You can search for gadgets:
On the control panel:
Even games:
Not to mention Internet Explorer:
Google's got to be thrilled to get a few extra months before Vista ships.
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| Google's prospects from a Google user and independent investor |
Microsoft is serious about search - 3/25/2006 07:07:00 AM
If you can go fast, no one will ever catch up - 3/24/2006 07:29:00 AM
Yahoo's Jeremy Zawodny says Google Finance makes him sad, since it shows how Yahoo's Finance group let their products stagnate for years. Now Google builds a Finance site from scratch which does much of what Yahoo could have done years ago. Once again, Yahoo is in catch-up mode, trying to copy a Google innovation.
Henry Blodget applies Jeremy's story to all of Yahoo, calling it a "fossilized old media company," and Jeremy objects to the generalization. Jeremy's surely right, there is still good innovation happening at Yahoo. But after Sue Decker cried Uncle and said Yahoo was satisfied with a diminishing #2 position in search, you don't have to be an insider like Jeremy to see that Yahoo has lost its edge, and allowed innovation to lag in order to juice profits. I don't know about "fossilized," but certainly lagging. The same thing happened at Microsoft. By allowing their core products to get stale while they milked their cash cows, both Yahoo and Microsoft gave Google the opportunity to grab the lead in innovation and push them into defensive catch-up mode, while their market shares got shredded. summed it up nicely, arguing that rapid innovation is an incredibly potent competitive weapon: Can you strike the fear of God into your competitors by releasing every two weeks the features that takes them three months to write?Even though Google has gone fast the last couple years, they're going to go even faster. Google CEO Eric Schmidt promised to accelerate the rate of innovation in 2006. This is gonna be a fun year! I can't wait to see what Google has for April Fools Day. |
Why is this news? - 3/23/2006 10:16:00 PM
Not that I'm complaining about a $32 spike, of course. It's just that this is old news, so why wasn't it already priced into the stock?
The speculation started more than a year ago, when Google was under $200 per share. After the lockups expired, Google would meet all the criteria for inclusion in the S&P 500 index, big institutions and pension funds would be required to buy and hold, and the price would soar. Then in May 2005, Google shares jumped $14 on more rumors of getting added to the SPX. Buygoogle wondered at the time why the price would spike when it was already common knowledge that Google would be added sooner or later. Hadn't institutions already loaded up in anticipation? In October, the stock took a month-long swoon after it again wasn't added to the luminous index. Since it's been a matter of when, not if, why would the stock jump 9% on the news? Whatever happened to efficient markets? |
The program is not responding - 3/22/2006 07:54:00 PM
Is this why Vista was delayed?
I switched to Firefox for two reasons: tabbed browsing and adblock. But IE7 beta 2 was refreshed this week, and the rendering engine is supposedly complete. While IE7 doesn't have adblock, it does have tabbed browsing. Since I happily use whatever product works best (that is, I'm not religiously anti-Microsoft just because I buy Google), I downloaded the IE7 beta this morning. But in the first 30 minutes of use, IE7 crashed an astonishing 11 times. It crashed while opening a new tab, it crashed while switching tabs, it crashed while scrolling a web page, and it crashed when watching a YouTube video. It even crashed when I wasn't doing anything - I'd stopped to answer the phone, and while I was talking, IE7 froze and required a ctrl-alt-del end task to recover. (This is on a modern machine, fast processor, 2GB memory, the latest Microsoft patches, and perfectly stable except for this.) Now what I could see between crashes was exciting. The IE7 browser has a clean, spare interface and it feels much faster than Firefox or IE6. If it was stable, and if I could find a way to block all those banner ads that adblock invisibly removes, I'd switch back to IE today. But Buygoogle isn't a Microsoft blog, or a Firefox blog, it's a Google blog -- why should the Google investor care about the instability of IE7? Because Google says Microsoft is their most dangerous competitor, and Microsoft execs throw chairs when they have to compete against Google. Vista threatens to funnel users to Microsoft's search engine for web searches, and it includes desktop search that could make Google Desktop irrelevant. So if Microsoft's quality problems continue to push out the delivery of Vista, that gives Google a larger window of opportunity to scale and to deliver new innovations (and refine old innovations) that can level the playing field with Microsoft. Google needs every week of delay that Microsoft will give them.  |
Endangered species cookie recipe - 3/19/2006 10:43:00 AM
What the heck? Searching for [endangered species africa] returns results for cookie recipes??
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Google promotes GWA - 3/19/2006 10:35:00 AM
I've posted many times that the Google Web Accelerator is still alive, despite rumors to the contrary. But until now it's been in stealth mode - available, but not promoted.
Today for the first time, I say GWA promoted right in Google's search results pages.  On my work machine, GWA reports that since first installing it in May 2005, I've viewed 292,766 web pages and saved 3.9 days. |
| buygoogle.com |
In each of these cases, Yahoo and Microsoft let their products stagnate, while the competition (mainly Google) stole a march on them:
I'm sure there's more cool stuff coming from Yahoo and Microsoft, but the focus and ethic at Google seems different.
Google's zen-like approach is to build and refine useful products and figure out how to monetize after there's a solid, differentiated product. Because Yahoo and Microsoft need a business case first, they're now both behind the innovation curve. After all, if a product is making money, what's the business case for investing to replace it with something revolutionary?