Incremental Blogger

Robert Scoble’s right about the nature of the Valley: people readily go from one venture to the next–whether it’s Yahoo or Google or whatever. That’s one of the things that makes the Valley so dynamic and interesting.

From the outset I thought a Microsoft-Yahoo teaming was a relatively good one for both sides. The only thing better for Yahoo might be an Apple-Adobe-Yahoo mindmelt. The tripple merger could create a venture that would rival Microsoft and Google. But personalities and cultures being what they are it’s very, very unlikely to happen. You see, maximizing shareholder value is not as absolute as many make it out to be.

In fact, really put your maximizing shareholder hat on and ask yourself why Microsoft even needs to acquire any or all of Yahoo at this point. Let the press and market attack Yahoo, point fingers, Ichan change the board, the instability discourage key employees, and so on and let the company and stock slide. Why not? An indirect assault on Yahoo knocking it from #2 over a cat and mouse game makes a whole lot more sense than going in debt to acquire it. Doesn’t it?

Of course, Microsoft might want to leverage Yahoo’s audience today in order to capitalize on its advertising capabilities. Makes sense at least in the short term. I’m sure someone has worked the numbers to make this case.

Now, of course, my engineering mind would rather think in terms of innovation than business tactics and in this regard here’s what I’ve been recommending to both Yahoo and Microsoft:

* For Yahoo, acquire AllTop and bring in Guy Kawasaki. The directory-oriented AllTop property makes sense from a DNA perspective at Yahoo and with Guy on board the community and entrepreneurial connections would be refreshing and invigorating.

And yes, I’ll go back to my Apple-Adobe-Yahoo merger suggestion, but that’s more up to Apple and Adobe than Yahoo.

* And for Microsoft: I’d work more closely with the MVPs when it comes to advertising. Build an ad system that gives value to their sites. There’s a reason after all that the top traffic sites don’t use Google ads. Leverage their weakness.

I realize it’s just business, but all of this talk of buying a business and disassembling it to gain market advantage is making me uneasy.

I’m an engineer at heart. I like competing in the marketplace, although I realize that many a great business was built and thrived by its strategy and not by its products.

After dabbling with creating thumbnails for tweets, I’ve come to the conclusion that although they’re quite useful, they’re probably best not done with the tools I have.

Here are just two problems: Script errors and pop-up windows. You’d think the .NET tools could work around this, but I guess not.

So it appears at this time that moving the thumbnail creation to a web service makes the most sense. Although, there are some thumbnail services already, this one needs to be tuned to twitter messages so it seems like yet another twitter service needs to be born. In that way, all of the twitter clients can use it to display good twitter thumbnails. Maybe this is a nice service for Google or Twitter itself.

Till then, I guess I’ll make my own.

Sure would be nice if there was a way to pass around more information that’s less web-page oriented to get around problems like this. If only we had archived RSS-like feeds for all of our content.

Isn’t there always one more thing? Heh.

Ed Bott tries to put to rest the speculation that a re-write of Windows is eminent.

While I agree with Ed that it’s unlikely that we’ll see a new flavor of Windows any time soon, I think he’s missing something here. Something big. What is it? Those little phones.

Here’s the thing: With the transition to portable computers and Intel and everyone else unable to deliver faster and faster processors that are power-user notebook friendly we’re on track for a cross over point with dedicated devices. So for any new OS, I’d say don’t look to your desktop. Look towards your phone. That’s where the big innovation change is most likely to occur. The desktop/server IT world can stick with Windows the way it is. Everyone else will move on.

If you look out five years I don’t see Microsoft changing Windows that much. Maybe we’ll see better connectivity across connectivity types. Maybe we’ll see more integration with communication services. But by and large, for the IT world, I don’t expect we’ll see much change.

Now looking at the phone I see something different. Here’s where I wouldn’t be surprised to see a new OS pop up out of the blue. Not only would it be a much smaller task, it’s already a more dynamic market, and it’s ripe for innovation.

For the high-end desktop/server/virtualization market, I think there will be plenty of processor power for more of the same. Could a better tuned OS come to the rescue? Sure, but most people won’t even be paying attention to it if it were to ever come out. They’ll be too busy using other devices.

So, if you ask me don’t watch the high-end over the next five years. Watch the low end. Watch the low-cost PCs. Watch the phones. Watch the dedicated devices. That’s where the processor innovation sweet spot is now. That’s where the OS innovation sweet spot is most likely to come. The OS lags the hardware. Always has. Always will.

Yes, some day the numbers of “desktop” PCs is going to get dwarfed by these other devices and their OSes and we’ll ask ourselves why we were so hung up on Microsoft re-writing Windows–because the future OSes will be evolving in front of our eyes all along. They’ll just be coming from the non-desktops.

So when might we realize all of this? Hmmm. What do we have now? One billion Windowsish PCs out there now? That market took about 20 years to grow. I wouldn’t be surprised to see the device world “replace” it in half that time. Working backwards, I wouldn’t be surprised that all of this becomes obvious in five years or so. With Windows 7 slated for around 2010 and another three years for the Windows version after that in 2013…that means by the time that follow-up version of Windows hits the market, I’d expect that we’ll begin to really see how the OS isn’t what it used to be. Heck, with the web and all you can say that now–though rightly so I think you can argue that the web is too desktop oriented too :-).

Watch out. There’s more change to come. That’s for sure.