{{ http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2214/2234037367_2a77f57641_m.jpg|Microsoft’s hostile takeover bid}}

It would be sad if the merger/acquisition does go through (which I think it will, eventually). Meanwhile, while the long drawn battle plays itself out, I can’t help but wonder why Y! failed to leverage some of its really valuable assets. Honestly, some of their assets have incredible value in them. To some extent I do blame the media (or Yahoo’s PR). I don’t believe that Google does //all// the innovation, nor that all their products are superior to the competition. But still, even if someone in Google sneezes, it gets Dugg and Slashdotted and every one just goes hyper. In this post I’ll discuss some of these issues.

First off, some of the good stuff (I’m not going to mention the usual suspects like Y’s traffic numbers or their share in the web-mail and IM markets):

* Yahoo! is a major supporter and contributor in [[http://hadoop.apache.org|Hadoop]]: an open source implementation of [[http://google.com|Google's]] [[wp>MapReduce|MapReduce]]. Complaints of Yahoo playing catch up and “too little too late” apart (I will address them in another post), I do think this is a timely and much needed development, both for Yahoo and the industry in general. A cursory look at the [[http://wiki.apache.org/hadoop/PoweredBy|list of places using Hadoop]] is enough to give an idea of the kind of enabler this platform is. An entire community and several other projects are mushrooming around Hadoop including [[http://hadoop.apache.org/hbase/|HBase]], [[http://incubator.apache.org/pig/|Pig]] (bad name if you ask me) and [[http://hypertable.org/|Hypertable]]. Google might have the largest, most efficient MapReduce and BigTable implementations, but their implementations are just that — theirs, and extremely closely coupled to their infrastructure. Opening up such a platform for others and building a healthy community around it is I think a Good Thing.
* Yahoo! Developer Network: This crew has churned out some remarkable products (such as [[http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/|YUI]] and [[http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/|YSlow]]) as well as some really well organized guidelines (such as [[http://developer.yahoo.com/ypatterns/|the Design Pattern library]]).
* [[http://finance.yahoo.com/|Finance]]: the [[http://finance.google.com|competition]] is not even close.
* Flickr and Del.icio.us
* [[http://mobile.yahoo.com|Yahoo! Mobile]]: I have yet to get on the mobile Internet bandwagon, so I really have no first hand experience here. But I’ve heard that Yahoo products have much better support across a wide variety of devices compared to the competition. In fact, until the Java based GMail reader came out, the mobile version of GMail’s web interface was quite lacking.

That said, I feel there are two main areas Y! needs to work on if they want to get back in the game:
* Brand image: Y! needs to work on how they are perceived //externally// as well as //internally//. I feel that people who work at Y! themselves don’t believe in the company, or have the feeling it is somehow not as good as or not as cool as other companies. A lot of Google’s brand image comes from the attitude of its employees, and the work culture. Ditto for Microsoft.
* Streamlined products: Yahoo! Maps and Mail are good applications, but they are far too bloated. Even on my reasonably powerful dual-core desktop, these applications feel sluggish and drive the CPU to saturation which is just not acceptable. In comparison, offerings from Google feel much leaner, load quicker and are more responsive.

In the end, the company that remains competitive and offers the best value to its customers and shareholders will prevail. And I feel that a combined Microsoft-Yahoo entity will not make the space any more interesting. On the other hand (as many fear) I think it might kill and certainly slow down innovation that might otherwise have happened. If Yahoo! can somehow manage to stay afloat on its own, it will at least be a little more exciting. So come on Yahoo! dikha de (translates to “show us”)!!

Today’s speaker is Ray Ozzie. He’s going to talk about collaborative software.

Some guy who’s name I couldn’t get invented the plasma panel and also the first version of a touch screen. Motivated by computers for education, not really a computer scientist, just an eccentric. The terminal was called PLATO IV.

Ozzie’s slides are pretty interesting because they don’t contain any text. Almost each slide is simply an image, while he talks through the context and the anecdote behind the image.

Ted Nelson authored two (comic?) books called “Computer Lib” and “Dream Machines”. He was also the author of Hypertext.

Anyways, so a few days back I was in a meeting when the growth rates of Indian companies such as Infosys and TCS was being discussed. Out of curiosity, I wanted to get a feel for how say Infosys stacked up against say Microsoft. So I went and dug up some numbers from Yahoo Finance.

Infosys (with around 36,000 employees) is //already// almost half the size of Microsoft, however, its market capitalization trail M$ by a factor of 7. The yearly revenue of Infosys is almost a 20th of Microsoft’s. On the other hand, Infosys is trying to grow to around 70,000 people in the next two years. I haven’t read of any such expansion plans from Microsoft.

To puts things in a little perspective, Google’s is around a 10th the size of Microsoft, while its market capitalization is already about half of M$. Google’s annual revenue is around a sixth of Microsoft’s.

But what do all these numbers mean? Honestly, I don’t really know. I hope some of my [[http://nakulmandan.blogspot.com|learned friends]] will be able to shed some more light on this. I just have some qualitative comments to make.

The first surprising thing to me was that Infosys was already so big (in number of employees). I mean, comparing it with M$, I’m actually amazed that they are able to sustain such a large working force. I guess thats one of the advantages of being based in India — a big company can save billions in salaries, employment benefits and taxes. Though I don’t know enough to make any claims, I feel slightly worried whether Infosys will be able to attain its target growth rate, unless its revenues and assets grow in proportion.

There was a news story in Time a couple of weeks back on how Ford Motors is struggling to get back into the US auto market. They mentioned that back in the 90s, Ford was //losing// around $250 per car manufactured (because of the employment benefits, health care etc that they had to provide), while Toyota was making more than a 1000 dollars on similar priced cars because they weren’t incurring these costs. Sounds somewhat similar to what Microsoft is/would be dealing with as companies like Infosys encroach its markets?

I was also a bit taken aback by Google’s figures. I mean sure Google’s been all over the news since like forever, but I had never actually taken a look at concrete numbers before. This is a crude way to look at it, but one way to visualize Google’s figures is to imagine it being roughly twice as productive as M$ on a yearly basis, and almost five times as valuable. Its truly remarkable. Google has also been growing at an almost alarming rate — almost a 100% growth rate in the past few months I believe (I think they were recruiting 100 new people every week at one point). I read somewhere that they will probably slow down their growth in this coming year, but its still quite remarkable.

Note that Infosys’s target growth rate is actually almost similar. I’m quite curious as to what kind of strategy Infosys is taking to achieve its goal. Its probably in Infosys’s favor that its not on the radar of newsmongers like Google is. IIUC, even HCL and TCS are on similar growth curves. I’ll try and read up a little more on their plans and post an update if I find something interesting.

One word: //pathetic//.

The font rendering was horrible. Some really useful CSS properties such as ‘max-width’ aren’t even supported. Why does IE suck so much? I even tried some of the hacks I found, but even they didn’t work (most involved using the ‘expression()’ method to set the width)

Anyways, I don’t have the time and patience to fix layout right now. So if you’re using IE and you think this site looks ugly, thats fine by me. But you’ll be better off using a //real// browser.

Sheesh.

So what is Google’s future going to be? It certainly seems headed to become a giant — like Yahoo! or Microsoft. However, as Google management has pointed out, they are not going to be a profit-minded company and they are still going to operate much like a private company. Which is another way of saying that Google’s policies and products will still be tightly controlled by Larry and Sergey’s team of PhD’s.

The tide also seems to be settling down in the corporate IM market. Corporate IM had taken off big time as Yahoo! and M$ and AOL all tried to sell customized versions of their messengers to businesses. This was fine for a start, since the companies were mostly using messaging for internal uses. However, as businesses expand and the world continues to shrink, companies started facing the need to talk with clients and customers and providers, who are not surprisingly, often using a different network/service for their messaging needs. The demand for interoperability and compliance brought the market down a bit.

In a surprise move, both Yahoo! and AOL have announced to step back on their corporate IM businesses at around the same time. Even more surprising is the fact that they have agreed to make their current software and protocols interoperable with other products (those from M$ and AOL) using a Microsoft product called the Microsoft “something” server. Naturally, they earn royalty from M$ for using their server, but they also have conceded to let go of this market, leaving an almost clear ground for M$ to take over.