Is Google going wrong somewhere?

This post is not at all related to the MS-Yahoo deal. It’s just coming at the time.
Neither this post has to do any thing with “It is Different this time” post below.
Two days ago I had a chance to talk to a Stanford graduate who has been working with Sun in the U.S for about past eight years. He joined Sun at a time when Sun was at the top. After the 2001 bubble burst, Sun just came crashing down. There was a time when (like Google today) Sun had free food, free goodies and many many facilities for their employees. They used to just throw away lots of food that was left. Today Sun is a position that it cannot even provide free snacks with tea/coffee. They had hired very few employees in past 7 years.
Is google going in the same direction? They are spending so extravagently on everything today. I am sure that even if there is a second dotcom bust still the google search engine won’t be effected much simply because of its utility. In past few years google came up with lots of new cool products…but just came up without proper marketing of any and suddenly there are no really cool products from it. Most of them also were developed by google employees in their extra 20% time This reminds me of android but it’s still not there in the market. For those of you who don’t know right now the only proper work of google employees is just maintenance of existing products and some development. Google has already done a product and just earning from it now.
In a age where a kid in a garage can put a big company in trouble (what Sergey Brin and Larry Page did to Yahoo! by making Google), How long can google survive like this?
We all know what Youtube did to Google video ( ohhhhhh Yaaa….There used to be a google video site also) and then Google bought Youtube.
Google tookover picassa . For how long will google do by taking over smaller companies?

I just hope google doesn’t repeat Sun’s mistake. It is one of the best and most ethical companies of our times .

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Create cool flowcharts online at giffy

Sometimes it can be really difficult to create a flowchart without the proper tool. I just discovered this really cool website that allows you to create a nice flowchart online without much effort. I just created this flowchart for finding out if a number is primary or not.

Topics: Resources, Tools

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It is different this time

Long long time ago (i.e in 2000) there were many websites that spent a lot of money for getting users. They planned to monetize the users through advertisement. However that plan did not work out and most of them had to close shop.In the process they lost a lot of money. I am sure you have heard this famous story about the dotcom bubble and bust.

Why am I writing about a 8 year old story? Because it seems like the story is being replayed again. There are many starry eyed (including me) kids trying to create websites that will make money from advertisement. And many pundits do not take us or our business seriously because they think if it did not work in 2000 and hence it will not work this time. They are WRONG. This time it is different. It is different because

We are not creating websites to earn from advertisements. We are creating the websites to solve real life requirements of our users. Advertisement is just a side story and not the story.

In 2000, the only guys who were advertiseing on the internet were other websites. This time it is the brick and mortar companies that are selling their stuff on the internet. We have realized that internet is just an enabler and not an end in itself.

The advertisement revenue for 9 months of 2007 has reached more than $15 billion.

People are buying real stuff on the internet on amazon and ebay

I believe that monetization through advertisement is a perfectly good business plan to have. So stop listening to the experts who think they know everything. and start working on your idea and on getting users to your website.

P.S: If you have an India centric website, that you monetize through advertisement then please leave a comment below. I will like to write about you.
If are new to entrepreneurship then you may want to read about how to select an idea and how you can start your business without leaving your job.

Topics: Entrepreneurship, Internet, Make Money

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Video download plugin for firefox

The previous post talks about downloading yutube videos. I would like to give another option for firefox users. Get the unplug plug-in for firefox. It’s a video download tool that’s not just for youtube. It can download any embedded video on any webpage. It gives a list of all the videos embedded on a particular page.
It downloads from the original source of the video.
Try it . It’s great.

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