Is there some relationship between razorfish and stingrays? About the time I started to blog about Microsoft selling digital ad agency Razorfish to Publicis Groupe, a phone call came that a stingray had stung my daughter. So I raced north to Del Mar beach, where the wonderful lifeguards cared for my wounded 15 year-old. We’re back home, and I am, finally, ready to offer my intrusive opinion about Microsoft’s sale.
Themes for Chrome 3.0 beta got me to thinking about Google’s sudden personalization push. You can skin Gmail, and there are comic-book heroes and other themes for iGoogle. Now there are Chrome skins, and what about that Android-powered MyTouch from T-Mobile? The marketing push is big customization and personalization.
TechFlash’s Todd Bishop did some good sleuthing of regulatory filings and turned up a so-called Yahoo escape clause to the Microsoft search deal. Two, actually.
But while they might comfort Yahoo that there is a way out of the deal, I promise you there is none.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMpwJn_4NtE]
Damn, I must read Chris Anderson’s book Free: The Past and Future of a Radical Price. Based on the WNYC video (below) and Q&A—”The Gift Economist”—in the July 19, 2009 the New York Times Magazine, I must disagree with Chris’ concept of free as applied to digital products. Free and the Internet go oddly together, and not necessarily well together.
Chris may be right, but for other reasons than he presents here. In the video above, Chris asserts that on the Internet “free really can be free.” Nobody has to pay. He presents his view, which does allow for combo free and paid models, by way of marketing and economic history and theory.
S-o-o-o-o, US TV broadcasters aren’t alone pulling the plug on their analog channels. Microsoft is closing down channels 8 and 10 and folding some of their content into Channel 9. Someone at Microsoft thinks this is good marketing? It’s a great idea if the goal is for existing and potential customers to start switching channels.
My reaction to Microsoft Hohm is mixed. The branding and marketing are quite clever, and that’s yet another welcome change. More fundamentally, Hohm is yet another example of Microsoft chasing Google’s tail. Maybe Microsoft should conserve some energy by taking a shorter path rather than tagging behind the weaving Google.
Flash should have a place on all mobile handsets, and Adobe is planning to make version 10 available for smartphones. But not iPhone. Now why is that? I’m going to tell you.
First this, ah, news flash. Today, Adobe showed off Flash running on Android-based smartphone HTC Hero. This is a dreamy handset. You want it. You know you do. Hell, I want it, and I recently bought a Nokia N97. While iPhone is all the rave, Android is where the big action is coming. Google gets the mobile-to-cloud applications stack better than any company, even Apple. Flash is part of the story.
Microsoft has abandoned the fundamental principles that made it the most successful software company of the last decade and ensured its software would be the most widely used everywhere. But in just three years, since 2006, startups and Apple have set a new course for technology and how societies use it.
For Microsoft, this change is scarier than movie “Quarantine.” Without a course correction, Microsoft in the 2010s will be very much like IBM was in the 1990s. That’s no place Microsoft should want to be.
Microsoft has reached a surprising, and quite unexpected, fork in the road to its future. Choices the company makes today and over the next 12 months will determine whether computing relevance shifts away from its products.
The company has abandoned the fundamental principles that made it the most successful software company of the last decade and ensured its software would be the most widely used everywhere. Understanding those principles, and how they shaped Microsoft’s past, are important for understanding what the future might be.
This week’s turmoil on the streets of Tehran is but a metaphor for another turmoil: How the Internet is tearing down monopolies of power and empowering individuals and smaller groups. The Internet is the new democracy, which can be seen from pictures and videos coming from protests in Iran.
The Iranian protests are capturing the world’s attention in part because of fairly new tools that make it easy for most anyone to be a broadcaster, a real-time journalist. These tools punctuate change sweeping through the news industry and destabilizing others.
Seriously, it’s kind of a “d`uh” question. Apple released iLife for Macintosh in January 2003. Every year or so, the suite gets better, with no Windows developer offering anything comparable. Isn’t it about time?
I fault Microsoft for not developing something equivalent, although, I concede, the company has the makings of a placeholder offering while working on something better (more on that in a few paragraphs). Microsoft should have stepped in when its partners didn’t.
The Microsoft-Google tit-for-tat spat over Apps Sync accents the new battleground over which the companies are fighting. Google has moved onto sacred Microsoft territory: Office. Google’s synchronization approach is simply brilliant, and Microsoft executives should cower in fear.
Quick recap: A week ago, Google unveiled Apps Sync, which lets Outlook users connect to GAPE, Google Apps Premiere Edition. Rather than an Exchange Server, Outlook connects to Google’s cloud services. Today, Microsoft took the offensive on this incursion into its territory with a blog post detailing two problems caused by the Apps Sync plugin. I’ll get to the specifics of the problems in a few paragraphs.