Believe in the internet makes us stupid

There's a very interesting observation and reasoning behind the quote below. It's too much to summarize, go read it yourself...;-)

"The beauty of the Internet is that it connects people. The value is in the other people. If we start to believe that the Internet itself is an entity that has something to say, we're devaluing those people and making ourselves into idiots."

The meaning of Windows Live

Getting Ray Ozzie to work for Microsoft has had a refreshing and enlightening effect, inside and outside of Seattle. First we had the leaked memo's and his interesting weblog, and last week he explained the Windows Live vision. Microsoft has invited me to come over to Seattle in August and I will meet a lot of Windows Live people there. The strategic direction feels right, will be exciting to see (and help) it become reality....

"But we're in a new era, an era in which the Internet is at the center of so much of what we do now with our PCs. And it's important to start then from a different vantage point. So instead, we start with the Internet service. Even in cases where the experience is best delivered by writing applications for the PC, when considering the overall user experience that we're trying to achieve, we now start with a service-centric perspective. We frame the question, How can we best accomplish the experience we want taking advantage of the ability of centralized services to enable seamless end-to-end experiences for the user? We know that a centralized service can be a great place to store or cache things so they can be accessed anywhere on the Net, and to organize things and share things with others. So in our case, we consider what can be done for the user by assuming the presence of a new service infrastructure that does such things, a set of centralized services that in our case we call Windows Live. The services offered up by the Windows Live platform are available to Web sites and also to client applications and also to mobile applications. And this is key to our strategy. Because it's our aspiration to create seamless Web, desktop and mobile experiences for all activities relevant to users and customers in all our markets. And our model for doing so is to use our Windows Live services platform as an experience hub, and to use the PC, the browser and mobile devices as different experience-delivery mechanisms for the value we aspire to deliver."

No brand control to begin with

A message to 'advertising people' and 'media types' from Jeff Nolan who is attending the AlwaysOn conference. Let's hope they'll get it someday.

"I was part of a panel discussion about corporate blogging and the changing tactics of marketing, and for the life of me I can’t understand why these questions about brand and message control are still floating around… ferchristsakes, you never had control to begin with so get over it. I am also getting tired of hearing about case examples (anecdotal, not full case studies) about how car companies and consumer electronics companies are using blogs to facilitate product development and target audiences. At least we’re still not using the Kryptonite Lock story… we’ve moved onto Dell exploding laptops."

Building long tail relationships

John Hagel has some interesting thoughts on Chris Anderson's Long Tail book. This specific quote is intriguing, need some more time to think about that...

"I am also a bit more skeptical than Chris appears to be about advertising as a sustainable business model for many media companies over the longer term. It’s a topic for another blog posting, but the very efficiency of advertising aggregators like Google in making it possible to sell “tens of millions of unique ads” will over time just contribute to the growing clutter as more and more options compete for our limited attention. The increasing current focus on intention and transactions in online advertising, while understandable, distracts from the real opportunity: to build deep and sustaining relationships."

The crowdsourcing loophole

Jason Calacanis will share the revenues from his user generated content services (i.e. Netscape) with its most active users. And with all these services, the most active users create most of the monetizable value.

"The concept of "free" content producers, which I think WIRED called crowdsourcing, is going to be a short-lived joke. A loophole in the content business that will be closed by savvy startups which identify the top 5% of the audience and buy their time."

Pandora’s box of services

Saleforce.com CEO Marc Benioff tells his employees, and us, that the world won't be waiting for Microsoft and that software as service applications that will make up "The Business Web" will come from everywhere and everyone. But it won't be easy says Phil Wainewright, "because of the the semantic minefield that most SOA projects get bogged down in".

"It will not be dominated by any one particular company or application or geography. The reason is that The Business Web will be best known for its ability to easily create composite applications, or what is now popularly known as “mash-ups.” Made popular on consumer sites such as www.housingmaps.com, a mash-up driven by Google maps and craigslist.org, or www.bikramfinder.com, a mash-up driven by salesforce.com and Google maps, the point is simple: the future of business applications is multiple, heterogeneous applications talking to each other and sharing data."

Personal engagement factor

Fred Wilson highlights the most important part of Robert Young's interesting thoughts on the "Rise of the Socially-Integrated Media Empire". It's pretty obvious, but may be not (yet) to everyone...

"But just as the Internet was not a subset of AOL, social media will not become a subset of traditional media. In fact, social media will increasingly begin to compete directly with traditional media consumption. Yes, it is true that the media output produced and distributed by the audience itself will generally be of lower production value and quality. Even so, they will prove highly competitive to Hollywood products, as the personal engagement factor inherent in personal media outweighs any loss of production value."

No enterprise mashups

Worth thinking about....

"That's why it's a delusion to imagine that Web 2.0 mashups can solve longstanding enterprise integration problems as easily as creating a mapping mashup. Mashups that rely on core, culturally defined and universally agreed informal data structures like names and addresses are misleading outliers. They mask the true difficulty at the heart of the integration problem: "The semantic challenge is what people will come up against," warns Foody. Mashups are a great stimulus to innovation, but they haven't actually made it any easier to link specific items of information from one system to another. They've just made it look easier because they've all homed in on the few information types that already enshrine some form of pre-existing semantic structure."