Filtered for Purity
I spent some time this week at CNet’s Web Builder conference, and heard “usability expert” Jared Spool go on and on about how expensive sites aren’t necessarily usable sites. The News.com wrapup: “Users find that the less ‘readable’ a page is, the more authoritative, clear, and useful it is.” Attention David Carson…
Also at Builder, Netscape spent some time explaining how open source will help evolve the browser. They’re touting that an XML parser has already been checked in to the source, and that the browser could potentially become much smaller.
From Back Office to front office… Microsoft has discovered the perfect way to make money on their web sites…and coopt their competition at the same time: license the technology. They’re already doing it with Expedia, where the Microsoft-designed travel reservations system has been licensed to Northwest, KLM and Continental. This week they announced that they’ll adopt a similar strategy in consumer financial services, where they’ll license the Investor technology to banks and brokerages who want to offer new Internet-based services.
With Intel’s announcements this week of lower earnings, maybe its time to reexamine the hardware/software network effects that are the key to their strategy. Here’s a problem: Pentium II lacks killer software.
More network-effect problems: micropayments just aren’t happening. (This is supposed to be news?)
Whoops. Did we say $872 million? We really meant $772 million.
You’ve got CarlMail: “After you subscribe to the list you’ll divide your email into two categories: the mail that’s from Carl, and the mail that’s not. And, I’m willing to wager, you’ll refer fondly to the mail from Carl as ‘CarlMail,’ as in ‘I got CarlMail today! And did it ever brighten my morning!’”