Microsoft finds good use for MSN.com

Today, Microsoft turned the home page of MSN.com into an ad for Office 2007. Oh, the irony.

Starbury and VRM

The Starbury is a basketabll shoe endorsed by NBA All Star Stephon Marbury.
It doesn’t retail for $200, but $14.98.
I’m getting a pair.
The idea was partly started to try to eliminate any reason for “getting jumped” for your valuable sneakers.
It looks like the idea has legs, and NBA player Ben Wallace will also be sporting the brand on the court.
We’ve all known for some time how much markup there was on these sneakers, and I’m thinking this is indicative of a greater trend.
In this case, it might just be a marketing gimic, or an actual good gesture to help the community, but it begs the question of whether goods of all kinds can close the gap between price and cost, since most of that is controlled by the brands and the distribution channels.
With the fact that distribution of all kinds is bringing the manufacturer and the consumer closer together, whether it be news, or basketball shoes, we all know that this phenomenon is being actualized.
The next logical step is the consumers creating their own brands, wrought out of the demand side either supplying itself, or leveraging their collective demand to have the manufacturer create a product to their specs.
Enter VRM.
One aspect of VRM, or Vendor Relationship Management, is the ability of ad hoc groups to create a collective demand, and influence the suppliers to meet that demand.
In such a case, it’s hard to see what a brand has to offer, if they are anything but an enabler in the process, much in the same way that the Wordpress brand enables me to blog, though it gets no immediate revenue from me.
The Wordpress brand however, will or might generate revenue from ancillary services, in and around the actual product.
Could it be, that in the future, Nike or Microsoft might only exist, not to sell their products, but to aggregate attention from the demand side, and facilitate a transaction.
That would seem to be where Google is headed. Wise companies might just follow.

Google Office vs. Microsoft is not the question

Richard MacManus asks whether Google is being genuine when they say their Web Office is not in competition with google.

Well, I think they are genuine because this is a completely new market, and definedly different than the one Microsoft controlled. This is an Attention market, not a software market.

That said, they are in competition with Microsoft, since Microsoft realizes that they need to convert their business model to this new market as well. If they don’t adapt their Office strategy, they will fail.

It seems to me that everyone that is relevant on the web is competing for a new type of market. The Office aspect is just one sector.

Blog good about thy enemy

Alex Barnett has a nice post on Yahoo and APIs.

What struck me about the article is that Alex, a Microsoft employee, is drumming up the competitor, Yahoo.

Now, it could be that he’s trying to give his own company a kick in the rear, or that he’s just being honest.

Either way, it makes Alex look good, and in a weird way, that makes Microsoft look good, in my mind.

So, talking good about your competition, when it’s well deserved, has benefits for your business as well.

Love thy enemy, was the Biblical creed. Blog good about thy enemy is the new path.

Hmm.

Dave Winer audio on why patents aren’t fair

A few weeks ago a bunch of us met in NYC and Dave Winer led a discussion abouta bunch of cool topics including Ukranian food. I was having trouble with my recorder so I only have a small snippet of poor audio, but if you can overlook that, it actually is one of the most important points made during the night.
And it’s even more appropriate now, after the Apple iPhone promotion.

Dave Winer on Patents

Leave out the bad stuff Daylife, not the good

It’s funny how quotes can deceive.

Dave Winer quoted Mike Arrington about Daylife and I thought the quote was a positive one.

I though it meant that Daylife left out all the garbage you find at typical newspaper sites.

Turns out Mike meant leaving out RSS feeds. That’s not good.

RSS (and OPML) is more important to me than HTML. I think that trend will grow. Will that become a truth for the mainstream soon? I don’t know, but IE7 will certainly push it in that direction. No?

Just for that, the Old Media Doomsday Clock may be making a shift back a minute or two in favor of Old Media. Wow!

Stay tuned.

Media is dead

Something has been bothering me since Adam Curry talked about media vs. technology on the Gillmor Gang.
And I’m also left wondering why Jason Calacanis pumps up AdSense and yet gets labeled a “media guy”, or even calls himself such.
I think it’s a dis-credit to himself. He’s much more than that.
He’s an “Attention” guy.
You see, media by it’s very nature can be disintermediated, and I don’t think any strategy that could fall prey to that is a good one.
Is Google a media company?
No.
Media companies aggregate content makers and act as mediaries between the advertisers and the media consumers. (sorry to Doc, i don’t like the word consumer either)
Google is doing more than that.
They are an Attention clearing house.
It’s what Jason might call an enabler, and it’s why the successful new companies we adore all seem to be doing just that. (del.icio.us, grazr, edgio, top ten sources etc.)
They are enabling an attention transaction to occur. Think eBay or Craigslist. OPML, not HTML. Tom Morris, not Morris, the Cat.
There is no enabling happening here, just intermediation.
Jason’s latest venture is about enablement, so I think he’s on the right track. Paying people doesn’t change that, as long as a service is open.
Attention enablers can’t be disintermediated. They can be replaced, but not disintermediated.
I don’t come from the software industry. I much more relate to what Dave Winer calls a himself, a “media hacker”. And that’s what he calls Scoble too.
It’s not really about technology. That is a means, not an end.
Technology itself can be disintermediated or commodified. Soon, we will plug into technology like we do into electrical outlets. It’s happening now.
So I say that the winning companies are not media companies or technology companies, but Attention companies.
And if PodShow is a media company, it may succeed in the short run. But to last and grow, it will have to transform to an Attention company. So will Tribune, New York Times, Microsoft, Podosphere.com and the whole lot.

The Golden Fleece

I’m hoping part two of the latest Gillmor Gang will prove more interesting.

If you remember the Jason and the Argonauts tale, you might know how Jason succeeded in conquest over the Seed men by casting a stone at one, who thought it was his neighbor, and letting them all kill each other.

That’s what Steve Gillmor seems to do by letting the fellas discuss the importance of Google algorithms and whether site owners can get a cut by having search engines bid for their site search.

If Steve would have put the “knockoff” Cheerios down for a sec I know what he would have said.

It’s not whether Google’s algorithms hold up, it’s whether they can garner more stock in the conversation with all their attention data.

The winners of the future are not the best technologies. We’ll all be able to plug into those the same way we plug into an electrical outlet.

The winners are the services which add value to the conversations happening throughout distributed web networks.

These networks and conversations are fluid and changing constantly in response to our gestures.

Those who don’t get this are either thinking too hard or just not enough.

In a similar way that facial and hand gestures are a meaningful supplement to spoken conversations, the gestures which we talk about with attention are the metadata of the conversations happening on the web.

That equates to economic power because markets are conversations.

I agree with Jason Calacanis that many in the SEO business are trying to game this system, but I disagree when he says the system works. People are trying to game the system because it does not work. It just works better than the previous systems.

I can prove it Jason. I’ll write a better piece on a new cell phone than Engadget and see which shows up higher on Google.

No. Those dynamics are only part of the game.

The richer system envelops us with answers using our data and our network’s data in a chameleon like fashion, never static like Google. That’s child’s play.

Jason(Argonaut) succeeded in getting the Golden Fleece but was fickle and left Medea for another Princess.

Likewise, in the shorter term companies may succeed by amassing link attention.

The true winners won’t be seeking the Golden Fleece at all. They will be removing the barriers and letting the crystal waters flow in, filtered and clean, Pure Conversation.

IE7 feed reading view is “forced control”

OPML grazrs look out!
Well, I know most probably don’t work with XSL but I wanted to get your attention.
This latest post from the Microsoft Team RSS Blog explains how feed reading view will work in IE7 and gives guidelines for mime-types to use for RSS feeds.
I’ve brought this up before, and here is why I don’t like it.
One of the coolest and under-utilized things about delivering xml to the browser was the ability to add a stylesheet transformation to the document.
And it worked pretty well with Firefox and IE.
Now I can’t accompany an RSS feed with an xsl stylesheet and have the browser IE render it on the fly. It goes directly into feed reading view.
It doesn’t seem unreasonable or technically difficult to check for a stylesheet and use it if it is present, and only go into feed reading view if it is an RSS feed AND no stylesheet is present.
Considering how much contribution Microsoft is making with SSE and SLE and RSS for other types of applications in general, this seems to counter that thinking, by assuming the party serving the feed has only one use in mind.
I hope they don’t do this for OPML! We want to create rich browsable applications with it, right guys?

Dainbramaged

Stowe Boyd points out that XP can boot on a Mac.
Interesting, but isn’t everyone really waiting for Mac OS X to boot on commodity PC Hardware?
Who would you pay for Mac hardware and run Windows, to see if the XP can freeze up that hardware too?