Tag Archives: Microsoft

The master moves to the cloud

Fact: data is moving en masse from PCs and enterprise networks to SaaS applications in the cloud. This trend will reshape the computing industry and change the very core of how we think about data and applications. For example, we … Continue reading

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How IBM and Yahoo made Microsoft and Google

Here is the five-step recipe for creating the most important software companies of the past 30 years: Convince the market leader to give you something big they don’t see the value in for cheap Innovate, innovate, innovate Make a ton … Continue reading

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Dogfooding vs. maintaining perspective

I’m all for dogfooding but not at the expense of deep competitive research. Sometimes you just have to live with your competitors’ products in order to understand them the way their customers do. I guess now that Bill Gates is … Continue reading

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Adobe Engage 2008 To Launch Flex 3.0 and AIR

Tomorrow, at the invitation-only Engage 2008 event in SF Adobe will launch AIR and Flex 3.0. If you want to get a sense of what will be shown, here are the slides from the January pre-release tour. The event has … Continue reading

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Polaris Digital Media Summit

I spent the last few days in Deer Valley, UT at the annual Polaris Venture Partners Digital Media Summit or PVPDMS08 as we casually refer to it (right). It’s a great event where the CEOs of our digital media companies mix … Continue reading

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Emerging Ecosystems & Platforms

I’m at David Kirkpatrick’s iMeme conference in SF. It’s likely going to be a treat. The speakers and the attendees are of great caliber. As an ex-platform guy who’s recently spent a lot of time thinking about social infrastructure, I’m … Continue reading

Posted in Digital Media, Google, Microsoft, SaaS, startups, virtual worlds, Web 2.0 | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | 5 Comments

Enterprises, Everybody Wants Your Data

As storage gets cheaper, enterprises small and large accumulate more and more information. Finding the right information at the right time is becoming harder and harder. Information comes from many sources: email, IM, the Web and intranets, employee’s desktops, enterprise … Continue reading

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Google Targets Enterprises With Postini Acquisition

Another strategic move by Google–buying Postini for $625M. Postini has been a leader in the hosted email/IM security, archiving and compliance space. In addition to having well-thought out service offerings, the company has been able to operate on a big scale … Continue reading

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Playing Monopoly in the Advertising Space

So, let’s see: Microsoft buys aQuantive for $6B (2x price premium suggests some deal competition) Google buys DoubleClick for $3.1B (beats Microsoft) WPP buys 24/7 Media for $649M (Microsoft was also looking at it) Yahoo buys Right Media for $680M … Continue reading

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Perception and Reality: Why It Makes Sense For Google To Pay $3.1B For DoubleClick

Perception and reality sometimes have a twisted relationship. That’s particularly true in cases where being perceived as the leader makes you the leader. We tend to see these types of self-fulfilling prophecies in aggregator / market maker and other critical … Continue reading

Posted in Advertising, Google, Microsoft | Tagged , , , | 5 Comments