en-us http://www.keithwatanabe.net/index.php Keith Watanabe's Website http://www.keithwatanabe.net/blogs/2007/10/25/6075a06abab5b029af7e29de5b2261f8.html
The thing to me is that Facebook has no real value to the individual except maybe a slightly better interface. The AJAX capabilities outshines Friendster and Myspace. Overall though that should not persuade someone like myself to put such a high emphasis on this company. More than that, it's extremely tiring when one has to continuously migrate their data and friend's data from one site to another since these sites continue to perform poorly in terms of unique services.

With regards to Micro$oft's renewed attempt to get into the SNS space, I think it's a dumb move. Micro$oft doesn't know jackshit about people, which is why they've failed at getting into the web. As long as people like Baller is in charge, I believe that M$ will continue to fail in becoming involved in the web. They don't understand it, they never will. M$ really needs to stay away from the web and allow other companies to move forward. M$ is the main perpetrator of problems on the web like viruses, data theft, usability issues, etc. since their software is built for them to have a monopoly, yet lacking essential things to make people's lives better.

If M$ wants to continue voyaging in this space, they need to invest in unique sites that add value to the web, not put tons of money into worthless sites. BTW, M$ if you want a site some day, forward me $2 mil. I've got a couple of nice ideas for you.]]> Thu, 25 Oct 2007 10:08:34 -0600 http://www.keithwatanabe.net/blogs/2007/10/25/6075a06abab5b029af7e29de5b2261f8.html http://www.keithwatanabe.net/blogs/2008/2/1/f1033a369b039e1b3c14415bab3bed4b.html
On second thought, the idea horrifies me.

It horrifies me, not in the thought that M$ and Yahoo would be this mega corporation. But it horrifies that it's really a dumb idea. For both companies.

Both companies see Google as The Enemy. This is erroneous thinking and a myth that's become perpetuated horribly in Silicon Valley that people have been utterly brainwashed by the hype.

Google is simply a company with a lot of innovation, a vision of how it wants to shape the future, and it's uncompromising nature to make good on that vision. Yahoo, M$, Ballmer, and a lot of other people see it as simply a territorial war in ad space. Ads are the only thing that fuel Google and it's probably why Ballmer wants to strike them in that area. Honestly, there's absolutely zero reason for M$ to get into that market in the first place because they dominate in so many other markets.

But when I look at M$ after Bill Gates stepped down, I realized that they took an incredible misstep in promoting Ballmer to the position of CEO. Ballmer, for all intents and purposes, is indeed the stereotypical Pointy-Haired-Boss from Dilbert. Heck, I'm certain Scott Adams must've got his inspiration from some where :p Ballmer was an operations guy, someone who knew how to streamline the internal business. But as far as a leader in technology, Ballmer lacks vision, except tunnel vision. One slashdotter aptly put it that Ballmer's myopic quest to end Google is probably going to end up killing whatever dignity M$ has left.

The combination of Yahoo and M$ would be horrible for the industry. People predict that the acquisition would make the combined companies stronger in terms of a rival for Google. Instead, the truth is that the acquisition would end up killing both companies while Google sits back and watches the flames spurn from the distance.

I believe that the acquisition would cause more irrevocable harm to both companies because it'll simply bloat M$ up even further than it is. Think about the internal politics, the restructuring, the name calling when it comes to using which product. Both companies have incredibly strong personalities and senses of identity. So a merger would just rip into the fabric of time and space.

And it'll make both companies even less agile in this market.

Google's internal culture promotes agility as much as a company of that size can. In Ballmer's obsessed state, I think he'll go mad micromanaging what stays and goes in the Yahoo brand. Why would there even be a Yahoo brand after the acquisition? Everything would be re-branded and slowly migrated to a decaying Vista platform. Then the services would grow slow, less open, and charged. In the meantime, companies like Facebook and Google will continue to open up their services and give out the crack called open source and APIs to hungry developers that will consume up such gifts while M$ begs old customers to stay on their aging platform.

This is the reality of what will happen if this acquisition goes through.

Now, to Mr. Jerry Yang.

My advice to you is this. Your shareholders are important, but money isn't everything. M$'s deal is their own poison and they don't even realize it. All the work you've striven to accomplish with the Yahoo brand will slowly fade. And honestly, do you really need more money?

Move away from the deal. If you take it, you will be one of the most despised men in the industry. All your loyal Yahoo employees will migrate away to companies like Google, Facebook (if they haven't already) in disgust at your selling them out. The Yahoo must remain independent to allow for people to choose. Terry Semel did a lot of damage in a similar manner that Ballmer is doing to M$. But if you want to correct the damage that Semel did, you must allow the Yahoo identity to remain, give the customers what they want and show guts and vision in this period. Yes, Yahoo isn't doing well financially as expected, but many companies will face a similar crunch in the coming quarters. That's how the market is just going to react from the greed of the housing market. The buyout is nothing more than a short term snort of cocaine for your investors, but in the end they'll lose and you'll lose.

Don't sell Yahoo to M$. It's a bad deal.

Besides, if you do sell to M$, Google will simply buy Sun and merge with Apple. Then what are you going to do?]]> Fri, 01 Feb 2008 10:25:18 -0700 http://www.keithwatanabe.net/blogs/2008/2/1/f1033a369b039e1b3c14415bab3bed4b.html http://www.keithwatanabe.net/blogs/2008/2/4/0fd6ac98f50d9094f34f6ad5cd2596f4.html
I feel it's like being on a battle field where you're seeing all the lines of allies and enemies being drawn up. Or maybe it's closer to who's going to pull the trigger first.

I've already stated that I firmly believe that Yahoo should remain independent as M$'s move would simply hurt themselves and the industry. I think Yahoo themselves both internally and key members of management feel the same way. Not to mention that there was an interesting reaction where Yahoo mentioned increasing their relationship with Google. I'm hoping that people aren't just looking at the sheets, but all the different angles of what this buy out means. It's not that easy and I continue to believe that hostile marketing by companies like M$ have been bestowing negative imagery upon Yahoo.

While I do believe Yahoo hasn't done so well for itself, you cannot deny the power that they hold. It's just that people hold huge expectations for them. The truth is that right now, economics in the world have not been doing well. It's just a simple casualty of the fall out from the subprime loan situation in America.

If you just take these three players, the thing is that you have to make them realize what their relationship to each other is. Google is becoming the OS/engine of the web. Yahoo is the media and supplier of information in the web. And M$ is a steering way or maybe a window to the web.

These three companies should respect each other on these grounds. If I were the government and forced to intervene on these warring parties, I would have them make an agreement to how their businesses are divided.

Regardless of what's going on, I have to admit that this is one of the most interesting times to be part of this industry. Glad, I'm working in it and for it.
]]> Mon, 04 Feb 2008 10:30:46 -0700 http://www.keithwatanabe.net/blogs/2008/2/4/0fd6ac98f50d9094f34f6ad5cd2596f4.html http://www.keithwatanabe.net/blogs/2008/2/4/001c4b1ebaa65176fae393eba52a6351.html

• Buy Sun out. Sun bought Mysql out and practically are a great hardware distributor. Spin Sun's hardware business off as an independent company, and as a primary distributor to Google. Take over all patents for Java and release them as pure Open Source. Re-do the whole N-1 grid programming project and combine Google's OS with Sun's Unix in creating a distributed, grid programming platform, completely supported by Google. Cater to start ups and midsized companies by eliminating the need for DBAs, system administrators and production support groups by providing round the clock service for all areas of support. Kill Sun's SunOne Identity management system in favor of OpenID as a de facto standard for the industry's constant id management system crisis.
• Merge or partner in a closer relation to Apple. Force Apple to lower the cost of desktop systems, get rid of Safari, and only provide Firefox as the true browser of choice.
• Buy Facebook already. Orkut is useless so get rid of it. Also, OpenSocial sucks because it's too limited. Give that kid his money already and put someone with experience in charge.
• Buy the Mozilla corporation out. Come on. We know you want them.
• Create a new business for web businesses. A complete investment model. Think of it as building a new town. You have the land, the wood, the construction trucks. But you have no dependent businesses to make the town a city. To initially attract the people to your city, you give them what you need. In return, your citizens pay tax to help the city to prosper.

This is my vision for Google. Want to hire me as a strategist yet?????]]> Mon, 04 Feb 2008 10:43:37 -0700 http://www.keithwatanabe.net/blogs/2008/2/4/001c4b1ebaa65176fae393eba52a6351.html http://www.keithwatanabe.net/blogs/2008/2/9/6a7c0e83310d0523b497ce3f2940c9d5.html
I've stated it before that the whole deal is just nasty. I'm certain many on the inside of Yahoo and other companies certainly fear, detest and want to avoid this deal at all cost. However, because this involves purely money, shareholders, being the sheep that they are, probably are thinking of the short term value that they can from such a deal. Some are calling this move from M$ a hostile takeover, since it's basically a bribe to Yahoo's shareholders in order to lay claims to the company. And of course, I'm just against the idea completely.

Some writers, like Arlington from TechCrunch, feel otherwise in terms of turning around the company. While I'm not certain if Jerry Yang is the person that can do this enormous job after the damage Terry Semel caused the company, I do think that Yahoo has to plan for the long term. I think writers like Arlington are "stuck in the valley" and don't view things from a global perspective, nor from a wider perspective. He did write up a better analysis of the theoretical acquisition which would cause the company to bloat and reduce near term action. But his position still is in this mystical long term view of the value of Yahoo.

To me, big mergers just don't work out and there are many cases in history to demonstrate where these incompatibilities disrupted and destroyed the foundations of some good companies. My coworker and I discussed this issue and pointed out how companies like AOL-TimeWarner really fell apart, and that now AOL is just losing money. Or think about the HP-Compaq merger done by Carly. It simply hindered the old engineering corporate culture that HP was famous for by adapting the HR practices put forth by Compaq. Or in Japan, look at the disaster that came out from the whole Mizuho banking merger of three major banks. It did position Mizuho higher than many other companies, but they went through their own disasters initially when they rushed the roll out of their combined ATM systems.

I think acquisitions work far better on a smaller scale. Certainly, M$ is indeed larger than Yahoo. Look at the market cap, the amount of money in the bank, their annual gross and the number of employees they have. But Yahoo is still a large, powerful company with a strong culture and sense of identity. This isn't a situation where you have M$ buying out a limited player like Facebook, or ebay purchasing StumbleUpon. This is clearly a threat and everyone in the industry, minus those shareholders, know it.

I've emphasized what Yahoo needs to do to succeed. Becoming community oriented, opening up their data APIs for developers, becoming a company to act as a technological venture company for young businesses and re-utilizing their infrastructure so that existing businesses don't have to re-invent scalability and reliability each time. These are Yahoo's strengths but they have yet to monetize them in a sensible way. Becoming a WebOS/creative platform for people to build the next generation of internet properties are what these giants should leverage their technology for. And it makes a lot of sense to me.

For instance, I was talking to my friend who works at my previous company. They have a VERY poor (global) support model. The local infrastructure particularly is setup incredibly poor that there's no good ways to handle things like VPN, mass software installation, server maintenance, etc. The chief problem is that the company had piss poor people who are of the lowest caliber. A company like this who wants to have the killer applications running efficiently and doing seamless deployments is someone who would make a great candidate for a company like Yahoo to host their applications. DBAs, System administrators, network support people, security administrators, etc. are practically a dime a dozen. Getting solid versions of these types to build up a killer infrastructure are rare compared to the number of these out there. But truthfully, the types of infrastructure that most companies want are not too dissimilar. They want the three tiered architecture, the app servers, the web servers, etc. Most companies spend needless amounts and probably would be better off spending their money on pure development, since development requires a high degree of creativity that implements the business ideas (whereas support are not really related as closely by comparison).

So having Yahoo handle the infrastructure setup right down to the deployment methodology would solve a lot of companies' IT problems. You wouldn't need to perform due diligence against a shady consulting company claiming that they can handle some top down solution, especially if their track record is hidden from view. You'd also avoid getting those so-called "shadow IT" departments where business people end up setting up their own infrastructure because the core IT team is either too restrictive, too backlogged or just too dumb and lazy to give the business what it wants.

With a Yahoo, imagine what you'd get. A trustworthy name containing all the solutions a business needs. You'd have your email, your single sign on, your chat, your APIs, your 24/7 up servers, your global support, the raw network speed, etc. It makes perfect sense.

Jerry Yang, this is my gift to you. My view of what Yahoo should focus on. Call it Yahoo Enterprise Business.]]> Sat, 09 Feb 2008 11:09:46 -0700 http://www.keithwatanabe.net/blogs/2008/2/9/6a7c0e83310d0523b497ce3f2940c9d5.html http://www.keithwatanabe.net/blogs/2008/2/9/5ff7691a596840ed7ad265af06d8c08d.html
My feeling about this deal is that it's a personal agenda item from Steve Ballmer. It's been well documented on Ballmer's personal attacks against Google and his desire to put an end to them. It's kinda strange because I don't think a lot of businesses are quickly converting over to Google in terms of their office software. A lot of companies still employee and will probably continue to employee M$ Office just for compatibility in sharing documents between other businesses. I mean, Open Office probably does a better job than Google's Apps for handling M$ Office compatibility issues. And by the time Google can rival M$ on these areas, M$ just has to create further incompatibilities. In other words, M$ will continue to make a boatload of money from their desktop products and can mutually survive with Google in the playing field.

So why would M$ fear Google?

I don't think that M$ honestly fears Google at all. I think the reason for this mess is that Steve Ballmer is fearing for his position as CEO of M$.

M$ in the past few years has been for the most part a joke. Some items on my list to ridicule M$ on are:

• Vista. Bloated, people are asking for XP. Not a good sign.
• XBox. At one time, M$ was losing money for each XBox produced. Other companies are excelling in the game industry and M$ isn't the only one in the field.
• Zune. iPod holds the better product and M$ was just far too late to get into this playing field.
• MSN. It just sucks. Face it.
• Live/Spaces. M$ doesn't understand the web and never will.
• Ads. Google owns with Yahoo being the closest second.
• Firefox catching up in terms of market share compared with MSIE. IE is a terrible product and is a cause for many viruses on the web with its insecurities.
• Security. M$ has the worst record for security.

And so on. M$ has just an awful track record in the past few years. And who's at the helm?

Steve Ballmer

What does that say? While Google made headway as the fastest and largest growing software company around (and it's funny calling them a software company), M$ has been nothing but the biggest butt of jokes. Steve Ballmer hasn't done a thing to take M$ ahead of the game because he's just a pointy haired boss. He's not a visionary like Gates, he never was a tech guy. He's just an operations fellow who managed to move up because of his past relationship with Paul and Bill.

With such a list of failures, I'm certain numerous people within the company and shareholders alike are calling for Ballmer's head in the near term future, kinda like how people wanted to impeach George Bush for his failures. Well, their product line ups have failed in not being able to copy as successfully as their competitors. And bullying is no longer an option at this point because they lack the market share in the internet compared with Yahoo and Google. So their last resort in M$'s typical business tactics is to buy.

If the deal went through, Ballmer might initially look like a star. He'd have his place in M$ history as being the guy who had slain the ancient dominant dragon of Yahoo sitting on a mound of global shares of wealth and connections. He would get his 2-3 year extension as CEO and probably receive renumeration in shares from the deal with Yahoo, making him one of the most powerful CEOs around.

It's purely ego driven.

What it isn't is solid business sense.

This is the deal that will honestly kill M$ in the long term. I think Ballmer will promise Yahoo and M$'s shareholders of being able to reorganize and turnaround both companies in being able to compete in the market place against Google. Initially, shareholders thrilled at hearing news will become emotional, not really seeing that this ploy is simply a tactic to buy time for Ballmer's lack of vision. Heads will roll at both companies, more likely Yahoo's than M$'s. Products will be deactivated or slashed out of existence. Fights will occur between teams. There might even be a stupid notion of trying to migrate the entire Yahoo platform onto Windows. That would definitely destroy everything Yahoo has built. Look at Hotmail when they tried to migrate it to NT. How can either company do anything productive while organizational battles go on to survive within both companies? How can innovation thrive in a big re-organization?

Look at the HP-Compaq merger. It took them about 3 years before things came about. In the meantime, other players like Gateway/Emachines and Dell surged. The HP-Compaq merger offended a lot of veteran HP employees. Certainly, the policies between Yahoo and M$ would differ enough to cause cultural clashes between both companies.

But I think that the market in the internet is far more competitive and more agile than the PC hardware market. Applications can be built faster and better than selling a PC at lower cost. In the internet market, you have to blast out applications at a rapid pace and innovate where your competitors are not focusing their strengths. Google has a culture of the 20% rule. With the threat of M$-Yahoo, this rule might be the key for Google's survival.

And probably some of the most valuable employees that Yahoo will lose are their engineering team. I can easily see engineers leaving by the dozens while Google offers them a safe haven. You gotta think about how an engineer inside Yahoo might react. I'm certain many Yahoo engineers love Linux, love open source and hate Windows. The very thought of having to use a restricted proprietary system would make them want to leave. And I'm certain many of these people are highly motivated and extremely bright, wanting to get their chance at their own 20% rule that probably was killed off when Terry Semel took hold of the reigns in Yahoo.

Either way, this deal only has one benefactor: Ballmer. But he's not going to be the star he believes he's making himself into. He's going to be another Carly, and at the end of the day, he's going to have a miserable farewell and will be ridiculed as a visionless, do-little CEO.
]]> Sat, 09 Feb 2008 11:40:23 -0700 http://www.keithwatanabe.net/blogs/2008/2/9/5ff7691a596840ed7ad265af06d8c08d.html http://www.keithwatanabe.net/blogs/2008/3/8/29f9dff1168b0564e1ae4ac6e9660719.html

• Lock down of engineers. Remember the embittered battle between M$, Google and Kai-Fu Lee? All engineers would face similar non-compete clauses upon the transition. Obviously, Google would be a safe haven, but it's doubtful that they could fully employ all engineers initially.
• Lack of support for non-IE browsers. Considering Yahoo's global reach, the impact of revoking support for non-IE browsers would be a tremendous blow to the internet market, especially browsers like Firefox, Safari and Opera. Don't think they'll do it? Just check out their new 3-D image technology which forces people to upgrade to Vista and the latest version just to view! It's not a coincidence people.
• Absorption of numerous user accounts. M$ has long wanted to create a standardized portal for user information management. Remember the failure called Passport? Getting Yahoo's tremendous registered user base would take them one step closer to that reality.
• Intellectual property absorption. All that information that Yahoo has collected over the years and given away for free would be owned by M$ in nefarious manners. While people criticize Yahoo for not monetizing their properties, it's almost a lock that the absorption of Yahoo into the M$ fold would imply that slowly they'd determine a method to get a return on investment for each Yahoo property. In other words, all that hard work you've done uploading photos, creating social networks, etc. would more than likely be charged in the future. The only reason for the moment while M$ gives away things for free is that they don't have the reach that collectively all these competitors have. But grabbing Yahoo brings them closer and quicker to that goal.
  
• Absorption of all the partnerships that Yahoo has. I think one of the internet's strengths, especially companies like Yahoo, is that it provides smaller players the chance to succeed by utilizing these services. Moving Yahoo into M$ means that M$ can now control these services and do whatever they want like increasing fees. In the case of APIs where other sites might employ the various web services provided by Yahoo, M$ would be able to shut them out or force them to sign new contracts and monetize those services (not a bad idea in reality, but M$ is not the player I'd want to be handling this)

A skunk is still a skunk. I think people are only looking at the dollar signs and failures of Yahoo recently rather than examining the big picture. M$ will continue to play a zero sum game when it comes to business for as long as they exist. And here it will not be any different.]]> Sat, 08 Mar 2008 08:43:21 -0700 http://www.keithwatanabe.net/blogs/2008/3/8/29f9dff1168b0564e1ae4ac6e9660719.html http://www.keithwatanabe.net/blogs/2008/4/23/32b23b2b038c45bbae1076caafba1af4.html written (sorry about the punctuation) about the move away from pure client computing to distributed services. I think we'll still struggle to certain degrees between privacy and security for a while. It's inevitable.

However, in M$ embracing the web full throttle, that implies (for me at least) that my net value has actually risen. Sounds odd interjecting such a statement/idea in a situation where someone is proclaiming a massive change in course for the largest software company in the world. Yet think closely on that statement.

The shift in focus basically means that people programming pure client applications or even two tiered, client-server apps are pretty much obsolete and that we need to now focus on what I've been doing for the past nearly 9 years. Or is this really true?

I honestly don't see much of a difference in general in the paradigms. The basics are the same. Ask for some data. Send some data. Display some data. And nuke some data.

The major difference is that we're using massively distributed networks with more open standards, and mechanisms for exchanging what used to be more proprietary systems. We'll be focusing on increasing the depth and richness of data being exchanged as well as increasing the stability of the platforms by utilizing the concepts of cloud computing.

What I don't think people realize here is that what we ought to be doing is trying to diversify the types of information/services out there. Obviously, there's going to be a lot of replication going around and I see that being just as bad as having spaghetti code inside a single, omnipresent file with no abstraction. In other words, replication is a bad practice in the web services as well because we're simply not being economic and ecological in that sense.

Maybe I'm getting cynical and old. It's like that saying, "The more things change, the more they stay the same." Yeah, we get a little more redundancy, but I want to see rich services with tons of details that we can mine for useful information that helps progress computing, rather than just rebuilding what we've done in the past.

And regarding my paycheck, I'm hoping that Ozzie's validation of the web increases my salary in the near future because I didn't spend the last 9 years sacrificing late nights in trying to be competitive for nothing.]]> Wed, 23 Apr 2008 10:07:00 -0600 http://www.keithwatanabe.net/blogs/2008/4/23/32b23b2b038c45bbae1076caafba1af4.html http://www.keithwatanabe.net/blogs/2008/6/22/b9824fa5af094d779237b27531136518.html
Probably, we need to start with the deal on M$ and Yahoo that never went through. For a few months, I remember reading more than one site discussing the possible buyout of Yahoo by MSN. I believe even I suggested something like that with the threat of Google looming in the background. Despite the actual move, I never actually thought MSN would make the move so soon, but that move had triggered a chain of events that are historical and political in nature.

The natural reason for the buyout from M$'s point of view was to thwart Google. Steve Ballmer has been notorious for his outburst, directing his rage against Google. Rather than utilizing the situation as a real business opportunity, Steve Ballmer turned this situation into what seemed (to me at least) like a personal crusade to bury Google and Eric Schmidt in particular.

Ballmer ought to watch the Godfather (kinda like Bill Gates' character in Pirates of Silicon Valley) in emulating Vito Corleone in never showing his true intentions and feelings. If anything his outburst aided in the perception that M$ was purely going to do this deal to hurt Google, much in the same way Sonny Corleone would tip off Solozzo "the Turk" in being interested in Solozzo's drug deal, something Vito Corleone wanted no part of.

My interpretation of Ballmer's choice of Yahoo in particular was to get that final feather in his cap he desperately needs in his tenure as a CEO. Thus far, Ballmer's reign as CEO has been plagued by highly publicized disasters. The XBox money losing fiasco, Vista's lack of acceptance by the public, M$'s failure to capitalize on new grounds on the internet market (particularly social networking), the massive loss of ground of the server side to Linux, and Google's slow but imminent penetration in the enterprise through their free apps. Thus far, we have yet to see M$ come out on top as they had conquered the 80's and early to mid 90's.

The deal in itself is nothing new to M$. In fact, M$'s typical business practices historically have been to buy or copy, never innovate. In relation to the internet, M$ has no clue. Without monopolistic practices like bundling Internet Explorer with the operating system, M$ would have a difficult time catching up to some of the mega internet crazes such as social networking, blogging and open APIs. With Yahoo having a huge percentage of the internet in their pocket due to their longevity and brand name recognition, Yahoo would fit nicely in M$'s scheme of things.

That aside, another well known fact about M$ is their anti-competitive practices. For some reason, it seems that many of the internet writers had suddenly favored the deal, rather than remembering M$'s infamous past cases of monopolistic practices (and I for one believe that these writers probably had some stock in either M$ or Yahoo). Still, many of us remember the pre-internet days where we were enslaved to the M$ OS. With M$ potentially acquiring Yahoo, the outcome would be a monstrous capitalization on the internet ad market, something that M$ wants dearly as everyone knows for a fact how Google uses that market as their primary course of survival.

Fortunately, for whatever reason, M$/Ballmer did not go through in the end. Of course, Jerry Yang and other Yahoo executives had staved off the invasion temporarily through attempting to raise the price (although Yang himself doesn't really need the money), provide excellent severance packages for their employees and just delaying. Threats of proxy fights would be imminent as would shareholder lawsuits. But truthfully, there is far more at stake than money on the table.

From there until now, Yahoo itself would go through a new barrage of assaults. Although Yahoo and Google would ink a deal (which I will discuss hereafter), that would not halt the acid rain coming from the murky clouds of disgruntled employees and the wrath of their shareholders. The shareholders, in their infinite myopic perception, only care about immediate return, especially in this downturn economy. In some ways, Yang and company are now finding out the hard way why having a public company isn't always about just making money from stock options and that those years of loyalty were non-existent and that these people were waiting just for a moment like this to cash in their checks.

Worse yet, Yahoo, kinda like a whore spreading her legs and awaiting an infection, would receive a truly menacing threat from Carl Icahn when he would purchase up a good number of their shares on the market. I can't say anything good about this guy. I don't even know if he understands the implication of what he's doing in his proxy fight. But it's obvious how some investors had managed to manipulate him into going into this fight as a cause.

Then you have the mass exodus leaving Yahoo. As I mentioned the other day, this doesn't necessary imply a bad thing. But I'll get on to that later.

But let's step back to my previous point about the Google-Yahoo deal. I think this latest and known development is pretty blatant and really is where you have to read carefully between the lines. The deal in a nutshell is Google giving Yahoo some bribery money to appease their shareholders. It's not the level of money that the shareholders want, but it's meant to prevent them from bitching too much. It's also a (begrudging) thank you to Yahoo for helping them out before, back when they were starting out. Most importantly, it's a way to keep Yahoo in Google's pocket (which is the irony of ironies) and for M$ to stay away.

Now, one may ask, "Is that really such a great thing? Isn't that collusion?" YUP!!! It's collusion kinda like George Bush and Cheney getting hidden handshakes from the oil companies in supporting their campaigns while the administration goes through great lengths in protecting these industries. Well, if that's the case, why isn't that considered monopolistic or why would I slam M$ for only doing what Google ended up getting?

It's simple. From my point of view, I really don't fear and mind Google as much as other people. Do I trust them? No, I don't trust anyone (for that matter). But I know for a fact based on history, based on Ballmer's rants against Google, that the deal was basically the lesser of two evils. The main thing is to continue allowing a company like Yahoo to remain independent.

At this point, both Yahoo and Google are propping up a lot of smaller companies through their ad networks. Eliminating one or both would stifle competition potentially. Back in the day when I was attending UC Irvine, the "in-thing" (prior to the IPO dot com craze of the late 90's) was the MBA guys hooking up with the computer science undergraduates, building an application and hoping to get the company sold to M$ so that the founders could make out like bandits. These days, we have a lot more players that can provide that assistance in the form of eBay, Google, Yahoo, Amazon (though not as a common), etc. Eliminating those companies would mean that a more limited selection of companies and people could make it, rather than having an increasing number of competitors on the market. Just common business sense for anyone who isn't a shareholder of M$ or Yahoo.

The other thing is that when I look at Sergie Brin and Larry Page, I don't perceive the same obsessed nuttiness of Ballmer nor the domineering, business savvy of Bill Gates. I see two guys who are very smart scientists/engineers working with someone who has a good sense of business in Eric Schmidt. Maybe 10 years from now, that might all change, but seeing their interviews and such, I just don't get the same vibe as I do with Ballmer. And that to me means a lot in this episode.

Circling back to Yahoo, I have to say that when I saw the so-called mass exodus of executives or managers, I thought it was a great thing. I believe the count of people leaving was somewhere in the neighborhood of 140. Well, if you read/worship Dilbert like I do, you'll realize that having that many executives is probably what's killing the company in the first place. Sometimes, you'll get these mid-level managers who attach themselves to companies like parasites until the rum runs out. It looks like the rum is running dry at Yahoo quite quickly. But again, I feel this is a great thing because potentially, younger, hungrier people can move up the chain faster.

The other thing is that you have to realize 140 executives/managers means that you had that many more competing viewpoints to deal with. Now, with 140 less people, you can try focusing the business more. Forget trying to hire from the outside (unless it's me). Go internal and get some of those kids who are itching to climb the ladder faster and move them into more strategic positions. If anything, those people are the ones that ought to be able to re-vitalize Yahoo. You don't want to insult the employees' intelligence by hiring more external help (except me) when you have all the talent within the organization. I'm certain there's more than one person who has the energy and vision to help drive a component or two in the company back to success.

Then you have Jerry Yang and the remaining top people. Let me advise something to Yang: maybe let the people below do the driving. In situations like these, you really need someone like a Steve Jobs to rally the troops. You need visionaries who understand what people and/or need. I don't know if Yang has that vision nor passion. I think when you make as much money as someone like him at his age, it's easy to become complacent. Rather than being on the streets, hungry, yearning for that first taste of success, you're hanging out with celebrities and living a glamorous life. You need to be street to execute something like this because it's the common person that's going to be using these things.

I already know where Yahoo ought to be taking itself. I know where M$ should go too. And I leave Google alone because they've got enough vision and talent to do without me. Nonetheless, this whole year is going to continue to be interesting. Good thing for me I'm back with the net!]]> Sun, 22 Jun 2008 11:50:14 -0600 http://www.keithwatanabe.net/blogs/2008/6/22/b9824fa5af094d779237b27531136518.html