Taking requests

Guy Kawasaki is requesting that readers submit their topic requests for his blog. Send him your ideas.

Blogging and ROI

Naked Conversations: "Sometimes, the quest for ROI in all corners of the corporation has caused the problem with customer relations that most reasonable people agree exists. We wanted better ROI from customer support, so we lowered the quality for the support. Marketing was historically to touchy feely for financial reviews, so we started adding ROI [...]

Software for the enterprise (and the web)

I've restarted my Microsoft blog with a specific purpose in mind- software for the Enterprise and how that intersects with what is happening on the Web. The premise is that Enterprises can learn a lot from the agility and scalability being shown on the Web. In addition, a concept that was covered at MIX really [...]

Caterina Fake- “it’s a terrible time to start a company”

Caterina Fake has posted a hilarious (and somewhat insightful) critique of the current climate for new software startups. My favorite quote- “I see some entrepreneurs in photos from *every single event*. Who’s talking to the users, writing the code, tweaking and retweaking the UI? It ain’t the Chief Party Officer.”
I think this may be true [...]

The folly of the “Vista rewrite” meme

Dave Winer: “You can view the 60-percent-Vista-rewrite story as something of a software development IQ test. Anyone who believes that it’s conceivable is someone who hasn’t got the most basic clue about how software development works.”
Well stated. There are plenty of people squawking about this story that have no clue of what they’re talking about. [...]

Web 2.0- From “Partners” to Participants

Don Marti: “From a pre-2.0 point of view, the partner program is what enables companies to interact with you. Start thinking 2.0, though, and the partner program looks more and more like pointless bureaucracy that keeps non-”partner” companies out. Just as you want Googlebot to crawl your product pages, (and some of you will go [...]

MIX06- Recap of Day Two

Here’s a recap of day two:
Joe Belfiore Keynote- Joe led a good session on smart clients and our direction outside of the browser for web applications. Interesting demos of the Yahoo Finance Explorer built on WPF, but I couldn’t help but feel that the audience for that session was a small niche.
AJAX Lessons from the Trenches- This [...]

MIX06- Recap of Day One

Here’s a recap of the first day of the event some observations about the events and content:
Bill Gates Keynote- Microsoft is embracing the Web, and the proof is all around us. Live Clipboard, support for RSS native in the platform, the Atlas toolkit, WPF/e. The future is bright. While we focus on the Web as [...]

Impressions from MIX06- What Happened, What Worked and What Didn’t

Now that the conference has ended, I’ve been thinking about what I learned at MIX this week. As usual, the event wasn’t about the technical content as much as it was about connecting with people. In addition to the customers that I spent time with at the event, I had some great conversations with a [...]

Don’t pitch me if you can’t deliver

No, this isn’t another Scoble-type rant on being pitched. I’m not overwhelmed like Robert has been and as he and I discussed earlier today, I don’t mind being pitched if it is done in the right way (a blind e-mail with no blog or conversation isn’t the right way). I’m certainly not on the A-list, [...]