Careless Notions

Yeah, I know - melodramatic title. People have been predicting the demise of Yahoo! for over a decade now , typically without much success . Still, there's something about the company's behavior over the past couple of years which makes me think Yahoo!'s days - at least as a dominant player on the Web - are numbered. For starters, Yahoo! is barely treading water in their core search business, while Google continues to grow rapidly. At the moment Google's growth is apparently coming at the expense of rivals other than Yahoo! (witness Microsoft's market share decline), but sooner or later Google's going to have to target Yahoo! directly if they want to continue to grow. Since each 1% of the search market is worth about a billion dollars in revenue according to what I've read online, that gives Google a massive incentive to fight it out with Yahoo! for every percentage of the search market they can gobble. Yahoo! does own Flickr now, which has a great im

What's up, He Man?

There's been a bit of hype in the media lately regarding Michael Dell's return to running the company he founded. It brings up memories of the whole Compaq merger mess, which was Carly Fiorina's "me, too" response to the rise of Dell Computer. Fiorina, with her degree in medieval history, set out to out-Dell Dell and was instead undone by her own shortsighted ignorance. It's a classic example of how you should be careful what you wish for, because you just might get it. Dell became a giant in the PC world by manufacturing customized PCs out of standard components, like electronic Lego sets. Dell sourced the cheapest components it could get from vendors, then relentlessly optimized the assembly process, driving out costs. Forgoing the traditional bricks and mortar retail channel and its associated margins and overhead, Dell sold its wares directly to customers, first via telephone and later on the Internet. Back in those days the average new PC cost

For years I've found myself writing little mini-essays dealing with various subjects, either as part of an e-mail chain between friends, or in the occasional comment form on sites scattered about the net. I've finally decided to consolidate all of that writing here at Careless Notions. As the name implies, a lot of these posts are likely to be half-baked and not entirely thought out, but hopefully some kernel of truth will always rest at their center.