Gary Robinson's Rants

CNET to launch indie music service

Shortly after buying the MP3.com domain name and announcing that its sprawling music archive would close, CNET Networks said Wednesday it will start its own free service for independent musicians online. [News.com]

I'm not commenting more cuz I'm just very, very busy.

I probably won't post again for a day or two, so... if you live in the U.S., or are traveling and celebrate Thanksgiving wherever you happen to be, have a great one!

Can Google Grow Up?

Google is one of the best things to happen to the Net. So will its IPO, expected this spring, be a must-buy? A look inside reveals a talented company facing trouble. [Fortune]

Why patent

CEO's of small companies are responsible for their shareholders and need to do what they can to protect themselves from the simple fact that any innovation can be very easily copied at almost trivial expense by any of the huge software companies, such as Microsoft, and now Google.

This copying is completely predictable. Business plans must account for it from the beginning. If you can't expect to grow fast enough to become an independent company on your own, or to have such a huge user base that you are a very strong candidate for acquisition, you need to at least have fundamental patent protection.

In a recent Boston.com article, Dave Winer responds to Google's acquisition of Blogger:

Consider Google's acquisition of Blogger, one of the companies that launched the personal weblog craze. It's got Dave Winer climbing the walls. Winer, a Berkman Fellow at the Harvard Law School, founded UserLand Software Inc., maker of the blogging program Radio Userland. Winer says that Google may crush rival blogging systems like Radio Userland.

He points to the popular Google Toolbar program that's attached to millions of Web browsers. The toolbar makes it easy to do Google searches and block pop-up ads, but it also contains a link to Google's Blogger service. Microsoft's critics once warned that the company would use its browser toolbars to steer people to Microsoft products. Winer sees Google trying to pull the same stunt.

"Do they have a right to do it? Absolutely," Winer admits. "But I also have a right to hate them."

Yes, he has that right.

But "hating" isn't an effective way to protect shareholder value.

On the other hand, given Winer's very early position and history of contributions to the blogging field, he also had the right to protect his shareholders by filing patents. If I was a shareholder, I'd be more interested in a CEO that protected my interests rather than one who hates large competitors who are only doing the obvious, utterly predictable and and completely inevitable actions that large companies always do. Hating inevitable realities is not an effective means for increasing the book value of a company.

He wouldn't have to sue Google -- and given Google's resources it would probably be foolish for him to do so outside of the context of a relationship with a well-heeled partner. And he wouldn't have to attack open-source blogging tools or other small companies if he does not feel it is ethical to do so. But the simple fact of the patents' existence would increase the value of Userland as a company. It would make such potential partnerships much more likely to occur, it would make investors more interested in investing, and it would raise the price of any possible future acquisition.

It would help protect shareholder interests.

I'm back

I haven't blogged in a while because I've been visiting Disneyland with my wife and 2 and 5 year-olds. Very important family time for us -- because both my wife and I work long hours, we just don't have as much of it as we want.

One thing I didn't expect. There is so little excellence in the world, that it was truly refreshing to go to a place like Disneyland, where half the lights aren't burned out on the rides as they are in most amusement parks, and everything seems to be done with a high level of quality. On the surface everything is fun and light, but I'm sure that under the covers there is enormous discipline making it all work. I was really glad to see that. It's the exact opposite of the scene Ayn Rand describes at the beginning of Atlas Shrugged, where the building walls are unpainted and cracking, the public clocks don't work, etc., which is all too common to see in the real world.

Even if you go into some of the best and most expensive hotels in New York, you'll find that the big clocks over the registration desks, often built with high style a number of decades ago, usually are no longer functional. And they don't have the pride to fix them, while charging hundreds of dollars a night per room. It's worse than sad. It's truly depressing.

So while it was an enormous pleasure and of real importance for us to have this family time, an unexpected side-benefit was the pleasure of seeing the rare phenomenon of excellence.

Gates denies Microsoft talks

Gates denies Microsoft had talks with Google in any form.  As an officer of the most watched public company in the world, I believe him.  Google's KPCB hype machine must just be clearing its throat for the IPO.  At this point, I distrust Silicon Valley VCs more than Microsoft (by a substantial margin) and have no desire to see the same personalities fleece the investing public one more time. [John Robb]

I wouldn't be at all surprised if Robb is exactly right.

What a set of space pictures!

...but does it look to you like somebody is giving us the finger in the upper left? See this National Geographic page.

Sun + China = #1

McNealy said that Sun has signed a deal under which the China Standard Software Co. (CSSC), a consortium of companies supported by the Chinese government, will use Sun's Linux desktop software, called the Java Desktop System.

"We're going to immediately roll out the Java Desktop System to between a half million and a million desktops in 2004," McNealy said. "It makes us instantaneously the No. 1 Linux desktop player on the planet." [News.com]

Microsoft vs. iTunes and the rest of the music world

In a move likely to send waves through the growing online music market, Microsoft Corp. plans to introduce a song-downloading service next year that will compete with similar offerings from Apple Computer Inc., Roxio Inc.'s Napster and others.

A spokeswoman for the Redmond, Wash., software company confirmed that Microsoft's MSN Web site will offer such a service in 2004, but declined to provide further details. Microsoft executives previously have said the company was considering selling music online; the company's latest comments represent the most concrete statement yet of its intentions. A person familiar with the matter saysMicrosoft has been in regular contact with major music companies to discuss plans for a service.

"They're definitely getting into the business," this person says. [Wall Street Journal; you may need to be a subscriber to access it though.]

Obviously, they will be using their monopoly in OS's to try to get a similar position on music downloading if they can; of course the courts will do nothing about it. Unless, maybe, Massachusetts's holding out from the settlement will provide a wedge.

SpamAssassin and HashCash

I've been assuming, and still assume, that although a hashcash scheme could solve the spam problem, and is arguably the easiest way to do it (despite some superficial, addressable challenges), it won't be solved that way. There are other feasible solutions which essentially have the advantage of not seeming so... strange and unlikely... to those who haven't studied the idea in depth, and in a world where who-gets-to-critical-mass-first usually determines what is and isn't adopted, such perceptions can be a killer blow.

I was interested to see this on Justin Mason's blog: "we do plan to add [hashcah] to SpamAssassin (eventually!)"

I followed a link to SpamAssassin's BugZilla bug 796, and one of their developers is planning to add it in the next major release. There is an active ongoing discussion in the comments section about how best to do it.

So that's a start toward hashcash possibly getting to critical mass. I still won't bet on it, for the reason mentioned above, but it does seem a bit more possible now.

Patent News: Prior Art + Outcry = Holy Cow, It Worked!

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has agreed to re-examine the Eolas patent that Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser was recently ruled to have infringed, after the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) presented the USPTO with examples of prior art and asked them to re-examine the issue.

"'A substantial outcry from a widespread segment of the affected industry has essentially raised a question of patentability with respect to the 906 patent claims,' Stephen Kunin, the USPTO's deputy commissioner for patent examination policy, wrote in his order for re-examination. 'This creates an extraordinary situation for which a director-ordered examination is an appropriate remedy.' . . .

"'The thing that's exciting to me is that the (US)PTO sort of made the ruling on the basis of how much interest there is in this issue on the Internet,' said Dale Dougherty, a vice president of online publishing and research at Sebastapol, Calif.-based publisher O'Reilly & Associates, who posted news of the USPTO's decision on the O'Reilly Web site. 'And it seems that they felt they had to respond to it.'" [GrokLaw]

That's good! My patent lawyer and I have talked about trying to get a re-examine on a particularly troublesome-looking patent once or twice, but this is the first time it's actually happened.

My guess is that the re-exam will succeed in overturning it. If so, that will mean that there really is a mechanism for the software development community to protect itself from at least the most problematic patents as long as their really is prior art and/or a strong obviousness argument.