I’ve been talking to coworkers about what I learned in Silicon Valley last week and I swear that venture capitalist Rick Segal is listening in. Particularly his second observation. That’s going to be the hardest for Microsoft to compete with because of how we setup our business units internally (and because we hire lots of entrepreneurial people from other companies that think deeply about how to build businesses). We don’t grok Google’s ability to ship stuff that won’t make them any money (or why they’d do that). Like Orkut, or even Google’s Maps (they don’t yet have any advertising on them). Microsoft is up against a brilliant Google strategy — one that’s aimed at disrupting all sorts of things that came before and one that’s aimed at our weaknesses (and at others too, all at the same time). Internally here at Microsoft each team has its own business interests to look after and considers itself accountable to shareholders to show same. We’re very decentralized. Google looks at its business holistically, not part by part like Microsoft does — it is very centralized compared to how Microsoft is run. Google tells its engineers to go and come up with cool services without thinking about monetization strategies — they say they’ll figure that out later. That’s disruptive.
Category: Web
I totally screwed up on post about BlogTronix
Yikes. Sometimes I just do something very stupid. Hey, keep it quiet Goebbels, I know you think I’m stupid on every post. But, this time I overdid myself. I saw BlogTronix on the weekend and linked to another company. I’m very impressed with BlogTronix’ stuff. It lets you do a site much like Channel 9 with video, audio, blogs, wikis, and more.
Anyway, here’s my fixed post.
New Memorandum stance, BlogTronix impresses
I’m going to make a real effort not to link to anything that’s already on Memeorandum. Why? Because that way new things will show up on Memeorandum. Sorry, Shelley Powers, that means I won’t link to you today either. 
(Which is a bummer, cause she made some good points about Memeorandum’s bias).
But, yesterday at the Blog Business Summit I saw two things that really are interesting. Here’s why. When I go to companies to speak, they keep asking me “how do I do something similar to Channel 9.” That isn’t easy. We had two developers working on that for quite a while. They started with Community Server from Telligent (Microsoft’s employee blogs are run on top of Community Server — we have more than 2,000 now and a TON of traffic, so it holds up very well. The new Xbox.com forums are built on top of Community Server as well). Our tech team on Channel 9 (Charles, Brin, Adam, and Jeff) mashed in video components and a Wiki and other stuff and then hacked the heck out of it to make it Channel 9. I’ve been hoping that a company would come out with a set of tools/service that would make it possible to do a Channel 9 style site.
BlogTronix is the answer. It’s awesome. Has all that and more (and has security built in so you can blog both internally and externally very easily). I’m going to get a test blog there and will write more after I actually can try it out.
The other thing that Steve Broback showed on stage was FeedFire. It lets you build RSS feeds out of sites that don’t have feeds. Steve writes about that tool here.
Update: I totally messed this post up, so here’s the fixed post.
Chris Pirillo’s favorite browser company is blogging
You might not know this, but Chris Pirillo RAVES about Maxthon. I noticed that they just started blogging too. It’s a little too PR happy for me. I’d like to see tips on how to get more productivity out of it. Maybe some point-by-point comparisons to other browsers. I’d like to know what they are jealous of in Firefox, for instance.
Atiki has cool tag-based interface
It’s fun to watch Web designers play with different interfaces to try to make things easier to use. Atiki just came out with a tag-based interface. Here’s a look at their tech news. It won’t displace Memeorandum, but I’m certainly intrigued!
RSS usability sucks
At the Blog Business Summit yesterday we discovered just how bad RSS usability sucks. Molly Holzschalg was on stage with me and visited a blog and was trying to find its RSS feed. She couldn’t find it. Why? Cause there’s no consistency in this industry on how to subscribe.
Some sites use RSS icons. Most that I visit use the orange XML icon. But other sites don’t have any icon and instead use words like “subscribe” or “feed” or “web feed.”
Even others, like many Blogger sites, don’t have any icon or word with a link at all. For those you’ve gotta know to simply add “atom.xml” onto the end of the URL. Aaaaarrrrrrgggggghhhhhhh.
And then there’s sites like Dare Obasanjo’s. He’s a geek. Works at MSN. But look at the right side of his blog. He has four DIFFERENT icons for RSS. One for Yahoo. One for MSN. One for Bloglines. One for Newsgator.
Oh, I bet Jakob Nielsen is screaming right about now.
Whenever I hit problems like this I ask myself “what would Jeffrey Zeldman do?” Or WWJZD for short.
Why Jeffrey? He’s still leading the Web design movement forward and is my favorite writer and speaker on the topic.
I find his minimalistic answer unsatisfying. He puts a text link in very small type at the bottom of his page.
My advice? Stick with the orange XML icon. Why? It sticks out. If the page Molly was trying to deal with yesterday had one of those she would have found it instantly. The BBC’s answer is actually pretty good too. They went with an Orange RSS button and next to it have a link to “What is RSS.”
In fact, I think that’s really the best answer: “just do what the BBC does.”
New Memorandum stance, BlogTronix impresses
I’m going to make a real effort not to link to anything that’s already on Memeorandum. Why? Because that way new things will show up on Memeorandum. Sorry, Shelley Powers, that means I won’t link to you today either. 😉 (Which is a bummer, cause she made some good points about Memeorandum’s bias).
But, yesterday at the Blog Business Summit I saw two things that really are interesting. Here’s why. When I go to companies to speak, they keep asking me “how do I do something similar to Channel 9.” That isn’t easy. We had two developers working on that for quite a while. They started with Community Server from Telligent (Microsoft’s employee blogs are run on top of Community Server — we have more than 2,000 now and a TON of traffic, so it holds up very well. The new Xbox.com forums are built on top of Community Server as well). Our tech team on Channel 9 (Charles, Brin, Adam, and Jeff) mashed in video components and a Wiki and other stuff and then hacked the heck out of it to make it Channel 9. I’ve been hoping that a company would come out with a set of tools/service that would make it possible to do a Channel 9 style site.
BlogTronix is the answer. It’s awesome. Has all that and more (and has security built in so you can blog both internally and externally very easily). I’m going to get a test blog there and will write more after I actually can try it out.
The other thing that Steve Broback showed on stage was FeedFire. It lets you build RSS feeds out of sites that don’t have feeds. Steve writes about that tool here.
Update: I totally messed this post up, so here’s the fixed post.
Dare says I just rediscovered Hailstorm
Dare Obasanjo, who works on the backend team at MSN, says I just rediscovered Hailstorm (which was Microsoft’s doomed effort to host your data on its servers). Hmmm, I didn’t remember Hailstorm being aimed at end users. I also didn’t remember that Microsoft tried to take people slowly into that world. They wanted them to jump in feet first. They also didn’t have the trust of customers the way Google has the trust of people on the street.
The other thing that’s hurting Microsoft? We don’t have a monetization gadget. Do we pay bloggers yet to include components? Not yet. Google does. That gets bloggers and Silicon Valley businesspeople to feel good about including their components on Web pages (and bootstraps them into this new world in a way that keeps people from screaming). Oh, and they didn’t name it “Hailstorm.”