Archive for June, 2006

VicG Leaving

Thursday, June 29th, 2006

News today that the GM of my team, Vic Gundotra, will be leaving Microsoft for a year and then joining Google.
It’s a big loss for us, and an even bigger gain for Google (they are dead last in the industry at some of the things Vic knows how to do well).  My only consolation is […]

Pimping

Tuesday, June 27th, 2006

The words “pimp” and “pimping” have become somewhat common, and I often hear people using them incorrectly.  Wikipedia is basically useless on this subject, so I am submitting my authoritative dissertation as a service to the world.
For starters, “pimp” has largely fallen out of use as a term to describe a man who finds clients […]

Deep Structure of Language

Sunday, June 25th, 2006

In English, we use “have” to represent past experience, and “will” to represent future — “I have skied before”, “I will ski tomorrow”.  Since English is full of homonyms, we seldom think about the fact that “have” is also used to indicate posession, and “will” is used to represent desire (”I have some money.  I […]

Ballmer Irrelevant?

Friday, June 23rd, 2006

Business 2.0 says Ballmer is irrelevant.  It’s typical that the tech press is repeating rumors, speculation, and basically piling on.  I hate to be a Kool-aid pimp, but this is just silly.  Ballmer came on-board when everyone said Microsoft was dead, and he doubled revenues in a six-year period.  I challenge anyone to name a […]

User Created Content

Tuesday, June 20th, 2006

Jon Udell continues his crusade to obfuscate the idea of “user-generated content”.  As Orwell implored in “Politics and the English Language”, people should call a thing what it is — it’s user-generated content.
There are problems with Jon’s two proposed replacements.  First, “reader-created context” is what Stumbleupon does.  It’s what digg does.  It’s not what YouTube […]