Moving from Blogger to Wordpress: update your RSS feed!

Since I started blogging, exactly two months ago, I have been advocating that the very best enterprises needed to focus on serving their customers everyday better - one of my favourite topics being that Information Systems & Technology could empower these companies´ processes towards the necessary "operational excellence" achievement. In other words, I´m a strong believer that tomorrow´s leading companies in all industries will be the ones which will have proven a certain mastery in creating and servicing a competitive advantage thanks to IT-driven projects.

There is a word for all this mess, "e-Business": use the best technologies, and make these used and understood by your ecosystem (suppliers, employees, etc.) to serve you customer best.

I felt that I had no right writing about something I actually wasn´t applying nor planning to implement. This blog is an enterprise in its own: it requires dedication, time, patience, and the drive to write, or at least try and do my best to write interesting "IT Addict" stuff. Furthermore, I have a fast-growing portfolio of very bright customers: you! Through gathering feedbacks, I realized you were overall pretty satisfied with the content & design, but that you wanted me to switch, for reasons I still don´t understand well, from Blogger - a tool you consider being "blogging for dummies", to a more "professional" platform like TypePad or WordPress. I´ve chosen the latter.

My goal being to serve better my community, of which you belong to as long as you read me and leave comments, I hope I found a good way to illustrate how a technology upgrade (from the Blogger platform to the WordPress software) may enhance customer satisfaction.

Now that the message has come accross, here are a few housekeeping remarks:

- Do not leave comments on http://itaddict.blogspot.com anymore, go to http://jeremyfain.wordpress.com instead (update your bookmarks); you will anyways be able to find my blog on http://www.jeremyfain.net.

- I made a slight blog title change, from "IT Addict, high-tech made easy" to "Tech IT Easy", under the name of a shop bearing such a name I saw in Rome;

- Update my RSS feed on your RSS reader from itaddict.blogspot.com/rss.xml to http://jeremyfain.wordpress.com/feed/ for posts and http://jeremyfain.wordpress.com/comments/feed/ for comments;

- I´m in middle of the migration process (making sure all the comments are there, pictures right-sized, no broken links, browsing features, etc.) and I should be done by the August 30th 2006. Consequently, I should be most grateful if you do excuse any inconvenience likely to happen until then.

- I´d like to thank: Blogger for providing me with a very simple tool that helped me start blogging; WordPress for making its superb software platform available to all for free (I added many interesting new features such as the last comments published); and you for your time and faithfullness in my writings & thoughts. I hope this is only the beginning of our collaborative sharings on the utmostly interesting topic of Information Technology.

See you right now on Tech IT Easy.

Entrepreneurial Brainstorming session N.3: BlogMapping.com

Which blogger hasn´t dreamt of accessing a sort of blogospheric map?

Blogs, as pretty much anything social, are organized in networks. If a visit doesn´t make of you a community member (Steve? Leo? ;-) ), leaving a comment includes you in a conversation and leaves a link towards your own personal space.

My idea would be to build a tool tracking networks on the blogosphere. In other words, BlogMapping.com would be an "automatic visual LinkedIn", where you could see who is connected to whom, and how strong their ties are. For instance, X & Y both leave comments on Z´s blog, so Z connects them. But Z leaves comments on Y´s blog, not on X´s blog, so the Y-Z link is stronger than the X-Z one.

I believe categories of bloggers should appear very fast, becoming communities of common interests (IT, Art, Rock music, entrepreneurship, Ventures Capital, Politics, etc.).

As usual, I´m not displaying any business model hint until it´s been commented (by the way, you´ll find commented what I think the business model answer is on WikiustomerService.com).

Kari Silvennoinen on Project Management

I spent a week-end in the world´s most beautiful city. You name it: Rome. Rome is just a big breathtaking open-air museum, and an open-air fashion show too by the way.

Here on the picture, you see my friend Kari, from Helsinki, Finland. We were brunching at ´Gusto yesterday, a very trendy place not far from the Spanish Stepsides (the exact address is Piazza Augusto Imperatore 9). Kari provided me with very useful professional insights, and agreed for me to share it on this blog.

Kari is an IT Project Manager at a major Nordic energy company. His projects involve mobile messaging platform implementation and IT risk and governance issues, among others. He is accountable for the project´s budget, quality and is obviously expected to make it match deadlines.

More interesting is the fact that Kari usually doesn´t have dedicated resources: he needs to "borrow people" from different types of IT resources (IT dept., contractors, etc.), people who don´t necessarily have time (or willingness) to commit to another project, and boss. You can imagine how enhanced Kari´s diplomatic & negotiation skills must have resulted! The role of the project owner (the Project Manager´s supervisor, directly reporting to the CIO) is also key: the project owner (who has the hierarchical clout) and manager (who has the execution drive) really need to seduce "client departments" when explaining why this project fits the company culture, goals, but also why the end-customer will benefit from such a service.

No doubt Scandinavian technological leadership and culture of consensus & dialogue help a lot in this challenging environment.

Oh, by the way & before I finish, here is Kari´s daily reading roll:
- Daring Fireball (Apple news, Kari is Mac-addicted)
- Reddit (news)
- Slashdot.org (News for nerds)
- and the late Drunken Blog (about Apple)

Apple vs. Dell: the victory of marketing leadership over operational excellence?

Is the bell tolling for process-intensive (Dell, Home Depot, Amazon, Wal Mart, HP, Ikea, etc.), top of the class in operations, companies? Why have marketing-dept. driven companies (Apple, Nescafé, American Express, l´Oréal) so strongly gained momentum in the recent months?

Take the Dell-Apple bullfight. Check this MacDailyNews article. Ceteris paribus, Apple computers (laptops & desktops) now appear to be less expensive than Dells (see an example here, in Spanish but easy to pick up).

As a reminder, Apple´s market cap has been topping the one of Dell since the early days of May 2006.

Furthermore, Apple blows Dell away at the Google fight (see picture below).

Laptop furnitures: a niche market yet to be taken over by a sound leader

The 41 years old German architect Konstantin Grcic´s last blockbuster is nothing else but a laptop-friendly geek´s chair. I find it pretty cool.

I believe there is still a market for a beautiful, metal-designed, fashionable laptop furniture manufacturer. When you browse the Ikea, Home Depot & Office Depot websites, you indeed find some nice stuff - but people spend so much time on their laptop that they might let go a little premium to afford a unique environment for the time they use it from home.

Furthermore, laptop sales having outperformed desktop computers for half a decade, there is no reason why laptop-focused furniture sales aren´t skyrocketing.

Creative launches an iPod killer

I´m not an iPod fan (see post). And I´m happy to see Creative Technology launching, for the sake of all, its ZEN: elegant, light, powerful, & most of all working perfectly - unlike its Apple couterpart - in an opened, peer-to-peer, knowledge and information sharing environment.

Entrepreneurial Brainstorming session N.2: MyMessage.tv

MyMessage.tv would basically be the Internet gateway of a real satellite television channel, the television channel of the People.

People vote (through the Internet, mobile phones, fax & telephone) for plannings, and the TV shows & programs to fill plannings in. Commercial broadcasting time will be broken down through an auction system: advertisers will be required to bid in order to obtain the targeted commercial timeframes.

People will also vote for the best commercials, which will be granted free prime-time spots to be allocated to charities. Basically, the winning advertiser will give out its commercial time to a charity it will have chosen.

Again, people will send donations (Internet, mobile phones, etc.). Biggest donators (individuals or organizations) will be granted free prime-time spots and be able to chose the advertising (politics, environment, themselves talking, their company, etc.) they´d like to watch.

This way, there would be no more program nobody would want to see. People will feel they entertain more wisely, spend their time & money better, & contribute to fighting poverty & diseases.

To make it short, MyMessage.tv is a TV channel inspired by eBay, LastMinute, Kiva & Wikipedia.

A few days in Barcelona with Vincent

My friend Vincent van Wylick just left Barcelona. Vincent is from nowhere: he speaks Dutch with a German accent and German with a Dutch accent...Born in Germany with parents from Yougoslavia & the Netherlands, a Dutch citizen, Vincent has studied in Manchester before working for Sony during 3.5 years in various countries & assignments related to marketing & innovation. He then went for Graduate studies in Rotterdam and is planning to start a financial auditing career in Luxemburg.

Vincent came to visit me for 5 days. Although I was most of the time working, we managed to find some time to to exchange on matters such as innovation, entrepreneurial economics, high tech, Apple, software, the Internet, & girls..which didn´t prevent us from drinking too much, eating interesting food, meeting nice people and listening to some really good live jazz music. I had met Vincent during my time, as an international exchange student within the Master of Entrepreneurship & New Business Venturing at the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus Universiteit.

We had teamed up to write a research paper about the best possible entrepreneurial teams. Vincent & I had come up with the conclusion that Asterix (mental agility) & Obelix (strength) was a good founding pair, and we defined the perfect profile: Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, is both a geek (Amazon rests on its customer-centric information systems) and a Wall-Street insider (helpful during fundraising times). Those who actually feel like reading the paper may write an e-mail to me and I´ll be glad to send it (.pdf).

The main reason why I´ve decided to write such a post is that Vincent underwent quite an interesting, although sad, adventure. As he was polishing his thesis, he landed a consulting job within one of the European Space Agency incubator´ start-ups. Founded by an Israeli / Belgian / American team, the start-up was devising virtual space tourism systems when its founder suddenly died in his early thirties. So did the project, obviously. It´s pretty difficult to comment on such a story, but I wanted to share it with you all.

This being said, Vincent is already thinking of executing one of his business ideas - a sort of Web 2.0 publishing company. Well, I´m afraid I can´t say much more, but you may expect Vincent, a very heavy reader, to come up with disruptive innovation (he was trained at Sony) in this ageing business.


Adendum 1: I have actually shot a video interview of Vincent. It´s pretty big (500 MB), and I´d like to start videocasting on this very blog. Would anyone be kind enough to suggest me a videocasting hosting service as well as a compression standard enabling me to plug the video (.avi)? I was thinking of YouTube and vpod.tv...Many thanks in advance.

Adendum 2: for your information, Vincent´s favourite websites both cast video. These are the great & utmostly famous Venture Voice & a Stanford University lectures broadcasting service I don´t know yet. Vince, could you please provide IT Addict´s readership with the exact address in the comments section?

Entrepreneurial brainstorming session N.1: WikustomerService.com

The domain name Wikustomerservice.com is still available and I don´t understand why.
Well I guess you get from the very name of the website what it´s all about - good, that means the name´s well chosen. I've been thinking about such a service since I discovered Wikipedia, quite a while ago. It might already exist, but I haven´t seen such a thing so far. Still don´t get the picture?

Wikustomerservice.com is an Internet wiki platform empowering users of all products of all brands to build their own customer service. Basically, the venture would need to convince potential clients, namely key accounts, to 'outsource' their customer service to their..customers! Employees specializing in certain business areas would be moderators in their fields, and companies would save millions in documentation and customer support service fees (such key accounts should keep their traditional customer service on the phone though; but why not also through being allowed to Skype the relevant moderator?). The wiki platform should be devised to enable a congregation of as many companies as possible, as well as brands, products, versions into a single graphic chart customable at the client´ convenience. The classifications & categorization may be inspired from, for instance, Wikipedia.

There you go. I'm not elaborating more on this business idea to let our creativity work a little bit. Wikustomerservice.com would´ve been helpful when Dell laptops burst, when Apple laptops burnt, when Smart cars & Class A Mercedes flipped over. Customers are more often than we think more reactive than product manufacturers themselves - a rather logical stance since customers are the ones that actually use the products.

Entrepreneurs, forget about NDAs!

Non Disclosure Agreements (NDAs) are useless.

At least that´s my opinion. I won´t be the first person advocating for their inefficiency and removal from entrepreneurial business practices (I´m not talking here about medical, law, industrial or any other "established" environment).

If you have an idea, say it! share it with your friends, family members, & the people you meet everyday. Why?

I can think of at least 3 reasons:
- Firstly, they´ll start challenging you and help you improve the initial idea.
- Second, because they´ll feel honored that your trust them and might well help you later on if they can.
- Third, imagine you talk to someone about your idea and realize that (s)he´s decided to start executing right away without telling you: if your idea has entry-barriers low enough to enable anybody to implement in a wink, I guess you should builp up your project, work harder to fit your market needs so that it becomes unmatchable by the competition in the short-run.

That´s why I´ll start posting a few ideas - all IT addicted- from time to time on this very blog, starting as of tomorrow. I believe we´ll be able to improve such ideas a good deal. And, who knows, some of you might well feel like starting-up something related to such brainstormings.


PS: it goes without saying that if someone comes to you with an idea, asking you for your opinion and input but for the strictest confidentiality as well, the most basic ethical discipline will make you even forget that you met with this would-be entrepreneur. However, before you shut your mouth forever to respect her/his will, take one or two minutes to try to convince her/he to display entrepreneurial ideas. There would be just nothing to regret since every word, comment, move, external input can only help.

56% of bloggers sometimes or often double-check their sources. What about journalists?

Although a mere 34% of bloggers define themselves as journalists, the bulk of them, actually 56%, sometimes or often double-check their sources (source: Pew Internet & American Life Project, 20th July 2006 report).

I believe 100% of journalists call themselves journalists. But how many exactly double-check their sources? How many 'professional' journalists cross information drilled through different channels before publishing/displaying/broadcasting it?

Believe me or not, the answer is "very few". Through a non-profit venture I worked for during 4 years, I had the opportunity to meet many, many journalists, one different everyday at some point, from many countries

Some journalists are sincerely curious, smart, honest, accountable, reliable, trustworthy, professional & helpful when it comes to helping readers getting to know what happened where. Unfortunately, such good journalists are a minority. I'm writing 'good' the same way I would qualify someone as 'a good person', in a narrow sense: I'm not talking about their skills, I'm not saying they're good rather than excellent, because these good people are just doing their real job, as it should be done.

Indeed, too many journalists forget about their initial mission statement: provide THE MOST ACCURATE FACTS to readers, rather than viewpoints or political messages. Instead of that, journalists are urged by their editors or their paper's owners to convey specific political messages. Reading one single newspaper hardly helps getting a clear picture of what's really going on since every single one of them expresses a viewpoint. The solution for us, citizens, would be to read all sorts of papers (different doctrines, countries, etc.) to confront representative opinions - which is hardly feasible for someone who can´t spend more than an hour a day reading the news.

Furthermore, many of the journalists I talked to confessed that, being conscious of their clout, they sometimes tend to abuse it. And when they do so, what happens? Well, nothing...A reader sends a letter to the editor, and this letter's most of the time not published, if read at all. However, in most regulated environments, there are consequences to one's mistakes: Andersen was dismantled in the aftermath of Enron, medical doctors get sued in case they do something wrong, unskilled politicians don't get reelected (well..I agree there's room for discussion on this one), thiefs get trialed, murderers get sentenced to jail or Death Penalty, Zidane got a red card..humm, let's stop piling up examples - you got the idea.

It all boils down to the following conclusion: no check & balances & seldom double-checking of sources (due to lack of time, fast-moving Society, publishing deadline, etc. - journalists just rephrase what Press Agencies broadcast), traditional media are in a pickle. Collateral damage: less and less citizens trust the media.

This is where blogs come in. Blogs, as I see it, constitute a Hegelian overtaking of traditional media routine:
Be inaccurate, just once, and someone will inevitably post a correcting comment.
Don´t mention your source & people will ask for it.
Try to lie on a blog: the blogging community will immediatly retaliate.
Blogs are also a fabulous counter-power for the people. Churchill once said during a House of Commons speech, on November 11th 1947, that "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." Thanks to blogging, democracies widen the gap that separates them from autocracies, symbolized by traditional media who have become more powerful than necessary.

Beyond "techno-fetichism & -nationalism": God Bless America´s Venturesome Consumers

I came across a refreshing article in the Economics Focus column of this Friday´s issue of the opinion-shaping, free-market, weekly, British magazine The Economist.

Amar Bidhé, a Professor of entrepreneurship at Columbia University´s business school, explained in a recent paper why mushrooming alarming reports stating that the US economy will suffer from a shortcoming of engineering graduates are mistaken.

Bidhé distinguishes upstream (R&D offsprings, inventions) and downstream (a service or product) innovations, and demonstrates that good managers, able for instance to bring a patent to the market, matter as much if not more than good engineers. Bidhé also advocates the Wal Mart case, striking a positive opinion about a company that has optimized its operational processes (downstream innovation) to lower prices and attract more consumers.

I recommend you to read Bidhé´s paper as well as The Economist´s column, which ends with Amar Bidhé´s main idea: there is no added value without a transaction, and since American consumers often lead the use of innovation products & services, the more innovation in China & India, the better for the United States. Consumers, not technologists, reap off the benefits of innovation. Hence the whole point of the demonstration: "America´s policymakers should worry more about how to keep consumers consuming than about the number of science and engineering graduates, at home or in the East" (source: The Economist).

Logistics: Information (Technology) matters every day more

This week-end I found some time to hang around the Barcelona Logistics Zone, hidden by the hill of Montjuic, at the Southern exit of the city.

I love watching the actual happening of international business. I believe the contemplation of merchandise trade flows helps understanding how the world goes round: a French container departs to Japan, a Chinese one arrives in Spain, etc. By the way, I suggest you combine harbor watch with reading a good Albert Londres novel for a unique, genuine, amazing brainstorming experience. It´s pretty much like making love whilst sipping a Chivas on the rocks.

Globalization has made the Information and Services Society hit the headlines, but though the feeling of distance might be abolished by IT, geography will never be annihilated. Moreover, we more and more tend to talk about what moves all around (capital, humans, goods, services, etc.) but tend to forget about what remains stable: distances. Distances matter more and more in a growing Consumers Society. We consume a hell lot of products, every day more products.

Products trade go through containers, a standardized metal "box" invented in the end of the 60s in Hong Kong. Containers fit the loading infrastructures of boats, airplanes, trains and trucks and are bound to at least use 2 of these transportation means during each trip, often more. Paradoxically enough, containers spend most of their time in storage areas like warehouses. Since containers are devised to make goods move from one place to another in a minimum period of time, one of the big challenges of supply chain management is to reduce storage periods.

This is where IT comes in: reducing storage time will lower working capital, and better the transaction economics. In this respect, IT can help.

78% of the logistics industry players make less than half a million dollars a year (source: International Data Corporation). Hence an overall limited of resources available for IT investments, which explains why, apart from MNCs who for a decade have been investing heavily to foster a competitive advantage. Trucking corporations have been particularly late in adopting Information Technology.

So far, it´s been proven (source: Ibid.) that the use of Internet & collaboration tools lowers transportation costs by 20% to 30%. Such achievements were reached thanks to:
- a better accountability of supply chain flows;
- inventory data sharing between manufacturers, transporters and retailers.

See for yourself, the best logistics companies are no more in the logistics business but in the information business. This is due to the very shift of the industry, enhanced by the generalization of EDI systems (Electronic Data Interchange) and soon-to-come (?) generalization of RFID.

I was always amazed by the FedEx tracking feature, allowing end-users to know exactly where a shipment is. I think information about one´s flows help accepting natural shipping delays due to geographical distances, never to be abolished. Let´s however make sure financial analysts don´t start analyzing logistics player stocks like media company ones...

On Microsoft´s diversified competitive environment

Which company doesn´t compete in a way or another with Microsoft? I can only think of two: Coca-Cola and Ikea...

Seriously speaking, Microsoft´s huge free cash-flows finally find some battlegrounds to be invested. It looks today as if Microsoft could start competing against any software or Internet industry player whose market proves sufficiently juicy.

Take a look at Microsoft´s competitive landscape, & you´ll find how tough the software/Internet environment is since only top-notch companies operate in this industry:

- Operating Systems: Microsoft Windows vs. the open-source community´s Linux
- Consumer Electronics / Digital Industry: Microsoft Zune (an iPod-like, an AppleStore-like, an iTunes-like, MS Media Player vs. Quicktime - Microsoft is, like Apple did, keeping its environment closed, too bad for them) vs. Apple
- Video Game Stations: Microsoft´s XBox 360 vs. the Sony Playstation
- Internet Browsers: MSIE vs. Mozilla Firefox, Opera, Safari, Crazy Browser, etc.
- Search Engines, Instant Messengers, eMail services: MSN vs. Google
- Same as above, + Media Content: MSN vs. Yahoo!
- Encyclopedies: Encarta vs. Wikipedia, Britannica, Universaelis, etc.
- Enterprise Resources Planning (mostly business intelligence & customer relationship management): Microsoft Dynamics (ex-Business Solutions)´s Axapta, Navision & MapPoint vs. SAP, Oracle-Siebel, Business Objects, Salesforce.com, Amdocs, Cognos, Sage, etc.
- Contacts Management: Outlook vs. Mozilla Thunderbird, Eudora, Novell Groupwise, and even IBM´s Lotus Notes & Domino
- Office Solutions: MS Office vs. Open Office, Star Office, Corel WordPerfect Office, Google, etc.
- Personal Finance: MS Money vs. QuickBooks, etc.
- Internet Development Standards: the .Net galaxy (AJAX, XML, etc.) vs. LAMP (Linux-Apache-MySQL-Php)

And I´m forgetting so many (MS Meeting, MS Visio, MS Project, Windows Mobile, MS Exchange Server, Virtual PC, etc.)...I believe Microsoft´s ability to deal with so many impressive competitors deserves an in-depth reengineering of "commonly-agreed corporate strategy rules" like, for instance, "diversification is evil" & "the BCG matrix is wrong" which prove to be jeopardized by Microsoft´s software industry leadership. But that´s another story.

As I see it, Microsoft´s main strengths are:
- top-of-the-class Software Development Project Management Methods, undoubtedly;
- R&D horsepower (MS doesn´t find it too hard to attract talents from all over the world; R&D headcount: over 25K!)
- a certain know-how when it comes to reaching the mass-market; I would say this was Bill Gates´ genius, cf. the democratization of Windows 3.0 against MacOS, IBM OS/2 and Jean-Louis Gassée´s BeOS, although Microsoft undoubtedly had the worst product at the time i.e. less stable and user-friendly.

Before I finish, I bet Microsoft will soon make (say before 31 December 2007) a VoIP acquisition (Wengo?) to allow Outlook users to basically "Skype" their contacts who are online just by clicking on a button. Who bets?

CIOs ought to be business people, not geeks

Let's see how you react to this stance: I more and more tend to believe that, although it would definitely be best if engineering trained, CIOs (Chief Information Officers) need first to be business & management people, not geeks.

Further to that, CIOs should be promoted from the very inside of a company, and be familiar with its key processes and operations. Then, CIOs should obviously be keen on working in IT-intensive environments, though they don't necessarily need to be IT people.

Facing the dilemma "who should I chose between an excellent functional manager of one of my business key processes, and an excellent technologist?", I would definitely go for the process-knowledgeable candidate since this person will empirically know what it takes to optimize current operational routines, and foster a breakthrough from good to great value chain execution.

What about you? Please feel free to discuss my stance.

CRM software vendors: leaders should pay attention..

..to rising stars SalesForce.com (ASP only) & AmDocs (combining billing and CRM solutions). Both are pushing hard. See the following Customer Relationship Management software vendors ranking by Gartner:

Wondering about which blog service fits ITAddict´s needs best

Due to recurrent uploading problems with Blogger at the moment, I´ve been wondering whether I had made a good decision or not opening "ITAddict: IT made simple" on Google´s Blogger / Blogspot. Don´t worry, this blog´s very existence in by no way in danger: I enjoy blogging a lot.

To tell you the truth, when it comes to chosing a service to power my blog, I´m not sure I actually made a choice: I just happened to open it on Blogger without thinking too much (I had had a former, pretty interesting, blogging experience one year ago - which lasted 3 weeks and as many posts, using Overblog - which wasn´t bad at all).

Since I didn´t want to pay anything to be able to blog (Six Apart´s Typepad and Movable Type), my pain should more or less have resulted in chosing between Overblog, Wordpress, and Blogger.

Blogger is very easy to use, powered by Google (ungrounded rumors: there are good chances that search rankings will be higher!), and easy to remember since so many people use it. But it lacks functionalities such as editing comments (rather useful when you realize you made a spelling mistake), and has been unstable recently. Another shortcoming: the layout is the one you should expect if you user Mozilla Firefox to browse the Net; otherwise, and especially on MS Internet Explorer, the design is crappy and definitely not what you should expect.

Anyways:
1) too late...
2) I´m not convinced another blog service provider would´ve done much better (e.g. WordPress´s rather slow at loading; Overblog is too French; TypePad is not free; etc.).


Adendum 1: I just happenend to discover that Olivier Ezratty, a former Microsoft France executive and now a coach for start-uppers, explained on his blog (in French) why he chose WordPress. To French-speaking readers (I apologize to the majority): Olivier Ezratty´s blog is one of my favourite daily visits. I don´t know the man, but his analyses are unique. We share a common drawback, which is having a hard time writing short posts :-). But though some of mines are concise, you won´t find any single one of them on his.
Forgetting about length, you have access on www.oezratty.net to the most accurate analyses on the software industry (innovation, R&D) in general and Microsoft on particular (as an insider, his writing usually involves a sarcastic tone when it comes to regulation or lobbying; e.g. "MS fined by Bruxelles for lower-tier software engineering methods"). You may also find in a recent post an enlightening interview of Bernard Liautaud, the co-founder & the Chairman of Business Intelligence software player Business Objects. Interestingly enough, the interview was published in the magazine "Centraliens", an in-house alumni review of Ecole Centrale Paris, a leading French engineering school where I´ll be starting in September majoring in computer science, telcos & project management thanks to an agreement between Centrale & my home-university, HEC Paris.

Adendum 2: ...the same Olivier Ezratty provides his readers with an a link: Emily Robbins describes on her blog her experience with both WordPress & Typepad.

Adendum 3: 5 blog services reviewed by CNet. Blogger ranks last between Typepad, MSN Spaces, Yahoo! 360 & AOL Journals but taking a look at user comments, Blogger´s far ahead. Although I´m aware of the sample bias we´re facing here.