WSJ writes on Google's rising clout, and how it has been helped along by the very companies that are competing with it. The mistake IBM made with Microsoft 20 years ago is what Yahoo did with Google.

Some rivals, particularly Yahoo, can blame themselves for helping Google take off. Three years ago, Yahoo picked Google's search engine to provide search results on Yahoo's network of Web sites, replacing a service by Inktomi.

Yahoo had started by providing Internet searchers with information from its own directory, functioning like a giant Yellow Pages to the Internet organized largely by human editors. If this couldn't provide the information, Yahoo would use Google's search technology. Increasingly, though, users went directly to Google's Web site for results.

It was a classic case of underestimating a high-tech jewel and giving it away, similar to when International Business Machines Corp. gave the business of supplying PC operating systems to a little-known company called Microsoft. Although IBM thought it was just subcontracting a part of the PC, Microsoft's Bill Gates saw that operating systems would someday control the lion's share of profits and strategic influence in PCs.

Executives at Yahoo gradually realized they were losing their leadership in Internet search. The Google threat to other Yahoo businesses didn't sink in until last year, when Google unveiled a Web site that automatically collected summaries and headlines of top news stories from the Web and displayed them.

What could dethrone Search and Surf? Syndications and Subscriptions. More on this soon.

Search Engine Watch has a detailed analysis of the implications of the Yahoo-Overture deal from multiple angles. "Once the Overture deal closes, Yahoo, like Google, will control both key elements to search success: good content to pull users in and good ads to help pay for the service. That helps secure Yahoo's future as a search destination."

Phil Windley blogs a talk by HP's Stormy Peters on open-source:

She suggests the following business models around open source:

- Commercial software - Oracle running on Linux is the example she uses.
- Support and services - This is the professional services model.
- Aggregation and enhancing - This is Redhat and other Linux vendors.
- Commercialize with a dual license - "Free for non-commercial use."
- Enable hardware
- End of life - What to do with a dog product that isn't selling?
- Building an ecosystem - Eclipse is the example here.

Why would you want to open source a product?

- Commoditizes a market you don't control (disruption)
- Make a technology pervasive
- Promote a proprietary product you have
- Lower the overall cost of a project (shared effort)
- Promote hardware
- Enable custom solution for customers (let them roll their own)
- Exit a business
- Leverage resources from others

When isn't it appropriate? This is bound to be controversial?

- The product is a control point (Windows)
- The product is obsolete (Windows---NO she didn't really say that.)
- The cost doesn't justify the benefit. This is a nod to the fact that open source development isn't free.
- Misdirection and defocusing of resources
- Intellectual property risk cannot be justified. Don't open source something you can prove you have the right to. This is important.
- Don't open source something to compete against the OS community.
- Just because its cool (I disagree with this---this is a great reason to open source something---ofttimes you don't see the benefit until people play with it and geeks are the ones to do that).

I tried an experiment over the past 10 days or so to get an idea of the utility of blogs. I get about 500-odd items from my 90+ feeds daily. I decided to delete the ones which I found not very useful, and see how many items would be left over a 10-day period. The answer: about 300. This means, that I getting about 30 good ideas / comments from bloggers daily. I cannot think of any other source which provides such a rich set of new inputs. Bloggers cook food for the brain, and RSS feeds are the delivery people.

With my Info Aggregator, I am now as excited as I've been about a new technology. RSS is undboutedly the HTML of today. The Info Aggregator (or more broadly, an RSS aggregator), is creating within me the same excitement that I felt using Mosaic in the fall of 1994.

Something big is underway. The pieces are slowly coming together. Blogs, Publish-Subscribe, RSS, Information Refinery, Dashboard, Web Services - its all very exciting. We all have an opportunity to be part of this new emerging world.

CRN's Michael Vizard on RSS and its growing importance:

Web logs are interesting, but what's even more interesting is the RSS technology. Now, I've got a mechanism by which I can let people customize how they want to have information come to them. One of the things you've seen happening on CRN.com is that we're creating an RSS feed around storage. That's my first experiment with getting people to sign up for it. People can have a storage feed and get all the related headlines coming to them.

Once they get the headlines, they click on them and it takes them back to our site. It becomes a mechanism for driving traffic to the site that is phenomenal. It also is a beautiful thing for readers, because it allows them to customize content in accord with what they're looking for.

Right now, we're not shipping out whole stories via RSS. People want tight, limited summaries in an RSS feed, but will come to the site to read the stories. They use it as a digest and index to what's going on, but at the end of the day it will actually drive more traffic to the sites.

I think RSS means that people will move from the days of active Web surfing to passive Web surfing. By that I mean that people will no longer go on the site because it's fun, they'll only go when they have some specific thing that they care about. The RSS feed is a way to bring people back to sites for stuff that they care about it.

At the same time, people will find Web sites richer because they'll find them easier to navigate. I don't care whose site it is -- aggregating any site's content these days is a difficult chore because there's so much of it. RSS gives people a point of entry into the site for things they care about. I think that it will actually rejuvenate content on the Web. We could also have a much longer conversation about how RSS and e-mail will leverage and extend and improve each other.

I always thought of game theory as very mathematical-oriented, and having little impact on the way one made decisions in business. It took a recommendation by Chetan Parikh of a book by James Miller – “Game Theory At Work” – to change this view. The book has an extraordinary collection of everyday situations and how ideas from game theory can be used to understand and then solve the problem.

Here is how the book starts: “Your life consists of games, situations in which you compete for a high score. Game theory studies how smart, ruthless people should act and interact in strategic settings. This book will teach you to solve games. In some games, you will negotiate for a raise; in others, you will strive to ensure that an employee works as hard as possible. Sometimes you will know everything, while in other games, you will have to guess at what others know that you don’t. Occasionally, competitors will work together to survive, while in other situations, co-operation will be impossible since the winner will take it all….In the world of game theory, there exists no mercy or compassion, only self-interest.”

James Miller highlights some of the lessons from the book, many of which seem counter-intuitive (all the more reason to read the book!):