Wed 6 Jun 2007
In a recent interview at D5, Eric Schmidt said that Viacom’s Lawsuit against YouTube was “probably just a mistake”. Google said that and Schmidt maintains they respect the terms of the law. The outcome of the case will be really interesting…
In the meantime, here is the video of this interview:
Thu 17 May 2007
Everyone would like to be rich (I presume). Everyone would like to be sucessful (I presume again). Everyone would like to have an ingenious idea to make a lot money quickly. Those two guys at Google did it.
One month ago, an interesting article from ReadWriteWeb talked about the Google model to make money.
You will see two charts describing how it works in the “physical” world compared to the “online” world depending on the demand on the market.
ReadWriteWeb tells us that Starbucks Coffee is the equivalent of Google in the physical world. It means that they’re making good money but it’s funny when you look at the differences:
Those four points are so relevant.
I take advantages of this article to give you the financial results for the Q1 2007 of the Internet Giants:
For Apple, it’s a record when for Yahoo is a clear decrease. Is Microsoft gonna merge with Yahoo ? Steve Ballmer doesn’t rule out the idea… We will talk about it !
Stay tuned
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Sun 15 Apr 2007
Yes, it’s not a joke. Google has just bought DoubleClick.
“DoubleClick provides a suite of products that enables agencies, advertisers, and publishers to work efficiently, that will enable Google to extend our ad network and develop deeper relationships with our partners.” (from Google blog)
One more time, Google has beaten Microsoft for this bid. They spent almost twice more than for the acquisition of YouTube last year ($1.65 billion).
I totally agree with Ionut from Google Operating System: “The major Internet player outbid by Google was Microsoft and that was probably the explanation for this huge value paid by Google for the largest and most ungoogly acquisition ever made.”
Sat 7 Apr 2007
Viacom has recently sued YouTube and Google for “massive intentional copyright infringement of Viacom’s entertainment properties” and seeks more than $1 billion in damages! Indeed, like on Dailymotion, everybody can watch on YouTube copyrighted video of Viacom such as: The Colbert Report, SouthPark, An inconvenient Truth, The daily Show with Jon Stewards…
Just a reminder: YouTube is protected under the American Digital Millennium Copyright Act (ADMC) of 1998 which has a safe-harbor provision. Indeed, YouTube has to block access to materials once they are notified by copyright holders of specific infringement. Thus, YouTube can not be sued for copyright infringement if they respect this principle; in other words, Google has no duty to monitor its content and the firm is protected from the consequences of its users’ actions. However, Viacom blames YouTube for directly profiting from the availability of popular infringing videos and this point is the main issue of complaint because the safe-harbor is no longer applicable in case of profitability of this video broadcasting. Thus, the outcome of this complaint will be interesting insofar as it will condition the future of video broadcasting via the Internet and the future of Video Platform such as Dailymotion, YouTube, etc.
To anticipate and avoid this kind of complaint, the current strategy of Google is to make contracts with traditional content providers (BBC, NBC, etc) which allow them to provide the content they want and to share advertising incomes with Google. But In exchange, they can not sue YouTube for copyright infringement. We will discuss of this strategy again because its success could have a big impact of this market.
At last, we wonder about the real intent of Viacom. Indeed, iFilm, a Viacom-owned video sharing website also relies on the provisions of the DMCA and meet the same copyright’s issues as YouTube. Thus, if YouTube is violating the law, so is iFilm!
Thu 29 Mar 2007
Recently, Thomas Rubin, Microsoft’s associate general counsel, addressed the Association of American Publishers’annual meeting in New York and argued in his speech that Microsoft’s Live Search Books honors copyright protection and fair use whereas Google’s Book Search abuses it. He said that “Google has chosen the wrong path for the longer term, because it systematically violates copyright and deprives authors and publishers of an important avenue for monetizing their works. […] Google has also undertaken this path without any attempt to reach an agreement with affected publishers and authors before engaging in copying“. Indeed, Google’s book’s policy is one of the main chink in Google’s armor and Microsoft envisages to capitalize on it.
Google’s concept is to index the World’s libraries and to offer entire books or sometimes just snippets to the public. As books are copyrighted (like websites), Google allows authors to opt-out of the search engine. In contrast to Google, Microsoft has adopted an opt-in approach; in other words, Microsoft only indexes books that are no longer copyrighted or books which have been approved for indexing by their authors via Microsoft’s Publisher Program. However, in this Battle, the arguments of Google are weak. Indeed their opt-out approach is not justifiable and can not be compared to websites indexing insofar as the authors have never come down in favor of an online use of their books. Moreover, opt-out approaches on the Internet are not very popular: take for example the Spam issue.
As Forbes explains it, Microsoft’s attack against Google is strategic. For 10 years, Microsoft has been criticized because of his supremacy and its monopolistic will which has been illustrated by anti-trust trials; whereas Google enjoys a very good image. Thus, by criticizing and bashing Google, Microsoft is trying to differentiate itself from its opponent and position itself on a higher moral ground.
So, its time for Google to adjust its strategy and to remenber its “Don’t be Evil” mantra or else Microsoft is going to use it against it, which is dangerous for Google whose capitalization is in a great extent based on its popularity.
Sun 25 Mar 2007
American Giants Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft have made China one of their priorities for growth and are considerably expanding their research and development centers in China. Thus Google has recently announced (source: IHT) its plan to hire thousands of people for its Beijing development center; Yahoo! is launching Flickr.com, its photo-sharing site, in China and Microsoft is developing its partners network. This expansion has also raised several polemics one of whom was the rumor of complicity of Yahoo! in the arrest of a journalist in China.
Almost unknown outside China, Baidu.com is very similar to Google, has almost the same simple home page and the same Business Model. Launched in 2001, Baidu went public in 2005 and was the biggest opening on Nasdaq since the dot-com peak in 2000. According to the Search Engine Market Survey 2006 from the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC), “Baidu’s market share is increasing constantly to 62.1%. This means more than 60% internet users are going to choose Baidu as the first option when searching online. Google’s market share in this segment is 25.3%, decreased 8 percent points when compared with the performance at same period last year.“. Thus Yahoo! and Google are challengers on this Market which is presented below (source: NYT):
The Chinese Internet Market is very different from the Western one. Indeed in China there is a really developed entertainment culture, which appears on the Internet and which Internet companies follow. However Google and Yahoo! do not take enough this culture difference into account and therefore are loosing ground (cf. evolution of the pay-per-click market on the graphs above). However, beyond this necessary cultural adaptation, the American Giants have some advantages: a big capitalization and an important technical task force.
So, the Battle begins and is off to a good start!
Thu 22 Mar 2007
Net Neutrality is at the core of the Internet Battle and will be one of the main aspects of the trade war which we will follow through this blog. To sum up, Net Neutrality refers to the current principle that Internet should be neutral which means Internet users should have the choice in what content they view and what applications they use on the internet.
As the SavetheInternet.com Coalition explains it in the video on the left, American’s main cable and telephone companies such as AT&T, Verizon or Comcast want to charge Internet companies for quality-of-service (QoS); in other words they want to tax content providers to guarantee faster delivery of their data. For example, last year, Verizon’s CEO argued that Google should have to pay for bandwidth. However, even if they pretend to do it in a non-discriminatory way, their main strategy is to discriminate in favor of their own search engines, Internet phone services, etc by blocking or slowing down their competitors. Paul Kaputska notes in his blog that the message of telecommunication companies is “Google is bad, and wants to control the Internet to keep its cash pile growing. Telcos, meanwhile, just want to innovate, so please don’t write laws keeping them from doing so.”. However, beyond this trade war is the issue of the Public Interest.
Even if Google was recently at the center of a buzz which alleges that Google was backing off its full commitment to Net Neutrality legislation, rumor that has been refuted 4 days ago, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, eBay, InterActive Corp., Microsoft and Yahoo! are the principle supporters of Net Neutrality among the leading high-tech companies and they try to influence the FCC to adopt a Net Neutrality Law. Via this blog, we will follow this issue and its economical and technical consequences.