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MS-Yahoo: Can Ray Ozzie Make Elephants Dance?

Published February 3, 2008 by cgerrish

My two cents on Microsoft’s hostile bid for Yahoo: Microsoft, finding itself in the new world of the social graph, needs to buy some friends. People don’t like Microsoft, they fear and respect it. People don’t buy Microsoft products, they buy products that already contain the OS and Office. People choose Yahoo, they choose delicious and flickr. They like Yahoo Finance. And it’s all supported by advertising.

The question about whether Microsoft could successfully integrate Yahoo is a people question. Is there a strong enough personality within Microsoft to envision an entity that creates a new integrated whole. Clearly it’s not Steve Ballmer, and that means it’s got to be Ray Ozzie. Ozzie is trying to move the key Microsoft revenue streams on to the network with his “Live” initiatives. Yahoo is the advertising framework and user base that could contain and support the new web-based Microsoft Office live.

If Ray Ozzie can make elephants dance, many of are wondering who will call the tune. Microsoft is willing to pay $31 a share, but the cost to Microsoft will be much higher if they decide that Yahoo has to be rebuilt on a Microsoft technical stack. That was their approach with HotMail and it was very expensive. Is this the moment in time where Microsoft embraces a mixed technical operating environment? Yahoo is a big supporter of open standards and open source, the community is justifiably concerned about how Microsoft will affect this. When you integrate YahooMail and HotMail, do you make your decision based on technical stack or the quality of the product? Are the decision makers at Microsoft capable of making a decision based on product quality?

Can a shot-gun wedding result in a happy marriage? When we discuss $1 billion in efficiency as a result of the merger, we’re referring to the brutal process of merging groups, firing people, closing facilities and trying to keep the lights on during the process. The digerati of the Bay area and Redmond will be significantly affected by these changes, and it will ripple into the surrounding economies. There will be a lot of pain for both those who stay and those who leave.

It’s up to Ray Ozzie to provide a new vision of the combined entity that will convince those left standing that it was worth it. For the deal to ultimately be successful, Microsoft will have to be transformed as much or more than Yahoo.

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How would it look if the earth revolved around the sun?

Published January 31, 2008 by cgerrish

Ludwig Wittgenstein


I liked this podcast so much, I listened to it twice. And I may listen to it again. It’s a beautiful discussion about the philosophy and impact of Ludwig Wittgenstein. You can find this gem on the Philosophy Bites site. Regular hosts Dave Edmonds and Nigel Warburton discuss Wittgenstein with Barry Smith of Birkbeck College London.

I particularly like the discussion of Wittgenstein’s later work and the Philosophical Investigations. Although they even made the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus sound interesting. There’s a great story recounted about Elizabeth Anscombe saying to Wittgenstein, that she can “understand why people thought that the sun revolves around the earth.” Ludwig asks, “why?” Anscombe says, “Well, it looks that way.” Wittgenstein responds, “and how would it look if the earth revolved around the sun?”

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Did Memes Create the Digital to help us Remember?

Published January 29, 2008 by cgerrish

If there is such a thing as “memes,” did they drive humans toward the digital? A meme has been defined as a theoretical unit of cultural information. Digital replication is exact, whereas human memory is fallible. Some say human memory doesn’t even remember things, but rather the relationship between things. If a meme wanted to persist in an exactly identical form as it passed from human to human, it could only do so through the digital. In some ways this is counter to the idea of evolution, it’s not an adaptive system. The digital meme can’t adapt because it would become unreadable. This meme, and no other, shall survive.

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Transparency and Information Asymmetry in Venture Capital

Published January 27, 2008 by cgerrish

Is The Funded going to create transparency and symmetric access to information for both buyers and sellers in the private investing market? TechCrunch says that they’re going to create a database of term sheets. If this works, it’ll change the landscape of private investing.Today venture capital firms have vision into the pricing market, in fact they largely create it. New companies are completely in the dark. How do you decide the right price for equity units in a private company? How does a new company know if they’re getting a good deal, or getting taken? Openness and transparency will change the market and just like with IPO pricing, the status quo will resist the change.

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