Krishwords

LinuxWorld has a Q & A session with Linus Torvalds

Some people get a bit too excited about MS, I think. I don’t think they are that interesting. And conversely, some MS people seem to get really hot under the collar about open source. … I’d rather just worry about the technology. The market will take care of itself. Giving customers what they want is the way to make progress, not to try to control them or try to spread propaganda or FUD.

This looks like a good response to people like Matt Asay, who get excited about Microsoft and use their media position to attack Open Source Developers and other architects/promoters of open source. I still welcome Microsoft to the open source fold but not on their terms. They have to completely agree to the open source philosophy and embrace it. Any other tactics will get repulsed in spite of attempts by new media entrants to portray the real open source community in a bad light.

Marketing can be conversations but all conversations cannot be marketing.

I missed much of the brouhaha on how paid elite bloggers to participate in the People Ready campaign. I don’t doubt the integrity of people like Om Malik, Paul Kedrosky, etc. Their credentials are so strong that events like this will not affect them. But I would have expected them to put a disclosure in the posts. That would have added to the credibility. You can call me old school. I do understand that marketing is conversation but all conversations cannot be marketing. Under such a scenario, how do I know that the conversation I am having with a person I trust, is a marketing one or his sincere opinion. I liked the response given by Om Malik on this issue. It definitely raised my respect towards him. In fact, Dave Winer nails this issue correctly when he says

Second, and this is the really important one. It’s one thing to let Microsoft buy space on your site (it’s called advertising) and quite another to accept Microsoft money for words coming out of your mouth. Next month when we read something positive on these sites about Microsoft, how are we supposed to know if it’s an opinion, or just another example of being paid to say something supportive of Microsoft.

I just posted my thoughts on Yahoo-Ebay merger at TechBizMedia. You can check the post here.

Yahoo has replaced its CEO Terry Semel with Jerry Yang, its co-founder. You can read Yang’s post here.

If you just want to see what Facebook platform can do to your web business, just check out the following graph. You can see the growth of apps in the pre-facebook world and how it has changed in the facebook world. The viral nature of Facebook platform is amazing and it open up a great opportunity for all the web companies to tap into the vast user pool.

Source: iLike Team Blog

According to Comscore,

The growth of widgets is amazing. It is where the money is right now. In fact, most of the companies don’t have their widget strategy right. There is a good opportunity for the first mover advantage if the companies manage to get their strategies right.

If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today’s ideas were invented, and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today.

- Bill Gates (1991)

When the facebook platform was opened to public last week, everyone was comparing it to how Microsoft built its ecosystem. But there is one subtle difference between the Microsoft’s approach to their ecosystem and facebook’s approach. Microsoft tried their best to promote their apps over the other third party apps. They integrated their apps much more closely to their platform and had many apps pre installed on their platform. However, facebook didn’t try to promote their apps over the other third party apps. They allowed their apps to compete on a level playing field with third party apps. Except for some of the apps they had from the time before their platform announcement, all their apps appears in the same application directory available for other third party applications. I feel that facebook has shown better ethics than Microsoft in building an ecosystem around their platform. Kudos to facebook for this.

Observed from the Ali Partovi’s interview on VentureBeat.

Check it out. Sam claims that Google might end up acquiring Feedburner. Do I hear Monopoly?