entirely new distribution network for some projected new Windows mobile phone operating system. I mean, why didn't Windows 7 Desktop launch with a complete "give us your credit card number and we automatically install, manage, upgrade everything for you automatically" sort of thing?

I had managed applications from a central repository of packages on my Debian system in 2001. I have it seamlessly on Ubuntu (and have had for a good while). When Apple came along and showed the world that owning an app-store was a great business to be in, all the other mobile providers rushed in and started building their own.

What M$ could have done, is set a few engineers building something similar, for integration with Windows 7. I don't mean a website, I mean something more like win-get (or Debian's apt-get).

I'm installing software on my wife's new Windows 7 laptop today, and I'm amazed, now I come to think about it, that there's no "buy apps" option under the Windows Start button, right next to the list of already installed applications. Why is there no search-box built into Windows to let me find Microsoft-approved 3rd party applications to buy?

Think what a feature this could have been for Windows 7. How it would have driven corporates to upgrade (too expensive to pay our own IT people to install software, better to pay for the new Windows and let Microsoft sort it out.) How it would have energized the MicroISVs and lone developers to continue to invest their energy in Windows (rather than start dabbling on Android and iOS). How it would have given M$ a cut of all the software sold in the Windows eco-system.

The more I think about it, the more this seems like it would have been a good idea, and the more the absence of an app-store in Windows 7 seems like an extraordinary oversight. Was one planned but not finished in time? Was Microsoft too scared of potential legal implications to do with competition? Did they just slip up?

2010-07-26T16:32:00.001-02:00

Some great insider anecdotes on Google's 20% time.

2010-07-26T10:48:00.005-02:00

Gamasutra on Google's investment in Zynga, possible games platform.

WTF? Why are Google doing this? Smells very wrong (ie. defensive / me-too-ism) to me. And not at all core. (How is this organizing all the world's information?)

But let's see if they have an angle.

Update : I guess Farmville et. al. as a social gaming network that's folded into Google TV might make sense.

2010-07-23T08:15:00.002-02:00

Stowe Boyd quickly summarizes the Flipboard debate.

Someone *ought* to be getting ready to buy this.

2010-07-21T14:41:00.000-02:00

More on Apple getting into the Enterprise.

2010-07-09T21:26:00.001-02:00

This is important. iPads getting into the Enterprise.

iPads are an ideal vehicle for "corporate dashboards". Expect to see every senior(ish) manager want to control their own little empire from one.

It will be very problematic for Microsoft if the iPad becomes the aspirational machine for executives. Here's why : Excel. If M$ don't get Excel onto the iPad, soon, then the iPad will pull people away from Excel. (Rather than Excel keeping people on Windows.)

Suddenly, as well as those dynamic dashboards, executive summaries, quick to-do lists and project plans will all be migrating to whatever catches the imagination of iPad users.

And if M$ lose Excel, then the whole Office edifice starts to collapse.

2010-07-09T13:39:00.001-02:00

Very good Douglas Rushkoff talk.

2010-07-02T19:26:00.001-02:00

Cringely :

Remember when Ballmer talked through his hat a few years ago about how Microsoft was headed to a model of Windows based primarily on ad revenue? There’s no way in Hell that business model can be sustained for Windows or the PC (or for Macs, either). But make the platform cost $199 and be replaced every 24 months, build-in mobile subscription revenue, MobileMe subscription revenue, content revenue, app revenue and ad revenue, with none of those involving much effort or expense on Apple’s part at all and the future becomes clear.

2010-07-02T18:25:00.001-02:00

Worth a listen.

2010-06-25T23:12:00.004-02:00

I've long argued that Microsoft are a company built around a profound and fundamental belief : that it was possible to be a pure software company and allow someone else to produce commodity hardware.

Microsoft's DNA is to be a maker and seller of software qua product but not of hardware and not a provider of services.

This was an idea that served them well during the 80s and the explosion of the microcomputer, but served them badly in the 90s during the rise of the internet and its twin correlates : free software and software as a service.

Apple, by contrast, have always been a hardware / software company; which put them at a disadvantage in the 80s and 90s, but proved to be surprisingly fit when they adapted their "full stack" philosophy to become a hardware / software / service company in the last decade (starting with the ipod / itunes / itunes store ecology and moving on to the iphone / ipad etc.)

Anyway, I always thought that, due to free software, and software-as-a-service, the vision of a pure software company was on the wrong side of history.

Today I just had an intriguing thought. What if I was wrong? What if Microsoft's big vision wasn't out-of-date as I supposed? What if it were possible to thrive as a pure software company?

What if the only problem was Microsoft's bad execution? Or if, from their dominant position, Microsoft had come to believe that their role was to capture and dominate platforms, and to extract rent from them? That it was their birthright to own platforms?

That belief has proven to be spectacularly wrong. What if M$ did try to live according to their DNA? And did try to be a pure software company in 2010?

What would they look like?

Well, they would support all important platforms. They wouldn't worry about *owning* platforms, just selling software to take advantage of them. The important platforms today are the web, Apple's iOS, Google's Android, Linux, Facebook, Twitter etc. So if M$ were true to their DNA they'd start producing apps. for these platforms.

When did you last see M$ producing a popular iPhone or iPad app? Or a killer game on Facebook? Or a great Twitter client? Or making sure that Office and Sharepoint and IE and IIS ran on Linux?

If you do start seeing this, then you might start to have some hope for them. That maybe they have started to rediscover their true nature.

2010-06-24T08:31:00.002-02:00

New battle between Twitter and Facebook.

2010-05-21T12:50:00.000-02:00

Daniel Lyons :

The most telling thing to me was Google's tone toward Apple at the event. Instead of pretending to still be an Apple ally, Google today basically threw down the gantlet and admitted that it's engaged in total war with Apple.

And unlike other Apple rivals, like Adobe, Google execs weren't huffing and puffing and wringing their hands about Apple's bad behavior. No, instead, Google was mocking Apple. Making fun of it. Laughing at it.

2010-05-21T07:53:00.002-02:00

So ... GoogleTV. Clearly some interesting ideas.

(I still think they should have gone for the YouTube brand, though.)

2010-05-17T22:24:00.002-02:00

Phil Windley's Technometria is a really good. This podcast about Facebook is well worth the listen.

2010-05-13T11:37:00.001-02:00

Overview of Facebook vs. Zynga

2010-05-12T07:48:00.001-02:00

Jonathan Edwards :

App Ads are potentially a Google-scale cash flow, and Jobs wants it. He wants to sell ads and inject them into apps on the iPhone/iPad/iDesk, just like Google injects ads into web pages. He can’t do that unless all the apps are using his libraries. If he lets Flash apps in, then Adobe would be able to sell the ads instead. That is why section 3.3.9 of the new developer agreement says “the use of third party software in Your Application to collect and send Device Data to a third party for processing or analysis is expressly prohibited”. Like, for example, Ad networks.

2010-05-10T19:19:00.003-02:00

Festo is arguably the coolest company in the world at the moment.

2010-05-06T17:43:00.001-02:00

Apple vs. everybody

2010-04-30T22:53:00.011-02:00

After HP buys Palm, some fantasy matchmaking :

Adobe and Microsoft. If Apple keeps hammering at Flash then maybe Adobe has to cuddle up somewhere. What Adobe and Microsoft have in common is that they're good old-fashioned desktop application companies and don't really know how to be anything else. The combination, if not exciting, is at least comfortably compatible.

OTOH, here's what would be exciting : Adobe and Behance. (or Adobe and DesignOutpost etc.)

Apple are dominating markets for creative work through iTunes and the app-store. They're gunning for the rest of it with the iPad as book / magazine / news market as well.

Adobe is the only other brand with such a high profile among creative professionals. It should ask itself whether it's in the business of providing commodity video stream plugins, or whether it's really in the business of helping creative people to produce great work, to distribute that work to their audience, and to get paid.

Why is Adobe not running the most popular site for web and print designers to host their portfolios? Why can I not go to an Adobe site to find a freelancer? (And why are Adobe not a clip-art company? A photo-agency? A talent agency for the kind of people who work on Avatar?)

Adobe is never likely to compete directly with Facebook. But the world is going to get more niche and specialist networks. Adobe ought to grow a presence there; one that will, in turn, help it to understand the creative community it caters to.

Even better, what about Adobe and Ponoko? The future for creatives is to go beyond traditional print / video / web design and move into making : physical objects, product design, smart-materials, desktop manufacturing, etc.

Adobe started as the company that made a programming language to drive laser printers. Where is the programming language to drive RepRaps and the coming breed of 3D printers? Where's the design software for the art school student that wants to design printable furniture? Or jewellery?

2010-04-28T17:56:00.001-02:00

I recommend Winer and Rosen's 49th Rebooting the News podcast

2010-04-21T10:27:00.002-02:00

Apple vs. Adobe

So this is what the whole "originally compiled" thing was about. To prevent Apple's OS's getting wrapped and commoditized by Adobe Flash.

There may be real technical issues to be solved (eg. the "hover problem"). But the real question is the power-struggle.

2010-04-16T15:05:00.001-02:00

Wow!

SmartSheet puts The Mechanical Turk behind a Spreadsheet interface.

Clever.

2010-04-06T22:05:00.003-02:00

Cory Doctorow gives the definitive verdict on the iPad.

The way you improve your iPad isn't to figure out how it works and making it better. The way you improve the iPad is to buy iApps. Buying an iPad for your kids isn't a means of jump-starting the realization that the world is yours to take apart and reassemble; it's a way of telling your offspring that even changing the batteries is something you have to leave to the professionals.

2010-03-23T15:11:00.002-02:00

How bad will it get for M$?

2010-03-09T18:53:00.001-02:00

How Apple uses patents to kill an industry.

Bleah!

2010-02-09T23:29:00.004-02:00

Steve Crossan commented (on Facebook, of course) that he likes the new FB design.

I couldn't agree more. This is the first time I think Facebook have got it absolutely right. Of course, I guess this is the result of them buying in Friendfeed. But I'm intrigued ... was it the technology they needed from FF? Or the understanding of feed-based user-experience?

Whatever it was, if FF was a material contribution to the new FB, the synthesis was brilliantly executed (in less than six months!). And the result is a triumph. It's disturbingly compelling. Facebook have again shown themselves to be very clever at learning from others, at adapting to changing fashions, and taking their large base of existing users with them. (In this, they're reminiscent of Microsoft in their heyday.)

If I was running Twitter, at this point, I'd start to seriously worry. They aren't going to grow their network at Facebook's expense. Whereas the opposite is highly plausible. So what do they do now?

On first glance, Google's Buzz, reminds me of Microsoft in all the wrong ways. It looks like a "me too" clone of Twitter / Facefeed that exists for no other reason than that Google are frightened that there's a space they don't dominate. And now they want to muscle in on it.

A couple of things may change my mind :

1) Dion Hinchcliffe says Buzz has loftier goals. (Then again, doesn't Bing?)

2) At this point, the fact that it's hung off of Gmail is merely not dumb, as opposed to actively smart. Nevertheless, maybe this is the beginning of the wavifying of Gmail. In which case, that's an interesting evolution to watch. Gmail is a very nice upgrade of the standard email client. It could potentially turn into "the next Outlook" if Google do the right things with it. [1]

OTOH, lose the f***ing brand! "Buzz" is truly horrid; like a tired celebrity gossip page in one of those free newspapers you find on the tube. Except worse.[2]

But back to Dion's article. If the main claim of Buzz is that it brings better algorithms to the social web, then I think we need to be highly sceptical.

Firstly, the attraction of the social web, may not really be its data-processing efficacy. Yes, we all go round saying that it *is* useful. But it's also, necessarily phatic. Strip out that phatic, community forming flava, reduce it to factoid sharing, and your social network may become as charmless as dmoz.org. For many, FB will always be about little lost vampires turning up in your Mafia pizza emporium. And Twitter would never have found its way into my heart without Chinposin' Fridays.

Secondly, while Google are pretty smart at algorithms, returns diminish rapidly in hyperlocal social space. PageRank is not a genius algorithm : it's a clever heuristic based on some statistical characteristics of large datasets. By definition, neither the hyperlocal nor your meaningful social-network are anything like large enough for simple statistical algorithms to deduce much of any significance from. To add some kind of real value to that, we're talking "A.I. Complete"

As a comparison, think of it this way : Google is allegedly an algorithm company. Gmail has made a much better email experience. But Google have never been stupid enough to pretend that they can prioritize and schedule your email. Are they really going to add much value to a slurry of 140 character tweets?[3]

[1] With the right calendaring / feed-reading / tweeting / waving) Google could write a decent downloadable client (built on Chrome technology) as a direct replacement for Outlook, with their eyes shut. Why do this? Because it would signal that Gmail is ready to fight that battle.

[2] Buzz is not going to be Facefeed. It's not going to be a fun, populist social network. And Google already have too many brands; they don't need more. And they particularly don't need more failed attempts to be "groovy" that make them sound as desperate as Microsoft.

[3] Your tweet-stream is good because you've already chosen who's got a high-enough signal to noise ratio to pay attention to. And if you're wrong, you tolerate it 'cos it's your mistake. No way will a Google algorithm make that decision for you better than you could. And no way would you trust it to.

2010-01-27T22:02:00.001-02:00

Mashable : Google is now Apple’s greatest enemy

2009-12-05T21:59:00.003-02:00

Stowe Boyd is predicting Yahoo / Facebook merger.

2009-11-23T18:17:00.004-02:00

Android and ChromeOS will converge.

Like all ostensibly sensible ideas, this is probably a bad one. The whole point of Android and ChromeOS, right now, is that they're "playful experiments", tweaking Microsoft's tail, exploring new markets. There's no point Google having a big, boring engineering consolidation project to bring them together. That's just going to alienate internal developers ("but this is my baby!") and confuse third-party developers ("shall we wait for the convergence?").

Better to have a reasonably decent Android emulator running on the ChromeOS machine so that Chromebooks can run Android apps.

Update : read the comments on this blog-post. ("this blogpost" meaning this one, on Platform Wars). Lots of good discussion there.

2009-11-17T19:21:00.002-02:00

Tim O'Reilly :

It could be that everyone will figure out how to play nicely with each other, and we'll see a continuation of the interoperable web model we've enjoyed for the past two decades. But I'm betting that things are going to get ugly. We're heading into a war for control of the web. And in the end, it's more than that, it's a war against the web as an interoperable platform. Instead, we're facing the prospect of Facebook as the platform, Apple as the platform, Google as the platform, Amazon as the platform, where big companies slug it out until one is king of the hill.

Update : don't miss this analysis of Google's "less than free" model and mapping data too.

2009-11-03T07:32:00.003-02:00

Good overview of smart-phone market in light of latest Droid phone.

Pundits seem to agree : motorola + android == win. Bad news for RIM, Palm and Nokia.

2009-09-27T20:08:00.000-02:00

Simon Wardley :

Following such a strategy, then it could be Game, Set and Match to MSFT for the next twenty years and the open source movement will find itself crushed by this juggernaut.

2009-09-24T11:12:00.002-02:00

Blindingly obvious truth that needs to be spelled out :

Steve Jobs is very clever. If Apple had implemented Flash on the iPhone, it would have quickly become the cross-platform standard, and Adobe would have owned the whole mobile-app. market.

Possibly we'd have been talking about an Adobe App. Store.

2009-09-24T06:25:00.002-02:00

Microsoft's nihilist "scorched-minds" advertising campaign continues.

Remember, the whole reason for these adverts is to make you believe that the universe is an absurd place where Manichean structures (such as Apple==cool/PC==uncool) don't obtain.

2009-09-17T11:08:00.002-02:00

Your Company? There's an app. for that.

2009-09-12T06:43:00.001-02:00

I like the comments on Cringely's outline of Google's work environment.

Bonepart rides again

2009-09-08T15:36:00.005-02:00

In 2006 (with links circa 2009) :

What I'd suggest is that Winer understands, maybe better than anyone, how these things work as an "ecosystem". ...

Look carefully. Whatever Winer is promoting, he always has a tool and a format and some kind of hosting or central server and he's "dog-fooding" it and talking it up on his blog and he's finding new, quick-win, applications to extend the platform and he's making new connections into a user community and he's on the offensive, smacking down any potential rivals or threats to his authority ...

2009-09-01T07:28:00.003-02:00

Ebay are selling Skype.

Which I guess puts the end of my whole "skypal" thing. I'm sort of surprised that nothing came of it. OTOH, I'm not that surprised given that Ebay doesn't seem to be much of a "visionary" company at all. Can't remember when they actually did anything interesting given their size / potential influence.

2009-08-28T16:37:00.003-02:00

Dave Winer is enthused by the new iPhone Facebook.

You can see why.

2009-08-15T07:23:00.001-02:00

Facebook buys FriendFeed