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What Netscape’s Founder Thinks About the New Google Browser
Marc Andreessen, whose first startup, Netscape Communications, introduced the consumer web to millions thanks to its Netscape browser, seems to be suitably impressed by Google’s recently released Chrome browser. He waxed eloquent about Chrome during an onstage conversation with Portfolio magazine contributing editor Kevin Maney at The Churchill Club in Palo Alto, Calif. “Any desktop application that has not been implemented in the browser is now going to be implemented in the browser,” Andreessen said. It was an idea he had espoused over a decade ago.
Blown away by the speed of the browser, and its radical and innovative JavaScript engine, Andreessen called the launch of Chrome an “extraordinary event.” He said that it is going to make Firefox and Internet Explorer compete actively with Chrome and that it would ultimately boost browsers as a whole. Mozilla CEO John Lilly had shared similar sentiments in an interview earlier this week.
“Microsoft can build good products when they want to,” he said. The barons of Redmond released a version of Internet Explorer that was superior to a bloated version of Netscape and gave it away for free, driving a stake through Netscape’s heart. That’s ancient history, anyway. Andreessen thinks that IE and Firefox will have to accelerate their plans and introduce new technologies. He thinks that all this is going to boost the performance of JavaScript. Giving into nostalgia for a minute, he pointed out that it was 10 feet away from his desk at Netscape that JavaScript first got going. He said.
More than a decade later it is everywhere. “If JavaScript gets any faster, then developers will question if they should develop in Flash or (Microsoft’s) Silverlight (technologies),”
“Super interactive browser that sits atop a super-fast connection…now interesting things will happen over the next 5-10 years,” he said. While he talked at length about Facebook, Twitter, Qik and Ning, it was his comments about the Chrome browser that were quite interesting.
Why? Because back in the day he was one of the first few people to talk about the browser as an operating environment. I had bought into the concept then, and I buy into it now. With always-on connections feeding networked devices and mobile phones, the browser-as-an-operating-environment is close to becoming a reality.
During the Q&A session, in response to a question, Andreessen said the share of Google’s browser market share depends on the company’s ability to fully productize the browser and then distribute it.
P.S.: I tried to take notes as fast as I could, but since Marc speaks too fast I apologize if some of the quotes might be wee bit mangled.
GigaOM Interview: Michael Dell, CEO & Founder of Dell Inc.
Last week, at the Fortune Brainstorm: Tech Conference in Half Moon Bay, Calif., I caught up with Michael Dell, founder and chief executive officer of Dell Inc., the Round Rock, Texas-based computer hardware maker. He’s been trying to get Dell’s mojo back for over a year now, and in the past three months, things have started to come together, with sales, profits and the company’s stock price beginning to move in the right direction.
We had a wide-ranging conversation, one that covered everything from cloud computing to the likelihood of Dell entering the smartphone business to the advantages of being a founder. Below are edited excerpts from my chat with the eighth richest man in the U.S., who is as humble today as the day he started selling computers from his college dorm room.
On cloud computing
Om Malik: Will Dell ever start offering its own cloud services?
Michael Dell: Today, we sell to the guys who make clouds. We actually already have some services that we provide; you can think of them as software-as-a-service. For example, for managing your infrastructure, we purchased a number of companies recently like Everdream that are all services provided online. We’ve got a huge business in managing the computing infrastructure for large companies.
Om: What do you do as a company to become a leader in (cloud) client computers?
Dell: For the last eight years, here in the U.S., we’ve sold more computers than any company in the world. In fact, last quarter our lead kind of widened relative to the No. 2 company. Mobile Internet devices and smartphones are all part of our mobile computer business. Our focus is on the bull’s-eye of the volume, which today is notebooks, computers and laptops.
The interesting question is these “Internet-in-the-pocket” kind of things. Do those replace the notebook, or are they a compliment to the notebook? That is the kind of threshold question one would think about as you explore this.
Om: It is actually a complimentary device. But I think the bigger opportunity is in buying those devices because they can be replaced every six months.
Dell: No question, this is a large and significant opportunity and it’s one — I think you will see Dell move in that direction. But I think it will be sequenced in the right order relative to all the opportunities we have.
Om: What do you think is the biggest opportunity for Dell?
Dell: We have identified five big opportunities. When I say big, I’m talking about $5-$10 billion dollars each in terms of scale opportunities. They are the consumer business, mobile computers, emerging countries, enterprise, and small/medium business. We [have] reorganized the company around these key priorities.
On smartphones
Om: Any plans for mobile phones or smartphones?
Dell: We are certainly looking at the whole smartphone category, but I wouldn’t expect anything anytime soon.
Om: With the emergence of Google’s Android, and with Symbian OS and Microsoft Mobile already on the market, do you think that makes it easier for Dell to get into the phone business?
Dell: What you’ve got [are] industry-standard platforms upon which applications are being built and ecosystems are being created, and that kind of building-block architecture gives us all sorts of opportunities.
Om: You can be a big game-changer in this market, right? You can decide to work with Android or Symbian. Is there a desire on your part to work with one over the other?
Dell: We’re not ready to publicly disclose our plans there…we’re kind of working on that.
On being a founder
Om: From your perspective as a founder, what makes a founder/CEO different than a professional CEO?
Dell: The founder has special permission to make changes at a company. There have been two or three times within the history of the company where we’ve made some pretty dramatic changes; the last year and a half has been a good example of that. When I told our company that the direct model has been a great revolution for the industry but it’s not a religion, that was actually a pretty big shock to a lot of our people. Some of them thought it was a religion.
I think as a founder you get special permission to call into question things from the past, and it is up to you to figure out how to do that.
Om: So it’s almost like a political job in that sense.
Dell: I think there’s a lot of equity and trust that gets built up in the company over time. And when we’ve laid out the priorities in the organization — if we’ve done a good job and people see the results and they can see how their efforts apply to their success, and how they can realize their own dreams at the company — then they kind of say, “These guys know what they’re doing.”
On the future
Om: My impression has always been that your biggest competitive advantage was your supply chain; you fine-tuned it to such a level that others couldn’t compete. That has actually evolved over a period of time because others have started to think like the “Dell” way. What is the next competitive advantage going forward?
Dell: I think it’s true that we have had and have a supply-chain advantage. If you look at, for example, return on equity, you’ll see that our return on equity or vested capital [has been] massively higher than our competitors and still is today.
That advantage is very much intact in terms of the capital efficiency of the business. But I think that is really only part of the story. What informs that advantage is the connection we have with customers and the information that customers convey to us in the process. By knowing exactly what customers want and being able to build that and provide products and services tailored to customers’ needs and being able to personalize products — that creates significant advantage and significant growth possibilities for us.
Photo Courtesy of Dell Inc.
Nails on a Chalkboard: The Google Chat Notification Sound
There’s a scene in the movie “Dumb and Dumber” in which Jim Carrey asks, “Do you want to hear the most annoying sound in the world?” And then he screeches at the top of his lungs. If that movie was made today you could easily substitute Carrey’s screaming for the notification sound Google Chat makes.
You are feverishly working on deadline, concentrating to craft the perfect sent-
Dunk!…
-ence, when that noise cuts through your mind as your-
Dunk!…
mental train goes careening off its rails.
DUNK!DUNK!DUNK!
Arrrgh. Who is it, and what the @*&#$ do you want?!
Om’s talked about Gmail sucking, but this is a bigger threat to productivity, since at some point it will drive me insane and I’ll take everyone with me.
Does it have to be such an unpleasant, angry, sound? Especially since it repeats the noise until you switch windows and read the damn message? A jackhammer would be less obnoxious. And the only option in the settings menu is to turn the sound off, which really isn’t helpful when someone is trying to urgently reach you.
Why not a few options, Google? I don’t need the sound of puppies making rainbows or bunny rabbits blowing kisses, but there has to be a less harsh noise than the one you dumped into such an important communication tool for the modern worker. Heck, you could even slip in the biddy-biddy sound from 411-GOOG.
DUNK!
Does Facebook’s Overseas Growth Matter?
Earlier this month, I shared with you my post that called for a big wake-up call for Social Networking sector, thanks to the presence of too many me-too players at a time when recent traffic trends are showing signs of hitting a plateau. Hitwise recently reported that in the US, MySpace and Facebook ranked 1st and 2nd had 95% and 93% repeat visitors for the month.
The May 2008 traffic data from comScore furthers that argument. Another interesting finding of the May 2008 data – Facebook is doing much better than MySpace in the overseas markets.
Nevertheless, of late, I have stopped taking traffic on face value, and instead almost always juxtapose it to how much money you make off those page views. (Dave McClure recently chastised me for thinking too much in the short term.)
Matt Brezina, co-founder of Xobni earlier pointed out that Facebook will take in $265 million and MySpace will bring in $755 million in 2008. So unless the overseas (and overall page view) growth translate into real big dollars, our friends at Facebook (and MySpace) have problems. Experts believe that the answer is in better relevance in display advertising – still the dominant form of advertising on the social networks.
Facebook vs Others
The traffic trends have to be troubling for for geographic hits such as Orkut and Friendster. The overseas growth of Facebook also calls into question the veracity of the decision by AOL to pay $850 million for Bebo. Some data crunching by Andrew Chen (using the newly announced Google Trends) shows that Facebook is making big headway in markets such as UK, France, China, and India. Orkut is very popular in India, while as the map shows Bebo is big in UK and other European countries.
I think it is these guys who need to worry the most with Facebook’s march & MySpace’s rear guard action. I suspect, if Facebook continues to grow, MySpace could opt for buying market share.
But if you take a larger view, Chen’s conclusion, that “Social networks have weaker network effects than previously speculated,” is quite prescient. As someone once noted, social networks are like night clubs – there is always a cooler, hipper, funkier joint being planned by someone.
Over past few years, generally described as the golden years of social networking have led to the sector’s giants resting on their laurels. The fundamental nature (and utility) of social networks hasn’t really changed. The platform-ization of social networks has led to the rise of social apps that are best described as time wasters. You can be fascinated by vampire bites and what not but in the end, there is a finite amount of time you can waste.
In other words, Social Networks need to find new purposes for people to come back every day and be loyal. I had argued in my previous post that the world of social networks is going to be divided into two – the big players (MySpace, Facebook) and niche players (Dogster, Dopplr etc.)
In a recent chat, Ning CEO Gina Bianchini pointed out that they are adding 2000 new niche social networks every day and are now upto 315,000 networks. The niche is allowing the company to get even good non-optimized, straight-up average eCPMs from AdSense. She pointed out that they are about 3 to 4 times better than the average for general one-size-fits-all social networks. “This is because the social networks on Ning are organized around well-defined topics and interests – skiing, smart cars, diabetes, etc. As a result, contextual advertising works more effectively for Ning than it does for other general social networks,” she said.
Photo Courtesy of comScore via C/Net News.com’s The Social.
Exclusive: U.S. Online Video Startups Raised $461M in 2007
Profits may not have arrived for online video, but venture capitalists are still happy to pick up the bill. More and more U.S.-based, venture-backed online video companies are attracting more and more financing each year, according to Dow Jones VentureSource. Some $460.5 million was invested in such startups in 2007, up from $266.9 million in 2006. And already, in the first quarter of 2008, another $217.3 million rained down on the category. NewTeeVee has the exclusive.
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Pizza.com auction closes at $2.6 million
On Wednesday we mentioned that pizza.com was up for auction. With the bids finally in Chris Clark, who registered the domain 14 years ago, has turned $20 a year in renewal payments into millions of dollars.
Can You Hear Me Now? Not So Well In SF, LA & NY
If you are a resident of one of the major US metros - Los Angeles, New York, or San Francisco - then there is a good chance you have a love-hate relationship with your mobile carrier. You love your phone, when on rare occasions the calls don’t drop off. And rest of the time you experience mobile rage.
Apparently, there are some places in the US where the phone experience is actually pretty good. The Nielsen Company’s Nielsen Mobile service has released a report that reveals the Top 10 Cities with best voice coverage and wireless data connections. They are not necessarily the same. We put it in a nice handy map for quick referral. No NY, SF, and LA don’t make the list.
Cities with top ten voice networks averaged a 99.2% successful call rate; on average, 0.3% of all calls in these cities were dropped. Among the cities with top ranked 3G data networks, the average download speed for a 4 megabyte (MB) file was 727 kbps—an increase of more than 100 kbps over the top market average measured during the second half of 2006. Nielsen defines a “successful call” as one established and maintained for at least two minutes.
In 2008 when industry is espousing a wireless broadband future, completing and maintaining a phone call for at least 2-minutes is seen as an achievement.. go figure!
Dog Is Da DJ
Swedish broadband service provider, Tele2 has come up with this fantastic promotion featuring a Beatboxing Bassel Hound.
The connection to broadband seems tenuous but what the hell, it is a nice way to waste a few minutes, especially on this April Fool’s Day, when most of the jokes/pranks seem to quite lame. This campaign is in Swedish, so I don’t know what it really says, but it shows that non-US phone companies have a sense of humor. [via]
Here Comes Trouble: A Social Directory
The declining relevance of telephone directories erased 95 percent of publisher RH Donnelley’s market capitalization over the last 12 months. Although Google’s free 1-800-GOOG-411 service may attract some share of the directory assistance business, the crux of the problem lies with the diminished standing of wired telephones in an increasingly crowded communications landscape. The demise of paper directories does not, however, mean there exists a clear alternative to accommodate the growing list of communication coordinates most people juggle. A “social directory” created by merging the telephone directory with the social networking model may provide a way forward.
Given the open-ended nature of the information that gets indexed, search engines remain poorly suited to the task of finding contact information. Success depends on a cleverly structured query; search engines do not, after all, distinguish contact information from other types of information. But while a directory with a relatively finite and narrow data set (e.g. contact information) would greatly increase the probability of success, the process of creating directories still awaits an Internet upgrade.
The standard model for directories fails with respect to mobile phones, email addresses and instant messaging screen names. Posting the Yellow Pages online retains the same city and state search limitations of the paper directories, and the infrequent publishing cycle of directories becomes unworkable at the current pace with which communication coordinates get added and subtracted. Further, the growth in communication options makes it impractical to rely on a single service provider directory. What makes much more sense in our Internet-heavy world is a user-generated directory in which individuals own and update their own listing.
The lack of a directory for mobile phone numbers traces to the fear of unwanted calls. A directory that supports authentication along the lines of social networks solves this problem. Keeping your number secret and employing Caller ID are poor substitutes for actually controlling who can call you. The social directory could implement an invite authentication process like any other social network. People already include some contact information in their social network profiles, but a purpose-built social directory could offer additional communication functionality.
The social directory represents a far more elegant solution than that of spamming friends with requests to update contact information through services like Plaxo. The social directory could make a social circle accessible via clickable links while hiding the actual contact information. Rather than giving out a telephone number or email address to a new acquaintance, users of a social directory would associate their listing with keywords (such as “plumber” or “dog lover”).
As the number of communication options increases, so does the burden of managing contact information, yet Internet-enabled directory options remain lacking. Google’s 60 percent share of Internet searches gives the company both gatekeeper status in the information Internet — not to mention a rich market capitalization. However, Google’s revenue represents less than a third of what the declining telephone directories generate in the U.S. alone. Riches await the infocom company that achieves gatekeeper status for the Internet’s communications applications.
Why the GPS Party Is About to End
SiRF Technology (SIRF), a San Jose, Calif.-based maker of GPS chips, this morning said it was cutting jobs and trying to restructure its business due to softening consumer demand. Already the worst performing tech stock for the year, shares of SiRF nosedived in early trading this morning.
“SiRF experienced greater-than-expected softness in product demand from its customers, especially in the PND, or Personal Navigation Devices market,” the company said in a press release.
SiRF is the canary in the GPS coal mine. In other words, the GPS device market has hit the skids and we should expect more bad news, and more dominoes to tumble. Why? Look at SiRF’s customers: Tom Tom, Magellan, NAVIGON, Sony and European white-label GPS maker, Binatone. If the macroeconomic trends are putting a damper on SiRF and its chip-buying posse, it isn’t hard to extrapolate and see trouble for Garmin as well.
Looking further out onto the horizon, I think the standalone GPS device market is going to get cannibalized by mobile phones, which are getting increasingly sophisticated when it comes to personal navigation functionality. GPS devices were among the hottest-selling consumer items this past holiday season, with sales up 214 percent and revenues up 488 percent, respectively, year-over-year.
FCC Gives Apartment Dwellers Freedom To Choose Their Phone Company
This is one decision I can totally applaud– FCC is banning exclusive phone deals for apartments. In other words, you can pick whatever phone company you want and not be restricted to the “agreements” building owners have with phone companies. I think for once FCC has taken a consumer-first decision. Housing and real estate groups are bitching and moaning… of course they would. What would be great if FCC extends this to broadband as well. For instance, I would love to buy my broadband from Ethernet-based service provider, WebPass and not the two current choices of Comcast and the phone company. [Fixed the bad Web Pass URL. Sorry folks]
Indian Cell Population: 246 Million and Counting
The Indian cell-phone boom isn’t showing any signs of slowing down. Indian mobile operators are adding around 8 million new subscribers a month; February’s tally of 8.46 million brings the total to 246 million, making the country second only to China. Sure the ARPUs are low compared to those in the West, but I find it amazing how quickly the market has grown. I remember going there in 2004 and being amazed by the mobile frenzy. At the time, there were 34 million subscribers and hopes of hitting the 100 million-subscriber mark. They are clearly way past that. I wonder, how long can this growth continue? What is the natural limit to the market? Any theories, people? [via Unstrung]
FolderShare vs. Dropbox
Earlier this week Om wrote about Dropbox, which he liked so much that we at GigaOM are trying it out for our file-sharing and backup needs. Also this week, FolderShare, another remote file access program, launched its first version since being acquired by Microsoft two-and-half years ago. So I decided to try them out, too.
After playing around with both, I’m torn. The essential differences between the two stem from the fact that Dropbox is all about sending your data to the cloud and accessing it there, whereas FolderShare links two computers that are already online. So for remote access of your files, FolderShare is the clear winner, while Dropbox takes the cake for backup and collaborative work.
I used both programs to link my MacBook with my ancient Toshiba laptop, which runs Windows XP. I’m using Firefox as my browser, and it was nice to see that Microsoft’s FolderShare program respected that and didn’t seek to open in Explorer instead. Both took just a few minutes to install and were easy to get running. Dropbox didn’t install cleanly into the applications portion of my Mac’s hard drive, but I moved it over.
With the install over, it was time to play. I created a shared folder in Dropbox and had the option of either saving files into my Dropbox located on the desktop or going to the Dropbox web site and uploading them. This feature would be nice if I were working on some else’s computer and didn’t want to install the Dropbox client. Could you use this to upload proprietary corporate data even if it was protected from transfer to a USB drive?
To access a shared folder, you send out invites. With Dropbox currently in private beta, it’s a nice way to spread your Dropbox love to friends who might appreciate the site. Another fun things about Dropbox is that you can share your photos with non-Dropbox members via a URL, but that will show all the photos in your Dropbox photo file, so be careful who sees it.
Frankly, because I don’t collaborate with anyone using offline files like Word or Excel, and work from the same laptop all the time, I’m not sure how useful I find Dropbox. FolderShare, on the other hand, is appealing to me in the way it lets me access the random files I have stored on my personal laptop, such as contact data from Outlook and notes taken on my personal PC. I can also use it to grab photos and music fairly easily, although I do wish I could see thumbnails for my images in the display. That would require too much information to be stored on the Microsoft servers, though.
Another caveat is that for FolderShare to work, both computers have to be online. So hibernating computers need to be awakened from their slumber. Bottom line, you could use FolderShare for easy access to your files on various computers and Dropbox for backup and collaborative work. As a word of caution, both services were running pretty slowly while I was playing around with them.
