Quite a quote from Kim Cameron of Microsoft on the Gillmor Gang’s latest conversation:
Everybody should just stop trying to exploit identity.
Maybe out of this conversation about the sorry state of digital identity will come a recalibration and a willingness to move forward together?
Interesting to read the conclusion of Mitch Ratcliffe’s post on HP on Red Herring’s The Now blog.
Ironically, the key is how many products the labs can commercialize through licensing deals with Chinese manufacturers.
The Guardian’s published their list of the 100 most useful websites – based on reader suggestions.
Kim Cameron has posted Stefan Brands’ identity and privacy reading list. Stefan is one of the real innovators in this whole domain.
Five years ago this month, New York Times writer Saul Hansell asked that question.
Wall Street has put up the money to realize his dream for the most “amazing” and “creative” store that sells everything. Now the warehouses have been built and the ribbon has been bought. There’s only this Christmas, and maybe a few more, to find out just how big Amazon.com can be.
As an aside, for tomorrow’s Sunday New York Times, Hansell updates the Gates vs. Jobs story of Microsoft vs. Apple in online music.
Although the online archive for my weblog begins in November 2001, an earlier edition of my original personal weblog (which is now offline) began on June 20, 1999. So, in one form or another, I’ve been blogging now for almost five and half years.
I found the story link above in an offline copy of that first weblog that I had saved. By the way, back in those pre-historic blog days, I maintained my personal site (and weblog) with Microsoft FrontPage. Yuck!
When Radio Userland was introduced about three years ago (late 2001), I migrated to Radio. I believe this November 2001 post was my first using Radio Userland. Radio was, of course, a mind blower. Not just a web posting tool, Radio was a desktop news aggregator as well — and available cross-platform to boot!
Just about a year ago I migrated my blog from Radio to TypePad. Radio, while being very powerful, was a bit like an Erector set — and I opted for TypePad’s more user friendly approach. I believe this is the first post I made here using TypePad.
For my news aggregation needs, I’m now totally addicted to NetNewsWire and I’m posting this blog update using the ultracool MarsEdit.
Rebecca Lieb writes about the online word-of-mouth marketing behind Firefox.
Everyone you speak with about SFX, the campaign and the Web site, eventually draws a comparison with Howard Dean’s grassroots success on the Internet. Turns out that analogy is accurate for a number of reasons. For starters, Hofmann told me spreadfirefox.com actually uses code from Dean’s Web site (developed by Civic Space software). A whole bunch of site features will look awfully familiar to anyone who surfed their way through the presidential primaries.
(Via Steve Rubel’s Micro Persuasion.)
More about Firefox in this USA Today story.
Remember CompuServe? That pay-by-the-hour online service that was born in the 80’s, matured in the 90’s, and was effectively dead well before the turn of the millennium.
One of the primary reasons CompuServe died was AOL — who used flat rate monthly pricing to kill the economics of CompuServe. Mortally wounded, AOL eventually acquired what was left of CompuServe, turning it into AOL’s “value brand”.
Now, Yahoo! (and others) are doing to AOL what it did to CompuServe. As ad-supported and by-the-transaction revenue streams kick in, as broadband penetration now exceeds dial-up, AOL’s monthly subscription model is under serious attack. AOL lost something like 2 million subscribers in the last quarterly report.
From today’s Wall St. Journal:
America Online, in its latest effort to adapt its operations for the high-speed Internet world, unveiled a plan to reorganize its corporate structure. The shake-up reflects AOL’s plan to shift from a business heavily dependent on revenue from paying subscribers to a more advertising-dependent model in which a growing number of consumers will use AOL services free.
The separation of access from content is essentially complete.
I found a curious link this morning on GE’s home page to Imagination3 (as in cubed). It’s an online, multi-user shared sketchpad application. Wonder what GE’s up to with this?
This is a post with my notes from BloggerCon III being held today.
Ed Sims writes in Delivering software as a service:
What I have learned and what Adam points out is that it comes down to the customer experience, making a product easier to use for a customer and evolving it as quickly as possible to meet the customer’s needs.
Software delivered as a service enables that and packaged software does not. In the time it takes Microsoft to deliver an application (went from 1 year to 5 years), a company delivering software as a service can deliver 60 iterations of its product.
Ed goes on to list a number of important advantages of the ASP business model in his full post. Seems to me there are at least two key issues, however, with the ASP approach.
First, the question of revenue ramp. No question that building sustaining recurring revenue streams results in highly valued businesses at the end. But it requires patient investors who are comfortable with the slope of the revenue curve vs. more traditional product companies.
Second, the target environment has to presume broadband to deliver a decent consumer experiencce. That’s increasingly less of an issue — but has to be thought out.
It’s also important to note that some companies can do both. Intuit’s Quickbooks on the Web comes to mind as a great example of taking packaged software and delivering it in a very high quality way as an ASP. (By the way, the team at Intuit is doing a great job with their Official Quickbooks Online Weblog!) What Sixapart is doing with Movable Type and TypePad is another.
(Via BeyondVC.)
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