schoudha

Either way, he's a great hacker and that was great candid interview.

Startups shouldn't be looking to compete with the core businesses of Google and MS/Yahoo. They should (I think):

1. Invent a new service 2. Improve a service that sucks

I doubt PG funded anyone who claims they can build a better search engine.

There are some thing big companies can do and other things they can't (i.e. Justin.TV).

It's not like Google is letting MBA grads run engineering.

Clearly, the intention of this particular number is to steal. It's not enough that pirates steal, but they have to publicize their behavior and tactics and encourage others to follow them. It's this type of publicity that fools people into thinking that somehow digital piracy isn't equivalent to walking into Best Buy and shoplifting.

I can only hope that one day these characters get caught and have to face the MPAA in court.

Are pirates so proud of stealing that they have to broadcast it to the whole world?

However, as the industry moves towards HD standards - are consumers going to be satisfied with the solid but still lower quality video that can be efficiently transmitted on the net?

Ruby will be 5 times faster by Christmas 2007. :)

Nevertheless, even if we assume that this is true, many of Google's employees, including tech leads, produt managers, VPs, do give slide presentations. These employees have huge influence on the products and thus its very likely that Google "Presenations" will be more like Gmail than Google Video.

I don't think the goal is to replace Keynote or Powerpoint but rather provide software the lets people easily develop bring presentations for a web audience.

As a former iWork engineer, I think some of the stuff Keynote has can't be replicated effectively in a web application.

Zenter has some tough competition ahead of it but I'm sure they expected it.

Google can't lock out or force it's products onto its users, they're in a very different business and environment. In order to continue grow they'll have to innovate - users can easily switch to other services by a click of the button.

As for Facebook being the new Google, Google reinvented a business, internet advertising. Facebook has a great product, but they haven't shown that they can monetize the way Google did to search.

My partner and I are off to Silicon Valley anyway for jobs, however the Y-Combinator process has made us hungrier then ever to ultimately do something on our own.

I'm going to make sure Google doesn't remain a "blackhole" as PG described it :)

This is sort of related to having a technical advantage on your competitors. How can startups that aren't from cutting edge PhD proposals or started by that rare star hacker (Bram Cohen, Wozniak, etc...) have real and sustainable technical advantage?

What does it mean to be dead then?

What I think Paul Graham is saying, and this is underscored by the notion of "being dangerous," is that Microsoft is no longer the place where new ideas and true innovation is going to come from. Startups are born from fresh ideas, and the companies that are dangerous to them are places like Google which seem to being designed to produce competitors to startups.

Microsoft will continue to sell $50 OEM copies of Windows to Dell and licenses of Office but this is a business on the decline. Microsoft is Old-tech stuck in the era of desktop applications, closed development strategies, and the economics of software licensing.

The financial effects of MS being dead are already showing some effect, MSFT has moved much since the dot-com boom, but it will take 5-10 years and continued blunders from MS to see some real damage.

If such blunt and sweeping statements are being made in Redmond then surely Paul Graham is right. Microsoft is dead.

To even think that IPTV and YouTube are 1 on 1 competitors represents a fundamental misunderstanding of what YouTube is all about.

You might be referring to Thrift. In that case, it's only useful if you want to do cross-language services. I don't think an early-stage startup needs this sort of architecture but I guess designing for scale never hurts.

Compare Justin.tv to Ustream.tv. Justin immediately presents us with live video and even provides his real cell phone number. I was actually the first user to call, as far as I know :). On Ustream, I'm having trouble viewing any live video and even more trouble understanding what exactly I'm watching.

I think a lot of people who believe in the iTunes-iPod lock-in strategy don't understand that the vast majority of music on iPods is not from iTunes. Any iTunes-iPod lock-in that Apple has is through the seamless experience of syncing one's music onto his or her iPod through iTunes.

The move towards non-DRM music will help Apple avoid anti-trust issues in Scandinavia and make buying digital music a better experience for users. User affinity is the #1 lock-in strategy and no one knows this better than Apple.

In the extreme case, where every online community is tied to facebook, imagine being able to click a user name and find out "real' information about a person and his friends. It might make people less willing to post.