E-mail readers of this column don’t have an easy way to leave comments so of course they send them straight to me, which is easily done simply by hitting reply. Other bloggers are smarter than I am and don’t use their actual e-mail address for the feed. The trend this morning among my e-mailers is to see the hiring of Marissa Mayer at Yahoo as some kind of trick by Google. Ms. Mayer is Google to the core, readers say, and she’s going to Yahoo simply as a commando to pick and choose future Google acquisitions.
No, she isn’t.
But I can’t write just a two paragraph column so I’ll go on to suggest what I think Ms. […]
If Aaron Sorkin (The Social Network, The West Wing) was writing the story of Yahoo and he got to Marissa Mayer’s surprise entrance yesterday as Yahoo’s latest CEO, here’s how he would probably play it: the brilliant, tough, beautiful, charismatic engineer defies her Google glass ceiling and, through sheer vision and clever example, saves the pioneering Internet company. That’s how Sorkin would play it because he likes an underdog, loves smart, well-spoken people, and revels in beautiful if slightly flawed characters and happy endings. But in this case Aaron Sorkin would be playing it wrong.
A reader pointed out to me this week that the personal computer is well over 30 years old — a number that has real consequence if you are familiar with my work. He remembered I predicted in 1992 that PCs as we knew them would be dead by now. I was obviously a little off in my timing. But only a little off. PCs are still doomed and their end will come quicker than you think.
In a few weeks I’ll be launching a YouTube channel where you’ll be able to see lots of shows readers have been asking about including Startup America and even that lost second season of NerdTV. YouTube, as the largest video streaming service anywhere, is the absolute best place for me. But YouTube isn’t the future of TV.
With Facebook now public and sitting on a huge pile of cash, let’s turn the conversation to the social network’s most pressing competitor, Google. Google and Google+ don’t appear to present much of a threat to Facebook, but the game board was reset on Friday and tactics at both companies will change accordingly. Now Facebook has to find a way to grow revenue and users and will increasingly bump up against Google’s huge advantages in search and apps. For Facebook to achieve its goals, the company will have to enter both spaces with gusto.
