Sarah, Excellent insights...as usual. You are right about young entrepreneurs emulating the real Mark Zuckerberg...the one most people don't know. I had the pleasure of working with Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker at Napster when they were just 19. Their instincts and maturity at that young age were truly exceptional. Today young entrepreneurs like Andrew Mason, Chris Poole (4Chan), Brian Chesky (AirBnB) and Travis Kalanick (UberCab) are inspirational. Movies are almost never produce good role models. The Governator comes to mind :-) Don

Well, Thank you Midori. It has been a pleasure working with you. Welcome to the world of blogging. It is a great way to express yourself, and writing makes you focus your thoughts. It is exhilarating. We will see each other at conferences or shows. Its a small world...very small. Don Dodge

Hey Sarah, Great seeing you at TwiistUp. You were gracious, lovely, and engaging as always. The anonimity of the web emboldens people to write/comment things they would NEVER say in person. These anonymous trolls should be ignored. Like hackers who destry others computers, anonymous commenters write terrible things because they can without detection. They are cowards from the shallow end of the gene pool. Keep writing and sharing your insights. Don Dodge

Ed, Excellent! You have boiled the issues down to exactly where the challenge is...seamless integration of offline and online experience. Ray Ozzie calls this the Client /Server / Services continuum. It means having substantially the same experience online and offline, and the same features across all devices. Sounds easy, but its not. Microsoft Outlook Web Access did this about 10 years ago.It has steadily improved, and the same model will be extended to other Microsoft products. Office Live is available now, but there is a lot more coming. Microsoft is building two $500 million data centers to host the online apps. The wheels are in motion to do all of this, although Microsoft is staying pretty quiet about it for now. How do you think Google will respond? Can they solve the offline problem? Client based applications are far more powerful and responsive even when you do have online access. How will Google respond to that? Google has all the press buzz now, and consumers love them. But business customers are much more demanding, and less suceptible to hype. This will be a battle of the titans. I wouldn't bet against Microsoft. And yes, I work for Microsoft, so you know where my bet is.

Ed, Great post! I wonder if it costs millions less to start a web company today, or if entrepreneurs are just spending less because VC's are unwilling to throws buckets of money at them? "Get big fast" used to be the mantra. That meant hiring lots of people, buying lots of equipment and spending big bucks on advertising. Remember when internet companies were buying Super Bowl TV ads? I was at AltaVista at teh time and we spent $100M to build the brand. See my blog, The Next Big Thing, for a post about how we built comapnies in the good old days. http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2005/09/those_were_the_.html Now companies build an audience and brand through viral marketing and offering great services. Browser apps and services are making a big impact. Microsoft's biggest threat is not Linux and Open Software, it is browser based apps, services, and tools that render the operating system irrelevant.