Image by Photography King ♛ via FlickrTechCrunch: Microsoft’s Ballmer: Android Isn’t Really Free — You Have To Pay Us For Patents: this is all political nonsense and a pathetic play by Microsoft...... The software giant hasn’t been successful in mobile phones, so they’re attempting to ride on Google’s coattails with some software patents. ..... Microsoft is giving phone makers a choice: pay us to use our software, or pay us to use Google’s software. Or pay your lawyers to fight us in court. (Motorola is apparently choosing the latter — no doubt at Google’s urging.)
Microsoft has been left in the dust. It is nowhere on the smartphone stage. It is missing in action on the tablet stage. It was never nowhere on the data software stage. Bing is a joke. And Google is busy cannibalizing Windows - hello Chrome OS, hello Android - and Office - hello Google Apps. So Microsofties actually held a party in Redmond - not making this up - where they ritually buried the iPhone. That has to be a joke.
Now they are out to use legal shenanigans to hurt Android. Android is free. It is meant to be free. So is Windows. Put out a free, minimalist Windows if you want to keep competing. That is the message. Now the innovation is in taking things out and keeping the bare minimum, not in adding yet another feature no one wants and that gives everyone headaches.
But then what is an Economics major CEO gonna do?
TechCrunch
If Web 1.0’s Kryptonite Was the Bust, Web 2.0 Kryptonite Was the Grind: the CEO and founder of the media company I work for were on stage looking awkward and white, but dancing none the less. ..... One word has summed both of these guys for a while now: Tired...... and for me, mostly ended last week when TechCrunch was sold. But the recession didn’t crash this one– exhaustion did. Building media companies– which is what most Web 2.0 businesses are– is a grind. .... We make startups sound easier and more glamorous than they are..... the Industry Standard– the magazine that chronicled the 1990s bubble and held weekly rooftop parties ... A few million dollars is life changing for most people
Opening Weekend: The Social Network Tops Box Office With $23 Million In Ticket Sales
Should Entrepreneurs Bet It All On The Billion Dollar Exit, Or Cash Out Small?: entrepreneurs are almost always wrong. They really don’t understand their customers; they learn by trial and error..... all the Groupon clones. .... If you’re a founder and own 50% of your startup, a $30 million acquisition can be life-changing. With a $15 million payout, you go from poverty to riches. You’re set for life
's growth had plateaued. What could 
do to reach the masses and end up with hundreds of millions of people using the service? Simplify, simplify, simplify. Right now it is so easy to get lost in the service when you are a new user. You first start out by not believing something worthwhile can be said in 140 characters. That is too brief. You may be do not desire to share with the world what you had for lunch. You might not know who to follow. The people you personally know are not necessarily the people with the most interesting 
. What's a 
anyway? 
has to evolve as a service. A stangnant basic service that is hoping to only scale will not cut it. 
at once will have to become 
's growth has been how primitive the search function at the site is. I can't even get it to deliver to me 
I posted several months ago. And all those 
reside on 
's servers.
necessarily has to grow and eat into its ecosystem. That is how 
. The 
engulfed the nearby planets and grew. 
had become unmanageable for me. The 
feature I like, but I can see why it has generated much controversy. One big reason is the old way you could edit the tweet before retweeting it. To that I say, you can still choose to do it the old way. 
's 
page weeks ago, I saw the mistake they were making. They were basically using 
to collect votes for the hottest news articles for that day. That is only one of many uses of 
does a much better job of bringing me the news for the day. And it is not true 
is doing 
on does not quite cut it.
account has to be the starting point for my 
experience. And one thing could add to that experience more than any other: the ability to 
all tweets that might have ever been posted. I should not have to use 
. I should be able to store all links of interest to me right there on 
, and I used to do that. Then 
stopped delivering.
, just like 
is going to have to make sense of 
search is going to be able to read tweets, and make sense of a large number of tweets with the same keywords to give me a feel for what the masses are thinking and feeling. Right now I don't have that. Show me on one screen what the masses are saying in a million tweets. Where is that search and display function?
is not just for now. Real time archives are also valuable. Tell me how 
supporters felt about 
in the summer of 
. Collect all the tweets on the topic and make sense of them all for me. 
talks, and 
does not have enough of it to truly get ambitious as a basic feature of the web experience. I still think 
should go for an 
so it will have a billion dollars to become what email would be if it were designed today. Maybe it will not be 
. It still can be.
has had a scalability problem because it has not had 300 million dollars to pour into its 
. 
has to be always on if it can be part of the basic 
of our web experience. 
were invented today, it would not have a subject line. I would not need your 
address to be able to send you an 
. The 
would always be short. I should be able to read a million such emails in less than a minute. A celebrity should not feel overwhelmed by all the emails she gets because the search feature is so good. Because 
makes sense of a million tweets on the same topic in as much time as Google takes to deliver search results. Well, 
does not, not now.
DM is a joke. You have so little control over it. I get so much 
, I stopped reading DMs months ago. 
trending topics list is so feature poor, it is not even 
. I should be able to do 
with that list. I should be able to do topics, and sub topics, and sub sub topics with that list. I should be able to have a trending topics list based only on my followers. The trending topics list needs to be a full blown 
. 
today is not all it can be. If 
is going to end up with a billion users, it is not going to be the ![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_v01FKGV8enOgaKqnrNeoZ17S5K7Jr25K3jHAi6mYKMVRkAiO7lPaK5VcX5KCsGE7eL1xlaieQ0UL0T292fUnGJ0DnpZv1G4Rvnc02X1TIkrpNcvUVvUQclpqwML9fvfAnIvjJaoF5O5R2cvJTyMeYx=s0-d)