Tag Archives: web 2.0

Reports of Microsoft’s death have been greatly exaggerated

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It’s probably a bit too late for a April fool’s prank, but Paul Graham’s essay ‘Microsoft is Dead‘ has caused a bit of buzz over the weekend. Like most other pieces of anti-Microsoft blabber, it was on Slashdot earlier today.

I read the article with an open mind and ignored minor errors (for e.g. XMLHttpRequest was invented for Outlook Web Access i.e Exchange, not Outlook). But he really lost me when he mentioned point #4:  

Thanks to OS X, Apple has come back from the dead in a way
that is extremely rare in technology.
[2]
Their victory is so complete that I’m now surprised when I come across
a computer running Windows. 

Gee – I’m not sure what kind of people Paul Graham meets at Y-Combinator, but how can anyone be surprised when they meet someone with the 96% of computers that run Windows? Hell, Slashdot even reported yesterday that Apple’s marketshare had dropped by a bit last month because of Vista. I guess things are a little different in the real world than in web 2.0 bubbleland.

And the way to bring Microsoft back from the dead? According to Paul Graham:

  • Buy all the good “Web 2.0” startups. They could get substantially
    all of them for less than they’d have to pay for Facebook.

  • Of course, we all know how well that’s working for Yahoo. 

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    User generated ads

    2 Replies

    Kiss 106.1, the radio station we usually listen on our way to work everyday recently ran a contest for the best commercial that user’s could come up with. Now, I had heard of contests for the best slogan or the best punch-line before, but this is the first time I’ve heard of anyone holding a user-submitted-commercial contest.

    What makes this contest really unique is the fact that you submit entries by uploading your entry to YouTube and tagging it with “kiss 1061 commercial contest“.

    So, has Web 2.0 finally hit mainstream?

    Is user-generated-content really the future? Or is this just a result of Kiss 106.1 cutting their ad budget by an order of magnitude.

    Philosophical questions aside, here’s the winning entry:

     

     

    All other entries are at http://www.jackieandbender.com/KISSTV3.htm. Most are pretty lame!