MSFT
In-depth analysis and expert insight into Bing, MSN, adCenter, and more.A few weeks ago, Warren Buffett announced that Berkshire Hathway was the single largest investor in IBM In an interview with CNBC, Buffett explained:
We went around to all of our companies to see how their IT departments functioned and why they made the decisions they made. And I just came away with…
Quick timesaving tip: this edition of DDD Weekly will be abbreviated, but most people aren’t interested in lots of business reading during a near-vacation week, anyway. To save time on other sites, ignore any stories whose headlines include “of 2011″ or “for 2012.” These are uniformly filler.
Gogo files for an IPO
Gogo in-flight wireless…
Too Many Investors, or Too Many Powerful Investors?
GroupMe’s founder argues that more investors mean more time spent arguing with investors. That makes intuitive sense when you move from one investor to two. But it doesn’t seem to follow during an IPO, when a company moves from a dozen investors to thousands. The difference:…
How Search Engines Decide Whom to Trust
Bill Slawski does the usual patent deep-dive, evaluating how Google decides which writers to trust. As Google moves from domain trust to author trust, this will hurt the dwindling number of online media companies that rely on cheap, mass-produced content. (One surprising side effect: this will make…
Netflix Splits DVDs and Streaming
Netflix has split its DVD business from its streaming business, perhaps in anticipation of spinning off one or the other. In the announcement, Netflix’s CEO specifically calls out AOL, which is facing exactly what he wants to avoid: half of the business belongs in some kind of asset-stripping private equity…
We’ve already documented that Google hates scalable SEO strategies for economically sound reasons: their utopia is a world in which a CMO who doubles his digital spending has to do so through AdWords or DoubleClick—nothing else scales the same way. That explains a lot about Google: not just why they don’t like paid links, but also…
Yahoo Update
As has been reported at length, Yahoo’s board fired the company’s CEO, who fired back with an infamous email and a furious interview with Fortune. Yahoo’s board is now rumored to be considering spinoffs, divestitures, or a buyout, especially with the encouragement of their 5.1% owner, the activist hedge fund Third Point.
As a…
There are three big typo databases in the world:
The collective algorithmic typo database. There are a few standard typos (transposition, off-by-one, omitted letter, etc.), which are generally understood by anyone in academia who has studied the issue. Google’s massive database of misspelled terms, plus the results customers eventually click on. Apple’s massive database of…
Google Brand Affinity Update
Score one more point for Google’s love of brands: they’re now citing recent searches in new search results. In other words, if you search for “airline tickets” and see a big-brand result, and then do a narrow search for “things to do in portland,” the sites that showed up in your…
Skype Buys GroupMe
Skype has purchased group-texting service GroupMe for about $85mm, a nice exit for the year-and-a-half-old firm. It’s also an interesting combination: one of Skype’s big strengths is its peer-to-peer structure, which basically coopts users’ computers to keep things running smoothly. GroupMe uses Twilio, which is basically an API for anything a standard…
Recent Research
Digital Due Diligence Weekly