DISQUS

exactly. and a government enforced redirect would come across as comand-economy, so i see little chance of that happening. i'm just not sure current anti-trust laws can even address an internet based monopoly. the internet is the antithesis of the physcial restrictions defining our current paradigm of a monopoly. there's simple an indeterminate number of competitors but it's irrelavent if people simply choose to "not go there". bookmarks, rss-feeds, etc all create a volition of content avoidance rather than an inablity to access content. worst case senario is the government forces google to break up the different opperating units...honestly, i think that would end up benefiting google anyway. (smaller is better when it comes to the internet...also a paradigm shift from "industrial" markets).

messels's last blog post..My Business Model for Investing: Covered Calls or ?always profitable? (at least imho)

the google question is one i've been wondering about for a while.
how would we define a monopoly on the internet? it's not the same kind of monopoly that forced the break up of AT&T, for example. in that situation, the consumer had no choice. in the case of google, anyone can at any time surf on over to a different search engine. and there will be a need for other search engines. i mean, just the other day i was finding CRAP on google and then went to yahoo, msn, and ask. (i got CRAP from all of them. lol). i'm not sure a website can be broken up. it wouldn't even make sense. how do you break a search box up? search could be separated from the other operating units but that's just a "show"; there's no real impact. i'm pretty sure our antitrust laws can't even address the internet. very much a square and round hole situation...
or??

messels's last blog post..My Business Model for Investing: Covered Calls or ?always profitable? (at least imho)

definitely a good comment. i guess it's "business as usual?" i mean, business doesn't seem to care much whether their actions impact consumers so long as we keep consuming...

also, fred. seems like you've changed stance a bit on this one. i cited you here: http://www.positionmakers.com/2008/02/01/yahoo-... [to here:]
http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2008/02/you-had-to-se...

on the one hand you were thinking it was undervalued yet you still think the management should maintain control of the company despite "rats fleeing a ship en masse." rats don't start fleeing until the ship is sinking and i know that was where you were going with it. how can it be undervalued yet be a sinking ship? that doesn't make much sense. at this point in the game, yahoo! shareholders should take the buyout and just be thankful for the stellar (steal) of a deal they're getting from msft. both companies are being run by total jack asses; they're running counter to the "smaller is better" mentality. both are big, bloated companies that rely on their head start within the 'consumer can identify me' race to make numbers. yahoo! is the antithesis of a creative company, acquiring companies and then leaving them to languish by snatching up their people and re-appropriating their roles (meaning, "work on my yahoo! project...your company that was growing at break neck speed last week isn't important anymore). same goes for msft.

SO, i'm saying this IS a good thing for consumers. once the titans combine to make a bigger titan, there will be more room for niches to form and fissure the goliath until they both become obsolete. lots of room for creative destruction...it's like the death star analogy that princess leigha makes in star wars. lol.

enis. *great* article. reading it now and couldn't wait to come back here to comment that this is exactly what i'm talking about (comment below). it may be later in the article but there's no mention thus far of 'creative destruction' as a historical reference point for buttressing the 'smaller is better' paradigm.

i mean, if we think about it, we all have bosses that are really "comfy"; why change that if there's no real risk?

fred may not like me saying this but i think companies like yahoo! really fall into this type of conundrum. there's no real innovation coming from the internal teams so they look to other companies for innovation (like jumpcut in the case of yahoo!) and purchase those innovations. that's the easy route to innovation and the purchasing company ends up killing the innovative and 'small team' mentality of the people and thrust them into a different company culture with different "political" hierarchies and "set" ways of interpreting the world, essentially killing the formula that made the company successful in the past.

we could even interpret amzn w/ this lens. why is amzn releasing the kindle? why not spin the company off? put a little fire under their feet. the kindle can still be an amzn exclusive offering...at least for a time. kindle itself, as a separate entity, would be immensely better off by allowing people to choose the retailer they'd like to purchase from. obviously amazon has a protectionist stance and justifiably so. this doesn't mean it's the right decision in the long run. meaning, protectionist stances on market share can have a negative affect on innovation. rather than focusing on how to be "better" the company focuses on how to "maintain." there's a big difference in the outcome of those two different paradigms, one being offensive and the other strictly defensive.

hopefully i'm being coherent here and not letting my excitement obstruct my ability to express myself clearly...

ouch. i know that hurts. i'd imagine being a VC you have a long term outlook? that's basically what you implied when you did the forward cash flow calculations. i wouldn't worry too much about the sudden drop since you're looking out 10 years anyway. also, i think you're right: google will eventually figure out how to monetize its different offerings--hopefully they're able to do so without infringing on user experience. i mean, at the end of the day, it's all about user experience on the net. throwing up even a click of a barrier is enough for a competing service to start gaining ground--and quickly, at least imho.
as for the per-share price, you can always average down. then when the market moves beyond all the FUD, you will be well positioned for bigger gains.
i noticed from your covestor post that you don't have any dividend paying stocks. why is that?
the markets seem to really reward investing cash flows into new businesses. i'd rather a company simply focus on its core business and pay a dividend. i mean, there really is no garuntee that after all the billions invested in a new product that a startup can't come along and usurp that work with a better market position. in the case of google, they have an amazing head start in the SaaS land (apps such as google docs) but it's by no means a done deal.
from my perspective, companies in the internet sphere excessively rely on acquisition for growth. why not just spin off a small company, well funded but still hungry for more? that should create a better company culture of driving toward real growth with a smaller group, allowing for more nimble decision making. it also offers shareholders better future value since they're positioned as true investors--rather than just placeholders in the speculation game...i could go on for a while and i don't think this is the place.

good luck and happy *investing*

hey congrats!! did you build this yourself? are you an author and a web programmer?

great story. i've run into a few people i've made as friends strictly through online contact. mostly through jumpcut.
my most recent experience was with a young lady i thought may...want to date or something which isn't something i'm available to do considering the long term relationship i'm in. she was totally cool and i'm hoping we'll hang out next time she comes through town.

have you ever had that experience? where it's not clear if one person is "interested" in the other? aw--k--ward...

hmm, i think it's great that they're putting effort and investments in furthering the development of nations such as india but i'm not sure i see how this is directly philanthropic. i mean, google is going to benefit directly either by finding stellar talent or reselling the investment later (or simply "floating" the company). it's not a foundation in the sense that other foundations are since they'll be acting as angel investors. even if they don't' accept stock in exchange for the funds, there will be an interest rate attached to the funding in which case google.org becomes a bank.
i'm not saying i don't think economic investment can increase the standard of living among developing nations but calling it philanthropic is a HUGE spin on what they're doing. it's like saying we're in iraq on a humanitarian mission...right...
this is a far cry from the concept that mr. yunis initiated in bangladesh, eventually culminating in a nobel peace prize; it's just normal "business" and i don't see the reason for the spin.
google can avoid a lot of "evil" being cast on it by just being more transparent and honest about its motives. sheesh, it's not like telling the truth is unethical.

interesting idea. i'm not sure i agree with charging for streaming since that still seems like a meatball sundae to me (i.e. 'factory' mentality).

we should make streaming free, absolutely free in every case. the suggestions of purchasing the mp3 file for the portables and hard-drives is definitely the way to go. as seth godin discussed in a teleconference organized by escape from cubical nation (with chris anderson of wired mag, among other participants), the margins go to zero so the distribution cost goes to zero and what we're purchasing isn't the "song" (the "cog") but the souvenir; it's that special something we take with us. "we go to the talk for free and buy the book as a souvenir."
streaming should be free. it's like charging to listen to the radio; it doesn't work that well (sirius radio and xm are dying for a merger to compete against terrestrial radio--and simply because the distribution margins are extremely high, so they have to charge for the subscription, they have to charge for "device" in the car, etc; they offer a great service and it's worth charging for but compared to the internet it's not competitive).
the music industry, like the print industry, is resisting the forces of creative destruction and it's a status-quo maintenance effort that is killing them in the long run. they have the resources (mainly money but also the infrastructure of a large organization) to capitalize on the internet but it's small mindedness and a resistance to change that is killing the head start these companies should have.
i also sense a bit of greed powering this resistance; i mean, radiohead made millions on a donation system and from my understanding they grossed more than they did on their last cd release. and it'd be difficult to claim that sales are "finished."
http://www.longtail.com/the_long_tail/2008/01/t...
http://marketingmarshall.com/recommends/sethtel... (this is the link to the talk i referenced above).
cheers!

small is the new big! :)
i'm glad i was going through your older posts as i'm currently looking into the forces of creative destruction and how "they" come to bear on contemporary business entities...essentially whether companies should willingly split themselves up into smaller entities to position for more growth.
it's a pretty big project since i want to avoid looking like an ass, but it's good to see that the general paradigm is shifting toward accepting the possiblity that the smaller is better.
of course, as concerns internet companies, i'm not sure companies like twitter/photobucket/etc should overly rely on ad revenue as their sole source of income. it's simply not sustainable since it's mostly "vaporous" and extremely vulnerable to competitive forces; meaning, as soon as another, better competitor comes along the company is doa since there was no real revenue stream...goog for example has the masses supporting it now but that's obviously not enough to sustain growth--and they know that, considering the massive amounts of functionality expansions they've been undergoing.
cheers!

K.I.S.S. i think you have that w/ this iteration.
fred wenzel's suggestion of a serif font would increase readability a bit.
i like the open space.

it is an excellent book; i gave my wife the book as a gift a few years back. hopefully you'll make it on to the second installment which is pretty good too. i really enjoy getting the "other perspective" on iran (and iraq for that matter); political climates change but hearing ms. satrapi tell it, i don't see a lot of love between iran and iraq, despite what our government in saying. maybe we should take it with a grain of salt...this is the "smoking gun" administration. ha! what a crock of BS.

have you used jumpcut much? maybe your kids would be into it. the entire concept is mashing content together. it's a great platform.
the most frustrating thing about IP is the rigid control of how it's manipulated.
i think the tools created by as well as structure of the net will continue to challenge old beliefs about how we handle IP. 'creative destruction' at its finest.
http://www.jumpcut.com/view/?id=D64963E4EAFC11D...
http://www.jumpcut.com/view/?id=AEB359DAF60411D...

honestly?
short answer: i think it's a horrible idea. it's as bad as the msft+yhoo deal imho.

wee-bit longer answer: there's no value in the deal for shareholders. aapl would get mired in yhoo's mismanagement. aapl is in the midst of its best growth period it's ever had and slowing that down with dead-weight yahoo! would be a very, very bad thing. (because, instead of focusing on innovations within the aapl-realm of competency, resources would be directed to fixing the problems with yahoo!).

besides, what leads you to think that appl isn't already working on ways of getting a piece of the "cloud computing" market? it's a very 'young' market, so aapl has time to develop a strategy to compete with goog and maybe even do so under the radar.

sorry, i just think it's a bad deal for shareholders all around. cheers!

interesting question but i'm not sure there's anyway of claiming that the internet is private. the entire concept is based completely on public-facing material. everything is about accessing public information.

there are certainly ways of circumventing this--such as "hidden" or "granular access privileges" to public profiles (i'm thinking facebook and myspace here...heck, even linkedin).

another way of protecting yourself on the net is to use the onion router. funny sounding name but it's an amazing service for "erasing" your original IP address, essentially protecting who you really are and where you come from. http://www.torproject.org/

also, there are programs that will reset your mac-address, which is another way of tracking browsing history. (this is in addition to turning cookies off...i think the public has generally forgotten that cookies exist...and it was sooo vogue to talk about them during the early '00s).

lol. gl and great question!

microsoft is a loser-company. there's no core business. it's run by a scatter-the-seeds-mentality. okay at everything and not experts at anything. they'll never make money on their non-OS business. they simply don't have the expertise to do so. now, if they spun those other units out, that might change things. until then, expect nothing but mediocre results.
and the only reason they make money on the OS business unit is because PCs running windows is still fairly synonymous with computers-at-work. once that changes, good by msft.

sorry for being such a bear! i can't help but see the need for a MAJOR rehaul of the business.

yes, you are getting heated up. you resorted to name calling--or a form of it at least: "unbased drivel". (which was unbased of you to claim and quite rude...if you're going to have a blog be ready for opposing views and a discussion of those views, or just stop blogging.)

i think you're defending a mute point as you're now arguing what constitutes ENOUGH research. that's very different than source *adequacy*.

i'm "lazy" for pasting a search query here? i included the "define: research" search so you could see that i'm not cherry-picking definitions. (which you _are_).

honestly, i feel i'm listening better than you are since you haven't addressed my arguments *at all*.

again, you illustrated my point and i'm not sure you meant to: "graded 100s of papers [so i know and am more qualified." {the buzzer sounds at the evidence of self-justification} i've graded papers. wtf does that really have to do with anything? i can tell you that the problem in the american university system is not adequacy of research sources but the ability to communicate thought. from what i've read of student papers, most people are near-illiterate. and those people are getting "C's" from professors and earning a college degree. now seriously, what's worse: (a) student A who uses wikipedia but clearly communicates his/her thoughts or (b) student B who can't read or write to save his/her life but "didn't use wikipedia when researching." the state of the union clearly answers that question for us.

also an important question arises, "why are professors passing students in subjects said students have near-to-nil comprehension of?" simple answer! to get tenure. again, we see self-justification at its finest, as well as the fact that professors aren't immune to a bit of natural human politico in securing a position.

i think you have some serious reflecting to do because it's evident you haven't penetrated much beyond the surface of things.

good luck!

wow, you're getting pretty heated up on this.

i see self-justification everywhere i look, so i really wouldn't put it past professors to do the same thing. i'd be seriously surprised to find anyone who doesn't justify everything they think/feel/believe w/ something reflective of their personal experiences. "i deserve to make 100k...i deserve to make 10 million this year because i run a big company...i deserve to have my..." we're an entitlement society.

i'm not sure where you get the idea i don't have any basis for what i'm saying...you have no real idea who i am or where i came from. you have the link in my name and that's it.

btw, how can the peer review pale in comparison? it's immediately accessible. listed authors present. checks and balances in place. none of that is in a journal article.

using the "wikipedia calls itself argument" holds zero water: google calls itself a search engine...i guess you haven't used google docs, gmail, maps.google.com, finance.google.com...yeah, all those services are restricted to finding websites. (not)

i think you don't know what research means:
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient...

i imagine you don't know much about the positivist movement (in philosophy). maybe you do. i would look at that up and compare the sentiment of abandoning discussion of metaphysical and morality as unscientific with the banning of wikipedia in the classroom.

i'm sorry you don't see the elitism in this situation. elitism is a very natural habit to fall into. we all like to think we're special--and maybe every once in a while we are actually special; most of the time we're not special though. it's during that "most of the time" that we begin to justify ourselves.

that being said, you haven't refuted nor addressed the fact that there's no real differentiation between a bibliography on wikipedia and one at the end of a journal article. you also haven't addressed what happens when a student gets his/her hands on a disproved article or paradigm. does it have more clout than the up-to-date wiki entry because it was printed on paper? a quick check to wikipedia would illustrate (with a citation!!) of when and why an argument was disproved.

just not seeing it. (and i *am* open to a real discussion.)

you just said it: it's a starting point. that makes it a resource.
i think pigeonholing wikipedia as an encyclopedia isn't quite right either. we've never seen a "living" encyclopedia before, making it something *more* than an encyclopedia. the sources used in citations are [typically] live links; there's also a list of further reading. that's about all you would expect from reading the bibliography at the end of a journal article, and citations in a journal can be wrong.
again, i think there's a sense of elitism within the academic community going on and elitism is not easily justified impo. not that there's an easy solution. like you said, professors are trying to get students to think outside the box (lol, the box being common-day internet use...how far we've come! i remember having to do research only using the internet back in HS, meaning we've gone from "kids need to learn how to use the internet" to "kids need to stop using the internet for everything.")
personally, i feel that professors are feeling challenged by the internet now that anyone can become an expert. i don't need a piece of paper w/ ph.d written on it to be seen as an expert since i can do independent research and then write that, post it, etc. where's the value in the phd if just anyone can do it?
simple answer becomes, "well, we read journals. and google doesn't do journals" (yet). so, psychologically i can justify myself easier by claiming that wikipedia is not a validated source (even though there is MORE peer-review on wikipedia than any journal publication could dream of getting).
citing wikipedia as a source is perfectly valid as it still requires research (i have to go there and read it). typing in a search query on a school journal database is no more difficult.
research doesn't have to be hard or time-consuming to be valid.
i'm getting long-winded here...

i think what you're saying makes a lot of sense but you should also point out the reason google isn't a very good resource/tool for research purposes: it doesn't search secondary sources (let alone most primary sources--but that's changing!).
i find getting my grubby hands on secondary sources to be a challenge most of the time.
one GREAT source i know of:
http://highwire.stanford.edu
can access research journals for free! :P

as for wikipedia, i think that's a resource and tends toward being more right than wrong. typically the entries are put together by "experts" within a field, including citations and further reading material, including links. it's also a fluid entry-point for information so as changes arise, the site is updated. that doesn't happen with a journal...and a student could easily get that old information and cite it as correct!

SO, i have to disagree w/ the professors' decisions (and your argument?) that wikipedia isn't a valid source. i think there's a dangerous duality at play:
on the one hand the professors want to teach students what "proper" resources are while at the same time perpetuating elitist perspectives on who holds the keys to education & thought. (i'm not convinced that professors necessarily have better answers than "non-experts"...they simply have more time to gather sources that support their arguments, making them *appear* to be more legitimate). blogger apophenia (http://www.zephoria.org/) has written extensively on this topic and is worth a read if you haven't done so already.
just my two cents.

i say good riddance to Ms. Whitman! she was a horrible CEO, entering into agreements such as the skype purchase that provided zero benefit to shareholders. she should have been asked to step down years ago.

great to see that studies are looking at ads in video content.

not sure if you noticed but nytimes USE TO show ads before the news-clips would start (homepage). i *hated* it but it's gone so that's great.

i think you had a good opp to mention the use of ads during video content delivered from studios (such as ABC, NBC, etc). the worst of the worst? by _FAR_ ABC wins that prize, requiring that you NOT ONLY have an ad play every 6 min at a significantly higher volume than the actual show being streamed but you have to click on the screen to continue to the desired content. (requiring me to get up and go click on the screen).

sheesh, you'd think the people making decisions like THAT have never used a computer let alone streamed content to it.

the important thing to keep in mind--and it's the reason advertising isn't going anywhere--is that the only people really excited about ads aren't the consumers but the "marketing geniuses" pushing their pitches and the executives buying into it. ads don't work on anyone but the less-educated. (trendspotters had a post w/ a research study illustrating this point)

i'd much rather ad-budgets get slashed and companies pay out bigger dividends from the $$ saved.

meh, just my 2 cents.

wow, no kidding! thanks. i've been wondering for a while now about the great google's ad-sense and this is looking at first glance to be WAY more valuable.

kudos!