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Dissecting Yammer: A Revenue Stream is not necessarily a Business Model by Tim Marman

I mentioned that I thought Yammer had a flawed business model , and I’ve been planning on expanding on that for awhile now. I recently revisited the topic with Corey and Dan in light of a NY Times article suggesting that Twitter had popularity and Yammer...

You don’t change the world with a marginally better mousetrap by Tim Marman

For those of you paying attention, Cuil , a new search engine taking aim at Google, launched with much hype. Much of that hype comes from the fact that it was founded by former Google search architect Anna Patterson and her husband, Stanford professor...

Why you SHOULDN’T start a tech company in Silicon Valley by Tim Marman

There’s been a bit of back and forth on what the best place to start a technology company is these days. The conventional wisdom these days is that the place to start and run a technology company is Silicon Valley. The key reasons put forth to justify...

Technology really only matters when it creates new possibilities by Tim Marman

I've gotten a bad rap over the years as a "gadget guy". Every time something new is released, people have come to expect me to have it. I'm definitely a gadget guy, but I think people often miss why I buy gadgets. Unlike, say, Alex , you'll...
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Simultaneous Discovery and its impact on stealth mode by Tim Marman

We’ve talked a lot about the anti-stealth movement here and on the nextNY list, and the topic has resurfaced again recently thanks to Brad Burnham’s post about the advantages of being open . I noticed that, at least anecdotally, there was...

Give me an “elite” leader, please by Tim Marman

Susan Jacoby’s latest article examines how the word “elite” became a slur. Pity the poor word “elite,” which simply means “the best” as an adjective and “the best of a group” as a noun. What was once an accolade has turned poisonous in American public...
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The Challenges of Scaling Twitter's Follower Model by Tim Marman

I wrote previously that Twitter's architecture is not scalable for real-time messaging . Indeed, the Twitter development team talked about this recently . Twitter is, fundamentally, a messaging system. Twitter was not architected as a messaging system...

Innovation, Disruption and The Economics of Free by Tim Marman

Hank Williams managed to stir up quite the controversy with his recent post lamenting the rise of free and blaming the VCs . His assertion is that the venture capitalists have made free, ad-supported businesses the norm and effectively "ruined it...

The Enterprise, The iPhone, and the Role of Silverlight by Tim Marman

With its recent announcement to support ActiveSync on the iPhone , Apple is clearly going after the enterprise user. The problem, as Colin puts it, is that the decisions that consumers make decisions on a radically different set of criteria than organizations...

T-Mobile doesn't know how to treat its customers by Tim Marman

It looks like T-Mobile dropped their data plan from $29.99/mo to $19.99/mo. I originally thought this was related to the new unlimited rate plans and losing the Starbucks account , but it was actually back in September (on my birthday no less). I must...
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