This morning’s Observer column
Those whom the Gods would destroy, they first make clever. That, at any rate, is the conclusion to be drawn from recent ‘systemic failures’, all of which have occurred in systems designed and built by ostensibly very clever people…
… I should have paid more attention to the horizontals.
… in 1970, Bertrand Russell died. I’ve always loved his essay In Praise of Idleness for its wonderful definition of ‘work’:
Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth’s surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid.”
Great career advice for any young person.
Intriguing speculation about the detailed implications of a Microsoft-Yahoo merger.
While the tech world waits to see whether Yahoo will accept Microsoft’s $44.6 billion takeover bid, Microsoft and Yahoo employees sleep restlessly at the prospect of massive staff cuts if the takeover goes ahead. There’s a lot of duplication between Yahoo and Microsoft’s internet arms and services will shut and/ or be downsized as content and services from each cross-pollinate across the merged entity.
Here’s some upcoming clashes and which side/ service may continue into the future…
From my point of view, the only interesting question is what would happen to Flickr.
The trouble with Oppenheimer is that he loves a woman who doesn’t love him — the United States government”.
Albert Einstein
A friend has just logged into the Revenue and Customs web site to submit her tax return. (She was unable to do it yesterday because the site was, er, unavailable.) She was greeted by this reassuring dialog box. What’s going on? The return-submission site is unreachable today too.
This is an agency of the government which expects us to trust it with ID cards.
I always thought the MySpace/Google deal was a work of genius — for Rupert Murdoch. It’s beginning to look as though I was right.
The stock market may be fretting over Google’s disappointing earnings, but somewhere Rupert Murdoch is smiling.
One of the weaknesses that Google’s management highlighted in its conference call was advertising on social networks. The company said its traffic acquisition cost, the money it pays to sites on which it places ads, rose in the fourth quarter because of required minimum payments it must make to certain sites.
“We have found that social networking inventory is not monetizing as well as we would like,” said George Reyes, Google’s chief financial officer, implying that the sites on which the minimum payments are due were social networks. By far, the largest social network on which Google sells ads is MySpace, which is owned by Mr. Murdoch’s News Corp. In 2006, Google agreed to a three-year deal to sell ads on MySpace, committing to pay a minimum of $900 million.
People involved in that deal said that Google never assumed that it would earn its $900 million back from that deal, but it appears to be losing even more than it had expected.
From The Register…
[Google CEO] Schmidt is very proud of the company’s international growth, and he says there’s still “tremendous potential” for further growth outside the US. In Q4, overseas revenue hit $2.32bn, which amounts to 48 per cent of the company’s overall revenue. In Q4 2006, international dollars accounted for only 44 of overall revenue.
No, you needn’t do the math by yourself. Total revenues for the quarter ending Dec. 31, 2007 were $4.83bn. That’s a 51 per cent jump from Q4 2006. Meanwhile, Q4 profits were $1.2bn, a 17 per cent jump from the previous year.
Believe it or not, this is bad news for Google. For just the third time in the past 14 quarters, the company failed to meet the expectations of Wall Street analysts.
So, even though world domination is a distinct possibility, Google’s stock price is on the way down. At least for the moment.