This is the thing that worries me about the acquisitions that Oracle is making in open source software, what if they came to the conclusion that they would never overtake SAP in license revenues and that the only way they could beat us was by not fighting our war but changing it. If that’s the case, maybe what Ellison’s crew is doing is buying their own LAMP stack and replacing the “M” with “O” and bundling in Fusion middleware with it? That would be a game changer and definitely not fighting yesterday’s war. In a recent Credit Suisse conference interview, Ellison spent a great deal of time talking about subscription revenue and open source, which makes me believe he may have come to the conclusion that the only way he can beat SAP in the application business is to do something he believes we won’t be willing to do, namely take away the license component of our economic model.

Venture Chronicles - Fighting Yesterday's War

Bill Gates just finished his keynote here at the RSA Conference in San Jose. He gave a good show and even dropped security buzzwords such as botnets, rootkits and phishing. He also mentioned malicious attacks against mobile phones as an example of current trends.

Bill's presentation focused on four things that we need: trust ecosystem, engineering for security, simplicity and fundementally secure platforms.

On authentication his comment was simple: "passwords won't cut it anymore".

Likewise, on simplicity of security systems he said: "we absolutely have to do better".

F-Secure : News from the Lab

So what to say about all this? After all, can we really expect private companies to effect national and international policy? Perhaps if they banded together - Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL (GYMA) - and said "Enough! We ask the Chinese government to respect the basic rights of humans to free speech and free association!" After all, besides the universal claim that "going into China, even censored, is better than not going in, in terms of total information available to the Chinese user," the real reason all these companies are going in is, well, their competitors are going in. What if they all agreed to hold hands and...not jump?

Oh please, I then say to myself. Don't be freakin' naive. Unity on an issue as freighted as national policy on China? This from a group of companies who can't even interconnect their goddamn IM networks? It'll never happen.

John Battelle's Searchblog: Never Poke a Dragon While It's Eating

In case you run across the acronym AGILEAMY, it was contrived by venture capitalist Brad Feld:

In case you were wondering about the new category "AGILEAMY", it's for news and thoughts on the following companies: Aol, Google, Iac, Liberty, Ebay, Amazon, Microsoft, Yahoo. I figured this was an acronym that could actually be pronounced (vs. GAAMEILY or YIEMALAG) -- plus it's named after my wife.

Entrepreneurial Engineering: What is AGILEAMY?

There are some things that become so ubiquitous and familiar to us - so seemingly obvious - that we forget that they actually had to be invented. Here's a case in point - the weblog post's permalink. I mean - let's think about it. The problem was that a weblog's front page is by far its most visited page. This is the page where everyone actually sees your content (or at least it was until the creation of RSS feeds). But it's not possible for someone to effectively bookmark or link to that particular entry on that page, because shortly it will scroll off the bottom. Added to that, bookmarks operate at the level of pages, not posts. So how do you handle that? How can you make it possible for people to link to something with a higher level of granularity than just the page? Moreover, how can you get them to link to something that's not actually on the page you're looking at?

On Permalinks and Paradigms... (plasticbag.org)

Simon Wellison notes taken during the Joshua Schachter, lecture at the Carson Workshops Future of Web Apps Summit today:

Nice pointers on building Large Web Apps (particular: folksonomy-based)

Irish Developer Network - Things to Look For When Building Large Apps

The Time Barron’s Investing Thesis is as follows.

* Step 1: Buy Barrons and Read Barrons
* Step 2: Do whatever Barrons says to do.
* Step 3: Wait.
* Step 3: Scan Time Magazine Covers; if a given week’s Time Magazine Cover agrees with Barron’s investment decision see Step 6, if not return to Step 3.
* Step 6: Exit the position you entered into in Step 2.
* Profit.

Long or Short Capital » The Time Barron’s Investing Thesis

Valentine's Day is right around the corner, and everyone knows that's one of the most chocolate-centric holidays around. This year, though, there will be no treating your sweetheart to a Chantico after the big Valentine's Day dinner, because Starbucks (Nasdaq: SBUX) has discontinued the decadent drinkable chocolate.

This is a real pity. A couple of weeks ago I was in a Starbucks (rare event) that offered it (also fairly rare). I ordered it and found it to be wonderful. Yes, I know it has an insane calorie/ounce ratio. At 6oz it was more than enough, quantity-wise. I am not a coffee drink but I am a coffee house addict. Chantico is an ideal drink for someone like me (if I ended up at Starbucks). Or, was.

Chantico and Coffee Don't Mix? [Fool.com: Motley Fool Take] February 13, 2006

This is a must read story on Google, explaining how competition is heating up, advertisers are actually leaving the Google 'pay per click and search' fold, and how Google reminds Barron's of Amazon back when it was selling for $400 per share and Blodgett was making a case for it to be $800. (One of the interesting asides in the story is how Henry Blodgett is now making a case where he could see Google hitting $100 per share.)

Overview of the recent Barron's post, summarizing the Google risks.

Fool.com: Mishedlo [Post of the Day] February 13, 2006

As a leader, you're probably not doing a good job unless your employees can do a good impression of you when you're not around.

800-CEO-READ Blog: Quote -- Leadership