Category Archives: microsoft

Bill Gates to become full time philanthropist and leave Microsoft management over next 2 years

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Bill Gates' passion has become his outstanding philanthropic work, mostly relating to global health initiatives, and today he said he'd leave his day to day management of MS over the next two years.

Although the future of Microsoft may be in question thanks to the rapidly changing online, open source and competitor environments, this is a great day for international development efforts.  

In addition to saving over a *million* people from tragic deaths due to disease, the Gates Foundation has brought an entrepreneurial, innovative approach to the development of global health solutions.   I'm thrilled that Gates – still a young whippersnapper – will devote his substantial intellectual and monetary resources to the world's greatest challenges.  Bravo Bill!

Fortune Magazine: Is Slashdot the Future?

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Back in February David Kirkpatrick, Fortune Magazine's senior editor, raved about Slashdot and SourceForge as the future of media.   He focuses on the power of content and communities generated by users and notes how effectively and powerfully Slashdot manages content and community with minimal staff. 

Kirkpatrick ponders the implications of open source "revolution" noting that open source is:

… Creating something of tremendous widespread utility for the ego value …

How powerful will ego be in shaping the media landscape of the future?   I've been noting at events like Mashup Camp as well as chats with people from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Amazon, etc, etc that large numbers of extremely bright people are motivated to a very large extent by pride and virtuosity rather than a narrow focus on money.    It's not just coincidence that corporate giants Yahoo and Google began in academia as non-commercial projects.   Both were inspired more by the interests of their creators than by a quest for dollars, yet rose to become two of the most successful companies in the history of commerce.
Of course profits and selfishness will play significant roles in the future of almost all companies, but perhaps the ability of the internet to leverage time, skills, and social connections so effectively is also generating more ego-based economic activity than ever before.

Online vs Offline Advertising – an epidemic of irrationality.

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Matt McAlister is unimpressed with online advertising.

OK, but take a look at OFFLINE dude! I replied to him over at his blog:

I think you may be overestimating the abysmal stats behind conventional advertising. Online, the 1% of people clicking into an advertiser's site at a cost of perhaps .15-.25 is very good. For example if you advertise a website prominently in a print publication you should expect perhaps 1/10th to 1/100th that level of performance (1 in 1000 to 1 in 10,000 readers) clicking to the site. I've tested this result using unique URLs and large print ads and the results were…underwhelming. I've seen no study to contradict my own results though I've noted many ad buyers tend to evaluate ad effectiveness in very questionable ways, such as when a $20,000 print campaign results in a few thousand leads and the conclusion is that it was a huge success.

Context ads have redefined the relationship between content and advertising in a positive way for both advertisers and publishers, and until a LOT more money flows from absurdly overpriced offline media to online, and thus starts to close the ROI gap, I think it is unreasonable to expect online ad models to change much, although do see them moving away from PPC and towards pay per action models which make performance measures somewhat more straightforward and PPC fraud almost impossible.
I think many online folks simply have no idea about the incredibly poor performance of offline advertising. My working hypothesis is that most advertising buys have negative ROI but that media companies and sales reps have done a very good job of convincing ad buyers that their advertising is working.

This article suggets that Google's failure to get high bids for print ads was an anomoly.  On the contrary I think this is a glimpse of the future of advertising, which will continue to move online until relative ROIs balance out.

Google selling print failed because print advertising is *dramatically* inferior to online and Google customers know this. Even online campaigns generally have negative ROI, but I suggest that most large, image driven print campaigns have negative ROI unless flimsy methodologies are used to measure ROI.

Few clients measure print effects well if at all, allowing advertising reps and companies to BS their way to keeping TV and print in play which is the main funding source for large media companies.

Based on my observations and experiments with print and online advertising in the travel sector It's an epidemic of irrationality, where few bother to measure ad effectiveness and those few who do measure it, and find print generally fails to deliver positive ROI, simply turn to subjective justifications for continuing failed campaigns.

Scoble leaves Microsoft!

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Robert Scoble, one of the world's most influential and well-known bloggers, is leaving Microsoft for startup podtech.net

It's not official until he announces it tomorrow at Vloggercon.com, but in typical blogOsphere fashion the news is out before it is news.    Looks like Robert notified a few folks who called a few others who posted about it and it'll be old news by the time he announces tomorrow.

I had a chance to talk briefly with Robert at the MIX06 conference and he's a great guy.  I'm very surprised that Microsoft allowed this to happen though I'm guessing it's because the corporate structure made it hard to reward him appropriately for his enormous contributions to Microsoft as one of their most prominent online spokespeople.    Also I'm guessing he was frustrated by the slow pace of change at MS. As such a well-connected guy I bet he wanted to jump into the excitement of Web 2.0.  Microsoft is missing much of the point of Web 2.0 as many have noted – in fact it they aren't careful Web 2.0 could kill Microsoft, and Scoble's departure is notable in that respect.   He was Mr 2.0 at Microsoft and now he's gone.

Microsoft's loss is Podtech's gain and I'll look forward to seeing Robert more often now that he's heading to Silicon Valley. 

Is Web Surfing Dying?

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I'm still big on "web surfing" and prefer bouncing around from site to site to RSS feed readers and customized home pages like MyYahoo.

However, as information online continues to explode and as blog content replaces website content as the freshest and most interesting stuff online, I think we'll all be moving to a more structured environment for pulling in information. This won't stop our surfing but it will tend to reduce the time surfing and increase the focus on topics of interest to us. Interestingly, this may mean we'll be less inclined to bump into "new" ideas. On the upside it may allow more in depth analysis as we refine the niche sources to the best of class in our areas of expertise/interest and learn to organize the information and data associations in more effective ways.

I think these RSS vs Surfing developments may be more profound than most realize. At MIX06 it was clear that Microsoft was going to focus heavily on RSS feeds as a key online distribution tool. Yet it was striking to me how Bil Gates (who I respect) and MS in general seemed out of touch with the big news of Web 2.0. Tim O'Reilly and Tim Berners-Lee both are good at seeing the future and they seem to suggest there are profound changes in emphasis for the online world – a shift to community/collective intelligence/complex webs of interconnected dynamic data/ etc. This is not directly related to the future of surfing but will influence it greatly, and I think Web 2.0 may not be as compatible with "navigation via surfing" as the old web.

Watch out for the … Amazon!

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Over at Webmasterworld someone was noting Amazon's new free commercial website service and wondering if they were watering down their brand with all the new online services Amazon is offering. 

To the contrary I think the Amazon strategy is brilliant and the idea is to water down the OTHER brands by commoditizing things like commercial sites and search. The relationships they are establishing will pay modest but very long lasting dividends.

The global search niche, by comparison, is hugely profitable but is always threatened by "the next best thing" since users will tend to jump to the best search having little stake in the brand itself.

Amazon has nothing to lose in the areas of free website, storage, web services, etc. I think they are very clever to provide complex, data intensive services.

They are also lucky to have one of the best tech evangelists in the form of Jeff Barr who is spreading the word about some of the new services in his excellent presentations such as the one he gave at MIX06. 

Perfect Search = Advertising problems?

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Issues about Search are generally and wrongly presented as technological or computer challenges when in fact they are best viewed as *advertising* challenges.     Ultimately the search winner will be the advertising winner  (Now that winner is Google with Yahoo, MSN, and ASK working hard to catch up).  I'm suspicious that innovation is now driven more by advertising than by "quality search" considerations.  Certainly innovation is now mostly *funded* by advertising and bets placed on the quest for ad dollars.  

I suggested in an email exchange recently:

…. a "perfect" search engine set up like Google would make much less *directly* from ads since it would always deliver a perfect organic (ad free) result.   I suppose in some cases there would ALSO be a perfect ad match, but there is an interesting natural tension between profit, search quality, and market share.

Tom observed in response:

…let's assume a perfect search result is one where each search result has a bit of information that's of interest to the searcher; and since it's perfect, the search engine has gone over the results and found superficially similar results that don't contribute new information content, ranked the results according to useful information content, and generally done a perfect job.  I think there's still room for product promotion in there, especially if I'm looking for a product, which I increasingly do on the 'Net.

I replied:
I agree if we ssume as below that perfect search still does not really match us exactly to our query. But I'm more optimistic about search and think that when combined with personal histories and other inputs like query refinements, it'll come close to reading our query intention with extreme accuracy.    People would still BUY stuff as a result of search but it would be hard to use the existing models for advertising which associate only those willing to pay with the relevant results lists. 

Drats, Foiled again! Humbled by math and technology, which I’m convinced are EVIL forces of the DEVIL!

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There was me, priding myself on applying the elusive Monty Hall conditional probability math to "Deal or No Deal" TV show and thinking how clever I was to integrate DVD, touchscreen, and LCD Television for a snazzy new tourism presentation.     WRONG and WRONG was I, since it appears the math on Deal no Deal is NOT Montyfied, and the DVD touchscreen solution remains elusive.

Circuit City was very helpful figuring out the challenges and I learned that running DVD through a computer using the normal VGA outputs will give crappy picture.   The video is very high quality and keeping it that way is a priority.  Surprisingly to me, even with a hyped up graphics card and DVI output I may not get great quality on a 42" LCD TV.    The TV dude said that this is from incompatibilities in digital standards and helps explain why media center technology (much hyped by Microsoft at MIX06) is NOT taking off very well.

The problem is I need to interface with a touchscreen so the users control the presentation on the touchscreen but can also view it on the 42" LCD TV above.    The solution appears to be to get a touchscreen capable DVD player (which I did not know until today existed) and then hopefully be able to output from it to touchscreen AND the LCD TV.     If this fails it's back to the DVI PC solution.

Let’s have more OPEN conferences – a LOT more.

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I've been to all or portions of about 7 internet conferences in the past year, and without a doubt Mashup Camp was my favorite in terms of the quality of the information and the way it was delivered.

Unlike the highly structured MIX06, WebmasterWorld, AD TECH, and Search Engine Strategies, MashupCamp lets attendees decide the topics, interact via wiki and other features, and in my favorite session had developers present their stuff to small roving groups in 5 minute "speed geeking" sessions.

Rather than take a nap because the topics were rehashes of what I knew, I had to take a walk outside to cool my brain from the firehose of Web 2.0 information overloading me in Mountain View during the 2 day conference.

I think and hope that events like Foo Camp, Bar Camps, and Mashup Camps are the future of power networking, because this type of conference builds a much stronger type of relationship between attendees and powers more effective idea building than the traditional "lecture/session/track" model. It's a wild west out there and the conferences should reflect that.
Conspicuous is the fact that this conference charged nothing to attend, cleverly getting corporates to sponsor the meals and other needed items. I did chip in a few hundred because that was helpful but I don't think it'll be needed at the upcoming conferences, which now have even more active support of Yahoo, Google, MSN, ASK, and many more key industry players.

Huge KUDOS to David Berlind, Doug Gold, Mary Hodder and Doc Searles who not only put on a great event but are doing it again in July and expaning the camp to include "Mashup University".