Tag Archives: yahoo

Blodget: Microsoft implying they may be poised to buy Yahoo

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Henry Blodget’s got an interesting take on the recent UBS talk by Microsoft where they suggested a plan to capture “30-40%” of the search market over the next several years.  Although the literal reading of this does not seem to suggest a Yahoo buyout, Blodget is correct that it is simply absurd, even given the normal Microsoft bluster factor, for Microsoft to think they can capture this much of the market in a short time …. unless they buy Yahoo, which as Blodget points out gives them all this, and more, instantly.  

Given Yahoo’s modest capitalization of some 30 billion, and Yahoo’s huge online prospects (they have similar traffic to Google but with far poorer monetization of traffic), it would not be prohibitive for Microsoft to nab them.

I’ve noted before this would be an excellent move for Microsoft.  It still is.

Disclaimer: I’ve got some Yahoo shares.   Not that they are doing me much good right now.    But they’d probably jump in value if Microsoft bought them.   Did this influence me writing about this?   I don’t think so, but since money is the root of all evil you can’t really trust me on Yahoo analyses, disclaimers or not.   Also important is that nobody can predict the market swings with any forward looking reliability.   So there. 

Email as the new Social Network

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The New York Times is summarizing some interesting plans from Google and Yahoo to turn their email systems into forms of social networking.    This idea could have a lot of potential, as the Yahoo’s Brad Garlinghouse points out in the article that Yahoo has a lot of information about an individual’s social relationships – for example who they email regularly – and this info is simply begging to be mined to help users navigate their increasingly complex online worlds. 

Google as Social Network = THE killer application?

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Google’s acting social at the Googleplex and this could become an earthquake in the social network landscape.   TechCrunch reports that Maka Maka appears to be the Google codename for their social network integration, which may be a way to tie together existing Google stuff in a seamless and user friendly way.   For many of us Google aleady has a lot of info.   I use Gmail, Google Toolbar, and more.  If they simply say to me “click here and we’ll make it all work great” I’m going to do it.    If it works, I’ll keep it.  If I, and 50,000,000 other users keep it Google will be bigger than Facebook….almost overnight.  If they integrate it all with the upcoming Google Phone?   Wow.

TechCrunch:
The real killer app for Google is not to turn Orkut into a Facebook clone. It is to turn every Google app into a social application without you even noticing that you’ve joined yet another social network.

Hey Yahoo!   Why don’t you DO THIS!    Use Mash to get all Yahoo users going.  Don’t ask others to sign them up – simply have a  one click Mash page creation thing where YOU set up a page for all Yahoo users…..right NOW.    If people want to delete it, fine.  If not, rock on with the new largest social network, and populate it with people …. later.

San Jose Mercury News – A Cautionary Tale from Business Week

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There is a great summary at Business Week of the  remarkable rise and pending fall of Silicon Valley’s newspaper – the San Jose Mercury News.     They note that in many ways the Mercury News saw it all coming, but still failed to position itself to profit from the migration of offline info to online info.  

Although the article does not make this point, to me the failure supports the idea that paradigm shifts do not come from old systems evolving into new ones even when the old systems “get it”, rather they come from new folks thinking out of the old boxes and building the next generation of innovative solutions basically from scratch.  

Obviously new technology rests on the shoulders of old technology, but it seems reasonable to assume that the next big things are not going to come from the previous big things, they are going to spring up from the harsh, quirky, and shifting sands of technology and innovation.     I would suggest that IBM might be an exception to this notion but clearly Microsoft, then Yahoo and Google, now YouTube, Myspace and Facebook all fit this model of major changes coming more from scratch than from a slow simmering of existing ideas.     This also helps explain the challenges of Venture Capitalism in finding “the next big thing”, which may right now only be known by the glimmer in a college kid’s eye.

If so, who is next?

Yahoo Mash – Yahoo!, don’t forget about Yahoo! Mash

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Yahoo’s social networking tool “Yahoo Mash” offered up a good first entry into the social networking space by a major player.    But I’m noticing how it seems to be languishing after the initial positive buzz, and I think this is because Yahoo’s taking too long to go out with full bore, full online network promotion.  

Yahoo Mash offers some features I really like compared to Myspace and Facebook.  It’s an open architecture meaning that you can mashup mash with modules that show pictures or RSS feeds like this blog.   I think my favorite thing about Yahoo Mash is the way the comments stream from profile to profile, so you don’t have to keep bouncing back to a single spot to remember what you said to somebody.    I’m not enough of a social networking person to know if this is a real innovation or not because Myspace and Facebook also have some features that cross pollinate across profiles, but somehow Mash feels more like a “social networking” experience to me, even though I with it had the kinds of business networking features you find at LinkedIn.  

If Yahoo Mash is just working out kinks and getting ready to scale up to full release soon that is fine, but if the idea is to scale the project *slowly* over a year or so I think they are making a big mistake.  Why?   Because social networking is an explosive phenomenon both in the sense that it has quickly become a key online activity across all users but also because it seems to me that social networks don’t gain momentum gradually, rather they become “in fashion” as did Myspace and Facebook and grow quickly and explosively.   Facebook is still in this growth mode while I think Myspace growth is tapering off (I’m too lazy to go look at graphs to see if this is true).  

Disclaimer – I’ve got some Yahoo stock.  Not enough to prejudice my views, but perhaps enough to make me unreasonably optimistic. 

China redirects searches to Baidu? OR NOT!

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TechCrunch is reporting today that China is redirecting internet searches from Google, Yahoo, and MSN and I assume all other engines – to Chinese search engine Baidu.   However I can’t find anything but little anecdotal posts to support this.   Looks to me like some videos and blogs have been affected, but that the big search engine issues may have related to a temporarily problem or testing of DNS stuff.

They suggest this may relate to the recent award given to the Dalai Lama I’d guess China is spending a lot of time thinking and experimenting with ways to maximize their search revenues, and this redirection, if it really did happen as dramatically as some suggest, would probably be testing ways to gather data on how well Baidu monetizes search compared to the agreements they have with other players.

Wait – here’s a blogger in Beijing, China saying that he’s getting to places TechCrunch says have been sent to Baidu, like Google.   Not sure what’s up …

Is this a false alarm?   I think so, though it might be another example of how China’s centralized socialist economy can create power and monopoly conditions the most ruthless old style US capitalists could only dream about.    Increasingly control of the online landscape is control of the business landscape, and as China’s massive economic expansion continues it will be very interesting to see how the China wields her power.

Note – I just edited this post quite a bit thanks to the new info.  Still dunno what’s going on.