The lock-in is a carrier issue. I actually run a HTC Touch Pro (a Windows Smartphone) on the Sprint network and have found it to be far more open then many of the other phones I have had. Of course, we will see what happens because for all intensive purposes much of the development in the mobile world is going to the iPhone right now and Apple is following the old MS playbook, build audience until you are relevant to developers - unlike Win Smartphones today.
As for GSM, it might have been easier today if we had done that at the time. The problem between GSM and CDMA has always been that they originally started out solving two very different problems. GSM began by trying to link very dense, small, urban areas with cellular service - like Europe where it is ubiquitous today versus CDMA which was trying to account for large swaths of area where there would be fewer users but a greater need to conserve capital by spreading towers. For the most part both have arrived at close to the same place today. However, we are still bound by the decisions of the past whether we believe they were the right ones or not.
Information can be gleaned very easily from the Internet, but knowledge and the mechanics of synthesizing knowledge are best learned in a university setting. I do agree that in many ways college costs have gotten out of control. It used to be you would goto college to be a school teacher. However, why would you spend $50,000 on job that is at best going to net you $35,000 out of the gate (other than someplace you would rather not teach and danger pay come to mind).
The university setting is best for individuals who need to do high-end problem-solving or research as part of their work not for vocations. Vocations are best learned in a setting where you can skip a lot and go straight to what needs to be known and add a few extras as well. My own family is a perfect example of what can be done through vocational training. My uncle who is dsylexic and color-blind was never great in high school. Instead of moving on to college like he may have been pushed today he went to a technical college where he floushied in electrical power and control and today has been designing power systems for commericial and industrial buildings for over 25 years.
For better or worse, college has become part of the American dream and many who do not belong there are now going. People are going not because they want to but they feel they need to in order to achieve the American dream. The more we due to de-emphasize the idea that college is the only answer and supplement it with apprenticeships, vocational training, etc. , the better will do for all our children.
for those around here that remember 1998, the Rio PMP300 was the 2nd but the most important MP3 player that came on the market. Not exactly ripping it up at 32 MB of RAM but an important introduction nonetheless and ultimately led to Creative and then Apple following with their MP3 players. Given that, in 10 years we may all have them on our key chains next to the USB terabyte drives.
I have been on Slashdot for a decade now and those comments about Microsoft being gone in 5, 10, 20 years never get old. When you are sitting on that kind of cash and that kind of cash generating ability your not going anywhere, anytime soon.
Apparently these jokers do not know how valuable a TLD is. $185,000 is all you would charge? This needs to be well north of $185k more like $18 million. I will buy the TLD.xxx for $185K tomorrow and then make somewhere north of $50 MM off everyone else.
...release to large fan fare and wide downloading, but only partially functional.
Then either A. receives little not follow-up going unloved inside Google and eventually fails. or B. continues to gain in popularity, gains some developer following leading to either 1. hangs in beta forever as Google tries to make money or 2. figures out how to make money and comes out of beta
There is something to be said for this sort of processes. Resources and brainpower go where it believes the most opportunity is thus ensuring that high potential projects go forward. However, this also means you get little follow through with projects that could be successful but are nowhere near as sexy. To use stock market analogy, everyone in Google wants to own call options on projects - (they can make you wildly rich) especially when Google is buying, but no one wants to earn the large cap paying a good dividend, it will not make you rich nor is it as sexy. Or to use baseball terms, the firm is still trying to hit home runs when a few singles and doubles will keep the inning alive.
Consider this, anything that would bring in $10 million a year in net income probably has little to no pull within Google. Why? Because Google brings in $4 billion a year in NI (almost exclusively from Ad Words), making $10 million dollars is like throwing a shovel full of dirt into a mining pit, literally having no impact on Google's bottom line - but what if you had 20, $10 projects? Now we are starting to get somewhere. Instead of looking for the next billion idea relentlessly, they should searching for multiple $10 ideas across its platform or start looking to hit singles and doubles while they can still afford to do so.
Given Google's wild success and having never really to struggle, the firm's conventional wisdom believes markets like online ads to be common occurrences. What this creates is a culture and portfolio of technology and products that are constantly trying to mimic that success, but going to do so to a lessor degree. These products tend to have a higher potential payouts, but smaller changes of succeeding.
This leads me to my ultimate conclusion, Google has now become the most highly capitalized and valued venture capitalist firm. The only problem with this is that Google isn't treating its products like a portfolio, but rather casino bets - continuously moving from one project to the next. A VC firm knows that the big returns come from big winners but you also need a string of solid firms to help manage the volatility of the underlying portfolio of companies. This is the idea that Google really never has figured out and will ultimately lead to the deprecation of its stock price. You cannot have huge winners all the time and while Google Ad Words was an incredible find and tremendous money maker those projects and program only come along once every 10 - 20 years - just look at the time between Microsoft and Google to understand why.
In an Alternate Reality(Score:4, Interesting) by Hangtime (19526) on Friday December 12, @01:21PM (#7702447) (http://slashdot.org/) (AP) Paris - 12/12/2003 10:53 AM Vivendi Universal today was among the host of media companies with record company subsidiaries reporting record profits for the third quarter. Jean-Marie Messier, CEO of Vivendi, attributed the stellar quarter to the company's partnership with the Napster Inc. Napster, a software program used to share and download music, started out as a way to pirate music, but turned legitimate in December 2000 with a broad licensing agreement between each of the five major record labels. Since that time, Napster has made agreements with 6 of the 7 largest US ISPs and OEM deals with computer manufactuers Hewlett Packard and Dell Computer to either install or give users the right to download music from the network. In the case of AOL and Earthlink subscribers, each customer pays an additional $10 a month to share and download from the network. In addition, deals with most of the top indie record labels have followed since 2000 giving Napster users the right to share and download those record label files from the Napster network.
"While we ceratinly were anxious at the beginning of the Napster "experiment", it has truly taken off. It is our hope that even more users will join the network, we are already seeing wonderful penetration in Europe." This past spring, Napster opened its gates to European users in one of the biggest product launches in history. "The network almost doubled the day we opened up to Europe. We are now seeing concurrent usage approaching over 500,000 users with nearly 100 Terabytes of files being shared on the network." explained chief technology officer Shawn Fanning. "With our improved distribution system, we hope to push on into Asia sometime in the 2nd quarter of 2004 once we reach deals with many of the labels there."
The success of the music industry stands in dark contrast to the rest of the economy which grew at an annualized rate of 1.2% this quarter while revenue among the five largest record labels was up 11% from last year. When questioned about Napster Messier replied "Napster has truly been an innovative product and has rewarded Vivendi shareholders and most other media company shareholders immensely."
We have all seen it. Ebay a couple of years ago going down due to Oracle corruption. Royal Bank of Canada failure due to an improper software upgrade. Now, Google with Gmail and other Google Apps failing. All of these organizations were geared towards having the highest uptimes available and failed spectacularly.
Whether you host your own or use someone else its the illusion of control that somehow clouds our judgment into believing that it would somehow be different if I did it. Example: Is it better to drive or fly? Pure numbers state that its safer to fly on a commercial carrier by an order of magnitude but somehow we feel safer when we drive. Whether we choose to acknowledge it or not the world is full of 6 sigma events. As long as you are doing everything you can and within your budget when your hosting your own apps or auditing your provider to ensure they have, backup systems, redundancy, offsite bunker, etc. then you have done everything you can to prepare for this inevitability.
In a lot of ways designing systems is like playing poker. You can play your hand perfectly, design all the systems redundancy and recovery you like, but sometimes even after all that your opponent (risk) draws a lucky card on the river to beat you. Just because you got beat doesn't mean you shouldn't continue to play the same way, it just means you hit one of those events that you cannot plan.
you will find plenty of people that fall WELL outside the normal range. In my industry where I deal with millions of customers its always the case. Even if the earth were covered with only 1% of out of normal range people (which I think its much higher then that) that would mean 60 million or the roughly the size of the UK. If its closer to 5% then its the size of the US. Scary there might be that many people who think like that in the world.
Everytime a significant event occurs the company must publish it on one of the wire services and file an 8-K: Current Report with the SEC. My interpretation would be they would continue to have to file 8-Ks, but they could post the information on the investor website instead of sending it to the wire service. If you are filing 8-Ks, you still have a distinct and 3rd party managed repostitory.
Good points on California's experiment with "deregulation", but I think it helps to prove the point sufficiently. You could say Texas is about as open as you can get with deregulation while California was fairly restrictive. What we can conclude that neither one of these markets turned out the better and continuing to try is probably futile at this point. Now whether it was from the way the markets were designed or from the actual product characteristics itself (which I tend to believe), it still stands that its been tried twice and its failed twice. A third go around is probably not going to create any better results given that each of these has failed as miserably as they have.
I wish you wouldn't have posted as an AC because your point is an excellent one.
Since through economic evidence from over a century's worth of data tells us that markets tend to function better then monopolies for all those involved (except for the monopolist of course) it makes the most sense to lean towards deregulation. This guided my thinking and why I was very pro electric deregulation.
The idea with the electric deregulation was to deconstruct the monopoly and in some way recreate a functioning market from it. The whole concept is predicated on not knowing you are dealing with a natural monopoly (one company serves the general good better then multiple companies) until you have actually tried both. Example: Prior to the breakup of ATT in the US it was thought telecommunications was a natural monopoly and the country was best served by one firm. We now know this not to be the case.
What we have found through electric deregulation is that certain aspects lend themselves to making it untenable. In my opinion, it is the pricing nature of electricity itself. As I stated before, it is the most volatile commodity ever created by man. It cannot be stored, must be used, has uneven demand both during the day and seasonally, incredibly high fixed costs to produce, and you must have enough or the whole system collapses.
So let me come back to your original points.
Electricity is a form of natural monopoly. Yes, I believe it is.
Are all industries that propose to be natural monopolies actually natural monopolies? No, I do not believe so.
Presumably you would also like government control of all other natural monopolies. Yes, I do believe this is the case. As a society, we must have the ability to regulate those that are. But again to the above question, unless there is overwhelming evidence for the case of natural monopoly then that is the only time I welcome it.
Perhaps you should stop pretending to be a libertarian? I said I was libertarian leaning thinker meaning I start most of thoughts from that point and move away. I never said that I was a total libertarian. All people must have a basis for thought, mine starts from that point and moves away. The difference is that unlike idealists whether socialist, democrat, republican, or even libertarian who use their dogma as hammer when all they see is nails, I use mine as a compass to move from place to place and am willing to look at the evidence everyone produces and change my views accordingly.
As a former resident of Texas and once a proponent of electric deregulation, I can say that the last five years have been an eye opener. While at the beginning many including myself talked about the possibilities from a theoretical standpoint, the actual execution of deregulation has been a disaster. The WSJ just did a piece on Texas deregulation this past week which you can find here.
I do believe modernized transmission would go a long way to helping the state like the article talks about, but I also believe Texas should fully embrace the national power grid. Since Texas is not connected in any major way to any other state's grid, ERCOT runs the show and FERC rules need not apply. This gets the double whammy of double set of rules for those who would choose to do business in the state and disallows any load balancing from other grids.
For a state that went from one of the cheapest electric rates to one of the most expensive (I live in NYC now and its only slightly cheaper then Texas), combine this with the folly that was California its a crushing blow against the idea of electricity deregulation. While the WSJ article talks about soaring natural gas prices (most of the state still gets its electricity from natural gas) and congested transmission as being culprits, I think you have to look at the volatility in pricing. Electricity is the most volatile commodity man has created. Unfortunately, no business, market, or participant structure can sustain 10,000s percent moves in intra-day pricing.
As a libertarian leaning thinker I believe in the free economy and as little market regulation as possible, but I am also scientifically-minded individual meaning I will examine the evidence from both sides. Given what we have seen in the markets that have been deregulated, the data and evidence conclude that electric deregulation just does not work.
Quick cash? Stock hasn't done anything in four years. Company has tracked the SP500 for the last year (both down 18%). Buy the SP500 at least you get the diversification.
YHOO got rid of that media company strategy when Terry Simel left. YHOO is now hooked its wagon to search and the overseas assets. BTW, Yang is selling the only way to monetize his search to GOOG. Who cares if YHOO is 1st, 2nd, or 7th in search if GOOG is the one selling the advertising. YHOO with the sell is doomed to average returns and will be no better then the average blog. The company had an opportunity to be the gatekeeper of the Internet and that has passed to GOOG. This should be your most damning evidence that its not about what's best for the company its what's best for Jerry Yang and his ego.
So who are short-term investors and what do you classify as being short-term? Let's say for instance you purchased your YHOO stock four years ago what would be your reward for your efforts? Well the SP500 would have gone up 10% (which is pretty weak) and your YHOO stock would be worth 30% less. In fact, you would not have seen positive territory since Jan 2006. Let's say you believe Jerry Yang has it right and will take you to the promise land. Well he has at least kept pace with the SP500 both are down roughly 18% since his 2nd tenure at YHOO began in June 2007. Of course if you had invested in GOOG when Yang came on board you would be up 10%.
Students and people have the right to equally excel, but not the right to excel equally.
My favorite parable. It begins the book Soar with your Strengths by Don O Clifton's the past chairman of Gallup who died in '03. I met him as senior in high school. He was an incredibly gregarious and his energy was infectious. His views on the subject and this book have had a profound effect on me.
"Let the Rabbits Run", a parable from the book: Soar With Your Strengths
Imagine there is a meadow. In that meadow there is a duck, a fish, an eagle, an owl, a squirrel, and a rabbit. They decide they want to have a school so they can be smart, just like people.
With the help of some grown-up animals, they come up with a curriculum they believe will make a well-rounded animal: running, swimming, tree climbing, jumping, and flying.
On the first day of school, little rabbit combed his ears, and he went hopping off to his running class.
There he was a star. He ran to the top of the hill and back as fast as he could go, and, oh, did it feel good. He said to himself, "I can't believe it. At school, I get to do what I do best."
The instructor said, "Rabbit, you really have talent for running. You have great muscles in your rear legs. With some training, you will get more out of every hop."
The rabbit said, "I love school. I get to do what I like to do and get to learn to do it better."
The next class was swimming. When the rabbit smelled the chlorine, he said, "Wait, wait! Rabbits don't like to swim."
The instructor said, "Well, you may not like it now, but five years from now you'll know it was a good thing for you."
In the tree-climbing class, a tree trunk was set at a 30-degree angle so all the animals had a chance to succeed. The little rabbit tried so hard he hurt his leg.
In jumping class, the rabbit got along just fine; in flying class, he had a problem. So the teacher gave him a test and discovered he belonged in remedial flying.
In remedial flying class, the rabbit had to practice jumping off a cliff. They told him if he'd just work hard enough, he could succeed.
The next morning, he went on to swimming class. The instructor said, "Today we jump in the water."
"Wait, wait. I talked to my parents about swimming. They didn't learn to swim. We don't like to get wet. I'd like to drop this course." The instructor said, "You can't drop it. The drop-and-add period is over. At this point you have a choice: Either you jump in or you flunk."
The rabbit jumped in. He panicked! He went down once. He went down twice. Bubbles came up. The instructor saw he was drowning and pulled him out. The other animals had never seen anything quite as funny as this wet rabbit who looked more like a rat without a tail, and so they chirped, and jumped, and barked, and laughed at the rabbit. The rabbit was more humiliated than he had ever been in his life. He wanted desperately to get out of class that day. He was glad when it was over.
He thought that he would head home, that his parents would understand and help him. When he arrived, he said to his parents, "I don't like school. I just want to be free."
If the rabbits are going to get ahead, you have to get a diploma, replied his parents.
The rabbit said, I don't want a diploma.
The parents said, "You're going to get a diploma whether you want one or not."
They argued, and finally the parents made the rabbit go to bed. In the morning the rabbit headed off to school with a slow hop. Then he remembered that the principal had said that any time he had a problem to remember that the counselor's door is always open.
When he arrived at school, he hopped up in the chair by the counselor and said, "I don't like school."
And the counselor said, "Mmmm, tell me about it."
And the rabbit did.
The counselor said, "Rabbit, I hear you. I hear you saying you don't like school because you don't like swimming. I think I have diagnosed that co
bring in hundred of thousands in unit game sales with your name then you can whine. Right now, you could sub that voice out with any other and it would not make one difference in sales. For the closest approximation think Mark Hamill who did video cut scenes for the Wing Commander games back in the mid-90s. People bought that game because he was a part of it, he can ask for royalties. If they made another GTA IV with the same Niko character but with a different voice actor would it matter? Heck no because I don't play the game for the voices, I play for the gameplay.
is best. I have to write my sticky on a touch-sensitive pad which will then need to be transferred to the PC, undergo handwriting recognition and AI to try to ascertain what the heck I meant which will then try to organize that information.
Or, I can continue using my sticky notes and organizing them on my cube wall (a much larger surface and higher resolution then my 19 inch monitor), freely moving them from one place to another, changing meaning through organization without having to worry about manipulating them on a computer.
Forgive me but I believe this is a tool in search of a problem that does not exist.
Which explains why everybody and their dog wants to work at Google. Would that all software projects were run this way. Usually, 80% is more than good enough and the last 20% usually isn't worth the effort, except to PHBs and PHBeancounters. And to the goobers posting to comment sections
Of course this is if everyone is using the same program for the same purpose. Its called gold plating. However, when it comes to the Office Suite everyone has a a different way of using the program. Take for example this comment within the thread.
i would use gdocs more often if i could do endnotes / footnotes with it.
lack of these is a deal-killer for me, and i imagine many in the academic world. the idea of chipping away at a paper in different offices and around the world is quite appealing to me, especially if i can collaborate on it./I.
I would say endnotes and footnotes fall into that 20% category. I certainly don't use them and neither do my colleagues. Of course within academia I would think they would be vitally important. Of course, then you start looking at the rest of the missing functionality and saying what else do I need to add and you end up where the Office Suite is today. While everyone will never use every piece of functionality within Word, everyone probably belongs to at least one 1% population that is using Word in a different way today. In fact, its the closest thing we have in the software world to being all things to all people.
Amen brother. Google likes to build the 80% thinking no one uses the 20% and on average this would be correct. If you look at usability most folks don't use the higher end functions out of Excel (one of my pet pivs when Microsoft updated to 2007 and the ribbon). But if you look at all the advanced functionality (Sub-Totals, OFFSET(), VLOOKUP(), Validation, Goal Seek, Solver, Add-Ins, Macros, Data Analysis pack, Consolidate, STANDARDIZE(), Percentile(), etc.), however, the chances of any Excel user using at least one of these function thus one function within the 20% is very high and is a gotcha. Everyone complains about feature bloat in Office, but the beauty of the suite is that it will give you that one function you might need to make your life infinitely easier even if it isn't used by 99.9% of all the other users. Ultimately, this is why Google will have limited success. Its not fun building features for a few thousand or a few hundred users, but this is how you build your userbase by catering to smaller and smaller niches of folks who will gladly pay you money to purchase your software.
Living in NYC, I am beholden to TimeWarner as my only cable provider. Of course, TimeWarner unlike nearly all other cable systems in the country sets the broadcast flag for EVERY channel other then OTA (CBS, NBC, FOX, ABC). When questioned about this they just pretty much laugh and say its a part of the contract. Of course, I would love to see said contract because I highly doubt every cable channel is asking TimeWarner to set the broadcast flag, ESPECIALLY when I friends on other large cable systems that do not have this problem. This means is that TivoDesktop is useless to me and I cannot download shows to my laptop to watch on the plane unless they are from the major networks.
*Yes, I am a geek and could go find workarounds. No, I don't want too because I have more important things to worry about and things to do with my time then be denied TV on the go which is probably a good thing.
I refused to get in the middle of HD DVD vs. BluRay and refuse to catch BluRay now that this supposed war is over. The BluRay format has bounced around like a damn super ball and No I am not buying a Playstation 3 for the purposes of watching movies. I want a machine that will remove my need for my upconverting DVD player and above all else the format and player are solid, finished, and done. Versioned software 1.1, 1.2, 2.0 is good. Versioned hardware is bad. Somebody wake me when Sony is tired of tinkering and actually settles on the final standard. No, having new features become available for new hardware isn't an option all it does is screw the original purchasers (take a look at 1.0 spec players).
They are finally figuring out this thing and that they are the ones publishing the current and continuously updated content. Why do you need a middle man like Google, Yahoo, or MSN to get in the way? These guys have been selling advertising longer then founders of those three companies have been alive.
Go pick up a book on M&A, might I suggest Barbarians at the Gate, Den of Thieves, or Payback to get your feet wet. Dated material at this point but still worthy of reading. Then go read up on some of the whales in the marketplace and how they get things done with boards like Yahoo. Probably your closest and most recent view is to look at Carl Ichann and some of his deals BEAS would be a good start there.
Yahoo board is not staggered meaning everyone on the board is voted in each year. This will make it difficult for Yahoo to put up an exceptional defense because MSFT can nominate an entire slate of board members which they will do before the deadline if Yahoo hasn't accepted the offer. Also, the turnover in YHOO shares has been rather large in the last 3 months these folks are looking to lock-in gains quickly and move-on. Before you say they can sell at any time, large positions take time to exit. In addition Legg Mason and a couple of the large institutional shareholders had a real cruddy year's last year and want to be sure that this year looks a lot better. Don't think that Legg Mason wants to see MSFT's offer come off the table. The only takeover defense that I am aware of is Yahoo has a poison pill that it can invoke if a hostile bidder (MSFT) acquires more then 5%. Microsoft is unlikely to actually purchase stock in YHOO to the point of hitting that mark. All MSFT wants to do is force the issue and is playing the game beautiful.
So yes, it is that simple. Little to no defense through shareholder rights, a weakened stock, a CEO that can't seem to put a cohesive plan together for Wall Street, and a motivated bidder who just swung a huge deal that no one is going to be able to touch. So yes, hit the "Easy" button because it is just that easy.
Slashdot Mirror
The lock-in is a carrier issue. I actually run a HTC Touch Pro (a Windows Smartphone) on the Sprint network and have found it to be far more open then many of the other phones I have had. Of course, we will see what happens because for all intensive purposes much of the development in the mobile world is going to the iPhone right now and Apple is following the old MS playbook, build audience until you are relevant to developers - unlike Win Smartphones today.
As for GSM, it might have been easier today if we had done that at the time. The problem between GSM and CDMA has always been that they originally started out solving two very different problems. GSM began by trying to link very dense, small, urban areas with cellular service - like Europe where it is ubiquitous today versus CDMA which was trying to account for large swaths of area where there would be fewer users but a greater need to conserve capital by spreading towers. For the most part both have arrived at close to the same place today. However, we are still bound by the decisions of the past whether we believe they were the right ones or not.
Information can be gleaned very easily from the Internet, but knowledge and the mechanics of synthesizing knowledge are best learned in a university setting. I do agree that in many ways college costs have gotten out of control. It used to be you would goto college to be a school teacher. However, why would you spend $50,000 on job that is at best going to net you $35,000 out of the gate (other than someplace you would rather not teach and danger pay come to mind).
The university setting is best for individuals who need to do high-end problem-solving or research as part of their work not for vocations. Vocations are best learned in a setting where you can skip a lot and go straight to what needs to be known and add a few extras as well. My own family is a perfect example of what can be done through vocational training. My uncle who is dsylexic and color-blind was never great in high school. Instead of moving on to college like he may have been pushed today he went to a technical college where he floushied in electrical power and control and today has been designing power systems for commericial and industrial buildings for over 25 years.
For better or worse, college has become part of the American dream and many who do not belong there are now going. People are going not because they want to but they feel they need to in order to achieve the American dream. The more we due to de-emphasize the idea that college is the only answer and supplement it with apprenticeships, vocational training, etc. , the better will do for all our children.
for those around here that remember 1998, the Rio PMP300 was the 2nd but the most important MP3 player that came on the market. Not exactly ripping it up at 32 MB of RAM but an important introduction nonetheless and ultimately led to Creative and then Apple following with their MP3 players. Given that, in 10 years we may all have them on our key chains next to the USB terabyte drives.
I have been on Slashdot for a decade now and those comments about Microsoft being gone in 5, 10, 20 years never get old. When you are sitting on that kind of cash and that kind of cash generating ability your not going anywhere, anytime soon.
Apparently these jokers do not know how valuable a TLD is. $185,000 is all you would charge? This needs to be well north of $185k more like $18 million. I will buy the TLD .xxx for $185K tomorrow and then make somewhere north of $50 MM off everyone else.
...release to large fan fare and wide downloading, but only partially functional.
Then either
A. receives little not follow-up going unloved inside Google and eventually fails.
or
B. continues to gain in popularity, gains some developer following
leading to either
1. hangs in beta forever as Google tries to make money
or
2. figures out how to make money and comes out of beta
There is something to be said for this sort of processes. Resources and brainpower go where it believes the most opportunity is thus ensuring that high potential projects go forward. However, this also means you get little follow through with projects that could be successful but are nowhere near as sexy. To use stock market analogy, everyone in Google wants to own call options on projects - (they can make you wildly rich) especially when Google is buying, but no one wants to earn the large cap paying a good dividend, it will not make you rich nor is it as sexy. Or to use baseball terms, the firm is still trying to hit home runs when a few singles and doubles will keep the inning alive.
Consider this, anything that would bring in $10 million a year in net income probably has little to no pull within Google. Why? Because Google brings in $4 billion a year in NI (almost exclusively from Ad Words), making $10 million dollars is like throwing a shovel full of dirt into a mining pit, literally having no impact on Google's bottom line - but what if you had 20, $10 projects? Now we are starting to get somewhere. Instead of looking for the next billion idea relentlessly, they should searching for multiple $10 ideas across its platform or start looking to hit singles and doubles while they can still afford to do so.
Given Google's wild success and having never really to struggle, the firm's conventional wisdom believes markets like online ads to be common occurrences. What this creates is a culture and portfolio of technology and products that are constantly trying to mimic that success, but going to do so to a lessor degree. These products tend to have a higher potential payouts, but smaller changes of succeeding.
This leads me to my ultimate conclusion, Google has now become the most highly capitalized and valued venture capitalist firm. The only problem with this is that Google isn't treating its products like a portfolio, but rather casino bets - continuously moving from one project to the next. A VC firm knows that the big returns come from big winners but you also need a string of solid firms to help manage the volatility of the underlying portfolio of companies. This is the idea that Google really never has figured out and will ultimately lead to the deprecation of its stock price. You cannot have huge winners all the time and while Google Ad Words was an incredible find and tremendous money maker those projects and program only come along once every 10 - 20 years - just look at the time between Microsoft and Google to understand why.
In an Alternate Reality(Score:4, Interesting)
by Hangtime (19526) on Friday December 12, @01:21PM (#7702447)
(http://slashdot.org/)
(AP) Paris - 12/12/2003 10:53 AM
Vivendi Universal today was among the host of media companies with record company subsidiaries reporting record profits for the third quarter. Jean-Marie Messier, CEO of Vivendi, attributed the stellar quarter to the company's partnership with the Napster Inc. Napster, a software program used to share and download music, started out as a way to pirate music, but turned legitimate in December 2000 with a broad licensing agreement between each of the five major record labels. Since that time, Napster has made agreements with 6 of the 7 largest US ISPs and OEM deals with computer manufactuers Hewlett Packard and Dell Computer to either install or give users the right to download music from the network. In the case of AOL and Earthlink subscribers, each customer pays an additional $10 a month to share and download from the network. In addition, deals with most of the top indie record labels have followed since 2000 giving Napster users the right to share and download those record label files from the Napster network.
"While we ceratinly were anxious at the beginning of the Napster "experiment", it has truly taken off. It is our hope that even more users will join the network, we are already seeing wonderful penetration in Europe." This past spring, Napster opened its gates to European users in one of the biggest product launches in history. "The network almost doubled the day we opened up to Europe. We are now seeing concurrent usage approaching over 500,000 users with nearly 100 Terabytes of files being shared on the network." explained chief technology officer Shawn Fanning. "With our improved distribution system, we hope to push on into Asia sometime in the 2nd quarter of 2004 once we reach deals with many of the labels there."
The success of the music industry stands in dark contrast to the rest of the economy which grew at an annualized rate of 1.2% this quarter while revenue among the five largest record labels was up 11% from last year. When questioned about Napster Messier replied "Napster has truly been an innovative product and has rewarded Vivendi shareholders and most other media company shareholders immensely."
but I wouldn't trust it going into the Hammerhead or Chicago. ;)
*for those of us who Love Top Gear*
We have all seen it. Ebay a couple of years ago going down due to Oracle corruption. Royal Bank of Canada failure due to an improper software upgrade. Now, Google with Gmail and other Google Apps failing. All of these organizations were geared towards having the highest uptimes available and failed spectacularly.
Whether you host your own or use someone else its the illusion of control that somehow clouds our judgment into believing that it would somehow be different if I did it. Example: Is it better to drive or fly? Pure numbers state that its safer to fly on a commercial carrier by an order of magnitude but somehow we feel safer when we drive. Whether we choose to acknowledge it or not the world is full of 6 sigma events. As long as you are doing everything you can and within your budget when your hosting your own apps or auditing your provider to ensure they have, backup systems, redundancy, offsite bunker, etc. then you have done everything you can to prepare for this inevitability.
In a lot of ways designing systems is like playing poker. You can play your hand perfectly, design all the systems redundancy and recovery you like, but sometimes even after all that your opponent (risk) draws a lucky card on the river to beat you. Just because you got beat doesn't mean you shouldn't continue to play the same way, it just means you hit one of those events that you cannot plan.
you will find plenty of people that fall WELL outside the normal range. In my industry where I deal with millions of customers its always the case. Even if the earth were covered with only 1% of out of normal range people (which I think its much higher then that) that would mean 60 million or the roughly the size of the UK. If its closer to 5% then its the size of the US. Scary there might be that many people who think like that in the world.
Everytime a significant event occurs the company must publish it on one of the wire services and file an 8-K: Current Report with the SEC. My interpretation would be they would continue to have to file 8-Ks, but they could post the information on the investor website instead of sending it to the wire service. If you are filing 8-Ks, you still have a distinct and 3rd party managed repostitory.
Good points on California's experiment with "deregulation", but I think it helps to prove the point sufficiently. You could say Texas is about as open as you can get with deregulation while California was fairly restrictive. What we can conclude that neither one of these markets turned out the better and continuing to try is probably futile at this point. Now whether it was from the way the markets were designed or from the actual product characteristics itself (which I tend to believe), it still stands that its been tried twice and its failed twice. A third go around is probably not going to create any better results given that each of these has failed as miserably as they have.
I wish you wouldn't have posted as an AC because your point is an excellent one.
Since through economic evidence from over a century's worth of data tells us that markets tend to function better then monopolies for all those involved (except for the monopolist of course) it makes the most sense to lean towards deregulation. This guided my thinking and why I was very pro electric deregulation.
The idea with the electric deregulation was to deconstruct the monopoly and in some way recreate a functioning market from it. The whole concept is predicated on not knowing you are dealing with a natural monopoly (one company serves the general good better then multiple companies) until you have actually tried both. Example: Prior to the breakup of ATT in the US it was thought telecommunications was a natural monopoly and the country was best served by one firm. We now know this not to be the case.
What we have found through electric deregulation is that certain aspects lend themselves to making it untenable. In my opinion, it is the pricing nature of electricity itself. As I stated before, it is the most volatile commodity ever created by man. It cannot be stored, must be used, has uneven demand both during the day and seasonally, incredibly high fixed costs to produce, and you must have enough or the whole system collapses.
So let me come back to your original points.
Electricity is a form of natural monopoly.
Yes, I believe it is.
Are all industries that propose to be natural monopolies actually natural monopolies?
No, I do not believe so.
Presumably you would also like government control of all other natural monopolies.
Yes, I do believe this is the case. As a society, we must have the ability to regulate those that are. But again to the above question, unless there is overwhelming evidence for the case of natural monopoly then that is the only time I welcome it.
Perhaps you should stop pretending to be a libertarian?
I said I was libertarian leaning thinker meaning I start most of thoughts from that point and move away. I never said that I was a total libertarian. All people must have a basis for thought, mine starts from that point and moves away. The difference is that unlike idealists whether socialist, democrat, republican, or even libertarian who use their dogma as hammer when all they see is nails, I use mine as a compass to move from place to place and am willing to look at the evidence everyone produces and change my views accordingly.
As a former resident of Texas and once a proponent of electric deregulation, I can say that the last five years have been an eye opener. While at the beginning many including myself talked about the possibilities from a theoretical standpoint, the actual execution of deregulation has been a disaster. The WSJ just did a piece on Texas deregulation this past week which you can find here.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121625744742160575.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
I do believe modernized transmission would go a long way to helping the state like the article talks about, but I also believe Texas should fully embrace the national power grid. Since Texas is not connected in any major way to any other state's grid, ERCOT runs the show and FERC rules need not apply. This gets the double whammy of double set of rules for those who would choose to do business in the state and disallows any load balancing from other grids.
For a state that went from one of the cheapest electric rates to one of the most expensive (I live in NYC now and its only slightly cheaper then Texas), combine this with the folly that was California its a crushing blow against the idea of electricity deregulation. While the WSJ article talks about soaring natural gas prices (most of the state still gets its electricity from natural gas) and congested transmission as being culprits, I think you have to look at the volatility in pricing. Electricity is the most volatile commodity man has created. Unfortunately, no business, market, or participant structure can sustain 10,000s percent moves in intra-day pricing.
As a libertarian leaning thinker I believe in the free economy and as little market regulation as possible, but I am also scientifically-minded individual meaning I will examine the evidence from both sides. Given what we have seen in the markets that have been deregulated, the data and evidence conclude that electric deregulation just does not work.
Quick cash? Stock hasn't done anything in four years. Company has tracked the SP500 for the last year (both down 18%). Buy the SP500 at least you get the diversification.
YHOO got rid of that media company strategy when Terry Simel left. YHOO is now hooked its wagon to search and the overseas assets. BTW, Yang is selling the only way to monetize his search to GOOG. Who cares if YHOO is 1st, 2nd, or 7th in search if GOOG is the one selling the advertising. YHOO with the sell is doomed to average returns and will be no better then the average blog. The company had an opportunity to be the gatekeeper of the Internet and that has passed to GOOG. This should be your most damning evidence that its not about what's best for the company its what's best for Jerry Yang and his ego.
So who are short-term investors and what do you classify as being short-term? Let's say for instance you purchased your YHOO stock four years ago what would be your reward for your efforts? Well the SP500 would have gone up 10% (which is pretty weak) and your YHOO stock would be worth 30% less. In fact, you would not have seen positive territory since Jan 2006. Let's say you believe Jerry Yang has it right and will take you to the promise land. Well he has at least kept pace with the SP500 both are down roughly 18% since his 2nd tenure at YHOO began in June 2007. Of course if you had invested in GOOG when Yang came on board you would be up 10%.
My favorite parable. It begins the book Soar with your Strengths by Don O Clifton's the past chairman of Gallup who died in '03. I met him as senior in high school. He was an incredibly gregarious and his energy was infectious. His views on the subject and this book have had a profound effect on me.
"Let the Rabbits Run", a parable from the book: Soar With Your Strengths
Imagine there is a meadow. In that meadow there is a duck, a fish, an eagle, an owl, a squirrel, and a rabbit. They decide they want to have a school so they can be smart, just like people.
With the help of some grown-up animals, they come up with a curriculum they believe will make a well-rounded animal: running, swimming, tree climbing, jumping, and flying.
On the first day of school, little rabbit combed his ears, and he went hopping off to his running class.
There he was a star. He ran to the top of the hill and back as fast as he could go, and, oh, did it feel good. He said to himself, "I can't believe it. At school, I get to do what I do best."
The instructor said, "Rabbit, you really have talent for running. You have great muscles in your rear legs. With some training, you will get more out of every hop."
The rabbit said, "I love school. I get to do what I like to do and get to learn to do it better."
The next class was swimming. When the rabbit smelled the chlorine, he said, "Wait, wait! Rabbits don't like to swim."
The instructor said, "Well, you may not like it now, but five years from now you'll know it was a good thing for you."
In the tree-climbing class, a tree trunk was set at a 30-degree angle so all the animals had a chance to succeed. The little rabbit tried so hard he hurt his leg.
In jumping class, the rabbit got along just fine; in flying class, he had a problem. So the teacher gave him a test and discovered he belonged in remedial flying.
In remedial flying class, the rabbit had to practice jumping off a cliff. They told him if he'd just work hard enough, he could succeed.
The next morning, he went on to swimming class. The instructor said, "Today we jump in the water."
"Wait, wait. I talked to my parents about swimming. They didn't learn to swim. We don't like to get wet. I'd like to drop this course." The instructor said, "You can't drop it. The drop-and-add period is over. At this point you have a choice: Either you jump in or you flunk."
The rabbit jumped in. He panicked! He went down once. He went down twice. Bubbles came up. The instructor saw he was drowning and pulled him out. The other animals had never seen anything quite as funny as this wet rabbit who looked more like a rat without a tail, and so they chirped, and jumped, and barked, and laughed at the rabbit. The rabbit was more humiliated than he had ever been in his life. He wanted desperately to get out of class that day. He was glad when it was over.
He thought that he would head home, that his parents would understand and help him. When he arrived, he said to his parents, "I don't like school. I just want to be free."
If the rabbits are going to get ahead, you have to get a diploma, replied his parents.
The rabbit said, I don't want a diploma.
The parents said, "You're going to get a diploma whether you want one or not."
They argued, and finally the parents made the rabbit go to bed. In the morning the rabbit headed off to school with a slow hop. Then he remembered that the principal had said that any time he had a
problem to remember that the counselor's door is always open.
When he arrived at school, he hopped up in the chair by the counselor and said, "I don't like school."
And the counselor said, "Mmmm, tell me about it."
And the rabbit did.
The counselor said, "Rabbit, I hear you. I hear you saying you don't like school because you don't like swimming. I think I have diagnosed that co
bring in hundred of thousands in unit game sales with your name then you can whine. Right now, you could sub that voice out with any other and it would not make one difference in sales. For the closest approximation think Mark Hamill who did video cut scenes for the Wing Commander games back in the mid-90s. People bought that game because he was a part of it, he can ask for royalties. If they made another GTA IV with the same Niko character but with a different voice actor would it matter? Heck no because I don't play the game for the voices, I play for the gameplay.
is best. I have to write my sticky on a touch-sensitive pad which will then need to be transferred to the PC, undergo handwriting recognition and AI to try to ascertain what the heck I meant which will then try to organize that information.
Or, I can continue using my sticky notes and organizing them on my cube wall (a much larger surface and higher resolution then my 19 inch monitor), freely moving them from one place to another, changing meaning through organization without having to worry about manipulating them on a computer.
Forgive me but I believe this is a tool in search of a problem that does not exist.
Which explains why everybody and their dog wants to work at Google. Would that all software projects were run this way. Usually, 80% is more than good enough and the last 20% usually isn't worth the effort, except to PHBs and PHBeancounters. And to the goobers posting to comment sections
/I.
Of course this is if everyone is using the same program for the same purpose. Its called gold plating. However, when it comes to the Office Suite everyone has a a different way of using the program. Take for example this comment within the thread.
i would use gdocs more often if i could do endnotes / footnotes with it.
lack of these is a deal-killer for me, and i imagine many in the academic world. the idea of chipping away at a paper in different offices and around the world is quite appealing to me, especially if i can collaborate on it.
I would say endnotes and footnotes fall into that 20% category. I certainly don't use them and neither do my colleagues. Of course within academia I would think they would be vitally important. Of course, then you start looking at the rest of the missing functionality and saying what else do I need to add and you end up where the Office Suite is today. While everyone will never use every piece of functionality within Word, everyone probably belongs to at least one 1% population that is using Word in a different way today. In fact, its the closest thing we have in the software world to being all things to all people.
Amen brother. Google likes to build the 80% thinking no one uses the 20% and on average this would be correct. If you look at usability most folks don't use the higher end functions out of Excel (one of my pet pivs when Microsoft updated to 2007 and the ribbon). But if you look at all the advanced functionality (Sub-Totals, OFFSET(), VLOOKUP(), Validation, Goal Seek, Solver, Add-Ins, Macros, Data Analysis pack, Consolidate, STANDARDIZE(), Percentile(), etc.), however, the chances of any Excel user using at least one of these function thus one function within the 20% is very high and is a gotcha. Everyone complains about feature bloat in Office, but the beauty of the suite is that it will give you that one function you might need to make your life infinitely easier even if it isn't used by 99.9% of all the other users. Ultimately, this is why Google will have limited success. Its not fun building features for a few thousand or a few hundred users, but this is how you build your userbase by catering to smaller and smaller niches of folks who will gladly pay you money to purchase your software.
Living in NYC, I am beholden to TimeWarner as my only cable provider. Of course, TimeWarner unlike nearly all other cable systems in the country sets the broadcast flag for EVERY channel other then OTA (CBS, NBC, FOX, ABC). When questioned about this they just pretty much laugh and say its a part of the contract. Of course, I would love to see said contract because I highly doubt every cable channel is asking TimeWarner to set the broadcast flag, ESPECIALLY when I friends on other large cable systems that do not have this problem. This means is that TivoDesktop is useless to me and I cannot download shows to my laptop to watch on the plane unless they are from the major networks.
*Yes, I am a geek and could go find workarounds. No, I don't want too because I have more important things to worry about and things to do with my time then be denied TV on the go which is probably a good thing.
I refused to get in the middle of HD DVD vs. BluRay and refuse to catch BluRay now that this supposed war is over. The BluRay format has bounced around like a damn super ball and No I am not buying a Playstation 3 for the purposes of watching movies. I want a machine that will remove my need for my upconverting DVD player and above all else the format and player are solid, finished, and done. Versioned software 1.1, 1.2, 2.0 is good. Versioned hardware is bad. Somebody wake me when Sony is tired of tinkering and actually settles on the final standard. No, having new features become available for new hardware isn't an option all it does is screw the original purchasers (take a look at 1.0 spec players).
They are finally figuring out this thing and that they are the ones publishing the current and continuously updated content. Why do you need a middle man like Google, Yahoo, or MSN to get in the way? These guys have been selling advertising longer then founders of those three companies have been alive.
Go pick up a book on M&A, might I suggest Barbarians at the Gate, Den of Thieves, or Payback to get your feet wet. Dated material at this point but still worthy of reading. Then go read up on some of the whales in the marketplace and how they get things done with boards like Yahoo. Probably your closest and most recent view is to look at Carl Ichann and some of his deals BEAS would be a good start there.
Yahoo board is not staggered meaning everyone on the board is voted in each year. This will make it difficult for Yahoo to put up an exceptional defense because MSFT can nominate an entire slate of board members which they will do before the deadline if Yahoo hasn't accepted the offer. Also, the turnover in YHOO shares has been rather large in the last 3 months these folks are looking to lock-in gains quickly and move-on. Before you say they can sell at any time, large positions take time to exit. In addition Legg Mason and a couple of the large institutional shareholders had a real cruddy year's last year and want to be sure that this year looks a lot better. Don't think that Legg Mason wants to see MSFT's offer come off the table. The only takeover defense that I am aware of is Yahoo has a poison pill that it can invoke if a hostile bidder (MSFT) acquires more then 5%. Microsoft is unlikely to actually purchase stock in YHOO to the point of hitting that mark. All MSFT wants to do is force the issue and is playing the game beautiful.
So yes, it is that simple. Little to no defense through shareholder rights, a weakened stock, a CEO that can't seem to put a cohesive plan together for Wall Street, and a motivated bidder who just swung a huge deal that no one is going to be able to touch. So yes, hit the "Easy" button because it is just that easy.