New business venture
It's been difficult to find time to post on this blog as I'm heavily engaged in setting up a new internet business,
dir3ct. It's intended to provide services for internet traders and our first offerings are a shopping cart package and a "back-office" system, Epic, which provides things like purchase orders and picking lists. We host them for you too, so all you need at your end is a browser.
It'll most likely appeal to the trader who has a mix of sales from ebay and from their own website. The great thing about Epic is that it'll typically cut 3-4 out hours of donkey work for the trader that has, say, 100 transactions a day. Use our shopping cart too, and you get further benefits from the way they tightly integrate.
Not all the bits and pieces of the site are up and working yet, we're aiming to have everything ready for the start of April.
We also supply hosting separately, for any sort of legal site except porn due its high bandwidth requirements.
Turkeys, roosting
Microsoft $44.6bn bid for YahooThe only real shock about it is how much they're paying, but then again share prices are all about perception rather than genuine value.
As Keynes put it, it's like a beauty contest in which you're voting not for the most beautiful entrant but the one the other judges are most likely to pick. It should make the share price of the combined company soar, at least in the short term.
The reality is that neither company are great performers in the internet world. Microsoft have long been playing catch-up... and failing, whereas Yahoo seem stuck in the late 1990's.
Yahoo were simply eclipsed by Google with its attitude of providing web users with free, relevant search, putting providing a service first. The relevance point is critical, before, with any of the search engines, query on, say, "Pizza in Coventry" and your first 20 results would most likely be 10 "me-too" porn sites, 7 dismal American rock bands, 2 obscure academic papers and 1 actual pizza parlour, and even then probably in Coventry, Connecticut rather than Coventry, UK. Yahoo do have a structured directory too, which is excellent, but there's a better one at the
Open Directory.
Microsoft seem to have always been playing catch-up, after all, Windows hit the market long after the Mac OS and only with XP did it start to come close in terms of ease of use. Their business strategy however, could scarcely be faulted (as being the world's wealthiest company attests), lock-in consumers and regularly produce ever more bloated products. Perhaps the wheels are starting to come off with Vista though, like many techies, I will
never use it. Apart from it requiring a pretty hunky machine to be able to run its eye-candy, I'm not going to have an OS on board that has a DRM layer at base, slowing everything down. If the big US copyright holders want me to run it, and that's who it's for, they can buy the PC for me.
For all its marketplace dominance, Microsoft have rarely been innovators, the only truly original product of theirs I can think of is ASP.
Which brings us back to this takeover deal, 2 huge businesses who've slid behind in the internet revolution, trying to cling to their position by a merger of muscle, altogether reminiscent of that other gigantic deal, the Time-Warner takeover of AOL.
Some are touting it as the emergence of a serious competitor to Google, but I doubt it. I hope a competitor
does arise, but it's far more likely to come from another audacious start-up as they once were.
It's not only technology and business, it's about being part of the whole
culture of the net.
This blog was made with recycled bytes.