Archive: July, 2006

I meant to post this yesterday… and forgot…

There were quite a few posts a week ago or so about Google, (of course), click fraud, and Eric Schmidt’s comments on Click Fraud, where he was quoted as saying “Let it happen” and “because, in a “perfect” economic sense, the money paid for the invalid clicks will be factored into advertisers’ ROI calculations as part of the cost of doing business with Google.” – Eric Schmidt.

I noticed a comment on the about this story (not in reference to my blog post), on Google’s Blog yesterday while catching up on reading. I also, had a chance to read the Report on Click Fraud by Dr. Tuzhilin, which I found to be quite interesting and informative.

My thoughts on the way out of this story? I don’t believe Eric Schmidt was misquoted, and I do believe what he said is accurate. Being honest is not a bad thing. But that’s also not good enough. I do believe that they are trying, and they need to keep trying.

The problem is that they are not communicating this effort very well.

Just in from CNET, Google’s second-quarter net earnings reached $772 million, beating analyst expectations by about 12%, on revenue which exceeded expectations by just 2%.

Google’s share price dropped 3% on the news!

Amazing isn’t it? Google managed to earn more money per transaction than in the past, and the market goes down. Months ago, many pundits were predicting that Google’s staffing build out to meet demand would cut into this very ratio. They’ve proven everyone wrong.

On Tuesday, Yahoo met earnings expectations, while overall revenue did not meet projections. So they too found ways to earn more profits per transactions. Nicely done.

Yahoo did announce they were delaying their next release / update of their advertising platform. That makes sense. The release would have gone out too close to the busy Holiday season, and the learning curve on using it to its full potential may have negatively affected spends. The market did not approve however, and dropped their stock price as a result.

Overall though, great news for both companies, and something which all their employees should feel proud of. After all, it takes everyone pulling in the same direction for a company to enjoy solid earnings growth without big sales increases.

I started using the Beta 2 version of Microsoft’s Ineternet Explorer 7 browser about 2 weeks ago. Generally I use Firefox and IE equally during the day, but for different tasks. While I also have Opera installed, I rarely seem to use it. It’s good; just not a “must use” technology for me.

I’ve been very pleasantly surprised by the new IE7 browser. What I liked most was how all the screen fonts upgraded on install. Now, some people won’t like the fact that the fonts upgrade, and many webmasters won’t because there are bound to be issues, and I’ve seen some funky formatting. But from a user perspective, things are much easier to read.

I like Microsoft’s tabbing system. I predefine multiple home pages, and they all open in separate tabs when the browser starts up. Oddly enough, I find this to help save me time each day. I didn’t think it would.

Just saw this pop up at MSNBC.

According to the story, Yahoo and Microsoft have started to test making their Instant Messaging (IM) systems work together. While not technically challenging, the millions of users for both companies’ system means that the scale of the system is daunting.

The companies first announced this plan last October. Now they’re starting implementation. Google is not the obvious target here, ( a rarity when MSFT and Yahoo! work together ): AOL is.

Sure wish they could get Skype into the mix.