The Real Threat to Google

According to a BusinessWeek article, the real threat to Google isn’t Microsoft or Yahoo!, but cell phones:. “As more people use cell phones and their tiny glass screens to gain access to the Internet, Google and its fellow online advertisers will have less space, or what’s called ad inventory, to place marketing messages for customers. […]

Eric Sink on Windows XP and Listening to Customers

Eric Sink on Windows XP and Listening to Customers: “My overall posture toward Microsoft is still friendly. I still use Windows every day…I’ve used Vista, and while I didn’t find it to be a compelling “must-have” upgrade, I rather liked it. But none of this means that I’m going to give my blanket agreement […]

Microsoft’s Cheesy Internal Vista Video

And to think that it’s Apple that gets associated with the term “Reality Distortion Field”: here’s an internal Microsoft video featuring a faux Bruce Springsteen band singing about how the Vista sales team “saw lots of sales” can expect to see even more now that SP1 is out. I also show some other equally painful Microsoft Windows-related videos.

Microsoft’s and Google’s Product Pipelines, According to Scoble

Robert Scoble (on Twitter): “The fact that Bill Gates couldn’t ship one new thing at his last Consumer Electronics Show was an indictment of their product pipeline,” and “Out of all the companies I study Google has the best product pipeline and best management. No one has figured that out yet.”

DemoCamp 17 Covered in the National Post

DemoCamp 17 was a smashing success and was also covered in today’s National Post. Read on for more…

Microsoft’s Bid for Yahoo!

On the very off chance that you hadn’t yet heard: Microsoft has proposed to buy Yahoo! at $31 per share, which translates to just under $45 billion. My fellow Canuck tech news bloggers Mark Evans and Mathew Ingram have weighed in, and — as Mark has astutely observed, the major snowstorm covering the northeast should […]

When “We Remove Vista” Becomes a Selling Point

Here’s a sign displayed in the window of A&D Computer in Milford, New Hampshire:

Read the full story for details…

“The Dog Ate My Homework”…The Microsoft Way!

Phil Factor’s blog entry, Microsoft Boy Announces His School Homework, is a pretty good allegory for how Microsoft’s marketing department communicates.

Your Website Shouldn’t Be Just An Electronic Version Of Your Print Publication

My buddy George has said this a number of times: “There’s power in re-stating what should be obvious.” Hence a re-statement of what should be obvious, even though a number of publications have yet to get it — Your Website Shouldn’t Be Just An Electronic Version Of Your Print Publication.

Advice for Startup CEOs

Some of the advice in the SEOMoz article Advice for Startup CEOs includes: have a voracious appetite for knowledge, be ready to multi-task, be able to communicate in multiple mediums, have a background in usability, cultivate a strong culture of analytics, admit and understand that a company is NOT a democracy, delegation is your friend […]

Mac Support Ad Based on Desktop Icon Art

Here’s an ad created by the ad agency 2008Scandinavia for “Teknograd Mac Support” in which the graphic is a Mac OS X desktop with icons arranged to form images:

Read the full article to see these images at full size.

Programming Book Profits (or Lack Thereof)

John Resig writes about how much money he made writing his book Pro JavaScript Techniques (which, as of this writing, boasts a five-star rating on Amazon.com): after collecting a $7500 advance, which applied against future profits, it took him a year’s worth of sales for him to make an additional $246.30 in profit.
He also […]

Guerrilla Marketing Tactics for Online Publishers

“Someone who was a lot smarter than me figured out that ‘blog’ stood for ‘Best Listings On Google’.” — Will Pate in his presentation, Guerrilla Marketing Tactics for Online Publishers.

Facebook Asked to Remove the “Scrabulous” Game by Scrabble’s Rights-Holders

The toy companies Hasbro (who own the rights to Scrabble in the U.S. and Canada) and Mattel (who own the rights to Scrabble for everywhere else in the world) have asked Facebook to remove the “Scrabulous” application as it infringes on their copyright for the game…

“Putney Swope” on How Not to Negotiate Price

I may have to go look around for the Robert Downey Sr.’s movie Putney Swope, which among other things, contains a great “how not to negotiate price” scene.

The Coming 2008 Dot-Com Crash

The Coming 2008 Dot-Com Crash. Greg Linden writes: “I am only going to make one prediction, but one with broad impact. We will see a dot-com crash in 2008. It will be more prolonged and deeper than the crash of 2000.”

U.S. Album Sales Down, Digital Sales Up

U.S. album sales plunged 9.5 percent last year from 2006, continuing a downward trend for the recording industry, despite a 45 percent surge in the sale of digital tracks.

Useful Non-Sleazy AdSense Tips

Merlin Mann of the excellent site 43 Folders writes: “it’s depressingly rare to find useful, non-douchey advice about making money with a website.” Luckily, he found it — it’s Philipp Lenssen’s Google AdSense Tips, over at Google Blogoscoped.

On Extended Warranties

Illustration by James Kaczman for the New York Times.Click the image to see the illustration with its original article.
In response to an article from last year titled Extended Warranties are for Suckers, a reader going by the name “any non moose” pointed out in the comments that:

Corporates often prefer to warranty their purchases, since having […]