Christopher Kata

Yahoo: Yang Says He's in Charge, Says Little Else

I'm fine with Jerry Yang running the ship as long as they continue to innovate and give people more and "new" reasons to search with Yahoo vs anyone else. If that does not happen then Yahoo is doomed to continue sliding backwards - and eventualy MSFT will either buy them or beat them.

Google Patent Taps Ocean's Power

If it's for the good of mankind why patent it? Clearly they want to make some $ on it.

Comcast's Internet Cap Debate

I think the problem with their plan to cap is that they are warning clients once and then kicking them off their network entirely for a year and not providing a metering application.

They are already tracking the data clients use. Why not report on it through their website and when a client hits the cap give the customer choices:

1. go over and deduct the overage from next month (so next months cap is smaller)
2. pay for the overage
3. shut of your internet for the rest of the month

That sounds like a much more friendlier approach for legitimate high bandwidth users.

Books: The Next File-Sharing Frontier?

Hi Mathew!
The interesting part of the Microsoft story is not that they are getting out of the book scanning business, but rather that they were contributing to open service (on the order of millions of dollars) which was contributing scanned books to the Internet Archive. In fact MS allowed the Internet Archive to keep the scanners in place continue on with the work. So in fact, the service has not gone away but rather has simply suffered a drop in funding to continue with the work.

Google's option is not open - it's a closed system that can only be accessed through Google's search engine.

Microsoft's initiative through the Internet Archive is a far better, more open solution that likely will one day become funded by the public just as libraries are today. While the scanning technology is a little more expensive than off the shelf scanners, the service wrote their own software that transfers the scans to the central servers for processing and only costs $0.10 / page (roughly $30 per book) to execute. That's cheaper than a physical library and reaches far more people.

So I for one am hoping that the Internet Archive is able to replace the funds that MS was contributing to the initiative so that it does not fold.

Microsoft Should Fire Steve Ballmer, or Hire SuperNanny. Or Both.

Hey Paul - I appreciate your fresh take on this situation. Personally I welcome the acquisition as I think it will generate some true competition for Google. On the other hand, it's starting to feel like the Google machine is starting to slow a bit and perhaps MS does not need Yahoo! long term to compete.

So that leaves me wondering what the heck MS is doing! Are they smarter than we all think and working out some super back room deal, or are they really floundering as you imply?

Online time will tell!