Alec Saunders SquawkBox

The Toronto Board of Education got taken over today as well.

• Statement by Donna Cansfield, Chair of the Toronto District School Board Re: Naming of A Supervisor and an Advisor
• In To Let Schools Breathe the Globe Editorial page has strong words.  I’ve never thought of Mike Harris as a socialist before.  Even so, the Globe’s point that every student’s, and every education district’s, needs are different is a good one.
• And then you’ve got that blatherskite Dalton McGuinty at it again – McGuinty: Board supervisors do Eves dirty work.  Yes we’re angry, and thanks for stating the obvious.  Can anyone convince this man to shut up?

Iraq says US won’t topple Saddam like Taliban. Sabre rattling from Iraq.  

Alarming news.  Three in Ontario may have West Nile.  The government sent this out on the newswires to remind us to take precautions against mosquitos.

In this piece titled Platforms Joel Spolsky says "If you want a platform to be successful, you need massive adoption, and that means you need developers to develop for it. The best way to kill a platform is to make it hard for developers to build on it. Most of the time, this happens because platform companies either don’t know that they have a platform (they think it’s an application) or they get greedy (they want all the revenue for themselves.)"

95% of the time the reason platforms die is that the companies get greedy.  When you’re building a platform business, you’re creating an economy around your product.  You cannot make the price to participate in that economy a barrier to entry.  Most of the value you can charge for your platform is directly related to the number of participants in your economy.

Building a platform economy is a textbook example of the virtuous circle at work.   Adoption brings innovation followed by refinement and renewed adoption. Make the barriers low enough initially, and the economy around your platform can expand rapidly — think Linux and Windows.  If the barriers are too high, then you’re doomed to be OS/2.

There’s an interesting example of this behaviour playing out in the market right now.  The incumbent RTOS vendors, like Wind River, have established numerous barriers to entry to participate in their ecosystems.  Green Hills, Microsoft and others (not to mention Linux) are making huge headway by pricing tools and runtimes very very low or making them free.  My bet is on the newcomers.

And on the Canadian political front:

• Next convention date a minefield for Liberals. The Liberals are having a tough time trying to figure out when they should have the convention to replace Chretien.  Boy, that was hard to predict!
• From Ehgloo (which OpenCola found for me!), Moving beyond the Chretien Era, in which the author paints Martin as the last of the old crop of politicos running the country, and also takes some good swipes at Chretien over his foreign policy.
• Also from Eghloo, United we … fall paints a grim picture for the PC’s and the Alliance in the next election.