http://www.sketchup.com/index.php?id=1439

What would you buy if the margin account in your stock porfolio was as big as Google's? Internet search, and internet search alone, is responsible for the size of that margin account. Certainly, orkut ain't contributing.

To understand the board game "reversi" is to understand the internet and the business of internet search. You could be #1 and then suddenly, while you were busy on a quixotic quest to "defeat microsoft", some small, unknown player comes out of nowhere and suddenly, the board is all white where it used to be black.

Changing your favorite search engine isn't anything like switching from Windows to the Mac. It takes about 30s to change your search. In any browser.

There's no question that Google is fatcat in search at this time. Nevertheless, all the search engines retrieve good results and fast. I'm sure this could be argued 'ad-nauseum', but there is no objective measure of search result "relevancy". It is subjective.

In fact, when I want a fresh perspective on something, I always turn to either http://search.yahoo.com/ or http://search.msn.com/.

Google's tendency toward censorship does not bode well for a global internet site. In addition to censoring results in China, Google's archives of internet news are highly treated as well. nntp is dead. long live nntp!

Microsoft takes another shot at handheld market

By Dean Takahashi
Mercury News
In a bid to capture the huge audience for handheld entertainment gadgets, Microsoft is designing a product that combines games, music and video in one handheld device, according to sources familiar with the project.

Yep. Someone oughta tell the folks at M$ to concentrate on shipping Vista/Longhorn, bighorn, ultrahorny, or whatever the darn thing is called these days.

Most high-tech companies keep fridges stocked with free beverages. Microsoft should get rid of their fridges and replace them with bookshelves containing free copies of Fred Brook's seminal "The Mythical Man-Month", which describes in detail what happens to operating system projects that have too many programmers. After hanging around WWDC for a couple of years meeting Apple folks, I can say that they definitely understand the pitfalls illustrated in this book. Which is why they are able to shoot new versions of OSX out the door at regular intervals. If I was billg@microsoft.com I'd probably feel more powerful than god as well. But, the saying goes, you cannot break the law, you can only break yourself against the law.

Another key thought on software engineering in the large which applies here is Grady Booch's notion that successive refinement is the key to achieving a robust system, not a huge break from tradition. OSX may be new to Apple, but it is anything but 'new' technology. Instead, each year, they roll new fresh improvements into OSX. Accumulated innovation over four revisions of the OS is what we're looking at right now. Not grandstanding.

Vista is doomed. WinTel will remain a Win32/Win64 hybrid until everyone switches to a future VMWARE+MacIntel.

Checking out the new Real Player, along with the Real Guide. At least RealVideo looks better than flash. DVD quality? Not!

The new player and guide are looking pretty good. Just don't click on anything! The RealPlayer jumps around on the screen like it's got a live carp up the leg of its pants...

You can't really browse around the guide while listening in the background. It's impossible to tell what will cause the player to switch titles/tracks. And how long has the iTunes music store been live?