Microsoft wants people to resonate with the “brand” - they want to be liked for being Microsoft, and harvest the benefits of that affinity - and they’ve determined that having dedicated stores to contextualize their product will help them to define their destiny. But their ubiquity poses a serious challenge to this: it’s awful hard to like something you can’t actually choose. People can enjoy using their 360 or even their Zune, because those products exist in a continuum that includes other products - you can make a decision that reflects you in some way. On the desktop, and this is unfortunate for them, the only way to make a truly discriminating choice is to purchase a competitor’s product.

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Luke Kanies, the author of Puppet, blogs about Chef. I’m impressed by that because Chef is a direct competitor to Puppet. (CFEngine is another, older, product that could be placed in the category with Puppet and Chef. Namely: declarative, recipe-based server configuration systems.)

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Google Alerts, RSS feeds of Technorati searches, and Twitter trackers like TweetBeep have created a subtle but powerful shift in the flow of information between producers/performers and their audience.

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