Microsoft CEO, Steve Ballmer, was egged by a student during a speech at the Hungarian University in Budapest. The student threw eggs at Mr. Ballmer and accused Microsoft of stealing 45 Billion in Hungarian taxpayer money.
Many African countries have said that the aid Microsoft provides them in the form of free software, benefits Microsoft many times more in the end. Microsoft donates free software to governments and universities and hence gets them hooked on it. Shortly after the donation, the software requires upgrades, if not it becomes unusable. By then the governments and universities have become highly dependent on the software and have no choice but to fork out millions of dollars for upgrades. These cash strapped countries have many requirements competing for their money such as buying food, medicines, and other necessities for their populations. Hence, Microsoft came to be known as the evil empire. The Government of India, was faced with a similar situation with Microsoft and decided to launch the Linux Initiative, which had a significant negative impact on Microsoft's business. In fact, the State of Tamil Nadu has rolled out Linux and Open Source Software in all the government departments.
Is Microsoft still evil? Will the rise of web applications give rise to a new axis of evil?
Microsoft's proposed bid for Yahoo was its fastest way to gain the scale necessary to compete against Google for online advertising dollars. Even before pulling the Yahoo offer, the company he had begun laying the groundwork for a strategy to compete with Google in online advertising. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is convinced that online advertising is crucial to its future. So much so that he sees online advertising making up as much as 25% of the company’s business within a few years. Google generates approximately US$ 22 billion versus Microsoft's US$ 3.3 billion from online advertising.
Consumers and businesses increasingly are switching from desktop software like Microsoft's to free online services that do the same things. "We are absolutely committed to be the leading player in that endeavor," Ballmer told employees at a recent gathering.
Google dominates the market, taking in 77% of the revenues from search advertising where as Microsoft has 5% of U.S. search revenue, according to search marketing firm Efficient Frontier. Acquiring Yahoo would not have given Microsoft the revenue nor the search market share it is seeking for, as Yahoo's strength is in display advertising not search advertising.
Microsoft Seven Times Bigger Than Google In Display Ads Microsoft's share of the display advertising market is already about 7 times larger than Google's. Although the display market is smaller than search, it's expected to grow faster over the next few years because of a surge in video ads. Market research firm IDC figures that by 2012 the display market will double, to $15.1 billion; revenue from search will reach $17.6 billion.
Microsoft makes money in the display business in two ways. It sells ads on its own popular web sites, such as MSN and Hotmail, and it acts as a broker by placing ads on other companies' web sites and then splitting the revenue with them much like Google's Adsense Program. Smaller web sites use Microsoft because they don't have a salesforce to call on advertisers and ad agencies. And even large players like media giant Viacom have found that letting Microsoft sell some of the space on sites like Comedy Central and MTV can lead to higher revenues. "They can achieve better monetization than we can on our own," says Viacom CEO Phillipe Dauman.
It's All About Display Microsoft's new pitch is that, in display advertising, the company has the most sophisticated technology of any company. It can help advertisers precisely target display ads and assess the value of ads even when web surfers don't click on them. Microsoft is also making the case that search advertising, Google's gold mine, is overrated. Soon the company, it plans to introduce new ad technology that it says will demonstrate that to advertisers. "We're going to win with this strategy," said Keith Lorizio, Microsoft's advertising manager. More>
Google has befriended Salesforce.com and recruited the company to battle Microsoft. Salesforce’s customer relationship management software and Google’s suite of office productivity applications, which includes e-mail, word processing and spreadsheets programs will be integrated into a single software package that will be offered over the web.
The offering competes with Microsoft’s customer relationship management software, which is integrated with the its Office suite. Google is seeking to displace Microsoft by offering a web based alternative.
Dave Girouard, Google’s Vice President said the product would have new features like letting users keep track of e-mail sent to a customer right on that customer’s sales record, and a group of people collaborating on a sales account would be able to communicate by instant message with one another".
“In the history of hosted software to date, applications could be like islands,” Mr. Girouard said. “They don’t really work together seamlessly. This is a first of its kind.”
“Salesforce has belatedly recognized that it is important to link C.R.M. apps to productivity tools,” said Brad Wilson, general manager for Microsoft’s C.R.M. unit. “It has been core to our product since we launched five years ago. It validates our strategy.”
“The enemy of my enemy is my friend, so that makes Google my best friend,” said Marc Benioff, chief executive of Salesforce.com. However, Google has introduced a service called Google Market Solutions that competes directly with Salesforce's App Exchange. Also see Google Is Frienemy.
Google gave the cloud computing initiative a major boost today by launching Google App Engine. Web developers can build and run their web applications on the Google infrastructure. The goal is to make it easy to get started with a new web app, and then make it easy to scale when that app reaches the point where it's receiving significant traffic and has millions of users.
The service is similar to Amazon Simple DB and SalesForce App Exchange where developers can online demand applications or SaaS applications. Google App Engine gives developers access to the same building blocks that Google uses for its own applications, making it easier to build an application that runs reliably, even under heavy load and with large amounts of data.
Dynamic webserving, with full support of common web technologies
Persistent storage (powered by Bigtable and GFS with queries, sorting, and transactions)
Automatic scaling and load balancing
Google APIs for authenticating users and sending email
Fully featured local development environment
Google App Engine packages these building blocks and takes care of the infrastructure stack, leaving developers more time to focus on writing code and improving your application.
Bungee Labs has released a service called Bungee Connect an on-demand service that helps developers build rich internet applications that can be hosted by Bungee.
The service includes wizards to simplify specific workflows for developers and it supports the ability to import code from different projects, style sheets and APIs. The service aims to slash the time and costs associated with the entire application life cycle.
"It's time to stop developing 'here' and running 'there.' Today, most applications are coded in one environment, then tested in another, and redeployed to yet another for production," said David Mitchell, Bungee's Founder and CTO.
Developers can use Bungee without charge to develop software, to collaborate with colleagues and to test applications. They are charged only when end users run an application that was built using Bungee. Charges range $2 to $5 per month per user for a heavily used business productivity application or fractions of a cent per e-commerce transaction.
Super Tuesday was super cool with Google and Twitter showing real-time tweets from voters, pollsters, pundits and analysts. Wow! how the web is changing society so fast. I am sure the candidates or their deputies were watching all this excitement unfold right before their eyes. Click here to view real-time tweets. To add this widget (gadget) to your website click here>>
Andy Beal recently wrote that Google's stock is far from the $2000 a share predicted by Henry Blodget publisher of InternetOutsider. After missing analyst estimates and the announcement of the Microsoft - Yahoo takeover (predicted here), Google's shares (GOOG) have been hit very hard. Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Eric Schmidt and Ram Shriram who own majority of the Class B shares (which control the company) have seen the fortunes drop by US$16 Billion collectively. The Microsoft Yahoo overture shows Google's vulnerability. Over 90% of the company's revenue comes from search advertising. If I ran Google, I would have used the high share value as cheap currency to make acquisitions of web products, tools and services companies that litter Silicon Valley to transition to a provider of multiple web offerings and reduce the dependence on a single revenue stream. Google's market value has dropped US$70 Billion from it's peak - that is a lot of acquisitions.
Want to develop applications for Google's new Android mobile phone platform and make a cool $275K?! Google has put $10M into a competition to do just that. The idea is to develop a lot of original cool apps that are highly functional as well as usable. The apps need to access core Android functionality like location-based services, accelerometer and always-on networking.
The smartphone market is heating up and Google is looking to the development community to create the killer app that's going to make people switch to Android. Apple also recently announced that it will be releasing an iPhone/iPod Touch SDK in late Feb.
The WebGuild's kickoff event for the new year on The Future of Web Apps was a huge success. Thank you to everyone who attended and to everyone who contributed to making it a success. Many thanks to the speakers: Brad Neuberg, Google Gears; Raju Vegesna, Evangelist, Zoho; Bill Scott, Director of UI Engineering, Netflix; and John Rowell, Chief Technology Officer, OpSource. The video will be available shortly.
SocialMedia is a well chosen name for a startup which in their words is aiming to be provide services to Manage, Market and Monetizing apps to developers on platforms like MySpace and Facebook. Managing here refers to a developer being able to track their apps while Marketing means SocialMedia providing services which will enable a developer's application to grow (virally). As we know, in a viral platform like Facebook or even Digg, to attain popularity one needs an initial base of users after which growth is pretty much spontaneous. This is where SocialMedia has stepped in to help apps become viral. Note also here a viral calculator which claims to predict the cost of each new user. Of course, its quite low mainly because of the Facebook referral effect due to its feeds and thats why developer love it most for.
SocialMedia is also an ad network helping developers monetize their ads. Other players in this arena are startups like Lookery, Rockyou, Cubics etc. This ad network was launched back in late August. While giving developers about $1-$3 for every thousand users, as mentioned, developer Greg Thompson who developed Aquarium Application had earned $100,000 in the first 3 months of his joining the network. You can have a look at their Appsaholic application if you are interested in the popularity and growth of some of the popular Facebook apps.
SocialMedia was one of initial developers for the Facebook Platform. It launched Food Fight and Happy Hour applications which attained quite a bit of popularity. Now, in their own words Social Media has developed as a way of providing services to applications after they felt a need for managing, marketing, and monetizing the apps themselves. It is a good strategy which has payed off well till now. There have been some apprehensions about this kind of advertising on Facebook apps which involves one application advertising other applications, so I am going to be very interested in how advertising is handled in the Facebook apps context.
The web is about pushing boundaries and first movers usually have the advantage. Recently, I was fortunate to meet with Lord British aka "Game God", the creator of Tabula Rasa.
Tabula Rasa is a MMORPG (Massively multiplayer online role-playing game) about humanity's last stand against an alien race called "The Bane". Massively multiplayer online games have exploded with the growth of broadband internet access. Hundreds of thousands of players can play the same game together over the web. Sound like a social network? Indeed. The next generation of social networks will be inspired by the likes of Tabula Rasa.
Online gaming communities are turning a social activity into big business. The rising popularity of rich web applications, streaming video, audio and access to broadband is making on-demand entertainment available to anyone with an internet connection.
Lord British is not only pushing the boundaries on the web but he is also pushing the boundaries so you and I can one day go to outer space. He funded the Russian space program to explore private flights to outer space and paid $30 million to buy the first seat to become the world’s first private astronaut.
Ruby On Rails Version 2.0 was released on Friday. Rails or RoR is a free, open source application framework using Ruby programming language. It is aimed at increasing the speed and ease with which database-driven web sites can be created. Ok, I am not a hard-core programmer so I won't even begin to try to interpret the changes in v2 but here is a listing for those of you who can decode this:
Multiple Controller View Paths - Rails now supports multiple view paths for each controller
SOAP has been replaced with REST - SOAP is considered too complex and RoR is more focused on building REST-ful applications
Improved Security features - to protect against phishing with provisions to guard against cross-site request forgery (CRSF) intrusions and cross-site forgery (XSF) attacks. Improved testing support and backing for Atom feeds critical to application updates
ActiveResource feature added - which encapsulates web services and makes them as easy to use as databases. This is similar to the ActiveRecord feature for encapsulating database calls in Rails
Talk about portable widgets is not new. After all, 2007 has been proclaimed "Year of the Widget" by Newsweek. Though what I intend to discuss here is more about portability aspects and efforts in this direction rather than about widgets themselves. One of the early entrants in the market was Knofabulator (remember anyone?) which was bought by Yahoo. Then it seemed that they didn't know what to do with it and rebranded it but added no extra functionalities. A few days back it was in the news that Yahoo was releasing version 4.5 of its Konfabulator widget. The new version includes things like HTML and Flash support as well as a better user interface. However, Yahoo widgets are still only for desktops like Vista or XP. However, with Google releasing widgets for Mac a few days back, as well as Mac having widget support and Microsoft supporting widgets in Vista, Yahoo may find itself facing tough competition in a comparatively small market. Such widgets are important if we see them in the light of what is expected of applications in future. Application virtualization is gaining ground and also to be noted is the following vision of Google's CEO, Eric Schmidt.
Netvibes is a company which had initially announced a widget platform to make widgets that can work on Vista, Google, Mac, and even Yahoo widgets. It is called Universal Widget API and has the aim of "build your module once, deploy everywhere". Other companies in this space are Musestorm and Clearspring. Musestorm enables non-programmers to develop rich media widgets and Clearspring specializes in distributing widgets as well as analytics and API. The next step, of course, would be for these applications or widgets to run on mobile as well. For instance, I am sure Google's Android which is to be released next year with Open Handset Alliance will soon be integrated with their Web ToolKit so that applications can run over mobile, computer, and web. And won't that be cool?
First it was virtual worlds, then virtual shopping now it's virtual workspaces! Qwaq, a company that creates 3D collaborative environments for meetings just grew their piggy bank by $7M to grow the company. Similar to Second Life it uses avatars so that each person has a virtual self - but with the focus on an actual 'workspace' there is a focus on sharing and collaborating office apps including Word, PowerPoint, Excel and others. Their initial customer list which includes BP, Intel and HP, is impressive and it validates the growing interest in virtual 3D worlds.
Virtual Worlds and 3D animations is also a growing trend in marketing. Here are a few things that I'm aware of:
3D Product Demos Already companies like Cisco, Intel and even smaller companies like Mirapoint offer 3D product views. The virtual products are also starting to replace those that get shipped out for roadshows and tradeshows with the help of companies like Kaon Interactive which bring the interaction on a large touch screen so your products can be there without really being there.
3D Holographic Presentations Musion Systems takes that a step further with true Star Trek 'Beam me up, Scotty' type of functionality where you can have a 3D holographic image of a person appear next to you on a live stage - even if that person is thousands of miles away!
Virtual Websites Brookstone's 3D store is a good example of this for B2C situations. The Second Life sites like the one Microsoft has can also be considered a virtual website (or "island").
The Nasdaq (Nasdaq:NDAQ) today announced it has launched the NASDAQ Internet Index (Nasdaq:QNET). The Index is a new benchmark designed to track the performance of companies engaged in a broad range of internet-related services such as:
1) internet access providers 2) internet search engines 3) web hosting 4) website design 5) internet retail commerce
"The NASDAQ Internet Index is comprised of securities of companies that are at the forefront of internet technology. They are leading innovators in providing faster internet access, creating more intuitive e-commerce experiences, and developing the second generation Web," said NASDAQ Senior Vice President Steven Bloom.
However, they NASDAQ did not provide a break down of the index composition. Many in internet industry have relied on Google (Nasdaq:GOOG) to be a proxy of the internet industry. Why not! Google operates:
1) the largest search engine 2) the largest online advertising network 3) the largest online video site 4) the third largest social networking site 5) one of the largest payment flow services, email and mapping services
Soon Google will be a big player in: 6) mobile applications 7) productivity applications 8) online storage services (other than email)
Mashable is reporting that Intuit, the company behind QuickBooks, Quicken and TurboTax software, has acquired Homestead Technologies for about $170 million. Homestead offers website creation tools and other e-commerce and marketing products made for online use, the combination of Intuit and Homestead will present opportunities for Homestead’s technologies to be used for small businesses both internally and with direct interaction with customers.
The plan is to basically offer a suite of solutions for companies looking for an integrated option to extend their businesses into the online sector, reach out to customers and retain them as well. Intuit had already been making some moves towards offering more self-administrative tools for business owners with the launch of services like their involvement with the online service for Quicken.
The company also already has a partnership with Google, which should be another advantage for the web-based tools and Google’s ongoing initiative. With the combination of Intuit and Homestead, these web-based tools move even further into the realm of Salesforce, but could present another level of competition for services like Upspring that are using the social networking angle for the promotion of businesses online.
The co-founder of Hotmail has jumped into the online office suite fray with InstaColl, another online office application like Zoho, Google, and Zimbra.
Sabeer Bhatia has been more outspoken than most about the relationship of this rapidly changing marketplace to the short term business prospects for the software business. Bhatia recently suggested:
"We are just a few years away from the end of the shrink-wrapped software business. By 2010, people will not be buying software,"...
As some have pointed out this may be an example of biting the hand that fed you, given that Bhatia scored a huge payday when he sold Hotmail to Microsoft. However it's hardly fair to ask him to sit back and watch while Microsoft's shrink wrapped empire quickly may be...unwrapping.
I'm not a big fan of office, noticing that I rarely use it anymore in preference to simpler tools, CMS, etc. However I think Microsoft's market wont' dry up so quickly. Offices are slow, non-innovative environments and it's unlikely we'll see big changes from the tens of millions of secretaries now dependent on their facility with Word and Excel. Live documents has a natural advantage in this market and if Microsoft plays their cards cleverly they may be able to keep folks on board as the slow transition to online office suites continues.
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed on the WebGuild Blog including posts, comments, and external links, are those of the individual
authors and not WebGuild's.
Google has befriended Salesforce.com and 
Google gave the cloud computing initiative a major boost 
The service is similar to 
Want to develop applications for Google's new Android mobile phone platform and make a cool $275K?! Google has put $10M into a 
The web is about pushing boundaries and first movers usually have the advantage. Recently, I was fortunate to meet with 
Online gaming communities are turning a social activity into big business. The rising popularity of rich web applications, streaming video, audio and access to broadband is making on-demand entertainment available to anyone with an internet connection.
Mashable is reporting that 
