There’s a fantastic article about celebrity and our culture’s concomitant obsession with celebrities over at NewYorkMetro.com.
If nothing else, the article spawned this image which will live in my mind as a source of amusement for a long, long time:
The Register has a neat article about how the music industry could live forever, get richer, and even, maybe, be loved. They also have this neat article further expounding the flat fee approach to content distribution (in this case, music).
From this article entitled Staking a claim in the patent gold mine:
Another company that could benefit from lucrative license fees is Picture Marketing Inc., which says it holds a patent for embedding photos in electronic messages sent for marketing purposes. The company, which has retained a former Microsoft attorney to represent it, will seek to collect royalties from companies that send (or have been sending) advertising e-mails that contain pictures. The patent was obtained in the late 1990s.
I used to be reasonable about intellectual property laws. Now I realized: intellectual property laws have their weaknesses which I believe any narrative about commercial creativity should include. What we should really be fixing is our government’s seeming fixation on handing out the silliest patents possible so that jerks like this can make millions in the name of so-called innovation.
Hey, has anyone patented linking to dynamically generated photos from within a temporal-linear textual content management system?
UPDATE: Just found this article about fixing the broken patent system by allowing for patents to be challenged.
Heard anything from Microsoft lately? After seeing all those Evolve! commercials about how important it is to upgrade to the latest version of Windows and Office for some damn reason or another I’m starting to think that Microsoft is slowing down. Even Scoble is talking about it.
Of course, this is Microsoft I’m talking about here. I bet, behind the scenes, that Microsoft is reorganizing, is trying to shift (regain?) focus. Hopefully they’re learning from the Open Source community about speed of execution and adoption. Hopefully they’re not creating work and over-emphasizing process. What are customers looking for? What are developers looking for? Is there a way to satisfy both groups and make money? That seems to be a particularly good way to about things. What’s a business model that will continue to make money into the future forever? If you think that business model is “add features every year and they’ll buy it” I’m starting to think you’re wrong. If you think it’s “give me money for these perfectly reproducible bits” I know you’re wrong.
Does that mean that maybe Microsoft should pursue a more startup-ish model? Small, agile teams entirely focused on delivering their one or two products/services? How can they operate strategically? Is there something in the way birds flock and agile methods work that can be used in that situation? Now that we can give agile methods some time to breathe with regards to project management and software development, is anyone working on business process agility in this brave new context? They have to be, right? Solve that problem and you could be rich.
Unfortunately, it’s like the early days of the EAP around build number 56 or so… RS2.0 was throwing exception windows every few seconds for me. If you’re a Resharper user, do your part and run it for a bit to give the JetBrains people some ideas about how to fix their product!
Hopefully they fixed that memory problem that I kept writing about.
So, of course I’ve read Harry Potter and of course it’s great and of course I can’t wait for book seven. I’ll save any ideas or predictions or any of that sort for another time to be sure that people I know who might read my blog don’t get all spoiled and stuff.
One thing, though: there’s a great article about Mrs. J. K. Rowling on Time.com. It’s a little revealing, which is fantastic.
And she used to be a smoker, like me. Obviously.