I’m not going to lie. I was never a Microsoft fan. Not even when I was using Windows (that I begrudgingly moved to after the Amiga). But at least you used to have some awe and respect for the gorilla that was Microsoft. Bill Gates might have been an evil genius, but at least he was a genius.

Now contrast this to Steve Ballmer. Who’s certainly no genius and calling him evil is to belittle evil. He has turned the gorilla into a buffoon. And frankly, it’s sad. Gone are the feelings of rage (except when they patent troll people for being web apps) and left is pity.

None of this is new, of course. Ballmer has be running Microsoft for more than a decade now, but when you don’t hear from the guy directly for a while, it’s easy to get lulled into the belief that he’s probably running alright. Not.

See this video from D8 of Ballmer babbling about “productivity is going to be important, consumption is going to be important”.

Now contrast this with Steve Jobs speaking about a much, much tougher issue at the same conference:

Jobs is lucid and reasoned. Ballmer is… Hell, I don’t even know how to describe it. He’s all over the place. No clear definitions, just randomly running his mouth. Compared to Jobs, I think it’s charitable to call him pathetic.

Jobs needs worthy opponents and Ballmer isn’t it. Look at this chart of Microsoft’s market value from the Gates to Ballmer hand-over:

Chart by Erik Pukinskis of Sprout Robot

Now look at this picture of Apple stock since Jobs returned:

It matters who’s at the top. It sets the company tone. Microsoft is undoubtedly full of very smart people, but as long as they are being run by Steve Ballmer, they’re going to be shackled by his ineptitude.

I wish Microsoft had their evil genius back.

37signals can trace its roots back to the dot-bom tech recession of the early 2000s. The party was over, the mega budgets were gone, and you had to hunker down and make money in exceed money out. Back to basics.

This might have seemed like exactly the wrong time to start a business, but I believe the opposite is true. The skills and the culture you pick up at formation will stick with you forever. The corporate mind of 37signals became imprinted with frugality and efficiency that still is at the core of who we are today.

That’s why it brings me extra joy to read in the New York Times that 2009 was a record year for new businesses started. It’s at a 14 year high! As the article muses:

Maybe this is a good thing. A deep recession can be the mother of invention. These Americans are now liberated from the bureaucratic straitjackets they thought they had to wear. They can now fulfill their creative dreams and find their inner entrepreneurs. All they needed was a good kick in the pants.

A whole class of companies forced into existence, forced to be lean, forced to be profitable. Nothing is so bad it’s not good for something.

(Yes, some of these starters will not be successful or they’ll make less than they did in their former job. Just starting a business is no guarantee for success.)

I’m sick and tired of hearing about how you should be producing “content” to attract a web following. Treating content as a category on its own is missing the point entirely. Nobody cares about content. Nobody wakes up in the morning and thinks, hey, I should read some content today.

What people want is opinions, analysis, techniques, experiences, and insights. The best of all these come as a by-product from actually doing stuff. The closer you are to the topics, the more natural you’ll be able to extract the goodies.

This also means that it’s hard to schedule. You can’t put neatly into timeslots when you’re going to be annoyed, ecstatic, disappointed, have a great insight or discover a new awesome technique.

The great thing is that it doesn’t really matter that much anyway whether you follow a tight schedule. Between Twitter, RSS, and the aggregator sites, good stuff usually bubbles to the top regardless.

So no more content, please.

Microsoft has filed suit against Salesforce for infringing the following patent:

1. Method and system for mapping between logical data and physical data
2. System and method for providing and displaying a web page having an embedded menu
3. Method and system for stacking toolbars in a computer display
4. Automated web site creation using template driven generation of active server page applications
5. Aggregation of system settings into objects
6. Timing and velocity control for displaying graphical information
7. Timing and velocity control for displaying graphical information
8. Method and system for identifying and obtaining computer software from a remote computer
9. System and method for controlling access to data entities in a computer network

Lest you think these are just the headlines and that the abstracts are better. Check out the one for System and method for providing and displaying a web page having an embedded menu:

A method for providing a web page having an embedded menu to a web browser and for displaying the web page to a user of the web browser are provided. A request for a web page is received from a web browser In response to the request, a web page and an applet associated with the web page are packaged for transmission to the web browser. The web page and the applet are then transmitted to and downloaded by the web browser. When the web page is displayed and the applet is executed by the web browser, the applet creates and manages an embedded menu in the displayed web page under control of the applet . This embedded menu provides a user of the web browser with a plurality of links through one action in the displayed web page.

Software patents are a despicable tax on innovation. Companies that use them in aggression are pathetic.

Big companies where both sides have huge patent inventories might have fun with this sort of sue and counter-sue, but when the titans reach outside of their country club gardens to pick on someone a speck of their size, it’s truly disgusting.

These patents are so generic that Microsofts suit against Salesforce is purely selective enforcement against a competitor. What would we do if we were sued in a similar fashion? Probably the same thing a shop keeper on a street run by mobsters would do: Pay up or lose a limb. Extortion at its best.

But hey, maybe five years from now a cut-off-the-air-supply email can emerge, then the justice department can spend another half a decade pursuing a slap on the wrist, and in 15 years we’ll have some “justice”.

Fucking patent trolls. Fucking Microsoft. What a sad day.

Basecamp is being used by companies all over the globe, but until today they’ve had to make do with a user interface in English. That might be fine for creative professionals used to dealing with English in their company, but it’s often a problem for dealing with clients who are more comfortable in their native tongue. We’re tackling that problem today.

The Basecamp interface has been translated into nine languages already and we have even more coming. The languages that are going live today are French, Spanish, Portuguese (Brazillian), Dutch, Greek, Polish, Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish. Italian, Russian, and Slovak are not far behind and will be ready soon.

You can change the language of any company in Basecamp by going to the edit company screen and picking from the language drop-down.

Everyone from that company will now see Basecamp in the selected language. (We’re open to making localization a person-by-person option, but we’re just starting with companies for now.)

Getting a translated interface just right is hard, though. So it’s unlikely that all of these translations are perfect out the gate. But we wanted to get them out there and get some feedback on what we need to improve.

We’ve set up a dedicated mailing list for translations to help connect people willing to work on improvements.

The translation team
We couldn’t have done this without an amazing team working on translations. We’d like to extend a big thank you to the following translators for their hard work. I did a fair share of the Danish translation myself and I can tell you that it’s harder than it sounds to translate the 2,000 strings needed for Basecamp.

• French by Christophe Porteneuve from Ciblo
• Spanish by Nacho Carretero from Albucasis Traducciones Especializadas and José Espinal
• Portuguese (Brazillian) by Rafael Rosa from Ruby Inside Brasil
• Dutch by Helen Potters
• Greek by Petros Amiridis
• Polish by Piotr Petrus from riddle.pl
• Norwegian by Henrik Hodne
• Danish by Jakob Skjerning from Substance Lab and yours truly
• Swedish by Fredrik Mårtenson

If your language is not on the lists mentioned, we could use your help. We’re looking for volunteer Basecamp users that would use the application in their own language to help make it available. Please write [email protected] with the subject “Translate Basecamp into LANGUAGE” if you’d like to help.

The Rails infrastructure
The technical side of things relies on the excellent i18n infrastructure already present in Ruby on Rails and a new tool we developed called Tolk. It gives translators a web interface for updating the phrases and can even track things like updated strings. It made translating Basecamp much simpler. It’s completely open source and free for anyone else to use. Enjoy!

Ning is laying off 40% of its staff and dumping free versions of its service. That’s a shitty day for the people who lost their job and the folks left behind without their coworkers. I went through a few rounds back in the dotcom days and fun it was not.

But I can’t help but be puzzled by the coverage of this. Here’s TechCrunch on the situation:

While the massive layoffs are obviously a big hit to the company, it isn’t all bad news for Ning: the service is still seeing its traffic grow according to comScore. But traffic growth is no longer good enough for the company — it needs to start generating some serious revenue, and advertising clearly isn’t cutting it.

Are you kidding me? The company has blown through $120MM of VC funding over six years, built up massive traffic, yet just had to slash and burn, and you’re saying that “traffic growth is no longer good enough”. How the hell was it ever good enough?

Ning’s problem is not a lack of eyeballs but its inability to turn them into cash money to pay the bills. Getting more of something that’s a net-negative is not going to make up for it.

That was always their problem. From day one. Just like it’s any other business’ problem. Acting all shocked and surprised now is just incredibly ignorant of our industry’s very recent past.

This is the same kind of ignorance that goes on to celebrate so-called businesses successes before they posted black numbers on the balance sheet. Until that happens it’s all conjecture and possible maybes.

The just-give-it-away-for-free-and-they-will-come-and-we’ll-be-rich automatron is as broken now as it was in 2001.

UPDATE: Just found this fantastic piece of cheerleader reporting from Business Insider from just last year: “Build-your-own-Facebook startup Ning is still on fire… How much money is Ning making with all that traffic? Bianchini wouldn’t comment. But by our back-of-the-envelope calculations, Ning could be on a nearly $10 million annual”. Oh boy.