Bill Gates Wants Yahoo’s People. The Feeling isn’t Mutual.

This is the funniest thing I’ve heard all week.

Bill Gates is willing to pay a lot for engineering talent.

Asked what makes Yahoo worth more than $40 billion, Gates pointed not to the company’s products, its huge base of advertisers, or its market share, but rather to Yahoo’s engineers. Those people, he said, are what Microsoft needs to go after Google.

In an interview after his speech at Stanford University, Gates said that it turns out it takes a lot of manpower to build tools for advertisers, mobile, and video products as well as improving its core search algorithm and building an infrastructure for cloud computing. “The amount of computer science it is taking to do that is phenomenal,” he said. “As you get more scale of engineering you can just pursue that agenda more rapidly. Yes, the advertisers and the number of end users is good, but we’d put the people and the engineering as the key thing.”

Bill, what the Hell are you talking about? Yahoo employees hate your guts! No matter how great their engineers are, they just won’t work for you!

“Yahoo has always considered itself a bit of an upstart,” says a former Yahoo employee who asked to remain anonymous. “Most Yahoo employees will feel that, A., we lost, and B., there is no way in hell that I am going to work for Microsoft.”

Even if Microsoft buys Yahoo, Yahoo’s best engineers could follow the well-respected Brad Horowitz to Google. In a cruel twist of fate, Google could end up getting the very engineers Bill wanted out of the purchase. Ballmer could end up needing a lot more chairs.

After watching this clip from Pirates of Silicon Valley, it occurs to me that Bill is probably lying about his motivations. He really wants Yahoo for its advertisers and users. All his talk about valuing Yahoo’s engineers is just a ploy to lower resistance to a merger.

Either way, it won’t work. Genuine or fake, Bill’s lust for Yahoo’s people is not mutual.

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February 21, 2008 | Filed Under Tech | 2 Comments 

OMB Fines CD-R King Over Blank Discs

I’ve been saying it for years: the Optical Media Act is a bad idea. Part of that bad idea: import permits for fucking pieces of plastic.

The Optical Media Board (OMB) has ordered CD-R King, one of the country’s biggest suppliers of optical media and related technology products, to pay P1.5 million in administrative penalties.

This was after the OMB, through the Bureau of Customs, found that the company was allegedly importing optical media discs without proper import permits from the agency, according to Cyrus Valenzuela, officer-in-charge of legal service division of OMB, in an interview.

The OMB sent its order Tuesday to CD-R King, informing them of their administrative violation of provisions of Republic Act 9239, or the Optical Media Act of 2003.

This is the same kind of thinking that gets Warner a per-Zune fee: just because a device with perfectly legitimate uses can conceivably be used for “piracy” means it should cost more. If you’re buying such a device, you’re automatically a thief and you should pay for your thievery. That’s just ludicrous! Not only does it raise the cost of legitimate information exchange — the basis of any vibrant civilization — it also serves no other purpose than to protect someone’s obsolete business model. That such an idea should be enshrined in law is even more ludicrous!

CD-R King gives a lower-income Filipinos a chance to use technology. It would be a shame to see it shut down just because the recording industry can so easily write our laws.

(Via Jepoy Bengero.)

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February 14, 2008 | Filed Under Hardware, Law, Philippines | 21 Comments 

Microsoft-Yahoo? Who Cares?

Unable to compete with Google AdSense on its own, Microsoft tries the only thing it knows how to do: buy something, anything. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is offering to buy Yahoo for a whopping $44.6 billion.

Microsoft still doesn’t get it. Google AdSense reaches into the global Long Tail of ad space: sites outside the US. Neither Microsoft adCenter nor the Yahoo Publisher Network can do that. Until either of them does, Ballmer’s proposal doesn’t mean squat to me and thousands of other AdSense publishers worldwide.

Back in the late nineties, I advertised with Microsoft’s old LinkExchange service. I got pretty good clickthrough rates for the pre-contextual days, and I paid well for campaigns. My LinkExchange banners appeared on sites big and small, inside and outside the US. Why can’t Microsoft tap small global publishers like LinkExchange did, especially now that there are so many more of those small global publishers? Oh, that’s right: they’re stupid.

When it comes to online advertising, Yahoo can’t compete with Google in the first place. What the Hell makes Ballmer think buying Yahoo will make Microsoft competitive with Google? Oh, that’s right: he’s desperate.

As a non-US AdSense publisher, why should I even care if Microsoft buys Yahoo? Oh, that’s right: I shouldn’t. Neither should the vast majority of the world’s webmasters.

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February 2, 2008 | Filed Under Advertising | 5 Comments 

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