Are Microsoft’s second-tier executives all second-rate? Apparently. Microsoft has just tapped Stephen Elop, the COO of Juniper Networks, to run its Business division, which includes the highly profitable Office suite. Elop, the former CEO of Macromedia, is a good fit. But his hire sends an unwelcome message to up-and-comers within Redmond: Keep toiling away, but don’t aspire to run one of Microsoft’s great franchises. Bill Gates can find someone better than you elsewhere. Which should be as good a signal as any for them to start leaving.

Source:Valleywag

What’s the difference between a blogger and a journalist? Nothing, says CNET’s Rafe Needleman. But he’s concerned that Gizmodo’s sophomoric prank, using a TV remote control to turn off video screens at the CES 2008 gadgetfest, will get bloggers disinvited to the event next year. After all, CES only grudgingly started accrediting bloggers to the show. The only problem with Needleman’s thesis?

Gizmodo attended the event — and pulled their silly stunt — with full press credentials, not second-class blogger badges. And people say the difference between journalists and bloggers is that bloggers don’t factcheck. Needleman is right: There is no difference.

We hear that Yahoo TechTicker, the online-video show from Yahoo Finance featuring Valley fox Sarah Lacy and red-hot moneymen Henry Blodget and Paul Kedrosky, is delayed, and won’t be airing early episodes next week as rumored. Dammit! Scott Moore, we blame you for this, too.

Source:Valleywag

“The Wall St. buzz is that msft and yhoo are bidding for eBay. My source tells me that Yahoo! has bid 1.76 shares for eBay ($40-41) and is expected to win at that price.” So writes Scot Wingo, the plugged-in CEO of ChannelAdvisor, an auctions-software maker in which eBay owns a minority stake. Let’s dissect that rumor, shall we?

The deal does offer a generous 25 percent premium to eBay shareholders, pricing the company’s shares at the 52-week-high they briefly touched in October. But as proposed, it would be ruinously dilutive to Yahoo shareholders, leaving them with 36 percent of the combined company. Why a Yahoo shareholder would settle for this escapes me, however, unless they have completely written off Yahoo’s management, brand, and assets.

Which is not out of the question. At the levels Yahoo’s trading at, shareholders are essentially paying for its minority stakes in Yahoo Japan, Alibaba in China, and Gmarket in Korea. But if a shareholder would be disillusioned enough to accept this deal, one wonders why they wouldn’t simply sell their Yahoo shares and buy eBay shares on the open market, where they’re considerably cheaper.

I don’t know if this plan is being seriously considered within Yahoo. As many have written, Yahoo and eBay’s assets make a nice strategic fit, in theory; eBay’s PayPal already has a search-ads partnership with Yahoo, and the two companies have other advertising deals. Google is actively pursuing a profitable combination of search and e-commerce through its Checkout initiative, sharpening the threat to both Yahoo and eBay. Not to mention Skype, which eBay has written off but could find a better fit with Yahoo’s mail and IM products.

But in practice? The reality is that both companies are collections of underused assets, with management that has allowed vital talent to flee. Putting them together might provide a needed shakeout of eBay and Yahoo’s overstaffed executive suites, but the transition would be chaotic and painful.

A much simpler course would be selling out to Microsoft or News Corp., which surely remain interested in Yahoo’s online-advertising business, if they can stomach all the troubles that come with it.

That this rumor is circulating, that it’s even being whispered about, suggests that Jerry Yang may have given up on being rescued by a deep-pocketed buyer. Issuing so much undervalued paper for eBay smacks of desperation. It would keep Yahoo independent, but at a very steep price. So steep that, if it’s being seriously considered, can only mean no one wants to buy Yahoo.

Source:Valleywag

Entrepreneurs. Engineers. Bloggers. You keep asking: Why does a writer like me hate people like you? Nick Denton’s new traffic-based pay scale has backfired wonderfully, giving me a few minutes to explain it.

Entrepreneurs You guys think money is everything. That is, you think money is some sort of universal currency into which anything can be converted, and which can be converted to anything else.

• Good writing is one of the things you can’t buy with just cash. Bill Gates, the richest man in the world, has proven that again and again.

• Even when you guys mean to be helpful, you get it all wrong.
  (A) You encourage me to demand more money from my editors. The only thing they’ll pay extra for is being famous, because that sells more copies without buyers having to read the article first.
  (B) You offer to let me “pick up a few extra bucks” by writing your kids’ college entrance essays.

• Here’s an idea: Pay me to mention your company and/or product in one of my articles. Not that I would, but I’m sure someone else will. The astounding thing is in 11 years I’ve been offered money for everything but a covert endorsement. You guys have a blind spot there.

Engineers It’s hard to be smarter than everyone else, isn’t it? You tech people never ask anything about my job. Instead, you explain it to me.

• You just know that my life as a professional writer must be exactly like your life as a professional software developer or sysadmin. Salespeople must come by my desk and demand I change my articles so they can close a big deal, right?

• You’re 100% certain that if you wrote the article instead of me, it would have been better. Lucky for you, your fellow engineers are like string theorists: They’ll praise this assertion for its elegance and daring, instead of asking you to prove it with a real-world test.
• You’ll explain to me that my ideas for articles start from press releases, and must be reviewed prior to publication by the companies I write about. If I praise your competition, it must mean they bought an ad. You got this worldview from your company’s PR lady. You have a crush on her.
• Do me a favor: 34 percent of the Internet is comments from engineers that begin, “It is unsurprising to me that …” Look, we get it. Nothing surprises you. So it’s unsurprising to us that it’s unsurprising to you. So shut up already.

Bloggers There is, in fact, a special circle of hell reserved for you. You’re keeping it real! Real long, and real dull.

• The only other fields where people spend all their time bragging about themselves and insulting their rivals are talk radio and gangster rap. There’s your level of intellectual discourse.

• Jack Kerouac? He had an editor. Allen Ginsberg? Spent months rewriting “Howl.” Andrew Sullivan? Face time with the world’s best editors, and he still puts me to sleep when he writes solo.
• Free advice: Every time you type the words “not so much,” or “the internets,” or “Techmeme,” reach for that key that says DELETE and press it a few times fast. You’re a better writer already!

(Did you notice? I don’t hate PR people. Sure, I filter all messages with “for immediate release” or “embargo.” But you guys are OK. It helps that you pick up the tab — not the free drinks, but the principle of the thing.)

Nick Denton’s new pay scale — more to the point, the reactions to it — prompted me to write all this down. The thing that ties entrepreneurs, engineers and bloggers together is they all think they know everything. If you can suffer through 150 know-it-all posts, you’ll find that no one got it right, on two counts.

• I hardly know who Nick Denton is. He emails us all “please log out of nexis” once a week, and has posted one comment to my work: “This post breaks the first rule of internet argument.” Since there’s only one rule of Internet argument and it’s “Don’t be boring,” I ignore him. I’m logged out of Nexis already.

• Denton’s new pay scale works like this: Instead of autobilling him twelve bucks a post, I’m now paid a flat fee in exchange for a minimum number of posts. There’s some traffic bonus, but whatever. The important thing is that my extra posts don’t cost Denton anything. So I can now post anything I want without feeling guilty. Here you go.

The SF New Tech Meetup is showing mercifully short 5-minute demos from startups. Just think of all the BlackBerry messages you can catch up on in five minutes! If that doesn’t sound like fun, join a discussion on viral Facebook apps in Palo Alto.

Got something to add to the calendar? Send it to calendar@valleywag.com.

Source:Valleywag

Is Europe a country? The question puzzled gameshow contestant Kellie Pickler. And now even the European Commission seems confused. Apple has appeased the pangovernmental body by offering Britons the same price for iTunes downloads as the Continentals. But the original complaint remains unaddressed: Why can’t Europeans shop at any national iTunes store, since the region is ostensibly one open market?

Jonathan Todd, the commission’s antitrust spokesman, states:

Contrary to what we had been led to believe, the fact that the same content is not available in all EU countries is not the result of restricted business practices between Apple and the record companies, but of the restricting copyright legislation.

So it’s the government’s fault after all. Glad we cleared that up! The European Commission is eager to make companies do its bidding, but getting fractious nation-states to update their laws appears to be beyond its ken.

Some will view Apple’s statement that it “will reconsider its continuing relationship in the UK with any record label that does not lower its wholesale prices in the U.K. to the pan-European level within six months,” as bullying. But this is the reality: If anyone has the clout to force changes in the music industry and its regulatory regime, it’s not the European Commission. It’s Steve Jobs, savior of iPod users everywhere.

Source:Valleywag

From his hospital bed, stricken GigaOm blogger Om Malik posts an update on his health after he suffered a heart attack last month. And he manages to work in a review of a new voicemail-transcription service into the blog entry. Any questions on how he landed in the hospital in the first place? The man never stops working.

Commenter Beng asked the question about CES’ two-tier journalist passes that I wondered, too: “What is the difference between the blogger badge and the press badge, and does that mean that even Engadget and Gizmodo get blogger badges?” Gizmodo editor Brian Lam is toting a Press badge, just like Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis. Our own Jordan Golson has been tagged a “Blogger.” Hey Jordan: Besides a separate lounge with espresso and cookies, what other perks does a Press pass get you that a Blogger badge doesn’t? Just login and let Calacanis answer again, that was hilarious.

Always the charmer, Jason Calacanis has announced plans to visit the press lounge at CES. His barking continues to amuse. But here’s something that’s no laughing matter: Why is the CEO of a search engine, a legitimate object of news coverage, allowed access to the private press lounge at CES?

Sure, Calacanis has a blog. But so does Jonathan Schwartz, the CEO of Sun Microsystems, and I don’t think he’d be allowed in the press lounge, where he could overhear reporters’ confidential plans for coverage of his business rivals and partners. I trust my peers in attendance at CES will make their views known when Calacanis shows up — hopefully in Brooklyn language he might understand.

Millions of text messages were sent simultaneously at midnight on New Year’s. Many were delayed, or didn’t arrive at all. A delay in holiday greetings is not a big deal, but what about during a real emergency? Emergency personnel and government officials are automatically given priority on landline and cellular networks, leaving the average consumer in the lurch. After 9/11, cell-phone traffic in New York was at a standstill for days. Cellular networks, like highways, aren’t designed to have everyone use them at once. When everyone tries to make a call at once, for a holiday or emergency, communication breaks down. The communications infrastructure, as it is currently designed, will never be able to handle calling patterns thousands of times heavier than normal. Your best bet? Send an IM. (Photo by PhotoOptik)

Source:Valleywag

Brian Lam, the go-go-go force behind gadget superblog Gizmodo, explains how paying for traffic backfired until he dropped an iron fist. Brian’s formula? Focus on consistent semi-hits, instead of drawing the mob with doofy, off-topic videos. I found most of this week’s commentary on the topic to be poorly reasoned and/or self-serving, in addition to mostly getting Denton’s pay formulas wrong. But I’ll let Brian have the last word.

At giz, the pay system has had the opposite effect, and we do far less viral work with mainstream appeal. Easy hits cause CPM deflation over time, making your real news posts, the core posts, worth less and less. It also rewards laziness, which I know have to slap down with an iron fist. So the funny random viral videos we loved posting so much before have become a serious problem with making sure pay is fair across the site. It forces you to be very careful, actually.

Also, everyone who writes for Giz has a talent for making traffic. Talent. Megahits are unpredictable, but making sure a post gets decent traffic is a matter of editing know-how and maybe marketing know how, too.

Loren Feldman, the transgressive online-video maker and would-be comic, slams Scoble’s “woe-is-me” posturing over his Facebook ban. Play the video, or read on for the choicest bit.

He’s fighting for himself … It’s dishonest and it’s wrong. Facebook has a right to earn money. You agree to give them your data. Everybody knew about it going in, and that’s not good enough for Robert, because he thinks … he’s above another company’s terms of service … For Robert to wrap it up under the guise of “I’m a freedom fighter for your data” is just completely dishonest.

Source:Valleywag

Blogger Om Malik could never have predicted he’d have a heart attack at the age of 41. But he did foresee one thing clearly: He would never build a business on a single blog so closely identified with one author. His spinoff blogs — Web Worker Daily, NewTeeVee, Earth2Tech, and FoundRead — have not matched GigaOm’s success; of the four, only NewTeeVee, in my opinion, shows promise of being a breakout hit like the original. But unlike Michael Arrington, who built TechCrunch solely on his startup cult of personality, Malik has sought to diversify his media startup in a way that it can survive him. Until December 28, this was merely wise in theory.

I’ll admit it, I’m jealous: While Valleywag remains stuck with a logo that looks like an IBM monitor from 1982, io9, Gawker Media’s newly launched sci-fi site, has gotten a wickedly cool illustration. The future is coming, and it is diabetically adorable. I quizzed site editor Annalee Newitz on the origins of the logo.

Valleyfag: Let me guess at your instructions to the designer for the io9 illustration: “Think Hello Kitty meets the Borg Queen.”
t3chn0ptimist69: hahaha we just said, “give us a cute gender-neutral thing with a brain implant” Eliza Gauger, the illustrator, is a genius

Like I said: Hello Kitty meets the Borg Queen. A supremely effective exploitation of the visual resonances of two pop-culture memes. I can only applaud. And, in a nod to my futurist colleagues, coin a new word: “cynesthetic.”

Source:Valleywag

Facebook applications were supposed to provide advertisers with compelling new ways to mine for customers on the Web, but the results have not panned out. Sony attempted to capitalize on the Facebook buzz and the holiday season with a branded snowglobe application. Just the sort of useless eye candy popular on the social network, but the application garnered less than 500 installations and only 35 active users. Why?

One explanation is that it was simply a bad application, transparently created by advertisers rather than developers well-versed in the network’s mores; with no way to invite friends in on the fun, Sony’s trinkets didn’t take advantage of Facebook’s built-in marketing mechanisms. Building a Facebook application for the mere sake of having one is probably not the advertiser’s goal, but for the time being, ad agencies don’t seem to be able to come up with much more than these hamhanded attempts. Desperate to seem hip, advertisers will likely keep shelling out for more useless apps — until they start looking at the numbers, and grow some globes of their own.

Source:Valleywag

Yahoo has axed its Picks blog, which has highlighted a notable new site webevery day for the past 12 years. In an age of 24-hour blogs, a one-link-a-day site was antiquated. And Picks, at 12, was a Methuselah of the Web. But we owe so much to the long-neglected site that it deserves a better obituary than the one Yahoo afforded it.

Blogging, at its roots, is a simple act: Choosing a link and describing it as briefly as possible. Long before we had things called blogs, sites like Netscape’s What’s New, Cool Site of the Day, and Yahoo Picks performed this service. These proto-blogs inspired Suck.com, the daily fountainhead of Web snark, whose tone then informed many early blogs. We owe the Web’s relentless spirit of neophilia to pioneers like Yahoo Picks.

Yahoo can hardly be blamed for killing Picks; Yahoo’s Web directory, the engine of Yahoo’s early success, has long run out of steam. Yahoo doesn’t want to send users elsewhere; it wants to lure them into portals like My Yahoo and Yahoo Finance, and keep them as long as it can. No surprise that Yahoo is struggling with that strategy: If walled gardens are faring poorly, how much worse will the unwalled ones do?

The closure of Picks is an acknowledgement that the Yahoo of today is not the Yahoo of 12 years ago. It would be less sad to lose such a defining property if we had any idea what Yahoo stood for now.

“I’m going to get thrown under the bus on Valleywag even more in 2008 than in 2007,” serial self-blogger Robert Scoble claims, because of Gawker’s new traffic-based pay plan for Valleywag bloggers. Um, how to put this gently: No one reads our Scoble posts, as Robert himself has observed from his clickthrough logs. We do them out of love. But based on our most-read posts of 2007, I’ll be throwing some guy named Kevin Rose under the bus every single day.