"I think that's a weak rebuttal. You can have a distributed Twitter that is everything in functional form that the original is. Such a service could be made far more reliable, data portable, and open to future features and innovation.
Twitter is not Michaelangelo's pi eta, it's a messaging application." - Alan Wilensky
"As millions of Institutional Investors read my blog and seek my advice regarding tech sector investments, I have decided to salt Fred's comments with some unsolicited moral porridge, something that shall stick to the ribs of investors and not run off, as tech news is want to do. Investors! Heed me! Hold off on the Yahoo call. Yahoo's wise, though beardless founder, has made a decision that is in the best interest of the industry at large, in the long term. Yahoo is being helmed back to its center; back to the days when lasting architectural foundations of internet systems were made to last and deliver value for more than one trading cycle, more than one quarter's report. The merger would have been a drawn out fiasco, and resulted in naught. The new fear of G-d that is Yahoo's sweaty legacy of this non-deal, is that the preeminent engineers and smart y pants people that built the Yahoo legacy, are for a moment, back in the driver's seat. You, shareholder, may be currently dismayed. But..." - Alan Wilensky
"A long strange trip. Yahoo, the one-time almost permanent leader off all things internet, veered off course to mimic a Hollywood entertainment agency, thereby sabotaging their far lead in open systems and user-centric communications tech. They underwent a management culture upheaval, where the middle grew fat, cigar chomping, and Byzantine. The technical meritocracy temporarily faded as do nothing managers cut deals with questionable entertainment industry bozos.. They lost their ad monetization focus. They became vulnerable to a torpid giant. They have gone through a shock - now if the market shows forbearance (not bloody likely), they may, underscore may, bring their unified platform and open source API/computing platform (Open Hadoop, Ubiquity API of all platforms) to fruition. This could be a good thing - I implore the shareholders to suspend disbelief, for now. Fat chance of that. BTW: I am a simpleton; however, in group meetings among consultants, 2006 October, minor Yahoos met..." - Alan Wilensky
"The Ycombinator model was way forward looking. Back in 2004-5, Paul Graham saw that the NRE and RE were on a declining path. Not everyone agreed. For a neat look into the inside of Ycombinator, and one of their vaunted charges, take a look at this video blog post of the now famous Justin Khan and Emmet Shear, who went after selling Kiko, a Ycombinator venture, to found JustinTV. Here are two links:
http://bizcast.typepad.com/cli......
http://bizcast.typepad.com/cli......" - Alan Wilensky
"I quote you. "But even Google is not without fault. It has bought a number of assets over the years and several of them have languished." When a Google VP visited the FT lab regarding joint projects, someone asked him about the recent spate of acquisitions that seemingly disappeared. His answer was very long, but one quip caught my attention, "..oh, you mean our 'nonperforming asset division'. My take away from that meeting was that they did not have a primary harvesting strategy for their acquisitions under a certain size - they were collecting people and IP. Regarding Delicious. I still use it as a research tool. I tell all my less wired cohort that they should consider using delicious rather than emailing links to me, and i show them the browser extension. The whole tutorial takes about 5 minutes...and never sticks. Combine this lack of stickiness of the less techno-savvy, with the fact that there are so many new services that encroach on delicious' territory, and....some small..." - Alan Wilensky
"Ask me, both as a user and a SMB consultant: "give one up, Facebook or Wordpress, choose only one."
No contest, I would cut Facebook loose in a heartbeat. Wordpress is a platform for delivery of services beyond blogs. Facebook, as a medium for promoting small and medium business, or as a platform for fostering better communication between a business and its user constituency fails miserably.
However, neither of these observations cuts ice in the metric of buzzyness. Facebook is more valuable in terms of the market of ghost valuations - functionality has very little to do with the market of perception.
ThruDispatch, my dead baby for indy mobile dispatch, was DOA at VC due to the fact that although it was a defacto social network for automotive mobile servicers, was not worth funding due to its not being a 'mobile social network for consumers or teens"." - Alan Wilensky
"The current industry dependency on Mid-end or free RDBMS is the 'chief feature' that leads to scaling problems in Web Applications gaining large numbers of active accounts. Particularly when the case is applications that generate many small, transient joins.
We have raised a generation of programmers and engineers that have relied on getting small, proof of concept applications backed by these toy databases - they are unaware of the solutions that the financial and other high volume data application sectors have used to overcome write saturation. The current fix for these web/database apps (Clusters and Mirroring) are often worse than the problem they seek to solve.
While it is an interesting and provocative statement to posit that there is a human, organizational counterpart to transaction scaling (and there well may be something to it) at its root, it is a technical maturity problem that is certainly centered in the Web industry's workforce - gee maybe I just made your point!" - Alan Wilensky
"Small and mid local business need better solutions than a mere 'web page', that just sits there and is that is driven exclusively by search and SEO.
SEO is the biggest scam for the small biz person; recurring fees for one time edits! There must be a way to weave together the social media presence artifacts for a small business to not only expose it's business specialty and value, but to create a live channel for local marketing - even non-local, hmmm.
I have been groping forward with this strategy by tying together some locals: Facebook, Twitter accounts, Friend feed, more....into a landing page with Ustream, a blog, etc.
I don't know where we are going...but I think, I intuit, that there is something better here than a web site for small, specialist, business." - Alan Wilensky
"I just couldn't resist. I was half joking. I occasionally work on short term background research for institutional investors, but that work is being displaced by contract PM work that is closer to near term execution.
The days of the hired pundit are over in the B2B application space, and is being overtaken by a more pragmatic "product prostate exam" methodology." - Alan Wilensky
"As if the company can’t find out what to do with the 20 billion in cash that the transaction would incur. It’s ridiculous. You can launch an empire with that money, acquire willing victims, rather than boat anchors that are so unwilling.
Forget the stock part of the transaction - the cash man, the cash…what are these guys thinking…? Make your existing and under performing on-line channels work, throw a minuscule amount of that cake at it.
Gawd. What an uninspiring story…Where is the creativity? Is this what the best minds in Redmond can come up with? It’s as if they fell ass backwards into the money and don’t know what to do.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, yahoo should hold out and continue to quietly work on their ubiquity platform." - Alan Wilensky
"You dont mean 37s basecamp? What does that have to do with anything? That's a PM solution! I'm talking public facing. you are way off." - Alan Wilensky
"I'm sure that new language bindings are not too far away. When Amazon S3 and EC2 came around, it took the ruby community about 4 months to get adapters out the door. Now, we have keroku, a Web IDE for Rails Apps - unfortunately, they don't host the database, which the Achilles heel of Rails scaling issues.
My bottom dollar says that bungee labs has some serious heartburn now - they have a strange and unfamiliar language, zero community (comparably), and an uphill fight. The Python crowd must be crowing, crowing with delight.
Now, Mr. Winer, can you recommend a good Python book?
:)" - Alan Wilensky
