Failed Screenwriter

Microsoft's $44.6 billion dollar offer for Yahoo! is a classic case of a company not getting it. Yahoo! is crap. I should know, I use to work there. I left in 2003 when it became obvious the company had no idea what it was, what's its objective should be, and had no gumption for innovating. I thought the press and analysts would soon see through it as well, however then came Google's AdSense. AdSense brought money back to the market and Yahoo! got swept up in the wave. But it's now obvious Yahoo! was just along for the ride. By the time this deal closes, if it closes, the combined search market for Microsoft and Yahoo! will be less than it is today. It is Google's wave, everyone else is just along for the ride.

This is a deal armchair strategists and Wall Street stock pumpers have been in love with for the last couple of years. Yahoo's been a weak stock and they'd love to make a profit on what's been a lousy investment.

- Microsoft-Yahoo the mother of all clusterbombs

It's Google's wave because they get it, just like Gates understood the market in the 80's and rode it to dominance in the 90's. Goolge's reign has just begun. So who if anyone is going to compete with it? Who will force Goolge, to buy a dieing company just to try and stay relevant? The social networks just went off a cliff.

The major challenge for MySpace, Facebook and every other social network: Figuring out how to turn their enormous online audiences into dollars. But they may have another problem: Figuring out how to keep their enormous audiences.

- MySpace and Facebook's Real Problem: Bored Users

Most likely the company, the model that will compete with Google has yet to materialize. And when it does it will be from where Google is blind - the metaverse. Google isn't completely blind to the metaverse today and will surely jump into the metaverse as it develops, but it's over confidence in AdSense will hinder its exploration. Their take aways from experiments will be clouded. They simply won't get it. At some point Google will leave an opening, an opening some industrious company to exploit. Seth Godin explains in his new book Meatball Sundae: Is Your Marketing out of Sync?, that the same thing happened to WordPerfect, the one time market leader for word processing.

When Microsoft introduced Windows, WordPerfect Corporation hesitated. They saw no reason to support Microsoft's effort to sell an entirely new operating system, and they (rightly) pointed out that version 1.0 of Windows was pretty lousy. So they reinvested in their DOS version.

And as they say, the rest is history.