Microsoft Hailstorm (aka World Domination v2.0) is dead!
New York Times story.

“Microsoft has quietly shelved a consumer information service that was once planned as the centerpiece of the company’s foray into the market for tightly linked Web services.

The service, originally code-named Hailstorm and later renamed My Services, was to be the clearest example of the company’s ambitious .Net strategy. It was intended to permit an individual to keep an online persona independent of his or her desktop computer, supposedly safely stored as part of a vast data repository where there could be easy access to it from any point on the Internet.”

How to post to Radio from, er, Microsoft Word!

AOL Time Warner shares slump
New York Times story.

“AOL Time Warner’s stock has plunged 10 percent over the last two days, as investors have grown concerned about the company’s balance sheet, turmoil in its Internet unit and stock sales by a big shareholder.

The stock closed yesterday at $19.60 in heavy trading, piercing the $20 mark for the first time since late 1998, more than a year before AOL announced plans to acquire Time Warner.”

Inventing the Future

Extraordinarily perceptive article by Tim O’Reilly about how the future of the Net will emerge from a myriad of developments, most of them outside the corporate sector. This piece is in the same league as Clay Shirky’s original essay on the significance of P2P.

Shake-up at AOL Time Warner

Chickens coming home to roost department. Financial Times story here. New York Times story here. And the FT followed up with an admiring profile of the company’s putative saviour.

IN FIVE years’ time, says Andy Grove, the former chairman of Intel, all companies will be Internet companies, or they won’t be companies at all. [Source]

Good description of Microsoft — by Ralph Waldo Emerson!

“An institution”, he once said, “is the lengthened shadow of one man.”

“Can the Corporation survive?”
Useful Economist piece on Coase’s theory of the firm and how it stands up in modern times.

Another Homer Simpson joke

Homer is learning computing. Comes to the instruction: “Press any key to start”. “Where’s the Any key?” he asks.

SJ Mercury: Andreessen: Copy protection efforts are doomed. As film studios and recording studios urge Congress to extend copy protection to every home entertainment device, Andreessen said the entertainment industry need look no further than the software industry’s own expensive, failed attempts at encryption to realize it is ineffective at stopping piracy. [Tomalak’s Realm]