-
I am one of those anal retentive scholarly types.
-
Incredible. This bloke has self-published tens of thousands of books on amazon using a computer to write the books.
-
What he said. A proper nutjob who thinks there is a conspiracy amongst scientists to hide the awful truth that THE EARTH ISG GROWING.
-
Whoops - eeepc rooted out of the box. This is why the further downstream you go from Debian, the scarier it gets.
Monthly Archive for February, 2008
-
amen.
-
comprehensive breakdown of energy stats
-
Amazingly useful list of XSS vectors. Test your apps against these.
-
boring story, ace headline.
-
Justification for my management, er, technique.
-
A rational scale of the harm done by drugs. No real surprises in the order of them either.
-
A list of geolgical tipping points coming up that are triggered by human activity. One is next year, and there’s another within the next 10 :/
-
Some tips on setting up the eee.
-
Great advice on giving presentations
-
This is the delicious extension you actually want to install, not the other one which is incomprehensible and takes over your browser.
-
Lukashenko, the nutjob dictator of Belarus, tells us what he thinks of the US primaries.
-
Feynmann is one of the greatest men in history. Shame most of these lectures are in Real format :/
-
A gallery of many of the photorealistic biro drawings of Juan Francisco Casas. Some may be NSFW if you work for an American firm.
-
Stacks of great advice for engineering an online search experience.
-
From webpagesthatsuck.
-
PDF generator from XML and HTML markup.
-
Reduce the number of image requests, and improve performance, but packing all of your images together into a single sprite.
-
Why would people want to pay for something they can get for free? The author lists eight ‘generative’ properties that a copy can have that makes it better than potential free ones.
-
Highly amusing ‘peer-reviewed’ creationism research journal.
-
All blue-eyed humans share a single common ancestor born 6000 to 10,000 years ago.
-
Very addictive little flash game
I see so many great things go past in my blogroll, and it’s just too much effort to blog every one of them. So starting now I’m going to try and collect the links into regular tabdumps.
Since this is the first one, I’ll go through my google reader starred items too and pick out ones that still look tasty, you lucky readers you.
Microsoft are going to buy Yahoo!. No way this isn’t going to happen now. Shareholders will love it and the only place where the combined company might trouble competition authorities is in webmail - which they don’t care about.
Microsoft have just bought one great big heap of trouble. Tens of thousands of FreeBSD boxes running PHP. They found digesting Hotmail famously hard. Yahoo is going to be way harder.
Microsoft’s motivation here has to be the growing, and obvious, realisation that they are incapable of competing with Google in their current form. Google are full of smart new ideas and they manage to pull enough of them off to be a truly innovative company.
Microsoft, OTOH, are culturally incapable of innovating. They haven’t ever invented anything new, and I don’t see that changing.
(A long digression. Clearly any sort of software development involves innovation somewhere. So when Microsoft copied VisiCalc to make Excel, yes there was some innovation. Same when they copied the PARC UI to make Windows.
In a January 2001 article, The business of software: the laws of software process, there’s a discussion of process in software, and where it works, and where it doesn’t.
The interesting bit of the article uses levels of ignorance to evaluate where process works - the more ignorant you are about a subject, the less process is applicable to it.
If you sort of take the reciprocal of this idea you get a structure for levels of innovation. The greatest innovation happens where you know nothing, where you have to invent the problem space itself, or perhaps even the basic terms of reference.
Google really grok this. Nobody out there was saying ‘hey, what I really need in my life is a zoomable, rotatable model of the Earth!’. Even less was someone suggesting they’d pay for it. Yet Google Earth is probably one of their most valuable properties in the long term (honest).
Now back to your regularly scheduled transmission).
Microsoft are good at taking requirements they understand from people in business they understand, and delivering pretty good applications. And then screwing them for every last penny they possibly can. They’re just a great big boring old software shop.
From Powerpoint to the DRM hydra that is Vista, they’ve got a clear picture in their head of the Dude in a Suit that they’re aiming at. Bully for them. However Microsoft Powerpoint does not the Interweb win.
From a Microsoft analysis (remember, the only people they really care about are Dudes in Suits - the rest of us are NPCs) what they need to beat Google is scale. If only they get enough eyeballs, some of them will be Dude in a Suit Eyeballs who might buy Microsoft Visio 2008 Dude in a Suit Edition. Yahoo gives them eyeballs, some of which indeed might be tricked into buying a Microsoft product, perhaps whilst drunk or distracted or operating heavy machinery or something.
They certainly don’t give two hoots about some of the really spiffing technology Yahoo have. It would be insane to try and move all of Yahoo onto a Windows platform, but I think that’s just what they’ll do. It’s like the biggest case of cognitive dissonance ever. “We bought Yahoo because they were better than us and we really needed them… but our software is better! hell yeah!”
Where they’ve got a parallel product they’ll port the data and the users to their own product (i.e. Hotmail) and shut down the Yahoo offering (Yahoo! Mail) - even when the Yahoo offering (Yahoo! Mail) is the best available anywhere.
Like John Gruber says, the weird boutique items (Flickr) will be sold off or spun off. Not enough Dudes in Suits use Flickr, and the opportunity for selling them Office upgrades is limited. They are mostly filthy mac users anyway.
I have to think this is going to be a slow train crash, punctuated by the screams of loyal Yahoo users as they flee. If I were a Yahoo shareholder I’d take the cash and put it straight into Google.
The best quote I’ve seen (via Daring Fireball) is from Andy Baio: It’s like tying the Titanic to the iceberg. It’d keep you from sinking just long enough to freeze to death.
Recent Comments