Robi Ganguly’s Big Ideas

The tears didn’t fall, but they were there.

I don’t believe in idols anymore, but I do admire people and seek to learn from others. In the past decade, I’ve come to really admire and respect Steve Jobs.

For me, it’s his sense of humanity that is most important. Many people bring technology to people. Steve brought how people worked to technology and forever changed our expectations about what’s possible.

Which is why I found myself almost crying yesterday afternoon when I read on Twitter that he’d passed away.

An important voice in the world is now silent. He guided us to build technology for people, enabling us to be more creative, free and human. Fortunately, we had that voice around long enough to learn from.

Steve – your Stanford Commencement speech has been on my refrigerator since you gave it, pushing me forward, reminding me to do what I love. I didn’t have to meet you in order to learn from you.

Thank you. You are missed.

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I saw Dave McClure tweet about history’s greatest badass, which reminded me of Teddy Roosevelt (definitely one of the top options).

There’s a book about the political education of Roosevelt that’s been gathering dust on my bookshelf that I’m going to pull out and read this weekend. Trying to build your own something is hard when the time horizon is long. Sometimes it’s lonely and often times you feel like you’re just running for the sake of running.

You just have to keep running.

Which brings me back to Teddy. If you didn’t click the greatest badass link above, you should. Teddy Roosevelt called himself a “self-made man”. I’ve always loved that phrase. It means to do it yourself. To focus on who you want to be, what you want and then to go after it, regardless of anyone else.

I have to remind myself of this often. It’s the only thing I have to hold on to sometimes.

So this weekend I’m going to solicit Teddy’s help and read more about him. I expect to find gems like this famous quote of his about the “Man in the Arena”:

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

“there is no effort without error and shortcoming”

Boy is that right.

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The only thing that would’ve made Marshawn’s Beast Mode touchdown run more awesome would have been if it sounded like a Super Mario Brothers game real-time:

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I have a lot of pending posts scattered about my computer; half-written Word docs and emails, waiting to get revisited and finished. This writing thing isn’t getting easier by having lots of other writing requirements on my plate. But, it’s time to start pushing out some more regular content here. Let’s start with some links you should check out if you didn’t see them:

1. Tom Friedman’s piece on the “New Untouchables” is great for two reasons: it focuses our attention on education, which really deserves more discussion AND it serves as a reminder for all of us that we need to be striving to be “Untouchable” if we want to end our concerns about job security.
2. Greg Coleman, former Head of Sales at Yahoo! (and AOL for a brief bit of time), writes a piece he calls “Sharpen the Saw” about how he spent his summer of unemployment. I worked with Greg at Yahoo! and thought his story was both inspiring and sad. 31 years without pauses to really sit back and evaluate what you’re doing and why is a LONG time. I applaud him for sharing something so deeply personal publicly.
3. Ian Kennedy (also a former Yahoo!) wrote an excellent overview of what he saw as being crucial at the Web 2.0 Summit. He and I have chatted about these topics before and he really nails why Social Filtering is a very big opportunity.
4. Working on startups means that I spend a lot of time thinking about how to sell better. Steve Blank’s focus on the “Customer Development Process” has really resonated with me. He writes about it a lot, but here’s a great post elaborating on his view that most companies try to apply Product Development processes to Customer Development and as a result, fail miserably.

Let me know what you think of those pieces and pass along any suggestions for related materials.

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So, I look at my Twitter stream this morning and along comes an interesting link about the “Funniest U.S. ads”. I click through and find myself reading this article on Forbes.com: Laugh Track: Funniest U.S. TV Commercials

2 minutes in I’m sold: “sure, great, where are the videos??”, I ask myself. Turns out it’s a whole complicated set of steps you have to take to see them.

Morons. Here, I’ve done what they should have:

Out of 37 videos, here are the highlights:

Ikea’s Save the Lamp: the panel’s favorite

Levi’s Tainted Love – another popular one:

An ad from 1981, for FedEx, featuring the world’s fastest talker

(anyone remember the Guinness Book of World Records?)

Outpost.com’s “audacious act”. I can’t help laughing every time I see this:

EDS’s epic “CatHerders” commercial. Effective in its seriousness:

And two Ferret favorites, to wrap it up:

Budweiser’s take:

and Verizon’s:

See, Forbes, was that so hard? I bet if you’d done that, you’d have 10 times the video views you’re getting out of that article right now.

Fix it. Or just link to mine .

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I haven’t written since my prediction about who McCain was going to pick as his VP candidate and no, it’s not just because I was horribly wrong . Instead, I’ve been having a lot of private conversations about this selection and come to a conclusion:

I was right.

Specifically, I was right when I wrote in my post about Biden’s selection as Obama’s running mate that:

I still maintain that from a pure #’s analysis, Obama picking Hillary means the election is over. It might not have been super practical, but it would have killed the McCain campaign. I personally never got the sense that they really disliked each other and couldn’t work together, but enough smart people have argued convincingly that I see that it could have presented real issues. That doesn’t diminish a key fact, however: Consuming the media is a successful strategy. The chatter about a Hillary selection after the Democratic National Convention would have continued all the way through the Republican convention and established the Repubs as an afterthought in many voters minds. McCain would have had to select Paris Hilton as a response, if he wanted to get some meaningful media time.

I’ll repeat myself: Consuming the media is a successful strategy.

10 years ago, I was living in Washington, D.C. and working as an intern at C-Span. I learned a number of important things there (like how to talk yourself into a hearing with Ken Starr…awesome), but one of the most important was just how few people actually CARE to watch the entirety of our political process. In fact, most of us don’t even come close to watching enough of the political process that we understand what’s going on, how bills are proposed, debated and voted upon. Nor do we watch the primaries, the speeches of the candidates, their full statements or anything else substantive enough to understand the nuance of a candidate’s platform.

This doesn’t stop us from going into the voting booths and pulling the levers, though.

So, how do we make these decisions, if we’re not devoting much time and energy to the self-education process?

• We read the headlines.
• We skim over short articles.
• We leave the radio on while we’re driving and pick up snippets.
• We turn the TV on when we walk in the door and catch bits and pieces as we do our household chores: changing, making dinner, checking email, surfing the web, making phone calls, taking care of the kids etc..
• We chat with our friends and those in our circle of like-minded folks
• We read the things that our network passes on, usually of a more humorous or fantastical nature – things that get our attention and are entertaining.

This information gathering process is haphazard. It’s rarely open-minded, it’s mostly self-selecting. It’s, objectively speaking, very limited in critical thinking and optimized for time efficiency, rather than being geared towards delivering clear arguments that enable us to come to a decision about our own beliefs and stances on the issues of the day.

The Republican Party has understood this for a LONG LONG time.

Going back to what I wrote about the possibility of a selection of HRC as Obama’s running mate – it scared the Republicans because it meant a total consumption of the news media. The agenda for what would be discussed in the mass media and subsequently, at the water coolers, would have been completely set by the Democrats.

When it didn’t occur, the Republicans saw their opportunity: they didn’t need to select Paris Hilton, they just had to find her political equivalent – Sarah Palin. Pretty, simple, good on camera, quick with the catchphrases (can’t you just see her saying, "That’s hot"??) and most importantly, NEW. After an 18 month election cycle, voters feel like their skimming of the race has told them all they need to know about Obama and McCain. But now.. there’s someone new. And not only that, the news media doesn’t know anything about her, so they need to investigate and dig and tell us everything they find.

Look what happened in the week following her selection. The news was CONSUMED with Palin. Awareness of her name went from nothing to 60, 70, 80% of the country. The conversation was owned by the Republicans. Just as they like it.

Now, of course, the financial crisis is so massive, it’s trumped any strategy the Republicans could put forth, but still, they’re working their best at managing the news cycle to their advantage.

Which brings us to tonight’s debate

According to Nielsen, last week’s Presidential Debate got ~50mm viewers. Putting that in perspective for a moment, we see that in the 2004 election, ~121mm people voted. Very simple math tells me this: less than half of the people voting in the election watch the debates (probably far less than half, if we assume that some of those 50mm people are not eligible to vote and that turnout this year should be higher).

So, if you know that less than half of the voters watch the debates, part of your strategy needs to be focused on the story that comes out of the debates that informs the rest of the voting population.

This is where the expectations game comes in: Just about everyone believes that Palin is going to do a poor job in the debates. The Republicans are very happy to have this happen. Why?

Because the story will almost inevitably be about how the candidates did, in comparison to their expected performances:

Biden is a knowledgeable, experienced, vocal guy. He’s a known entity.

Palin? She’s a total black box at this point. Will we see the Katie Couric performance from her?

Or maybe we’ll see the Convention speech that she gave?

Or, most likely, we’ll see the 2006 Alaskan gubernatorial debates performance. Which is to say, if you’re watching live, you’ll probably be a bit stunned at how she avoids questions and doesn’t address tough issues.

But, if you’re not watching it live.. you’re probably going to hear something like this:

"Palin holds her own, snags Biden on voting history, delivers zingers and was fairly poised. Flustered Biden has a clear mastery of the facts and policy, but seemed out of his elements at times, unsure of how to respond to Palin’s approach."

I’m getting a little specific here with the prediction, so it might not come out sounding like that, but my point to you is this:

Whether or not you watch tonight’s debate, you should pay attention to the wake of the debates.

The headlines and storylines that flow out from tonight’s debate through the mass media and information sources will be interesting and informative.

Your friends who are behind Obama are going to send you clips of outrageous Palin responses and ask how people can vote for Palin. Your McCain friends might keep quiet, but when prodded, reply that "she did all right, she handled herself well and you’ve got to admit, she really zinged Biden a couple times."

As you watch this stuff unfold, what I really urge you to do is to step back and ask yourself if your decision-making is due to the manipulation of the media and the news cycle. Are you letting yourself just skim and feed off of the wake of communications strategies? If the answer is at all yes, I suggest that you dig deeper and think a bit more critically before it comes time to pull that lever.

While you’re at it, tell your friends to do the same .

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As many people across the U.S. did, I spent some of this past weekend thinking and talking about Barack Obama’s selection of Joseph Biden as his running mate. When I found out on Friday evening, I was rather dismayed and Twittered the following:

Biden?! Biden?! No no no. This can not be happening.

My friend Andrew saw that and asked me my thoughts about it, so I wrote him a rather long email, which seems appropriate for a blog post on the topic as well.
In short, the selection of Joseph Biden is a great management decision and a questionable strategic decision. While I certainly appreciate how they came to decision, I’m rather concerned that the Obama team has gotten overconfident in its abilities. I believe that they are really overestimating their abilities to explain nuance and complexity and that overconfidence could really become obvious over the next few months, beginning with this selection.
To explain what I mean, I want to start by saying that I believe that there are many strong reasons for selecting Joseph Biden as Vice President. Some of the strongest are the following:

• If politics is a business, Biden is a fantastic hire. He’s the kind of pick that adds a ton of value and should really round out the adminstration’s skill set. He’s known for getting things done in the Senate and should be a good bulldog in the administration in order to push things through. What you need in any organization, especially one fraught with bureaucracy, is execution. Biden brings a wealth of experience in executing in the political realm. He’s a great COO hire, if you want to think about it that way.
• He’s a team player. I believe that he’s got an ego that will allow him to mesh with Obama and play second fiddle. It’s very very hard for most politicians to accept that Obama is essentially a superstar politician as the result of 6 to 10 years of planning and risk-taking, in conjunction with some luck. They grew up in a system where you’re supposed to work for decades in order to get to the top of the heap. Even the Clintons toiled for a LONG time to get to 1992. It’s tough to really tell, but my sense is that Biden doesn’t actually have this issue and that is important to a positive working relationship because egos derail political organizations far more often than is typically reported.
• Obvious reason #1: He’s well-versed in Foreign Relations and Security matters, as is being talked about. This is actually helpful to Obama and a big asset. Obama shouldn’t think that he’s mature enough to go out and tame the world on his own. A lot of the world operates in a mindset that tradition and seniority matter. Regardless of how they see Obama (in a positive light b/c he’s a big difference from Bush, sure..), many of the countries around the world and their leadership believe that you should be old and a known entity in order to work with them. This is one of the reasons why Condoleeza Rice has a hard time gaining traction abroad and why Dick Cheney, when he does travel, manages to have some pretty meaningful meetings. Sad, but true.
• Obvious reason #2: He’s an asset in courting some of the middle class white vote and should be helpful in states like Pennsylvania and Ohio – swing states. He is not a known entity nationally, but in the Northeast he’s certainly got some name recognition and should assist in some key states.

BUT, the risk here is that the voting population of the U.S. won’t understand the strong reasons for picking Biden and how he’ll be helpful in running the country. Taking complicated decisions and explaining them to the U.S. is exceptionally hard and I am concerned that the Obama team is overconfident in its ability to do so. Especially with the mainstream media constantly wanting to put all decisions in black and white terms (observe how they discuss the selection process, it’s very rarely an investigation of concepts and tradeoffs, it’s mostly presented as a list of bullet points). Consider these broad groups of folks that will be in play:

• The folks who are behind Obama because they’re single-mindedly focused on new, different, aggressive leadership. Many of these folks have reacted by essentially saying, “damn it, that’s not exciting”. Who are these people, for the most part? The young voters. Obama needs to keep them excited enough to actually vote in November. McCain and Co want to bore them into staying at home on Tuesday.
• The folks who are the “centrist objectivists”. You probably know plenty of these folks and might even consider yourself one – they say they’re fiscally conservative and socially liberal. They believe in meritocracy and like to talk about who’s going to run the country the best as a leader and minimize government’s interference in the workings of society and the capital markets. These folks also tend to believe that career politicians are distasteful. They happen to be part of the reason that we haven’t had a president who wasn’t an Executive in some regard for over 3 decades (Carter – Governor, Reagan – Governor, Bush – VP and head of the CIA, Clinton – Governor, Bush II – Governor). Obama picking a senator painted a big target on his back. If McCain picks a former Executive, these folks are very vulnerable to the arguments about career politicians (regardless of the duration of Obama’s career).
• The miffed Hillary supporters. People can be stupid and sometimes people are stupidly loyal. Some of these folks will think it makes more sense to stay home and pout than to vote. I am counting on Hillary to get out there and keep talking to these folks. I think she’ll do it, but this is a big issue.
  • I still maintain that from a pure #’s analysis, Obama picking Hillary means the election is over. It might not have been super practical, but it would have killed the McCain campaign. I personally never got the sense that they really disliked each other and couldn’t work together, but enough smart people have argued convincingly that I see that it could have presented real issues. That doesn’t diminish a key fact, however: Consuming the media is a successful strategy. The chatter about a Hillary selection after the Democratic National Convention would have continued all the way through the Republican convention and established the Repubs as an afterthought in many voters minds. McCain would have had to select Paris Hilton as a response, if he wanted to get some meaningful media time.
• The crowd of folks swayed by attack advertising: Democrats hate admitting that people are swayed and influenced by negative ads. It’s a large blindspot in their decision-making process. The truth is, attack ads fucking work. And it’s really really easy to attack the record of someone who’s been a Senator for 36 years. Why? He’s voted on every issue you can think of dozens of times. Sometimes for, sometimes against. You can paint whatever picture you want.

So, that’s my thinking. Some very broad, simple concepts might drive decision-making for sizeable groups of people. Obama’s campaign requires nuance to counter some of these things. Nuance is terribly tough to communicate during the election cycle. (I want to be clear here though: I very much appreciate the nuance and fundamentally believe that people are more complicated than the buckets that my points imply. But communicating to people in a nuanced manner through the mass media is VERY VERY difficult.)
Despite all of that, I think Obama should still manage to win. McCain’s a terrible candidate for the Republicans – almost as bad as Dole was in 1996. But I believe the Obama team, in picking Biden, made their path to winning in November harder than it should be.
Simple as that. They could have won the campaign quickly, now they have inserted a lot more chance into it. The Republicans are feeling hopeful and seeing rays of light. I don’t think that that is a good thing if you’re an Obama supporter.

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As I wrote last Friday, I went to the Yahoo! shareholder meeting with the hope that I’d find the management team to be open and welcoming to questions from shareholders, but understanding that I was likely to be disappointed.

Unfortunately, the latter proved to be the correct assessment of the situation.

As an ex-Yahoo!, I don’t say this lightly. While I didn’t intend to be a “lifer”, I certainly joined in the hopes that I could add a lot of value to the company while I was there and because I was proud of the many past successes and future opportunities. In retrospect, I would say that I have perhaps given the company too much credit in the past. My time at the company, combined with what I’ve witnessed over the past 6 months has led me to a few personal conclusions about Yahoo!, which were all in evidence at this “shareholder” meeting (quotes included b/c this meeting was not really about shareholders in any way):

1.   I don’t actually believe that the Yahoo! board and management team have any interest in engaging in a discussion of the tough questions facing them. That’s totally fine, of course, because every management team is charged with operating their business as best they see fit. Management is an endeavor that is shaped by each individual, their values and personal philosophy. However, as investors, we are all afforded the opportunity to invest in public companies whose management teams match our own values and philosophies. My personal opinion is that a very key trait of management is honesty, combined with a good ear for listening. I think that it’s important as a leader to accept that you’re going to make mistakes, to be focused less on the making of those mistakes and more on the identification and reaction to those mistakes. My philosophy tells me that this will encourage intelligent risk-taking and that I will earn the trust of the people who choose to do business with me.

Yahoo!’s management team and board clearly have philosophies and values that fail to match mine.

2.   Words are important, but not as important as your actions. When your words and your actions don’t fit, you need to address that issue and fix it. Focusing on anything else is useless, because you’ll always be battling yourself. By my calculation, it’s been about 2 years since Yahoo! started telling Wall Street and its employees that the company was going to take it on the chin in the near-term in order to invest for the long-term. The thing is, I agree with that choice 100%. I really believe that companies should be managed for the long run and need to avoid focusing on quarterly and annual Wall Street expectations. Which is where the big problem for Yahoo! occurs: the company routinely lies to itself. Sue, Jerry, Blake: stop telling analysts, your shareholders and your employees that you’re making “big bets” and investing in the business for the long term if you’re going to continue to turn the screws on your business lines every quarter. It’s one thing to hold executives accountable (that is smart management). It’s another thing entirely to expect your executives to routinely manage end of the quarter fire drills and create plans for long-term projects that return short-term revenues (that is DUMB management). No wonder execution is lacking at Yahoo!.

Yahoo!’s management team and board embrace creating cognitive dissonance. The effects are disastrous.

3.   The environment that you encourage and tolerate determines many of your outcomes. As a former Yahoo!, it was one my great frustrations to discover that the company was intensely political. As far I can tell, not only was this acceptable behavior, it often was rewarded. Executives who were known to be very good at “playing the game” are often the ones who ended up with senior roles. This is but one example of an area where the management team tolerates behavior that has detrimental downstream effects. Another example was the shareholder meeting itself: the management presentations were unsophisticated parroting of the party lines. If you talk AT your investors, guess what? Your investors will talk AT you. Although I was saddened to see it happen, I wasn’t terribly surprised to find that most of the folks who got time on the microphones were basically just using the time to talk for a while. I wish that I’d gotten up right at the beginning and asked one of the questions I typed up, but I think I would have looked quite out of place actually standing up and expecting to hear a thoughtful answer in return.

Yahoo!’s management team and board aren’t good at creating an environment that transfers responsibility and thoughtfulness to their employees and shareholders.

I walked away from the meeting unsatisfied. I’d hoped for more out of the shareholders in attendance and I’d hoped for more from the management team. I certainly take responsibility for not making more of an effort to take the mic, but I also suspect that if I had done so, it would have been wasted breath.

So, as a shareholder, I’m left with a tough question: do I want to continue holding shares of a company whose management team disappoints me and doesn’t seem capable of making the radical changes that are necessary? If the management team continues to ignore the tough questions that the market has for them, what can I do? Is there a way to get the kind of dialogue that is necessary with the management team of Yahoo!?

Ultimately, I think that the answer to both questions is NO. I don’t trust this management team’s decision-making and I don’t believe that it will change in any meaningful way. I wish that there was another way of communicating with them, but I have to accept that it’s just not realistic. Perhaps other companies will navigate this new communications age more successfully, but I’m not hopeful that Yahoo! will be among their ranks.

My last post on this topic will be an investigation of what Yahoo! could do to change their future trajectory and what it would take. Again, I’m not hopeful that they’ll navigate out of their situation, but if I’m going to criticize, I might as well put out some suggestions as well, right?

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Last year, as I sat in my cube and watched executives leave amid financial turmoil, I snapped this picture, which I thought nicely summed up the feeling many of us employees had at the time. Unsure if things were on their way towards getting better, people were asking themselves if the future held more of the same or some brighter possibilities.

I had no way of knowing just how much worse it could get.

Today, I’m attending the Yahoo! shareholder meeting as an ex-employee and a frustrated shareholder. I’m curious to see how management deals with what will likely be a media circus and an auditorium full of vocal people. Additionally, I really want to discover how this management team deals with this pressure. If Yahoo! is really embracing “the Open Web” and understands that the corporate culture starts at the top, I expect them to fess up to their mistakes, take difficult questions and admit to not knowing the answers to certain questions that get asked.

However, if the management team is as weak as I think it is, I expect them to be evasive, use double-speak and generally avoid the really challenging questions.

I thought it would be interesting to make my own Top 10 list of key questions that I think shareholders would like honest answers to:

1. Why are you hiring back people who were laid off and given generous severance packages; especially at higher salaries and with signing bonuses? Isn’t this a complete waste of company money, not to mention a huge burden on employee time and morale?
2. What reason do your search-only customers have for staying with Yahoo!, now that you’ve agreed to place Google searches on the list of results?
3. Are you going to be using the data from the Google partnership to allocate search monetization resources?
4. How long do you believe it takes for a reorganization to prove effective (or not)?
   1. Given your answer, don’t you think that the number of reorgs in the past 18 months has actually been harmful, rather than helpful? Why do you keep pursuing this tumultuous line of action?
5. When will you know you’re not the right leadership for this company? What are you measuring yourselves on?
6. If your Asian presence is so important to your future strategy, can you give us more specifics on what is going on there and how it should be evaluated? The generalities are unsatisfactory at this point.
7. Why is the Connected Life segment of the business still operated separately from the rest? That doesn’t make sense, are you kowtowing to egos?
8. Why aren’t you firing more often? Any large and disciplined company understands that it needs to set the tone for unacceptable behavior – why aren’t you more clear on this?
9. What are your metrics around retention and how have they trended over the past 24 months? Couldn’t you tell that you had a workforce issue quite a while ago, if you’d been seriously tracking these numbers?
10. Given all of the turmoil around the company related to being publicly-traded and the bearish valuation (according to your evaluations) of the company, why haven’t we heard more about a Management Buyout of Yahoo!? Wouldn’t the company be more nimble out of the public markets for a while?

If you’ve got additional questions, please feel free to add them in the comments and discuss them.

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A few weeks back, Bill Gates officially left his role at Microsoft. This Seattle Times piece did a great job of reminding me of something that has been on my mind for a while.

Bill Gates was the software industry’s visionary.  If you checked out my post on Steve Jobs and Bill Gates at the All Things D conference and watched the entire video you saw Steve Jobs do something surprising: he praised Bill Gates in a huge way. He said something to the effect of: “Before Bill there was no software. He basically created the industry, dreamed it up.”

Now Bill is moving on to new frontiers. In so doing, he’s leaving the software industry with a huge void. Now, of course, there are many more people thinking about the future of the software industry and building for it than there were when he and Paul Allen were creating Microsoft. But, as I look around the landscape of software technology I find myself wondering if any of the up-and-coming folks are really visionaries in the way that Bill was: seeing a future that only existed in his head and creating the teams and the tools to build all of that future out.

• Is Ray Ozzie going to take Microsoft (and the world along with it) into the connected devices future that we’ve heard about for a decade? Is he going to teach the world that bits and bytes can exist everywhere, in different states (connected, silo’d, disconnected etc) and make life smarter as a result?
• Are Larry Page and Sergey Brin going to prove to us that software is only important insofar as it enables our online experience and that the offline experience is a minor nuisance to be served for only the next 5 to 10 years? Is the networked computer really going to be a reality on Eric Schmidt’s 3rd try?
• Is Mark Zuckerberg going to continue mapping the Microsoft platform gameplan and applying it to identity and social networking? Will he create the “Social Operating System” for the web and eventually come to own the “Social Graph” for the world?

Or is there someone else out there that will take Bill’s place in envisioning an entire industry of 1’s and 0’s that we have yet to really understand?

I think that Zuckerberg might be the favorite at this point. But the fact that he’s basically copying the Microsoft playbook makes me think twice. It makes me ask a very simple question: Was Microsoft copying someone else’s playbook when it went about building its business and the associated ecosystem?

It seems to me that they broke a lot of the “rules of business” in building their company. I don’t see a lot of rules that are being broken by Facebook yet. It makes me question just how big their impact will be.

Sometimes we get our heads very stuck in the details and the hype and forget to step back to see the large picture dynamics. Which is where the next Bill Gates will constantly focus his/her attention. That’s what makes Bill Gates… Bill Gates.

Perhaps it’s time that someone copied his memo-writing tradition in order to spread their vision of the future of the software industry. For the leadership / tech nerds among you, I urge you to check out some of the memos. Powerful stuff.

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