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Microsoft's Secret Shame

Oh, thanks, George, write about the successful company and leave the topic of these guys to me, why don't you:

Funny Microsoft disaster photo-montage from RoughlyDrafted.com.

In the article The Secret Failures of Microsoft, Daniel Eran writes that the Beast of Redmond's fortunes are largely based not on their technical merit, but rather PC vendor laziness and the “OEM tax” that comes from including Windows with new PCs:

All of these partners hooked up with Microsoft simply because they had
no idea of what to do on their own. Few even experimented with their
own independent technology plans; they simply picked Microsoft because
the company seemed like a safe bet at delivering technology. They
obviously didn’t do their homework.

The article's main thrust is that when you consider areas beyond the desktop, where a more level playing field and actual competition exists, Microsoft fails more often than it succeeds. Eran walks through a short list of Microsoft's failures in consumer electronics — phones and handhelds, tablets and PDAs, various incarnations of WebTV and XBox (24 million units moved, but at a loss) — citing keyboards and mice as the only area where they've experienced commercial and critical success. All these serve as data points from which he makes the (rather easy) extrapolation that the Zune will be the next flop in the series.

While beyond the scope of Eran's article, one could easily apply the same thinking to their application development tools, another area where they face real competition. As with consumer electronics, they do well with input devices (Visual Studio, a tool with which even many die-hard open-source coders look upon with envy) and with SQL Server, a field where few competitors exist. When you consider the move away from their desktop stronghold and towards “Web 2.0”, the rest of the Redmond toolset offerings don't offer anything special to developers. Their efforts seem to be an attempt to build a slightly better Java — a strange aspiration, considering how some of Java's most vocal proponents and biggest contributors are migrating towards Ruby, functional programming and agile frameworks like Rails.

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Writely is Dead, Long Live Google Docs & Spreadsheets

Google today retired the Writely name and look and feel, replacing it with the cumbersome "Google Docs & Spreadsheets."

Writely users won't notice much in the way of new functionality; Google's main focus has been combining users' lists of their documents and spreadsheets into one view and keying them off their Google account (which also means a single method for sharing documents and spreadsheets with collaborators). The top left corner of your Google pages is starting to get crowded with all the services Google offers: Google, Gmail, Calendar, Photos, Docs & Spreadsheets…

Google bought Writely in March of this year, so this integration took eight months. Pretty speedy. Yahoo!, by comparison, bought Oddpost in July 2004 but it took them until September 2006—over two years—to roll the new Ajax-ified Yahoo! Mail out to the general public. Similarly, other Yahoo! acquisitions like Flickr and del.icio.us still live in splendid isolation from Yahoo!'s other services.

An unfair comparison? Perhaps. Nevertheless, these kinds of comparisons are a big reason why people are saying Yahoo! is quickly losing its edge to Google.

Link.

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One Laptop Per (Libyan) Child

New USA BFFL, Libya, is joining Brazil, Argentina, Nigeria, and Thailand in the One Laptop Per Child program.

The government of Libya reached an agreement on Tuesday with One Laptop Per Child, a nonprofit United States group developing an inexpensive, educational laptop computer, with the goal of supplying machines to all 1.2 million Libyan schoolchildren by June 2008.

Discussions between the One Laptop project and the Libyan government began as part of work being done by the Monitor Group, an international consulting firm co-founded by the economist Michael E. Porter. It is now helping the Libyans develop a national economic plan.

A million Libyan kids will soon be disappointed to find out they can't play Half-Life 2: Episode One.

Link.

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WidSets

WidSets: Microcontent for your mobile phone, delivered via widget-type…uh…widgets. The project comes out of Nokia, but is compatible with any Java MIDP 2.0 phone. Widgets—tiny targeted portals for content—seem ideal for mobile form factors. [via O'Reilly Radar]

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Google's $1.6BB Ticket to the Future

“If you believe it’s the future of television, it’s clearly worth $1.6 billion,” Steven A. Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, said of YouTube. “If you believe something else, you could write down maybe it’s not worth much at all.”

So says Uncle Fester, and he's right.

I suppose everyone's got a take on Google's purchase of YouTube, so here's mine: $1.6 billion is an insane amount of money for Google to spend on YouTube, the stand-alone business model, but it's a pretty cheap way to buy yourself into the future of entertainment.

Google's core business is putting an audience in touch with the information they want, and slathering the whole experience with ads that are somehow tuned to the individual reader's interests. They're quickly dominating that business with regards to text, but the web sure isn't limited to alphanumeric characters. Since YouTube is beginning to dominate the way people search for, discover, watch, and share video on the internet, it makes sense for Google to bring that network into the fold. As I've said before, the new network looks more like Google than it does ABC, CBS, or NBC.

And while the existing dominant players in video entertainment (the broadcast and cable networks, and their production partners) slowly adopt digital distribution strategies, I suspect smaller independent producers will start to see the large reach, digital word-of-mouth, searchability, and potential for revenue presented by a Google/YouTube-mediated network as an increasingly interesting option.

Link.

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SiteKreator

SiteKreator: A nifty tool deserving of a spot at DEMO, but with one (to me) flaw: the fact that SiteKreator hosts your site (if you want, you can point your DNS records at their IP addresses). I'd like to see something like SK help me design and manage sites on my own hosts.

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WidgetWatch: MySpace Whacks Webcam Widget?

In another bamboozling move, MySpace has now blocked Stickam webcam codes. At the end of last week, the team reported that newly-created Stickam widgets wouldn’t work on MySpace, and yesterday I was forwarded an email (thanks James) from Stickam that claimed the widgets had been “blocked” by MySpace. I assumed that they were being affected by some kind of glitch that prevents Flash embeds working properly – something along the lines of the MySpace update that broke many Flash widgets (it was supposedly a reaction to the MySpace hack). As it turns out, there’s something more sinister afoot: today I logged in to MySpace and realized that all links to Stickam are being blocked. If you try to link to Stickam.com anywhere on your profile – either inserting a widget or using a plain old link, it will be removed. Apparently it’s been this way for a few days. Since only links to Stickam.com are affected, it seems that MySpace is intentionally blocking the service.

Never underestimate the potential for greed to cloud the vision: MySpace could indeed be wondering why they should let some third party build a business on the back of their popularity. Of course, the response would be that MySpace's popularity is, at least in part, due to how these widgets add to the MySpace user's experience, allowing them to truly customize their MySpace pages.

On the other hand, never underestimate the potential for fear to cloud the vision, either: MySpace may not actually care about Stickam's widgets from a competitive perspective—they may very well want to play an open game here. They may, however, care very much about what images may be broadcast through these widgets; imagine the headlines when a parent finds out their teenage kid has been flashing their friends. Whose name do you think the media will sieze on: Stickam or MySpace?

Link.

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