Category: Web/Tech

I found it curious yesterday in the Sunday newspaper supplements that all of the front page Xbox ads from the big box and other major retailers featuring the Xbox branding — without any mention of Microsoft. Similarly, check out the Xbox web site.

Obviously, this is a very conscious decision — Microsoft spends a fortune on PR, strategy, etc. — but also a curious one. Frankly, I never understood the Xbox branding to begin with — other than the fact that Nintendo and PlayStation were already taken! 😉

I’m a Mac user, having given up on Windows almost exactly two years ago and never looked back. Oh, how I wish that were completely true.

The dirty little secret is that up until a few weeks ago, I need to continue to run Windows (under Virtual PC on my Mac) mostly to use a piece of collaboration software – called Groove – that we had come to depend upon. Oh, how I wish that were completely true.

The other dirty little secret is that I’ve also needed to run Windows to be able to use Intuit’s Quickbooks Online – which, most unfortunately, was written to require Windows and Internet Explorer as a result of its use of an unfortunate technology, ActiveX. One of these days Intuit might get with the program and shed such an unfortunate technical dependency, what with AJAX and all.

Anyway, Microsoft bought Groove a while back, picking up now CTO Ray Ozzie in the process. For a number of reasons, we concluded earlier this year that it was time to abandon Groove, a thick client in every meaning of that word and way too thick for us. We moved to it in a terribly weak moment a couple of years back. Basically, all we need is a nifty cross-platform file sharing mechanism and we thought we’d found that in FolderShare.

So what happened today? Microsoft bought FolderShare, saying how it was going to become a part of Windows Live. Jeez, just what we’ve been waiting for.

Anybody out there interested in starting another cross-platform file sharing company? I suspect we’ll be looking for a new home relatively soon. Or, maybe I can just sign up for Flickr Pro and just make my files look like JPEG’s instead? Or, wait for GoogleBase?

Reading Dave Winer’s rant this morning got me off my duff and posting again. Things have felt really hectic on the day job front and, as a result, essentially all of my posting activity has been over on my day job blog Payments News, not here, for the last three weeks. Indeed, I was even too tired to make it to Mike Arrington’s latest Friday night bash where Dave provided some words of encouragement to the assembled clan.

To me, Dave’s post is all about inclusion and about not working in walled gardens. Indeed, it’s about not even thinking of erecting walls around the gardens we build. Yet, we have walled gardens all around us. Sometimes the walls come down (e.g., the Carterfone decision); mostly new walls go up (e.g., eBay’s just announced Safe Payments Policy that appears designed to keep any new PayPal-like entrant outside the eBay garden or when the New York Times moved some of its choice content behind a new Select wall). VCs have historically looked for big walled gardens — called barriers to entry — although even that seems to be changing.

Seems like walls tend to go up a lot more often (and easily) than walls come down. Then, once you’ve built a wall, you seem to invest a lot of energy in tending to the wall itself perhaps even to the detriment of the garden blooming inside. Indeed, you almost never will tear that wall down of your own volition — even if the garden inside is dying or has already died. It’s only when you’re forced to tear the wall down that it actually falls.

One of the great things about the web to date has been a relative lack of wall building, even by those who could easily have done so. For example, Netscape (with some excellent friends) developed SSL – the key protocol enabling secure communications on the Internet — and gave it away to the community. Dave himself did the same with RSS, enabling all manner of new forms of information distribution to emerge and new millions to be made by others.

This could be changing — or maybe not. Maybe it’s just the usual ebb and flow of business?

There was a Wall St. Journal story last week about how the wireless carriers and telcos were working on plans to restrict the Internet network pipes they sell to customers from being able to support voice over IP telephony traffic — because of the threat it represents to their core business. We’ve got a big set of walls surrounding the cellular carriers — where a Carterfone 2.0 decision is sorely needed. And, the already mentioned the eBay example of limiting payment choices and the New York Times locking up content. Indeed, theres some irony in these examples: limitations on Internet telephony would impact the success of eBay’s recent acquisition of Skype!

Most of us really enjoy the gardening, not the wall building or the wall tearing down, and Dave’s clearly a gardener, at least much of the time. Some great fortunes have been made by those wall builders who knew just where and when to erect their walls. Some great reputations have been earned by gardeners who chose not to erect new walls but who propagated their plants and encouraged others to stand on their shoulders. Do you toil for money or for love?

Which are you? Hoe in hand, or brick? New mantra: “Do no evil, build no walls”?

Seems to me that Tim O’Reilly’s look at what he (and others) are calling Web 2.0 overlooks perhaps the most important contribution that Netscape (and others) made during the 1.0 era:

SSL.Initially developed by Netscape (beginning just eleven years ago) and contributed to the Internet standards process and the public domain, SSL enabled users to trust the security of their browser sessions. Without SSL (or, perhaps even worse, with an SSL developed and held captive by an intellectual property hungry company), the web’s first ten years of evolution would have been very different indeed.

So, what’s the right way to complete the metaphor: SSL is to Web 1.0 as ??? is to Web 2.0? Is that missing link identity-related?

Let’s hope that Flock works tightly with TiddlyWiki, avoiding the need to separately save changes and just enabling local user TiddlyWiki’s with built-in persistent storage.

No FOO invitation for me either, not that I expected one!

Maybe we should be planning a FOG event for FOGheads instead: Friends of Glenbrook?

Scott