I was reading Joe Wilcox’ analysis of Ray Ozzie’s speech and later Ryan Stewart chimed in and the whole time I was reading that I was wondering:

Does Joe or Ryan know that Ray is an investor in Second Life?

If he did, that would have explained why Ray believes that the Web won’t deliver the most interesting experiences online. You go try to build Second Life in AJAX. I’ve seen it done and it’s not pretty.

It’s not lost on me either that the first thing I tried to do with Gmail is hook Outlook up to it. I can’t stand using the Web browser for email. And I have both the beta of the new Hotmail as well as Google’s new corporate Gmail and Maryam uses Yahoo’s email (formerly Oddpost). These are the three leading web-based email systems. I know many of you are OK with reading your email on the Web, but I’m too used to having my email offline. It gives me peace of mind to know I’m in control of my access to my email.

Eileen Brown, who works at Microsoft, in the UK, just added her cell phone to her blog. Alright, now we can all call her up.

Ahh, today is a busy day. The movers are here. I have a TON of email and I need to go into Microsoft to finish up some expense reports. Then we sign our house away. I’ll be on BBC radio tonight (they found me because I had my cell phone on my blog). And then we start the drive down to California.

And it’s freaking hot here again today. Hope your Monday is going as well.

We (Maryam, Patrick, and I) had a wonderful breakfast with Chandu Thota. He’s a developer lead on Virtual Earth Microsoft’s Windows Live Local service. You know, Microsoft’s Mapping Service (why can’t they name things simply at Microsoft? If I could figure that one out I’d probably be running marketing). On his “20% time” nights and weekends he also does the very cool FeedMap which lets bloggers find other bloggers near them.

Anyway, at one point while we were munching food at the Brown Bag Cafe in Redmond (our favorite breakfast place) we got in a creative mood and we started throwing around ideas of things we’d like.

That’s not the important thing I took away from this conversation, but listening to how a developer thinks when in a creative conversation is very interesting. One idea he threw out was that he wanted to crawl all the blogs, look for commonalities, then spit them back to a box that I’d put on my blog. Something like Amazon’s “you may be interested in these items” feature, but for blogs.

Note the developer’s impulse, especially from someone who is adept at building Web Services. He wants to put a bunch of data into a database in the cloud, analyze it, add value to that analysis, and spit it back out to bloggers everywhere.

This isn’t the first time I’ve heard this pattern. At BARcamp, MindCamp, FooCamp, and at Dave Winer’s house, I’ve heard this same pattern over and over again.

Yeah, the details vary. Some developers want to study weather info. Some want to mash up ticket selling services and find you better ticket prices. Some want to take real estate data, mash it up with mapping data, and spit it back at you. Etc. Etc. Etc. Just watch TechCrunch to see daily examples of this.

But, what are the common things these developers all need:

1) They need a freaking fast distribution platform. Er, a set of server farms around the world. Why? Well if that little Internet component that Chandu’s thinking of slows down my blog I’m going to get rid of it. And so will every other user around the world. Delivery speed is job #1 in this new world. It better work in London, Chennai, Tokyo, Shanghai, and Cape Town, the same way it does in San Francisco.

2) They need a shitload of storage space. Yes, that’s a technical term. You try crawling 100 million blogs and see what kind of index it builds for you. Let’s just round up to “a terabyte.” Can you afford to buy a terabyte in storage space to scratch your developer itch? Chandu can’t.

3) They need an API. Something simple to spit data in, and suck data out. REST seems to be the one of choice lately.

4) It needs to be cheap. Um, free if possible. At least if you want Chandu to be able to build it, deploy it, and have it survive its first exposure on DIGG. If Chandu starts making revenue then you can get him to give you a cut, but the startup costs need to be near zero so that the developer “itch” can be scratched. Guys like Chandu (and most of the other geeks I know) don’t have much money to buy access to services.

What was Chandu’s first impulse at breakfast? To use Amazon’s S3 service.

But, that made me wonder why Microsoft isn’t seizing this opportunity now. Microsoft has been stunningly successful by simply catering to developer’s needs.

The fact that one of its own engineers is feeling an impulse that can’t be satisfied on Microsoft’s own server farms is telling. And should be keeping Microsoft’s executives awake at night.

We talked about the fact that only big companies will be able to deliver #1 and #4. #2 is actually pretty easy to do for a small company, but if you want your app to be distributed around the world it takes some resources and to both of us that will mean developers will be attracted to Google/Microsoft/Amazon/Yahoo/eBay.

So, let’s go through the players one-by-one.

Google. Google has some daunting advantages in the coming developer wars. First, nearly EVERY developer I know uses Google. Most use Gmail. Most use Firefox (which really is a Google-friendly browser). A large percentage use Google Maps. The fact that Microsoft has ceded the influential geeks over to Google is going to pay off big time for Google. I’ll bet this is why Vic Gundotra decided to go over to Google (he still hasn’t told me what he’s gonna do at Google or why he left Microsoft, but I can read the tea leaves).

Yahoo. Yahoo has the social software world, which will be its key card that it can use to stay in the game. Whenever I meet a developer I ask him or her about the services they use. Invariably the names Flickr and Del.icio.us come up. If Yahoo can figure out how to use these two developer touch points to get developers to come over and build things on its system, it’ll see wins. That said, I’ve been doing a lot of surveying of user behavior lately. When I hang out with developers they use Google as their search engine. When I hang out in places that have more “normal” users, they are heavier Yahoo and MSN and AOL users. So, Yahoo isn’t seen as “geeky” as Google, which might hurt their position. Yahoo will need to bring something dramatic to the table to get geeks to pay attention. If they just match Google’s offerings, the geeks will just stay with Google.

Microsoft. Microsoft has a huge number of developers but those developers are skilled at building Visual Basic apps for businesses. They don’t think a lot about the Web. The ones who’ve decided to spread their wings generally switch over to a Google mindset instead of switching over to a Microsoft mindset. But, Microsoft can always get back in the game. They are investing big time in both marketing initiatives (Mix, Channel 9, On10.net) and have some really interesting stuff coming. While at breakfast Scott Guthrie, general manager inside Microsoft’s developer division came over (I’m going to miss living in the Redmond area) and said he wanted to show me some cool new Web developer initiatives they will soon launch. Not so secret weapons? Ray Ozzie. Scott Isaacs. Google should have hired Scott when it had the chance. Scott has some stuff cooking that’ll keep Larry and Sergey (and MarkL and VicG) up at night.

Amazon. Amazon is out in the lead right now with S3. Will the rest let them keep that position for long? No. Some other advantages Amazon has? Great community, loyal — and buying — customers who’ll buy other new things offered on Amazon’s site. A great affiliate model and system (bloggers get paid everytime they send customers to Amazon).

eBay. They have Lenn Pryor. Seriously what they have is the largest buying and selling community out there. And they have Skype, which hasn’t made sense yet. But, Skype built a great P2P system. What’s the hardest thing for developers to do? Get huge amounts of data around the world without paying for it. Hmmmm, if the dev team that did Skype could do something innovative here that would absolutely rock. But, let’s assume that the Skype team isn’t gonna do anything. Well, eBay still has learned a TON about keeping its Web system up and running. That wouldn’t be hard to turn into a set of services that developers could use for other purposes.

My money? It’s on Google. Why? Cause I go back to the developers. Right now they are more likely to use Google’s stuff than any other — you should see how developers and geeks talk about all these companies. So, unless Google does something evil to piss developers off, or don’t deliver the long-rumored GDrive soon, it’s their game to lose.

That said, don’t bet out the other players. They are all trying to figure out where the value will come in this chain.

Anything I haven’t thought about? How do you see the coming Internet Developer Wars playing out?

Update: Nik Cubrilovic stands up for smaller companies (like the one he started, Omnidrive) that are doing the same thing, but are shipping now.

The geeks are cooking now. Or will be after they read “Cooking for Engineers.” Done by a software developer, Michael Chu, in Silicon Valley. Mmmm, this makes me hungry!

Noah Kagan sent me this one (he’s a user experience designer, used to work for Facebook). We were talking last weekend about potential videoblogs that might be fun to do. His idea was to do a cooking show, which I thought was a great idea. Why would that work and why is that an opportunity that isn’t filled by mainstream media like Julia Childs? Because, let’s say I have an iPod. Let’s say I had 50 different recipes downloaded onto my iPod, but each one is a video podcast. First 10 seconds of each is a list of ingredients you need from the store. Now, no program on TV does that. Why? Cause that’s a lame format for something where you’ll watch for 30 or 60 minutes. But an iPod is different — you can select from a number of choices and you can carry the thing around with you. The needs of an iPod user are DIFFERENT than the needs of someone sitting on their Barcalounger watching a TV screen. Don’t ya think?

This opens up a whole raft of new content opportunities. Imagine if Robert Hess converted all his cocktails on his Drinkboy site to videos? (He’s a geek who works at Microsoft, by the way).

I wonder what a food critic, like Hillel Cooperman’s TastingMenu (a geek who runs the Microsoft Max team at Microsoft) would be able to do with video? That site rocks, by the way.

Do you have a favorite food or drink site? Especially ones done by geeks with day jobs like these?

I get the weirdest phone calls.

This afternoon I got a call that went something like this:

“Hello, this is Robert Scoble.”

“Hi, this is Michael Markman and I live right around the corner from you and wondered if you would like to see Moxi before you leave?”

“Sure.”

Now, Michael had emailed me before to let me know about Moxi and it sounded very interesting, so I wanted to make sure I saw it before I left. He pitched it as sort of a Media Center for cable companies.

Long story short I wasn’t doing much and the heat was keeping me from doing anything productive anyway, so I said “sure, wanna meet up now?”

Anyway, I just got back from spending a delightful hour or so with Michael.

I wasn’t prepared for what I saw.

First, I didn’t know much about Michael. He was creative director on Moxi. Ran the team that designed the interface, which won two Emmy’s! (That was a clue that this would be a step above other UI’s). He also told me he worked at Apple for about 10 years in the creative services department back in the 80s/90s.

Anyway, he showed me through the UI. I wanted one almost instantly. And that’s where the story falls apart.

“Can I order this through Comcast?”

“No.”

“How about any other cable company?”

“Only if you live in a few select cities.”

Seems that you can have the best UI, a well-thought out system, with lots of great options, but if you can’t talk the cable companies into adopting it you’re dead in the water.

You know, I’m tired of putting up with a poor user experience on my cable box.

Everyone complains about the monopoly that Microsoft has, but at least you have a choice there. You can go with Open Office. Or Wordperfect. On the Office side. On the OS side there’s OSX and Linux. Wonderful competitors to Microsoft’s offerings.

But on cable or phone systems? We have absolutely no choice.

I want to buy Moxi. But the cable companies are keeping us from considering it.

And we won’t even talk about the IPTV systems that Microsoft showed me. Four HDTV video channels on screen at one time.

That’s blocked too.

Instead we have to put up with crappy UIs, poor feature sets, and crappy HD content.

Do you blame me for loading BitTorrent?

Anyway, thanks Michael for inviting me over. I sure wish everyone could use the system you helped design.

Jeff Sandquist, my former boss at Microsoft, had a horrible experience on Northwest Airlines today. He’s sitting in the Minneapolis airport. Say hi if you see him. He also just started a wiki to start tracking power and wifi locations at airports. I thought about doing that, but not sure it would really help anyone. Wikipedia, though, does list wifi availability for airports.

Anyway, this reminds me why I am a HUGE fan of Southwest Airlines. Nearly the identical thing happened to me on a recent trip. I was set up to have a connecting flight through Reno. The flight was getting delayed. I was getting nervous. But before anything could happen the flight attendant called out my name and the name of another gentleman.

Turned out she was getting us off the plane and had already booked us on another flight.

It’s weird, but the people who interact with the customers at Southwest are just a lot more interesting than their blog makes them out to be. I’ve been on flights where the attendant tells great jokes. Another time someone sang and got cheers from the passengers.

BL Ochman has an interesting post today about Dell’s recent business problems.

I think it’s even deeper than the support issues that Dell has had with bloggers.

But, let’s start there. This week Patrick’s power supply broke for his Apple iBook. So, I dropped him off this afternoon at the Apple store in Bellevue, Washington.

He promptly walked out with a new powersupply. I didn’t have to even be involved. He just got a reservation at the Genius Bar and took care of the problem himself. I wasn’t even in the store.

Dell can’t match that customer support. If he had a product from Dell he’d need to wait until Tuesday to receive his new power supply.

If Dell hasn’t figured it out yet Apple is now just another Windows OEM. But what an OEM it is! And Apple is definitely taking away marketshare from Dell (all the new MacBooks at Microsoft that I saw were evidence of this — passionate computer users appreciate great design and great service). Dell is also being hurt on the innovation side of the house. By not doing a Tablet PC Dell has told the marketplace that the innovation is gonna come from other places. I’m typing to you on a Lenovo Tablet PC right now. Why isn’t this a Dell? Because Dell didn’t innovate.

Apple has marketing that makes everyone pay attention. Does Dell inspire anti-Dell advertising imagery like this?

But it gets worse from there. I need a new laptop for work. PodTech has given me a budget of $2,500 to spend on a new laptop.

I’m a home user. Quick, find me the new Dell that has a high-definition screen on Dell’s home laptop page. Hint: it doesn’t exist there. If I hadn’t seen them at Microsoft I wouldn’t even know about them. This is a competitive advantage that Dell has over Apple (Apple doesn’t have 1080 screens in its laptops yet) but Dell is hiding them.

But, I look at how Apple treated a 12-year-old today. And, I probably will hold out for an Apple product because of that service aspect that Dell just can’t provide because Dell’s business model requires cutting every bit of cost out of its distribution chain.

I was telling someone just today that I will never sign up for another email newsletter. Ever.

Michael Martine reminded me of that when he wrote a blog post “my love/hate relationship with Microsoft.”

In that post he even gives Microsoft a couple of kudos “maybe they learned something from Scoble afterall.”

No, sorry, Michael, it looks like telling Microsoft’s marketers that they should be fired for not having RSS feeds didn’t take.

Getting people to subscribe to an email newsletter is sssooo 1990s.

If that’s the kind of marketing we should expect for Zune then Apple has nothing to worry about.

But, Michael is right. At least the Zune team has a blogger among its ranks. I’ve subscribed to his blog. It has an RSS feed.

You might not know it, but there’s a San Jose State University mafia and we’re going to take over the world. Someday.

Scott Mace helps out the SJSU cause by getting on TWiT’s Inside the Net. (Scott was in SJSU’s journalism program a decade before I was). TWiT (This Week in Tech) is the #1 rated tech podcast, and you can hear why when you listen. Leo Laporte and Amber MacArthur are a lot of fun to listen to. Takes me back to when I ran Leo’s chat room when he was on KGO Radio back about a decade ago.

Seriously, Scott is doing the most excellent Calendar Swamp blog. Hmmm, the Google Calendar team invited me over to talk with them after I get back from vacation on August 14th. Hey, Scott, wanna go together?

Actually, listening to the show it sounds like he’d rather go and pound Microsoft’s calendar teams on the head. Turns out there’ll be a new calendar application in Windows Vista and it won’t sync with Outlook. Now, is that bright or what? Not good, not good at all.

Hey, Microsoft, do you really want Google Calendar to take over? I’m using it and it’s quite good and it only took me a few days to get used to it.

This post is for Raymond Chen. He’s one of the most talented programmers Microsoft has (and, one of the best bloggers too). And, he loves stitching. Or knitting. Or whatever they call it. Anyway, Make Magazine sponsored a “Stitch n’ Pitch” night at the San Francisco Giants and it looks like everyone was having a great deal of fun. There are 12 more Stitch n’ Pitch nights coming soon, including one on July 25th here in Seattle.