Category: Editorial

Friendster now has lawyer-value: Patents

mike 0 Comment Editorial, Lawyers, Technology

GigaOM writes that “Friendster just wrote in to tell us it has been granted a second social networking patent.”  Oh joy.

As I have written before, software patents don’t work.  Soon enough, we’ll see some lawyers talking to Friendster about going after MySpace, Orkut, LinkedIn, Tribe, Tagged, and others for violation of this silly patent.  The money is just too alluring.

Nobody Wins
Let’s say Friendster is right, and that the others are “infringing” (I am making no judgement, but let’s be hypothetical).  Nobody uses Friendster because their service has been miserable.  The service is slow and they just failed to build the right features.  Myspace, Facebook, and even Orkut, have all performed much better and have orders of magnitude more users.  If Friendster were to win a patent-infringement suit, these other companies will either have to pay Friendster hoards of cash (which will just be pocketed by lawyers), or stop offering these features, or both.  In any event – the users of social networking will be the losers – as the products they use will have fewer features and possibly even carry additional fees.  Keep in mind that none of this affected Friendster’s fall – they failed only due to their own poor execution.

Proof of Invalidity
Now, you could say that Friendster pioneered this space and that is why they got the patent.  But this is not true.  The notion of uploading pictures associated to a profile is too obvious and simple.  If you read the patent, you’ll see that covered under this patent would be the notion of uploading a picture to an access-controlled or moderated bulletin board (you have a group of registered users, and there is a “degree of separation” which is enforced via the access control).  Clearly, this was done years ago, and Friendster’s patent is invalid.  The USPO is just not capable of differentiating patent-worthy from bull. 

Sadly, there is a whole army of lawyers that will argue against my example, for they want their own piece of the pie, even if the only way to do it is to steal from those that actually created something useful.

How Times Change

mike 0 Comment Editorial, Lawyers, Technology

FEBRUARY, 1999:  During testimony in federal court, Microsoft presents a video to show how Internet Explorer cannot be removed from Windows 98 without degrading system performance and other negative impacts.  Government attorney David Boies catches a small mistake in the video, and it is discovered that the video is actually spliced from two machines.  Microsoft’s Jim Allchin claims this was an honest mistake, that IE must be bundled into the operating system, and to remove it would hinder innovation. In the end, Microsoft wins the browser war.  (See also: NY Times)

OCTOBER, 2006:  Microsoft ships Internet Explorer 7, the first major release of a browser from Microsoft in several years.  Microsoft is no longer embroiled in competition with Netscape, and instead faces eroding market share by open-source rival Firefox.  Apparently whatever happened in 1999 which made IE so tightly coupled with the OS is now irrelevant, because this browser is no longer has unified navigation with the shell (see here), can easily be installed and uninstalled, and even runs side-by-side with IE6.

I hate to look a gift horse in the mouth, but which one is it?  I guess technology has improved and now Microsoft has the technology to no longer bundle browsers.  Of course, Netscape had this technology in 1993.  On the positive side, IE7 is a huge leap forward, and its great that users can choose to either use IE6, IE7, or Firefox.  Choice is good!

Microsoft to give away Office for home use

mike 1 Comment Editorial, Technology

This isn’t really news, it’s just a prediction. 

With all the new, free office equivalents out there, Microsoft will be giving Office away.  Hooray!  The fact is that the free alternatives are looking pretty good.  If you don’t like Google’s Writely, you can use Zoho.  If you don’t like Zoho, you can use OpenOffice.  The point is that there are lots of viable, free choices.

Now, Microsoft is the only vendor that is deeply entrenched in the corporate market, and that is their stronghold.  One of the biggest threats to that stronghold however, would be to lose the consumer and low-end markets.  As we all know, the tools you learn at home and at school are the tools that you carry with you to the office over time.  College students right now can either spend $199 for office (that is after the $300 “student discount”), or they can use a free alternative.  Obviously, they will be increasingly electing to use the free stuff. Schools already get lots of donated copies of office, but it’s not completely free.  These institutions will also be looking to cut costs and consider what is free. 

So, it is inevitable that Microsoft must curb the spread of free alternatives – otherwise they risk losing the small & medium sized business in the medium term, and the corporations in the long term.  It’s just a matter of when they feel enough pressure at the consumer level to finally give it away. 

Regardless of which word processor “wins” the consumer market, one thing is clear – prices are finally going to drop.  Since most of Microsoft’s revenue comes from the corporate arena, this shouldn’t even affect their bottom line too much.  Wow – everyone wins.

Porn invades RSS

mike 0 Comment Editorial, Technology

I’ve been a big fan of Rojo for quite a while, as you’ve probably read.  But recently I’ve been having to report often that RSS from porn sites is occupying the top spots on Rojo.  I guess that is what happens when you have a successful content publishing platform – porn and spam abound.  Today, the #1 site they recommend I read is “Naughty Neighbors July 2006”.  I guess I should have known from the title…. 

Online Poker Opportunity!

mike 0 Comment Editorial

With Congress and now the President signing into law (HR 4954, title VIII) that it will be illegal for US credit card companies to facilitate transactions for the purposes of gambling, business opportunity abounds!

Our well-intentioned lawmakers have found that we are freely choosing to do something they don’t want us to do. So what is a lawmaker to do about it? Create a new law, of course! But social engineering rarely works, and this will be no exception.

The fact is that many major US credit card agencies have already been denying payments to online gaming sites for years. Yet, customers have found their way to these sites anyway – often through fairly obtuse payment mechanisms.

The gambling sites are already hosted off shore, because facilitating the gambling is already illegal. Now that sending money to them is also illegal, what will happen is that a bank or some other “legitimate” business will spring up offshore too. It will be real and reputable, which is okay for US companies to do business with. But, it will create business relationships with the online gaming companies to make it incredibly easy for customers to get their money into the gambling sites. Of course, they will do this for a modest fee. Everyone will know that the offshore company is breaking the US law. But, it is offshore (just like the gambling site itself) and can do whatever it wishes. The US credit card companies will want the transactions to go through, because they want their own slice of the money. So they will claim to be bewildered and befuddled about how to distinguish “gambling” from “honest business”.

In the end, poker players will still play online. There is just too large of a market for this need to go un-served. Players will just have to pay someone else a cut through this weird, new type of money-laundering scheme. When does it stop? If we ban enough businesses, all business will eventually be done from Antigua.

I thought this was a good article: http://www.casinocitytimes.com/news/article.cfm?contentID=161472

Belshe leaves Microsoft

mike 4 Comments Editorial, Technology

REDMOND, WA – Friday, September 29 2006 marked the final day at Microsoft for Mike Belshe, a development manager in the IS Client group in Silicon Valley.  The end of Belshe’s tenure marks a turning point for Microsoft, as Allchin, Valentine, Kennedy and Gates also hang up their hats.

The recent announcement was not a surprise.  Markets had adjusted to the Microsoft (MSFT) news over the past few months, and the stock has soared.  Prior to the news, the stock traded at $22 in June, but now tops $27.35.  “We’re not surprised by the market reaction,” said Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft.  “Mike’s salary was pretty high, and with revenues of only $10B per quarter, our profits were in jeopardy.  He was doing a stellar job, but it was really hard for us to provide investors the return they expect.”  Investors are ecstatic, and happy to have the money back in the bank.

When asked, all that Belshe had to say was, “I really enjoyed the folks I worked with at Microsoft.  I wish them all the best, and I’m super excited that the stock price is up.  Like everyone else, I expect great things from a great team of people.  And Microsoft has got a great team.” 

Working in Seattle

mike 1 Comment Editorial, Technology

I just read a really old blog post from Steven Sinofsky.  He’s a pretty big deal at Microsoft, and he writes a great blog with all kinds of advice for college grads about what it’s like to work at Microsoft.  If you are thinking of joining Microsoft, definitely check out his blog.

But this particular article struck me as somewhat comical.  I never thought of the weather as much of a selling point for a job, much less as a selling point for Seattle!  Steven fairly posts the cold, hard facts about the weather – that it rains for 155 days per year in Seattle.  (That’s 42% of the days)  They even have streaks of rain every day for 3 or more weeks at a time there!  But then he goes on to pitch that the climate there is actually a moderate one, going so far as to state, “Most people are surprised to learn that it really doesn’t rain all that much in Seattle“.   Huh?  I’m not sure how much rain is “all that much” by his measure, but I guess we all have our own opinions.  To me, that is great salesmanship, Steve!  Believe in your product!

Truth be told, if you are going to work for Microsoft, definitely move to Redmond.  The campus is great, the people are great, and you’ll have a blast working on great technology.  But make no mistake – with the exception of a very short summer – the weather is wet.  Steven claims that, “No matter where you live, people can find a reason to complain about the weather (or is it weather forecasting?)”, but he’s just lived in Seattle too long.  Here in California, we don’t dwell on the weather, except to debate whether we should bike to work or surf.

Blog Moved, Upgraded, Revamped, and Fixed!

mike 0 Comment Editorial, Technology

WordPressAfter letting belshe.com fall into disarray with ancient blog software, lack of comments, a horrible UI, and other problems, I’ve finally updated. And, I must say, it’s a lot nicer!

The heart of the upgrade is a move from MovableType 2.64 (MovableType is now at version 3.3) to WordPress 2.0.4. This upgrade brings a host of new features for my ability to publish and also for users of belshe.com, the world’s exclusive host and premier provider of my bulls***. Most importantly, comments are now open again. No longer hold back your anger, disdain, disgust, and outright horror when you read belshe.com. You can now join the discussion and tell me what you really think.

Overall, the upgrade process was very good. It took a while to learn where everything is and get all my little features configured just right. But the documentation and install steps were all accurate. Let me know what you think! How’s the new UI?

The Cost of Cisco’s Company Meeting

mike 0 Comment Editorial

This morning, traffic was the worst its ever been for me coming to work.  It was over 2 hours, and everyone in the office is complaining.  Even those with what is usually only a 10 minute commute suffered for 90 minutes or more.  The cause?  Cisco decided to have a company meeting at the Shoreline Amphitheater this morning.

According to the radio, 30,000 Cisco employees descended upon Shoreline this morning.  I suspect that number is inflated, but regardless, traffic in all directions was completely snarled from 8am to 11am.  Several people decided to bail on work altogether.

I don’t care much about how much this meeting cost Cisco, as they did it on their own.  But what did they cost the two other major employers in the Shoreline area?

Assuming the average employee makes about $100K per year here, and assuming the average employee was delayed about 1 hour, and assuming about 80% of employees were impacted:

Microsoft, 1500 employees: $60,000

Google, 8000 employees: $320,000

Ouch.  And we don’t even work for Cisco. 

If you had trouble getting to work today, please link to this article with “Cisco Sucks” in the link text!