The vision behind Macromedia's newest desktop software for editing static HTML sites, authored by Norm Meyrowitz, President, Macromedia Products:

Welcome to the low-maintenance, read/write web. Macromedia Contribute was created to solve the key problems I've described:

It provides self-service site maintenance capabilities that don't require continual calls to web designers- a key concern among users and web teams.

It gives a way for web designers and administrators to create templates that allow users to update their parts of the website, while providing those administrators with the ability to lock certain parts of the page so they're read-only, and the ability to grant access rights to control who edits each page.

It permits regular users to set up and maintain their own pages and sites (for example, on a corporate portal) without prior training.

Imagine a world in which clients and web consultants, investor relations departments and web teams are in love with each other. It could happen!

We believe that Macromedia Contribute starts the next wave of the web - the low-maintenance, read/write web - where each user can participate actively in what's out there, rather than be a passive recipient.

The document was presented at a Microsoft internal Linux Strategic Review held at the Microsoft offices in Berlin during Sept. 2002. The memo was leaked to Eric Raymond, an open source advocate and author of "The Cathedral and the Bazaar".

Writes InfoWorld about the memo:

"The overall tone of the memorandum is very defensive," Eric Raymond said in advising open source advocates on his conclusions to the survey. It's "not quite panicky, but the researchers are not able to name any argument with the open source community that their own figures show them to be winning. In fact, their figures indicate that we are winning. It looks like all we have to do is stay the course."

The memo describes the results of a telephone survey of developers; system, network and database administrators; and business executives who make decisions on IT spending. The project was developed to provide a greater understanding of how key "audiences" perceive open source, Linux, shared source and general public licenses, and which messages will be effective with each audience, an executive summary of the memo said. The survey was conducted in the U.S., Brazil, France, Germany, Sweden and Japan.

The researchers who conducted the survey found that familiarity and favorability for open source software (OSS) and Linux was high across geographies and audiences. They also found that respondents cited open source software's "low total cost of ownership" (TCO) as one of the best reasons to support OSS, but because it is an "alternative to Microsoft" was second. Forty percent of all respondents felt that a low TCO was the best reason to support OSS and one-third of all respondents cited "an alternative to Microsoft" as one of the best reasons to support OSS.

Additional Comments: NYT and News.com.

From News.com:

Motorola's Instant GPS chip will give users of such devices the ability to tap into a satellite system and pinpoint their geographic location. Measuring only 49 square millimeters, or less than half the area of a Pentium 4 processor, the chip will sell for roughly $10 in volume quantities, said Tim McCarthy, business director for GPS at Motorola's Automotive Group's Telematics Division. That should let device makers add GPS for about a quarter of the cost of current multiple chipsets, which run about $40.

"All of a sudden, starting 10 or 15 years ago, every electronics device had a clock," McCarthy said. "I see position awareness going down that same path. It's just a question of how long it takes."

Giants of Enterprise: Seven Business Innovators and the Empires They Built
By Richard Tedlow

Enterprise defines modern business. Business innovators are responsible for much of what we see around us. Be it the ones who built the railroads across much of the US in the mid-19th century or the dotcommers who spurred the adoption of Internet technology more rapidly than any other, entrepreneurs have always taken risks, done things differently; in the process, they’ve broken old rules and created new ones. Not all entrepreneurs are successful. In fact, most fail. And even the successful ones have to endure failure. A mix of vision and will, combined with daring and determined execution combine to make possible some of the most successful entrepreneurs.

Tedlow’s book profiles seven “extraordinary men doing what Americans do best: building new businesses. They overcame seemingly impossible obstacles to achieve enormous success and, in the process, played a role in the creation of the modern world.” The seven: Andrew Carnegie, George Eastman, Henry Ford, Thomas Watson Sr, Charles Revson, Sam Walton and Robert Noyce.

Writes Tedlow in his introduction:

These are seven stories about men who saw things others did not and made the most of their insight. They used tools that were available to others as well, but used them with greater skill.

For what purpose? To win. To own. To control. To create. This is the story of seven capitalists seizing opportunities in spite of what others saw as constraints.

These seven were all risk takers, innovators, experimenters. They were all more hungry for success than they were afraid of failure. They all had the courage to change not only when things were going badly but, and this is much more difficult, when things were going well.

The Weather Channel: The Improbable Rise of a Media Phenomenon is written by its founder Frank Batten. As the title says, The Weather Channel is one of those unlikely success. Who would have imagined a channel talking about temperatures, isobars and storms to be so commercially successful? Who would have expected people in the US to watching of all the things a weather channel? It is a fascinating story of a channel and concept almost no one expected to succeed.

Piloting Palm by Andrea Butter and David Bogue is billed as “the inside story of Palm, Handspring, and the birth of the billion-dollar handheld industry”. Butter was a marketing executive at Palm from 1993 to 1999. Pogue is the personal technology columnist for the New York Times. Future success for Palm is still not guaranteed, even as it has split into two companies – one focusing on the hardware and the other on the software. But the story makes fascinating reading.

Tomorrow: Dragon Stories