Comments on: Rapporteur Wrap-up – Ben Wagner for Networking Group

By: Dave Chase

Dave Chase — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 04:28:16 +0000

Ben – I would actually say that you could leave out “might”. I think the topdown efforts from Sidewalk to Backfence have largely failed or at least fell far short of expectations. The unfortunate thing, from my POV, was that Sidewalk was originally envisioned as much more bottoms-up with the cities having a lot of freedom. There were some extraordinary folks running some of the cities — e.g., Cella Irvine ran New York Sidewalk and is now About.com’s CEO. There were others of similar caliber who had their wings clipped. Sidewalk may have been too early but its fate was sealed IMHO once the innovation and freedom was taken away from the cities.

It is a clear design point for the venture I’m working on now — NextNewsNet — to be bottoms-up at the core. We’ll see if it works out but one thing I know for sure…no one is funding something like Sidewalk. There’s been too much money lost. The model that ultimately succeeds will be much more bootstrap oriented. Once that’s proven, money will flow to expand on the success.

By: Benjamin Wagner - New York City Singer/Songwriter, Journalist & Filmmaker

Benjamin Wagner - New York City Singer/Songwriter, Journalist & Filmmaker — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 18:08:25 +0000

[...] that’s what I wrote in the blog post that was the second half of my assignment. I’m certain that I was significantly less [...]

By: Benjamin

Benjamin — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 15:31:07 +0000

Thanks, David. Note my inclusion of the word, “might.” Looking forward to diving into you piece, and exploring further with you.

By: Dave Chase

Dave Chase — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 02:46:16 +0000

As one of the first dozen or so Sidewalk team members, I was interested to see the reference to “The Cracks In Microsoft’s Sidewalk“ above as I had never seen that article. That article barely scratches the surface of what really happened at Sidewalk. It’s considerably more complicated. About 8 years after Sidewalk was unloaded and Ballmer was quoted as saying his biggest regret as CEO was letting go of Sidewalk, I decided to blog the real story (at least my view of it). I wrote a rather long post at http://marketvelocity.blogspot.com/2007/02/sidewalk-insiders-view-of-why-how-it.html. Sidewalk was started at the zenith of Microsoft’s influence in the industry. It was roughly at the same stage of its corporate development as Google is now — much feared (probably beyond what is warranted).