Life has a funny way of getting things to balance. Consider the following post from the gang at Oreilly:
A Black Eye for Firefox Security by Preston Gralla -- Another day, another Firefox vulnerability. Ho hum. It's starting to feel old hat. But the way that Firefox has responded to the latest threat (and previous threats) has given those in charge of the browser a black eye.
I'm a VC which means I'm not taking a position. You can be pro/anti either side of whatever debate you want but it seems to me we are now at the stage where these words with respect to the internet as a whole are starting to ring louder and clearer:
"It wasn't designed for this"
If you take a step back, you can understand why the AOL walled garden isn't all that bad. Okay, it is, but you get my point.
Me thinks its time for lots (or a few) smart people to check egos at the door and layout internet v2 from the perspective of knowing what we know now, let's do something right.
Just like Compuserve, GEIS, AOL, the Source, etc, all went away (sortta) over time with the Internet, I think we could come up with a plan to get the world moved vs. this endless game of piling one fix/hack/patch on top of another, regardless of the current love/hate of whatever.
Lemmie put it to you another way. I'm seeing business plans and software that are the equivalent of Norton/Ad-Aware/etc for Firefox and Linux in general. Think about it, if you get Firefox and still have to buy "fill in the blank" to counter this or that problem, are you net better off vs. the same "fill in the blank" to counter an IE problem. Seems the same to me; problems for people that are not getting us to software as dial tone, i.e. its just there and works.
Don't flame me, if there's a business selling software add-ons to fix Firefox, Godzillia, the Penquin, etc, I'm in. I just think we might all want to spend just a wee amount of energy looking at the bigger picture.
Either works for me as both are good opportunities.
Hi:
I'm a business writer at the Toronto Star researching a story about business and blogging. A general introductory feature on how blogging is changing business and what companies and employees need to know about blogging.
Thought you might be able to help. Can you call me at 416-869-4258. Thanks Dana
Posted by: Dana Flavelle | May 12, 2005 at 08:46