Marc Gerstein

Microsoft's Debacle – and Google's Challenge

Why should the author, me or anyone else go out hunting for such third-party applications? I use Blackberry. It's every bit as easy to use as the author indicates. What's his or my motive to look for a solution for a non-existent problem?


On Oct 15 11:48 AM bricki wrote:

> The problems with this article is that the author has missed the
> point of Android. It is an open platform and the result is that there
> are 3rd party applications that support a variety of tasks.
>
> Take a look at MyLink for Android for example.

Why Isn't Microsoft's Strategy Working Anymore?

Sometimes, I wonder it there is a tendency to over-strategize. I'm not a tekkie, not even close, but I have noticed that over the years, my willingness to use or not use Microsoft has more to do with how good it is than with all the fancy strategies, business models, market positionings, and so forth.

Example: IE vs Netscape. About a decade or so ago, when I was doing a rock music web site for an ex girlfriend, I noticed that it was so much easier to code fancy effects on IE than Netscape. So I became a fan of IE. It had nothing to do with Bill Gates' behaviors or strategies. It was simply s mstter of IE being more workable. Period. Later, when my web design days had passed, I switched to Firefox because I like tabbed browsing. I had no political bone to pick with Microsoft. When IE 7 came out with tabs, I checked it out. But I hate it because it feels too heavy and takes much longer to load. Again, nothing fancy, I'm just picking the product I like better.

As to Excel vs 123 and now Open Office, I favor Excel becase it kicks you-know-what in terms of its ability to macro. 123 never made it our of the stone age. Open Office is pretty good, but still not quite there. So again, I'm just going with what works better for me.

I have an iPod and not a Zune. Do I even have to explain!

On my last laptop purchase, I had it set up with XP, not vista, because I wanted it to move at reasonable speed.

As to wintel vs mac, I still remember during the heyday of the battle being at Kinkos with a Mac and trying to figure out how to take a floppy disk out of the drive. After nearly half an hour, and when I was starting to slid a pen into the drive to pry it out, some Mac fan had mercy and came over to show me I had to drag the disk drive icon to the trash. Oh yeah, THAT was intuitive! (I assumed doing so would erase the contents.) And of course there was Conflict Catcher software to correct crashes that strategists tell us never occur with Macs; those obsolete one-button mouses; the absence of a delete or backspace hey (I can't recall which) on the Mac keyboard ... hey, Microsoft and pc didn't win only because of predatory practices. There are many who find Apple computers to be long on boasting (and long on pricing) but short on delivery.

Going forward, I think the prescription for Microsoft is really quite simple. Don't su**! If they put out good stuff, they'll do fine. Too few observers give them credit for this as they rose to prominence; yes they imitated and yes they marketed, but often in the glory years, they were a bit better, way more so than critics admit. If they put out junk, they'll flounder. It's really quite simple and more important now, with the industry mature, than it was in the days when they could make so many first-time sales.

Google Didn't Kill the Analytics Industry

What am I missing here? How does any of this refute the notion that Google killed paid web analytics.

The Forrester thing is just a prediction, nothing more. How do we know it won't be wrong?

If you want to maintain that "Google didn't kill the analytics industry," I think you need some objective facts and some persuasive arguments as to why we should give credence to the Forrester forecasts.

Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz: We're a Different Company than Google

Yahoo definitely has problems . . . mobile is terrible, the newest mail interface is slow and clunky, the pop-open menus in Finance are way too jumpy, and if you ever have to call customer service for something, brace yourself for a collection of the worst most heavily and annoyingly scripted drones you will ever encounter.

But I think BioBoy is overdoing it a bit.

Google has problems too . . . even in search. Nowadays, more often than not, the only reason I search Google is inertia; all too often, I just use it as a gateway to Wikipedia, and if Ineed more, the external links at the bottom of the Wikipedia articles often prove more productive than the rest of what I see on Google.

Regarding everything below Wikipedia, Google seems to be falling victim to its own advertising success. As advertisers pay more and more and exert more influence over what is displayed and how it's displayed, the usefulness to users is diminishing. Advertisers are playing way too fast and loose with keywords and therefore shoving themselves into places where they really aren't relevant and it's damaging the usefulness of Google's search results.

And heaven forbid I really do have a commercial need and try to use Google. It's dreadful! Memo to Google's search geeks; when I want to find a local service in Queens, NY, having a vendor in a place like Sommerset New Jersey and the like up at the top does not contribute in a positive way to Google's branding as the place to search! Usually, after encountering too much obviously irrelevant garbage on Google, I wind up switching to the old fashioned hard-copy Yellow Pages, and locating exactly what I need.

If Google wants to be as dominant in search ten years hence as it is today, it will need to find a way to prevent overzealous advertisers desperate to mindlessly shove themselves onto as many screens as possible from diminishing usefulness to users without causing them to reduce the revenues they give to Google. That will be a difficult and delicate balance, but if Google ignores it and simply leaves it's user experience to the mercy of increasingly pushy and crazed advertisers, it wind up as the AOL-Alta Vista-Excite-Lycos of the 2010s.

Putting all this together, I think the battle between Yahoo and Google is a lot more level than BioBoy and others like him realize. Both have substantial strengths but both face heavy challenges.

And as an investor, I might lean more toward Yahoo simply because its weaknesses are well known and probably priced into the stock, while Google's problems are still pretty much a silent topic, and, presumably, not at all reflected in the price of its stock.

Morningstar's Biggest Error: The Perils of Youth

To: Sundrenched

Re your comment: "I'm definitely not renewing my membership with them."

Actually, I did just renew my membership with them. They certainly do have some irritating shortcomings; hence my rant here. (And perhpas another day, I'll write about what I think of so-called discounted cash flow valuation, anothe textbook marvel that #$&@ ... oh well. later topic).

But I've also seen that this company has shown a strong ability to correct mis-steps. I hope they see my criticisms and accept it as constructive feedback. There are a lot of good things they do as well. If they can continue to know the companies as well as they do and communicte as clearly as they do and at the same time drop some of the folks bias, they could become truly excellent. I hope they do.

To donzelon:

Re your observation: "But the thesis of your article gives me pause: young kids screwed up, older vets screwed up, hence, we should rely on older vets more because... " Yes, this is a frustrating situation. I guess the benefit of experience is that veterans are less error prone because they, at least, can eliminate one category of error: the kinds that arise from recurring situations. Unfortunately, though, we're all vulnerable to life's new wrinkles. :-((