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Updated at the bottom: We have short memories in Silicon Valley, which is both a blessing and a curse. We forget the bad times as quickly as we forget the good times.

At the turn of the century, everything went to hell with the dot-com bust. Then the pendulum started to swing the other way; the pessimism that once reigned supreme was being replaced by wild-eyed optimism. Now Silicon Valley is in for a long-overdue reality check, one that should worry one and all. Why? Because the news coming out of advertising-focused companies is not good.

Yesterday ValueClick, a display advertising network, said it now expects its second-quarter revenues to range from $162 million to $164 million, lower than the previously forecasted $170 million. The company also cut its full-year 2008 sales guidance by about 10 percent, to between $655 million and $675 million. It blamed weakness in its display and comparison advertising business, and flatness even in its lead-generation business.

Time Warner’s Platform-A advertising division isn’t doing so well either, according to some of my sources. The company is instituting wide-scale belt-tightening measures, including freezing travel budgets. Pali Capital in a blog post today forecast, “AOL’s display advertising revenues down about 8% in Q2 (Q1 ‘08 was down about 10% organically), with the back-half down mid-single digits.”

Microsoft, in its fourth-quarter 2008 earnings call today, also admitted that online advertising was tough. “The one proviso to that is in the online advertising space…it was weak in the fourth quarter. There is a direct impact and we’re not immune in the online space, ” Microsoft CFO Chris Liddel said in a conference call with analysts. “The online advertising area is part of the business that we think is most challenging…the online advertising area is very difficult at the moment.”

And if that wasn’t enough, Google just announced spectacular growth in its second-quarter revenues — about 39 percent over the same period lat year — but fell short of Wall Street’s profit expectations. Between The Lines blog notes that Google CEO Eric Schmidt, in his company’s conference call with investors, said they would survive the downturn because there will be a flight to quality, and that they will provide a better return on investment. Maybe! Larry Dignan hit the nail on the head when he wrote:

“Color me skeptical. Anyone that lived through the dot-com bust has heard these lines before and no company is immune if there’s a recession.”

Like him, the skeptical me went straight to the traffic acquisition costs (TAC), which is where I think the real story lies. If you look at the image below you’ll see that Google’s traffic acquisition costs have declined rapidly while its revenues have ballooned. TAC in general and AdSense specifically are like a black box – no one quite knows how much Google gives out. Sometimes it feels like Google can use this “black box” to come up with pretty much any numbers it wants to.

We’ll get a better sense of the overall health of the market when Yahoo reports its latest numbers, but the way I see it, things are sort of troubling. We wrote about this nagging problem back in May. I think that as we go forward things are only going to get worse — and even Silicon Valley can’t ignore what’s been going on in the overall economy.

The housing crisis is being replaced by a much scarier problem: the personal credit crunch. In a recent report, American Express noted that it has started to see a sharp increase in late card payments. Now folks, this is American Express, whose customers skew towards the affluent, especially compared to those of its competitors. The company has boosted loss provisions for its U.S. card business, profits have declined, and defaults are up.

Will these problems escalate? Probably. Consumers struggling with the housing crisis and rising fuel costs — and thus higher basic living expenses — will be forced to cut back on other spending, which will lead to slower sales and in turn, less money for advertising.

We know the housing and financial sector-related ads have already declined drastically, now we’re going to start to see other sectors cut back on advertising, too — and that is going to have a negative impact on everyone from large social networks to ad networks to Yahoo and Google to small startups, including weblogs like ours. I guess Provigil sales are going to take a nosedive in the Valley as we stay up all night worrying about everything.

Update: And there’s more bad news today. The Wall Street Journal reports that General Motors is going to sharply cut back on advertising. GM is one of the big spenders in U.S. — last year the company spent about 32 percent of its $2.3 billion dollar ad budget on newspapers and 11 percent on television networks — but it looks like those expenditures are going to get hacked. It’s not clear from the report how this move will impact Internet advertising.

Photo courtesy of ZDNet

A few minutes after she delivered a speech at our Structure 08 conference in San Francisco, I caught up with Microsoft’s corporate VP of global foundation services, Debra Chrapaty, for a video chat. I think a more appropriate title for her would be Mr. Softie’s Internet Infrastructure Czar. I found her very knowledgeable, engaging and open with her opinions. “We have some new innovations up our sleeve that are going to knock the socks of anything anyone is doing, including our friends down south,” she told me. She didn’t name Google, of course, but we all know who she was talking about.

Her candor was one of the reasons I wanted decided to share the video with you guys. The common theme of the conversation: Microsoft is spending liberally to build out its Internet infrastructure, including upgrading its backbone network and scaling out its data center infrastructure by adding new technologies.

When I asked her exactly how much Microsoft was spending on it, she dodged the question, saying just that it was a big number. This much we do know: Two years ago, the company was spending close to $2 billion on its infrastructure; it has since undertaken the development of six data centers, with parts of two networks already online.

Facts About Microsoft-Owned Data Centers

Adding 10,000 servers a month

New data centers being planned/under construction are equivalent of over 15 US football fields of data center space.

Plans to cut of 30% to 40% in data-center power costs company-wide over the next two years.

Current network backbone runs at about 100 gigabits per second, but soon Microsoft plans to bump it to 500 Gigabits. I think this could be big for Level 3, long time partner of Microsoft.

Building out its own CDN (Edge) network - 99 nodes on a 100 gigabit per second backbone.

For Microsoft, total data grows ten times every three years. The data in near future will soon approach 100s of petabytes. This includes data from all of their online services.

Source: Microsoft, GigaOM

Location Status Quincy, Washington Opened April 2007, construction continues San Antonio, Texas Under Construction, planned opening September 2008 Dublin, Ireland Under Construction Northlake, Illinois Under Construction, Phase one to go live in October 2008 Iowa TBD

When complete, it will consume 48 megawatts of energy. Microsoft can tap up to 72 MW of energy coming from hydro power. Microsoft is paying about 1.8 cents per kilowatt, but will rise to between 2.6-to-2.9 cents per kilowatt as more capacity goes online. Two data centers in this location.

It will be 447,000 square feet on 44 acres. Microsoft is building two data centers here

first Windows Live data center outside the U.S.

The first floor of this facility is going to be entirely made of containers and would house Microsoft search.

Source: Microsoft

Watch the video to get the full low-down, but if you’re in a hurry, here are some highlights, including her quotes from our conversation.

• “We are building data centers but I don’t want to say not just data centers. We are already on to our second generation data centers. More utilization, better density and more power efficient.” For Chrapaty, power efficiency is not just talk, it’s her mission — she is the driving force behind Microsoft’s server utilization.
• “Infrastructure is a differentiator. I use FedEx as an example. They are world’s most predominant distribution company. It wasn’t that they had a great brand or they had all these plans. No, what they did was find these strategic landing fields where they could get in and out quickly to key distribution points across the globe. It defined their company. I think the same is true in the infrastructure now. Data centers are already becoming a scarce resource.” Google realized this a long time ago; Microsoft is now demonstrating how it can put money to work and build an advantage over others.
• Like Google, Microsoft is taking the design of servers into its own hands. “We are doing some unique things in the mother board designs, server designs, and because we are Microsoft, operating systems.”
• She’s a big champion of container data centers, which essentially act like the trailers on long-haul trucks, optimized and packed with all sorts of gear — servers, switches, storage systems — that’s wheeled in and plugged into the power grid and the network. Sounds like Rackable Systems and Verari are major suppliers of these containers to Microsoft; the company is making extensive use of them in their Chicago facility.
• Her comments indicate that Microsoft has plans to offer managed services to large corporations.
• She lets us know first that they are building a IOWA data center, which is huge for Iowa. Google has one in Iowa too.

Technology buzzwords come and go…virtualization, green, SaaS…and after sitting through the Google Friend Connect announcement, reading about Facebook’s Connect service and writing about last week’s MySpace Data Availability launch, “open” appears to be just the latest. But open is one of those words whose definition can be spun into a variety of meanings.

While Facebook isn’t yet releasing much detail on its efforts and may completely surprise me, Google’s Friend Connect program today highlights how open standards such as OpenID, OAuth and OpenSocial can be used to create a platform that’s pretty closed. The service, which will launch tonight and only expects to have between 12 and 24 sites participating while it’s in preview mode over the next few months, will allow site publishers to put some code on their sites. If a user visits a site with the appropriate code, she can get access, via an IFrame, to applications built in OpenSocial. A user can also share her activities on a participating site with her contacts, as well as through her news feeds on participating social networking sites.

Last week, I pointed out that MySpace’s Data Availability efforts were welcome in that they expand the number of sites on which a user can use her MySpace data, but that MySpace still had a lock on the user data since it hosted and determined who could display that data by approving site partners. If MySpace’s efforts were three steps forward in opening up user profiles, then Google’s Friend Connect represents two steps back.

The use of the IFrame means that site owners have no way to change or work with user data, they can only display it. MySpace doesn’t allow sites to store user data on anyone’s servers other than its own, but it does allow that data to be used directly in the outside site. For more differences among the three services, please check out the chart below.

While none of these services are entirely open yet — and may never be, given security and data abuse problems — the trend toward a more social web is clear. With broadband more prevalent than ever and voice fading as the primary means of communicating with people who aren’t in the room, enabling a truly open social web is the next big step in communication. But in order for that to happen, the user needs to be able to reach across walled gardens and gain granular control as to what he or she shares and with whom.

There’s open source (really open in that anyone with knowledge can participate in how the code evolves), open standards (open only in that anyone can participate using a pre-defined version of the standard), and open APIs (open in that anyone can take the pre-defined standard and build something for a closed platform such as Facebook). Knowing this, the efforts to open up a user’s data on a social network (their social graph, if you will) by these three companies falls somewhere between an open platform and an open standard.

Facebook Connect (not launched yet) Google Friend Connect MySpace Data Availability Standards Used Social Data That’s Shared Getting Access to the Data Time Frame Launch Partners Where Data is stored and displayed Privacy

unknown, but Facebook API is likely	OAuth, OpenID, OpenSocial	OAuth
basic profile information, profile picture, friends, photos, events, groups	Applications built with OpenSocial, contacts, activities on participating sites published back to a news feed	Profiles, friends, photos and videos
unknown	Web site owners must apply to Google and be accepted	Web site owners must agree to MySpace terms and conditions, but MySpace will allow anyone who doesn’t abuse the user data to participate
will launch within a few weeks	First 12-24 sites will go live in the next few days and the rest of the web will take a few more months	Launched on May 8 and adding more partners within the next few weeks
unannounced	Plaxo, Orkut, Hi5 and Facebook	Yahoo!, Twitter, eBay and Photobucket
unannounced	On Google servers and displayed only via an iFrame	On MySpace Servers, but can be displayed however the participating site wishes
A user’s privacy settings will follow him around the web	Users opt in to Friend Connect and can limit their profile sharing to existing contacts only; a user can elect on which sites he wants to share his activities, can also instantly change privacy settings across all participating sites	Users can control their privacy settings (right now, only which sites get access to their data) on a central page. Partner sites must accept changes in real time and sharing profile data is an opt-in service

Update: The Wall Street Journal reports that Yahoo and Google are going to work together on an experiment that might lead to big things. In other words, a two-week test that is limited to Yahoo’s U.S. traffic will carry Google ads. These ads will be limited to “no more than 3% of Yahoo’s Web search queries.” If all goes well, then a broader search outsourcing arrangement could be struck by the two companies.

Loose translation: With its bid for Yahoo, Microsoft made a checkmate move. Yahoo is out of suitors. Its shareholders don’t give it a prayer of a chance, and further more, the company is still as listless as it was six months ago. So what does it do? It goes and sleeps with the enemy!

Just a reminder of Yahoo’s cluelessness: In 2000, it outsourced its search queries to Google. It renewed the deal in 2002, and has become a minor player in the search business. Anyway, about this new-found friendship, I wonder if the U.S. government is going to let this one through. I mean, this is one instance in which antitrust concerns could actually hold some merit.

Microsoft is pretty clear about its position. As Brad Smith, Microsoft’s General Counsel, told the WSJ:

“Any definitive agreement between Yahoo! and Google would consolidate over 90% of the search advertising market in Google’s hands. This would make the market far less competitive, in sharp contrast to our own proposal to acquire Yahoo!”

Either way, in this deal, heads or tails, Google comes away a winner. If Yahoo goes to Microsoft, the ensuing chaos is going to benefit Google. If Yahoo gives away its search ad business, Google is a winner.

Update: The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Yahoo and Time Warner are planning on putting together a deal where Yahoo will get AOL which is being valued at $10 billion. In exchange Time Warner will get 20% of the combined company (Yahoo) and will make a cash investment. Google will be the search-ad-partner. Yahoo would spend the money it gets from Time Warner $10 billion buying back its own stock and beating down Microsoft. With Legg Mason, 7% owner of Yahoo opposing the Microsoft offer, the new plan could work. To make this plan come apart at seams unravel, Microsoft has to up the offer by a few dollars per share. I say this again, Yahoo has some serious problems. Buying AOL, already troubled in its own right, is only going to compound problems.

• Yahoo Press Release (link)
• Microsoft’s Response in a press release. (link)

Microsoft is fighting a war — one in which it’s being attacked on three sides. Cut through the flurry of announcements out of its Mix conference this week and what emerges is the Redmond giant’s three-pronged defense strategy: consumer, enterprise and developer. Only by understanding the battles Microsoft is fighting does it become clear where the company is headed. So we’ve broken it out for you here.

The consumer attack

The front: Desktops, handsets and consoles. Flanked by Apple’s cooler desktops and devices, Google’s insight into users, and the Nintendo/Sony console world, Microsoft is struggling. Windows Mobile isn’t a consumer handset like the iPhone. Live hasn’t really taken off. Vista flopped, with the company embroiled in claims that it overstated the number of machines on which it would run. And the Xbox, despite its success, has an alarmingly high recall rate. Perhaps most frighteningly, it’s becoming clear that when it comes to consumers, advertising is paying for it all (what Chris Anderson calls the “freeconomy”). But Microsoft isn’t plugged into that ad stream.

The defense: One OS to rule them all. Users have dozens of devices, and Ray Ozzie wants them all to work seamlessly together. Expect Danger, Zune, Xbox and Vista to share and synchronize automatically. Carriers and labels will love it. Consumers will settle for it. And once they’ve got a central identity, they’ll be able to carry their desktop applications (with varying degrees of functionality) from their desk, to their car, to their hip, to their sofa.

But how to pay for it? What Microsoft needs is an ad network like Yahoo, and media formats like Silverlight that lure advertisers. Ballmer’s clearly not resistant to the concept of advertising: In an on-stage Mix interview with Guy Kawasaki, he performed a mini-monkeyboy dance, only to demand of the person who had requested the jig: “If your buddy behind you just gave you a buck, I want 50 cents.” He knows where his consumer revenue’s coming from down the road.

The enterprise attack

The front: On-demand apps and a mobile workforce. Salesforce.com has gone from a turnkey contact manager to a full-fledged ecosystem for developing CRM applications. Amazon lets hundreds of upstarts build project planning, accounting, word processing, messaging and more — apps that traditionally filled Microsoft’s coffers. Standards like OpenID give interoperability without buying a suite. As companies realize the inevitability of on-demand computing, Microsoft has to completely change its business model. And on the mobile front, Windows Mobile can’t hold a candle to the BlackBerry.

The defense: Connected productivity and an easy move into the cloud. Expect the firm to retrench on mobility. Exchange still holds the bulk of business users’ internal relationships. More and more, it’s focusing on workflows and business process. Moving those processes between the enterprise server, the mobile device and the web — seamlessly — would be a big win that companies will love. With Danger, Windows Mobile can stop being a tweener and go after Research In Motion. And Microsoft’s asp.net architecture is still the easiest way for its legions of developers to build online applications.

When companies are ready to port their data centers into the cloud, Microsoft will make the transition as painless and transparent as possible using Windows Live Storage, SQL Server Data Center Services, and other services with codenames like CloudDB, Horizon, and Live Core that execs are still tight-lipped about.

The developer attack

The front: Open source, web apps and video. The thing Bill’s always done right is focus on developers. He put in functions. He opened up APIs. He showered them with development resources. And it worked. But today, we have Sourceforge for snippets of code. Eclipse gives ActiveVisual Studio a run for its money. We built Web 2.0 with Flash, AJAX, Ruby, Python — the language of the web isn’t .net, and it hurts. When it comes to video, Microsoft’s Silverlight seduces content providers with tracking and ad support, but we’ve already built those things out of Flash ourselves. And Microsoft’s notoriously long release cycle for Longhorn impacted its ability to react to market changes.

The defense: New Lego. Remember old Lego, which only had a few pieces? You had to carefully build the front of a spaceship from thin rectangles and dozens of identical bricks. But new Lego is different. There’s a single piece for the front of the spaceship. And while old-school Lego types cry foul, now pretty much anyone can build a spaceship.

That’s Microsoft. New features in Internet Explorer 8, working in concert with the company’s web servers, will make it easy to drag-and-drop sex appeal into the application without needing much talent. And enterprise developers will embrace it, as they always do, because it’s easy. Things like Feedsync and Sliverlight will make it that way. Even the Popfly site makes anyone who can drag a mouse a coder, performance be damned. By breaking the software into services, there will be less delay between releases, which should fix the Longhorn drought.

How will the battle go?

Mix08 was an upbeat event.  But read between the lines, and it’s clear that the company is bracing for a fight from several sides at once. Don’t write off Microsoft: We were here once before, when Netscape was going to put the company out of business. But Gates issued an edict, the company turned on a dime, and a few years later IE was the dominant web browser.

But you never want to fight a war on multiple fronts, and that’s what Microsoft faces in battles for consumers, enterprises and developers. If it survives, the Microsoft of tomorrow will be a very different company.

Google acquired JotSpot eons ago, so long ago that one almost forgets about the wiki company and its founder, Joe Krause. Apparently Google didn’t let it go to waste. It is now the underpinning of Google Sites, a web-based collaboration software service that is going to be part of the Google Apps and will be available later on Thursday.

It is a simple and easy way to build a web site where you can share information with your team, including files, calendars and presentations. You can put content from other Google products, including YouTube, Google Calendar and Picasa. Google hopes that small business, wide-spread teams, classrooms and even political organizations would use this new offering in tandem with its current Google App offerings.

Google is not the first one to make a collaboration available — 37Signals’ Basecamp, Microsoft ’s Office Live WorkSpace, Zoho and GoPlan come to mind — but it has come up a pretty compelling offering that is going to challenge competitors.

“Creating a team web site has always been too complicated, requiring dedicated hardware and software as well as programming skills,” said Dave Girouard, vice president and general manager of enterprise, Google.

I was pleasantly surprised by new offerings’ ease of use. Sure, some power users are going to be disappointed but I suspect a majority will find its simplicity appealing. Moreover, it is tightly integrated with Google Apps, which would make its adoption easier, just like Google Docs and Google Talk.

I bet like me, no one wants to deal with another wiki. Funny how Google is taking a page out of Microsoft’s playbook, and offering an “integrated suite.”

WebWorkerDaily, which follows collaboration software quite closely had outlined similar approach.

Take GMail, GCal, plus Google Docs & Spreadsheets and you could manage a project reasonably well…If you wanted dashboard or notification-type features, you’d probably have to custom-build them yourself, though, and that’s a serious undertaking.

Looks like Google fixed that problem. My initial enthusiasm aside, I am still withholding final judgement on this product for now. Like most Google apps, the limitations become obvious after one has had a week or two and real-work situations to put the service through, a case in point being the marginal IMAP experience on GMail.

Related Post: An in-depth review of Google Sites over on WebWorkerDaily

Looking back at 2007, we will remember it as a year Google finally grew up and showed its true colors. Sure there was Facebook and all the hoopla around its platform and privacy, but the big story of year was still Google. The Mountain View, Calif.-based company that still gets a majority of its revenues from advertising made moves that would help expand its reach into new markets.

Wireless, Voice and Applications were three areas of major push - and if that meant taking on the telcos, the FCC, Microsoft, Wikipedia and even Facebook, so be it. And along the way it is estimated to add $1.7 billion to its $10 billion or so sales in 2006. No wonder it commands a market capitalization of $217 billion. Here are some of the major developments of a very Google-y 2007.

• January 2007: Crosses $10 billion in sales.
• February 2007: Google Office, ready for business. Microsoft beware.
• March 2007: Announces its 700 MHz spectrum plans, taken on Verizon, AT&T.
• March 2007: Viacom sues Google for $1 Billion.
• April 2007: Buys Doubleclick for $3.1 billion.
• May 2007: Launches Streetside View for Maps.
• June 2007: Buys Grandcentral.
• June 2007: Buys Feedburner
• July 2007: Buys Postini.
• August 2007: CFO Greg Reyes retires.
• August 2007: YouTube launches embedded inline advertising.
• September 2007: GoogleNet is going global
• October 2007: Buys Jaiku
• October 2007: Launches OpenSocial, takes on Facebook
• November 2007: Launches Android, Mobile Platform, taken on Microsoft, Nokia, Others
• November 2007: Announces plans to produce GigaWatt of clean energy.
• December 2007: Launches Knol, takes on Wikipedia

As everyone knows, you get what you pay for. That maxim certainly holds true for Internet infrastructure, especially when it comes to servers. Over the past few years there has been an explosion of low-cost appliance servers – also known as pizza box servers — and they now account for a formidable portion of the Internet infrastructure. And though cheap in price, they are turning out to be power hogs.

“These servers are cheap to buy but consume a lot of energy and their utilization is pretty low,” said Jonathan Koomey, project scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and consulting professor at Stanford University, who recently conducted a study on the power requirements for servers. “The utilization is below 20 percent and we really need to focus on virtualization to get more from these boxes.”

According to his estimates, volume servers, or the low-end devices that include the pizza box servers, consumed over 50.5 billion kilowatt  hours in 2005, up from 19.7 billion kWh in 2000. That number surely must have increased by now. From 1996 through 2006, the sales of volume servers jumped from 1.41 million units to 7.282 million units, according to information collected by International Data Corp., a market research firm.

“Some of these (pizza box servers) throw up a lot of heat and are power hogs,” said Tim Sullivan, Chief Technology Officer of Internap, a data center and CDN provider, during a call with company’s management earlier today. He said that they are asking clients to better utilize the data center space and putting fewer of these pizza boxes in a more efficient manner.

One of the reasons these pizza box servers are inefficient is because they’re being made to do tasks for which they were not built. Back in the late 1990s, the form factor became popular with the large corporations, and there was plenty of space (and power) in the data centers. However, as web infrastructure needs have increased, so has the number of servers. Even tiny startups are beginning to buy 1,000 of these boxes to just stay in business.

As their numbers increase, and the problems mount, it makes me wonder if we’ll soon see the pendulum swing to the “big iron.” Thoughts, anyone?

In some strange, twisted sort of a way, Google’s foray into social content, aka Knols, is a tip of the hat to entities whose results have started to show up really high in the search results — Wikipedia and Mahalo, for example. Mathew Ingram points out this can hurt not only them, but others as well. It is also a sign that Google (GOOG) is finally beginning to show its monopolist claws.

It is also a tactical admission by a company that believed that the machine was more powerful than the “human” that it isn’t the case. First, what are knols? Udi Manber, Google’s VP of Engineering describes knols as …

…a new, free tool that we are calling “knol”, which stands for a unit of knowledge. Our goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it…A knol on a particular topic is meant to be the first thing someone who searches for this topic for the first time will want to read.

He goes on to extoll the virtues of authors, and how they need to be highlighted. This is a smackdown on Wikipedia, where the individual contributions remain part of the collective and are not the focus — and rightfully so. As Nick Carr writes,

For the past year, Chief Wikipedian Jimmy Wales has been doing a lot of trash-talking about taking on Google in the search business. Now Google’s striking back.

Whether it will be successful or not remains to be seen. Now if you think about it, the knol, despite its fancy name, is nothing but a classic move by a quasi-monopolist that wants to ensure it keeps getting the raw material (in this case, content on knols) for free, so that it can keep selling it at a premium. I stopped believing in Google’s “do no evil” ethos a long time ago, so that is why I am worried by comments this like from Manber:

Our job in Search Quality will be to rank the knols appropriately when they appear in Google search results.

Which is to say that they won’t start making knols appear higher in the search results. Maybe it is the jet lag, but I don’t see knols as revolutionary as others are making them out to be. After all, you can set up a blog, make an expert page, maintain it and even put Google Ad Sense to monetize it. So how does this make knols special?

Sure there are APIs that allow knols to be shared with others, and Google maintains that it won’t give special weight to the knols, but who’s to know what they do inside their four walls. Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan, who has the single best post on this subject, is a bit disconcerted by knols, it seems.

Google using its page rank system to its own benefit. Think of it this way: Google’s mysterious Page Rank system is what Internet Explorer was to Microsoft in the late 1990s: a way to control the destiny of others.

(Check out my interview with Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia)