Archive: October, 2005

Lately, it seems as if Microsoft is regularly having to react to Google’s latest moves, and their likely intentions on a regular basis.

However, with MSFT’s interest in AOL becoming an open secret, Google has been forced to deal with that issue.

About 11 percent of Google’s revenue in the first half of 2005 came from from their existing agreements with AOL. Seeing MSFT move into that space would put a serious crimp in Google’s revenues, and would likely affect their long term strategies.

So Google might need to dip into their last capital raise of $4.2 billion to defend their revenue streams, rather than expand into new markets.

Something of a reversal of roles from recent activities…

This week, Google and Sun announced a new collaboration. No surprise there, it only makes sense for them to work together.

Where the interesting potential for this deal lies is with the portion that was not announced; StarOffice / OpenOffice and Google’s considerable talents for making web based applications come alive.

Today, Sun’s OpenOffice offering is not very impressive. I’ve tried using it a few times up until a year or two ago, but always gave up in frustration. While it works, but usually time it doesn’t send documents back and forth with Microsoft Office very well, or when it does share them, they come through corrupted.

That said, Google is perfectly positioned to take this software, and ‘googlize’ it. i.e. turn it into a world class tool. Will it affect Microsoft? Yes. But is it a Microsoft killer? No.

In this battle one could argue that either company’s killer strategy isn’t actually an application at all. Let’s take it a step back and use a political analogy to compare what’s going on in this battle and what occured during the Cold War.

Yes, you read right The Cold War.

It looks like the AOL – MSN talks are back on. According to Reuters, there’s a push to get it done by the end of the year.

I like this deal. On the surface it looks good for both AOL and MSN.

For MSN in particular, it eats right into Google’s market, in that MSN would supplant Google in providing search data to AOL. It would also obviously affect the distribution reach for Google’s adwords.

Wonder where this leaves AOL’s next version of Netscape? I would be surprised if AOL continued to try and build new versions of the browser.

With REM’s song blazing in my ears, I realized that as of yesterday “I couldn’t get there from here” was possible for a large number (15%-17%) of people online.

A dispute between Level 3 and Cogent left thousands of Internet users, including Time Warner’s Road Runner clients, struggling online Thursday after a dispute between the two service providers left large portions of the Internet unable to talk to each other.

The problems first become public knowledge after Level 3 Communications Inc. started refusing to accept traffic from rival Cogent Communications Group Inc., thereby rendering large portions of the Internet unreachable by others. Normally, large providers like Cogent and Level 3 handed off traffic from one network to each other free of charge. Recenly however, Level 3 claimed that it was handling too much Cogent traffic, and it appears to blame part of it on unfair pricing practices. This move might be directly trying to force Cogent to raise its prices, which at $10 per megabit are far below the market average of $60 or so per megabit.