Intellectual Happy Hour

Fred Wilson, of Union Square Ventures, writes an incredible post on the evolutions of Google. I agree with him, to a certain extent, Google is starting (only starting) to lose its mojo. Fred nails it on the head, "size is the enemy of efficiency and innovation."

The new XBox 360 sounds like it might just be another homerun for Bill Gates. I hope that game designers can meet the processing power available and user expectations. Let's see how this plays out.

Bo Peabody, from Village Ventures, writes a great column in the Venture Capital Journal on how startups attract the most eclectic and intelligent people. I would agree with eclectic, but intelligence is definitely a subjective assessment that might be somewhat biased.

Jeff Nolan points to the Strategic Board that calls out notes from Jeff Bussgang who blogs live from the Microsoft VC Conference in the Bay Area. The cry is the death of enterprise software - definitely agreed. But, I would further add that I strongly believe in "The Rise of the Stupid Enterprise" and mass customization of corporate user applications (I'm actually in the process of drafting an essay on this).

John Battelle comments on the About.com acquisition by the NY Times. It's great that the old guard is stepping up and rolling with the times (no pun intended). John says; "About provides the Times a platform to explore microcontent without having to - necessarily - extend the Times' brand to everything. And as I've told anyone who will listen to me, I think microcontent is key to winning in the Web 2.0 publishing world." Right on John. The long tail may be a buzzword, as is the concept of microcontent, but in the world of print media, local-local has always been big business. And, this is just the equivalent online.

Michael Stroud posts on AlwaysOn about how Yahoo is, in fact, quite similar to Apple in a fundamental way. Uh huh. So. Call me crazy, but I just don't see Yahoo making a dent in the world of online music. The media business, produced music and video content is not anywhere near letting itself get controlled by an aggregate listing service such as Yahoo. I tend to think (and maybe even hope) that Hollywood will eventually come to play in this arena, and it won't be as simple as what Yahoo proposes.
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