It’s been two and a half years since I started working for Google. Now, as I walk out the door, I’m going to try to capture some of my thoughts about the experience and share them here.
In the summer of 2007, as I was finishing up my MBA, I was faced with a choice of [...]
After months of rumors about companies trying to buy Facebook, yesterday a deal was announced. In a sense the deal is quite small because Facebook sold just a 1.6% equity stake to Microsoft. But by paying $240 million, the deal values Facebook at about $15 billion! What’s going on here? This surely can’t be based on rational economics, can it? Let’s analyze how these deals should be valued and take a few steps back through recent internet acquisition history for context. In trying to keep this post focused, I wrote a separate article about why mergers and acquisitions rarely work….
...full articleI see a trend of how we’re approaching Tim O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 ideal in a way that he didn’t really identify. But I think the trend is important, and growing, although still in its infancy. The trend is towards richer web APIs that enable people to build value on top of existing websites. I’ll give some history on how we got here, and talk about the current trend-leaders that I see: Facebook and Google Maps. I’ll also explain why I think Microsoft is in the best position to build the required enabling technology. Original Web 1.0 Universal access to massive…
...full articleAlmost every information service can be made more valuable by the addition of social networking metadata. So if you’re thinking about launching a new information service you currently have three choices in this regard: Build your app without social networking data Start from scratch with your own social network Integrate your app with Facebook The third choice is so simple, it is the obvious best choice for most new information services. As I see it, this is the fundamental power of the Facebook platform and why they’re going to go very, very far.
...full articleThis morning Scoble linked to a leaked video out of google describing some new features to be added to Google Reader. I don’t like re-reporting other-people’s news here, but I can’t leave this one sit because it strikes so close to home for me. The ideas they describe sound exactly like what I’ve been thinking the world needs out of a feed reader — features to manage infoglut using the social network. What I’ve been thinking about building in my copious spare time is a web-based feed-reader that assumes you over-subscribe to feeds. That is, it expects you to “subscribe”…
...full articleA trend in modern successful websites is the democratization of information and decision making. The so-called wisdom of the crowds is at the heart of what makes a web 2.0 company successful. I’m going to compare how three companies have democratized the process of making product development decisions. Amazon makes extensive use of so-called A/B testing to try out new UI’s and optimize the user flow. This works very well for them because their end goal is very well defined: they want people to buy stuff. They are facing a very hard optimization problem, but their objective function is clear…
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