Tag Archives: Yahoo

Sun buys MySQL

16 Wednesday Jan 2008

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Wow, Sun is buying MySQL.

Now, I’ve never been mistaken for a Sun fan.  I wrote about their continued slide into irrelevance when they changed their stock symbol to JAVA (huh?).  That move was panned by everyone, including the most avid Sun-philes.

This move, however, is great for Sun, but does it make any sense for MySQL?  I didn’t even know that MySQL was for sale (though, clearly they were).  I just figured a company that was more… um… relevant would pick them up.

But if you think about it, it didn’t make too much sense for the major players who are picking up companies right now.  Oracle would have loved to do it, but I’m sure MySQL would have balked.  The same goes for Microsoft.  Google would not bother to acquire something as mundane as plumbing.  Yahoo has enough trouble right now, and also is not interested in plumbing.

One interesting option would have been Amazon.  They continue to roll out web services that cater to startups; it would have been impressively bold of them to plop down the cash for the most popular database for startups, too.

But Sun takes it.  It makes sense.  Sun can bring their shiny new toy into the enterprise conversations they’re having with the big IT departments that MySQL wants.

Let’s just hope they don’t screw it up.

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Google’s failure to diversify

01 Saturday Jul 2006

Posted by in Social Networking, Technology, Web 2.0

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Really interesting read on Business Week on Google’s hype but lack of actual market delivery on many of its products beyond its flagship Search.

The stats cited (assuming they’re accurate) are really eye-opening:

Google Talk, an instant-messaging service launched last August, now ranks No. 10, garnering just 2% of the number of users for market leader MSN Messenger, according to comScore Media Metrix. Three-month-old Google Finance, heralded as a competitor to market leader Yahoo! Finance, has settled in as the 40th-most-visited finance site, according to data from Hitwise, a competitive intelligence firm. Gmail, the e-mail service that was lauded at its 2004 launch for offering 500 times as much storage space as some rivals (they quickly closed the gap), today is the system of choice for only about one-quarter the number of people who use MSN and Yahoo e-mail…

…Take Orkut, Google’s two-year-old social-networking site. Since making an initial splash, Orkut has seen limited changes and has faded in popularity everywhere except Brazil. Today it draws less than 1% as much U.S. traffic as MySpace.

The article does admit that there are some great successes to tout, like Google Maps. But in general, despite some really fancy technology and cool features, they can’t reach the marketshare they want.

Clearly, Google is still a successful company and every company out there would love the level of press coverage (read: hype) and batting average that Google has (Homestead included). But I think the facts show what many of us already believed: while it is a great technology company and great recruiting company, it’s currently only a decent product company and a worse product marketing company. Oh, and they’re run by engineers.

As Don Dodge writes, their products’ success “depends on how much effort Google puts into making them better, and how much real value they deliver to users”.

Also, given the unbelievably favorable opinion that the blogosphere (and Internet industry in general) has of Google and everything it touches, the fact that most of their launches haven’t gotten much traction reminds us of something else. It reminds us that most of the world doesn’t listen to us.

Update: The discussion continues: Michael Parekh focuses on how Google and the others can better market these hyped products.

Google Checkout: Why will users use it?

29 Thursday Jun 2006

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Google announced Google Checkout today, and all the world’s a buzz about it. But like TechCrunch, I’m not sure yet why end users would use it.

Now, I see a huge reason why merchants will use it. Merchants who use AdWords (which is pretty much everybody) will get the little shopping cart “I accept Google Checkout” icon next to their ad. And that is huge advantage. With Google’s very stark search results pages, a little icon does do a lot to attract attention. And of course, the more clicks you get on your ad, the higher your ad tends to float…

Forget the cheaper transaction fees ($0.20 per + 2%) or the credit against those transaction fees that AdWords users get. That doesn’t really amount to much unless a lot of customers actually use Google Checkout. The real merchant benefit is this little icon which will make their ad much more noticeable on the page.

But again, why would customers use it?  There have been a lot of online wallets before (like Yahoo) and none of them have taken off. Paypal is not a simple online wallet and, I think, has real benefit to end users (direct person-to-person money transfer). Even then, most customers’ interaction with Paypal is just a place to enter their credit card so someone else can receive money. In the case of Google Checkout, the end user can’t do simply that. They have to use their Google info to pay.

 So far, I only see two reasons that end users will use it:

  1. They are intrigued by that little icon next to all the merchants that they see, and they decide to sign up for it.
  2. They want to use it just because it’s Google.

Will it work?  I don’t know. The public uses a lot of Microsoft stuff just because it’s Microsoft, but then again, they own our OS and browser.

Anyway, I can see a lot of merchants integrating with it to get the little icon on their ads, but not getting a lot of transactions through it, unless Google provides more end user benefits.

Update: John Tokash has written a great review. He thinks Google Checkout’s shielding of your email address has a ton of value, but note how it will only forward the email to your gmail account. Tricky…

Yahoo! Local supporting microformats

21 Wednesday Jun 2006

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Titles says it all.

I’m curious to see what mashups are going to come out of that…

I think it’s a great move for the decentralized-data proponents, clearly. Now, we’ll be able to index, search, and organize the data more easily (but frankly, anyone who really wanted to could have scraped it before because the HTML has to be consistently formatted).

However, the problem with review sites even as far-reaching as Yahoo! Local is that there is still way too few reviews. Cruising through the site, I would bet that only a single digit percentage of small businesses in my area are reviewed. And I live in the Bay Area, where there is more density of reviews than pretty much anywhere. We still need to figure out a way to get people to enter their opinions into the computer. Let’s see Yahoo tackle that one.

Compared to that, indexing and reformatting are totally easy.

But I’m not really complaining; it’s still good news.