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Mark Cuban's Plan To Kill Google
rsmiller510 writes "Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, has a plan to kill Google by paying the top 1,000 sites a cool million each to leave the Google index and move to Microsoft. But could such a plan ever work, and would it be worth the risk to abandon Google?"
I know bribery is accepted practice in the US but here in the EU it is still frowned upon.
-- Cheers!
Is it worth $1 million to leave Google? I'm guessing most of the sites would say no, that's incredibly short sighted.
I'll give the top 1000 folks on slashdot who eat bread a nickel never to eat it again.
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
They are surely a top-1000 site. Will they get the cash to de-list themselves?
P.S. The guy is an idiot. People go to Google not to get stuff from a top-1000 site, but to find stuff that is not found in the search bars of the top-1000 sites.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
What TFA is short on is any sense of motivation on Mark Cuban's part. Why does he want to do this? Did Google frighten him when he was a baby?
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
Does the dude have stock at Microsoft? Or what's it to him?
1 million is peanuts. Amazon, one of the top 100 sites, makes that during a coffee break.
Why opt out of free product placement (Amazon usually ranks high in google) worldwide, for a pittance?
Cuban's mojo has left the room.
The phrase tortious interference comes to mind (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tortious_interference)
So, is he offering this out of his own pocket? (a billion dollars).
Or is this just a hare-brained idea that he is tossing out there to get some spin on his own name.
Let's see the Dallas Mavericks remove themselves from anything Google first. Oh, that's right, he must have already, never heard of the team before...
Tisha Hayes
I guess I should file this under Mark Cuban's plan to defeat Barack Obama, Mark Cuban's plan to dominate basketball, Mark Cuban's plan to dominate HD television content, and Mark Cuban's plan to destroy theatrical motion picture distribution.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
From wikipedia: "In 1982, Cuban moved to Dallas, Texas. Cuban first found work as a bartender,[13][14] then as a salesperson for Your Business Software, one of the first PC software retailers in Dallas. He was terminated less than a year later, after meeting with a client to procure new business instead of opening the store.
Cuban started a company, MicroSolutions, with support from his previous customers from Your Business Software. MicroSolutions was initially a system integrator and software reseller. The company was an early proponent of technologies such as Carbon Copy, Lotus Notes, and CompuServe.[15] One of the company's largest clients was Perot Systems.[16] In 1990, Cuban sold MicroSolutions to CompuServe--then a subsidiary of H&R Block--for $6 million.[17] He retained approximately $2 million after taxes on the deal.[18]
In 1995, Cuban and fellow Indiana University alumnus Todd Wagner started Audionet, combining their mutual interest in college basketball and webcasting. With a single server and ISDN line[19], Audionet became Broadcast.com in 1998. By 1999, Broadcast.com had grown to 330 employees and $13.5 million in revenue for the second quarter.[20] In 1999, during the Dot-com boom, Broadcast.com was acquired by Yahoo! for $5.9 billion in Yahoo! stock.[21]"
This man is not a business genius. He is a good self-promoter, and has leveraged this to making a lot of money. Re-read the last couple sentences. he had a business with 13.5 million in revenue in 3 months (not profit... with 330 employees, it was much, much lower). He then sold it for likely a 500+ P/E ratio.
The tech stock market bubble made this man. I don't disparage him for that. However, any business advice coming from this man is virtually worthless. Self-promotion... he's up there.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
TFA makes it pretty clear that this (on his personal blog) is a thought experiment, not an actual plan he has any intention to follow through. More, he is speculating about moves that Microsoft or others might take to bring Google down and what that would do to the market.
Frankly, it as much use as mine our your random musings on business: the only motivation for it making the Slashdot front page seems to be that this guy coincidentally happens to have a billion dollars.
'This writing business. Pencils and what-not. Over-rated if you ask me. Silly stuff. Nothing in it' - Eeyore
... but if he's going to just throw a billion dollars away, why doesn't he do something decent with it like feed the poor or cure a disease or give computers to schools or fund music programs?
Or start a new business to help America get its shit together and beat this recession?
Looking at Mark Cuban's robots.txt file ( http://blogmaverick.com/robots.txt ), I see that he's not blocking Googlebot. Therefore, he is listed in Google's index. So why should someone take $1 million from him to leave the Google index when he clearly does not want to leave Google's index himself?
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Maybe a better analysis:
Mark Cuban was sitting around one day smoking something and wondered, "How can I prove that I am really, really stupid?"
Oh, I know. Wow! I've got it. Microsoft could pay a billion dollars to prove to everyone that it can't compete, that it has to pay to get results. Why the advertising alone would be worth 50 billion. Everyone would associate Microsoft with puking.
They ought to change title to
Mark Cuban's plan to kill top 1000 web sites
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. - Yogi Berra