Ged Carroll

Category: wireless | 無線 |무선 네트워크 | 無線

This blog came out of the crater of the dot com bust and wireless growth. Wi-Fi was transforming the way we used the internet at home. I used to have my Mac next to my router on top of a cupboard that contained the house fuse panel and the telephone line. Many people had an internet room and used a desktop computer like a Mac Mini or an all-in-one computer like an iMac. Often this would be in the ‘den’ or the ‘man cave’. Going on the internet to email, send instant messages or surf the internet was something you did with intent.

Wi-Fi arrived alongside broadband connections and the dot com boom. Wi-Fi capable computers came in at a relatively low price point with the first Apple iBook. I had the second generation design at the end of 2001 and using the internet changed. Free Wi-Fi became a way to attract people to use a coffee shop, as a freelancer it affected where I did meetings and how I worked.

I was travelling more for work at the time. While I preferred the reliability of an ethernet connection, Wi-Fi would meet my needs just as well. UMTS or 3G wireless data plans were still relatively expensive and slow. I would eventually send low resolution pictures to Flickr and even write a blog post or two. But most of the time I used it to clear my email box, or use Google Maps if I was desperate.

4G wireless services, started to make mobile data a bit more useful, even if the telephony wasn’t great

 

  • Yahoo’s downfall

    I’ve seen a lot written about Yahoo’s downfall.

    Most of it lacks insight. And at the most basic level lacks precision. Yahoo is an employee who works at Yahoo! or Y! (the Y-bang). It was the best culture I ever worked in; and the most dysfunctional company that I ever worked for. I got to work with amazing people at a company that managed to fumble the ball on opportunity after opportunity. Most analysis you see comes from outsiders who lack insight.

    So when I came across this question on Quora and decided to post my answer. I’ve shared my answer on this blog with additional data points and information on ‘Yahoo’s downfall’.
    Yahoo! star
    This is a big question. In the answers that it will receive you are likely to see:

    • Difference of opinions about the reasons of the decline
    • Differences of opinion  about when the decline actually set in. Which begs the question was the downfall that drastic?

    Before we get into the why, lets think about the nature of businesses.

    Public listed companies generally don’t last forever

    The AEI said that 88 per cent of the companies that made up the Fortune 500 in 1954 are gone. Yahoo! is between 21 and 22 years old depending which way you count its age.

    Yahoo! has outlasted many of its peers:

    • Excite – merged with @Home Network in 1999. It went bankrupt in October 2001. It was sold in December 2001. By 2007, the business was broken up by territory.
    • Lycos – was sold three times, each time for a fraction of the purchase price
    • Hotbot – bought by Lycos
    • AltaVista – minority stake sold to CMGI in 1999. Bought by Overture in February 2003. Yahoo! acquired Overture in July 2003

    Only MSN remains of the original brands that it competed against. If MSN wasn’t a Microsoft business, its survival would be questionable. Microsoft’s online services lost money from 2006 through 2010. By comparison, Yahoo! has kept making a profit – despite its issues.

    Macro-effects

    The technology sector has become a hunting ground for active investors. Back in the 1980s, American publicly listed brands were attacked by investors:

    • RJ Nabisco – leveraged buyout by KKR
    • Gulf Oil & Unocal – T. Boone Pickens had failed bids for both oil companies but made a large profit on his holdings
    •  TWA – leveraged buyout by Carl Icahn. Icahn’s business practices were responsible for its bankruptcy in 1992 and 1995
    • Revlon – acquired in a hostile takeover by Ron Perelman, much of the business was broken up to pay for the deal

    In the 1990s, factors changed:

    • Credit lines for deals dried up as some leveraged buyouts proved to be bad for investors
    • Businesses developed more effective defences including poison pills, golden parachutes and greater debt
    • Overall value of the stock market increased. This reduced the amount of opportunities to get companies on the cheap

    Moving forward 20 years, the technology sector became in a similar place

    Historic technology businesses have moved from being high growth to value businesses. This changed the nature of investors interest in them.

    • Microsoft gave a seat on its board to an activist shareholder ValueAct Capital
    • Apple started paying dividends and raising the debt on its balance sheet to fend off Carl Icahn

    Google’s unique two-tier shareholding structure has proved to be an effective defence so far.

    A business like Yahoo! looks like a classic corporate raid target as its value is less than the sum of its parts. It has a regular cashflow that could service a lot more debt at current interest rates. It has assets that can be quickly sold.

    Capital has become much cheaper. This is partly a result of low interest rates set to keep the economy out of trouble in 2008. But there is also a lot of foreign capital and pension fund money looking for a home.

    Missed opportunities

    Given that we have the perfect vision of hindsight, Yahoo! missed key opportunities. Here are some of them.

    Yahoo! failed to buy Google

    Yes, Yahoo! did fail to buy Google. And their competitors failed to buy Google as well. Excite rejected the opportunity to buy Google for $750,000 in a deal arranged by Vinod Khosla. By comparison Terry Semel, then CEO of Yahoo! failed to buy Google for $5 billion. At the time Yahoo!’s entire market value was roughly $5 billion.

    Yahoo! failed to buy DoubleClick

    While Yahoo! was playing catch-up with Google on search. Google outbid the online industry to pay $3.1 billion for DoubleClick. DoubleClick provided advertisers with more opportunities to place banner ads than Yahoo! did.

    Yahoo! failed to buy Facebook

    Terry Semel offered $1 billion for Facebook in 2006. Semel wouldn’t go to $1.1 billion Facebook’s board wanted.

    Yahoo! failed to sell to Microsoft

    I don’t think that the Microsoft deal was a serious offer. There are  reasons to be suspicious:

    • Microsoft couldn’t make its own online business profitable at the time. The deal was unpopular with shareholders
    • Yahoo!’s contribution to the open source community would have been an antitrust issue
    • It would have to get through approval by Japanese competition authorities
    • It would likely have to get through Chinese antitrust authorities

    Yahoo! didn’t communicate these risk factors to shareholders. Which then left the door open for the Microsoft-funded Carl Icahn coup later on.

    Yahoo!’s board has failed the company

    I think that there is a stronger argument for this when you look at their selection of CEOs over the years

    • Tim Koogle – led Yahoo! on the upcycle of the dot.com boom. He resigned and replaced by Terry Semel during the bust that followed.
    • Terry Semel – was a senior media industry executive who bought the business out of the bust. He never got the product and never used email. He never managed to build a media company despite his Hollywood heritage.
    • Jerry Yang – history will look with more favour on Jerry Yang in the future. He did the Yahoo! Japan  and Alibaba deals which are the most interesting parts of Yahoo! today. As a CEO, his time was consumed by  Microsoft’s hostile bid
    • Carol Bartz – Bartz was a Microsoft approved appointee. Her deal on Facebook Connect saw the social network build its business on the back of Yahoo!’s user database. Bartz does the Microsoft search deal badly. She also launched mobile apps that were bad. The one thing she needs respect for is her approach to marketing. Bartz realised that she needed to promote the entire Yahoo! brand. Although there was a buzz marketing team in the US, most marketing was based around products. Unfortunately the execution of the brand campaign was poor. This was partly because it was led from the US with little engagement of regional and national marketing teams.
    • Scott Thompson – stayed for five months. Allegations were made about his education, better due diligence on his recruitment required.
    • Ross Levinsohn – Ross served as interim CEO after Thompson left. It is hard to know what CEO he would have made. But his successor seems to have borrowed his strategy.
    • Marissa Mayer – Despite the goodwill Mayer had going into the job she hasn’t managed to change Yahoo!’s current business. That the company’s strategy is being driven by activist shareholders says a lot.

    Problems in execution

    Yahoo! had its fortune hitched to brand display advertising. Growth has dropped in this for the past ten years. Yahoo!’s declining advertisng revenues started in Q2 of 2006. Part of the problem was that Yahoo! had been too successful to begin with. Yahoo! sold its display advertising for way more than it was worth.

    Yahoo! failed to monetise search as well as Google. And then handed its search business over to Microsoft, who failed to do as good as job as Yahoo! managed on its own.

    Yahoo! failed to execute in mobile, despite some smart early efforts. Photo community Flickr was the default photo app on Nokia’s N73 blockbuster smartphone. The N73 launched at the end of April 2006. It was was one of the last things I worked on before leaving. Given that headstart Flickr could have been Instagram. Instead its a more specialist community of ‘proper’ photography enthusiasts. Yahoo! Messenger and Mail both worked on Nokia handsets from the mid-2000s. Yahoo! Go was an app which provided access to services including:

    • Flickr
    • Address book
    • Calendar
    • Email
    • Maps
    • Search
    • Content: news, weather, finance, sports, entertainment

    It could have provided the same function that Android provides for Google, but Yahoo! considered as ‘beta software’ right up to it’s demise in January 2010. Yahoo! has been providing Apple with weather information and stock data for the iPhone. Yet it hasn’t managed to build a successful iPhone app.

    One way of illustrating the decline of Yahoo! in mobile is to look at the user numbers of Yahoo! mail, which seems to have peaked around September 2011.
    Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail and Gmail users over time
    Hotmail shows a linear increase over time, likely due to organisation changes as it has moved to the cloud and Gmail takes off, presumably on the back of Android – though iOS users also have Gmail accounts.

    Yahoo!’s acquisition process was broken. Ever since Yahoo! wasted 1 billion dollars buying Mark Cuban’s Broadcast.com the business slowed down. Broadcast.com was a scare on the collective memory. Capital decisions took longer, acqusitions took longer. The cheque book was harder to open. Under Marissa Mayer, it was finally let loose, but the purchases seem to have made little difference.

    Yahoo! failed to become a media company. Back when I was at Yahoo! we launched Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone – a sort of proto Vice News in 2005. Despite Semel’s Hollywood background, he and following CEOs never made it work. Despite the fact Yahoo! had joint ventures with TV networks in Australia and Canada. When Marissa Mayer finally managed to get talent in the door, audiences had moved to other sites:

    • Gawker Media
    • Buzzfeed
    • Daily Beast
    • Aol’s blog network
    • Huffington Post

    Yahoo’s downfall in social is spectacular. Yahoo! owned pioneer social brands, any of which could have been the Instagram, Facebook or WhatsApp:

    • Yahoo! Chat – chatrooms were the Facebook Groups of yesteryear. Yahoo! was doing social before it was a thing
    • Delicious – neglect, internal politics and corporate interference meant that Yahoo! never capitalised on Delicious. Despite its tribulations there are some people who still use it, though I am not sure why
    • Flickr – corporate interference and neglect destroyed the potential growth of photo sharing site Flickr. The site is kept going as a photographic enthusiasts community. It could have been Instagram. Thankfully, Yahoo! only spent $30 million on it
    • Yahoo! Messenger – Yahoo!’s Messenger had a poor mobile client, but could have been WhatsApp. Facebook dominates the sector along with Tencents WeChat, NHN’s LINE and Daum Kakao’s KakaoTalk
    • Tumblr – Yahoo! was forced to writedown the value of Tumblr to nothing. The company failed to monetise the popular blogging and curation platform. Tumblr is one of Yahoo!’s few products that attracts a millennial audience

    Yahoo! products had a poor experience. I launched over 14 products at Yahoo! in just over a year. I only ever used 2 of them on a regular ongoing basis – Delicious and Flickr. Other products like Yahoo! 360, Yahoo! Answers or Yahoo! MyWeb 2 – fell into three categories:

    • Dogs to use – particularly in the set-up part of the process
    • Not particularly useful – Yahoo! Answers, great idea in prinicple but poor cultural fit. That poor fit meant that it filled up with noise, Yahoo! Answers isn’t as useful as Quora
    • Strangled soon after birth – so it became frustrating to commit your time to them as a user

    Politics paid a part in this process. The Communications group (responsible for Messenger and Mail) had a lot of duplicate products. Yahoo! Photos was a bad version of Flickr. For storing your bookmarks there was:

    • Yahoo! Bookmarks
    • Yahoo! MyWeb
    • Yahoo! MyWeb 2
    • Delicious

    This all bogs management down and sucks away resources. There were also so many projects that never saw the light, due to constant changes in priority. More Yahoo!-related posts here. What do you think brought about Yahoo’s downfall?

    More information
    Fortune 500 firms in 1955 vs. 2014; 88% are gone, and we’re all better off because of that dynamic ‘creative destruction’ | AEI Ideas
    Microsoft’s Bing/MSN Results Truly Horrifying — Loss Rate Balloons To ~$3 Billion A Year | Business Insider
    Stupid Business Decisions: Excite Rejects Google’s Asking Price | Minyanville 
    A Microsoft First: Activist ValueAct Gets a Board Seat – WSJ
    How Yahoo! Blew It | Wired
    Yahoo! Could Have Bought Facebook For 2% Of Today’s Valuation | Business Insider
    Sorry Microsoft, Yahoo — Google Just Got Bigger | Ad Age

  • Thin film electronics + more things

    Coal redefined for thin film electronics | Electronics EETimes – sounds like a graphene connection. Thin film electronics is going to be key for wearables

    Web Summit 2016 | Approach to marketing – it does beg the question why should a marketer support this and go to their conference?

    The VR idea maze — Benedict Evans – worthwhile read. I think the point made on content is particularly pertinent. We may have the hardware but it could take decades for the craft of content creation to come to full fruition

    China’s government sounds out international PR agencies about how to polish nation’s image overseas, sources say | South China Morning Post – A spokesman for WPP, which owns Hill+Knowlton declined to comment. Ketchum also declined to comment. Fleishman Hillard Inc, Ogilvy Public Relations and Edelman did not respond to messages requesting comment – Weber Shandwick attracted negative attention working for China during the run up to the 2008 Olympics and Ketchum had a similar experience working for Russia

    Microsoft’s Silver Lining Is Shrinking — The Information – not surprisingly moving a cloud model disrupts Microsoft’s margins in comparison to package software (paywall)

    Off the grid – Official site of Stephen Fry – interesting essay on the perils of social media

    China Unicom bets on turnaround as net profit plunges 85pc | SCMP – 4G network capital costs and increased marketing costs

    “Overpaid and underperforming”: An anonymous investors’ letter lashes out at Nikesh Arora — Quartz – there are other shoes to drop on this. Looking that the shareholders hold ADRs rather than SoftBank shares – this is a US led charge. It is also interesting that this happening right before the Yahoo! shoe drops. SoftBank,  and its Yahoo! Japan joint venture are a key part of Yahoo! Inc’s value

    Korean TV Dramas Are the Best Export Since ‘Gangnam Style’ | Digital – AdAge

    Pirate Bay Founder: Streaming Model Could Ignite New Piracy War – TorrentFreak – really interesting essay. I had a similar experience with Apple’s iBooks. I bought James Michener’s Mexico for a long flight and trip, tried to download it a week later and it was no longer available. I now buy mostly paper books

    Brands rip up media plan in the face of disruption – it decided last September, in consultation with MediaCom, to take more radical action. Tesco slashed its media budget for newspapers to practically zero and shifted most of the money into online and social media. TV and other traditional media have also been heavily cut (reg wall)

    Can audio go viral on Facebook? Here’s what happened when NPR ran an experiment for a month » Nieman Journalism Lab – Sharing audio on social media is hard to do. Stan Alcorn documented many of the struggles two years ago in a widely cited Digg story

    Elisabeth Murdoch’s Vertical Networks creating ‘Brother’ Snapchat Discover channel – Business Insider

    IRIN | Spies Sans Frontières? – the ethical conundrums around this are particularly interesting. More security related posts here.

    Is Programmatic Expertise Moving In-House? – EContent Magazine

  • WeChat payments + more things

    WeChat payments and wallet function brought to the international version of WeChat with its last version update, but I only noticed it this week. Does this mean that WeChat is now putting all the pieces in place before they get serious about an international market push? They are already trying to get foreign credit card merchants on board accepting WeChat payments to  provide extra convenience for Chinese consumers travelling abroad.
    WeChat wallet now for louwai
    TfL brought back its experiment for having people stand on both sides of the escalators. For those of us who live in London this is quite a change to our usual routine. We are used to standing on the right or moving along the escalator on the left. It caught me out the first time that I visited London.

    But TfL research found that you net out moving people more efficiently by encouraging everyone to stand. This allows a ‘denser’ escalator and better times clearing people off platforms.
    Stand on both sides - people living outside London won't realise what a paradigm shift this is
    A comparable shift would be say, New Yorkers suddenly becoming unfailingly polite and accommodating. I do quite like the ‘blue pill’ footprints that TfL use for signage on the escalators.

    Japanese producer TOYOMU reimagined Kanye West’s The Life of Pablo based on reviews and a list of the samples used. Japan hasn’t embraced streaming music unlike western lemmings music buyers. I think what he came up with is far better, see for yourself.

    Forthcoming Russian superhero film Guardians looks even more intense than the Night Watch and Day Watch films. Apparently the bear packs a chain cannon a la Jesse Venture in Predator.

    Luxxury releases Greg Wilson remixes of the their track on yellow vinyl, have a preview of it here. I am a huge fan of Luxxury and the lush nu-disco products that he manages to come up with.  More Luxxury sounds here.

  • Hong Kong crime + more things

    How Hong Kong crime has changed over time, and what that says about the city | South China Morning Post – interesting social changes as reflected by Hong Kong crime. Although this might change with Beijing using Hong Kong crime organisations to influence local politics and opposition through murder and intimidation. More Hong Kong related posts here

    Confusing Google’s self-driving cars — Eightface – I love that hipster practices fuck with the AI of Google’s self driving cars – goes to show that machines don’t have a clue about why fixies either

    The man in the van — Eightface – great story ‘There he is at night, wearing a spelunking headlamp to go with his unkempt beard, writing in his “thought journal” or rereading Kerouac‘

    US-China Today: China’s WeChat better than Facebook: Advertising CEO – CEO of Havas on CNBC

    Why Olay’s choice of male ambassador for China is a stupid move – Campaign Asia – insightful essay on why male brand ambassadors won’t work well for female orientated brands. Based on a negative perception that Chinese women can be ‘baited and placated with male eye candy‘

    Google’s Package Tracking Card – great new Google shortcut

    Viber adds end-to-end encryption and hidden chats as messaging app privacy wave grows | TechCrunch – end-to-end cryptography now a hygiene factor

    Hennessy 8 Encompasses the Brand’s History in One Spectacular Bottle | Wine, Spirits & Cigars – the packaging design is nuts, however I can’t see that many being given away in China

    Foursquare Predicts Chipotle’s Q1 Sales Down Nearly 30%; Foot Traffic Reveals the Start of a Mixed… — Foursquare Direct — Medium – interesting trending data despite the source (Foursquare themselves)

    EU’s Google Probe Focuses on Preloaded Apps | WSJ – could allow for greater diversity in Android phone experiences, IF phone manufacturers get their act together. In reality likely to drive more bloatware

    Verizon, Hearst Agree to Buy Complex Media | WSJ – interesting how Verizon are becoming a major media company. Complex makes a great fit to Aol’s blogs business

    Watch: Martin Sorrell on how the industry can deal with ad-blocking | Campaign – interesting comments on Havas (paywall)

    Media Websites Battle Faltering Ad Revenue and Traffic – The New York Times – “In the first quarter of 2016, 85 cents of every new dollar spent in online advertising will go to Google or Facebook, said Brian Nowak, a Morgan Stanley analyst” (paywall)

    Chobani and Yahoo: Yes, Search Ads Really Can Lift Sales | CMO Strategy – AdAge – interesting use of search as brand advertising

    ‘We would not invest further in our UK business’ after Brexit, says Ogilvy global exec Paul O’Donnell | The Drum – an honest assessment

    Korean Drama Gets American Twist With Viki’s ‘Dramaworld’ | Variety – interesting that Viki invested in original content that would feature their target demographic, given that they have built their brand on the ‘otherness’ of hallyu content

    3 Things You Need To Know Today To Better Serve Your Millennial Customers Tomorrow – Forbes – email isn’t the dead medium that others thought it would be

    How to Manufacture Desire — Psychology of Stuff — Medium – I got this via Paul Armstrong

  • IBM guilty + more news

    IBM guilty of age discrimination

    I, Cringely Is IBM guilty of age discrimination? – Part two – I, Cringely – this could get very interesting, IBM guilty in a court of law would pose a wide range of problems from a political and regulatory point-of-view. There will also be issues in terms of skillsets for looking after large legacy systems. More on IBM here.

    Consumer behaviour

    Has Desktop Internet Use Peaked? – WSJ – Data from the research company indicate overall time spent online in the U.S. from desktop devices—which include laptop computers—has fallen for the past four months, on a year-over-year basis. It dipped 9.3% in December 2015, 7.6% in January, 2% in February and 6% in March (paywall)

    Culture

    A Japanese guy remade The Life of Pablo without hearing it | Dazed – I think its better than the real thing

    Media

    Copyright fight club – POLITICO – Hollywood in one corner, internet companies in the other

    6 Reasons BuzzFeed’s Revenue Miss Is OMG! – BuzzFeed’s supposed to be the media company that holds the answer to the media business’s future in a post-banner world

    Online

    UC Davis pepper spray: PHOTOS – Business Insider – interesting case study of online PR clean-up that didn’t quite work out

    Rocket Internet Vows to Limit Losses After 2015 Cash Burn | BoF – just wow

    企鹅智酷 | Tencent Penguin Intelligence – great online research resource in Chinese

    The CIA Is Investing in Firms That Mine Your Tweets and Instagram Photos – (paywall)

    Security

    FBI hasn’t learned anything from unlocked San Bernardino iPhone, says report – CNET – quelle surprise, I can’t even believe that this is news

    Daring Fireball: Motherboard: How Canadian Police Intercept and Read Encrypted BlackBerry Messages – basically if you aren’t running your own Business Enterprise Server, your BlackBerry messages and email are up for grabs. If the police have the key you can bet other people can get their hands on it as well – a la the criminal record database access that is acquired by private investigators through nefarious means

    Web of no web

    Why New York Subway Lines Are Missing Countdown Clocks – The Atlantic – if you look at the lifespan of the equipment deployed, how would Intenet of Heavier Things last as long?

    The return of the QR code? | The Digerati – the QRcode never really went away, what is interesting is how Facebook has gone for something proprietary in its code design for Messenger