As you probably know from prior rants on this blog, I think the U.S. Patent System is completely screwed up, especially with regards to software patents. Since I’m in Paris right now, I was pondering French food when I remembered Eric von Hippel and Emmanuelle Fauchart’s brilliant paper titled Norms-Based Intellectual Property Systems: The Case of French Chefs. Norms-based IP systems are an alternative (or a complement) to legal based IP systems. The Case of French Chefs is a superb example of how this works. If you care a lot about IP protection – especially if you think our current system has issues – this paper is definitely worth reading and pondering. 

On my flight to Paris Sunday, I managed to finally finish Partnering With Microsoft and then proceeded to snarf down Who Moved My Blackberry? I’ve been dragging around Partnering With Microsoft for the past few weeks as I crammed in a bunch of travel before my Paris trip. I’ve “partnered with Microsoft” in various ways, shapes, and forms through numerous companies over the past 18 years. While the history of this is interesting, it’s not nearly as important or relevant as the current reality. Partnering With Microsoft does a superb job of describing how to partner with Microsoft – covering the broad spectrum of types of partnerships, giving lots of examples of what works and what doesn’t work – while immersing the reader in the acronyms and styles that are critical to being successful with working with Microsoft. While this isn’t an exciting book, if you do anything with Microsoft, it is a must read. 

On Friday, Microsoft announced that it had donated $1 million to the National Center for Women & Information Technology. I was at Seattle University at the Future Potential in IT seminar where this was announced and got to say a few words on behalf of NCWIT to the 500 people (mostly students – about 25% women) that were there. I’ve been chairman of NCWIT for the past 18 months and this marks a huge milestone for us. A year ago Avaya partnered with NCWIT at the $1 million level, making them NCWIT’s first “investment partner.” While we have a great workforce alliance, Microsoft has stepped up in a huge way and is showing real leadership with our organization as our most recent investment partner.

My First Time at the Opera Review of: Ellie Caulkins Opera House By: Brad Feld Rating: 5 Read review on Judy’s Book. Amy and I went with our friends Dave and Maureen to the opera last night. Yes – the opera (the music thing, not the browser.) Now that I’m 40, I’ve decided it’s time to make sure I do more “grown up things” and the opera seemed like it fit the bill.

As Jason and I close out our Letter of Intent series, we thought we’d cover one last item that has screwed many a seller – the case where a public company acquires a private company for unregistered stock. Some buyers will try to ignore this – a good seller should work hard up front to get agreement on what type of stock and what kind of registration rights they will be receiving. Expectation setting is key in this situation.

I read two great posts today. Ben Casnocha wrote a great post on the value of resilience. Tom Evslin wrote a great post on why a great programmer is worth fifty good ones. Resilience underlies my desire to run a marathon in every state and I’m always on the quest for finding someone who is a 100x better programmer than everyone else in the room (I’ve been fortunate to work with a few of them over the years.)

Glenn Hubbard, the Dean of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Business, is an absolute riot. By way of Ezra Roizen, I saw Hubbard’s renovation of Every Breath Bernanke Takes and Dean, Dean Baby!, economic / finance spoofs performed to the tunes of Every Breath You Take and Ice Ice Baby. Sheer brilliance – the dean of every business school could learn something from this. Schmalensee, when are you doing a video?

Bill Ritter – who is the democratic candidate for Governor of Colorado – just launched a blog to compliment his website. Amy and I have become supporters after a very important (to us) conversation that we had with him about women’s rights issue. Like all good political candidate websites, it’s even got a nice form for contributing to Ritter’s campaign.

Rick Stratton sent me a picture of the original Treadputer today. I guess I need to go on eBay and find myself a Super Nintendo and a Power Pad just so I can have some variety in my workouts.