Posts from May 2004

I try to read all the VC blogs. There are a bunch of them. I count at least 10 on my Kinja. But I’m really excited about the latest entry.

I was reading Tom Watson’s post on making iTunes better tonight. I agree with everything he has to say.

I think iTunes as a vehicle to sell music is a great consumer benefit but not a great business opportunity. I think iTunes as a vehicle to sell more iPods is a better business opportunity, but someday everyone who wants one is going to have a portable MP3 player. But iTunes as a digital audio hub is a huge opportunity and Apple is as well positioned as anyone to pull that off.

Tom’s ideas for making iTunes better are all good. The one that really gets me going is sharing playlists. Tom has put a playlist up at the music store that all of us can go and buy. What I don’t know is what happens if I have all of those songs already in my iTunes and just want the mix? That’s a big deal to me. I have a lot of music in my various computers around my house. And I have even more on my Audio Request servers. While I always want to find more music, I also want to find great mixes that allow me to listen to the music I already own in different ways.

So Steve Jobs, start thinking of iTunes as a digital audio operating system, not just a commerce system.

UPDATE – I created a shared playlist of my own. It’s at the iTunes Music Store.

While not technically new (it came out last October), I can’t get this album off my iTunes/iPod, my Rhapsody, and my Audio Request system. It’s really great.

Transparency is good. It’s that simple.

Except in matters of national security, I can’t think of another situation where obfuscation is a good idea.

People ask me why I blog. I tell them that it helps me in my business. It allows me to reach more people and connect to more people (many of whom I know only through my blog) than I could ever do over the phone and email. It helps me get out ideas that I am interested in and foster discussion of them so that I can figure out where to invest. It gets me out ahead of the curve.

But on top of that, it allows me to disclose myself; who I am, what I like, who I love, what I listen to, who I am going to vote for, and many more aspects of myself, to the world. If you are not going to like me, you’ll know it from my blog. If you are going to come see me, you’ll know me before you even meet me.

Some people I’ve met with recently ask me if I think its weird or funny that they “know” me from my blog a lot better than I know them. It doesn’t bother me. Blogging makes me transparent. And I like that.

My biggest reservation about the war in Iraq has always been that it was likely to foster more ant-american hate, and the resulting terror, than less. And now I see shit like this in the NY Times this morning:

We are screwing up big time. War is hell. Bad stuff happens. John Kerry talked about the “war atrocities” he witnessed when he was in Vietnam. I don’t blame our troops over there. They are just dealing with the reality of the ugliness they find themselves caught up in.

I blame the guy who sent them there. George W. Bush has unleashed a wave of anti-americansism that is making us less safe, not more safe.

And I’ve had enough of it.