I woke up this morning to hear the news that Microsoft was launching a competitor to Twitter. In my mind, I can’t help but juxtapose that story with the news from last week that Oracle is buying Sun. Now, I’m not a big fan of Larry Ellison. I still have bitter memories from the 90s when my wife’s raise was held up, because Larry had to approve it, and he was off yacht racing. But, you have to admire the way that he approaches his business. I never have any questions about what Oracle is doing. Larry knows what Oracle is about: Enterprise Software. He has a vision of where the market is going: a few big players. And, he has a strategy to make Oracle the dominant player in this new world: buy up key technologies; offer the complete Enterprise stack. Once you understand Larry’s vision, you can understand and justify every move Oracle has made.

Now, contrast that with Microsoft. Ballmer doesn’t know what the company is about. Is it focused on the desktop, games, internet, enterprise? Who knows? He doesn’t have a coherent vision of where all these markets are going. Who could? As a result, Ballmer doesn’t have a coherent strategy. He’s attempting to do everything; and he’s doing nothing well. Seriously, does anyone have a clue what Ballmer will do next, and why? If you say you do, you’re lying. You can’t know, because there is no strategy. There’s just a bunch of incoherent initiatives. It’s too bad, because if Microsoft had been as focused as Oracle, they could be hugely dominant in the enterprise space. As it is, they’ve wasted ten years.

Here’s an email I just received from Google Adsense:

Dear Publisher,

We understand that the recent economic turmoil has created a lot of uncertainty in the lives of AdSense publishers. During these difficult times, we’re continuing to invest in innovations that improve publisher monetization and advertiser value in the content network.

We’re focusing on further developing our product offerings and boosting ad performance for publishers. We recently announced advancements in AdSense for search and experiments to make ads more effective. We’re bringing DoubleClick technologies to AdSense publishers, and we’ll continue to launch new products and features. We’re also continuing to improve our offerings for AdWords advertisers, making it easier for them to target the Google content network. Features for advertisers, such as the new display ad builder, are designed to improve ad performance on AdSense publisher sites.

We’ll keep driving technological progress, but our best asset will always be our publisher partners. The strength of AdSense lies in the value of the content you bring to users and the quality of the sites you bring to advertisers. Our success is tied to yours. We look forward to partnering with you for the long term, and remain dedicated to helping you succeed.

Sincerely,

Kim Scott
Director AdSense Online Sales & Operations

Google Inc.
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043

If they really want to reassure me, they should just tell me what the split is on my ad clicks.

UPDATE: If I was a real blogger here’s the kind of post I would have written about this email.

See Twitter has a new look.

Check out Jeff Jarvis’s post Google: Monopoly or Marketplace where Jeff claims that Google is not a monopoly, while describing it in a way that clearly indicates it is. The collapse of Yahoo has left Google in total control of the search advertising market. If you run a commercial website of any kind, you have to get up every morning and worry about what Google is doing to you, and you have no recourse. Google raises rates on adwords: you have no recourse. Google cuts your share of revenue on text ads on your site: you have no recourse. You have no recourse, because Google has no viable competitors. No viable competitors means they have a monopoly. And, no amount of dancing around the issues by bloggers like Jeff Jarvis will change that fact.

One of the big advantages to living in the city/valley, and working at SOMA is that you get to mingle with all the other people who are working on new web stuff, or are writing about it. Almost every night there’s a different party or event. On Thursday, I attended two: an AOL launch of their new fantasy football site, and the monthly Mashable event. Here’s my name tag from the Mashable party:

The Mashable party was far better attended, and it even had better bouncers.

The Jana group has officially given up their proxy fight to install a new board at CNET. They’ll thank CBS for the money and go home. See Silicon Alley Insider for the details.

Hope everyone (all 7 of you) enjoys the new blog theme. It was designed by Marc, the most talented web designer I have ever had the pleasure of working with. Here’s his explanation of the design. Any differences between his design and my actual blog are all my fault, obviously.

If you are interested in personalization, then another great blog is Geeking with Greg. This blog is by Greg Linden, who did a lot of the personalization work at Amazon. Later, he founded Findory, a personalized news service. The only complaint I could possibly make about this blog is that he doesn’t post enough.

According to Feedburner, there are now eight people subscribed to this blog’s RSS feed.

UPDATE: Dissing your RSS readers, doesn’t pay. Now, I am down to five.

UPDATE: Apparently, it does pay to diss your RSS readers, I’m back up to ten.

If you are as fascinated about the relationships between data as I am, here’s a great blog for you: Datawocky.