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.

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.

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

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

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

This is exciting. Ponoko team up with SparkFun.

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

Paul Graham on what went wrong at Yahoo.

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 :-)

Why Google has no Game.

So it's Google and Adobe at the moment.

Makes sense.

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.

Google's Lotus Notes opportunity.

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