• No one really cares about Microsoft anymore. Whatever they seem to do online is irrelevant, and the foundation for their dominance (Windows) is becoming less and less relevant as everything moves online.
• Microsoft’s attempts at becoming relevant in today’s internet have been so far useless. Like Google, they have completely failed to do anything around social networking, even though Windows Live (is that how it’s still called?) is a big player in IM. Bing barely made a scratch in Google’s prevalence, and their biggest wins have been by transparently incorporating themselves in other services, such as Facebook. Not too many people use Bing “directly”, or at least they don’t if they know what they are doing.
• Skype has survived being bought by E-bay and being sold off again, gaining users and cleaning up their legal issues in the meantime. Microsoft will have to really try hard to kill this one.

So basically, as long as Microsoft doesn’t ruin Skype (and I believe this is quite likely to happen), I couldn’t care less… Like Paul Graham said quite a few years ago, Microsoft is by now harmless.

{seesmic_video:{“url_thumbnail”:{“value”:”http://t.seesmic.com/thumbnail/6D8EqAyEzd_th1.jpg”}”title”:{“value”:”New Seesmic plugin activated! ”}”videoUri”:{“value”:”http://www.seesmic.com/video/rOfbOCncq7″}}}

Seesmic just gets better every day.

This fits right in to something I’m reading right now, and which has completely fascinated me – Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan.  To keep it short, the book is all about how we are greatly affected by completely unexpected and unpredictable events (the Black Swans).  So Marco Kaiser was just hit by a black swan – there he was, happily coding away at his hobby project, when one day he gets offered a nice amount of cash and a job because of his previously unprofitable time-sink.  It’s just like the book’s analogy to a turkey that gets continuously very well fed for one thousand days, making it feel very good about life in general, until it gets slaughtered to be served for dinner.  So, never throw away an idea so lightly, you never know when a black swan might be coming your way – and keep spending all the time you like in your worthless, non-profitable hobbies

To finish off: readers who have read the book might say that I am falling for confirmation bias, that is, I am using one single success story to justify my point, ignoring the millions of failures out there.  Not quite true – all I am saying is that if you enjoy it, keep doing it, and you might just find a black swan around the corner.  If you don’t find it, but enjoy yourself in the process, then all is well.