Kyle LeBoeuf

Great idea from Nicholas Deleon: lets solve all of the music downloading and royalty issues by banning music.

The article is meant largely in jest, but its message rings true…

I’m sorry, but we have to ban music. That’s just the way it is. (via TechCrunch)

I made a comment this morning on Twitter about an article on Techcrunch on Twitter Search. Robin Wauters of Techcrunch makes comments on some of  the (ridiculously stupid) trending topics on Twitter Search. When Twitter Search debuted in its current form last year, it was deemed by many as one of best and quickest ways to get breaking news information, since normal, everyday people on the scene of a major event can tweet just like the journalists and the mass media.

As Robin points out, trends in Twitter Search are quickly becoming overtaken by corny internet chain-letter-style memes (Like “3 Words After Sex“). Some of you may wonder why this is such a big deal, but bear with me for a second.

Think back on when E-mail first started becoming popular (seems like forever and a day ago, but its not that far back). It was orginally seen as a way of communication between friends, family, co-workers or clients/customers. Fast forward 15 years or so later, and everyday I am emptying my inbox of corny, annoying chain latters that contain jokes, funny pictures and videos, or petitions for me to sign and pass on.

Lets look at another popular internet service: Facebook. When Facebook debuted, it quickly became popular among college students as a way to keep in touch in more interactive ways than just e-mail. It wasn’t over-crowded with your entire family (even your grandma), and it was easy to find your friends amongst the riff-raff. The interface was simple, straightforward, and it worked. Go figure. Fast forward a few years later, and guess what? Facebook is packed with all kinds of people, welcome (your classmates, old friends) and unwelcome (your mom, your boss). Not only is it packed with all kinds of people, there’s also companies who on Facebook that are always in your face about getting you to “become a fan” of their product, and they spam with you stuff. Also, as Facebook adds more features and changes things around, it begins to lose the simplicity that was one of the service’s biggest appeals back when it was the newest web trend on the block.

When a service breaks into the mainstream, companies usually try to change the service around to meet the needs of the mainstream user. Most of the popular websites of today (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc.) have become a victim to this.

Twitter is already showing signs of this, removing some features that might actually be useful to some folks but may be too complicated for the mainstream attention the company is starting to gather.

Is breaking into the mainstream a bad thing? For the companies, not really. Mainstream attention can turn into a hefty profit, but it usually sucks for power users, because the services lose a lot of the funtionality that attracted attention in the first place.

My official designation for mainstream is Oprah. When Oprah joins your service, your doomed.

Kyle [at] kyleleboeuf.com

Engadget, Infoworld, and various other technology news sites are reporting on a new Microsoft OS project code-named “Midori”. Midori, rather than being based on previous architecture (such as the NT kernel for NT/2000/XP/Vista), will be based on an entirely new kernel, or maybe not even a “kernel” as we know it at all.

They are claiming that Midori will remove dependencies between hardware and applications using virtualization technology that exists today and taking it to the next level. While all of this sounds cool, Microsoft would have a hard time pulling it off.

Every time an OS company makes major changes to their product, they have to add compromises that cater to the desires of customers running legacy applications when moving a product from R & D to production. We’ve seen this in every major release of the Windows operating system, as well as releases in other operating systems, such as Mac OS (example: OS 9 to OS X, then OS 10.1-10.2-10.3 etc.)

Microsoft is already deep in development of Windows 7, the next version of it’s flagship product. Between supporting that product and any offshoots from it, a significant change in architecture probably isn’t in the pipeline anytime soon.

On top of all of that, you have the fact that the Windows brand is universally recognizable. That’s like telling Sony to rename their console series to something besides “Playstation”. That’s like Apple calling their new OS anything without “Mac” in it. It’s just not feasible.

Microsoft is putting a lot of R & D into pushing products out to the cloud, but they are all branded under the Windows Live brand. Read: Windows. Even with it’s cloud computing initiative (which is probably where MSFT is heading with Midori), it’s still retaining the Windows moniker.

Even if there is a completely different Microsoft OS out there in the future, don’t be surprised if it retains the famous/infamous Windows branding.

Then again, losing the Windows brand might be the thing that makes Microsoft look like a different company. Perhaps we’ll see within the next 5-10 years.

Kyle [at] kyleleboeuf.com