Bring me the head of Eric Schmidt!

No, Eric Schmidt didn’t step down from being CEO of Google to take Steve Jobs’s position at Apple. I’m fairly certain Schmidt was demoted. Or if he wasn’t, then he should have been.

From a strict business perspective I suppose it’s ridiculous to criticize Schmidt’s performance at Google, but that won’t stop me. The guy has done a fabulous job of optimizing search and web advertising but nearly everything else he and Google have done has been a failure. What else does Google make money from other than search and ads?

Nothing.

Yeah, but YouTube is almost profitable, right?

Hardly. While YouTube may be operating at near break-even that completely ignores the minimum $5 billion sunk and lost in […]

By |January 20th, 2011|2011|131 Comments
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It's All Downhill from Here

Google Labs has this new lexical research tool you may have read about called a Book Ngram Viewer, which allows you to peek inside five million books published between the 15th century and 2008 to see how many discussed antigravity and when:

Semiconductors:

Michael Jackson:

And good old-fashioned fornicating:

But most important of all, since this is simply a new form of Googling we’re talking about, we can look up […]

By |December 19th, 2010|2010|45 Comments
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Follow the Money

There’s a dispute going on right now between Comcast and Level3 Communications concerning the peering agreement between those two companies. Comcast says the dispute has nothing to do with the fact that Level3 just got the Netflix video streaming contract while most observers think that’s all it has to do with.

I think so, too.

Peering is at heart nothing but restraint of trade. Peering came about when various Internet backbone providers noticed they were all connected to the same big data centers and points of interconnection, normally inside telco central offices. Simply pulling an Ethernet cable from one rack to another could interconnect millions of users from two different backbone providers, saving time, distance, router hops […]

By |December 3rd, 2010|2010|18 Comments
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AOL+Yahoo is a Jealousy Game

If you think AOL actually intends to buy Yahoo, you are wrong. That story hit the press this week but it’s a ruse to motivate Google exactly as I explained a few days ago. AOL has neither the money nor the motivation to buy Yahoo, which is analogous to a bus company buying a poorly-managed airline.  AOL just wants to make Google jealous.

Here’s what I think happened. This is pure speculation on my part, of course, but I know most of the players and am even correct from time to time. I think one or more private equity firms brought the deal to AOL: they’ll put up the capital if AOL’s Tim Armstrong […]

By |October 15th, 2010|2010|49 Comments
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Crunch Time at AOL

TechCrunch, a company made up of tech blogs somewhat like this one as well as classified advertising and some events, announced its sale last week to the new-old AOL for a price widely, broadly, and deeply rumored to be $30 million. Nobody will officially confirm this price but I have no reason to believe $30 million is wrong. It is way too high, but it probably isn’t wrong. The better question is why would AOL pay TechCrunch four times what it is actually worth?

I think I know why.

Since I am not known as an equity analyst, you might wonder what makes me believe that TechCrunch is worth only a quarter of the rumored […]

By |October 2nd, 2010|2010|103 Comments
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