award tour

The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs is a great blog. It usually has some really funny stuff. On the weekend it posted the best commentary on the proposed Microsoft/Yahoo deal I’ve seen. The article is well worth reading but here’s some of the choice quotes:

It’s like taking the two guys who finished second and third in a 100-yard dash and tying their legs together and asking for a rematch, believing that now they’ll run faster.

But here’s the really dark part of all this. [Ballmer] knows it won’t work. He has to know this. He’s not stupid. [...] He has a mindset that was formed in Detroit, where he grew up. He’s a Big Three automaker kind of guy. And this is a Big Three move. It’s Ford buying Jaguar and Land Rover and Volvo because they can’t think of anything else to do.

Oh, and synergy. Yeah. They’ll talk a lot about synergy. You know, like when you hook together a bunch of data centers that run on completely different technology stacks.

Scariest to me is that in all the articles I’ve seen the one thing Ballmer keeps bringing up is how he’ll be able to save $1 billion a year in costs. Are you kidding me? Is this Microsoft or Dunder Mifflin? I mean, I don’t doubt he could save a billion a year. But it says a lot about the kind of company Microsoft has become that this is what they’re thinking about.

Yahoo is selling a new Jessica Simpson single in mp3 format (with no DRM) and it’s personalized to specific names. I made the list of names but poor Ramanan did not. I know he’ll be crying himself to sleep this evening.

There’s two things about this that strike me as quite interesting. First, it’s a prime example of the massive amount of customization that the music industry could exploit online. I just finished reading The Long Tail by Wired’s Editor-in-Chief Chris Anderson. It details how there is a lot of money to be made in niches, even niches as small as 1 person (or in this case, 1 name). The second interesting part is this post on yahoo’s music blog. They’re bascially begging the music industry to let them create an emusic competitor. They also make a great point about how DRM adds nothing since labels already sell DRM-free music in the form of CDs. Maybe there’s a chance the labels will come to their senses and give this a try. The Carrot: major labels realizing that DRM really just means they’re locked into iTunes. The Stick: companies like Yahoo saying it’s the only way to compete with Apple.