Vinnie linked to me after I wrote some negative comments about Blogger yesterday (others agreed), and pointed to an interview where Marissa Mayer talks about how Google builds products around constraints. Fast company also used the theme back in November.

What a crock.

Google believes in constraints the same way vice president Cheney is a sniper.

This is another good rant by a very intelligent independent tech analyst. The premise is that constraint-based design is critical, and Google doesn't follow it. From there, we get Not Invented Here, flailing design, etc. The first Google page was constraint-based and brilliant. Since then, it is mostly just 'throw enough smart people at every large problem must produce some great results, right?'

This is the technology version of the business model problems I've been recently meme'ing about. And like that, these are very subtle and hard to argue when they face a track record of success: Google Maps is better than MapQuest; Gmail is becoming the default mail reader among the tech-sophisticates; Google News is influential (although I've switched away).

Orkut was a nice demo but fell flat. Google Base hasn't taken off. Google Video Store isn't so hot. But those three examples took effort to remember, and there is still some cognitive dissonance (Google doesn't always win? What?) When they lose that dissonance, when their introduction of a product is met with skepticism, when they have to market an offering to get traction... that's an important step back.

And it is happening already. Google Desktop should be so good, Dell should be willing to paying for it (like they do Windows, and will with Vista which will make GD harder to adopt). I shouldn't hesitate to download Google Package (haven't even really thought of it). I should have real motivation to use Google Earth more than once.

Because if Google has to pay Dell $1B to bundle its software, and $1B to AOL to keep it on its side, then a sizeable warchest looks less intimidating. And its talent pool is going to feel the Web 2.0 lure when it is clear they're no longer all going to be multimillionaires.

James Governor's MonkChips: Why Google is not about constraint-based design, 37Signals is, Europe too

There are at least four such "super-bases" in Iraq, none of which have anything to do with "withdrawal" from that country. Quite the contrary, these bases are being constructed as little American islands of eternal order in an anarchic sea. Whatever top administration officials and military commanders say -- and they always deny that we seek "permanent" bases in Iraq -– facts-on-the-ground speak with another voice entirely. These bases practically scream "permanency."

Unfortunately, there's a problem here. American reporters adhere to a simple rule: The words "permanent," "bases," and "Iraq" should never be placed in the same sentence, not even in the same paragraph; in fact, not even in the same news report. While a LexisNexis search of the last 90 days of press coverage of Iraq produced a number of examples of the use of those three words in the British press, the only U.S. examples that could be found occurred when 80% of Iraqis (obviously somewhat unhinged by their difficult lives) insisted in a poll that the United States might indeed desire to establish bases and remain permanently in their country; or when "no" or "not" was added to the mix via any American official denial.

TomDispatch - Tomgram: A Permanent Basis for Withdrawal?

They already have their own designer clothes, health insurance and therapists. Now more and more American pets are enjoying their own birthday parties.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/dmv/5815543/

Oddly Enough News Article | Reuters.com

I've finally decided to weigh in on the 'VC Disruption' thread, in part because one of my earlier posts seems to be heavily cited in the discussion. A couple of caveats before I proceed.

It is an interesting thread, and I am interested in to where it goes. It's interesting -- certainly my Web 2.0 take-away is that it really doesn't make as much sense to prepare a business for venture capital so much as come up with an aggressive rampout and marketting strategy. Most of the costs can stay pretty low -- right, Decius?

Due Diligence: VC Disruption? Part One.

In case you missed it, proposed IRS Regulation 409A, dealing with deferred compensation, is making everyone in the startup community run around like chickens with their heads cut off. It’s a broad regulation, but in a nutshell, for private companies it redefines the way companies determine fair market value in granting stock options.

Wow. This was something I missed by ignoring the usual "how to start a company" talks in 2005. Great resource here for something that makes the super-small budget startup... much more expensive for the company and/or the option-receiving employees.

Feld Thoughts

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)