Ged Carroll

Search results for: “yahoo”

  • Yahoo! back to 2005?

    Back to 2005

    Events at Yahoo! this week took me back to 2005 – the halcyon days web 2.0 days before popular social networks. If you are vaguely interested in the online sector, you will have noticed that Summly has been acquired by Yahoo!. The acquisition is interesting for a number of reasons:

    • It is a statement of Yahoo!’s mobile aspirations. Yahoo! has been in mobile for a good while, back to 2005 at least. Yahoo! Go tried to pull all the of the Yahoo! portal properties into an app-like experience and Yahoo! ZoneTag was an early experiment of attributing location to smartphone pictures well before the iPhone. Upload to Flickr was integrated into many SonyEricsson and Nokia phones (notably the bestselling Nokia N73) But none of these pioneering efforts were rewarded with market share
    • Yahoo! is looking to buy cool, like it did back in 2005 and 2006, acquiring web 2.0 businesses. Summly has had about one million downloads, mostly by early adopters of its news reader. It is not the mass-market audience that Yahoo! usually targets. Like Flickr and Delicious before it this is about cool. Whilst most of the focus has been on the media, Yahoo! has historically made these purchases to try and infuse some of the start-up get up and go DNA into the larger organisation
    • Summly makes some interesting technological choices that would appeal to Yahoo!. Firstly, surfacing content that consumers would find of interest; particularly interesting given that Google has abandoned RSS. Secondly, using analytical techniques to create abridged version of content could also be a differentiator in search in terms of both presentation and as a technique to improve relevance (if the abridged rather than full versions were indexed). However, Summly doesn’t own the technology itself, but is a mashup of underlying services
    • The 30 million dollar acquisition figure being bandied around mirrors the rumoured costs of buying both Flickr and Delicious back in 2005 and 2006. One of the key differences between Flickr and Delicious with Summly is the technology benefit that was brought to the table by the web 2.0 pioneers and in Flickr’s case the quality of the business on offer. Prior to being acquired Flickr was pretty close to breaking even with its freemium model
    • Summly is an interesting focus away from the traditional Silicon  and Bay Area stomping grounds of Yahoo!

    More information
    Yahoo! to acquire Summly | Yodel Anecdotal

  • Facebook Yahoo! patents case

    I had delayed writing about this as I had a busy run-up to Easter and just about everyone of note in the Bay Area seems to have weighed in on the Facebook Yahoo legal case over patents. Fred Wilson (aka A VC) channeled the concern that the start-up community in general over wide-ranging patents being a tax on innovation.

    The new, new thing

    There is a certain amount of prejudice inbuilt against incumbents going on; Silicon Valley doesn’t make big money from existing large businesses but the new, new thing – for example:

    • IBM vs. Apple, VisiCalc, Oracle and countless Boston corridor enterprise technology brands before them
    • Beckman Instruments vs.the traitorous eight who went on to found just about every other semiconductor company from the late 1950s through to the early 1970s: Fairchild Semiconductor, Intel, Intersil, AMD, National Semiconductor, LSI Logic and venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins
    • Microsoft vs. Apple, Oracle, Sun Microsystems, the open source community
    • Google vs. Facebook and just about anybody else looking to make money from online advertising

    Monomyth archetypes

    I don’t necessarily hold this against them, it is the classic tale of David and Goliath that resonates at a deep level in the human psyche. It probably helped us move beyond being slightly smarter than the average ape and turn our use of tools into a decisive advantage with humans becoming the apex predator throughout the world.

    What a lot of these arguments are failing to do is look at the underlying form in the Facebook Yahoo patent case:

    • Yes, the patent system is broken
    • Yes, Yahoo! has multiple business issues which would merit a series of posts in it’s own right
    • Yes, Yahoo! is unlikely to survive at least in its present form. Though for reasons that I have gone into previously  I don’t think that Microsoft is a suitable suitor (just look at what has happened to its continued inability to match Yahoo!’s previous returns on search with Microsoft AdCenter) and more controversially I didn’t think that it was serious about its takeover bid first time around
    • Yes, Yahoo! is likely to be outmaneuvered by Facebook and be on a hiding to nothing

    But for me, the story isn’t about Yahoo! or the inequitable nature of patent laws, but about Facebook and its business practices in relation to data.

    Facebook Yahoo case similar to 1990s Microsoft practices

    In the 1990s file formats: .doc, .xls, .ppt and others were used by Microsoft to leverage a competitive advantage. Competitor applications couldn’t open them; so your information was locked into using Microsoft Office software. This was one of the reasons why the web was so transformational; HTML opened up publishing of documents that had been previously locked into Microsoft Office – electronic versions of scientific papers, price lists etc.

    Data portability is the document format of web 2.0 (or social web). During my time at Yahoo! we introduced the requirement to sign into Flickr using a Yahoo! ID, Stewart Butterfield and the team at Flickr worked hard to ensure that existing Flickr customers who didn’t want to have a Yahoo! ID could move their pictures off the service.

    The idea was that the customer’s data was their property and allowing them to freely move was as American as apple pie, capitalism and the free market. Allowing customer’s data to be portable fitted in with the web being free as in speech ethic that had predominated up until then. Portable customer data kept you honest and encouraged you to innovate as losing a customer was only one export click away.

    In the case of Facebook; the data that really matters is your address book. Whilst Facebook eventually allowed consumers to download their profile information (after it had gained hegemony in the US social network sector), it holds on fast to your address book. Om Malk over at GigaOM wrote a really good post on how Facebook leeched off Yahoo! user’s address book to build its business, but didn’t allow Yahoo! users to transfer data back the other way.

    This had a detrimental effect Yahoo!’s already weakened business. It wasn’t only Yahoo!, Facebook did the same on Plaxo and has been in conflict with Google over the same issue. In the Yahoo! patent case; Yahoo! is in the position of shooter and patsy – but like the dreams of conspiracy theorists looking for a dark hand moving the pieces around the board – Facebook is responsible.

    So consumers and some companies got screwed on their address book; but what the great and good of the start-up community who criticised Yahoo! forget is where Yahoo!, Plaxo and Google have gone before their start-ups could be tomorrow. The problem is the over-reliance on Facebook Connect as a federated ID and as a marketing tool using consumer news feeds in their word-of-mouth marketing campaign strategies.

    Federated identities

    Federated IDs are not a new concept, Microsoft tried to have their Passport technology adopted in a similar way some ten years ago and it was stymied because of early adopter and technology sector mistrust.

    Like Facebook, the businesses adopting Facebook Connect usually rely on some sort of advertising-related business model, either for their revenue, or for garnering customers; yet with Facebook Connect – Facebook holds all the cards on targeting information that means:

    • Your advertising platform will always be worse than Facebook’s because they have a better customer view – as we’ve seen in search this is likely to turn into a zero-sum game
    • For more e-commerce-based businesses, Facebook data could be used by rivals to directly target your customers – because Facebook already has your customer list. By using Facebook Connect you already gave it to them and they could even infer a good estimate of customer engagement were by how often and how long they logged in

    It has the potential to be digital equivalent of the way Standard Oil used its dominant position as a buyer of railroad transportation to screw over rivals. By supporting Facebook in the Yahoo! patents case; I believe that leading players within the start-up community inadvertently darkened their own futures.

    What Microsoft was like back in the day

    It is hard to imagine now, but in the mid-1990s Silicon Valley was genuinely afraid of Microsoft:

    Another big factor was the fear of Microsoft. If anyone at Yahoo considered the idea that they should be a technology company, the next thought would have been that Microsoft would crush them.

    It’s hard for anyone much younger than me to understand the fear Microsoft still inspired in 1995. Imagine a company with several times the power Google has now, but way meaner. It was perfectly reasonable to be afraid of them. Yahoo watched them crush the first hot Internet company, Netscape. It was reasonable to worry that if they tried to be the next Netscape, they’d suffer the same fate. How were they to know that Netscape would turn out to be Microsoft’s last victim?

    That was Y Combinator’s Paul Graham on Microsoft back in the day and how fear of it partly sewed the seeds of failure at Yahoo! Great ideas couldn’t get funded if they where considered to fall anywhere near the purview of Microsoft – and Microsoft wanted everything, at that time the company mission statement was:

    A computer on every desk and in every home running Microsoft software

    Now the vision uses softer language that also takes into account technological change with Steve Ballmer describing it as:

    …enabling people and businesses to realize their full potential

    Microsoft still isn’t a cuddly business by any means. Let me show you: Some six years ago I spent a weekend in San Francisco on the dime of the agency I worked with at the time. The reason why I had a free weekend was that I was originally going out there to pitch an international brief for an enterprise technology company – and the weekend should have been very busy and productive in preparation fo the pitch early the following week.

    The US folks had checked the substantial non-compete list that we had been provided with by Redmond and senior clients had been checked in with and they were ok with it.

    Happy days, I was put on a Thursday flight from Heathrow to San Francisco with British Airways. I deplaned, got through immigration and got a taxi into town. I went to the hotel first; dropped by bags off and washed my face and then got a taxi to our San Francisco office down near the ball park.

    As I walked in the door, I could see of the office general manager getting off the phone. Apparently my trip was a waste of time; someone at head office had a call with someone at Microsoft who asked us to withdraw at the last minute as the company operated in a space that Microsoft would like to enter in the next five years.

    I ended up spending the Martin Luther King day weekend at the Hotel Monaco close to Union Square and spent much of the Saturday exploring the Asian Art Museum, the then Sony Metreon centre and shopping off Haight.

    The point I am trying to make is that fear is relative, Microsoft is a changed but still fiercely ambitious and competitive business.

    Facebook power

    Facebook is much more than Microsoft. If we look at address books as an example; Facebook bought and closed down Malaysian start-up Octazen to close the door on others using their technology to import contact lists in February 2010.

    Facebook is keenly competitive in the way that Microsoft has been, but it has learned from Microsoft’s mistakes; it has lawyered and lobbied-up much earlier in its development, so with Facebook there will be no humiliating Judge Jackson trial which gifted the start-up culture of Silicon Valley a second chance.

    I believe that in the medium-to-long-term Facebook will have a neutron bomb effect on the Bay Area start-up finance community and at the moment they only have themselves to blame.

    Although it may seem counter-intuitive to the start-up community at the moment, fueling Yahoo!’s patent duel with Facebook may make more sense in the long run.

    More information

    Yahoo! Crosses The Line – A VC
    Will Yahoo Torch its Search Deal With Microsoft, Outsource Search to Google? – Search Engine Watch (#SEW)
    Is the internet too perfect a market? – renaissance chambara
    A quick primer re @blakei @yahoo #delicious – renaissance chambara
    Yahoo-Facebook patent fight: more than meets the eye | GigaOM
    Google Renews Battle Over Facebook Contacts, Removes Phone Directory Sync On Nexus S – TechCrunch
    Why Scoble Got the Boot from Facebook: Plaxo’s New Feature – Mashable
    What happened to Yahoo – Paul Graham
    Steve Ballmer: Microsoft Venture Capitalist Summit 2008 – Microsoft News Center
    Facebook Acquires Contact Importing Startup Octazen – GigaOM

  • Yahoo Found + more news

    Yahoo Found 

    Advertising Age has a case study of the Yahoo Found campaign that ran in London.The Yahoo Found campaign was interesting because it used the environment as an interaction with the poster executions to give it an experiential feel.

    The Yahoo Found campaign reasonated for a long time with consumers and we took found arrows on to the streets long after the poster campaign had finished to hijack the Dukes of Hazzard UK fillm premiere, SES London (with the help of Vegas showgirl outfits) and a Harry Potter book launch.

    Running a brand building campaign like Yahoo Found on a sustained basis takes a lot of cojones, especially in a corporate environment. Its a pity that Yahoo Found wasn’t exploited to its full potential.The problem that marketers now face is that brand activating tactics Google Adwords provide a safer option with PowerPoint friendly data that can be dropped into pivot tables and used like a crutch to support their decision-making in the face of a hostile management.

    What this doesn’t capture is brand equity through salience and mental availability which provides more diffuse benefits of preference over time.

    Influential analyst houses

    Interesting survey over at Duncan Chapple’s blog over which analyst houses have the most influence.Whilst the split may may change depending on what tech sector your client is in, its an interesting piece of research; particularly when you see the dominance of US focused players.

    And the fact that a good third of the most influential analysts are in the other category indicating a large amount of fragmented trusted expertise.

    EU roaming charges

    Meanwhile the GSM Association have a handy site that allows you to compare roaming charges when you visit different countries in Europe.

    I tried it using Orange post paid as my settings to have a look at different carriers. What I found interesting was that in the countries that I sampled (Germany, Ireland, Spain, France) there was not price differential between the carriers. Of course this was an unscientific test isn’t at all indicative of price fixing is it?

  • Yahoo! Answers adoption

    Yahoo! Answers was one of the last projects that I worked on when I was inhouse, I will hold my hand up and admit that I was a hawk in the Yahoo! Answers team. The reasons for my Yahoo! Answers hawk status in terms of the product being a ‘killer application’ was mainly because it failed my own ‘test’ of how is this relevant to my online life. It also suffered from the Yahoo! services problem of an off-putting onboarding process. If you weren’t put off by the sign-up then would be greeted by a product that would be familiar to business online support services.  The prototypes that I saw internally reminded me of the self service customer solutions offered by the likes of RightNow Technologies and Transversal and the support forums provided by Apple for users.

    I thought that the opportunity may be in sponsored channels: Microsoft sponsoring an XBox channel, or Sainsbury’s sponsoring a recipe channel. But this was poo-pooed as an idea by my immediate director.

    In some ways I was wrong about Yahoo! Answers success (and I am happy to be wrong in this case).Windows Live QnA doesn’t seem to have gone anywhere, Lycos IQ: though superior in terms of design and features doesn’t seem to have got that much traction so far.

    According to Hitwise (via SearchEngineWatch), Yahoo! Answers is now the third most popular reference site online, however its 2.94 per cent market share is puny in comparision to the 16.76 per cent marketshare of Wikipedia which has a Googlesque sector dominance.

    Steve Rubel has talked about Yahoo! Answers on his MicroPersuasion blog Marketers will Answer to Yahoo! and sees the opportunity for sponsored sections, which kind of squares the circle in the way that I viewed the product.

    It offers yet another opportunity for direct interaction with consumers and a channel for cummunications, but not a full-on dialogue.

    Where it gets interesting is when you look at the Google Trends data on the service, most of the search enquiries for Yahoo! Answers seems to be coming out of India, rather than the US or Europe. This will alter the services attraction for advertisers in terms of the net worth of the consumer, whether they can capitalise on the clicks through presence in the marketplace and the quality of answers given for a global audience – quality control will be a critical ongoing issue.

    In addition, where similar services have been provided in the US before, they haven’t made much of an impact. More related posts here.

  • Apple’s MacBook Pro at 20.

    Apple’s MacBook Pro turned 20 this year. Steve Jobs introduced the move to Intel processors that made the original Apple MacBook Pro possible at WWDC 2005. The reason revolved around computing power per watt. PowerPC’s offered 15 units of performance per watt, Intel’s future roadmap at the time offered 70 units of performance per watt.

    This impacted energy efficiency and heat management as much of raw processing power – both of which were important for portable devices and smaller desktop units. Those metrics were a symptom of IBM’s inability to push the PowerPC architecture and fabrication processes as far as Intel could. Here’s Steve Jobs’ from his keynote address:

    Because we want to make the best computers for our customers looking forward. Now, I stood up here two years ago in front of you and I promised you [a 3 GHz Power Macintosh G5], and we haven’t been able to deliver that to you yet. I think a lot of you would like a G5 in your PowerBook and we haven’t been able to deliver that to you yet. But these aren’t even the most important reasons. The most important reasons are that as we look ahead, though we may have great products right now, and we’ve got some great PowerPC product[s] still yet to come, as we look ahead we can envision some amazing products we want to build for you and we don’t know how to build them with the future PowerPC road map. And that’s why we’re going to do this. When we look at Intel, they’ve got great performance, yes, but they’ve got something else that’s very important to us. Just as important as performance, is power consumption. And the way we look at it is performance per watt. For one watt of power how much performance do you get? And when we look at the future road maps projected out in mid-2006 and beyond, what we see is the PowerPC gives us sort of 15 units of performance per watt, but the Intel road map in the future gives us 70, and so this tells us what we have to do.

    My journey with Apple’s MacBook Pro.

    I was leaving Yahoo! to go to an agency then called Waggener Edstrom, bringing my experience working on digital campaigns and using blogs as a product communications channel. My redundancy cheque was in my bank account and my Mac Mini was of limited use due to it being a desktop computer.

    Mac6

    Based on what I had seen the previous year and conversations I had with Yahoo! engineers there was only one laptop for me to get: the Apple MacBook Pro.

    The Apple MacBook Pro represented a step change in what you could do. You were longer tethered by your power cord to your machine. At Yahoo! we had a bad cultural habit of using our laptops in meetings, not only for presenting, but to retrieve relevant files, take notes and have sideline conversations on Yahoo! Messenger that may have been apropos to the meeting going on, or organising what to have for lunch.

    While you could access Yahoo! Messenger on your phone, it was much slower and less user friendly than iMessage, Signal or WhatsApp would be now.

    If you had two meetings back-to-back there was a dash back to your desk to plug into your charger. Going to a conference meant a scramble for those seats next to a power socket.

    The MagSafe connector meant that your laptop would no longer get dragged onto the floor by the power cable if someone brushed past your table. Instead it would be secured magnetically and easily disconnected.

    If your Apple MacBook Pro was plummeting to the floor, an accelerometer onboard would at least park the hard drive heads to minimise any damage on landing. It wasn’t fool proof but it was step out on options previously available.

    On the Apple MacBook Pro, the laptop lid closed and stayed in place, once Apple moved way from using the last generation PowerBook design case. Many Windows laptops had to have their screens locked with a latch or a button, a number still do. Previous PowerBooks were only slight more elegant with a flush mechanical push-button placed on the front edge of the lower case. Pressing it pushed a small internal bar that unhooked a latch extending down from the display bezel.

    In a darkened room the keyboard would light up. This was a game changer when you were watching a projected presentation, or in my case, going through emails while watching CSI DVD boxsets of an evening.

    Apple’s MacBook Pro was a game changer for me. I didn’t need to work at my desk. I could work in a local coffee shop, or a different part of the office without bringing my power pack.

    Apple’s MacBook Pro radically changed working from home. You no longer had to worry about a separate webcam perching precariously on the top of your screen. Instead, the MacBook Pro had it built into the top of the laptop screen. Giving you an integrated video studio that we now take for granted but was revolutionary when it was launched.

    An aside on laptop cameras

    So IBM made the first laptop with an integrated laptop with a webcam back in 1996 called the ThinkPad 850 which was a PowerPC workstation in a laptop format.

    There was also the Sony VAIO PCG-C1 PictureBook which was a Windows sub notebook that had a camera which could be rotated to look towards the user or in front of the laptop lid. Both were very expensive for the time and saw limited usage. The MD in my first agency had a PCG-C1 and it was a beautiful piece of industrial design for the time.

    DSC00161

    It’s the kind of laptop that would have looked right at home in Ghost In The Shell. Neither of them models could be considered to mainstream products. But the Apple MacBook Pro brought the built-in camera into the mainstream of laptop design.

    Remote working.

    Skype was only a few years old at this point, allowing for video calls with clients, distributed teams and remote working. With a MacBook Pro, you had it all together in a seamless package. Twenty years ago we were pretty close to what became the new normal during COVID and in the post-COVID work world.

    Battery life

    Early on in my agency career, a lot of my clients had Tumi leather bags. The Tumi Alpha bag became a corporate rite-of-passage. You were a corporate traveller. Tumi had benefits for air travellers, being soft enough to squeeze into an overseas bin, but tough enough to protect the contents and not burst at the seams while you waited at the checked baggage carousel.

    Beyond the social signalling Tumi bags became useful as a repository for spare batteries and a charging block with cable. There was probably a note pad and some pens in there as well, along with travel documents.

    That’s what a work day outside the office needed. One of the pleasures of people watching in an airline lounge at the time was watching the passive aggressive conflict over a limited amount of electric sockets available.

    The Apple MacBook Pro started off with a solid 4 1/2 hours of battery life making it ideal if you went to a conference like I ended up doing at the time. Or you could take it along to a pitch, present and head back to the office without your power brick. Things changed when Apple introduced the unibody model. You could no longer swap out a spare battery. Apple eventually compromised with a low price battery replacement for aged out batteries. This also meant that Apple pivoted to a full working day on batteries – a game changer in laptop computing.

    The move to ARM-based Apple silicon

    In the same way that Steve Jobs announced the move to Intel in 2005, that reasoning was mirrored in the 2020 move to ARM-based Apple silicon focus on performance per watt, which made the MacBook Pro even more ‘road warrior’ friendly.

    ARM also offered other opportunities

    • Custom silicon including on-silicon neural networks and security enclaves.
    • Common architectures with iPads, iPhones and the AppleTV.
    • Control over its own silicon roadmap, rather than being tied to Intel’s chip-making process delays.

    What’s also changed over the 15 years of the MacBook Pro is their ubquity. In coffee shops like the ones near my home, the few people that seem to use non-Apple laptops are usually mainland Chinese students. And their laptops borrow a lot design cues from the MacBook Pro.

    More information

    Macworld Podcast: The history and future of the MacBook | Macworld

    More related posts here.

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