Category: Business

Some are more equal than others

Android developers are less than pleased with the management of Google’s Android platform: Google vowed that its Linux-based Android mobile platform would empower enthusiasts and amateur developers, but today we have seen compelling evidence that this is an empty promise. Third-party Android application developers, who have grown increasingly frustrated with the lack of SDK updates, … Continue reading “Some are more equal than others”

Android developers are less than pleased with the management of Google’s Android platform:

Google vowed that its Linux-based Android mobile platform would empower enthusiasts and amateur developers, but today we have seen compelling evidence that this is an empty promise. Third-party Android application developers, who have grown increasingly frustrated with the lack of SDK updates, were shocked to discover that Google has been secretly making new versions of the Android SDK available to the Android Developer Challenge (ADC) finalists under non-disclosure agreements.

Perhaps it was an inadvertent error.

Commentary on today’s Senate Anti-Trust Hearing

I don’t have time to carry on at length about today’s Senate hearing on the Google-Yahoo search ads price-fixing deal, so here are a couple of pieces written before the hearing that put in its proper perspective. For your cocktail, try a bit of Information Week, a straight-up tongue loosener. For your appetizer, enjoy Washington … Continue reading “Commentary on today’s Senate Anti-Trust Hearing”

I don’t have time to carry on at length about today’s Senate hearing on the Google-Yahoo search ads price-fixing deal, so here are a couple of pieces written before the hearing that put in its proper perspective.

For your cocktail, try a bit of Information Week, a straight-up tongue loosener.

For your appetizer, enjoy Washington insider and tech buff Declan McCullagh on the revolving arguments:

The U.S. Senate is holding a hearing Tuesday on the antitrust implications of the Google-Yahoo ad deal, and the two companies, along with Microsoft, are testifying. You should expect sober, selfless discussions conducted with the public’s best interests in mind.

Or not. In reality, Microsoft will offer fanciful claims about the alleged detrimental impact of a Google-Yahoo partnership, just as Google offered fanciful claims a few months ago about the alleged detrimental impact of a Microsoft-Yahoo combination.

And for your main course, read Scott Cleland on the importance of advertising earnestly:

This is now a broad antitrust investigation of whether:

* Google and Yahoo are illegally colluding to reduce competition and/or fix prices;
* Google is more broadly abusing its market power illegally to impede competition from its #2 and #3 search advertising competitors Yahoo and Microsoft; and
* Google is abusing its market power in a myriad of ways, for example, “raising the minimum bids on keywords swiftly and steeply.”

And for desert, enjoy Andrew Orlowski’s incredibly insightful analysis of the importance of search ad competition for the future of the Internet economy:

Google: the mother of antitrust battles? | The Register

So Google has been readying itself for regulatory intervention for several years. It lobbies extensively, and thanks to its reach-out program to politicians and wonks, now owns a fair chunk of mindshare among the political elites. With its private “Zeitgeist” conference – an annual orgy of self-glorification – it reaches over the heads of representatives and and hacks to the political leaders and media owners themselves. In the UK, there’s a revolving door between the two major parties and Google.

Politicians can sprinkle a little of the future on themselves just by rubbing up against the web giant.

As Microsoft discovered, fortuitously, this is money well-spent. A sympathetic Bush administration dissolved the DoJ’s will to impose tough penalties against Microsoft more effectively than any lawyer or economist.

And finally, have some nuts with your brandy in the form of the testimony submitted to the hearing, which is just as Declan said it would be.

After I’ve seen the video of the hearing, I’ll have something else to say.

Google’s political head-fake

Here are a few excerpts from my piece in today’s San Francisco Chronicle on Google’s net neutrality trickery: The devil’s best trick is to persuade us that he doesn’t exist, but Google only has to convince us that it’s not evil. Nearing an agreement with Yahoo to grab the ailing company’s search business, Google scripted … Continue reading “Google’s political head-fake”

Here are a few excerpts from my piece in today’s San Francisco Chronicle on Google’s net neutrality trickery:

The devil’s best trick is to persuade us that he doesn’t exist, but Google only has to convince us that it’s not evil. Nearing an agreement with Yahoo to grab the ailing company’s search business, Google scripted a series of dramatic public events apparently designed to distract from the pending deal. These events emphasize network neutrality, an ever-changing regulatory ideal that Google thrust into the political spotlight two years ago. As entertaining as this spectacle is, regulators should not be fooled. They should apply traditional anti-monopoly standards, blocking the Google-Yahoo deal.

…

The centerpiece of Google’s net neutrality misdirection campaign, a new initiative to bring faster broadband at lower prices to American consumers, was book-ended by Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s visit to Washington and a public endorsement of heavy broadband regulation by Internet pioneer and Google Vice President Vint Cerf. The initiative, Internet for Everyone, is virtually identical to earlier network neutrality organizations, It’s Our Net and Save the Internet. Each of these organizations was fronted by rock-star intellectuals such as Lawrence Lessig, co-founder of the Google-funded Stanford Center for Internet and Society, and his protégé, Tim Wu, the new chairman of the advocacy group Free Press.

…

Initially, network neutrality was the demand that network carriers ignore the Internet’s fundamental inequality. Google had good reason to advocate this, because it is advantaged by a status quo in which money buys privilege. Any move by carriers to selectively boost speeds for fees dulls the advantage Google has secured for itself by building huge complexes of hundreds of thousands of computers.

These complexes exploit a flaw in Internet architecture that enables them to seize more than their fair share of network bandwidth, effectively giving their owner a fast lane. A richly funded Web site, which delivers data faster than its competitors to the front porches of the Internet service providers, wants it delivered the rest of the way on an equal basis. This system, which Google calls broadband neutrality, actually preserves a more fundamental inequality.

…

The tech press has been too busy reprising its Internet Bubble era cheerleading and cooing about Google’s network neutrality “idealism” to raise questions about the demise of Yahoo as a search competitor. Fortunately, the Justice Department is investigating, and Congress has planned several hearings, including one today.

Read the whole thing, if you please, and tell me what you think about the argument.

UPDATE: Nice reaction from Om Malik at Gigaom. Also Scott Cleland at Precursor and Hands Off the Internet. Paul Kapustka isn’t very impressed with my reasoning, unfortunately.

Today’s Senate committee testimony is here, and the announcment of next week’s Senate hearing is here and next week’s House hearing is here.

Non-merger Fallout

According to the Merc: Yahoo faced a shareholders’ rebellion Monday as the stock market punished the pioneering Internet company for its weekend rejection of Microsoft’s $47.5 billion bid. I’m thinking about buying some Yahoo! stock just to vote against Jerry Yang. It looks to me like the dude screwed his shareholders to hang onto his … Continue reading “Non-merger Fallout”

According to the Merc:

Yahoo faced a shareholders’ rebellion Monday as the stock market punished the pioneering Internet company for its weekend rejection of Microsoft’s $47.5 billion bid.

I’m thinking about buying some Yahoo! stock just to vote against Jerry Yang. It looks to me like the dude screwed his shareholders to hang onto his job. What exactly does Yahoo! do that everybody else in the world doesn’t do better?

Google falling

The inability to retain key employees is the first clear sign of company in decline, so this news has to be disturbing to Google shareholders: Facebook hires away Google’s top chef Is it “poaching” when a company steals a rival’s chef? At Google, executive chef Josef Desimone scrambled cruelty-free eggs by the truckload. Now Facebook … Continue reading “Google falling”

The inability to retain key employees is the first clear sign of company in decline, so this news has to be disturbing to Google shareholders:

Facebook hires away Google’s top chef

Is it “poaching” when a company steals a rival’s chef? At Google, executive chef Josef Desimone scrambled cruelty-free eggs by the truckload. Now Facebook has hired him to replace steam-heated trays of takeout with the kind of free food Googlers are used to. For engineers, Facebook is the new dreamland, and a company cafeteria is the kind of perk they’ve come to expect.

The end is near for the search monopoly.

Bad Time for Silicon Valley IPOs

This can’t be good: Brenon Daly, who tracks IPOs and mergers in the technology and telecom industries for the 451 Group in San Francisco, said both the avenues VCs use to achieve liquidity have been drying up for months. “The IPO market is dead,” Daly said flatly. Acquisitions had been strong through 2007, when big … Continue reading “Bad Time for Silicon Valley IPOs”

This can’t be good:

Brenon Daly, who tracks IPOs and mergers in the technology and telecom industries for the 451 Group in San Francisco, said both the avenues VCs use to achieve liquidity have been drying up for months.

“The IPO market is dead,” Daly said flatly. Acquisitions had been strong through 2007, when big firms spent $476 billion to buy 3,559 smaller firms in Daly’s market, but a good chunk of that activity was buyouts by private-equity firms like the flailing Carlyle Group, now caught in the credit crunch. So that means fewer M&A buyers in 2008, he said.

Having recently left one privately-held firm for another, this is the last thing I wanted to hear, but facts are facts and we all have to face them. It’s a damn shame that the crisis in the mortgage markets would reach out and smack down promising high tech IPOs, but it has.

This is what I like to see: VMware’s IPO

Check this out, technodabbler. VMware is worth a cool $20 Billion. That’s not social networking or open source, it’s real business, a company that sells software against two free alternatives and wins. I should have been nicer to that recruiter when she called me a few months ago, but who knew?

Check this out, technodabbler. VMware is worth a cool $20 Billion. That’s not social networking or open source, it’s real business, a company that sells software against two free alternatives and wins. I should have been nicer to that recruiter when she called me a few months ago, but who knew?

The coming bumper-crop of news

My old blogger buddy Jeff Jarvis is trying to figure out what’s happening to the news, and how to inject a little optimism into the business: This Friday, I’m giving a keynote at the University of Texas International Symposium on Online Journalism. My topic: “The end of the mourning, mewling, and moaning about the future … Continue reading “The coming bumper-crop of news”

My old blogger buddy Jeff Jarvis is trying to figure out what’s happening to the news, and how to inject a little optimism into the business:

This Friday, I’m giving a keynote at the University of Texas International Symposium on Online Journalism. My topic: “The end of the mourning, mewling, and moaning about the future of journalism: Why I’m a cock-eyed optimist about news.” I’d like your help. Tell me why you’re optimistic about news: what we can do now that we couldn’t do before, where you see growth, where you see new opportunities. (I’ll put the spiel up as soon as I figure out how to export Keynote with my notes.)

Here’s what I’d tell the children:

The good news about the news is that there’s no shortage of news. The best experts forecast a nearly boundless supply of news clear into the next century, so the news conservation efforts of the past (recycling, echo-chambering, and other forms of plagiarism) are no longer necessary and will phase out as soon as we have the means to harvest the coming bumper-crop of news.

And things aren’t just rosy on the supply side, they’re looking real good on the demand side. Previous generations of news consumers had to get by on two newsfeeds a day, one before work in the morning and the other after work. Now we can graze and forage on news all day long without becoming over-educated.

The challenge to news harvesters is in the construction of the apparatus that harvests raw news, processes it, and takes it to market. In previous generations, this process was most efficient when centralized in local news factories, but today and tomorrow the process will become more decentralized, sometimes even taking place on consumer premises under the control of news robots which sift, sort, organize, and filter according to consumer preferences. The process of moving these functions from central offices to consumer equipment is just beginning, although we’ve had working prototypes of the news robot for 25 years.

The revenue picture has never been brighter, as each feed is easily supported by multiple sources of ad and subscriber fees.

The key elements are understanding that decentralization is in fact multiple centralization, and that each center of news processing is a potential revenue generator. That’s all I wish to say at the moment, but you can do the math.

And Hook ‘Em.

Until they’re old enough to drive

I’ve always wondered how the Google kids get to work, and now I have my answer: Google is improving its green credentials by offering all of its employees a free bike to ride to work. The bikes, manufactured by Raleigh Europe, will be offered to around 2,000 permanent employees of the search engine giant in … Continue reading “Until they’re old enough to drive”

I’ve always wondered how the Google kids get to work, and now I have my answer:

Google is improving its green credentials by offering all of its employees a free bike to ride to work.

The bikes, manufactured by Raleigh Europe, will be offered to around 2,000 permanent employees of the search engine giant in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. All of the bikes – plus free helmets – will be branded with the Google name.

Holger Meyer, Germany’s first Google employee, came up with the idea and staff will be able to choose from a range of models including a “cool cruiser” – a folding bike for those that only make part of their trip to work under pedal power – and men’s and women’s hybrids.

I hope the bike giveaway isn’t so exciting that it cuts into nap time.

Aruba’s nervous breakdown

It’s come to our attention that Aruba Networks, the wireless LAN company that recently filed for an IPO, is terrified by the new architecture of the Trapeze wireless LAN system. To summarize the issues, Trapeze and Aruba both build enterprise-class wireless switches, consisting in both cases of wireless Access Points and back-end Ethernet switches. Both … Continue reading “Aruba’s nervous breakdown”

It’s come to our attention that Aruba Networks, the wireless LAN company that recently filed for an IPO, is terrified by the new architecture of the Trapeze wireless LAN system. To summarize the issues, Trapeze and Aruba both build enterprise-class wireless switches, consisting in both cases of wireless Access Points and back-end Ethernet switches. Both systems present a control point on the Ethernet side, and both switch traffic between the wire and the air.

But the new Trapeze architecture has a wrinkle that makes it much faster, more resilient, and more scalable than the Aruba system: local switching. In the Aruba system, all traffic originating on the air has to go back to a Big Ethernet switch before it can be decrypted and delivered to its final destination. But the Trapeze system, with local switching enabled, makes forwarding decisions at the edge of the wired network, not in a big switch that can become a traffic bottleneck.

Hence the Trapeze system can handle larger numbers of users with lower latency with no loss of management flexibility: you manage it as if it were a Big Fat Switch system, and it right-sizes its forwarding functions according to traffic needs, not the blinders of a mediocre group of system architects.

This has Aruba running scared, so they’re in full FUD mode as the e-mail below indicates. I’ve interspersed the Aruba message with a fisking from Trapeze.

Enjoy.

From: Alan Emory [mailto:[email protected]]
Subject: Trapeze Takes A Step Back – Selling Fat APs

We need to start with the subject of the message. Trapeze actually has taken a big step forward by combining the best of fat and thin APs in a single comprehensive solution. Aruba and Cisco force you to make a choice…one size fits all. Only Trapeze allows you to use the right tool for the right environment. It is very important to note that the customer can run the entire Trapeze system in a completely thin, centralized way if they so choose. Smart Mobile provides more flexibility in case that isn’t the right answer for your environment. Aruba? If the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
Continue reading “Aruba’s nervous breakdown”