I got to meet vice presidents S Somasegar and Eric Rudder yesterday. They were at IDC as part of an exec visit to India. Eric struck me as a thoughtful and intelligent person. He was technical advisor to BillG for a while, so that’s saying a lot.

While a lot of things cannot be discussed in a public blog, I do like the way Eric responded to one of the questions during the open forum. This question was related to losing market place in the very small business and personal use scenarios due to the often posed ‘good enough’ argument against commercial software. Among other things, Eric said that if ‘good enough’ is good enough, then we deserve to lose.

That’s taking on a much larger commitment that just saying that we will make good products and sell them, I think that that’s saying that in time the quality of what we can do will change what good enough means. That’s a measure of a company and will unlike most others ‘big’ guys in this line.

I also spend part of yesterday thinking about the ‘ethical’ argument with which non-commercial software tends to propagate and justify itself. I remember receiving lots of feedback on my talk about the commercial software model at the first anniversary of the Bangalore .net user group.

Not a lot, but a significant amount has been said from the perspective of commercial software.

http://www.microsoft.com/resources/sharedsource/Initiative/speeches/mundie_model.mspx

In general look here from time to time, some of it might seem to be a revelation -

http://www.microsoft.com/resources/sharedsource/

This is also an interesting book, with names like Lawrence Lessig an Bradford Smith in there -

http://www.aei.brookings.org/publications/abstract.php?pid=296

Also I realized something else, it’s probably an obvious little thing – but a lot of what you hear when you are outside Microsoft, sounds like science fiction: Avalon, Indigo, WinFS … ta da da. I now have having a weird feeling of ‘coming in touch’ right now, because I am downloading one of the builds of one of these pieces to try on my machine – the sort of thing I would not have seen for years otherwise, and it feels good. It also feels like a ghost stepped out of the shadows and then you realize that he was real all along.

I know this blog entry is all pithy stuff with no enumerations of ‘facts’; but that’s ok, for this one. I know it will not stand one of my ‘where are your facts?’ rants. But again, that’s ok for this one.