It is not about search

Vineet’s post made me think about the logic behind microsoft, yahoo deal. If it is obvious to everyone that even a combined yahoo and microsoft can not beat google then why is microsoft paying so much of money to buy yahoo?

Because microsoft is getting yahoo damn cheap. Yahoo gets as much or more traffic than google. Google earns almost all of its earnings from advertisement. More than 80% of that earning comes from its partner network. Which means it earns 80% of the earning from advertisement on its pages. Now if yahoo gets as much traffic as google, why should it not get as much of earning?

As a matter of fact, yahoo should be able charge a premium over google. On google all you know about a person’s interest is the keywords he enters into the search box. On yahoo answer he enters the exact question he is looking for. It can not get more accurate than that. Users at yahoo spend far more time than the users of google. That should enable companies to engage with users better.

Yahoo has some of the best products. Yahoo mail, messenger, flickr, yahoo finance, yahoo answer. These are by far the best products available in their resepctive categories. Most importantly yahoo has some of the best brains working for it.

Bottomline: Yahoo is getting sold far too cheap. It is a damn good investment if you have 40 odd billion with you

By the way you can Ducan’s views on the acquisition here

Topics: Uncategorized

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Miahoo ? Where does the MS-Yahoo deal lead us?

First of all I was thinking of a name for the MS Yahoo deal. Micro-ahoo doesn’t sound too good. Please suggest some creative names…Will be fun.

Anyways the Question is where does the deal lead us? How’s it gonna effect the today’s win-win situation of the Internet? Some say that MS has in a way accepted that it can’t beat Google on its own that’s why it needs Yahoo’s support. Now the question arises …even if MS accepts it’s defeat from Google, will it be able to defeat Google after the merger?

Experts say that the deal will be harmful for MS itself. Most of the employees at Yahoo and MS also are not happy with the deal. Another thing is that Yahoo’s servers mostly run on Linux…(need I say more?)

We have all seen that in recent times MS has been a failure in most of the things. Vista is a failure. Zune is a failure. MS Office 2007 is a failure. MSN live is a failure. Surface was a hype when launched and is just lost now somewhere in News archives. Also Bill Gates is no more the CEO. All this suggests that
MS is going to do something wrong again.

But I have great faith in Steve Ballmer’s abilities. Is he playing some unthinkable game?

Read the post above by Sita Sir. You will also believe in Ballmer’s abilities.

Fingers crossed…that’s all I can say.

Topics: Entrepreneurship, Internet, News, Uncategorized

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Linus says OS X is worse than Windows in some aspects !!!

Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux Operating System, thinks that OS X Leopard is worse than Windows Vista in some aspects.

Geek enough to be interested?

Read on here.

Topics: Blogs, Entrepreneurship, News

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Great GDB tutorial…

GDB (Acronym for GNU debugger) is considered to be one of the best debuggers among the geek community. i generally prefer debugging my programs without any debugging tools , i.e by mental inspection and printf()s. I feel this is the best approach for a student…It makes you learn a lot. But when you have to debug a more than 1000 lines code and you have deadlines to meet you practically can’t do without a debugger.
GDB is a command line based tool but really powerful and helpful.
I found a great comprehensive tutorial on GDB here ( http://www.dirac.org/linux/gdb/ )
PS: don’t leave chapter 2 of this tutorial. Even if you don’t want to learn about gdb, still read chapter 2 of this tutorial …. Read it to know why.

Hail GNU !!!

Topics: Coding, Open Source, Tools

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Nothing But Net : JP Morgan’s internet research report

JP Morgan’s research report on investment ideas in the internet space has just come out. The document is quite comprehensive, actually too comprehensive and technical. However if you are game for some serious reading then you can download the pdf here

Topics: Books

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IBM Fires 700 employees in India :(

Newyorktimes is reporting that IBM has asked close to 700 employees to leave after they failed to perform well in newly introduced performance tests. Asking people to join a company and then asking them to leave is absolutely criminal in my opinion. If a company has to perform some performance test, then they will be better off doing so before asking the person to join.

You can read the details here

Topics: News

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