On Seinfeld

How the mighty have fallen. Jerry Seinfeld’s Microsoft ads have been the subject of much speculation and now we can all see what the fuss is about:

Terribly unfunny. Here’s how it should be done Jerry:

On Powerset

After reading that Microsoft wanted to buy Powerset for $100m I decided to have a go on the now legendary new search engine. I wasn’t amazingly, amazingly amazed with the outcome. Google and Powerset came up with broadly the same answers and in one case Google had on its first page what I had in mind when I typed the query. In both cases the search string was identical and parsed in the natural language in which Powerset supposedly has the advantage.

I don’t think it is a bad buy by Microsoft, if nothing else it may help persuade Silicon Valley types that MS is a cool place to work. This is so long as MS doesn’t suffocate Powerset under its bureaucracy after the purchase goes through. This is what Yahoo did to delicious, and it is painful to see such a good idea still sitting on the launch pad. I’ve said many times before delicious is the best bet for anyone to come up with a better text search engine than Google. It has the potential for personalised search in a way Google never will but only Digg seems to do anything about it. Maybe PARC will come along and rescue delicious but since they have no record of acquisitions and came up with Powerset in the first place then I doubt it.

Voice, not text

I think natural language search does have a bright future but not as a text search engine. I was watching one of Bill Gates’ many valedictory interviews and one thing he said that caught my attention is that MS hasn’t yet given up on voice interaction with computer. This brings to mind the scene in Star Trek IV when Scottie says ‘hello computer’ into the mouse but it is intriguing. Text search engines are actually better without natural language search as it is less arduous to type in keywords. However natural language search comes into its own with voice. At the moment Powerset requires you to type the query in but it seems to me that this is not what MS has in mind for it.

I think that MS is looking beyond text search altogether. Gates has already posited his view of the future in which people interact with computers in new ways. Now I know he has left MS full time, but he’s still spending one day per week there. It wouldn’t surprise me if linking Powerset to the voice technology he is excited about is what BillG is spending his 20% time on. If he is then watch out Google.

Read more:
On Joshua Schachter
On Yahoo
On Bill Gates

On Bill Gates

The retirement of Bill Gates reminds me of the end of the Lord of the Rings, it seems to have happened about eight times. I remember him announcing stepping down as CEO, stepping down as CEO, stepping down as Chief Software Architect, announcing his retirement, doing his last CES, doing his final developers keynote, doing his wacky retirement video, announcing his retirement date and now, finally it seems, actually leaving (except he’s still doing one day per week at Microsoft). Like many Microsoft products, it seems there are may versions of the Gates’ retirement. Even in reporting it I have caught the disease and described it twice.

Gates is the standard by which all other technology entrepreneurs will be measured. No doubt there were better coders than him but there is no better strategist. Even though Apple saw the potential of Xerox PARC’s Graphical User Interface first it was Gates who recognised hardware didn’t matter and staked his entire company on that insight. And won.

Even his fiercest critics acknowledge the debt owed to MS. By creating a common OS platform for other developers to build on MS made the personal computer accessible and help laid the foundation for the explosion of the Internet. Yes MS engaged in some rather fruity behaviour down the years but even now, with their power on the wane, we must admit we are better off with them than without.

These days those insights are as sharp as ever. It was Gates who put in train the company’s greatest innovation – the Xbox – and with it the one genuinely distinctive product, Xbox live. In 2003 he predicted the computerless home in an article which I have not seen bettered for its brevity and insight. And now instead of wasting his money on yachts he is giving it away to promote education and combat disease. If he does to malaria what he did to Netscape the world will be a better place.

Read more:

High Stakes, No Prisoners: A Winner’s Tale of Greed and Glory in the Internet Wars

On Microsoft’s biggest mistake

On Microsoft strategy

On XP

On Microsoft strategy

I’ve been reading through some more of the coverage on Windows 7 and two things struck me. First of all Vista has been abandoned. I don’t know what the release date for W7 is but its perfectly conceivable that most users could stick with XP then jump straight to W7, assuming they wanted to stay with Microsoft at all.

The second thing is that with all the features that were demonstrated at D6, touch screens and the like, along with the other devices which have dribbled out like the interactive coffee table MS is looking beyond desktops. Now it is true that Gates has stepped down but I don’t think the current leadership has sufficient imagination to deviate from the strategy he has laid down. In a way they would be stupid to abandon it entirely as whatever else you can say about Bill Gates he is a brilliant strategist.

What it seems to me is that they are creating an operating system for an entire house, not just a desktop. I think MS imagines a world in which it runs your TV, mobile device, coffee table, fridge etc. etc. in the same way in ran your desktop and everyone will have to dance to their tune as everyone did in the nineties. This is why they put all the money into the Xbox – the games console as Trojan horse for the living room. Unfortunately Nintendo have thrown a spanner in the works with the cheaper and much more innovative Wii.

I think MS are as likely to succeed with this as they were with their ill fated attempt to usurp the Internet with MSN. This is not to say that MS has no place in the future but they will never have the dominance they had over the PC desktop. They are not the only company to suffer from such delusions, Apple seems to have similar ideas with Apple TV, iPhone, iTunes and so on. And they have made a similar mistake by tying down their STB to such an extent nobody will use it. They have taken the wrong lesson from the success of the iPod which thrived as because it was built on the back of filesharing, not the iTunes Store.

What any large company aiming to control everything fails to grasp is that those days are over. The ultimate goal of any company wanting to succeed is to look at what their users want rather than what they want. Users are in control now and the companies that recognise it will be the ones that prosper.

On mainstream users

Apart from my co-founders and I, none of my friends are technical. Technically I’m non-technical too, the only programming language I ever started to learn was html and I gave up fairly quickly. While this is a disadvantage for a founder in that I can’t program anything myself it also means I don’t have the curse of knowledge. I have more of an idea of how a mainstream user sees the Internet.

For example, here is a complete list of technology companies people have heard of:

Microsoft
Yahoo
eBay
PayPal
Napster
Google
YouTube
Skype
Apple
Nintendo
Sony

And here is a comprehensive list of technology company founders people have heard of:

Bill Gates

I was having a conversation with a friend and when I mentioned Steve Jobs, my friend asked who he was. This person has two iPods and a general interest in technology but he still had no idea who Jobs was. It surprised me because I see him as one of the most famous people in the world. But then I’m into tech.

It made me realise what mainstream users care about is having products that are easy to use and that work. So the iPod is famous but the man behind it isn’t. What got me thinking about this topic was finding out more about Persai and realising it relied on RSS. I don’t have any stats but I guess the percentage of people using RSS is minuscule. I installed it for a while and it just wasn’t any use to me. Either I search for stories on Google news or I go straight to the blogs I like.

I had the impression that Persai was some kind of browser plug-in which could track likes and dislikes to serve more relevant results than Google. The fact that it is built on top of RSS severely limits its potential adoption. I assume they have plans to take it beyond RSS but if not I smell trouble.