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 [...]
Nothing exciting here to report, but I thought I’d share pointers to some of the jokes I’ve stumbled upon that I like.
UniXKCD command line console
My favorite webcomic, Randall Monroe’s brilliant XKCD, is running a command-line version of itself today. A few commands you might want to try include:
find
wget http://xkcd.com/
Make me a sandwich
go west
Google renames itself [...]
...full articleAlthough most corporate mergers fail (often due to mis-aligned incentives on the part of the deal-makers) there is a solid economic foundation for the proposed Microsoft + Yahoo! merger. Most of their assets will work no better combined than separate. But the merged Microhoo ad network would be significantly more valuable than the sum of two ad networks alone. Why bigger is better for online advertisers The reason lies in network effects of the online search + advertising industry. Imagine you’re an ad buyer which is to say you have a service you want consumers to find online. Unless you’re…
...full articleAfter 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 articleThose of us who have been around the block know that Windows systems accumulate cruft as they age and just generally get slower and less reliable until you wipe the OS and start over. I realized recently that Windows Mobile 5 is no different. Here are the steps I took to clean off a machine that was so far down the path of destruction it was almost unusable Oh, Treo running Windows, how can you suck so badly? After having my Treo 700W for a while, it started to get noticeably less stable. First it stopped receiving e-mail. Then it…
...full articleHere’s a little hacker tid-bit for those of you with phones running WM5. It’s the closest thing to task manager that I’ve found without installing a 3rd party app. If you want to get a list of running tasks and actually stop one as opposed to push it into the background, follow these steps: Press Start Select Settings Choose the System tab Run Memory Choose the Running Programs tab Happy terminating!
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