Peter Black's Freedom to Differ

#atNickHodge: "Australian Constitution. Yes, We have one"

Last night I was a guest on Nick Hodge's Ustream show, atNickHodge, where we discussed the Australian Constitution:

 

Joe Trippi at QUT: "Online campaigning in the US Presidential election"

As part of Joe Trippi's visit to Australia thanks to Microsoft Australia, he will be speaking at QUT on Thursday 5 March:

QUT Faculty of Law Free Public Lecture Series 2009
Presents
 
Mr Joe Trippi
Trippi & Associates (USA)
 
Online campaigning in the US Presidential election
 
Thursday 5 March 2009
 
The Gibson Room
Level 10, Z Block
QUT Gardens Point Campus
 
5.30 pm Refreshments
6.00 pm Lecture commences
7.00 pm Lecture concludes

The Speaker
Joe Trippi is the man who introduced the internet into US presidential campaigning and is widely-credited with having ‘re-invented campaigning’.

Much of the success of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign has been attributed to the innovative use of the internet to rally grassroots support.

As National Campaign Manager for Howard Dean’s presidential campaign in 2004, Joe pioneered the use of online technology to organise what became the largest grassroots movement in presidential politics.

As a campaign manager, Joe has run presidential, senate, gubernatorial and mayoral campaigns in the US. His innovations have brought fundamental change to the electoral system and have become the model for smart campaigning.

Joe Trippi has been profiled in GQ, Wired, Fast Company, The New Republic and The New York Times Magazine. He is a  political analyst for the 24-hour US cable news channel MSNBC and a former Harvard University fellow. He currently heads the Washington, DC political consultancy, Trippi & Associates.

Joe is the author of “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Democracy, the Internet and the Overthrow of Everything,” the story of how his revolutionary use of the Internet and an impassioned, contagious desire to overthrow politics as usual grew into a national grassroots movement and changed the face of politics, and indeed many aspects of American life, forever.

Joe Trippi’s visit is supported by Microsoft Australia.

Registration: Register by 27 February 2009 at qutlawpubliclectures@qut.edu.au

Registered attendees may claim 1 CPD point for the Queensland Bar Association and Queensland Law Society.

Second Annual Microsoft Politics & Technology Forum: Online Campaigning

On Thursday 26 February, Microsoft will be hosting their second annual Politics and Technology Forum.  The keynote speaker this year is Joe Trippi.  Once again it looks as though it will be an excellent event:

Join government, business leaders and political bloggers at the second annual Microsoft Politics & Technology Forum.

On this informative morning, Keynote Speaker Joe Trippi details the impact of new technologies on modern politics. Heralded by the US press as the man who “reinvented campaigning”, Joe has run Presidential, Senate, Gubernatorial and Mayoral campaigns. His innovations have brought fundamental change to the electoral system and have become the model for online campaigning.

There will also be a Q&A panel discussion, new technologies will be demonstrated, and some revealing insights and statistics around Australian digital behaviour will be shared.

We are delighted to welcome Lindsay Tanner MP, Minister for Finance and Deregulation, The Hon Malcolm Turnbull MP, Leader of the Opposition to this exciting event.

RSVP here. Note, however, that before you start booking flights to Canberra, Microsoft is organsing events in other capital cities where Joe Trippi will akso be speaking.  Stay tuned for details of those other events ...

Update: Microsoft's Australian Government Affairs Blog has more information on the event, including this invitation:

While our keynote and discussion will be invaluable to anyone interested in democracy and communication in the first half of this century I also wanted the forum to be an opportunity for a look at practical examples of new technology tools.

To that end I'd like to invite any developers, web 2.0 or social networking activists with ideas for, or examples of, on-line tools that can be used in political campaigning and who would like to demonstrate their ideas (as a proof of concept or developed application) to the attendees at the forum to contact me.

I'm not interested in how the tools were or are developed, what platform or language the tool was or would be developed with as long as the idea is original, is yours, and you are prepared to demonstrate the concept or tool to the audience. It would be preferable if the idea were capable of wide usage but that is a matter for you.

• Up to three ideas will be selected for demonstration.
• Financial support will be provided to get to Canberra.

Contact me:

If you have an idea or you have developed a tool that you think will support on-line campaigning and you want to demonstrate it to our federal political campaigners and bureaucrats send me an email - simone@microsoft.com

Proposals will need to be with me by 16 February and you will need to have the tool ready for demonstration on the 26th of February in Canberra.

Read more here.

What's so great about Macs?

Tim Barribeau asks looks at those crazy Apple fans (of which I am one):

Apple users have a reputation of having drunk a bit deep of Steve Jobs' Kool-Aid. Whenever he gets on stage, the "reality distortion field" kicks in, and everyday features become mind-blowing to the devoted.

That said, their fanaticism occasionally masks a hardware and software set known for amazing design aesthetic, durability and ease of use. As with any devotee to a single brand (see Holden v Ford), the fanboy arguments are hilariously inane. Watching Apple fans go at it against Windows users, while the occasional bearded Linuxer sticks in their oar, is a daily occurrence of deliciously sad comedy.

Because, when it boils down to it, Apple products look a little better, are a bit easier to use, and cost a little more. And that's it. If that's what you want, buy it.

Read more here (form The Age).

The future of social media

ReadWriteWeb has a good piece on the future of social media:

Social networking is at a major fork in the road. Down one road is adding more features to a walled garden and opening up just enough, so that users seldom need to leave. Most sites are going down this yellow brick road and the prize is clearly a big one. But they may end up back in Kansas. Down the other road, lies a future of being the primary repository for your connections (aka the social graph), but with this data available via open APIs to anybody who needs it. That is a utility type model, and as with any utility, it can be hugely valuable at scale.

Deciding which path to take is a real decision. A botched choice will likely end in failure, albeit via a long, slow decline.

The problem with the first road is that it relies upon a revenue model that is native to social media. What revenue model works for social media? The assumption is advertising, but CPM comes from traditional mass media and CPC is ideally suited to search. Where is the ad model that is native to social media? At the moment we are force-fitting CPM and CPC into social media for want of anything better.

Some might argue that there is no ad model for social media. We don't have an ad model for telephones, afterall, and that's a two-way communication medium like social media. Ominously, we didn't have an effective ad model for email, which is the earliest form of social media, until Google treated email as just more search fodder for CPC.

If social media is not funded by advertising, it must be funded by subscriptions or transactions. Neither is easy.

Read more here.  Against this backdrop there have been a couple of developments in the social media world over the past few days.  First, the Google-Facebook arrangement has collapsed:

Google Inc.'s announcement of a service to "make the Web more social" was decidedly casual, or staged to seem that way.

Standing beside a campfire, the company's engineering director, David Glazer, explained how, through an agreement with Facebook and similar sites, the effort would serve a primal human need.

"We all like huddling around fires, and huddling around food and talking to each other -- people are social," Glazer, dressed in a red-checked shirt and sneakers, told about 100 people gathered outside the company's headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., last month. "With Friend Connect we are trying to make that happen everywhere on the Web."

Within three days of the campfire, a dispute erupted between Google and Facebook, its largest partner in the new service, that reflected the fact that for Web companies there is nothing casual about the business of Internet socializing.

There's too much money, maybe billions, at stake.

Facebook, the burgeoning social network, abruptly withdrew its support for Google's Friend Connect, meaning that none of Facebook's tens of millions of members could sign on to websites using Google's new service.

Coming so soon after the highly publicized launch, it was an embarrassing rift.

Read more here (from the Los Angeles Times).  Second, a report suggests that the web will be dominated by two players - Google and Amazon:

An Internet analyst for a major Wall Street firm argues in a new report that Google Inc and Amazon.com Inc will be long-term winners, while Yahoo and IAC InterActiveCorp fall by the wayside and eBay Inc becomes a merger target.    

Sanford C. Bernstein analyst Jeffrey Lindsay argues in a 310-page report entitled "U.S. Internet: The End of the Beginning" to be published on Tuesday that Google and Amazon are best placed to withstand the current economic downturn.

"We expect two players to continue to perform strongly, Google and Amazon," Lindsay writes. "Both Google and Amazon.com are still racking up annual growth rates in the 30-40 percent range, with only a relatively modest slowdown in sight."

Lindsay reiterates his previous positions that Yahoo eventually will be sold to Microsoft Corp and that Barry Diller's IAC e-commerce conglomerate will go ahead in August with its five-way split-up, as planned.

"Arguably the weakest players have strayed furthest from their original competences and have been operating largely as conglomerates," the Bernstein analyst says of Yahoo and IAC.

Read more here (from Reuters).  And finally Microsoft is wanting the a piece of the web action:

Lloyd Braun–the former Hollywood super-programmer turned Yahoo entertainment czar turned Hollywood and online programmer–has signed a multimillion-dollar deal to make an original destination site for Microsoft’s MSN portal, aimed at aggregating celebrity, entertainment and pop culture news, according to several sources.

With the still-unnamed site, MSN plants its own Paris Hilton flag in a very crowded field, which has numerous competitors such as People.com, PerezHilton.com, AOL’s TMZ.com, PopSugar.com and Yahoo’s OMG.

It is also interesting that Microsoft (MSFT), which has focused its efforts of late on its technology, especially related to online advertising and search, is making another foray into the content arena via MSN, where it has had mixed results in the past.

Read more here (from All Things Digital).  But returning to ReadWriteWeb, Bernard Lunn offers a way for the future:

Here is my take on which road the big social networking sites could take:

1. MySpace could potentially get away with the walled garden approach for a pretty large mainstream market, using music as the fundamental draw and later leading into other arts and entertainment. This makes MySpace less age-dependent than Facebook. Everybody loves music, art and entertainment, from pre-schoolers on up to grandparents. News Corp. is a media company through and through, so this route is in their DNA.
2. Facebook will have to become a utility for the world or a niche walled garden for college kids. Their DNA is too young to predict which way they will go. Both are viable, but neither will justify a $15 billion valuation, so they won't make this decision until new management steps in following a crisis. They cannot become a walled garden for the world, because their core community - college kids - will move into the world of work where they have to communicate in the wider world of the Internet. Once they have left college, their only connection to each other is as alumni and that ends up being a relatively weak connection as we grow older (despite what every generation believes when they are at college).
3. LinkedIn has a shot at becoming a mainstream, but work-centric, walled garden since the working world is constrained enough and follows well-defined conventions. LinkedIn is the network I use regularly and I have written about it before many times. They have now reached the stage where if they offered webmail that was as good as Gmail (and obviously as open as any standard webmail), it could become the default hangout for biz types. "Suits" could gradually stop talking about "living in Outlook" and talk about "living in LinkedIn." Add in some simple RSS-based startpage-like functionality and LinkedIn would be the place to start and end the workday. Biz people will pay a reasonable subscription fee - say less than $100 a year - for a package like that without any advertising. That is a bit of a stretch from where LinkedIn is today, but fundamentally viable in my opinion.

Clearly, any venture that succeeds in building a mainstream walled garden will become hugely valuable. They will effectively become the Internet for millions, which might even justify a $15 billion type valuation. The problem is that it is a very, very hard road to navigate successfully.

The mass-market utility model could also be hugely valuable at scale. My simplest description of this would be "social graph + communication tools." The communication tools could be email, SMS, VOIP, poking, walls, vampires, whatever turns people on. The social graph is the spam controller and way to make connections. The obvious players here are the vendors with big email networks - Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft (GYM). This is the background story to all the M&A "sturm und drang."

The one company that most needs to make this strategic decision - Facebook - is the one that is most constrained by that paper valuation of $15 billion. Neither route - niche walled garden for college kids or mass-market utility going up against GYM - will justify $15 billion. So they have to pretend that mass-market walled garden is viable, even though nobody believes that anymore. That is one nasty dilemma. Do you think Microsoft knew that they were giving Facebook that nasty dilemma when they agreed to a $15 billion valuation? Gates and Ballmer are smart enough, in my humble opinion.

The mass-market utility model will win out in the end for 3 reasons:

1. The social graph is so closely linked to communications, which has always been a utility model.
2. The ownership issues around the social graph are murky. A utility skates past that problem, saying "you own, we manage." AT&T does not own your Rolodex, or insert ads when you are calling Mom because they own your connection to Mom.
3. The social graph has to be monetized in creative ways and the best way to make that happen is make it available to all the entrepreneurs and established businesses, on clear and simple terms.

The mass-market utility model will work through an API. That sounds similar to what is already out there, but with one big difference. The current APIs are all about getting your apps INTO a walled garden, or two or three walled gardens. The utility API will be about accessing the social graph, getting the social graph OUT of the utility and into your application, for some pre-defined cost. What you do after that is entirely up to you.

Read more here.

Politics and Technology Forum with Matt Bai

Microsoft Australia has confirmed an their inaugural Politics & Technology Forum:

Join Government and business leaders and political bloggers for Australia’s inaugural Politics & Technology Forum, proudly sponsored by Microsoft, on 25 June 2008 at the Hyatt, Canberra.

Over an informative morning, you will hear from keynote speaker Matt Bai, author and political writer for the New York Times magazine. Matt will address the rise of political movements in the internet age, with a focus on new forms of Information technology and how they fashion or replicate the political debate and trends.

Matt will then join two panels of distinguished speakers for a forum discussion on Information Technology and its influence on political movements and campaigning.

Seats are strictly limited. To register visit here. The event ticket code is BAI. Should you have any inquiries email Sassoon Grigorian at sassoong@microsoft.com

More details to follow.

Microsoft has the last laugh

In turns out that Microsoft has a sense of humour after all ...

Guys, the joke's on us. Big time.

Bloggers have been chortling all day over a goofy video made for Microsoft's sales team that made its way onto YouTube.

The video, "Rocking Our Sales," by "Bruce ServicePack and the Vista Street Band," is painfully lame. How bad? A friend from IBM who viewed the video said it made him rip out his spleen. That's pretty bad.

In short order, Microsoft was getting pilloried for not having a clue about cool. The House of Gates was so square, it was beyond lame. Gizmodo put up a post titled "Internal Microsoft Vista Video is as Painful as Videos Get", while Engadget chimed in with "Microsoft burns our eyes with Vista promo video." Not to be outdone, CrunchGear added its 2 cents with "Don't shoot the messenger: Microsoft internal promo video about Windows Vista is hard to watch."

Truth be told, I thought pretty much the same thing. Only one problem. They were messing with your heads.

"This video was a spoof (believe it or not)," said a Microsoft representative familiar with the reason behind the production. Apparently, it was a way for Microsoft to have some fun at its own expense.

"They thought folks internally would get a kick out of not taking themselves so seriously all the time, but some people thought that's exactly what they were being--serious. Anyway, this little piece of art came to life and has caused quite a few laughs in Microsoft's hallways."

Who woulda thunk it?

Read more here (from CNET News.com).

Microhoo

CNET News.com have put together this guide to the Microhho saga:

Are Apple ads hurting Microsoft's brand?

CNET's Beyond Binary blog considers whether Apple's "I'm a Mac" ads have hurt Microsoft's brand:

A new ranking of global brands shows Microsoft's reputation sinking in recent years. Among the possible factors: Apple's "I'm a Mac" ads.

Microsoft lands at No. 59 in the rankings for 2007, down from No. 11 in 2004, according to the survey from CoreBrand released Wednesday.

"The effect of Apple's 'Hi, I'm a Mac' advertising campaign may have taken its toll on Microsoft," CoreBrand CEO James Gregory said in a statement. "The launch of a series of new products, following a long, relatively dormant period, will be closely watched to see if it will have a positive impact on the Microsoft brand."

...

In fairness to the folks in Redmond, they have fared far better in other recent brand studies. They were No. 1 on a list of Britain's top "superbrands" last year, and No.2 in an August BusinessWeek ranking of top global brands (trailing only Coca-Cola).

I don't know how much stock I put into the study, or its thesis that Apple is to blame, but it is an interesting question. How has Apple's rise affected Redmond's overall image beyond just a few points of PC market share?

When Apple occupied a smaller niche, it could be argued that what happened on the Mac side of things was less relevant to how Microsoft is perceived. But now that Apple has a larger role, is it affecting how Microsoft as a company is seen?

Read more here.

Microsoft to teach teenagers about IP

Information Week explains Microsoft's response to a recent study on teenagers attitudes to intellectual property:

Teens appear to be willing to curtail illegal downloading when told they face fines or jail time.

This finding, among many in a survey published by Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) on Wednesday, is the basis for the software company's new campaign to teach teens respect for intellectual property rights.

"Widespread access to the Internet has amplified the issue of intellectual property rights among children and teens," said Sherri Erickson, global manager of Microsoft's Genuine Software Initiative, in a statement. "This survey provides more insight into the disparity between IP awareness and young people today and highlights the opportunity for schools to help prepare their students to be good online citizens."

Microsoft's survey found that about half of the teenagers surveyed (49%) said they are not familiar with the rules and guidelines for downloading content from the Internet. Only 11% understood the rules well, and of those, 82% said downloading content illegally merits punishment. Among those unfamiliar with the law, only 57% supported punishment for intellectual property violations.

It's not clear whether Microsoft's statement to teen respondents -- "When you do not follow these rules you are open to significant fines and possibly jail time" -- is entirely accurate, particularly when teens under the age of 18 are involved. Emily Berger, an intellectual property fellow at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is skeptical. "I think it's being used as a scare tactic," she said. "It's a real stretch of the law to say it's theoretically possible."

Nevertheless, Microsoft wants to correct teens' woeful ignorance. To do so, it has turned to Topics Education, a developer of custom curricula, to create a curriculum called "Intellectual Property Rights Education" for middle school and high school teachers. The Microsoft-sponsored curriculum consists of Web-based resources and case-study driven lesson plans that aim to engage students about intellectual property issues.

To support its teachings, Microsoft has launched MyBytes, a Web site where students can create custom ringtones, share content -- "their own content," as Microsoft makes clear -- and learn more about intellectual property rights.

Read more here.  Ars Technica takes a more independent look at the survey's findings:

Nearly half of all teenagers have no familiarity with copyright laws and don't feel that the same type of punishment is necessary for illegally downloading media from the Internet as other types of theft. These findings came from a survey conducted by Microsoft, one which surveyed 501 seventh- through tenth-graders and examined their views on piracy. Only 11 percent of those surveyed said that they clearly understood the current rules for downloading music, movies, and other literature, and cited their parents as a main source of information on the rules behind downloading.

Given the above, it's not too surprising to hear that less than half of the group felt that some form of punishment was necessary for those who steal copyrighted content ...

Teens who did feel they had a good understanding of the rules were much less likely to flout copyright laws Microsoft said. Half of those who said they understood the laws of the land reported that their parents were their main source of information on copyright infringement (65 percent for younger teens), while TV, magazines, and newspapers came in a far second at 14 percent. Those knowledgeable about copyright were also more likely to think that illegal downloading should be punishable, with 82 percent saying that punishment should be required and another 28 percent feeling "strongly" about the issue.

The teens surveyed were more open to being educated about copyright than one would expect, though. In fact, a quick lesson on copyright guidelines (informing the group that downloading media usually involves paying a fee or gaining permission to use it, and that violations could involve significant fines) changed the opinions of a significant chunk of the group—72 percent. Considering that teenagers tend to lead the way in buying music online, pointing them in the right direction and giving them some way to pay for music legally (prepaid credit cards or gift cards for their favorite music stores) looks like a good idea.

Only about 28 percent said that they would continue to download and share copyrighted content without the owner's permission after being educated on copyright rules. Why? "Rock stars don't need the money," 40 percent of that group said.

Read more here.

Qutting Facebook

Quitting Facebook has been in the news a bit recently, sparked in part by the reports that Bill Gates is one of those trying to get out of Facebook:

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates has stopped using the Web site Facebook, the most damning indictment in a week full of bad press for social-networking technology.

Social-networking Web sites, which help people share and find information about one another, were supposed to change the way people use the Internet and the way we work. But lately, all we’re hearing about are the problems.

Workers who created profiles on Facebook are horrified to find out they can’t be erased, the New York Times reports. Even if you deactivate your account, Facebook still keeps a copy of all the information you ever posted. And, the Times reports, it’s still possible to contact people through deleted Facebook pages.

And it’s not just older worker who realize they’ve inadvertently given colleagues insight into their private lives that are upset: The MySpace generation is getting sick of MySpace, too, according to MSNBC. They’re turned off by too much advertising on social-networking sites. That’s one reason the amount of time the average person spends on a social-networking site has dropped 14% over the last four months, according to Internet research company comScore.

If that weren’t enough, Computerworld recently regurgitated a handful of reasons why the sites aren’t appropriate for the workplace. The highlights: They use up too much bandwidth; they cause employees to waste time; and there’s a chance that someone will disclose sensitive information.

None of those reasons caused Bill Gates to abandon his Facebook account, however. His problem is excessive celebrity. After Microsoft invested $240 million in Facebook last year, Gates spent 30 minutes a day on the social-networking site, the Sun reports. “But he signed off after getting more than 8,000 friend requests a day, and spotted weird fan sites about him,” says the Sun, citing an unnamed colleague. The article linked above says he deleted the account. A Microsoft spokesperson tells us that Gates hasn’t deleted it, but that he has stopped using it because he was inundated with friend requests. Not that deleting the account would have done any good.

Read more here (from the Wall Street Journal).  Negative stories like that have prompted a change to Facebook so that it is easier to permanently delete a Facebook profile:

Aiming to address the privacy concerns of disenchanted users, Facebook.com said on Tuesday that it was trying to make it easier for people to delete their accounts permanently from the social networking site.

Until now, Facebook has offered only a deactivation option, which keeps copies of the account’s personal information on the company’s servers. It is possible to delete an account fully using a cumbersome manual method, but it is difficult; many users complained that Facebook did not provide clear instructions.

On Monday, Facebook modified its help pages to tell people that if they wanted to remove their accounts entirely, they can direct the company by e-mail to have it done. But on Tuesday, representatives of Facebook stopped short of saying the company would introduce a one-step delete account option.

“We’re always working to improve the user experience,” Katie Geminder, director for user experience and design at Facebook, said in a statement sent by e-mail.

Read more here (from the New York Times).

Yahoo rejects Microsoft

From the Wall Street Journal:

Yahoo Inc.'s board plans to reject Microsoft Corp.'s unsolicited $44.6 billion offer to acquire the Web giant, a person familiar with the situation says.

After a series of meetings over the past week, Yahoo's board determined that the $31 per share offer "massively undervalues" Yahoo, the person said. It also doesn't account for the risks Yahoo would be taking by entering into an agreement that might be overturned by regulators. The board plans to send a letter to Microsoft Monday, spelling out its position.

Yahoo's board believes that Microsoft's is trying to take advantage of the recent weakness in the company's share price to "steal" the company. The decision to reject the offer signals that Yahoo's board is digging in its heels for what could be a long takeover battle. The company is unlikely to consider any offer below $40 per share, the person said.

It's unclear whether Microsoft would be willing to pay such a premium, which would increase the value of its original cash and stock bid by more than $12 billion. The rejection comes as Yahoo's board has been considering various other scenarios, including a search advertising partnership Google Inc. Yahoo's directors are still considering that and other options that would safeguard the company's independence, people close the company say.

Read more here.

Yahoo's Grief

The Deal Book (a New York Times blog) looks at the five stages of Yahoo's grief:

Denial: The initial stage: “It can’t be happening.” 

Yahoo is well past this. By rejecting Microsoft’s initial foray back in February 2007, Yahoo’s denial of Microsoft’s interest may have only whet Microsoft’s appetite, bought Yahoo only a limited amount of time, and lost them private bargaining leverage.

Anger: “Why me? It’s not fair.” 

The stage Yahoo is in right now. They’ve retained premier takeover firm Skadden Arps to represent them on their legal defense. Sorry, Wachtell, no $20 million plus fee for you. 

Yahoo now has a choice. How angry do they actually get?   

Read more here.

What would Microhoo mean for Australia?

The Age looks at how a Microsoft-Yahoo merger could raise problems in Australia:

Microsoft's $50 billion bid for Yahoo, if successful, could create significant problems for the local partnerships Yahoo7 and Ninemsn, analysts say.

Yahoo7 is a 50-50 joint venture between Seven Media and Yahoo, while PBL Media (owner of the Nine Network) and Microsoft each own half of Ninemsn, one of the most popular internet destinations in Australia..

Should Microsoft's bid for Yahoo succeed - which is likely since its offer represented a 62 per cent premium over the struggling company's market value - the online arms of bitter television rivals Seven and Nine would effectively be owned by the same company.

That position could become untenable, media analysts say. Ninemsn, Yahoo7, Seven and Nine all declined to comment on the matter.

"It's obviously going to cause a bit of chaos here," said analyst Peter Cox of Cox Media.

Read more here.

More on Microsoft and Yahoo

Mark Cuban explains  Why Yahoo should say Yes to MicroSoft:

One thing about Jerry Yang that I always have admired is that he cares. He cares about his employees. He cares about his products. He cares about his shareholders. Most of all he cares about building a world class company that can be great at what it does.

If you look at Yahoo singularly, it is a great company. For he and David Filo to build a company with more than 6B in sales and more than 25B in market cap is an astounding feat . Unfortunately for Yahoo, it has had to weather both the Internet Bubble Bursting and the emergence of Google as a force in search and online advertising.

These are both issues because Wall Street has made them issues. The bubble speaks for itself. Google is a Wall Street issue for Yahoo because Wall Street wants Yahoo to keep up with the Googles.

That's a problem for Jerry. Building a world class Yahoo to be the best company it possibly can be using the management skills that Jerry and company have is a far different challenge than optimizing the stock price. Particularly when Google is your stock comp.

Which is exactly why Jerry and David should sell to MSFT.

If there is one thing Microsoft does well , its ignore Wall Street and invest in its corporate strategies. It has so many huge lines of business, that Wall Street has learned to just let those that need to germinate do so. XBox. MSN. Online. Microsoft gets more leash from Wall Street to develop businesses than any company on the planet.

So the question isn't whether Yahoo should sell. It should. The only question is what the structure of the deal should look like so that Jerry and David can achieve many of the goals they set out to accomplish on the net under the MSFT umbrella. Jerry definitely is about customers first. This is his chance to show it. This deal accelerates his opportunity to get customers where he wants to take them if he negotiates it right. Something I dint think would be that hard. There is too much upside for Microsoft to nitpick the non financial deal points.

...

So Yahoo should say yes. Its less about the money than about finally achieving the corporate goals set out more than a decade ago.

One time Jerry told me that Yahoo stood for You Always Have Other Options. This time Yahoo doesn't, but their customers options could improve exponentially if Yahoo says yes.

Read more here.

Google on Microsoft and Yahoo; Microsoft responds

Google has come out in a blog post on the Official Google Blog by David Drummond, Senior Vice President, Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer, and stated that:

Microsoft's hostile bid for Yahoo! raises troubling questions. This is about more than simply a financial transaction, one company taking over another. It's about preserving the underlying principles of the Internet: openness and innovation.

Read the full post here.  Microsoft, of course, rejects Google's arguments.  The New York Times has a good summary of Google's and Microsoft's position:

Google said in a blog post on its Web site that given Microsoft’s anti-competitive conduct in the past and its continued dominance in the technology industry, the proposed transaction could pose threats to “innovation and openness” on the Internet. But Google’s broadly worded concerns lacked detailed claims about the anticompetitive effects of the deal, and the company did not ask federal regulators to take any specific actions at this time.

“Could Microsoft now attempt to exert the same sort of inappropriate and illegal influence over the Internet that it did with the PC?” asked David Drummond, Google senior vice president and chief legal officer, writing on the company’s blog. “While the Internet rewards competitive innovation, Microsoft has frequently sought to establish proprietary monopolies — and then leverage its dominance into new, adjacent markets.”

Yahoo declined to comment. Yahoo has said it is weighing Microsoft’s hostile offer and alternatives.

Bradford L. Smith, Microsoft’s general counsel, said in a statement on Sunday that the deal would create more, not less, competition “by establishing a compelling No. 2 competitor for Internet search and online advertising.” Mr. Smith noted that Yahoo and Microsoft combined would have 30 percent of the United States search market, far less than Google’s 65 percent share.

But Google appears to want to focus the debate, at least in part, on issues other than advertising, where it is dominant. Mr. Drummond noted that the combination of Yahoo and Microsoft would create a company with an “overwhelming share” of the instant messaging and e-mail markets.

“Could a combination of the two take advantage of a PC software monopoly to unfairly limit the ability of consumers to freely access competitors’ e-mail, IM, and Web-based services?” Mr. Drummond asked. Yahoo and Microsoft also run two of the most heavily trafficked portals on the Internet, Mr. Drummond noted.

Google’s reaction suggests the Internet search giant may be preparing to do its best to derail or delay any merger. If so, the strategy would mirror Microsoft’s own actions with respect to Google’s proposed acquisition of online advertising specialist DoubleClick for $3.1 billion.

Read more here.  Read more about this at Google Watch here, GigaOM here, Mashable here and here, Eight Black here, ReadWriteWeb here, and Ars Technica here.  But my favourite commentary came from TechCrunch's Michael Arrington, whose clearly not feeling the love from Google on this:

Google finally went on the record today regarding the proposed Microsoft/Yahoo deal.

In short, they don’t like the idea of Microsoft and Yahoo being one company. They think it raises “troubling questions” and threatens “the underlying principles of the Internet: openness and innovation.” Microsoft is also vilified as engaging in “inappropriate and illegal influence” and having “legacy of serious legal and regulatory offenses.” They mention, among other things, the overwhelming market share in instant messaging and email, and the large number of page views their respective portals generate.

But 2008 may be the year Google can no longer hide behind the “David v. Goliath” defense with Microsoft. Google is the reason that Yahoo has stumbled so badly, and may be Microsoft’s last hope to be a meaningful player on the Internet over the long run. To put it bluntly, the roles are reversed. Google is now the Goliath, and they’re public whimpering on the acquisition makes them look petty and scared.

The fact is that this deal isn’t about email, IM or even page views. In the places that matter - search share and advertising dollars, Google is slaying everyone. 2007 Google search share: 64%. Percentage of all online ad dollars going to Google in 2007: 40% and growing.

The truth is that Google has become the new Microsoft, and if we want to avoid a repeat of history, we need to allow the formation of a real competitor to keep them honest. Otherwise, all the ills perpetrated on the world by Microsoft in the nineties will likely be repeated again, this time by Google.

When it comes to Google standing up to the FCC and the incumbent wireless carriers to make our life better, I’m behind them 100%. But when the complain about the formation of a new entity that can provide them real competition in the search and online advertising space, I’m not feeling the love.

Read more here.

The story of the week: Microsoft and Yahoo

Hundreds (possibly thousands) of articles and blog posts have been written this week about Microsoft's offer of $44.6 billion to acquire Yahoo, however I thought it may be useful to highlight a couple of particularly good or interesting articles on this very significant tech story.  For background, however, see the letter from Microsoft to the Yahoo board here and the internal e-mail from Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to Microsoft employees explaining the Yahoo acquisition offer here - both via TechCrunch.  And if you are after a shorter, punchier summary of the reaction from the blogosphere, then it is probably best to head over to The Lede here.  Anyway, here are some more detailed extracts and opinions on several aspects of the proposed acquisition ...

Would this be good for users?

ReadWriteWeb's Marshall Kirkpatrick argues that Microhoo could be a positive move for users:

I think this acquisition could be very good news.

It's going to validate a lot of innovation at Yahoo! Many people, including Microsoft on the conference call early this morning about the news, are focusing on what this means for advertising and for search. Since when is Yahoo! particularly good at either of those things, though? Yahoo! has created a web presence with more traffic than almost anyone else on earth. That's what they are good at and the issue is that they haven't been able to make money off of it.

Yahoo! is great at content and online innovation, though. That's what Microsoft needs right now. Google is posing a threat to Microsoft not just because it is winning in advertising, where Microsoft is a relative beginner, but because Google is shifting the software world to online.

Microsoft is serious about innovation, they just haven't been doing much of it in house for awhile. The Live.com work and the Microsoft acquisitions in the health space indicate to me the company really is trying to do more than just catch up in search and advertising.

I think that this acquisition is going to mean a whole lot more energy put behind services like Flickr and Del.icio.us and innovative content sites like Yahoo! Sports and Finance. All of that will be good for Microsoft and it will be good for those of us who find those sites and services inspiring.

Read more here.  However, The Guardian's Bobbie Johnson isn't so sure, especially if you are an existing user of Microsoft's web services:

But what would it mean for ordinary users if the two were brought together?

The picture remains unclear at the moment, despite Microsoft saying it has created a detailed integration plan, but a deal would be likely to result in several popular products hitting the skids.

The email service Hotmail, for example, is one of Microsoft's flagship web products, but it remains second to Yahoo Mail, which has nearly half of the market. In the end, one system would probably end up overtaking the other, even if the names remain in place.

Elsewhere, closer integration of their competing instant messengers would make sense. With Microsoft the world's dominant software company thanks to the Windows platform, Yahoo messenger could eventually see the curtains come down.

It also appears likely the two would not be able to keep their search engines running separately. One of the main reasons to merge is the failure of their respective products – Yahoo search and Live search – to oust Google as the market leader. Recent figures suggest Yahoo search is more than twice the size of MSN at the moment.

Elsewhere, millions of people who use the pair's other services will be scratching their heads. What happens to your blog, photos or the music and video you have online?

Again, the news here could be better if you're an existing Yahoo user. Ray Ozzie, Microsoft's chief software architect, said these sorts of services are exactly what appeals in the deal. Yahoo is well placed, with a number of leading social web properties such as the photo-sharing website Flickr and the events site Upcoming. These would most likely replace some of Microsoft's less-used products.

Read more here.  In a similar vein, TechCrunch's Duncan Riley also looks at what components of the two companies are likely to stay or likely to go.  Read that here.  However, Rafe Needlemen does a similar thing for CNET News.com in his Web 2.0 cage match: Microsoft vs. Yahoo.  Read that here.  PC World's Mark Sullivan also tries to offer some historical perspective to this what will stay and what will go discussion:

The truth is, nobody really knows what Microsoft would do with all the Yahoo services if an acquisition takes place.

But history gives some hints. In the past, Microsoft has been far more likely to buy technology, user bases, and traffic, but not brands. In other words, Microsoft likes to promote its own homegrown brands  , like Microsoft Office or Windows Live, not brands that it has acquired.

Microsoft is likely to take that same approach to at least some of the Yahoo services, that is, subsume the people and technology behind the Yahoo services into its own MSN services. Microsoft says it can gain $1 billion in "synergies" from the deal. By that the software giant means the resources that can be saved as the two companies remove the redundancies from the combined business.

IDC's [Karsten] Weide says Microsoft should resist clinging to its own MSN-branded services,  if the acquisition takes place. "Microsoft would have a hard time doing that, because they are not a media company, they are an engineering company," IDC's Weide says. "Meanwhile, Yahoo has a lot of experience in media."

Read more here. 

By the numbers ...

ZDNet News has an interesting chart on Microsoft-Yahoo by the numbers, which includes the following facts:

• $59.09: the combined fiscal revenue of Microsoft and Yahoo in 2007;
• 1.2 billion: the combined unique monthly visitors to Microsoft's and Yahoo's websites;
• 83.1 million: the combined US email market share.

View the full chart here.

So why?  What does Microsoft want?  And is it a good business decision?

Quite a bit has been written on whether this is a good business move on Microsoft's part.  TechCrunch's Erick Schonfeld looks at the business of the potential acquisition:

Yahoo represents a new growth opportunity for Microsoft in advertising revenues and online services. During the last four quarters, Microsoft’s revenues for its online services (MSN, Windows Live, aQuantive, etc.) were $2.8 billion and it lost $949 million. So just combining Yahoo with that business, you get revenues of $9.8 billion, but Microsoft would still be showing a net loss for that business of $289 million.

But this is an advertising play for Microsoft. It wants to combine the scale of its recently acquired advertising networks with that of Yahoo’s, along with Yahoo’s vast consumer reach (which is appealing to advertisers, who see all those eyeballs as valuable inventory).

Read more here.  Wired's Betsy Schiffman wonders if, when it comes to search, two losers are unlikely to make a winner:

Assuming the Microsoft-Yahoo merger goes through -- which is still a big "if" at this point -- the combined company would have roughly 18 percent market share of the search-based ad market, while Google still has 75 percent of the market, according to Sandeep Aggarwal, an analyst with Oppenheimer & Co.

"Both Microsoft and Yahoo have tried to expand their search marketing business with no notable success so far … Microsoft needs to close the deal with Yahoo, integrate the combined company, and show a higher level of traction in the online advertising ecosystem as a combined company," Aggarwal wrote in a report.

The only area where the combined company could dominate is in the market for display ads, or banner ads, where Aggarwal estimates the companies could have 30 percent market share, besting Google's 2 percent share in the market. Even there, though, analysts speculate that the combined companies' dominance could be short-lived, assuming Google's acquisition of DoubleClick wins approval.

And of course when it comes to search, neither Yahoo nor Microsoft come anywhere close to competing with Google, which has 58 percent market share for search, while Yahoo has 23 percent market share and Microsoft has a measly 10 percent market share.

"The big difference between their ad offerings is that Google just does so much more volume, in terms of search," Gordon says.

Read more here.  But Slate's Chris Wilson doesn't see it is as being about search, he sees it as being about something else:

Google vs. Microsoft + Yahoo!—let's call the new company Microsoft!—would be a clash of the titans, but they wouldn't be battling over search. Yahoo!'s strength as a company has never been its search engine but rather its role as a portal to a variety of Web-based applications. Acquiring Yahoo! would not help Microsoft topple Google search. But the good news for Microsoft, if its acquisition should succeed, is that search is not the Web's final frontier. The next big score will come to whoever captures the market for everything else—photo-sharing, word processing, calendar-building—that people do (and will do) on the Web. When it comes to all of those other applications, Microsoft! would be in great position to head Google off at the pass.

...

Yahoo!'s experience as a portal and Microsoft's position as the leading provider of offline software are the ingredients for a powerful Google alternative. A recent survey found that only 6 percent of respondents had tried Web-based office applications, and nearly three in four had never even heard of such a thing. By comparison, there are hundreds of millions of Microsoft Office users. Even though Google Docs has a head start on the Web, Microsoft is perhaps better positioned to win the race. The challenge that Steve Ballmer and co. are facing is how to make a dominant offline franchise just as dominant online. "The Google threat is enormous," says Jonathan Eunice, the principal IT advisor for Illuminata, a technology consulting firm. "Microsoft is very specific in what it wants. ... Yahoo! has the user community. It has built a revenue model around being a place that people go. [Microsoft is] buying a user base and a crew at Yahoo! that can keep people coming back."

Read more here.  Tim O'Reilly also doesn't think it is about search - he sees it as being about strategic assets in email:

The thing that jumps out at me is just how dominant the combination would be in web-based email. (Caveat: Hitwise doesn't count "in service email" on AOL and MySpace in these figures.) Add in Microsoft's incredible dominance in corporate email with Exchange and Outlook. Now think about all the possibilities that are starting to be explored in the area of email data as a source of information about users, and a locus for building new services for those users. (Of course, you might also think about the anti-trust implications of this combination....)

Email hasn't changed significantly in years.  As I've written previously, there's a huge opportunity in building a next generation address book.  (Doc Searls calls this Vendor Relationship Management. I prefer the term Personal Relationship Management.) I want tools that augment my ability to remember, manage, and communicate with all the people I deal with every day, in both personal and business contexts.

If Microsoft does consummate this merger (and I understand from the scuttlebutt that Yahoo! does consider it a hostile takeover), the surest way NOT to profit from it is by focusing on the areas where Google is already the strongest. Microsoft needs to invest in the future of applications where Microsoft and Yahoo! are strongest, and where there is significant opportunity for innovation. Email and other messaging platforms meet these criteria.

Read more here.

Who is unhappy with this proposed acquisition?

Some Yahoo employees are concerned about the cultural impact of the acquisition (see here), privacy groups oppose the deal (see here), News Corp also isn't a fan given they are also now seem to want to acquire Yahoo as well (see here), and it is appearing likely that the deal may struggle to get antitrust approval (see here).  But the unhappiest group appears to be a small community of Flickr users - there are now 92 photos in a pool called MICROSOFT:  KEEP YOUR EVlL GRUBBY HANDS OFF OF OUR FLICKR, including these two ...

First, this one from ososment:

Second, this one from jcrr, which I found particularly amusing:

Read more about the unhappy Flickr community here (from Wired).  And Mashable has a great collection of other photos here.

Finally, to try and end on some balance, PC World's Tom Spring acknowledges that when you put together two giants like these, there are bound to be some good results and some nasty ones. So he lists his 11 dreams and nightmares resulting from such an acquisition.  Read it here.

Bill Gates' Last Day

You haven't seen it already, you really must watch this hilarious video depicting the last day of Bill Gates at Microsoft:

Macs, PCs and music downloads

This story from the New York Times is just over a week old, but I thought was particularly illuminating about the difference between Mac users and PC users:

Macintosh owners are far more likely than PC owners to have recently paid for a music download, according to the NPD Group, a market research firm. In the third quarter of 2007, exactly half of Mac owners paid to download music at least once, while only 16 percent of PC owners did. The data was derived from an online panel of 4,915 people and weighted to reflect the United States’ online population.

In part, the disparity reflects the ways Apple Macintosh and PC owners use their computers: Mac owners are more likely to listen to music on their computers and to upload music to digital music players. The Mac is marketed as an entertainment machine, and music and video are tightly integrated into the operating system. And, of course, the iPod is an Apple product.

“The whole concept of using the Mac as an entertainment tool across the board is much more woven into the fabric than with PCs,” said Russ Crupnick, the senior entertainment industry analyst at NPD.

It does not hurt that the most popular peer-to-peer file-sharing programs, which allow for free downloading, have generally introduced Mac versions later than PC versions, if at all.

Read it here.

Microsoft using YouTube

TechCrunch's Duncan Riley reports that Microsoft is using YouTube to promote Vista and Live:

Microsoft has taken its marketing push for Windows Vista and Windows Live into enemy territory by offering demonstration videos on YouTube ...

The content itself isn’t all that exciting, but they do demonstrate various positive aspects of Vista and Live that viewers may not be aware of. The more interesting aspect is that Microsoft would use the Google owned YouTube for such as promotion; it certainly demonstrates just how powerful the market position of YouTube has become over the last 2 years that Microsoft would use it to promote their products.

Courageously, Microsoft has also left comments open on each video ...

Read more here.  And this is one of the videos:

More spam than legitimate email

Read/WriteWeb breaks the bad news:

Reasearchers at IDC predict that this year the number of spam messages sent will eclipse the amount of legit email correspondence for the first time ever, reports USA Today. Approximately 10.8 trillion spam messages will have crossed through inboxes in the past year, compared to 10.5 trillion legitimate person-to-person email messages. The numbers indicate that spam is a growing problem, despite the promise of better filtering technology.

"Two years from now, spam will be solved," said Bill Gates in 2004 addressing World Economic Forum in Switzerland. But 2007 will go down as the worst year yet for spam, a trend that has held for the past four years, according to Rebecca Steinberg Herson, vice president of marketing at Commtouch, an email security firm.

In an interview last month with USA Today, Gates reminded that though the volume of spam has increased, more of it is being deleted by spam filters. "Sure, there's a lot [of spam] out there, but software is deleting 99.9% of that anyway," he said, though Microsoft has revised that claim to 85% - 95%.

Read more here.

"Don't Give Up on Vista"

The latest web ad from Apple:

Scoble on the brand promise of Apple

Robert Scoble rants on the brand promise of Apple:

So, last night I was out to dinner with a bunch of smart people. Folks who run their own companies. Folks who have helped many companies get started. Tech companies.

Of course people started talking about my Apple problems. Everyone at the table is a Macintosh user. What was fun is that at one point people started telling me about the problems they have had with their Macs. Many with far more serious problems than I have had.

I tried to turn on my video camera. They all instantly shut up and said “no video.”

Why not?

I dug a little more. It was because they all blamed themselves for the problems of their Macs and I think they also bought into the “Apple cult” which says that if you use a Mac you must be cool. Heck, look at that ad again. Who is cool? Not the PC user.

Now THAT is “brand promise.”

We believe Apple’s marketing so deeply that we aren’t willing to question it.

And then there’s something else. Apple has an ARMY of people who are anonymous who will come and call you every name in the book. I know. They hit yesterday here. I deleted them all, but, dozens, if not hundreds, of comments calling me every name in the book.

They hit over on Andy Beal’s site too. He got tired and just closed the comment thread over there.

The common thing about most of these comments is that it’s MY FAULT that my Apple machine is having trouble.

...

Just remember the brand promise of Apple, OK?

1. If your machine behaves badly it’s your fault.
2. Any idiot can use an Apple machine (that’s what they tell you before you buy one) but if your machine crashes then you must be a “genius” to fix it (they have bars at stores now where you can “borrow” a genius, but only after waiting in line — my son twice has been turned away from genius bars because they were too busy and was told to “come back tomorrow at 10 a.m.”). Oh, and if you are having problems at 10 p.m., and dare tell people on your blog about your problems you’ll get tons of abuse back “how DARE you be an Apple user and not know you needed to flash your PRAM.” Translation: any idiot can use a Mac, but not really.
3. If you dare complain about the brand promise you’ll get pounced on by hoardes of annonymous astroturfing Apple FanBois.
4. If you don’t get the brand promise of Apple don’t attempt to point out that the ads are ridiculous. Instead, just leave the cult and go back to using that “inferior” machine you used to use.
5. Check out my new Mac, with its cool brushed metal surface and the light-up Apple logo.
6. If you use an Apple machine you will be as cool as Kevin Rose.

...

I guess I just am not cool enough to like my Mac. I’m back on my Sony Vaio, which has never crashed the way my Mac did the other night. It also never has needed to have its memory and graphics controller replaced the way my Mac did. And its USB ports work, unlike those on my son’s computer. But it decidedly isn’t cool.

It doesn’t come with the brand promise of Apple.

Read more here.

Bill Gates on Facebook

For the New York Times blog Laugh Lines, humorist Jenny Lyn Bader has discovered that, with Microsoft’s acquisition of a stake in Facebook last week, the site has won a famous new convert to social networking.  Click here to see the full - if fake - Bill Gates’s Facebook page.

Can Google kill PowerPoint?

Writing for Slate, Paul Boutin wonders whether Google can kill PowerPoint.  And the winner is ...:

I don't think Google will catch up with PowerPoint. The company's strength is in reinventing applications rather than beating competitors on features. Google's one advantage, feature-wise, might be short-lived: A Microsoft spokesman told me the company will launch its own free collaboration service in December. It will let up to 15 people group-edit a PowerPoint preso.

Google Preso rocks for easy, no-money-down collaboration, but its visually clumsy slides won't win you a Nobel Prize or help you close a million-dollar deal. For that, the winning app is actually ... Apple's Keynote. The Splunkers now use it. They say Keynote allows them finer control than PowerPoint over layout, fonts, colors, animation, and overall wow factor in front of tough audiences. Google Preso comes in a distant third. Instead of being a PowerPoint killer, it's a PowerPoint commercial—a half-baked app that shows how powerful Microsoft's program really is. To prove it, I've whipped up a PowerPoint preso that recaps the differences. Any questions?

Read more here.