“Why aren’t there more Googles? Because in the last five years, every company that had the potential to be economically revolutionary sold out long before it ever had the chance.

“Many of us conjoin the urgency of making another sale with the timing to earn the right to make it. You must build trust before you need it.

“Open source web application development doesn’t seem sustainable. Deployment concerns are a huge part of this. Being interested in a project requires that you be able to use the product (and to use it casually). Right now most people can’t use open source web applications.

There’s some applications, sure. WordPress, Trac, MediaWiki, MoinMoin. But most wiki software doesn’t have a vibrant community. Many a bug tracker has fallen by the wayside. Blog software projects have a horrible time building a viable community. Other website software hardly gets anywhere at all. A lot of the development that might appear to be application development really is more like a framework when you look closely (e.g., Plone, Drupal). Given its better deployment story, it’s no surprise PHP is the basis of most viable open source web applications.

“If you tell people that something is important, often they hear it as: everything else is unimportant. People just seem to be wired that way.

“Strategy isn’t written in stone. Rather strategy is built upon a given set of economics, a set of payoffs. Today’s economics are in shock – numerous shocks are rolling across the global economic landscape. As economics change, so must strategy. What was “strategic” yesterday is less and less so today.

“Why doesn’t anybody sell a chorded keyboard for cellphones?

“Pot makes you feel fine with being bored. When you feel bored you should be learning something new or being creative. If you smoke pot you may grow up to find you aren’t good at anything.

“Reducing the number of economic hardships that the poor have to deal with actually makes them more, not less, likely to work, just as repairing most of the dents on a car makes the owner more likely to fix the last couple on his own.

“The world imposes constraints on us all, employee or free-lancer. But employees get handed constraints from above, without the motivations that ground them. Worse, they get used to the idea of constraints without reason.