A Meeting with a Mentor..
Having a two hour lunch with your friend and mentor is one thing, having a two hour lunch with your mentor and two of your closest friends and business companions is just pure bliss. That was pretty much the state of affairs today at lunch with my friend and mentor, Peter Bloom and friends: Richard Campbell and Tom Howe. We talked about everything from the future of Linux (which we all agreed needs an economic incentive to progress, see below), visual pinball, the state of on-line poker and lots of other business.
Peter, who was always was a Microsoft skeptic, but not a Microsoft hater, said that his faith in Microsoft technology has grown very substantially over the last few years, especially since .NET has greatly improved. He has seen more and more portfolio companies in his fund make a mission critical business bet on Microsoft and have great success. He thinks the since .NET Microsoft has just gotten it right. That is good news and I have seen much better quality from Microsoft in the last 3 years with .NET, XP and other stuff.
Lastly we all agreed that without an economic incentive and a corporate leader, Linux can never succeed. The reason why is that since it is all volunteer based only the COOL features get built. Richard was talking about how in the open source database he is using, awesome features exist, but boring things like incremental backup don’t. (Which is a deal breaker for any RDBMS for me!) This is why you need a corporate sponsorship of the whole open source universe. (sorry all my utopian society OSS friends, capitalism works, just ask our friends in the USSR…) Why doesn’t evil Larry say 10 million for the first person to come up with the needed boring feature? This will be fun to watch….
6:45:16 PM 
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