now that New Economy poster child Buy.com has been reunited with notorious greed-head founder and (erstwhile CEO) Scott Blum, they've finally hit upon the strategy to lift them out of their disastrous death-spiral: start a free magazine that highlights crap you can buy on their web site.

bravo. they've invented the Sharper Image catalog.

i guess this is what they mean when they say that "Scott Blum epitomizes the entrepreneurial spirit and has defined the role of a business leader in the information economy." either that, or they're talking about the time Blum and the SEC signed a consent agreement that closed an investigation of his accounting practices while at Pinnacle Micro (which subsequently went bankrupt in late 2000). (via c|net)

good old solid-blue IBM has published a comparison of WebSphere Studio Application Developer and Microsoft's Visual Studio .NET in the WebSphere Developer Technical Journal (i read it for the pictures). it's a pretty even-handed look at the two developer tools, and at the tradeoffs involved with the two vendors' approaches to web services. (via WebServices.org)

Monday's Washington Post featured a letter from MPA warhorse Jack Valenti. after some ranting about the "movie industry [being] under siege by a small community of professors", Valenti gets to the meat of the MPA's position:

The reason pitifully few films are legitimately available on the Internet is not producer hoarding. It is that those valuable creative works can't be adequately protected from theft. The analog format (videocassettes) and the digital format (DVDs) are different. Videocassette piracy costs the movie industry worldwide more than $3.5 billion, even though the sixth or seventh copy of analog becomes unwatchable. But the thousandth copy of digital is as pure as the original. Moreover, digital movies on the Internet can be pilfered and hurled at the speed of light to any spot on the planet. This is what gives movie producers so many Maalox moments.

this statement -- that inadequate technology and not producer hoarding is at the core of Hollywood's problem -- is completely at odds with established movie distribution practice. "producer hoarding" is the key to the movie distributor's business model.

when a movie is released, it's "windowed" first to the theaters, then to the pay-per-view market, then to the airlines and hotels, then to rental and retail, then to cable, and finally to broadcast. each step is an incremental relaxation of artificial scarcity driven by nothing more than business models. it's also worth remembering that this orthodoxy came only after Hollywood was forced to accept the technological shocks of first television and then the VCR -- both of which were regarded as detrimental to the movie business' interests.

the MPA needs to take a page from their compatriots in the entertainment software business (or even the software business in general) -- the only intellectual-property-based industry that's been digital from day one. every CD of Unreal Tournament can spawn a perfect illegal copy, yet nearly four million legitimate copies have been sold to date. without aid of unbreakable copy protection (and with pretty routine anti-piracy efforts), the entertainment software market has grown steadily. why shouldn't the MPA's members be able to do the same? (via the Reg)

fat-faced dimwit investment bankers will probably be yakking about this tale of stupendous excess until the next bubble comes along: six Barclay's derivatives geeks (most of them from the London office) were fired for trying to claim a $62,700 dinner tab as client expenses.