Monthly Archives: April 2007

Google buys DoubleClick for $3.1 Billion

Posted on by

It’s official, Google has acquired on-line advertising outfit DoubleClick for $3.1 billion. The sky high price though may be less a function of DoubleClick’s actual worth and more about what it can strategically provide for Google – and what it could have done for Microsoft, who were also bidding for the company.

Through this acquisition Google has gained a vibrant advertising business for banners, videos and other so-called display-ads intended to promote brands rather than to generate immediate sales. It’s widely known fact that DoubleClick has relationships with almost every major online publisher and almost half of all online ad agencies. This means that Google can now go head to head with its main search rival Yahoo! in the display advertising business.

To get an idea of why this is so important, analysts predict that the paid search advertising market will account for more than 40% of the $19.5 billion expected to go to on-line advertising this year (Mar. 7 eMarketer report).

David Rosenblatt, CEO of DoubleClick, made an interesting comment about this acquisition – he’s excited at the prospect of using DoubleClick’s relationships and Google’s targeting to sell off-line ads in the future. He also believes that DoubleClick’s existing clients wont think of this as a threat, but as a tool that makes advertising easier : ” I think they will see this as a best-of-breed combination – the leading platform technology provider and the leading monetization engine”.

Even more power for Google.

Web Apps can never be desktop replacements … ?

Posted on by

Came across this article over at madpenguin.org. The author, Matt Hartley, argues that Web Apps will never be desktop replacements. After reading the article I think the most compelling arguments he provides are:

  1. In order to use a web based application you have to have an internet connection. Broadband outages mean you can’t be dependent on them. When your offline you can’t use them.
  2. There are privacy issues to think about. Your effectively handing your data to a third party and relying on the fact that they will not abuse it.

Firstly, I think never is a long time 😉

I am not sure if either would dissuade me from using web based applications instead of desktop ones. I already use Google’s web based applications and I think they are pretty good in terms of delivering my day to day needs. I suppose if I’m honest I’m hard pressed to think of what I do with a word processor or spreadsheet on a daily basis that I can’t do using these applications.

As for availability. I can’t remember the last time I suffered from an internet outage that prevented me from getting on line for any significant amount of time. I certainly can’t remember any time I’ve tried to use one of Google’s applications to find that it was down or unavailable, or one of 37Signals applications.

Speed of response as I see it is a big stumbling block for web based applications. I’ve not experienced many such issues using Google applications, but I know how much I get irritated when I’m sitting there waiting for a page to load in BaseCamp for example. However, any organisation, worth its salt, that is serious about providing software as a service over the web has to consider the responsiveness of its software as a key metric in gauging the applications success, because users using it will.

Data security is a bit a funny topic, if you consider the prevelance of behaviour logging spyware on most computers , I’m not convinced the average persons data would be more secure on their own PC, or even works machine. I suppose it feel comforting to think that your somehow responsible for your own data but Microsoft is Microsoft, spyware is spyware, rootkits are rootkits and hackers are hackers.

Realistically thought, it’s certainly going to be a while before people will actually bring themselves to trust third party company’s with their corporate data. Any form of outsourcing raises questions. Google is making some inroads with its Google Apps premium service – which basically allows companies to have their corporate email provided by Google, and use slightly richer versions of Google’s web based applications as opposed to Microsoft Office.

Ultimately, I do wonder though if the reality around the viability of this transition from desktop to web is less about the technical issues but more the commercial ones:

Web apps will slowly replace desktop apps so long as desktop apps fail to turn the same profit that web apps and subscription services can. To some extent we can figure in the level to which users acquiesce to the transfer but the fact simply is that there are larger entities than end users calling the shots on this one. It’s like pushing a bill through Congress: if at first they don’t succeed they’ll launch a campaign to poll the public for the conflicting arguments, they’ll pay enough lip service to make people think that the issues have been resolved, and then they’ll resubmit next year. If the major business partners on Wall Street decide that they’re making more money from companies which offer web based applications then, slowly but surely, venture capital will be steered away from desktop application vendors and to world wide web application providers. We, the end users, have no control over this.

Goodbye Steve

Posted on by

I lost a very close friend of mine a little over week ago. Steve died when he lost control of his car on the way back from a friends birthday celebration. He was cremated on Thursday, I think that’s really when it actually hit me that he was gone – up until that point I’d managed to shut my feelings out so I could get on a do the things I needed to do … get on with work, help Steph with the funeral arrangements. It’s probably not a good idea to stick your head in the sand though, or pretend nothings wrong. I did make a few careless mistakes at work this week, I guess I was a little distracted – but fortunately I work with a group of guys and gals who are quite perceptive and know when something not quite right.

It was only Thursday it really hit me – at the crematorium. It’s a good job we have the Easter weekend, it’s given me a little time to reflect on things … get my head out of the sand and actually admitt to myself something is wrong.

As I write this im struggling to find the words to do him justice, but when I think of him I’m reminded of this passage from the Teachings of Tecumseh, i think he’d have appreciated this:

So live your life that the fear of death can never enter your heart. Trouble no one about his religion; respect yours. Love your life, perfect your life, beautify all things in your life. Seek to make your life long and of service to your people. Prepare a noble death song for the day when you go over the Great Divide. Always give a word or sign of salute when meeting or passing a friend, or even a stranger, if in a lonely place. Show respect to all people, but grovel to none. When you arise in the morning, give thanks for the light, for your life and strength. Give thanks for your food and for the joy of living. If you see no reason for giving thanks, the fault lies in yourself. Touch not the poisonous firewater that makes wise ones to fools and robs the Spirit of its Vision. When your time comes to die be not like those whose hearts are filled with the fear of death, so that when their time comes they weep and pray for a little more time to live their lives over again in a different way. Live your life so that when you sing your death song, you will die like a hero who is going home with no shame to meet the Creator and your family.

rest in peace … old friend.

Microsoft is dead.

Posted on by

I’ve read pretty much all of Paul Graham’s essays. I think he’s a wonderful writer and in the past we have often found ourselves debating his views at our bi-weekly geek bookclub @ Talis. One of his most seminal pieces was Hackers and Painters – which every developer should read. So, as you might imagine, I was more than a little intrigued this morning when my FeedReader listed a new essay by Paul with the contentious title: Microsoft is Dead.

Paul argues that Microsoft is no longer frightening, that the company is no longer seen as a threat, no longer casts the shadow it once did over the entire software industry:

I can sense that. No one is even afraid of Microsoft anymore. They still make a lot of money—so does IBM, for that matter. But they’re not dangerous.

Paul attributes this demise, if that’s the right word for it, to four things:

Firstly , Google. Who Paul believes is the most dangerous company now by far, in both good and bad senses of the word – using www.live.com as an example of how Microsoft is limping behind Google, continuously playing catchup.

Secondly, was the release of Gmail and the introduction of AJAX to the masses. Gmail showed how much you could do with web based software – signalling the death knell of the desktop as more and more applications are delivered over the web. Paul describes how Microsoft themselves might have contributed to the rise of AJAX, something I was previously unaware of:

Ironically, Microsoft unintentionally helped create Ajax. The x in Ajax is from the XMLHttpRequest object, which lets the browser communicate with the server in the background while displaying a page. (Originally the only way to communicate with the server was to ask for a new page.) XMLHttpRequest was created by Microsoft in the late 90s because they needed it for Outlook. What they didn’t realize was that it would be useful to a lot of other people too—in fact, to anyone who wanted to make web apps work like desktop ones.

The third cause is the widespread availability of high speed broadband Internet access – which is key to facilitating the delivery of web based applications to end users – which in turn is key to moving users away from the reliance on desktop based tools and applications.

The final nail in the coffin, Paul argues, came from Apple. The company re-defined itself and offered the world a viable alternative to Windows, in OS X. I know from personal experience that although I don’t have a Mac or a PC running native Linux, I do much of my development work in Linux VM Machines – this is partly due to infrastructure policy on our company laptops … which I should hasten to add … just changed 🙂 So when I get my shiny new laptop I can run Linux on it natively Yippee! ( I’d love it even more if I could have one of those 17″ MacBook’s … pretty please Ian if you do I’ll buy you one of these t-shirts!)

I think to a great extent Paul is actually right. But I personally wouldn’t count Microsoft out of the running. Microsoft is still a company that is capable of innovating great things. Just take a look at what’s coming out of their research labs in terms of PhotoSynth and DeepFish – to understand that they are looking to push the envelope in certain areas. Unfortunatly it does appear that these days they are reacting to innovations made by their competitors – www.live.com , and maps.live.com are great examples of two Microsoft products that are essentially late alternatives to Google Web Search, and Google Earth. Instead of leading the way, Microsoft is being forced to change it’s traditional business because others, like Google, are changing the industry around it.

I think Paul is absolutely right when he attributes part of their downfall, as it were, to their complacency as a Monopoly:

I’m glad Microsoft is dead. They were like Nero or Commodus—evil in the way only inherited power can make you. Because remember, the Microsoft monopoly didn’t begin with Microsoft. They got it from IBM. The software business was overhung by a monopoly from about the mid-1950s to about 2005. For practically its whole existence, that is. One of the reasons “Web 2.0” has such an air of euphoria about it is the feeling, conscious or not, that this era of monopoly may finally be over.

It’s been a well known fact for years that Microsoft is propped up by the profit it generates from two product lines … Microsoft Windows, and Microsoft Office. Hell even the XBOX is still making a loss for the company. It’s no accident then, that Google, have released browser based Office applications, in the form of docs.google.com. This service allows people to write and share documents and spreadsheets for free, combined with gmail and several other apps. Google are now positioning themselves as a service provider offering enhanced versions of this service for small businesses for $50 per user, per year. This will no doubt force Microsoft to change – perhaps even releasing a browser based SOA version of its Office Suite. It’s going to be interesting to see how this competition between these two giants pans out. I’m not saying that being the first in this kind of race is always the best, but if you get into a position where your forcing both the industry and your competition to react to you then thats got to be a good thing.

Take the time to read Paul’s essay. It’s not very long, but it does make some excellent points.

Yahoo! alpha (beta) Search – released

Posted on by

Looks like Yahoo! has taken a page from Google’s SearchMash experiment. I’ve been using SearchMash as my default homepage in firefox for a while now – because I can get an aggregated view of search results on a single page instead of having to navigate to different pages for different types of content.

Yahoo! ‘s new offering called “alpha” ( which is currently in beta 😉 ) neatly organises results from the Web, Flickr, YouTube, Wikipedia and Yahoo Answers, as well as other sponsored results. In fact at first glance it looks, well, almost identical to SearchMash actually. Yahoo! have stuck with a traditional paging control to page through search results, whereas SearchMash does away with the paging metaphor and instead gets more results which are added to the bottom of the page.

Yahoo! alpha integration with both YouTube and Flickr is very nice. Even though the layout of the two search engines is almost identical, I think Yahoo! makes better use of the screen, content doesn’t feel as cluttered as SearchMash can at times.

I like Yahoo! alpha. I love the fact that I can customise the layout and move the portlets around to my own liking … and I can share my layout with others. There’s no doubt in my mind that Yahoo! have taken a great idea that Google was experimenting with, and have improved upon it.

It will be interesting to see how Google respond to this? I’d hope it would be by releasing a long overdue update to SearchMash, to show all of us who have been providing feedback if and how they have taken that on board.

Information Software and the Graphical Interface

Posted on by

I came across a very interesting paper by Bret Victor a couple of week ago- “Magic Ink: Information Software and the Graphical Interface“. Here’s an extract from the abstract :

The ubiquity of frustrating, unhelpful software interfaces has motivated decades of research into “Human-Computer Interaction.” In this paper, I suggest that the long-standing focus on “interaction” may be misguided. For a majority subset of software, called “information software,” I argue that interactivity is actually a curse for users and a crutch for designers, and users’ goals can be better satisfied through other means.

The paper echoes some of the views Alan Cooper discussed in The inmates are running the asylum – another text that I think anyone interested in HCI / User Interface Design / Interaction Design should definitely read!

The author goes to great lengths to try demonstrate why information software design should be seen as the design of context sensitive information graphics. He goes to great length to explain and demonstrate what he feels is the importance of information graphic design:

A well-designed information graphic can almost compel the viewer to ask and answer questions, make comparisons, and draw conclusions. It does so by exploiting the capabilities of the human eye: instantaneous and effortless movement, high bandwidth and capacity for parallel processing, intrinsic pattern recognition and correlation, a macro/micro duality that can skim a whole page or focus on the tiniest detail. Meanwhile, a graphic sidesteps human shortcomings: the one-dimensional, uncontrollable auditory system, the relatively sluggish motor system, the mind’s limited capacity to comprehend hidden mechanisms. A graphic presents no mechanisms to comprehend or manipulate—it plugs directly into the mind’s spatial reasoning centers.

On the face of it this sounds reasonable – a picture speaks a thousand words. How we present information to our users has to be the most important question software designers should be asking themselves. So why don’t they? Well I wrote a piece offering my views on that question a while ago: programmers are generally bad at user interface design. So as you might imagine I find myself agreeing with what Bret writes here:

Compared to excellent ink-and-paper designs, most current software communicates deplorably. This is a problem of surface, but not a superficial problem. The main cause, I believe, is that many software designers feel they are designing a machine. Their foremost concern is behavior—what the software does. They start by asking: What functions must the software perform? What commands must it accept? What parameters can be adjusted? (In the case of websites: What pages must there be? How are they linked together? What are the dynamic features?) These designers start by specifying functionality, but the essence of information software is the presentation.

I believe there is a great deal of merit in the argument that Bret makes, and the examples he uses such as his BART project are indeed compelling. However its important to note that they are relatively small software projects. BART is a small desktop widget that provides train schedules so you can plan journeys around the San Francisco bay area. It’s a great example of providing users with information that is important to them and providing interactions that are intuitive but not distracting. It feels even more compelling when he compares his widget to the official bay area trip planning tool – which presents information to user in html tables full of text.

Unfortunatly highly graphical user interfaces aren’t normally very accessible to people with disabilities, for example visual impairments. When I look at the BART widget, as a user I love it, its simple presents a wealth of information that I can take in, in a glance – but that’s because I don’t have any disabilities. If I take a screenshot of it, then using photoshop turn it into a grey scale image – its suddenly much harder to use. It’s one of the reasons many DDA standards require that you cannot use colour alone to signify meaning. I could go all the way and ask how a blind user might use the widget. The answer is, they wouldn’t be able to. There’s a wider question of course of whether they’d want to or need to use it 😉 .

The accessibility issue aside, I think software designers should reflect on what Bret has written, and others before him, like Alan Cooper. I know I struggle with some of the ideas he’s presenting here, but I can’t help but feel that too many software projects descend far too quickly into the delivery of “functionality”, without any significant effort or thought placed into whether the software is presenting the user with the information he/she wants as effectively, and efficiently as possible from the point of view of the user. Far too often the very interactions and flows through an application can be a product of the framework the developers have chosen to use, for example JSF – forces certain patterns of behaviour that the user in turn is forced to adopt by proxy.

I’m not sure if there’s a right or wrong answer, but Bret’s paper has given me plenty of food for thought, you should definitly read it!