There’s a tad of a controversy this weekend on whether or not stealth mode makes any sense (at least for web services). Mark Fletcher and Om Malik say no, Paul Kedrosky and Russell Beattie (sort of?) say yes.

I wrote a while back about the impact that Groove had on Hotline - one of the more, shall we say, impactful aspects of Groove’s launch was that it was straight out of stealth mode (well, stealth for most of us). It was a shock to see Groove come out of nowhere with such an advanced tool. No question - it had an effect on our state of mind. I definitely agree with Paul on this. It’s warfare, and surprise is an important tactic.