Posts tagged Clues
Yahoo Clues, App Search & Other Products To Shut Down April 1
Mar 1st
Marissa Mayer is tightening Yahoo’s belt. Since taking over as Yahoo’s CEO, she’s spoken repeatedly on the need to zero in on being part of its users’ “daily habits.” Today, the company announced the shut down of seven products that don’t fit that…
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Clues to HP’s Possible Future From Meg Whitman’s Past
Sep 23rd
“Communications is at the heart of ecommerce and community. By combining the two leading ecommerce franchises, eBay and PayPal, with the leader in Internet voice communications,” announced eBay’s CEO in September 2005, Meg Whitman, “we will create an extraordinarily powerful environment for business on the Net.”
By 2005, what Meg Whitman had learned about “ecosystems,” such as they are, would have had to have come from her tenure as president of Stride Rite Shoes, the maker of Keds; and later as chief of Hasbro’s Playskool division, where she directly oversaw the marketing of Mr. Potato Head. Inspired by the reintroduction of the toy brand into popular culture with Pixar’s Toy Story, Whitman’s innovations included the licensing of the brand to television, leading to the 1998 premiere of Fox Kids’ “The Mr. Potato Head Show.”
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You may laugh. But assume for a moment that you were in charge of a nearly defunct plastic toy brand in the electronics era. If you had managed a deal with Fox TV, you’d be credited with a stroke of genius, even if the show bombed.
Meg Whitman’s career (aside from her failed run for the California governorship in 2010) has been around leading consumer products. This fact alone will send a signal to both HP’s investors and customers, both consumer and enterprise, that HP’s most recent change of course (which followed former CEO Mark Hurd’s change of course) is changing course. She is not a technologist. She believes in obtaining cumulative advantage, which includes accumulating assets where necessary, in order to build a larger foundation for the brand. (Hopefully stronger, but for the meantime, larger.)
A great deal of attention has already been paid to Whitman’s now-historic comment from October 2005, following eBay’s acquisition of Skype, that the cost of voice transmission will trend toward zero. It was such a polarizing comment at the time that not much attention was paid to what she said immediately afterward, which speaks more to her business philosophy than anything she’s ever said:
Our belief is that the winner in this space will be those that have the largest ecosystem, and what I mean by that is, the largest number of registered users, the largest number of voice minutes, the largest number of developers who develop against the platform, the best product, and the best array of value-added services that users of a certain network are willing and want to pay for. And we think that this that the way ultimately four or five, six years from now, maybe it will be a little sooner is, that the value-added services will be the way that Skype and many other of these providers are monetized. And we think we have a huge lead in that regard. One of the things we understand now better than ever is how far ahead Skype is in users, in usage minutes, and in the product capability that Skype brings to market, and the size of the ecosystem. The hardware ecosystem, the developer ecosystem, the build out of the APIs. So we subscribe to your thesis. I don’t think it is this year or next year, but I believe the ultimate monetization method of voice communications on the net changes from a revenue per minute to, you know, based on the size of the ecosystem.
During Whitman’s run for the State House last year, the opposition dragged a number of damaging incidents into the open. Some of those were taken largely out of context, and several actually took place before her watch. But the Skype acquisition, and the way in which eBay almost immediately began starving the growth out of that property, is a failure so colossal that it dwarfs most attempts at context. How Whitman handled that failure as it was happening was unique. First, she acknowledged that her initial tactics were wrong. Second, she repeated the tactics in a new context.
At eBay’s Q3 2007 conference call with analysts, she introduced a catch-phrase that she might have heard first from someone at Microsoft: “delighting the user.” Freely admitting that her initial analysis of the trend-toward-zero in voice communication was flawed, she replaced one goal with another, but her method for achieving that goal was essentially the same: conglomerate with something big, even if that something big doesn’t fit.
Over the next several months, we will work to improve the way we engage and delight Skype users. For example, yesterday’s announcement about the MySpace/Skype partnership is the next phase in our plan to make Skype available across multiple platforms. We also want to fully develop our nascent e-commerce services, like Skype Prime and Skype Find. Additionally, delivering the synergy with eBay and PayPal that we had always envisioned will be a renewed priority. We are also looking forward to the next generation of the Skype client, which has some fantastic features and will debut next year.”
There had been too much incentive, Whitman admitted to a Citigroup analyst, to monetize the Skype acquisition right away with programs that cut into the service’s value proposition. Given that customers were expecting free communication from Skype, why charge for it with services like SkypeIn and SkypeOut? Correcting her company’s course, she said, would involve turning its attention toward delighting the user, through combination deals like the one announced with MySpace.
FOR MORE: “Will Meg Whitman Succeed as HP’s CEO?” by David Strom
Step 1 for Meg Whitman at eBay was to collect and acquire resources; Step 2 was then to find some way of stitching them together into a platform. Step 3 became remedial: Unstitch the pieces when they don’t fit, and try another way. It’s Step 3 with which she has the greatest experience, for better or worse. Whitman has given a name to this tactic. In a speech to the George W. Bush Presidential Center last April, she dubbed the process of making many disparate pieces fit together under a guiding principle “BHAG” – Big Hairy Audacious Goal.
“And you know what? The BHAG works time and time again, because what happens is it becomes more than a goal,” Whitman told the Bush Center. “It elevates itself and embodies what we stand for, and what we strive for as an enterprise. It becomes a rallying point. And at eBay, we often found that BHAG to be our North Star, focusing and directing all of our efforts. And if something didn’t keep us directly on the path to that goal, then we had to question whether or not it was worth doing.”
It’s here where the following important and curious observation is worth noting: Last March, Meg Whitman joined the financial firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers as a strategic advisor. Raymond Lane is a managing partner of that firm, and today Lane was named HP’s new Executive Chairman. Kleiner Perkins was one of the early investors in Handspring, the innovative spinoff company from Palm that engineered the early Treo device, and was later spun back into Palm. In many ways, Palm was one of Kleiner Perkins’ babies.
If Whitman’s strategy as CEO of HP becomes a repeat of her approach to eBay, she may be less likely to spin off the Personal Systems Group responsible for PCs. And she may at least partly reverse course on HP’s webOS tablets, whose production was suspended by predecessor Léo Apotheker. But it may already be too late for HP to undo the process of acquiring Autonomy, the British software maker building a “Universal Search” platform – certain breakup costs would be incurred. Search is something that has appealed to Whitman before at eBay, at least by name.
So if history is any guide, Meg Whitman may try to stitch together these unlikely partners: touchscreens, business consulting services, ink production, and universal search algorithms. When they won’t fit together the first time, she’ll try another route, and then another. Big, hairy, and audacious. Like a certain Hasbro toy she helped resurrect.
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Yahoo Clues for SEO – Lost Press Marketing
Jun 30th
 Lost Press Marketing |
Yahoo Clues for SEO
Lost Press Marketing I have run two quick sample queries to show you if you were looking to understand the demographics of people who are searching for SEO online and even where you might be targeting your Facebook Ads you can do in an instant. Internet Marketing, SEM vs. SEO: Is There a Difference? The Success Factors of Aligning Social Media and SEO Strategies: SEO & Social … SEO Specialist Launches Guide to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to Improve … |
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New Yahoo Clues Offers Regional and Demographic Data
Jun 29th
Clues, the Yahoo product that provides information on search trends on Yahoo searches, has just gotten a big upgrade. Their new version includes an upgraded interface, regional search data, and trends for separate demographics.
The Yahoo Clues N…
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Yahoo Clues Relaunches With More Data, Wider Keyword Coverage
Jun 29th
Yahoo has relaunched Yahoo Clues, its search trends product that doubles as an underrated keyword research tool. Among the new features, the most important from a search marketing perspective are these: Expanded data: Yahoo Clues now includes a full year of data, up from just a month Wider…
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This Week in Microsoft News: New Clues In the Novell Patent Mystery and More
Dec 17th
These thee Microsoft stories weren’t the biggest news of the week, but they are worth knowing about if you missed them. One of the stories is merely a clue into an ongoing mystery surrounding Microsoft’s acquisition of some patents from Novell that have analysts speculating and open source advocates worrying. Each story sheds a little light on Microsoft’s strategy and where the company is headed. For example, the release of Forefront Endpoint Protection 2010 indicates how Microsoft is consolidating various enterprise management tools into a single interface.
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Forefront Endpoint Protection 2010 Released
Microsoft released a commercial version its Forefront Endpoint Protection software this week. It’s now available from Microsoft Volume Licensing Service Center. IT managers can now deploy, configure, manage, update, and report on FEP protections using System Center Configuration Manager 2007.
The significance of this is that Microsoft is now firmly in the software security business as the space converges. Earlier this year, Intel purchased McAfee in an attempt to bring security software closer to hardware.
Microsoft Wasn’t Alone In Purchasing Those 882 Novell Patents
Florian Muller discovered the companies behind CPTN Holdings, the members of mysterious organization that purchased 882 patents from Novell when Attachmate bought Novell last month. It turns out that CPTN consists of Microsoft, Apple, EMC, and Oracle.
What patents these companies bought remains a mystery.
Rumor: Oracle and Microsoft in Bidding War for Autonomy
British tabloid Daily Mail “reported” that Oracle and Microsoft are in a bidding war for enterprise analytics company Autonomy. We suggest taking this rumor with a grain of salt. But if true, this could be interesting as Arik Hesseldahl writes for All Things Digital:
On its face this rumor is interesting because now that the battle to roll up the data storage firms is largely resolved following Dell’s acquisition of Compellent, one of the next dealmaking battle fronts for the large IT vendors is going to be software that makes managing data in all its various forms easier, more powerful and less costly.
This could signal more consolidation in the business analytics field, something we talked about when IBM purchased Netezza last fall.
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Yahoo launches Clues trending service – V3.co.uk
Nov 16th
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Yahoo launches Clues trending service
V3.co.uk Site owners and online retailers have begun using the tools for search engine optimisation (SEO) strategies. Unfortunately, the tactics have also become … Yahoo! Clues Offers an Inside Look at Trending Search Patterns |
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Yahoo Clues: New Fun Search Keyword Tool
Nov 16th
Today, Yahoo announced a new tool named Yahoo Clues. Yahoo Clues basically gives you insight into the types of people searching for specific keyword phrases and shows related terms based on those searches and searchers. The tool allows you to plug in one or two keyword phrases and it then plots the…
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iOS 4.2 is Coming in November – Mobile Clues (blog)
Sep 1st
 The Hindu |
iOS 4.2 is Coming in November
Mobile Clues (blog) Apple SEO Steve Jobs has announced new version of ios 4.1 and it has many bugs fixed and some new features added, and jobs also mentioned that apple coming … ios 4.1 Announced at apple event |
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ios 4.1 Announced at apple event – Mobile Clues (blog)
Sep 1st
 Mobile Clues (blog) |
ios 4.1 Announced at apple event
Mobile Clues (blog) Apple SEO Steve jobs at apple event announced that they are updating ios to latest version ios 4.1, There are many Bugs fix and new features added, … |
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