Ballmer says Google’s hiring pace is ‘insane’

Google also is reliant on a single source of revenue, Ballmer said. The company made almost all of its revenue last year from advertising sales. “They’re still really one business, and it’s a search and advertising business,” he said. Google’s other efforts have been “cute,” he said.

I’m not sure that Ballmer’s rosy picture of Microsoft’s talent matches what Microsoft’s underground bloggers seem to be saying. Although, consensus from many seems to be that when Microsoft went into rapid-hire expansion mode the quality of their employees took a dive.

Also, considering how much of Microsoft’s revenue comes from either Windows or Office, as opposed to all of their other business offerings, I’m not sure how much ground Ballmer has to make that kind of comment. If he were at Procter & Gamble…

eTel: The open source phone crowd talks to itself

An example: An otherwise excellent speaker on identity, Kaliya Hamlin, tried to suggest some potential win-win strategies in identity management that would help users while still enabling the operators to make money. She suggested that the operators offer identity services and tie them to a commerce engine, so users could buy things and charge them through their wireless bills. It’s a great idea, and the Japanese operators are already doing it. But I know from personal experience that as soon as you mention ‘billing’ to most of the US and European operators they run screaming from the room. Their billing systems are already too complex, held together by chewing gum and spiderwebs, and the thought of making a big change to them is terrifying. Kaiya gets an A for effort, but in a forum that had a balanced representation her idea would have been discussed and debated rather than just tossed out there.”

I wonder if there’s enough of a market in pushing cell phones as a credit card replacement to justify starting up a new cell company or MVNO…

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/03/12/indian_students_told_to_talk/

The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Mumbai (Bombay) will turn off hostel students’ free internet access from 11pm until 12.30pm. Authorities hope the decision will get students talking to each other again. Mumbai has 13 undergraduate hostels.

The really interesting part of this for me is that they’ve decided that 11PM – 12:30PM is when they need to encourage social interaction. If you were going to pick an arbitrary time for this kind of thing, I would think you would choose mealtimes, or between 2AM – 6AM, or something along those lines.

Joey Day : Syzygy » The machine is us

This is the second time I’ve seen this video in the past 2 days. First Bart showed it at our internal meeting yesterday, and then it showed up randomly in a Technorati tag link. It is cool though.

I had a conversation with a coworker about blogging today who got into RSS because of an internal presentation, but was asking “How do I find feeds.” The short answer is… “here’s my feedlist (~140 feeds) see if you like some.”

It did make me think though, that I basically see 2 types of blogs. Some bloggers (Kottke, Dave Weiner) point to lots of links of things they found interesting, with some commentary interspersed. For tipping point readers, they’re the communicators who are bridging groups of people, pointing out new stuff. That’s how I get to most of the stuff that ends up in my feedreaders now, someone linked to it. Then I end up on someone’s blog, and it looks interesting.

The other category is people who publish a lot of original content (Joel Spolsky, Steve Yegge, Daring Fireball, etc.). I tend to land on these blogs from a link from some other blog, but subscribe, or keep coming back because the content is regularly good. Here, it’s more about getting a window onto an individuals thoughts or work, as opposed to enlisting someone else who reads a lot as an editor.

I think I fall more into the first category (though this entry is long for me:) — especially if you include my del.icio.us links which I treat a lot like a linkblog.