Archive: February, 2008

In the autumn of 2005, Bill Gates was asked if Microsoft would do to Google what it did to Netscape. “No”, replied Gates, We’ll do something different.”

- source: NYTimes.

Frustration Friday
On Friday, I was stuck in an airport waiting for the eastern seaboard to clear enough to allow the plane I was coming back west on to land. The WiFi was down or at least it was so over-used by thousands of others nearby it was virtually useless. Having headed east for a funeral, I didn’t think I would be spending much time working. Imagine how freaked out I was on Friday to be snow-stuck in Toronto waiting through delays, cancellations and re-bookings. The second biggest potential deal in tech history had made its way into the open and there was precious little I could do to research or cover it. All I could do was think and make desperate phone calls.

In some ways, this curse has turned out to be a blessing. Looking at the evolving situation from the comforts of my west-coast home-office is far mellower than Friday’s scene at Pearson International where I had a cell phone barely balanced in one ear and my laptop precariously balanced on my knees. Screaming kids, jangled nerves and sudden gate changes made for a complicated working environment. Bad as it was, my experience was nothing compared to what people in and around Yahoo would be going through.