Month: February 2008

Maybe Microsoft should buy Amazon instead

The Microsoft-Yahoo deal continues to be the hot topic in the blogosphere right now, with Techmeme still dominated by related discussion. The latest news is that Google has posted an official response to the proposed takeover. In general, discussion has moved from “can you believe what just happened” to “this deal with fail/succeed because…” If you read only two posts on the topic, read this one from Fake Steve Jobs and this one from Henry Blodget.

I really have no idea how this is going to play out. Based on what I’ve read, it seems pretty likely that Microsoft will successfully acquire Yahoo. Many think the deal is as good as done. Far less certain, however, is whether they can make the acquisition a success. It could go either way.

I think what’s clear is that this is a strategy change for Microsoft. A bold recognition that they need to succeed on the web. They trail Google in both search and advertising, and it makes a certain amount of sense that combining with Yahoo will create a stronger competitor.

Microsoft is a platform company. Their cash cow is Windows, the most widely used technology platform in history. They are good at platforms. If the strategy shift is to the web, shouldn’t it be slanted towards a great platform?

amazonawsSuch as Amazon’s Web Services platform. On Wednesday Amazon announced their fourth quarter earnings, and shared this tidbit about Amazon Web Services (AWS):

Adoption of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) continues to grow. As an indicator of adoption, bandwidth utilized by these services in fourth quarter 2007 was even greater than bandwidth utilized in the same period by all of Amazon.com’s global websites combined.

ReadWriteWeb has a good discussion of what this means.

Obviously Microsoft isn’t a retailer, and owning Amazon.com itself probably isn’t in the company’s best interests. It could acquire the company for AWS and spin off the rest, however. I suppose Microsoft could just try to duplicate what Amazon has already accomplished with AWS, but why bother? Grab the early market leader and take it to the next level.

I think AWS is an indication of what the platform of the future will look like. Microsoft would be wise to pay attention.

What's new around here?

mlogo I’m so happy that I’ve made the switch to WordPress! It’s a great platform with a great community. One of the best things about WordPress is the gigantic list of available plugins. If I wanted to add a feature to my blog in Community Server, it was always incredibly difficult to do. With WordPress however, the feature has likely already been written by someone else!

I thought I’d take a moment to share with you some of these features.

  1. Comments rock! One of the biggest complaints my readers had about the old blog was that it never remembered their details on the comment form. I hated that too. That’s no longer an issue with WordPress. But wait, it gets better! I installed the Subscribe to Comments plugin, which means you can check a box when you leave a comment and you’ll get email notifications of all follow-up comments!
  2. Twitter! I displayed my Twitter status on my old blog, but I wrote the code to do it myself. I probably re-wrote it half a dozen times too. Anyway, I installed the Twitter Widget, and it rocks. Nice and simple to use. And best of all, when Twitter goes down, I can just deactivate the plugin – no code changes required!
  3. Collapsible Archives! I’ve been blogging since November 2003, which makes for an incredibly long list of monthly archives. With the old design I had everything contracted by default, but I didn’t really like that. Now I have the Flexo Archives Widget, which shows just the years. Click on a year, and it expands to show the months. Very cool!
  4. Tag Cloud! I’m a big fan of tag clouds, and I’m really happy that WordPress 2.3 includes this functionality right outta the box.
  5. AddThis! On every post is a button that lets you save the link to your favorite service. On the sidebar is a button that enables you to subscribe at your favorite service. This kind of functionality should be included on all blogs I think! I’m using plugins from AddThis.

And some non-WordPress things:

  • A wider page layout! I also made the font size a bit bigger.
  • I am quite happy with the way my icon bar turned out! Click on the icons to access my profiles around the web.

If you’re reading this in an aggregator of some kind, I apologize for the multiple items you likely saw in my feed! Should only be a one-time thing. The feed address shouldn’t need to change, however.

Thanks for reading! If you have any feedback, please let me know!

Community Server to WordPress: Part 3

wordpressMy blog is now running on WordPress! It was quite a bit of work, but the migration from Community Server is now complete. Here is what I wrote last July when I decided I wanted to switch to WordPress. You can also read part 1 and part 2 of the migration process.

Here’s what I did since part 2:

  • Removed some spam comments and invalid data from the CS database.
  • Finished up customizing the theme.
  • Spent far too much time trying to get email notifications working. I’m definitely not a PHP expert, but the way mail is implemented just seems bizarre. I eventually got it working, and decided to use the wpPHPMailer plugin for WordPress.
  • Installed some more plugins that I wanted to use, such as the wonderful Subscribe to Comments.
  • Made some additional adjustments to the code.
  • Upgraded PHP to the latest version.

I also setup a second WordPress installation and changed my website over to that.

After I ran the migration tool I had written, I did some more testing, and discovered a big problem with the redirections! In the C# code I had simply written “datePosted.Month.ToString()” and “datePosted.Day.ToString()” to build the URLs. The problem is that if the month was January, that would return a “1”. Community Server likes to have “01” however! Long story short – I just had to add some regex code to the list of redirections to make it work.

As far as I can tell, it’s all working wonderfully! I’ll be doing more testing over the weekend, and please if you notice anything wonky, let me know.

Next up: my Dad’s blog and the Blogosphere.ca blogs.

If I were a terrorist…

…I’d launch an attack on undersea cables around the world.

On Wednesday, two such cables near Egypt were cut resulting in a major disruption of Internet access in south Asia and the Middle East. Today, another cable was cut near Dubai. In both cases the cause remains unknown, but ship anchors seem likely.

Why bother with bombing train stations when you can disrupt global communications, apparently by dropping a few anchors? Maybe it’s sick that I thought about terrorism when reading the news, but seriously, it seems to me that this could be a real threat. And I haven’t heard anything about preparing for it.

The image above gives you a good overview, but this very detailed, up-to-date map of the globe’s undersea cabling is better (and much bigger).

Microsoft bids $44.6 billion for Yahoo!

Post Image This is no longer just a rumor, this is the real deal. I’ve never seen so many articles on the same topic so fast on Techmeme, but I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. This is big, big news! Here’s what they had to say in the press release:

The combination will create a more efficient company with synergies in four areas: scale economics driven by audience critical mass and increased value for advertisers; combined engineering talent to accelerate innovation; operational efficiencies through elimination of redundant cost; and the ability to innovate in emerging user experiences such as video and mobile. Microsoft believes these four areas will generate at least $1 billion in annual synergy for the combined entity.

Microsoft has developed a plan and process that will include the employees of both companies to focus on the integration of the combined business. Microsoft intends to offer significant retention packages to Yahoo! engineers, key leaders and employees across all disciplines.

The offer is a combination of cash and stock. Microsoft thinks they can have regulatory approval and a completed deal in the second half of 2008.

Look out Google!

Read: Techmeme