There are certain fundamental assumptions about doing business in the VC world that make venture capital a bad fit with entrepreneurship. And since it’s the entrepreneurs who create the businesses that the VCs fund, this is a major problem.
Meanwhile, some corrections
Yesterday I said about VMWare that “everything runs emulated.” This was not correct. Keith Adams of VMWare informs me “VMware’s core technology is an x86 virtual machine monitor, not an emulator. The vast majority of guest instructions are run not by our software, but by the nice, fast x86 hardware our users have already paid for. It’s only when the guest does something “supervisor-ish” that we step in, and emulate an instruction or so at a time… We have a non-trivial CPU overhead, but it’s workload-dependent, and nowhere near as bad as if we were an emulator.”
On the topic of AOL using Gecko in their client, I have heard from more than one inside source that this was a decision made by AOLTW management in New York because they were afraid AOL customers would complain if the AOL browser didn’t display every web page perfectly. Given how long AOL went with their own substandard browser that was the joke of the Internet industry, I can understand their sensitivity to this issue, but it seems like they’ve swung a bit too far in the other direction. AOL is using the Gecko client on other platforms like OS X.
