Deviant Abstraction

An excellent moves for everybody. Here is an excerpt from the emails they have sent us.

We’re writing to let you know that Google has acquired JotSpot. We believe this is great news for our users. More importantly, we want to reassure you that you’ll continue to have uninterrupted access to your account. Both Google and JotSpot are committed to supporting our customers, and we understand that users have invested a lot in our products. In the near-term, we’re focused on migrating JotSpot to Google’s systems and datacenters. We’ll work hard to make that move as seamless as possible so that customers won’t be inconvenienced.

Why is Google acquiring JotSpot?
Google shares JotSpot’s vision for helping people collaborate, share and work together online. JotSpot’s team and technology are a strong fit with existing Google products like Google Docs & Spreadsheets and Google Groups.

What does this mean for JotSpot customers?
We believe that joining Google will accelerate our team’s vision of offering users the best collaboration platform on the web. Google shares that vision and presents us with the world’s best environment for delivering on it. We’ll be taking advantage of Google’s world-class systems infrastructure and operations expertise to ensure that access to your JotSpot is fast and reliable. We can’t share any of our plans publicly just yet, but we can tell you that we’re incredibly excited about the possibilities. We can’t think of a better company to have been acquired by.
Will paying customers still be charged?

We will no longer be billing customers for the use of the service. Although you will still have use of the product at your current pricing plan, we won’t charge you anymore when your current billing cycle expires.

This post shows some companies are already dead since in the end, surviving is a cultural thing. I know some companies which will not make it…

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“Not that iTunes is fair and balanced, either. I don’t know the details, but I have heard that they are like record stores of yore — doling out position (visibility) to a very very limited number of artists. No surprise there — there is limited space. I’ve also heard that true indie artists get inferior treatment — lower royalty rates (or higher entry costs), less attention, and sometimes they are refused entry outright. Who’s manning the velvet rope here? What happened to that Long Tail where everything is available?”

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If you want to get a glimpse of the future of information management, you should click here.

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We all know this chart is already obsolete and somewhat irrelevant. However, reflecting upon it is always useful.

What it really shows is the mainstream view of these technology. You can see VoIP or Web 2.0 but not P2P which is an emerging system trends (in the sense that a lot of its potential is still untapped). Some points are senseless (Grid computing: what does it mean? MPI is already there and battle-tested) and mix commercial application (VoIP), applied research (sensor networks) and fundamental research (quantum computing). In a way, this is good: it lays down some frontiers the academic community has artificially created.

Via JdN

… And therefore technology providers hardly earn their life selling technology. They have to exploit it to earn money.

This is a Wired article on how Zune (MS’s music player) is basically a betrayal of PlayForSure (MS’s DRM system).

We can see this scheme in advertising, where Advertising.com according to Startup Review maintained their position through not licensing their technology. On another hand in France where market maturation is really less advanced, AuFeminin precisely maintains their position through licensing of their adServer.

Actually, IT is now so important for business, it can disrupts and create new business model. If the technology is so disruptive (targeting changes the rule of advertisement), you will not be able to sell it (ever see something disruptive in a RFP?) unless using your personal network.

I will not drawn the obvious conclusions here.

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This is a great interview of Reid Hoffman. A great lesson in entrepreneurship and “enterprise wisdom”.

I do wonder one point. He states: “Smart people tend to think that they can execute on a complex plan. Executing on a complex plan is generally a recipe for failure.” What is a complex plan? How would you define one compared to a simple one?

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In this post, John Battelle shows us a Microsoft slide showing how MS expenses outsells his competitor (mainly Google and IBM). John then states Google engineering department operates as a R&D lab.

This raises an interesting question, deeply rooted in today’s questions what is R&D? Should we separate (as we do in France) fundamental research and applied research? What is the best way to do R&D?

If we look at the past’s big names, we can see how much those questions are somewhat falsely named. For instance John Von Neumann invented both computer and game theory (and a lot of other research). Metcalfe invented Ethernet and founded 3Com… Basically, all those human beings have done everything and did what they wanted to.

On an organizational level, this question is way more complex to answer: how should R&D be handled, what is expected from it? Papers? Products? New way of understanding reality?

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His advices apply also to most creative outsourced work.

Here they are:

1. If you want average (mediocre) work, ask for it. Be really clear up front that you want something beyond reproach, that’s in the middle of the road, that will cause no controversy and will echo your competition. It’ll save everyone a lot of time.
2. On the other hand, if you want great work, you’ll need to embrace some simple facts:
3. It’s going to offend someone. If it doesn’t offend them, then it will make them nervous. The Vietnam Vets memorial offended a lot of people. The design of Google made plenty of people nervous. Great work from a design time means new work, refreshing and remarkable and bit scary.



4. It’s not going to be easy to sell to your boss. That’s your job, by the way, not mine. If you want me to do something great, you’ve got to be prepared to protect it and defend it. Come back too many times for one little compromise, and you’ll make it clear that #1 was what you wanted all along.
5. You can’t tell me you’ll know it when you see it. First, you won’t. Second, it wastes too much time. Instead, you’ll need to have the patience to invest twenty minutes in accurately describing the strategy. That means you need to be abstract (what is this work trying to accomplish) resistant to pleasing everyone (it needs to do this, this and that) and willing, if the work meets your strategic goal, to embrace it even if it’s not to your taste.
6. Help me out by pointing out the work you’d like this to be on a peer with. If you want a website to be like three others (in tone, not in execution) then point it out. In advance.
7. Be clear about dates and costs. Not what you hope for, but what you can live with!
8. You don’t know a lot about accounting so you don’t backseat drive your accountant. You hired a great designer, please don’t backseat drive here, either.
9. If you want to be part of the process, please go to school. Read design magazines or take a course from Milton Glaser or get a subscription to Before & After. By the way, that one link is the single best part of this post.
10. This one may surprise you: don’t change your existing design so often Not when your kids or your colleagues tell you it’s time. Do it when your accountant says so.
11. Don’t get stressed about your logo.
12. Get very stressed about user interface and product design. And your packaging.
13. Say thank you.

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This article proposes a valorization of a network of n log(n) instead of n^2 according to Metcalfe’s law. They try to differenciate value in each link through this.

A must-read.

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