Year: 2002
New Baby Boy
Well, for all my friends at SuperNova here is a decentralised announcement from a central location – my weblog. Gené – my wife – gave birth to a 9lb 2oz boy at 1.54pm Pacific today. He is 20.75” long. unbelieveably the hard part – pushing – took only 20 minutes. No name yet – we’re…
New Baby
Well, Gené is going into Lucille Packard [children’s hospital] tomorrow to be induced for our second child. No doubt there will be news sometime during the day. Which means – of course – that I will miss SuperNova. Still some priorities have to come first
Manchester United 2 Arsenal 0
From today’s Sunday Times [UK]. How nice to see the youngsters of Manchester beat the unconvincing Arsenal team. December 08, 2002 Hugh McIlvanney: Bitter Wenger loses the Old Trafford plot Sir Alex Ferguson will have enjoyed the sight of Arsenal’s manager reacting in such an irrational fashion to this defeat NOTHING about yesterday’s momentous victory…
Supernova 2002
Kevin Werbach has a conference coming up in December. It is the 9th-10th in Palo Alto. The website explains: “Supernova is a new conference exploring the distributed future. With the bursting of the Internet bubble, businesses, end-users, investors, and technology vendors face a bewildering array of challenges. Yet a common theme runs through the fundamental…
Space to Compete
Sean Gallagher has some interesting things to say about competing with Microsoft. He hints at a new architecture for an operating system. Storage moving to the center seems to be part of the catalyst for this. OS X [which I love] gets a very positive mention. Its here I have to say – without assuming…
MSN grows ad revenue by 40%
Yusuf Mehdi has been boasting on CNet about the revenue traction MSN has been getting of late. Full article here. There are some key facts for those familiar with the RealNames story. Start with this quote from Mehdi: “For the 2002 fiscal year, which ended June 30, MSN’s online ad revenue grew $40 million, he…
MSN 8 has Keywords!
Well, it’s been a while since Microsoft decided not to proceed with the RealNames Keyword product in the browser. Now …. 5 months later, MSN has announced that MSN 8 – the one with the $300m advertising campaign – will include Keywords. Suprise suprise! Danny Sullivan – on his SearchEngineWatch site says the following: “There…
Google rank
Apparently Dave Winer is the second Dave on Google. I checked – I’m only the 47th “Keith”. But I am the 1st “Keith Teare”. 8:06:42 PM
IE – more growth!
Kevin Werbach has commented on Microsoft’s IE market share. I left the following comment: “IE has become – defacto – a piece of infrastructure. It is no less a gateway to content and services than Windows is a gateway to applications. In the world of web services – where binding the browser to a service…
IE Growth
From CNet: This is why Microsoft has to be responsible in its decisions regarding 3rd parties. IE is NOT just an application. It is, de-facto, a piece of infrastructure. Its power is such that a decision to partner or not has the power of life and death over a 3rd party. Where that 3rd party…
J Crew
Ok, it’s August the 9th today – I know that because it’s my wife Gené’s birthday. And I get this in my email from JCrew [where I buy a lot of things online] – “Fall’s here”! Well its 100 degrees F. in Woodside. I’d say its still summer. Whadda Ya think? Just because the retail clothing…
LBO’s
This article captures the consequences of the current market very well.The original is here. SuperModelsFeast along with the buyout vulturesThe market’s crash has left many low-priced companies easy prey when the new wave of leveraged buyouts begins. Here’s how to spot the stocks that might be gobbled up next.By Jon D. Markman With stocks trading…
Burger King
A friend – Tom Ball – just sent me this from The Deal. Seems that the EBIDTA multiple was 7.3 – that’s very high. Still, its less than McDonalds and Wendy’s are trading at. It’ll be interesting to watch. “But for the buyer, opportunity abounds. Rival McDonald’s Corp. is trading at a 10 times Ebitda…
Accountants
I love this John Dvorak comment: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,4149,362052,00.asp Although accountants are needed in any business, they’re supposed to advise the company, not run it. If a CEO doesn’t want to listen to the CFO and goes off spending like crazy, finally going broke, that’s the CEO’s fault. And if the CEO lets the CFO run the…
IE Monopoly
This story on CNet echoes some of the points I have been making. Particularly this sentence: “What we’re seeing with Web sites that are viewable only with IE is the privatization of the Web,” said Mozilla’s Baker. “And that’s a dangerous setting. We’re moving toward a world where all the capabilities of the Internet are…
MSN “superior” user experience
I have not had time to fully examine Microsoft’s replacement for RealNames, however, there are a few obvious points to make. Firstly, the claim that the user experience offered by RealNames was in some way inadequate, and that MSN was planning to improve on it, seems to have been clarified. Here are a few examples.…
Hack
Here’s a neat tip. Every internet connected computer has a hosts file. On Windows machines this file is in C:windowssystem32driversetc. If you are running NT, Windows 2000 or XP this may be c:winntsystem32driversetc. The file is called hosts or hosts.sam. A small modification can render Keywords active again – at least for as long as…
Back
Well, I am now back from a 2 week family reunion in Mallorca, Spain. First time many of the 18 people have seen each other for 4 years. Great fun. …And on my return I can confirm that Internet Keywords were switched off on 28 June. Try typing any well known brand in the browser…