TRACHTENBERG LLC
MIAMI, FLORIDA

Welcome to Trachtenberg.com. I am still working on the nice description of what’s going on here, so here’s my bio in the meantime: Adam Trachtenberg is the Director of the LinkedIn Developer Network, where he oversees developer relations and marketing for the LinkedIn Platform. Before LinkedIn, Adam worked at eBay as a Director of Platform Product Management and Senior Manager of Developer Relations and Innovation. Prior to eBay, he co-founded and served as VP for Product Management at Student.Com and TVGrid.com. The users outfoxed us again. It happens every fifteen years or so in this business, We lost our grounding, the users rebelled, and a new incarnation of the software business has been created. In the software business, FUD is the power to set the agenda, to keep anyone else from moving, to make everyone wait for you. It isn't entirely negative. FUD makes it possible for there to actually *be* an agenda. If the industry is run by random idiots, then this is preferrable. At least we're going somewhere, even if Bill always gets to name and play the tune. I think Bill got caught flat-footed here. At the Agenda 95 conference in September, I was surprised to hear him say that Microsoft's upcoming online service, Marvel, is a bet-the-company venture for the company. Now I think he's right. Bill is scrambling, he understands the stakes, and is doing the only reasonable thing he can do. The stakes are huge for him at a personal level: is he the next Ken Olson? Will Marvel be the DEC Rainbow of online systems??? Bill can bring Apple to its knees. He may have Novell pinned down. Microsoft is a very impressive company. But Marvel can't compete with the Internet. Once the users take control, they never give it back. They allow a new industry to form, let the old one wither and fade, even die, and then repeat the process all over again. It happened in the transition from mainframes to minis, in the transition from minis to PCs. And it's happening again.