Apple aren't great because they invent everything from scratch. They're great because they are able to consistently identify the best ideas and combine them into something amazing.
Microsoft, on the other hand, seem to take a bunch of concepts at face value and mash them together without totally understanding them. Or perhaps in a company so large and distributed it's more a case of great ideas becoming corrupted over time. I don't know.
Look at Marco's photos of the Microsoft store. On the surface it looks like they did a good job. Look a little closer and you quickly see dumb decisions. For example, the "Windows 8" lettering on the floor they need a staff member to warn people not to step over. It's these mis-steps that undermine Microsoft and make them look like they're simply ripping off Apple Stores (and tablets) without really understanding what makes them awesome.
I see what you're saying, but there's a big issue in doing this with domain names - the margins are slim to none (at least they are if you want to be price competitive).
Whereas registrars are paying 10%-20% on sales affiliates generate.
You need to think about whether you can actually beat this margin on your own, taking into account overheads like payment processing fees, customer support, billing issues & fraud etc. Not to mention the hassle of it all.
That's why Beau talks about branching out into hosting below.
GoDaddy make money off domains because they have massive scale, recurring billing, and a hell of a knack for in-cart up-selling.
Personally, I don't want to get my hands dirty with any of that!
I was recently at a talk where someone rallied against this whole "just a feature" argument. They made a compelling argument that there's a fairly natural evolution you see many start-ups go through from feature -> product -> business.
The rationale being that you initially build some specific functionality you can't find in the market (feature), over time rounding this out into a product and finally evolving into a business as you understand how to monetize it and where opportunity for growth lies.
You don't need to have your business totally conceived on day one. And in fact, finding where the business lies (or whether you even want to grow your idea into a business) is something you'll have a much better understanding of after a few months of being out there.
Personally (disclaimer: I run the domain search site Domize - http://domize.com) I think it's wonderful we can launch these "just a feature" websites and evolve them into products or businesses over time (or not). These 'better mouse-trap' sites are a fantastic, low-risk way of generating passive income and if you can string a few together you can potentially get to a stage where you can live off them. At the very least, you've demonstrated the kind of initiative and creativity that will provide you with a great talking point on your resume.
Let's not forget, both YouTube (embeddable video for eBay auctions) and Twitter (group SMS updates) started as "just a feature" and evolved into billion dollar businesses.
I am excited about the concept - was thinking about this very idea while watching Coachella streaming live this year and then seeing all the cams people were uploading.
I look after an Australian e-commerce site. About 6.5% of our users are on IE6 (I assume they're mainly office-workers on shitty, out-dated PCs).
That is way too big a chunk of revenue to ignore in the name of ideals or standards or what-have-you.
But please, feel free to redirect any IE6 visitors to your blog to whatever the latest "IE6 is shit and you're an idiot" single serving site of the moment is.
I agree that IE6 is a turd, but have never found making my designs work in IE6 too much of a hassle. There has always been a positive ROI beyond just pleasing the spec-writers.
I think a lot of developers write overly complex, fragile mark-up with lots of nested floats and the like. Keep it simple and you'll realise IE6 support is generally just a few tweaks or at worst a conditional or two.
This approach is very common. Any start-up dismissed as "a feature, not a product" has pretty much started this way: 1. take a product you like, but that is missing a feature you really want; 2. clone with added feature; 3. launch.
More often than not this approach fails either because of the high cost of migration to potential users or more likely the pet feature doesn't actually appeal to any more than a small niche.
Don't think this necessarily applies to Google in this case. But I think Google can pull together a user base of 10/20 million pretty easily. The success of Google+ will be determined by whether they can get into the 100's of millions.
Absolutely. I have run an SSL-only site (https://domize.com) for a few years now.
Other than Google Analytics I can't think of a single other widget/embed/analytics app that has supported SSL out of the box. It's a real shame, but on the other hand I'd bet good money that the web will be 99% SSL within the next 24 months.
I think this has much more potential than a 3rd party site. Particularly after the novelty wears down.
I am interested to see Gruber's reaction. If we start seeing high quality comments and engagement from interesting people with something to say it'll be hard for Gruber to ignore.
He's probably asking himself right now "What Would Jobs Do?"
I'm pretty sure this isn't going to be in CS5. The engineer says as much and John Nack, who just posted it, says it'll be in a "future" version of Photoshop.
Which, if I'm right, makes this a horrible way to steal CS5's thunder!
Microsoft, on the other hand, seem to take a bunch of concepts at face value and mash them together without totally understanding them. Or perhaps in a company so large and distributed it's more a case of great ideas becoming corrupted over time. I don't know.
Look at Marco's photos of the Microsoft store. On the surface it looks like they did a good job. Look a little closer and you quickly see dumb decisions. For example, the "Windows 8" lettering on the floor they need a staff member to warn people not to step over. It's these mis-steps that undermine Microsoft and make them look like they're simply ripping off Apple Stores (and tablets) without really understanding what makes them awesome.