Month: July 2002

  • 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…