GigaOM on Iliad’s Xavier Niel

What happens when the most talented french Tech-entrepreneur meets one of the best IT analysts from the Valley ?

Answer: This. A fascinating article on Iliad’s long term strategy. A portrait of the guy who changed the way french people “consume” the Internet. One should never forget that Free invented the triple play for everyone below 30€, and a bunch of  software and hardware innovations.  I can’t believe such great content is free.With freaks like me, Om Malik is leaving money on the table. I’ll be more than happy to pay for articles like that. I’m still surprised no one ever wrote a book on Xavier Niel’s story. We all have a lot to learn from him.

My biggest regret about Leweb3 is that I could not meet Om Malik and tell him how much I appreciate his work. He’s a really tough guy, but pretty fair too. You can see him nicely torturing my colleague Dan’l Lewin from Microsoft Corp in this Giga Om show. (And I believe Dan’l did great in this hardcore interview).

My friend Rodrigo told me he attended the 3 hours meeting between Niel & Malik:  Priceless. Lucky you Rodrigo.

I’m a big buyer/reader of french IT press & blogs, I try to read as much as I can,  and I think no french journalist ever did the job to go and meet Niel and ask smart questions. They’d rather focus on Niel’s hazardous investments, and comment recent departures from Iliad’s management.

Same feeling when I read David Kirkpatrick’s articles in Fortune, or the latest issue of Fast Company on Apple’s challenges.  You can guess that the journalists did a long and hard investigating work. David Kirkpatrick ’s article on Microsoft’s strategy in China is something that must take months to write.

And trust me, this is REALLY depressing me. Our french Software ecosystem would need someone to take the lead on this.