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P2P journalism at work Been hearing from other folks about Google — mostly that they're close to making a profit. Sure hope so. If they do it with advertising, that's really big news, because I think what they're doing with ads is closer to classifieds than to anything you'll see on TV and in magazines. This is good. With the possible exception of yellow pages, classified is the only form of advertising for which there is strong, undeniable end-user demand. If Google's system attracts that grade of demand, it will be a major breakthrough. New concept: selling in You know there had to be all kinds of political (board, investor, large shareholder) moves behind the departure of Eric Schmidt from Novell, that company's purchasing of Cambridge Technology Partners — together with naming its CEO (and Novell board member), Jack Messman, to replace Schmidt, and Schmidt's sudden appearance as the new "part time" CEO of Google. Novell hasn't been very interesting since Craig Burton left back in the 80s. But Google is the search engine. It adds enormous value to the invaluable "space" we call the Web. Google is doing well, but it's certainly not yet profitable. There's no IPO in sight. Can it continue to soak up investment dollars? Hmm. What happens next? Follow the money. The lead investor in Google is Kleiner Perkins, which has been involved since forever with Sun and the rest of the Kleiner Kieretsu, which informally also includes the law firm Wilson Sonsini, one of whose namesakes, Larry Sonsini, sits on the Novell board. Together all these folks are wondering... what to do with Google? If the first answer is "Hire Eric Schmidt," what's the second answer? Sell to Sun. This wouldn't be a whole lot different, Kieretsu-wise, from what went down when Netscape's peaked-out value was transferred to AOL and Sun back in '98. It would be a downer for Red Hat, probably, since the last I looked all of the servers used by Google (now numbering 17,000 or something) were running Red Hat Linux. And it would be great PR for Sun to run the Web's premier search engine. Lots of potential leverage there. Hope I'm wrong. I like Google as an independent entity. Hello, I'm . Who came up with the idea of sending junk mail with no return address, so you have no idea who it's from unless you open it up? I routinely throw these out. Such as this one from... (rippp)... InternetWeek. It's a subscription come-on. "Your professional status entitles you to receive InternetWeek (yada yada) entirely FREE." Now, I'm a sucker for free subscriptions. There's a better chance I'll subscribe if I know who the hell the pitch letter is from. But I'll resist the urge this time, mostly because I read approximately .003% of the paper that comes in the mail, and now that I've moved I'll have to cancel or change most of the subscriptions to what I already get but don't read. Sometimes what we don't do makes us stronger. Take it from one who knows and is tired of taking it from ones who don't Wisdom is durable stuff, and Bob Frankston has a pile of it . So this piece he wrote on Innovation hasn't aged a bit in the eleven days since it was published on ZDnet. Seems Bob has a problem with the same kind of post-dotcom punditry that vexes the rest of the Peerage. One example: Unless someone sets rigid rules there will be chaos. We must pretend the Internet doesn't work and then kill it through responsible governance. His nutshell response: The Web was not created by big companies for e-commerce. The seed was provided by Tim Berners-Lee with the initial HTML specification. It grew through the people creating their own home pages with no coordination beyond trying to guess how to mangle HTML to do what they wanted. It worked because no one set the rules to limit experimentation. Even better, all the mistakes just made the Internet stronger. As most of you know, The fact that all those guys are probably at PC Forum right now, probably getting shot by Dan, while I'm not there, pains me. We cannot allow this to happen again. Still not addressing the issue of what stuffed fish eat A few minutes ago Joyce suggested that Jeffrey leave his big stuffed fish on his bed so it could sleep while he's at preschool. "No," he replied. "This fish isn't nocturnal."
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