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Archive for the ‘Microsoft’ Category
Mark Zuckerberg Just May Be Brilliant
Mike Mothner | October 26th, 2007
Well, I can admit when I was wrong. And a year ago, I told everyone that would listen that Mark Zuckerberg, the 24-year-old founder and CEO of Facebook, was greedy and crazy to turn down an alleged $1 Billion acquisition offer from Yahoo! I was wrong. He was right. At that point Facebook was losing ground to competitors, MySpace was continuing it’s domination of the social networking space, and the kid had just walked away from a deal that could have made him worth $300 Million. Since then, Facebook opened up their network to all users, and last spring launched Facebook Apps, a brilliant model that instantly created an ecosystem of developers seeking ways to expand their reach into the uber-loyal Facebook crowd (MySpace is playing copycat with a developer network of it’s own shortly on the way). They are gaining a million new members a week, and half of Facebook’s users are on the site daily. While it is unclear exactly how to monetize that usage, the potential is clearly enormous. Combine the explosive growth of Facebook in the last year with the hyper-competitive acquisition market that have sent valuations soaring (DoubleClick bought by Google for $3 billion, aQuantive by Microsoft for $6 billion and Right Media by Yahoo for $800 million), and you end up with the seeds that grew Facebook into an absolutely astonishing $15 Billion valuation. A valuation growth of $1 Billion to $15 Billion in about 12 months? Not bad, not bad at all… Well Continue reading…
Acquisition Fever Continues: Yahoo purchases Zimbra
Mike Mothner | September 17th, 2007
As reported today, Yahoo! continued the recent frenzy of acquisitions by purchasing Zimbra, a popular maker of an email and calendar suite, for a cool $350 million in cash. This seems to be capping off a flurry of activity by interim Yahoo! CEO Jerry Yang who took over after the departure of Terry Semel. This is a very, very smart acquisition in my opinion. Yahoo! currently is heavily invested in the e-mail space, with the Yahoo! mail system counting over 250 million users worldwide. I imagine the purchase will allow Yahoo! to leverage much of Zimbra’s excellent email, calendar and collaboration technology, already popular among it’s educational and corporate clients. This purchase is setting up what will turn out to be a bloody battle of the desktop and the home page: Google’s much-loved Gmail faces off with both Yahoo’s much-improved new web-email offering and Microsoft’s Hotmail product. As the web-based email reaches new levels of usability, Microsoft Outlook, the king of corporate email, suddenly doesn’t look so invincible. Google Apps is a direct shot at Microsoft Office, and Zimbra’s collaboration and calendar tools look to be heading the same direction. Google’s domination of the search market hardly looks in doubt, but Yahoo! and MSN are throwing major resources towards winning back the almighty advertising dollar, with purchases of aQuantive and Right Media just a few months ago. One of the biggest questions will be whether or not web-based software such as Google Apps, Yahoo! Mail and Gmail, can become functionally Continue reading…
MSN Slings Mud as Google Encroaches
Michael Block | September 13th, 2007
In the same week that Google got into bed with Capgemini to help it break into the business application market, MSN criticized Google’s ability to produce such programs up to the standards that consumers are used to seeing from companies like (oh, I don’t know) Microsoft, for example. CNET News covers the blow-by-blow in wonderful detail, however, I did want to highlight one quotation in particular from a Microsoft rep in an address from Monday: “We believe competition is good for customers and the industry. That said, customers tell us that our solutions deliver the ease of use, reliability and security that enterprises need.” Let’s pause here. Okay, have you stopped laughing yet? You don’t have to be Steve Jobs to know that the one thing that Microsoft cannot tolerate is competition. Well, let me rephrase that: Microsoft loves competition, just not competition that it cannot trample, buy out or render obsolete through immense investment in R&D. Okay, let’s proceed with more of the quotation: “[Google's] enterprise focus and now apps exist on the very fringe, and in combination with other fringe services only account for 1 percent of the company’s revenue. What happens if Google executes poorly? Do they shut (them) down given it will (affect) them in a minimal and short-term way? Should customers trust that this won’t happen?” Touché, Microsoft. This is truly a sound criticism and, to be sure, no company knows more about a service suffering as a result of low priority than Microsoft. Working Continue reading…
Microsoft Calls Google’s Growth Strategy Insane
Mike Mothner | March 16th, 2007
This article cites some very funny backhanded complements by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, essentially equating Google’s present growth with Microsoft in the 1980′s and 1990′s during the meteoric success of their operating system and desktop applications market. “They are trying to double in a year,” Ballmer told a crowd of Stanford Graduate School of Business students on Thursday. “That’s insane in my opinion.” This really reinforces what I have seen developing in the last several years in the search engine industry: Google goes from post-dot-com-bubble darling to profit powerhouse to the 800 pound gorilla leveraging it’s industry monopoly in increasingly scary ways. We aren’t there yet, and I hope that I am proven wrong, but you can’t deny the comparison between the present Google and the past Microsoft. Read this analysis as well to see some healthy debate on the Google-becoming-Microsoft topic. Save this Post!
