The Mill Pond this afternoon.
Daily Archives: January 10, 2015
Mad Max rides again
As I was saying, now is the time to keep our heads. Max Hastings, alas, has lost his:
Our principal weapons against terrorists are not tanks, Typhoon fighter jets or warships, but instead intelligence officers using electronic surveillance.
Much cant has been peddled recently about the supposed threat to liberty posed by government eavesdropping on our lives.
Such people as WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and Edward Snowden (the former U.S. National Security Agency contractor turned treacherous fugitive), who have broadcast American and British secrets wholesale, are celebrated as heroes by some people who should know better, many of them writing for the Guardian or broadcasting for the BBC.
In truth, Assange and Snowden have damaged the security of each and every one of us, by alerting the jihadis and Al Qaeda, our mortal enemies, to the scale and reach of electronic eavesdropping.
Eh? As Caspar Bowden tweeted, “culprits of Paris, Woolwich, Boston not just all known to police, already jailed/ wiretapped for terrorism, or failed double-agent recruits”. So where does Snowden come into this? Answer: nowhere.
Marissa Mayer and Yahoo’s USP-deficit
My Observer review of Nicholas Carlson’s Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo.
[Yahoo] grew rapidly in the late 1990s, riding the crest of the first internet boom and metamorphosing into a “portal” – a gateway to the web. By 1999, Yahoo had 4,000 employees, 250 million users and $590m in annual revenues – much of it from advertising by dotcom firms. In March 2000 its market cap peaked at $128bn.
And then came the crash. The dot-com bubble burst, the laws of economic gravity reasserted themselves and ever since then Yahoo has been struggling to find its raison d’etre. The question that has always bedevilled it is the classic one from children’s books: Mummy, what is that company for? For its competitors, the answer is generally straightforward: Google is for search; Facebook is for social networking; Amazon is for online retail, and possibly world domination; Microsoft is for Office and desktop computers. But nobody really knows what Yahoo is for – what its unique selling proposition is.
This USP-deficit is largely a product of the company’s history. Its co-founders are genial hippie types who weren’t even sure they wanted to found a company…