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?

Behance becomes a market.

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?

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.)

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.