I love it when a smart employee of a company calls out stupid / foolish / irrational / annoying behavior of his employers. Don Dodge – a Microsoftie who I like and respect a lot (and who has a super blog) has a great post up titled Microsoft lawyer rips Google on copyrights – Why? I don’t have a lot to add other than “I agree – why?” and “don’t the lawyers have enough work to do dealing with their own issues?”

Thanks Jake for the reminder. 4 8 15 16 23 42 to you.

Every now and then I realize that I had a theme to my weekend reading. This weekend I absorbed three books: Ego Check, Toilets of the World, and The No Assholes Rule. Do you see the theme? Ego Check – written by CU Professor Mathew Hayward – was pretty good although once again a 225 page book could have been edited down to about 75 pages and gotten the same point across. The anecdotes and stories were mostly familiar to me, although Hayward put them together in a cohesive framework that’s useful if you want to study leadership styles and how “executive hubris” can destroy people and companies. Note to anyone writing a business book – think “75 pages.”

Finally. We had an amazingly wonderful normal weekend in Boulder – sunny, 50 degrees, a little snow hanging around, especially in the mountains. Notwithstanding the daylight savings nonsense (which is irrelevant to me since I wake up while it’s still dark outside and I use Vista now), it’s beautiful here once again now that the White Witch of Narnia has apparently been defeated. Of course, Amy just reminded me that March and April typically bring major spring storms. Fortunately I’m on the road most of the next two months. Wait, what am I saying?

Roger Fillion has a great, detailed article in today’s Rocky Mountain News on Todd Vernon’s experience pitching his company – Lijit – at the recent Venture Capital in the Rocky’s conference. If you missed the conference (or the pitch), here’s Todd’s first slide (that Roger builds his article around.) I thought Roger did a super job of getting inside Todd’s brain in this article. I also thought that Todd’s pitch on Lijit was one of the best at the conference. I recognize that I’m biased because (a) I’m a long time friend of Todd’s, (b) I’m an investor in Lijit, and (c) he compares me favorably to Paris Hilton. But – if you are an entrepreneur looking to pitch your new company, this is a great example.

Fred Wilson pointed me (us) to a video from his friend John Mahoney (CTO / co-founder of Instant Information – one of Fred’s portfolio companies) titled Practical RSS. It’s an excellent seven minute overview of what RSS means from a user’s perspective. John did an outstanding job both explaining it and creating a high quality video.

This is a rant – feel free to ignore if you don’t care about Microsoft. What do Vista, CRM, Sharepoint, and Outlook have in common? Yes – Microsoft. I’m using three of these every day (I dumped CRM.) I’ve been a PC / Windows user forever – always keeping a Mac nearby, but rarely using it (I like to turn it on once a week just to watch it update all it’s software automagically.) I enjoy the Microsoft upgrade cycle (of which we are once again starting a big one with Vista, Office 2007, and all the Server 2007 products that are coming.) I’ve always benefited financially from this (as I’m usually involved in companies that play around the Microsoft ecosystem). My inner nerd gets to learn lots of new things (or – at least do the old things in slightly different ways.)

David Cohen has been appropriately nudging me to write my counterpoint to his Big of Bullshit: Widgets post. Lots has been said about widgets over the past six months, including the ultimate counterindicator article The Year of the Widget? from Newsweek (nothing against Newsweek, but whenever something like this shows up it often means we’ve hit the apex of the phenomenon.) Lest you think Widgets are new, let’s take a short walk back in history. Do you remember Active Desktop? Yup – a nice Windows feature dating back to IE 4.0 that never caught on. I bet Microsoft has a patent floating around somewhere for this, even though it would be a bogus one because of prior art. How about DoDots (The Web without a browser) – one of our failed investments. Similar time frame, incredible technology, clearly ahead of its time, and misunderstood (e.g. a random quote I found in an old usenet archive when poking around – “I never understood their business plan. DoDots was creating software that allowed people to embed internet-based applications on the desktop — sorry, but isn’t that a web browser?”) Oh – and in case you happen to think Microsoft invented this – think again – they were floating around MIT / Project Athena when I was there in the mid-1980’s (anyone remember “Widget Athena Front End”?)

The blog “She Dreams in Digital” has an excellent, short article titled Me.dium Takes Social Bookmarketing One Step Further that does a nice job of explaining Me.dium. As my friends list continues to grow, the power of Me.dium grows with it (it’s a quiet Saturday morning – Amy is on Netflix, probably rearranging her queue, Kimbal is on Google searching for nebuchadnezzar (Kimbal – please tell me you are watching The Matrix), and Seth is on the Pepsi site seeing how fast he can type.) If you want to take it for a spin, use my invite code.