Global Nerdy

This story starts out with video of a tragically bad corporate reinterpretation of U2's "One" (commissioned to commemorate the union of Bank of America and MBNA's credit card businesses). It was so painful, it became something of an internet comedy senation. The New York Times, however, notes that the tale has turned tragically stupid:

A video of two Bank of America employees singing a version of U2’s “One” to commemorate their company’s acquisition of MBNA recently made the rounds of the blogs, prompting amusement and some ridicule from online viewers.

But the intended comic effect of their performance and the retooled lyrics (“One spirit, we get to share it/Leading us all to higher standards”) seemed lost on lawyers on the lookout for copyright violations.

On Tuesday, a lawyer for the Universal Music Publishing Group, a catalog owner and administrator, posted the text of a cease-and-desist letter in the comments section of Stereogum.com, a Web site carrying the video. It contended that Bank of America had violated Universal’s copyright of the U2 song.

All this really shows is the indiscriminate nature with which Big Content uses the legal weapons at their disposal, without a second's thought or reflection. I won't bother with the neo-hippie "it used to be about the music, man" lament that the music business is now dominated by corporate management, but doesn't this kind of nonsense make you wonder if the legal staffs at the major record labels have too much power?

The joke's on UMG, of course. The sheer awfulness of the song has spawned a cover featuring Johnny Marr (ex of the Smiths) and David Cross (ex of Mr Show and Arrested Development). Enjoy.

Note to UMG lawyers: please click on "Leave a Comment" to post your cease and desist notices.

Tags: U2, UMG, Bank of America, MBNA, One, Big Content, Johnny Marr, David Cross

This must have been an interesting weekend for Yahoo! employees. First, you get the direct fallout from the Wall Street Journal's story covering "the Peanut Butter Manifesto." Then you get the secondary analysis of just what ailes the world's most popular network of web properties. Finally, Yahoo! announces a deal with a clutch of newspaper chains. What's it all mean, and what's the relationship between these stories?

Let's try to connect some dots.

This year, Yahoo has suffered from slumping shares, slowing revenue growth, staff defections and a delay in a crucial project aimed at boosting online ad sales. As the memo shows, even some current executives have been fretting that the Internet company's top management isn't prepared to take the strong medicine they feel is needed to right the ship.

Some worry that Yahoo — whose activities range from online dating to fantasy sports — has stretched itself thin and lost track of priorities. Recently, the company has been outmatched in key areas such as search advertising and social networking. (See related article.)

Last month Brad Garlinghouse, a Yahoo senior vice president, wrote the memo, titled "The Peanut Butter Manifesto," for top executives. His contention: "Change is needed and it is needed soon."

Mr. Garlinghouse, who once shaved a "Y" in the back of his head, argued in his manifesto that Yahoo is spreading its resources like peanut butter on bread, thinly and evenly across all its activities. "Thus we focus on nothing in particular," he wrote, saying the Sunnyvale, Calif., company needs to pick specific areas to focus on and make bigger bets on them while dropping nonessential activities.

So, is Yahoo! broken? So heavily matrixed, sclerotic, and unfocused that it needs radical surgery? Or is Yahoo! simply a successful upgrade or a deal away from returning to their former glory atop the internet advertising pile, thanks to their industry-leading reach? It would seem that Wall Street can't figure it out either. Accoding to the New York Times this morning:

So is Yahoo stock, which now trades at $26.91, down 31.3 percent this year, a bargain suitable for value investors? Or is the once highflying company — which in its heyday was regarded not unlike today’s Google — destined to bring further disappointment?

Yahoo management, led by its chief executive, Terry S. Semel, is counting heavily on a technological upgrade of its search engine to enhance profits. The delayed upgrade, called Project Panama, is now scheduled for introduction in 2007, and analysts expect it to narrow Yahoo’s search gap with Google. Merrill Lynch figures that the project will raise revenue per search to around 5 cents in 2008, or as much as 7 cents if Panama proves a rousing success.

“Monetization is a hard thing; not too many people do it very well,” said Mr. Befumo at Legg Mason. But, he contended, Yahoo has some appealing alternatives.

“If you have a traffic problem, then you have a fundamental business problem because you have nothing to convert into revenue dollars,” he said. “But if you have a monetization problem, which is what Yahoo effectively has, you always have options.”

So the (investment) world is splitting into two perspectives on Yahoo!: those who believe the company is caught between aggressive competition from Microsoft and AOL as well as niche players like MySpace and YouTube, and those who see strength in their massive reach—a huge audience simply awaiting the right tools to properly address their needs.

What's the state of Yahoo!'s traffic? Fred "A VC" Wilson has a very useful post on the matter. It's clear from his numbers (which come from comScore) that Yahoo!'s still the biggest property manager on the 'net. Unfortunately, Yahoo! isn't growing their audience at the average rate of the internet as a whole. Google itself is barely keeping pace (if you don't factor in YouTube's audience growth). Here, I drew a quick graph (using Fred's comScore numbers) to show you what I'm talking about:

As Fred points out, the internet may not be mature (there's still triple-digit growth available for new services), but the warhorses of internet eyeballs—the portals—are looking pretty mature themselves, relatively speaking. Yahoo! has to keep pace with the net as a whole, otherwise every point of growth in the size of the internet audience comes at its expense. The chart above, however, makes me think that a portal-based strategy, essentially creating an all-encompassing destination for an audience, isn't where the internet's growth is coming from. Audiences are being attracted to sites that showcase within some kind of niche, either by virtue of the medium (YouTube for video), or the subject (Facebook for college kids), or the purpose (Wikipedia as a reference source). The portal's dilemma is that it's simply untenable to be as good as a specialist might be when that specialist is simply a click away.

So, should Yahoo! acquire audience growth? One of the things Yahoo! has taken some heat for has been their seeming inability to close deals for Web 2.0 properties like MySpace and YouTube. When you see the audience growth rates for Fox Interactive (ie, MySpace) and YouTube, you can see why: if Yahoo!'s core portal offerings aren't even keeping pace with the growth of the medium, then they can only increase their share by quickly incorporating the up and coming destinations.

On the other hand, if you're a Peanut Butterite, you'd have to believe that Yahoo! couldn't have digested those properties, leaving them as-is alongside existing (and competing) internally-developed services like Yahoo! 360 or Yahoo! Video. Even if you think Yahoo!'s traffic is fine but the monetization needs a tweak, then you'd have to imagine that the incremental traffic delivered by either acquisition would have come in handy later rather than sooner. In either case, it would have been a short-term waste of shareholders' money.

Back to Garlinghouse's assertion, then, that Yahoo! needs to focus on high-impact businesses where it can dominate. That sounds partly right, but it's a half-measure unless Yahoo! also addresses how they earn money with those visitors. Yahoo! has to get their ad network (search, contextual, rich media, and otherwise) right.

Google, of course, has neatly sidestepped these issues by not being a destination and concentrating on brokering individual audence members' needs with the information in their index. By focusing on building an ad network rather than a content destination, they allow the specialists to chip away at Yahoo!'s share of the audience (in fact, they finance the specialists through ad revenue).

And while it's critical for Yahoo to bring their ad network up to parity with Google's, they'll have to cut deals and spend money to ensure Google doesn't erode Yahoo!'s third party reach any further. That's the motivation behind today's announcement that Yahoo! will work with 176 local papers from seven different newspaper chains on a long-term project to share ad revenue and local content. Whatever the details of the deal, the main point is that it takes some powerful local ad distribution out of Google's reach. Yahoo! will be able to offer advertisers regionally targeted ads distributed by well-known local brands (such as the Atlanta Journal-Constitution).

Yahoo! has grown up to be the biggest media property on the web but their slice of the web's audience is declining all the time. Google, with their focus on search and advertising technology, has positioned itself to not only put ads in front of more people than Yahoo! can, but to earn more money when they do it. Yahoo! has rightly started to take a hard look at itself: what good is all the traffic it generates if it can't convert it into profits the way Google can? With competition on all sides, should the company consider reducing the scope of its services to focus on ways it can compete with Google, or is its breadth of offerings a strength, hidden behind second-rate ad technology?

Yahoo! CEO Terry Semel will come under inreasing pressure to find decisive answers to these questions, and soon.

Tags: Yahoo!, Google, internet advertising, content, Peanut Butter Manifesto

Happy 21st birthday, Microsoft Windows!

Although you've been of legal drinking age in France and Italy for five years, the United Kingdom for three and most of Canada for two, you're finally old enough to procure Bud Light in your home country!

In honor of this milestone, the site Connected Internet has published a list of 21 things you never knew about Microsoft, Windows and Bill Gates. Among the items in this list:

• The price: Microsoft Windows 1.0's retail price was US$100. The Connected Internet article states that 100 1985 dollars is worth about $177 today, which is about a dozen dollars short of what it costs to buy the full version Windows XP Home edition with Service Pack 2 at Amazon.com.
• Requirements to run Windows 1.0: 256KB of RAM (remember, that's kilobytes, not megs!), DOS 2.0 and two floppy drives.
• Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose: Windows 1.0 was out a full 2 weeks before it had to be patched to fix some bugs.
• Why Bill doesn't work in branding: Bill didn't want to call it “Windows”; his preferred name was “Interface Manager”. You've got to remember that this was the early days of personal computing. You have to remember that only four years prior to Windows 1.0's release, IBM's PCs were produced by an independent business unit whose name was “Entry-Level Systems”, which implied that PCs were something you bought as a gateway to buying a real computer.

If you're curious as to what installing Windows 1.0 was like, DigiBarn has a photo essay that goes through the whole procedure.

We'll close by leaving you with this cult favorite: a video of Steve Ballmer doing what I presume is an internal promotional video for Windows 1.0:

If you're wondering what Nintendo's up to amidst the noise surrounding the PlayStation 3 release, here it is:

Everything I hate about SOAP — the so-called “Simple Object Access Protocol” — has been summarized quite nicely in the dialogue The S Stands for Simple in Pete Lacey's Weblog.

Link

Kevin Barnes has posted a FAQ for programmers about living in India on his blog, Code Craft. The questions covered in his FAQ are:

• How did you end up going to India?
• How much do jobs pay in India?
• How can you live with yourself for helping to move American jobs to India?
• What’s the cost of living? / How can people there live on so little?
• Can someone from the US get a job working in India at US wages?
• What’s the visa/tax situation like?
• What’s it like raising your kids in India?
• Aren’t Indian programmers better/worse than US ones?
• Don’t you hate … in India/Bangalore?
• How long will you stay in India?

“If you want a more artistic sense for my feelings about India,” writes Kevin, “read this or this.”

I had hoped that these three entries chronicling my troubles with installing Release Candidate 1 of Microsoft's Vista operating system would mark the last of the annoyances I'd encounter, but that wasn't to be. My new problem: registration.

Vista would nag me time and again: “You have to register this software, otherwise it's going to stop running! You have x days left!” As Murphy's Law would have it, the OS would always nag me when I had something more important to do.

The period during which I could run Vista without registering with the mother ship in Redmond passed while I was away at ISPCON. When I returned, my PC desktop greeted me with a dialog box telling me that if I wanted to use the computer again, I would have to register. I clicked the button to start the registration process, and that's where the trouble began.

“You are not connected to the internet,” said a dialog box. This wasn't true: I'd been using the machine to surf the net before I left, and I hadn't changed any settings nor any of the cabling leading to the machine.

I decided to be thorough and eliminate the obvious culprits first. I took the network cable from the PC and plugged it into my PowerBook, and I was still able to connect to the net. I checked to see that the ports on my network switch were working, and they were. After going through a few more simple checks and fiddling with the cables, the only conclusion I could come to was that the machine was in fact connected to the net and that Vista just didn't realize it.

One of the options that the Vista dialog box gave me was to try to alter my internet connection settings. I chose this option. The only connection option it offered me was PPPoE — typical for home DSL and cable modems, but completely wrong for the office network. I might have been able to fix this by going to the internet or networking control panels, but I was effectively locked out of them until I registered Vista.

Another option offered by Vista was to register via modem. This was a non-option, as the machine didn't have one.

I was left with one final option: registration by phone. I dialed the toll-free number, where a voice activated system suggested that I try registering using the online method, as it's the easiest one. It then asked me to read eight or nine groups of numbers displayed on the screen and then asked me to enter eight or nine groups of numbers. The whole process took about five minutes and was as painless as a process like that could be.

Once the registration was complete, the system showed a dialog box informing me that I should reboot the machine, which I did. When the reboot was complete, I fired up a browser and found that the machine was connected to the 'net again. Even though I was relieved, I groaned — why did it mangle the 'net connection after my “trial period” had ended, only to restore it after I'd registered?

Experiences like this are why I find myself using Windows less and less.