Cognition » advertising

Why Microsoft is Evil (and Google is Not)

admin — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 06:40:12 +0000

Last time I checked, Google had annual revenues of about $20B.
Microsoft has annual revenues of about $60B.

Google knows everything about me – and they’ve shown a few times that they’re not afraid to use it. (Ask Chris Campbell about the time Google emailed us when we were working on Netscape 8.)

Microsoft knows very little about me.

As a developer of software, I respect and emulate their business model – they write software, and then they sell it to people. It’s old-fashioned, but it works. And it’s straightforward.

And Google? Google, who makes a living by pimping out a spot in my attention span; Google, who has the moral backbone of a Tadpole – is considered to be the good guy.

Why?

I’m a geek. If you’re reading my blog, you’re probably a geek as well. And one of the defining characteristics of geeks, is that we like to think we’re different from “ordinary” people. One of the places we’re the MOST likely to feel special, is in our belief that advertising doesn’t affect us.

In the strange and emerging economies of ‘freemium‘ business models, commercial open source software, and crowdsourced marketplaces – in a world so backwards we’re giving money away to the producers of the most inefficient vehicles on the planet, while far away our siblings, children and cousins are dying for the oil needed to run those vehicles – well, any company that makes a fortune off of the weaknesses of the gullible Average Joe, is okay in our book. Our digital ‘Robin Hood’ to the Sheriff of Rampant Consumerism.

Except that it’s folly.

Geeks are no more immune to advertising than anyone else. Less, really. Ever heard of Gizmodo? Engadget? Apple Computer?

The long term, nearly-recession-proof success of advertising-based business models simply serves to confirm a simple truth – one that helps to explain (should you wonder) how we’ve ended up in this mess:

People are sheep.

Even geeks.

PS – Please buy something from Amazon for Valentines Days (using my referral code.) Ktnxbye.

Seth’s Blog: …and your clicks for free (the new ebook)

admin — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 07:10:24 +0000

I’m struggling right now to come up with the ultimate unified theory of business, that somehow captures the wisdom of Seth Godin, Guy Kawasaki, Robert Allen, and Christopher Alexander. (It’s no surprise that you probably know either one, or two, of those names, but unlikely three and very unlikely all four – but it’s a toss-up which ones.)

Maybe Seth’s latest thoughts will help to clarify things:

Seth’s Blog: …and your clicks for free (the new ebook)

The real challenge is not unifying the theories and advice of those separate authors, but simply the fact that their ideas aren’t even INTERNALLY consistent. Should I “Don’t worry, be crappy” while bootstrapping (read: starving) myself into a niche? Alright: name three of the biggest internet businesses ever. Are eBay, Amazon, Yahoo, or Google on that list? What sort of niche do you think they went for?

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Tags: sethgodin, guy kawasaki, blog marketing, bootstrapping

A quick idea for Google

admin — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 19:16:00 +0000

I have categorically refused to build a web business based on advertising revenue. Eventually I had to ask myself “why”, and this is what I came up with – I find advertising repugnant, EXCEPT when it’s about something I want.

A little light went off in my head – I know how to hack google adsense to display ads based on a given keyword. I know how to use greasemonkey to edit the pages I’m browsing. And I know how to get my recent search history out of google. Why not combine these – a greasemonkey script that rewrites google adsense to be ads for products matching my recent search history? It could even be customized with a keyword list of my own devising.

I can’t imagine google would object – the ads will still be there, they’ll just be better.

Thoughts?