Microsoft organized yesterday its yearly VC Summit, which is always a great occasion to catch up on Microsoft’s product plans and most importantly meet with about 100 of their senior executives representing their different business lines. Venture capitalists from the US and Europe gather for a full day of briefing, discussions and networking.

One of the panels of the day involved a number of senior IT executives discussing the challenges of their respective organization (Motorola, Morgan Stanley, Mc Donald’s,…). I actually thought that McDonald’s IT and organizational challenges were really complex:

They have 31,000 locations over the world, sometimes in places where Internet or IP connectivity is barely available Their distribution is such that it is challenging to find IT providers who will scale to their size They have 1.6M employees, who have an average turnover of 100% per year across the workforce (i.e some people only stay a few weeks or a few month while others stay longer)

The few requirements … Read more »

Reading this story by the Deal about the gloomy outlook of Friendster, I came across a chart showing the unique visitors of US social networking sites (provided by Comscore, as of March 2006).

Quite stunning to see that 23% of US Internet users are visiting MySpace (1 in 4).

It would also be very interesting to see the percentage of overlap among visitors of these services.

David Hornik (sitting in fronf on me) tells that combining visitors to Six Apart’s LiveJounal and TypePad would make them rank pretty high on that chart (granted these are blogging platform more than social networking sites).