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

Update : Bill Seitz is brainstorming too.

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?

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 ...

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.

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

Can it be this simple?

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

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)

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?

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?

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.

GigaOm : Has Google given-up on social?

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.