Gary Robinson's Rants

Microsoft adding blogging

A Microsoft Research project called 'Wallop' has weblogging and document-sharing features and will be integrated into the next-generation Microsoft OS. [SlashDot]

This will obviously detract from the advantage accrued by Google in its acquisition of Blogger. $15 Billion valuation for Google? No, I don't think so.

Google and MS, sitting in a tree, NOT

There have been headlines in the last 24 hours about Microsoft's having approached Google about a possible takeover.

Of course. For Microsoft, it's a simple build-vs.-buy decision. If they could buy Google for the right price, that would be cheaper and easier than duplicating Google and pulling a PointCast on them, which will probably take a few years.

For the wrong price, they are better off building their own high-performing search engine.

The right price from Microsoft's point of view is unlikely to be the $15 billion Google apparently expects to be valued at after an IPO.

But it costs MS little to make an offer, so they did. And Google's VC investors, who see more money coming to them from an IPO than from an MS takeover, did not agree to the lesser price MS could and should offer, since they can simply take the money and run immediately after the IPO.

So, it made perfect sense for MS to give it a shot, and it makes perfect sense that nothing came of it.

The Economist gets it about Google

For Google to stay permanently ahead of other search-engine technologies is almost impossible, since it takes so little—only a bright idea by another set of geeks—to lose the lead. In contrast to a portal such as Yahoo!, which also offers customers free e-mail and other services, a pure search engine is always but a click away from losing users. [Economist]

This is the first time I've seen someone besides me sound clear warning bells about Google's future. The Economist totally gets it. Their article is highly recommended.

Anybody who buys into Google at a valuation of $15 billion is a fool, IMHO. But there are plenty of fools out there, and the VC's who invested in Google are likely to do exceedingly well.

Warning: The rest of this post is nothing but me pontificating about an abstract philosophical point. Don't hold it against me if you read it and find you have no interest -- if you don't want to read someone's pontifications about abstract philosophical points, don't! :)

When I make assertions such as my negative ones about the value of Google stock, I try to keep one thing in mind. It's human nature to make predictions and then tie one's ego to being right. But in reality, to win you don't have to be right all the time, and no one is -- you just have to be right more often than the other guy. That means knowing, all along the way, that you may be wrong, so that you are open to refining or even changing your opinion as more information arrives. Ironically, whose egos are too invested in being right are endeavoring under a handicap that will tend to make them wrong more often than if they were not so invested.

That process is far more interesting to me than any individual question of being right on any particular issue.

The challenge is in making the effort to try to come up with a correct analysis, without that history of effort causing me to be ego-invested in my conclusion. Any salesperson knows that once a potential customer has invested his time in hearing about a product, he's more likely to buy, because unconsciously he doesn't want that time to have been wasted. I think something very analogous happens with those who spend significant amounts of time trying to predict the future, with the result that their egos are invested in their predictions even if they never make them public. And if they do make them public, it's a double-whammy because they don't want to be seen as wrong.

So -- back to Google. To be more rigorous, I'll just say that there is a probability distribution of possible outcomes for Google. One class of possible outcomes involves them performing so brilliantly that they will find ways to maintain their lead despite the challenges they face. That is definitely a class of possible outcomes, particularly after an IPO which makes huge amounts of cash available to them. (You'd also be able to do cool things with billions of dollars, or even hundreds of millions of dollars, in your pocket -- at least I hope so.) So it would be moronic to flatly say that Google will not maintain their IPO valuation.

However, I think there is a discrepancy between the likelihood of that outcome, and the price people are expected to pay in an IPO, that makes it unwise -- very unwise -- to invest at that kind of valuation.

Man Arrested in Australia Over Nigerian E-mail Scam

"A 39 year old Sydney man has been arrested over the Nigerian Scam. Simultanious raids were conducted in two homes by police, who siezed computers and documents. Over the last 6 months, Australian police have tracked about 1.5 million dollars. The man faces Dubbo Local court today, charged with 17 offenses." [SlashDot]

Now that's the kind of news I like to read first thing in the morning. ;) Nigerian scams can be expressed in enough different ways that they have a higher false negative rate than most kinds of spam. So I have a particular dislike for them. The good news is that they are clearly criminal activity even without anti-spam laws, so their producers can be caught and locked up.

Best computer art yet?

Without a doubt, this is the most interesting "computer art" I have yet encountered. Thanks to Justin Mason for pointing it out. The artist is Jason Salavon.

Examples:

27 cover versions of Paul McCartney's Yesterday. Everything from James Taylor to the Warsaw National Philharmonic, in 4 minutes and 42 seconds.

Every Playboy centerfold, averaged together by decade.

Here's the whole gallery.

I find much of it strangely beautiful.

Try the gender genie

A new computer program can tell whether a book was written by a man or a woman. The simple scan of key words and syntax is around 80% accurate on both fiction and non-fiction.

The program's success seems to confirm the stereotypical perception of differences in male and female language use. Crudely put, men talk more about objects, and women more about relationships.

Female writers use more pronouns (I, you, she, their, myself), say the program's developers, Moshe Koppel of Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan, Israel, and colleagues. Males prefer words that identify or determine nouns (a, the, that) and words that quantify them (one, two, more).[Nature; hat tip to Andrew Sullivan]

You can test a simplified version of the algorithm on your own prose here. It worked for me.

Today's solar flare

Smaller than yesterday's, but still huge. Great pic at space.com.

The W3C is asking the PTO to re-examine the Eolas patent. [NYTimes]

This is a process by which a patent can be revoked as not having been properly granted in the first place.

Security reason to get Panther

According to [an] advisory, some applications are installed on Mac OS X systems with insecure file permissions, so "many of the files and directories that compose various applications are globally writable." The problem with that, according to @Stake, is it allows attackers with limited access to the system to replace program files with files of their choice, thus obtaining "additional privileges from unsuspecting users who may run the replaced version of the binary (file)."

"These Trojan binaries would escalate the privileges of the attacker to the privileges of the unsuspecting user who ran them," the advisory explains.[News.com]

Panther is reportedly not vulnerable to this issue.

Ha! Google is indeed trying to get into the act

Google is in talks with several publishers to build a service that would allow Web surfers to search the full text of books online, according to a report this week from Publishers Weekly's online site. Google spokesman David Krane declined to comment. But such a service would likely allow people to query a database for keywords and then view exerpts from books where those keywords appear, according to the report. So far, Google has made agreements that give it the ability to scan as many as 60,000 titles, the report said. [News.com]

I need to reconsider what I said before. Amazon has a clear advantage at doing this kind of thing. The fact that viewers of books on Amazon can immediately buy them with one click gives publishers powerful inventive to making book content available to Amazon. Google, at least on its own, cannot do that, and therefore publishers have less incentive to make such deals with Google as with Amazon. That may be the reason why Google currently has permission for 60,000 books while Amazon currently has permission for 120,000. If that trend continues, Amazon will always have the better book search service.

Would it make sense for Amazon to enable one-click shopping through Amazon on the Google site for the currently-viewed book? Then, from the perspective of publishers, Google would be as good as Amazon, and Amazon would arguably get more sales because they would draw in Google users. On the other hand, Amazon has reason to want Amazon to be the world's first choice for searching though books, and that would mean not doing such a deal with Google.

Barnes and Noble could do such a deal with Google, but it would possibly violate two of Amazon's patents.

This will be an interesting competition to watch.