Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

Scobleizer has a really nice blog post on the importance of early adopters.  Go and read it.

Early adopters DO matter. Anyone who says that they don’t needs to go back to business school.

gapingvoid, a blog well known for cartoons drawn on the back of business cards, has this post about monetizing on open source software - a very old discussion, as we know it.  In that post, one IT guy is quoted saying:

“If something goes wrong with Microsoft, I can phone Microsoft up and have it fixed. With Open Source, I have to rely on the community.”

What’s your first thought after reading that?  Mine was “Have you ever even called Microsoft support?“.  It seems that a lot of people believe in this notion of Microsoft support magically fixing whatever problem they might have with any of the Microsoft product.

The question really is - will they?  Myself I never had any experience with Microsoft support, but I know quite a few people who did.  Most of them seem to agree that Microsoft support is pretty much like any other technical support service of any other company.  Meaning that to get anything good out of it, you have to know how to get through to knowledgeable people and you have to know how to convince them to spend some time with your case.  Otherwise, you’ll get into an endless loop of answering machines, checklist questions, and advices like “Please, reboot your computer and call us back“.

I have to say that that makes sense to me.  Microsoft is the biggest desktop software vendor.  Desktop computer users tend to be the most uninformed and untrained category of users (no offense intended).  If even half of them believe in magic of Microsoft support, imagine what Microsoft has to go through to keep their support costs reasonable.  If you have a serious problem, you’d probably need to get through all that protection and prove that you know what you are doing and that your case deserves attention.  Getting through requires knowledge, experience and patience.  How many people of those who believe in Microsoft support actually have the knowledge, experience and patience to get through?  I don’t think many do.  Am I wrong?
P.S.: By the way, there is an interesting discussion in the comments to that original post.

I was reading this post about Mobile World Congress over at Web Worker Daily.  This paragraph got me thinking:

At January’s Macworld show, Apple CEO Steve Jobs cited data from NPD showing that the iPhone already has 20 percent of the smartphone market after one year, and that Apple is selling 20,000 iPhones per day.

How often do you change your mobile?  And how often do you change your mobile phone vendor?  Are you a fan of one particular brand or do you like trying each and every one of them?

Mobile market is measured in billions of users.  And these users can be pretty dynamic about their devices and the choice of vendors.  Mobile phone is something very easily replaceable.  It’s not like a house, or a car, or even a laptop computer. The thought of how dynamic the market is boggles the mind.  One day you the king of the mountain, and the a couple of months later they don’t know your name. But then again you can get it back before the end of the year…

The other day I wrote a post about possible Yahoo acquisition by Microsoft. There have been some developments to the story. If you haven’t followed it elsewhere, here is a brief summary for you:

• Microsoft decided to buy Yahoo (again)
• Yahoo said “No” (again)
• Microsoft insists in very aggressive ways

There are a couple of posts at Mashable (one and two) which tell how the story unfolds in more details.

What Microsoft does this time, is what they have always been doing. This time it’s just on a slighter bigger scale. And if you ever had any fantasies about how Microsoft cares about you as a customer or partner, take a closer look at what happens now. If they don’t give a flying fork about major players on the Web, who are creating an ecosystem, what do they care about you as an end user?

My extremism years are long over, but I still get to hear “Boycott Microsoft!” scream in my head once in a while. Whatever the case, I believe in natural balance and the equilibrium of all things. I think that Microsoft has been rocking the technology boat for far too long and that things are slowly turning to where they should be. It will take a few more years to make them more obvious to general public, but the trend is there.

In regard to this particular situation, there is a slight chance of Yahoo getting away from this acquisition through an alliance with Google. It’s not as good as if they could just be, but it’s by far better than if they get acquired by Microsoft.