AOL+Yahoo is a Jealousy Game

If you think AOL actually intends to buy Yahoo, you are wrong. That story hit the press this week but it’s a ruse to motivate Google exactly as I explained a few days ago. AOL has neither the money nor the motivation to buy Yahoo, which is analogous to a bus company buying a poorly-managed airline.  AOL just wants to make Google jealous.

Here’s what I think happened. This is pure speculation on my part, of course, but I know most of the players and am even correct from time to time. I think one or more private equity firms brought the deal to AOL: they’ll put up the capital if AOL’s Tim Armstrong […]

By |October 15th, 2010|2010|49 Comments
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Trolling for Dollars

Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen filed suit this week against a litany of Internet companies claiming they had violated patents awarded years ago to Allen’s now-defunct Interval Research. Many writers, including one passing himself off as me, claimed this made Allen a so-called “patent troll. ”

I don’t think that is the case.

Patent trolls are individuals or companies that habitually sue others over obscure patents. While the Interval patents generally are obscure, that doesn’t make them invalid. And the fact that Allen and then-partner Dave Liddle paid $100 million for the basic research behind those patents, well that hardly sounds like troll behavior.

If Paul Allen actually were a patent troll. he would have sued in […]

By |August 31st, 2010|2010|27 Comments
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The Future of Television (part II)

predicta2My last column generated a lively debate on the prospects for various business and technical options for the delivery of Internet TV so it makes sense to continue this topic and build it into a more full-featured model.  I used to write quite a bit about this back when I was trying to get NerdTV going.  The core of what I’ll write here can be found in a couple dozen columns from back then — columns that would seem to have been for the most part forgotten given the direction last week’s discussion took.  You see the future of television IS Internet television.  There is no other in sight.

No business or technology exists in a […]

By |May 13th, 2009|2009, Internet, Media, Technology|205 Comments
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Yahoo Should Buy Microsoft

microsoft_yahoo_1

My last column was all about the culture of Microsoft and how it makes real change difficult for the company.  It’s not just at Microsoft that these things happen, by the way: nearly all mature organizations get into similar ruts.  And if, like Microsoft, they are spectacularly profitable ruts, well then it isn’t surprising that things stay more or less permanently dysfunctional.

I said last time that a second column would follow with my specific suggestions for restructuring Microsoft, but now that I am really into it I think we might be looking at a total of three columns, not two.  But then I’ll be finished with Microsoft for a few months.

Setting out […]

By |February 8th, 2009|Uncategorized|59 Comments
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Surviving 2009

Microsoft

Microsoft may or may not make a deal for Yahoo’s search service.  What neither firm realizes yet is there is a better way to do searches with value advertising.  It will be easier than what Google is doing and can produce more tangible results.  Right now both firms are in the mind set of “competing with Google” instead of being creative and innovative.  When they start thinking independently and start tuning into what the customer needs, Google will have some competition.

Apple

If Apple would port its Mac software (iWork, iLife, Final Cut, etc) to Windows it could quickly OWN the software market.  Microsoft’s competitive advantage is not Windows — it is Office.  Apple could take them out if it chose to.  They won’t in 2009.  […]

By |December 16th, 2008|2009|177 Comments
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