Please, Give me LiveSoft

Ian [2006-03-18 12:03 PM]

Tim, if you think Bill will respond better to seeing this on a piece of paper, then I respectfully suggest that the prognosis is not good.

Thomas Lord [2006-03-19 01:17 PM]

There's a fine line between provactive and silly and I think that suggestion is right in that opaque cloud that obscures the exact location of that line (perhaps making it perfect to bring on-stage at Mix).

Where is this new spin-off supposed to get revenue anytime soon and, meanwhile, what would that leave behind in the mothership? So, yeah -- putting a good manager and management structure in there, maybe moving a lot of it "off campus", liberalizing policies for partnering within the new division -- those sure wouldn't hurt. The IPO thing seems over-the-top.

Any strategy that starts with "let's win over Google" (in search, ads, and perhaps media discovery/delivery) is a little bit nuts. I think the direction has to be "let's make sure we're playing *enough* (directly or indirectly) in these spaces to make them commodities -- to make sure we get to help shape the Web APIs and reduce the value of the caches and databases." Tactics like shared crawlers and a franchise business model for a server farm for low-level search results....

Meanwhile, while stuff under the Web 2.0 umbrella is and will continue to do a heck of a lot of good, it's going to come and go pretty quickly in the grand scheme of things. Web 3.0 will be roughly the same abstract picture but with APIs at different levels and more interesting components commodetized.

Cycles, storage, database service, and client-side application delivery all becoming commoditized. Technologies like clustering, virtualization, and large-scale distributed file systems are part of it. I predict additionally new very high-level languages for highly parallelizable, migratory, platform-independent persistent programs. There's a slick client-side component missing and that component isn't a web browser. The point?

That's the future for OS's, business apps, and (last to fall) games. That's Web 3.0. You have your little storage fobs to carry around. You have your secure personal micro to carry around. But other than that, clients are generic and *so are servers* -- the apps you need migrate close to where you need them.

Microsoft has to liberalize and manage well its Internet play to have influence on the low-level tech that is the foundation here but kicking it out the door seems pretty dubious.

-t