Software Defined Talk: When Billionaire Unicorn Farmers Attack

While Texas moistens up, the Software Defined Talk crew ponder the morals of rich tech folks suing journalists, the state of open source business, the history of the business intelligence market, and how to use the Meeker Decks. Check out the full show notes below for links to the recommendations, conferences, and bonus tech news items.

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Show notes

• If you like video, see this episodes’ video recording.

“Residential Diaper Rash”

• Shit’s wet in Texas.
• The right kind of rain.

Battling Billionaires

• Thiel-attack!
• Internet History podcast — Microsoft gets the internet and Microsoft at the Dawn of the Internet Era.

Making money in open source

• O’Grady’s open source piece.
• ARM licensing.
• Battery Ventures conference — Mårten Mickos says RDS has probably made more money off MySQL than Oracle has.

Notes from Corporate Strategy Land

• Qlik goes private: Thoma Bravo pays $3 billion. Good summary of historic BI acquisitions from 451.
• Wither JasperSoft?: “On April 28, 2014, TIBCO announced it had acquired Jaspersoft for approximately $185 million.”
• Court ruling on Dell going private: Coté has nothing to say about that. However, the story of going private in the first part of the 115-page court ruling is gripping stuff if you’re into corporate strategy — it’s a rare chance to see what happens in all these M&A deals.

Mary Meeker’s 2016 Internet Trends Report

• Video of the presentation.
• Quartz highlights
  • Software is getting faster at eating the (e-commerce) world: “The time it takes retailers to get to $100 million in online sales is shrinking. It took Nike 14 years from the time its retail site launched, compared to nine years for Lululemon, and eight years for Under Armour.”
• 213 slides of charts (PDF).

BONUS LINKS!

• Ezra Klein on productivity loss.
• Oracle loses their case against Google because APIs aren’t copyrightable. Counter-view: “cartoon vision of the world” and “banana republics.”
• AWS launches Flourish — Framework for serverless computing — Open up the ability to add new language runtimes.
• Salesforce moving into AWS?  $400 million over 4 years. But what about Oracle?
• CoreOS launches Torus: GIFEE strikes again!

Recommendations

• Matt: Weird history of fake bands in the 60s. #tronc.
• Coté: (1.) Weatherproof button-up shirts from CostCo. (2.) The old guy hair of Bloodline. (3.) Coach Taylor seem like a real nice guy. (4.) Provisional recommendation: Gerber Bear Grylls Parang Machete.
• Brandon: Tortuga Air offers no more fear of gate-checking.