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The Internet Has Trained Me to Hate Advertising 
smoothspan via SmoothSpan Blog on Fri, 03 Oct. 2008
I’ve noticed increasingly that on radio and TV I change the channel if there is too much advertising. In fact, sometimes I find myself getting quite agitated, usually on TV, if I’m trying to get through a program and it seems like there is more advertising than programming. Likewise, when I click through a search result to some annoying full page ad with a microscopic “skip a
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Cloud Competition, Lock-In, and Why Richard Stallman is All Wrong
smoothspan via SmoothSpan Blog on Thu, 02 Oct. 2008
As often happens, this blog post is born of threads coming together from many directions at once. It is pure serendipity, because no one thread is something I’d write about, and perhaps the threads exist only in my own world model, but nevertheless, I must write.
There is a discussion among the Enterprise Irregulars about Cloud Computing and Amazon as I shared
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Another Big Step for Amazon: Windows
smoothspan via SmoothSpan Blog on Wed, 01 Oct. 2008
The Amazon Elastic Computer Cloud is no longer just about Linux–you can run Windows too.
This is classic strategy because they’re making it tremendously easier for customers to pick one cloud computing and not have to choose. As
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Why Apple Might As Well Be A Bank: We’re All On The Same Boat Together
smoothspan via SmoothSpan Blog on Mon, 29 Sep. 2008
Tough day in the markets today. One of my favorites, Apple, is way off, along with almost everything else. Why? Because everything is so interconnected that when a potential disaster (evolving rapidly to being a real disaster) is big enough, it gets everyone’s attention. Everyone starts figuring out what it might mean so they can get ahead of everyone else. Before you know
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It’s Hard Being a Feature and Not a Product in Tough Times
smoothspan via SmoothSpan Blog on Wed, 24 Sep. 2008
Automatic (WordPress) are acquiring IntenseDebate, a Disqus competitor. These products are add-ons to blogging tools. They enable richer commenting facilities for the blogs. Interestingly, these tools reach across blogging platforms and give comments a life of their
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Living and Dying on Golden Crumbs
smoothspan via SmoothSpan Blog on Tue, 16 Sep. 2008
Many are watching with horror as venerable financial institutions in our country collapse one by one due to the demise of the sub-prime lending industry. But this is nothing new, though perhaps bigger more public names are being dragged down. The financial world regularly flirts with this kind of disaster because they’re
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Merchandising on the Web: True Genius
smoothspan via SmoothSpan Blog on Thu, 11 Sep. 2008
I read with interest Louis Gray’s post about iTunes 8’s new “Genius” feature. It’s designed to enable to help you find new music similar to songs you already like based on what other people liked. It’s much the same as Pandora, which a
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How Hard Could Syncing Calendars and Contacts Be?
smoothspan via SmoothSpan Blog on Wed, 10 Sep. 2008
Pretty hard, I guess.
Recently I wanted to sync up my calendar and contact info between my home and work instances of Outlook. In fact, I was slightly more ambitious. I thought this could be a good stepping stone towards moving off Outlook altogether if I could get everything sync’d to appropriate Internet cloud applications. Little did I know!
I started with Goog
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Sun Tries to Stay Ahead of Commoditization With Storage
smoothspan via SmoothSpan Blog on Mon, 08 Sep. 2008
I liked Jonathan Schwartz’s blog entry Fanning the Winds of Change in Storage. The seminal passage is here:
Granted, you can see an increasing focus on storage at Sun - the acquisition of MySQL is as much a storage acquisition, as an enhancement to Sun’s developer offerings. Discussions of flash memory,
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Which Came First: The SaaS Chicken Or The On-Premises Egg?
smoothspan via SmoothSpan Blog on Mon, 01 Sep. 2008
There’s quite a lively discussion among the various Enterprise Irregular blogs about
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Newegg Stops Collecting NY Sales Tax
smoothspan via SmoothSpan Blog on Sun, 24 Aug. 2008
In an effort to increase tax revenues, NY has been trying to tax purchases by NY state residents from online merchants outside NY. It’s been a controversial measure and Amazon has sued over it arguing that the law is unconstitutional. Now online computer and gadget s
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Visualize Success. Better: Get Your Customers to Visualize Success
smoothspan via SmoothSpan Blog on Mon, 28 Jul. 2008
Guy Kawasaki (world’s most famous tech evangelist) posts this morning about some fascinating studies involving perception. Seems that softball players and golfers who imagine softballs and golf holes to be larger than they really are have better days than those who don’t. Sounds like they visualized their su
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Fred: Comments Aren’t As Important as Blog Posts on Techmeme
smoothspan via SmoothSpan Blog on Mon, 28 Jul. 2008
VC Fred Wilson frets that Techmeme is a conversation that’s one sided because it doesn’t treat comments as highly as blog posts. He is unhappy that Scoble’s post decrying Silicon Valley VC disease got onto to Techmeme but
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The Advertising-Based Web 2.0 World is Losing Its Anti-Gravity Ray Too
smoothspan via SmoothSpan Blog on Wed, 23 Jul. 2008
I wrote recently that Google is losing its Anti-Gravity Ray. By this I don’t mean that Google is by any means over, merely that it will increasingly have to obey the ordinary laws of physics and deal with delivering real financial results that include a close focus on profitability and not j
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Posting for Traffic Loic?
smoothspan via SmoothSpan Blog on Tue, 22 Jul. 2008
I noticed a sudden flurry of posts from Loic Le Meur of Seesmic this morning in Google and wondered what was up with that. I didn’t actually check on it,
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Do You Read the SaaS Curmudgeons? Do You Enjoy SaaS Schadenfreude?
smoothspan via SmoothSpan Blog on Mon, 21 Jul. 2008
Do you read the curmudgeons? I’m not exactly sure what else to call them, but these are the posts that tell you the new new thing is actually not very good at all. There is always a willing audience for these sorts of things that are the large audience feeling threatened by the new new thing who would like it to just
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Google Anti-Gravity Ray is Fading
smoothspan via SmoothSpan Blog on Fri, 18 Jul. 2008
When a company has a monopoly on an extremely valuable franchise that is growing rocket fast, all sorts of unreasonable things happen. That company levitates. Almost no amount of spending can bring it down to Earth. Until, that is, the growth begins to slow. At that point the anti-gravity ray starts to fade. What usually happens first is a profitability crisis. Often the co
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Big Screen Kindle for College Kids is Brilliant
smoothspan via SmoothSpan Blog on Fri, 18 Jul. 2008
Remember how much college textbooks costs? Maybe you’ve bought some recently. It’s horrendous! And the reason is not that many are printed. These tomes are not best sellers in most cases. They’re thick, they have illustrations, and they are expensive to print. Double expensive because the printing runs are not for very many copies.
Enter
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Salesforces Switches to Dell/Linus. What’s Next, MySQL Over Oracle?
smoothspan via SmoothSpan Blog on Tue, 15 Jul. 2008
Salesforce will be unplugging the last of their Sun Solaris servers from their SaaS operations this week, according to TechCrunchIT. That’s quite a big change for Salesforce, and a bit of a PR blow for Sun. It reflects some important operational realities that the rest of the industry
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Is Less Always More? (Simplify More, It’s Better)
smoothspan via SmoothSpan Blog on Mon, 07 Jul. 2008
The blogosphere is such an interesting place. Read one article and it casts you out into several others, each of which in turn may lead you to new treasures. Fred Wilson’s “Thinking About Groups” took me on such a journey. He is writing about whether the world needs any new products for the groups sector (e
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