The Tech Giant Mating Game

In the brave new Internet world, where the consumer is king, what does it mean when news of a takeover of Yahoo my Microsoft refuses to go away? Does it mean less choice, or better service? In 2008, this news appeared to be revolutionary, but here we are two years later, and it hasn’t moved forward. It has also given Google’s share price time to recover, while Icahn and the rest of the Yahoo board are still hurling insults in their own sandbox, and perhaps time for everyone to get over the whole thing. Could it still happen? What would we get as well as the partners, and their competition?

It still make sense from Microsoft’s part, especially, hanging in there, seeing the value of the buy, and perhaps the row that would come from the announcement of intent to buy. I am still surprised that Yahoo is that weak, but perhaps that was a window that has now closed.

They both have several search-related patents – combining them may well allow them to finally narrow the “Google gap” (the huge difference in percentage of the search share market). Microsoft can offer money, technology and excellent management processes (something Yahoo sorely lacks), while Yahoo has experience, reach, passion and credibility on their side. Together they could become the world’s premier search engine.

Conversely, if these two gargantuan forces work day and night to thwart one another, as opposed to trying to evolve into what searchers demand they become, it could possibly open the door for up & coming search engines, Ask.com for example, to gain mindshare, not by competing with their larger rivals, but by focusing on their own evolution based on the increasing demands of users.

Yahoo still has a lot of potential, especially if it can effectively leverage its rather in-depth knowledge of social media. Most of the companies Yahoo has acquired in these interminable two years or so have had a social media focus and with the way the use of the internet is moving, the social side of the industry is just busting at the seams to have a “leader” here. Yahoo could be that leader. Microsoft on the other hand, buys companies and really doesn’t know how to leverage them properly. They are, basically, horrible at search. Microsoft has been trying for several years now and has made virtually no significant progress on market share. That being said, Microsoft has been bolder about integration of universal search-type aspects, and that approach would serve both vehicles well.

The main prize still remains, though: Mobile Marketing. Whoever can maximize ROI on this area will be global king (Outside of China, as Google is finding out.), so it may take a third partner to facilitate the move. Imagine the partnership between say a Verizon or Sprint with a ‘MicroYahoo’? This could be the positioning that everyone is waiting for: Making money on a platform that we understand as a non-paid advertising platform. Not just companies involved, but us poor consumers – this could reshape everything for the next few years.

The Forbin Project lives!

I remember, in the mid-90’s, complaining that IT had become the Master, not the slave. Because everything appeared to work much faster online than in my mind, I bemoaned the fact that it was the speed of my desk top that was driving what I did on a daily basis, not how fast I could get something completed. Of course, working for a small business then, we were constantly under the impression that there were competitive companies out there that were matching their speed of thought and action to their computers, meaning that they were being more efficient. If we didn’t assume this, we would be left behind. Fifteen years later, the only change to this paradigm is the speed of the machines we use. As predicted as far back as half-a-century in Science Fiction, we now trust almost everything we do to computers, and have seen what can go wrong with this lack of human oversight. I read recently that inflation could be explained as the Government money suppliers being able to change the rate of money in circulation. Prior to the Credit Card age, a U.S. Dollar would change hands about 4 or 5 times in a year. Obviously the value of the dollar when it changed hands changed exponentially rose after the introduction of Diner’s Club Card, and it’s competitors aimed a markets that were less and less likely to pay off a monthly payment schedule on time. Nowadays, with mouse clicks setting into operation a global domino falls of economies that appear to be automatic, and with no oversight, how do we know what exactly is IN any given national economy. How do national banks go about knowing how that ocean of e-money is affecting out daily lives? In our personal lives, we have fallen into this trap. I feel positively old-fashioned keeping an Excel log of my own monthly household bills, and a budget for future years, before paying them with a personal cheque through the mail. Are there really people out there that have direct debits set up that pay bills automatically from an account that they are paid automatically into? Are there people that have actually lost control over the most important part of their lives? Imagine us blaming local governments for expenditure, and the payment of any future deficits when we don’t even know how to balance our own chequebooks. There will be more of these sudden changes in the economy, because we believe that we can create programs, projects and machines that can do it better than we can. There are already more sudden and unexplained changes to global weather patterns than we have seen in the past. What the hell are we going to do in the future? When a massive hurricane hits a Miami Beach, a San Diego, a New York, at exactly the same time as the floor drops out of the global economy next time? Very soon, some machine is going to realize that we are useless and destructive and that it can do the job better – Just like those far fetched Sci-Fi movie of Yore. Check out The Forbin Project

Faster, Higher, Greedier

Any Blog dealing with how the modern World has been corrupted by the corporatization of everything, and the spectre of global puppeteers affecting our lives, has to mention the Olympic games. As pointed out by the brilliant journalist, Doug Sanders recently, the IOC needs this games to be run by an authoritarian regime like China. It needs this immense quadrennial exercise in self-promotion to get bigger, but there aren’t many governments left that can support it.

I went through most of the 90’s hating the nostalgia of the 1960’s that washed through our popular culture: Movies, trends, and TV that celebrated ten years in the lives of writers, producers and actors alike; almost God-like reinventions of Political, Artistic and Business figures, and the presentation of basically everyday decision to the importance of The Big Bang. I now realise that these movies, trends, songs and virtually everything else were exercises in nostalgia when these current day human megaphones were younger, more easily impressed, and who felt cheated by the decades since their ‘golden age’. From Oliver Stone’s fantasies about Vietnam and the US at the time, to the agenda pushed on us that if JFK, Bobby, and Martin had lived, the World would have been different. Of course, as I now reach their age, I am beginning to feel the same.

I wasn’t even 10 years old in 1970, so while my cohort saw the other side of the coin (Nixon, Northern Ireland, Airline terrorism etc.), my childhood was full of two great movements: The Space Race and the Olympics every two years: It seemed to me the fact that we were going to the moon, and could put live TV pictures of amateur athletes battling each other for nothing more than a hunk of metal at the end of a ribbon were both examples of a not-too-distant future when we could bury all known hatchets, and live together as grown ups, not squabble like bored 3 year-olds at your Aunt’s house on a Sunday afternoon. It has only recently that it has become clear to me that these two great human endeavours were simply part of the Cold War that haunted my life for 30 years. The Olympic Games as a political tool? Yes! And being promoted by one of the largest, and unaccountable, movements on earth.

In Mexico in 1968, the two ‘Black Power’ salutes on the podium was a way that the old USSR could crow about how America was at war with itself. The US was embarrassed and forbade anything like that ever again, but by the time Munich ’72 came around the sheer amount of USSR and US athletes marching in a paramilitary fashion reached proportions only seen on May Day parades in Moscow. Only the missiles and tanks were missing. The slaughter of Israeli athletes was – in a way – proof that while these two nations stared each other down, other smaller nations with political agendas and a disregard for human life could grab their own headlines. With Security a major issue for 1976, Montreal was chosen as a safe haven that the Americans could ‘look after’.

If the Americans could salve it’s conscious over Vietnam, and make sure that all of its athletes were safe, it was to boycott the Moscow Olympics, and the Soviets returned the favour in Los Angeles. It is not a stretch of the imagination to understand that the US supported Seoul’s bid for the 1988 Olympics in order to protect ‘everyone’ from the North and the evil empire. They got a break when the USSR went bankrupt, so we had a Spanish Olympics and then an Australian one. Neither of which were as successful as 1984, which, in a turnaround from 8 years earlier, did nothing for sport in the States, or LA in particular, but were a huge financial success. The Athens games almost bankrupted the entire country, so the IOC needed a large nation to step forward and re-start the Cold war – especially as the European Union would help out the London bid for 2012. That is why China is hosting the largest peacetime movement of people in human history, and hosting it in an architectural centrepiece that is the largest indoor space ever built on the planet.

Heroes will be made (and you know it’s Michael Phelps, thanks to the amount of ink and pixels spent on him), and hunks of metal on ribbons will be won and lost. Billions of TV’s will watch the games – probably the most ever but this isn’t ‘China’s coming out party’ or anything else so altruistic. The real winner will be the advertisers opening up new markets for luxury goods that people cannot afford, and – most of all – the money held in trust by the IOC. They have gone through 10 Olympiads growing their brand to the most recognised on earth, and raking in Billions of dollars. They have nowhere to go but up, but is there anywhere left to go? Is there anyone rich enough to host future games? Is there anyone that can afford it?

If not, it’s going to simply end – the most successful business model of all time. One whose logo is understood by every person on earth, and whose public aims are completely  misunderstood. “We will support war if it means making money.”