Posted by Ian Holsman
Wed, 16 Apr 2008 19:39:00 GMT
From "Don’t be Evil" to "We don’t need to be Evil".
because its true.
This yahoo/msft/aol/newscorp thing is just noise to them.
James pointed me to Latrz, which to me is a delicious clone. I’m guessing it was written in a day. My recent experience and It highilghts a couple of things to me
- Having the user api just makes sense for google in so many ways. I wish they would have chosen OpenID for openness, but If I was in thier seats I wouldn’t have.
- the next great idea will be written with appengine (or on a clone). it’s just too easy not to. I was on a conference call yesterday, and while listening I nearly coded up a django picture gallery and voting tool. now I would have been done if I actually remember WTF I was doing (I haven’t coded a django app in about a year and a half now).
- it is easier to just upload it on appengine than go through operations, and even copy it to a hosted machine I run.
- I don’t see the lock in anymore. If google announced this about a month ago, I would have a SoC project proposed to write a GFS-SQL parser for Hbase and Hypertable. (Anyone see the irony/joy of getting google to pay for it’s competition?) and it would have been done.
Posted in Business Related | Tags appengine, django, google | 3 comments
Posted by Ian Holsman
Tue, 08 Apr 2008 07:13:00 GMT
Google has just announced their alternative to Amazon’s s3 called ‘App Engine’.
I think that if this is successful it will provide a shift in some of the basic web development economics and practices, even more than Amazon’s s3 has.
why?
- Small hosting providers (ones that offer a shell account for $12/month) will be marginalized. why pay for something when you get it for free?
- M&A. It will create a 3rd platform to develop on. you currently have LAMP and Windows. The google app engine provides a 3rd. The major difference is you can’t buy it. If we acquire a company who runs on this platform we have 2 choices. continue paying google for the infrastructure, or redevelop it onto LAMP. of course this suits google as their integration costs are lessened. Google might provide a ‘open source’ version of their infrastructure.. but I doubt it.
- Language choice. currently it only runs one language, python. They say they might support others in the future, but if not there will be a lot of people learning python (to the detriment of PHP, perl, and ruby), as well as new tools and utilities written in it. It’s going to give python a huge boost in usage
- Database choice. Google’s App Engine will be using ‘bigtable’ which is not a RDBMS, and uses a hacked up version of SQL. This impacts companies like mysql. you don’t need to worry about replication here Krow ;-)
- Applications are integrated into Google’s authentication system by default. you don’t even have your own list of users.
As a python developer I love it. It even has django out of the box, but I would be a bit cautious to base my startup on a infrastructure which can only be provided by a single company.. when I get a invite I will be porting my applications over to it.. hopefully by then someone would have ported their blogging software to it so i won’t have to.
Posted in Business Related | Tags django, google, mysql, python | 2 comments
Posted by Ian Holsman
Wed, 02 May 2007 21:32:00 GMT
Mark Pincus just emailed me (and a million other users of tribe) that they had some news on tribe.
They sold the software and the engineering team to cisco.
I wanted to let you know that we have been working hard to ensure that Tribe will remain an independent and vibrant community. To that end, we sold the software to Cisco and most of the engineering team went along with the deal to reduce overhead.
My question to the ether is.
what does Cisco need a social networking site for? how does this fit into their corporate strategy?
Admittedly I don’t know all of which cisco does, but from a quick look they are focusing on infrastructure and hardware type things, not web services.
Mark goes on to say that tribe.net will be still up. So It sounds like they didn’t buy the user base.
color me confused.
Posted in Business Related | Tags cisco, tribe | no comments
Posted by Ian Holsman
Wed, 11 Apr 2007 02:08:00 GMT
Well it looks like the ASF has finally ran out of it patience with the Java Community Process and Sun’s refusal to allow Apache to use the TCK (Test Certification Kit) to certify it’s open JVM ‘Harmony’ with.
This is after 7 months of trying to reach a conclusion privately to something in a signed contract!
For me this sounds like a bit of a division inside of Sun. You have one part saying they want to be Open and Free, and harness the power of Open Source. This camp is responsible for releasing Tomcat, and getting Apache to participate in the JCP. They recognize what a open community can do, and the power of having multiple companies actively developing something.
You then have the old guard. These are the people who have revenue targets from J2SE licenses. They see this as a loss of potential royalty which would affect their bonuses, and a loss of control. No wonder they are baulking on their contract.
I guess Sun needs to answer the question.
Do you want to be open so that other companies have the freedom to use the JDK as they see fit (including commercial purposes).
to rephrase.. do you want to be owner of a small pie, or a participant of a much larger one?
personally I would prefer the bigger pie.
It will be interesting to see which Sun chooses.
(as well as how they try to spin this into a GPL/ASL war, which it isn’t it’s a contract dispute)
Posted in Business Related | Tags sun | no comments
Posted by Ian Holsman
Wed, 04 Apr 2007 04:20:00 GMT
Eric writes in his blog about how digg and other social network sites are not being fair and how some people are more important than others, and how this is a problem.
My first response is what I said to my children (and my parents to me) ‘lifes not fair’.
Let me explain a bit.
Digg is not about being fair, it is about delivering interesting news to its readers (and making money during the process). It has figured out that 25 people out of it’s million viewers are way better at finding interesting news than the rest.
What is key to Digg’s success is how it:
a) finds these people out of the millions
b) rewards them for doing it
c) knows when there usefulness is over, and they can be replaced
This is different to how the traditional ‘wisdom of the crowds’ works where the law of averages produces the best result. and to be frank I don’t think a wisdom of crowds solution would work for a news site.
why?
Wisdom of crowds relies on a significant amount of people independently voting/guessing something on a given topic.
This doesn’t work on news sites because:
1. There is too much information, and you really can’t get a significant amount of people giving their opinion on a single story they just come in too fast most stories only last on the new page for about 5 minutes before they are replaced with something else newer.
2. Digg’s system is not independent. In order for WoC to work the people performing the job need to be independent. By showing how many other people have ‘digged’ something will influence you to pay more attention to it
Posted in Business Related | Tags digg, WisdomOfCrowds | 1 comment
Posted by Ian Holsman
Fri, 01 Dec 2006 05:08:00 GMT
Ok.. I’ll admit I’ve never used google answers before, and as such i’m not going to comment on how good or bad it was.
What I like about the decision is that Google has the guts to fail. In all the management/innovation books I have read they keep talking about ‘Fast-Fail’ being one of the core things a company needs to understand if they want to be innovative and build really good things.
Fast fail is when someone has the balls to go up to a group and say.. this isn’t working.. lets kill it now, before it soaks up more time/energy/money. The thing you want is to learn from these failures, so you don’t repeat them.
It’s a hard call to make I’m sure, as the people working on answers would have devoted a lot of time and ownership into it. but it has to be done. It’s better for those engineers to go work on another project where they could add more value.
This ties in to yahoo’s peanut-butter manifesto as well. This is what happens when you don’t do fast-fail. you end up with all your resources tied up supporting things which aren’t really working, and the terms ‘black hole’ and sunk costs gets bandied about in meetings.
So Google is doing the best thing… I’d rather see them doing lots more things like answers as they are continually experimenting…. and some experiments don’t work..
Posted in Business Related | Tags fail, fast, google, yahoo | 3 comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Ian Holsman
Thu, 23 Nov 2006 05:37:00 GMT
In today’s slashdot they mention
Ramprate’s take on the online gaming industy, saying how net-neutrality is a bad thing for them, equating it to the mob and standover tactics:
The battle over net neutrality is really a battle for latency (and jitter). It is unlikely that an ISP will make the mistake of repeating Canadian ISP Telus’ attempt at outright censorship2. Rather, the ISP’s gentle nudge towards the preferred offering or provider is likely to come in the form of slow and inconsistent network performance for services that refuse to pay what amounts to “protection money” to an ISP.
The official name is business strategy terms is “Hold Up”, and it isn’t necessarily a bad thing for all companies.
Why?
It increases the barrier to entry.
While this might really suck for a small startup trying to break in, it might be seen as a positive thing for several ‘players’ in the industry.
- The existing sites. They (Google, WoW, Skype) have the money to pay it. While it sucks to them that they have pay money for something they used to get for free, they have the money, while smaller startups don’t. This makes it harder for smaller sites to get established and to threaten the status quo.
- The VC market. I’ve been reading lately on VC-chat how people are saying it’s hard to be a VC, as no one really needs their money anymore. Things are too cheap.. 2 guys in their garage can get a site further down the pipeline without needing huge wads of cash to buy things with. Charles River’s Quickstart program is a acknowledgment of this. With a barrier like net neutrality making it harder to get a site established, the VC is required again.
- (Possibly) more competition in the ISP/Backbone space. I say possibly, as I believe there is a lot of unused capacity out there and it will take a lot of $$$ to lay more fiber, but if they can get paid more money for each mile they will start laying more.. making for faster/larger pipes.
So while it might seem that the sky will fall if net neutrality ever came in, It would fall hardest on new startups, and might actually make the established companies more profitable. (as well as the Telco’s naturally)
As for the end user, he might have less diversity, but I’m not convinced that he won’t be paying less for his ISP connection.
Posted in Business Related | Tags HoldUp, net, neutrality | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Ian Holsman
Mon, 20 Nov 2006 11:08:00 GMT
Over at the Long Tail, Chris asks us to believe that all the economics of scarcity (the traditional supply/demand curve you’ve seen a million times before) is not applicable any more.
I’m not sure.
With the information age, the cost of reproduction is about zero, and the production of new copies is free… but doesn’t really mean that things aren’t scarce anymore. The scarcity has just changed to the demand side.
Now the problem isn’t making copies of something, it’s getting people to actually want what you have, when they can have literally millions of very similar things to yours. The eyeballs have become scarce, not the content they read. People have coined this the attention economy.
Don’t get me wrong, the implications are pretty much the same. You still need filters and signals to find quality (which was my main takeaway from the long tail stuff). I just dislike the name of it, and the implication that the economics of scarcity don’t apply anymore.
And to be honest.. this is not a new problem either (abundance/attention).. most commodity things have had these issues for a long time.
Think of soap or laundry detergents.. is there any real difference between any of these?
For most people all of the different products are easily replaceable with a near-identical version.
What has become scarce in these markets is getting you to actually know the product. Supermarkets capitalize of this abundance by charging for shelf space. Vendors differentiate the products by using emotion or linking the product to something you want/aspire to be.
So.. to bring this back to the information age .. in this era of information as a commodity .. what is important?
1. branding. The information you read needs to be linked to something you aspire to. Does reading XYZ make you feel cool or hip? what can a news site do to make you want to read their information instead of the millions of other sites that offer basically the same thing.
2. self space. Will popular sites (who get the eyeballs) charge publishers to stock their information instead of others?
you can argue that google’s search page is an example of shelf space. they charge people to put links on the page via their adwords program. and the branding is there too.
anyway.. I’m not sure the ‘commodity economics’ will catch on… but you might want to see how commodities are dealt with in the real world to see if you can see a business model not in the web/virtual one which might work.
Posted in Business Related | Tags abundance, attention, commodity | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Ian Holsman
Mon, 13 Nov 2006 15:38:00 GMT
So I was talking to some people at $NEWJOB, and they were doing the usual bitching.. how their internal suppliers were unresponsive and didn’t meet their needs.. nothing new here.. I’ve never met/had a internal supplier which knew what customer service was about.
And why should they? They are a monopoly. Their customers can’t choose anyone else, or even worse just do it themselves.. they have to do it with them.
Unless the shared service is managed properly, it is too easy for them to pay lip service to their customers, and managing properly is near to impossible, due to conflicting priorities, due to a shared service being thought of as a cost centre, and being rewarded on every cent they save, instead of the actions which save the entire company dollars.
My thoughts on this is if you are going to create a shared service, outsource it fully. Let multiple external vendors compete. You will still get the cost savings, and you’ll get a responsive supplier.
The other amusing thing about this conversation was that these people were also talking about consolidating their functions into a shared service for ‘cost efficiency’ for their clients.
Posted in Business Related | Tags sharedservice | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Ian Holsman
Tue, 31 Oct 2006 15:50:00 GMT
I forgot an important lesson yesterday.
Your Customers are not always the same group as your users.
This is especially relevant on ‘free’ web sites, or for people who offer ‘free’ services, and it sucks if you don’t realize this.
The customers are the ones who pay you (intrinsically or extrinsically). The users are the people who view your site. you need to remember (and I didn’t) that your site or service is also aimed at the customers.
I’m not saying the people who view the site aren’t important. The users are important as they perform a function the customer is willing to pay for, but so are the people paying the bills.
It can also help to remember this when you write your value proposition section of your business plan, as it opens up a line of thought and dialogue which you might not have had otherwise
Posted in Business Related | Tags bplan, customer, marketing | no comments | no trackbacks