The Corrosive Downside of Acquihires
For the past 5 years or so Google, Facebook and a handful of tech industry giants have been quietly buying scores of early-stage startups for their talent. And to keep up with the Jones’s it seems that Yahoo! has now employed the same strategy. And who cares, right? A couple of tech giants throw millions [...]
Marissa Mayer and Yahoo’s telecommuting policy: Right motivation, wrong execution
When Yahoo! hired Marissa Mayer, I supported the move, believing that the board needed to shake things up, and that given the dismal state of the business, Mayer was probably a better candidate than they could ever have expected to attract. I also supported the move on Mayer’s part; she wasn’t ever going to become [...]
Only Yahoos Work in an Office!?
Ok, so I think almost everybody has either slammed Marissa Mayer about the new Yahoo non-remote worker policy or said that it’s the medicine they have to swallow. Very few are actually pointing out however, that Yahoo was probably just really bad at managing their remote employees. In the end, I don’t care, that just [...]
Why Did Yahoo! Ban Telecommuting for Employees?
If you haven’t heard the recent news, Yahoo! decided to ban telecommuting and is now forcing all employees to physically come into the office to work and if they can’t or won’t then they can find a job elsewhere. At first glance this seems a bit counter intuitive to what many other companies are doing. [...]
The Workday IPO and ‘F You Money
The other day, a VC asked me about a founder he was thinking of investing in. He asked me if this founder had, quote, ‘F You Money. {I learned how this was spelled when a Businessweek article this week used the term, btw}. I wasn’t really sure if he meant this as a negative, but [...]
Silicon Valley Has A Short Attention Span
Sometimes people ask me why I’m always writing blog posts and speaking at events. “Simple,” I say. “Silicon Valley has a short attention span. If I don’t keep my name in front of people, they’ll forget who I am.” If they don’t believe me, I respond with what I like to call the Yahoo test. [...]
Hadoop Looms Big After The Hadoop Summit
Hadoop Summit 2011 was held this week at Santa Clara and it highlighted how Hadoop has matured in the past few years. Hadoop is an open source project under Apache Foundation which aims to solve the storage and processing of big data. Based on Google’s Map Reduce, Hadoop has emerged as a major platform in [...]
Open Source, my aaS ?
On February 23rd, Infoworld blogger and cloud expert David Linthicum posted an article that, until today, I had been studiously trying to prevent from playing over and over like the proverbial stuck record in my rather inquisitive mind. My inquisition, and subsequently my inability to let this escape my attention, was not necessarily raised the [...]
The Power of Twitter in Information Discovery
It surprises me how many really smart people I meet still doubt the power of Twitter. It seems the urge to be a naysayer of Twitter is really strong for some. I think some of this stems from the early days of Twitter when it was presumed that it was a technology to tell people [...]
Three Reasons Google Should Acquire Delicious from Yahoo
So the news is out. Yahoo plans to shutter Delicious, the largest social bookmarking site. Which is shocking, particularly among the tech savvy and socially oriented. Delicious is iconic for its application of social sharing and collective intelligence. Hard to believe Yahoo wants to shut it down. But wait…this doesn’t have to be the end. [...]
Gmail, Don’t be a Yahoo!
In the 90’s I used to laugh at friends who all used Yahoo! as their personal email service. I did not understand how anyone could put up with the slow speeds of web-mail, and tried to convince them to install a decent email client, like Outlook, which is what most of them used in their [...]
Entrepreneurs Should be Respected, Not Loved
I’ve been thinking a lot about what it takes to be a great leader and seem to be having this conversation a lot lately about Facebook, Yahoo!, Zynga and others. I wrote several of the characteristics when I did the Top 10 (11) Attributes of an Entrepreneur. One thing that I’ve realized over the years [...]
VMware Buying Zimbra – My Initial Thoughts
According to Kara Swisher of AllThingsD, VMware is close to buying Zimbra, open source collaboration software, from Yahoo. Yahoo is close to selling its Zimbra unit to VMware, according to several sources close to the situation. Though nothing has been made official yet by either parties, the news seems to be credible. Zimbra was one [...]
Corporate Reputation, Privacy and the CEO of Google
You have nothing to hide if you are doing nothing wrong; it is a scary thought because we all have things we don’t want other people to know about. There is a line between public knowledge that we share on Facebook, Likaholix, Posterous, MySpace and the tons of other places where we leave our digital [...]
OAuth Beginning to Rock the World
OAuth, or Open Authentication is “an open protocol to allow secure API authorization in a simple and standard method from desktop and web applications”. Basically it’s a way to allow one web application to utilize another without the need for users to worry about pesky authentication keys or the like. It also allows for data [...]
