Michael Lee's Train of Thought

Following on this review of Amazon's MP3 store, I thought I would try it myself.

It is pretty decent, especially if you are trying to avoid the DRM of songs downloaded at the iTunes store, and it's cheaper than iTunes on the DRM free front. And it combines with the iTunes player fairly well -- the only weakness I see so far is that you're going to end up copying all of your Amazon MP3 songs twice -- one to go into the folder that Amazon copies it to, and then when it goes over to iTunes. But this may make backing up your Amazon downloads a little easier.

All and all, it is nice to see a competitor for the iTunes store that will still work with iTunes and the iPod, which are certainly my favorite music delivery system. I'm hopeful that they'll expand their catalog of songs with more over time.

Labels: music

I've been traveling a fair bit recently, and as a part of those trips we've tended to make a stop at a Lush -- I've been to Lush London, York, Cardiff, and San Francisco. It's certainly one of the more interesting soap stores out there -- so there was a fair amount of excitement, especially amongst the women that I know -- that Lush opened up at the Macy's at the Mall of America today. So now there's a chance to get some stuff without paying for shipping or having to go out of town.

My expectations weren't that high when I had heard that it was going to be a part of another department store, but it really is comparable to many of the other Lush stores I've been to lately, and it seemed like most of the same things are there.

I figure it is in my interest for them to get more business here so they stay open and are successful here....

Labels: music

I'm glad to see that Heroes started its second season in a strong fashion. It was one of my favorite shows from last year, and instantly became one of my favorites.

Labels: heroes

Considering George Lucas is going to be speaking at next week's Dreamforce conference, the title was inevitable for a post about what Salesforce.com has going on.

I'm of course very interested in seeing more about how Salesforce Enters Custom Application Market With Force.com -- I've been using Salesforce.com as part of my job for a while, and I've generally been a fan of the tool, and a believer that they can replace things that might live in a Microsoft Access database today, and many of the small little databases and applications that exist in most organizations.

Obviously, a big question is the total cost of ownership -- people are used to buying software once, and then maybe upgrading every few years. And with the rise of more and more open source software, much software can also be done for free.

There's always a bit of a lock-in -- but there's always a degree of "lock-in" for a lifecycle of a process, and converting from an old system to a new system is hard -- and every new system will become an old system in time. Even something like an open-source system like Linux will lock you into regularly having a Linux expert around.

I'm especially intrigued to see that in some of the promotional materials that have already started to leak out about force.com that we're seeing the "not-ready-for-the-Enterprise" iPhone used as an input device. That may be attaching itself to a technology sexy device -- but part of me would expect to see a BlackBerry as a more logical front end.

And I suspect the same tools that they're demonstrating will also work with the BlackBerry -- perhaps taking over their existing Mobile applications, in the same way that I expect that Google Gears could replace the offline edition as well.

Labels: computers, it, salesforce