Changing Way

The 6-word memoir meme has spread to Johnny Bunko, the career guide in manga form (previously). Or rather, it’s spread to the Bunko blog, via the personal blog of author Dan Pink.

It’ll soon be time for Bunko haikus (Bunkus?). Here are a couple, the first of which is merely a compression of the six Bunko lessons into 17 syllables.

Do not plan. Think strengths.
It’s not about you. Persist.
Make great mistakes. Leave mark.

Chopsticks snap at dusk
Hastening a new morning
For Johnny’s career.

Today, both Newton and Leibniz are given credit for developing calculus independently. Chances are that most of my readers are nerd enough to know that, and most of the others are close enough to the nerd neighbourhood to find it interesting.

Less well known is that the phenomenon of simultaneous discovery—what science historians call “multiples”—turns out to be extremely common. So it’s just as well that Malcolm Gladwell tells us in his current New Yorker article. The article is to a large extent an admiring account of Nathan Myhrvold and his Intellectual Ventures.

So it’s just as well that Mike Masnick tells us that Gladwell, while “a truly fantastic writer… misses the real point.”

As Gladwell points out — rarely is it about “genius,” but about the fact that all of the previous work in the field naturally leads to this end result — and if it wasn’t one person discovering it, someone else would. The article lists out big name invention after invention that all have “multiples”…

[But] if these ideas are the natural progression, almost guaranteed to be discovered by someone sooner or later, why do we give a monopoly on these ideas to a single discoverer? Myhrvold’s whole business model is about monopolizing all of these ideas and charging others (who may have discovered them totally independently) to actually do something with them. Yet, if Gladwell’s premise is correct (and there’s plenty of evidence included in the article), then Myhrvold’s efforts shouldn’t be seen as a big deal. After all, if it wasn’t Myhrvold and his friends doing it, others would very likely come up with the same thing sooner or later.

The best term I can think of for what Myhrvold is up to is idea squatting, since it is rather similar to domain squatting. I wondered if I’d coined a new term, but a quick Google showed me that Machiavelli had beaten me to it, albeit by only four years, rather than by five centuries as I originally suspected.

By the way, a quick Domize showed that ideasquatting.com is still available. But I didn’t grab it, since I’m no domain squatter. Thanks to Mashable Adam for posting about Domize. And thanks to Open Glyn for dishing the (tech)dirt on Masnick on Gladwell.

Here’s an interesting juxtaposition of stories from Techmeme. The WSJ story is one of many today about Zune 2.5. The link to WSJ takes you only to a couple of paragraphs and an invitation to subscribe, so you’re probably better off with a link to a real article (e.g., at Engadget).

However, none of the stories about Zune 2.5 I’ve scanned say much about DRM. I believe that the Zuniverse is ridden with the stuff.

That brings us to the second story in the above screenshot. The title is yet another exaggerated rumour of music’s death. But the post itself is an excellent account of what Microsoft will do, on August 31, to people who bought from MSN Music.

On that day, Microsoft will turn off the servers that they maintain for the sole purpose of validating that the songs that people have already “purchased” through MSN Music are still theirs to play. Those people (hereafter “the victims”) will not notice the change right away. The victims will only notice it when they purchase a new computer, or when they upgrade the operating system on their current computer, or when the hard drive in their computer dies and needs to be rebuilt/reinstalled. At that point — transferring the music files they have “purchased” to another drive or a new computer — the Microsoft music player running on the victim’s PC (like iTunes, but all Microsoft-y instead of Apple-y) will make a call to Microsoft’s validation servers to verify that the music files were legitimately purchased. This call will fail, since the servers are not responding, since Microsoft has intentionally turned them off. The Microsoft music player will then conclude, incorrectly but steadfastly, that the music files were downloaded illegally and that the victim is a filthy pirate, and it will refuse to play them.

What can we learn from the juxtaposition of the two Techmeme stories? If we are music buyers, we should avoid DRM like the plague, especially when it comes from Microsoft. If we are writing about Zune, or about pretty much anything to do with digital music, we should tell our readers about the DRM implications.

Or we should at least ask our readers to comment on the DRM implications. So, can someone enlighten us about Zune and DRM?

One of the most interesting aspects of free/open source software is its relationship with end users, which for the purpose of this post I’ll define as users who are not also developers. Paul Young of Product Beautiful presents an thought-provoking case.

Open source developers have created products so good, that they are nearly indistinguishable to an end user from commercial software. This has changed the mindset and expectations of users to think that they are the persona that the developer is writing code for, but are they? Some applications, such as Firefox, have made the leap and are clearly developing for an end user. For an example of a FOSS project that hasn’t, look no further than Pidgin… a free and open source instant messaging (IM) client… Obviously, there is a huge gap between the expectations of the users and the developers. Who normally bridges that gap? Product Management.

As a once (and future?) product manager, I found Paul’s post particularly interesting. The comments are also good, including the ones that pointed out that Vista has a product management and a gap separating it from its users.

Perhaps there could be some sort of certification of free/open source projects. Some could wear the badge: our users are our customers (e.g., Firefox). Others could wear: our users are us, the developers, and others with the same tastes (e.g., Pidgin?).

I saw Paul’s post via Matt Asay’s Open Road blog. I find it strange that a blog about openness has a partial feed, rather than a full feed, and requires registration for comments. In other words, it’s more like Pidgin than Firefox. And so, with some sadness, I’ll unsubscribe from it.

The biggest tech story of the year so far is the acquisition of Yahoo by Microsoft, and the biggest current tech story is that the deal didn’t happen.

Let’s review, from a few different perspectives, starting with Yahoo itself. CEO Jerry Yang poses the question Ok, so now what?.

With Microsoft’s withdrawal, we’ll be better able to focus our energy on growing our industry leadership and maximizing value for stockholders. We’ll continue to execute on our plan — making your Internet experience as personal, relevant, open and social as possible, serving advertisers so well they insist on working with us, and opening up Yahoo! in a way that developers dream of.

Meanwhile, one of the leads at Yahoo News is: Yahoo shares fall 17 pct after Microsoft withdraws bid. The story tells that Yahoo shares fell to $23.73 in early trading, while Microsoft’s rose 2.3 percent to $29.30. Yahoo is up slightly to $24 right now, which is $9 less than Microsoft’s last offer.

I found via Fred Wilson, a poll on where Yahoo will close today . Yesterday, his prediction was $26, and mine was $18. I’ll actually be happy if he is still closer than me at the end of the day. But I fear that a further slide is only a shareholder lawsuit or two away.

There’s another poll related to the non-deal over at TechCrunch: Does Ballmer Need to Go? Currently “too soon to tell” has a comfortable lead, with “yes” and “no” tied for second place. Those are the only three candidates: I couldn’t find “Ballmer should go, but not for Microhoo-related reasons.”

So the deal, even thought it didn’t happen, continues to create distractions for both Microsoft and Yahoo. Google is the winner.

To put it in a few other ways:

• Ballmer backs off, writes to Yang that “clearly a deal in not to be.”
• Yahoo can stop worrying about Microsoft, and start worrying about shareholder lawsuits. As Om puts it:
  

  They said no to $31-a-share bid. (Apparently, Microsoft raised it to $33 a share… ) If the stock skids to say $21 a share, the shareholders are going to be might pissed… In other words, at a time when Yahoo, its management and its board of directors need to be focused on rebooting the company, they are going to be distracted by these nagging problems.

• Of course, if Y! stock falls that low, Microsoft might be back.

I was wrong. I thought that the deal would happen, because it seemed by far the best that Y! shareholders were going to do. I still don’t how Y! stock does anything but plummet next week, and I don’t see how it gets up to Microsoft’s offer price in the forseeable future.

This post concludes my series on Automattic making money. The best structure for the post seems to be the time-honoured, time-based structure: past, present, and future.

I’ll start with a list of the past posts in this series.

• How is Automattic Going to Make Money? is the introduction to the series, which I posted almost two months ago now.
• Making Money From WordPress.com. This, the most successful post at this blog so far, is about how Automattic makes money from the WordPress.com service it hosts.
• Automattic Profits From WordPress, the open source software project.
• Automattic Making Money From Other Projects, such as Akismet.

Now, on to Automattic’s past. In some ways, there isn’t much of it, since the firm was founded in December 2005, and is often described as a startup. But there is more history than that might suggest. WordPress is the successor to b2/cafelog, which goes back to June 2001. One of the reasons this is important is that WordPress inherited from b2 its use of the GPL, and hence has always been free/open source software.

WordPress 1.0 was released in 2004. That same year, Yahoo acquired Toni Schneider’s startup, Oddpost, and so Toni joined Yahoo. While there, he founded the Yahoo developer network which allows third party software developers to use Yahoo as a platform for creating Yahoo-powered applications and services.

As CEO of Automattic, Toni has cultivated what might be termed the WordPress developer network, but is referred to as the WordPress ecosystem by shameless buzzword-slingers. This ecosystem includes WordPress consultants, theme developers, and plugin developers.

My main comment on the present is that things are changing fast. I’ll give an example of change for each of the following: WordPress.com, WordPress, and Akismet. Sonific is one of the means by which you can include music in a WordPress.com post. That will cease to be true on May 1, when Sonific is going offline.

WordPress 2.5 was released about a month ago. Its emphasis is on usability, but not everyone considers it an improvement. When WordPress.com moved to the 2.5 code base, there were complaints about the new admin interface, and about the suddenness of the change. Bloggers using WordPress (as opposed to .com) of course have more control over their blogs, including control over when to move to the new interface.

As a third and final example of recent change, consider Mollom. It’s a new competitor for Akismet, and will probably be a strong one.

If you read this far in the hope of finding bold predictions about Automattic’s future, you’re out of luck. If such predictions ever do come from me, they will probably get their own post. The best hint about the future, and hence the best closing sentence for this post and for the series, is one that Matt wrote after Automattic raised a second round of funding ($29.5M) earlier this year.

Automattic is now positioned to execute on our vision of a better web not just in blogging, but expanding our investment in anti-spam, identity, wikis, forums, and more — small, open source pieces, loosely joined with the same approach and philosophy that has brought us this far.

Mashable Kristen seems positively giddy over the news.

Even before Google acquired Feedburner last year, integration of Google ads into Feedburner feeds was an exploratory wonderment that many wanted to blossom into fruition.

I see ads as weeds rather than flowers. I won’t be planting any in my feeds. If I were the polling type, I would ask: what’s more annoying, a partial feed, or a feed with ads?

By other, I mean other than WordPress. We are almost at the end of my series of posts on Automattic, and how the firm makes money. We’ll start by noting that the firm provides a handy summary of its projects. Some of them are covered in earlier posts in this series (e.g., WordPress.com).

There are three non-WordPress projects: Akismet, bbPress, and Gravatar. (Actually, to describe them as “non-WordPress” is to simplify since, as we will see, each has firm connections to WordPress.) I find the first of these the most interesting, and I know I’m not alone in that. Askismet is an ambitious project.

Automattic Kismet (Akismet for short) is a collaborative effort to make comment and trackback spam a non-issue and restore innocence to blogging, so you never have to worry about spam again.

Although Akismet is an Automattic project and is WordPress.com’s spam cop, it is not only for WordPress blogs. The Akismet API is published so that the server can be invoked from other applications.

The Akismet server is unusual among Automattic projects in that it is closed source. This seems to be the norm for spam-fighting server code: it is also true of Akismet’s rivals Defensio and Mollom.

Automattic, as a privately-held firm, is under no obligation to provide details of how much money it makes from specific projects. But Duncan Riley at TechCrunch described Akismet as Automattic’s biggest money earner. Toni, Automattic’s CEO, was quick to counter what he described as “misconceptions,” stating that Akismet is not even close to being Automattic’s biggest earner.

Direct earnings from Akismet come from commercial licenses. Indirect earnings arise from the extent to which Akismet helps convince bloggers to choose WordPress.com.

Moving on to the other other projects, bbPress is forum software. It runs the various WordPress forums. To put it another way, bbPress is the name under which Automattic released the software on which the WordPress.org support forums have been running for years. Automattic intends to offer hosted forums under the name TalkPress (rather as it offers hosted blogging at WordPress.com).

Gravatar is notable among Automattic projects for having been acquired; I believe it to be Automattic’s only acquisition so far. At the time of the acquisition, Om Malik described Gravatar as a small project that gives WordPress users the ability to add avatars to their profiles. It is clear from the Gravatar about page that there are far loftier ambitions for the project. Today, an avatar. Tomorrow, Your Identity—Online.

I’ll stop there, rather than speculate about the future of online identity. I’ll add one more post to this series: a wrapup.

Acquia was started up by Dries Buytaert, the lead developer of the Drupal CMS, in late 2007. At the time I remarked on the similarities between Acquia and Automattic.

Now that Dries has announced Mollom, there’s a new and significant similarity. Mollom, like Automattic’s Akismet, is a spam-fighting web service. Duncan at TechCrunch reports that Akismet is the current market leader.

Here are a couple of ways in which Mollom is following the leader. In each case, the server code is closed-source, even though it comes from a firm notable for its foundations in open source. In each case, the spam-fighting service can be invoked by any client using the API: Mollom isn’t just for Drupal, any more than Akismet is just for WordPress. One of the main differences is that Mollom uses captcha, albeit only when it’s unsure whether it’s just bitten on spam or ham.

Meanwhile, Six Apart has made an acquisition that expands its range beyond blogging, albeit into a closely related domain. Mike Arrington posted a guest the acquired firm contest on Friday. It now has almost 400 comments: that guy really knows how to get his audience going.

It turns out that Six Apart acquired Apperceptive. Here’s how Rafat Ali described the deal.

SixApart, the blogging software firm with products like MovableType, Typepad and Vox, is now moving up the value chain into offering advertising and consulting services, and has bought New York City-based social media creative agency, Apperceptive. The financial details were not disclosed.

In case you, like me, were wondering what “social media creative agency” means, it seems to be how they say “ad network” on the mean streets of New York.