By now I’m sure you have seen that earlier this week Microsoft bought Skype for $8.5bn, or 32x trailing EBITDA, a price tag that Business Insider described as “silly on a stand alone basis”. There must, therefore, be a strong strategic logic, and the best explanation that I have seen is the [...]
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In private conversations recently I’ve found myself being quite critical of Google’s track record in innovation. I’ve been saying that their search product is deteriorating and that outside of search the only business line they’ve really got working well is Android, and amazing though the success is even that has seen significant compromise as [...] More competition for the major web platforms would be a significant boon for startups. Google’s huge margins make it more expensive and hence difficult for startups to acquire customers and grow and Apple’s restrictive policies for iPhone apps have a similar effect on companies in the mobile arena. For this reason I’m a keen [...] It looks like Google is increasingly favouring its own properties in its search results. Techcrunch and the Wall Street Journal have both run articles to this effect in the last couple of days citing examples in local search. It appears that Google is promoting Google Places at the expense of Yelp, Citysearch, TripAdvisor and [...] Netflix, the US DVD rental cum video streaming business is out cutting $1bn deals with movie studios for streaming rights and Hulu is contemplating an IPO – both developments which suggest the premium video streaming business is starting to reach maturity. The music streaming business, by contrast, is still finding its way, and is [...] Apple and Google have been edging into each other’s markets for some time now and post Apple’s acquisition of music streaming service Lala and the launch of YouTube’s VEVO service earlier this month they are now firmly head to head. It won’t be long before an antipathy between the two companies builds – similar [...] I’m back from holiday today (Majorca, very nice, thank you…) and have been enjoying catching up on reading and looking forward to getting back into the routine of posting every workday. Perusing my usual sources for inspiration (amongst which Viewsflow is becoming increasingly important) I hit on this wonderful post from Bill Gurley about [...] We’ve all heard the old adage that the search problem is only 5% solved. My news today is that I got a much better idea of what the next few percent will look like, largely from a Microsoft sponsored session this morning here at the Web2.0 Summit talking where they are taking Bing. It [...] Betanews reported yesterday on the Microsoft announcement that a cut down ad-supported version of Office 2010 will be distributed for free on new Windows 7 PCs. Users will be able to pay for access to the full version with no ads (the full version will be pre-installed and the user will purchase a [...] There is a good piece in the New York Times today which lists a lot of ways in which Bing is better than Google. Here are some: Speed – of initial results and in the way it helps to find the right result, minimising clicks and dead ends Preview of search results without clicking [...] |
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