Thursday, May 22, 2003

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Weblog Search Plus Google Weblog search, cool stuff! 12:30:29 PM    comment []

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Intellectual Heroes A good, long interview with one of my personal intellectual heroes, Bob Metcalfe. One reason I admire Metcalfe is the relative grace with which he accepted his ouster by the board of the company he founded, 3Com. Another is his business philosophy, which seems very compatible with that of another of my intellectual heroes, Dave Winer: What Metcalfe refers to as the "ethernet business model" is a model "based on de jure standards with proprietary implementations of those de jure standards, and it is unlike open source in that competitors don't give their intellectual property away. The competition is fierce, but there is a market ethic that products will be interoperable. And the standard evolves rapidly based on market engagement in such a way to value the installed base." So he is a committed, realistic, even hard-bitten capitalist, but also committed to playing by the rules. 10:50:07 AM    comment []

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Intuit Pulls Back on Copy Protection I wish this kind of customer revolt would happen more often. This is GREAT! Eric Hellweg: "When Intuit launched the copy-control program, it predicted that revenue would increase, since customers who had previously purchased only one TurboTax program would have to buy a separate copy for each computer in the house. That assumption was dead wrong. Instead, the move triggered a consumer backlash the likes of which Intuit had never seen. Customer reviews on Amazon.com (AMZN: Research, Estimates) tell the tale. For the 2001 version of TurboTax (which had no activation feature), the average customer-satisfaction rating was four and a half stars. For the activation-enhanced 2002 edition, the average rating dropped to one and a half stars, and the reviews bore titles such as "scumbags," "disaster," and, perhaps presciently, "the demise of TurboTax." " 9:25:57 AM    comment []