Bill Gates is sure taking his sweet time retiring. While he is busy hyping yet another Microsoft research project to the CEO Summit, Google has vaulted several huge steps ahead in the cloud infrastructure battle with Friend Connect. Mike Arrington’s audience with WonderWall given all due props, what on earth does this have to do with how to spend the 44 billion left on the table after the Yahoo meltdown?
The product manager of this gizmo is none other than Chris Pratley, the genius (seriously) behind OneNote, the Tablet product that briefly made that platform relatively salivating on my way out the door to Macland. Of course, in the OneNote days, it was impossible to get past Allchin and the Office Palace guards to encourage a free OneNote player for the browser. Now Mesh is in the oven, and Silverlight is that freely redistributable player. The times they have a-changed.
But Bill’s pet projects will just not cut it while Google methodically mows down the marketplace with these silly little social media chunks of code. It’s not that Friend Connect is going to slow Facebook down; to the contrary, it’s going to consolidate Facebook’s equity in social metadata and create a groundswell of OpenID adoption which in turn will drive Open Social app development.
Each new OpenID registration produces warm fuzzy feelings for Web site owners who become part of an expanding network of reuse of the original log-in. The terms of service for accessing social clouds will normalize over the next few months as users gravitate toward sites that leverage their original investment in OpenID registration. It’s a Frequent Flyer strategy, producing affinity based on less work, common interface guidelines, and pressure on Facebook and outside clouds to modify their terms of service to avoid having to reinitialize access to their social data over and over.
The same dynamics are starting to accelerate in real time streams over Jabber and XMPP. Facebook is soon to open access to their Chat service, eventually allowing the kind of piping currently enabled between Gchat/Talk, iChat, AIM, and Twitter, which together produce a common set of streams that all are recorded and archived in Gmail’s Chat repository and made available to a single search. Once users don’t care how or even if this aggregation is going on, they view the composite service as the application, removing the motivation for switching.
Of course, the last time we saw this type of viral spread, it was Adsense carried on the river of the blogosphere. Now, with Twitter’s social graph being formed out of the combination of follow and filtered Track, Friend Connect can provide infrastructure to model the unique characteristics of Twitter’s dynamic graph using Facebook’s avatars. LinkedIn’s business relationships, and, eventually, Open Social widgets across high-value sites. Oh, by the way, MyBlogLog — see ya.
But don’t think that just because Google will prosper that Microsoft won’t. Live Mesh can fit into this like a glove, feeding downstream vertical versions of affinity groups to skinned Silverlight containers. We’re within weeks of offerings already from Twhirl, FriendFeed, Summize, and others we just haven’t been told about yet. All Microsoft needs to do is get Bill his gold watch and get back to work.
after 33 years of hyper-energetic work (benefiting the whole world).. is he not tired?
he is not tired because his achievements would not make him never tired…
I literally stopped reading the Mercury News, because of Steve Gilmore’s superficial and convoluted columns. I’lll stop reaching TechCrunch as well. Get him out, Mike.
“cloud infrastructure battle”
“made that platform relatively salivating”
“while Google methodically mows down the marketplace”
“going to consolidate Facebook’s equity in social metadata and create a groundswell of OpenID adoption”
“warm fuzzy feelings for Web site owners who become part of an expanding network of reuse of the original log-in”
“The terms of service for accessing social clouds will normalize over the next few months as users gravitate toward sites that leverage their original investment in OpenID registration”
“producing affinity based on less work, common interface guidelines, and pressure on Facebook and outside clouds to modify their terms of service to avoid having to reinitialize access to their social data over and over.”
“starting to accelerate in real time streams over Jabber and XMPP”
“allowing the kind of piping currently enabled between Gchat/Talk, iChat, AIM, and Twitter, which together produce a common set of streams that all are recorded and archived in Gmail’s Chat repository”
“the last time we saw this type of viral spread, it was Adsense carried on the river of the blogosphere”
“social graph being formed out of the combination of follow and filtered Track”
“can provide infrastructure to model the unique characteristics of Twitter’s dynamic graph using Facebook’s avatars”
“can fit into this like a glove, feeding downstream vertical versions of affinity groups to skinned Silverlight containers”
MAJOR NEWS ANNOUNCEMENT
Steve Gillmor and TechCrunch have licensed the Web Economy Bullshit Generator and have developed the world’s first artificial intelligence blog post bullshit generator codenamed TurdCrunch.
It is now being used by Steve Gillmor to produce unintelligible, meaningless buzzword-filled blog posts on TechCrunch.
May it spread virally like Megan Fox photographs carried on the river of the blogosphere!
Hmmm, seems perfect timing.. for some imperfect experiments…
Ditto @2. This is one of the worst articles on here. Froth and nonsense. Arrington remains Techcrunch’s top writer by a mile, the others would do well to study his style and content.
Seems MS has always been best (event great) at imitation, from OS’s, middleware, browsers and game consoles. I would argue that it is part of their DNA. It will be interesting to see if Ray Ozzie can play this strength effectively in a new era. Learning from Mozilla (ironically), Google and others who value openness (to some degree) and speed to market over the franchise would be a good start. They seem to making gesturing in this direction but could be fake tells. I’m hoping we are starting to see a MS that gives me a reason to spend quality time with their intellectual property.
Trying to find the content in this content.
What’s interesting about that, what, “Gold Watch”?
So is the point of this article to have Bill come back and to inspire the changes necessary to compete with google or to have bill fully retire and prevent distractions on unneccessary projects. I think it would be better to keep bill working, but on more important matters.
Apparently, “Bill’s Gold Watch” is slang for “another story mentioning ’social graph.’”
I truly wonder if anybody can articulate why we should give a shit about social networks. Seriously. As far as I can tell it’s only about finding another place to put an ad.
Interesting slang.
Better watch some cartoons on my blog..
I can’t believe I just read an article with the words “OpenID” and “Bill Gates” and “Gold watch” in one sitting.
Card space, live and the other MS proprietary ID failures are the way of Microsoft.
Microsoft is a very closed company. They have the longest running software moat in the industry besides IBM, and IBM opened the moat a long time ago.
Why google won’t prosper? hmmm… it means google is on top
Why yahoo won’t prosper? hmmm… it means google is on top
“Now, with Twitter’s social graph being formed out of the combination of follow and filtered Track,”
Because everyone in California everyone has $120 AT&T or Sprint unlimited Data & Voice plans to SMS bowl movement updates from the rest room so their friends know they haven’t died in the 5 minutes since the last update.
I have a gophone. 2 years is too much of a commitment for me. I get billed monthly. Twitter is not as promised, guaranteed.
That should have read:
“Because everyone in California everyone has a $120 AT&T or Sprint unlimited data & voice plans to SMS bowel movement updates from the rest room so their friends know they haven’t died in the 5 minutes since the last update.”
I’ll try to be more careful next time!
Yeah, this is really bad. Mike, pull this guy, please.
Is the watch a Rolex
?
@20
http://www.micr...potwatches.mspx
Which ultimately was an attempt to catch up to IBM when they released their RISC Linux watch out of the domino R&D
research.ibm.com/WearableComputing/linuxwatch/linuxwatch.html
“Rerelease what IBM did, and put the M$ logo on it, and do it often” -Microsoft founder Bill Gates
Sorry, the IBM link was off, here it is. It came WAY before MS ever though of making a JIT Windows clone. They couldn’t stand that Linux was ahead.
http://www.rese...linuxwatch.html
“Real time streams over Jabber and XMPP”?
Jabber and XMPP are the same thing. This guy doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about. The rest of the post isn’t any better.
Oh and @2, that was a different Gillmor. However I agree that this post is terrible.
Not sure why one should even advocate data portability? Both google, facebook make money off advertising and people chose them despite knowing that facebook has privacy issues and is full of junk and spammers. On the other hand, google even searches your desktop and they are no difrernet. So consumers have no voice and should not have when something is free. Welcome to capitalism!
I don’t really like the watch.
@1 “benefiting the whole world” HA!
Say that to all the companies that were squashed during the start up phase because of them!!!!!!!! more like slowed down the tech world.
where the hell is peter urban?
@25, That’s exactly it. I can only do so much on sitespaces.net, my social network because it’s free. Since CPM revenue is SO LOW on social networks thanks to Firefox plug ins that filter out the ads, you can’t put any resources into them expecting them to become strong revenue streams.
I am going to change that on ours by charging for something the other social networks never thought of. And people will pay.
If you can only get 10% or 10,000 people to pay out $10. That’s 100k right there, and you will NEVER get that back on CPM, not even with AFF ads, and they are the highest grossing of all on social networking.
It was funny to hear Michael make at comment at the Iron Man screening about scensationalist writings and that they are trying to get away from those types of postings.
I think with Erick in here as an editor (this story seems to be up his alley a bit with style/feel) he is tasked with helping to grow the site’s traffic and is doing a great job. There is 22 comments and this is the 23rd.., yes I know I am adding to the sensationalism by making this comment.., kind of like a california rubber necker on 280 with a cop giving someone a traffic ticket on the side of road.., but this is the point for TechCrunch.., add traffic.
The whole concept of “cloud computing” is still in its infancy and I am already tired of the term. You are contradicting yourself a bit:
“Google has vaulted several huge steps ahead in the cloud infrastructure battle with Friend Connect”…, then:
“silly little social media chunks of code”
Note to all…, just because programs are run and accessed via web servers it does not equal cloud computing.
Can’t follow the writing in this article. What is the watch product referenced? I worked with Chris Pratley at MSFT and he is definitely a smart guy, so I’d love to know more about what he is upto now.
Not sure how that reference fit into the rest of the article.
Is it just me or this article is hard to be understood?
@32, agreed. There are several lines that just don’t make sense and it’s hard to even figure out what the final take-away is supposed to be. Keep Bill involved and be more social-focused?
There is no narrative to the article. This is not the way to write to an online audience.
If I read this correctly, the only thing that Microsoft cares about are Bill’s pet projects [that probably require very small teams of engineers]. The rest of the company must then be providing administrative assistance, then?
It’s gold-plated.
Great perspective. Perfect for weekend reading, when things are a bit slower and we can get a chance to reflect on the big changes of the prior week (what a week!).
Also, it can get a bit slow around here on weekends. I’m at 10-20 refreshes/day on TechCrunch, even on Sat/Sun, and when there isn’t anything to read, I go elsewhere. So, I’m glad that Steve is in there kicking out these stories.
Thanks, Barry. Funny how the intelligent ones leave their real names.
Steve..May be Barry made a joke here..
Joke
are you from the New York Crickets or the Rhode Island branch?
Steve,
We love you! This post was just incredible. Your talk about real time streams and viral spreads stimulated our minds (plus a few other body parts). You really know how to get our rivers of juices flowing in more ways than one.
Keep up the great work baby. All of us (me, Mandy, Candy and Kelli) would love to meet you. I’m sure we could have salivating, mind-blowing conversations that fit into our interests like a glove (*wink* *wink*).
How about we meet at the Fairmont San Jose tomorrow night?
Kisses,
**~~ Sara ~~**
Steve..I am neither from New York Crickets nor from the Rhode Island branch…I am from India.
No, I wasn’t joking.
I apologize Barry and Steve.
I apologize Joke.
can I have the 10 minutes of my life back? ugh, my brain is very angry with me for punishing it like this. First last night’s vodka shots, now this, I’m lucky if it doesn’t pack up and leave me in a lurch.
Sunday morning and another stream of consciousness from Steve Gillmor. This one is better than last Sunday’s because it is shorter. The Saturday morning article from Steve was great, a little long but to the point, and about something tangible, so he can write conventional posts.
So what is this one about? Is Steve trying to create a new Journalism? I think I might be better to hear it spoken, then it would wash over you in the way poetry does. Even if it does not make complete sense, it will spark off thoughts and associations as appears to be the intention.
After the apologetic rounds, the watch still remains a mystery
i laughed all the way through the comments… i think we need just a bit more gilmor…
still laughing… he gives a great rap (turn on a drum machine, he is perfect) and brings out the true genius in the comments…
probably the real reason behind the wapost syndi deal, don’t you think?
It doesn’t make any sense to acquire yahoo. Msn and Yahoo search engines together can’t compete with google
Hilarious. Write a convoluted buzzword filled article and then call the people who are complaining that they can’t filter through all of the meandering, often meaningless or redundant sentences “unintelligent”. Awesome.
Great way to win over an audience. At TechCrunch you get a paycheck because of the reputation for integrity. Don’t squander that by acting like a dick when replying to reader comments with a legitimate complaint.