Jellyfish or Lutefisk?

Microsoft recently coughed up some change and bought comparative shopping site Jellyfish.com. Jellyfish offers its customers a cut off the advertising revenue by offering rebates on purchases made through the site. (A cool 50% of the advertising revenue is given back to the customers.) According to Microsoft, this acquisition will give them a way to augment their e-commerce and search offerings. Microsoft offered no specific details about the strategy or the purchase price, but it seems like this deal is consistent with Microsoft’s high potential “small purchase” strategy.

Jellyfish is a Madison, Wisconsin based company started in mid-2005. So far, Jellyfish.com says it lists at least 5 million products with a "pay per action," charge rather than pay per click. This value based model is a growing trend in the market and I personally think this is the model of the future.

Only time will tell if this will tell if this will stink like Lutefisk or smell like money for Microsoft.

Microsoft releasing the Source Code for .Net Framework Libraries

Today Microsoft announced their plans to release the source code for the .NET framework libraries with the release of .NET 3.5 and VS 2008. Soon we will be able to download the .NET Framework source libraries via a standalone install and use any text editor to browse it locally. The plan is also to provide integrated debugging support of it within VS 2008.

Wow, how things have changed over time!

No so long ago I would have told you something like this is just a pipe dream. Sharing the source code and debugger integration is going to be really valuable for .any .NET developers. And being able to step through and review the source will allow us to get deeper understanding of the implementations of the libraries and as a result generating better implementations and quicker problem resolution.

I am looking forward to utilizing this unexpected gift from Microsoft.