EightBlack.

Well, there goes that opportunity. I don’t know who I am going to bag now.

You see, all those over priced digital agencies who were primarily responsible for those completely irrelevant SWF (Flash Files) are now no longer an easy target. No more lack of total respect by the SEO fraternity.

Those files are now able to be seen by Google (and Yahoo!).

Most SEO practitioners treated flash files with the contempt it deserved. But no more.

Being seen is one thing. Being ranked is entirely another. But at least its a start.

Techcrunch has more here and Adobe’s official line is here.

Bravo.

This is the start of something to be sure. News today in The Australian that Gmail has just won the tender to supply the entire NSW Department of Education with 1.5 million student email accounts.

Apparently, its one of the single largest Gmail deployments ever, and the work is being done by local integrator, SMS.

Email storage increases 170 fold (from 35MB to over 6 Gigabytes). Which is enough for even the most perverted of students.

What is silly though is that students wont be given access to the chat function (GTalk) and teachers wont be ported to Gmail because some IT drone was worried about bandwith costs between the US and Australia.

If they were worried about, why not ask Google to pony up for the money. You can be sure they’d listen, especially if it meant ousting Microsoft from every other state based education department.

The deal is going to save the NSW Government around $24 million.

According to TechCrunch;

The cost savings are substantial. The Outlook/Exchange platform involved a AU$33 million contract and took four years to go live, although it’s unclear why it took so long. The Gmail/Google Apps rollout, which is being completed by subcontractors, will cost just $9.5 million and should be live by the end of 2008.

It will be interesting to see how the students react to contextual based advertising within email, how many continue to use their Hotmail or Yahoo accounts or simply how many kids just don’t give a stuff.

I’m convinced Google will be very keen on the data that they will be able to pull from the deployment.

If you are a parent with young children, you will understand where I’m coming from with this.

Sometimes I walk around the house in my underwear, yelling loudly “It’s good to be the King, It’s good to be the King”.

I want my kids to know who’s in charge.

However, not long after this act of bravery started on my count, my 5-year old daughter came up to me and said in a stern voice, “Daddy, you may be the King, but you’re not the boss”. I looked at her in disdain and gruffly demanded just who is then, if it’s not me.

She says matter of factly,  “Mummy is”.

Sort of a bit like Jerry Yang. He used to be the King at Yahoo!. But he’s no longer the boss.

I wrote a while ago that I honestly thought “the deal” would get done (between Microsoft and Yahoo!). I’d seen Steve Ballmer talk at last years Web 2.0 Expo and as soon as Battelle mentioned the word Google and Search in the one sentence, he started jumping up and down like a 9 year old boy who swallowed 4 and half litres of Ritalin.

Or something like that.

Microsoft desparately wants to win at the search game and thought Yahoo! would have at last, let them get closer to their arch rival, Google.

Anyway, I’ve never been a huge fan of Yahoo! so I sort of really didn’t care either way. I’ve never had a Yahoo email address, rarely use Flickr,  wouldn’t know what Yahoo Groups is/does, and never use Yahoo as my search engine.

And I think Yahoo! are so far behind in the whole area of search marketing, it’s not funny. The only people who have less market share than Yahoo in this space in Australia at least, is Sensis. And they would have better luck selling an STD to someone before they sold a search marketing solution.

But I digress.

I think Jerry Yang’s days are numbered. Carl Icahn is not the sort of person you need circling above and as the Yahoo! stock price heads south, the Board and their major shareholders just might ask Jerry to step aside. He may be the founder, but he may not have a choice.

One thing is clear. Yang hates Microsoft. I don’t reckon he wanted a deal done with the devil at any price.

And Ballmer for once played a game of patience, made his offer, didn’t budge and waited Yahoo! out.

The biggest sign of trouble though has nothing to do with the share price. Nothing to do with Google and Yahoo! getting into bed. And nothing to do with Microsoft.

It’s got to do with the mass exodus of talent leaving Yahoo’s gates. Look, the really smart bastards had already left, and the next calibre of people probably had already been trawling through the Google jobs board.

But when these guys leave, the crack becomes a gaping hole and pretty soon the proverbial damn will burst and there will be no stopping the thing. According to one source, over 50 top executives have left since January 2008, 9 of them since the Microsoft bid collapsed just over a month ago.

You can’t innovate without talent, doesn’t matter how much money the company has. Yang is in it deep now and if there is any hope for Yahoo!, he needs to step aside and take drastic measures to stop the brain drain. Before its too late. And it might already be…

However, if he wants to be like me, and continue to walk around in his underwear in a state of delusion, yelling out “It’s good to be the King” he can go right ahead. It’s just that pretty soon, there’ll be no one left in his Kingdom to preach to.

Which reminds me, I need to ask my wife if I can stay out late tomorrow night…

At least that’s what Mark Cuban thinks.

Except for one thing. Hulu is co-owned by NBC and News Corp, 2 companies with zero heart and zero soul. So when Google comes along and offers them a wad of cash - they’ll have to consider it.

It’s not like there’s a 23 year old at the helm.

They raised $100 million out of the gate, and the management team looks like a poster ad for Harvard University.

Pity that we can’t view the content here in Australia. Hulu’s licensing pact only applies to the USA at present.

Mark Cuban is a smart bastard. His blog post makes sense.

For a video on Mark, here’s the footage of him at Blogworld last year in Vegas. Clearly one of the highlights of the event.

I honestly didn’t think this would happen. Maybe Ballmer is getting far less impatient in his old age. This from the Microsoft website. I still don’t think this is over by a long shot. Because one thing all the pundits have forgotten in the coverage of this news story, is there’s still the issue of a little search company in Mountain View to deal with.

How Yahoo! and Microsoft intend to deal with “search” in the bigger context is still a massive undertaking.

Be interesting to see what happens when the market opens on Monday in the US and what value it places on Yahoo! then. My guess is that after a week of “blood on their hands”, the Yahoo! directors will want to do a deal with just about anyone.

May 3, 2008

Mr. Jerry Yang
CEO and Chief Yahoo
Yahoo! Inc.
701 First Avenue
Sunnyvale, CA 94089

Dear Jerry:
After over three months, we have reached the conclusion of the process regarding a possible combination of Microsoft and Yahoo!.

I first want to convey my personal thanks to you, your management team, and Yahoo!’s Board of Directors for your consideration of our proposal. I appreciate the time and attention all of you have given to this matter, and I especially appreciate the time that you have invested personally. I feel that our discussions this week have been particularly useful, providing me for the first time with real clarity on what is and is not possible.

I am disappointed that Yahoo! has not moved towards accepting our offer. I first called you with our offer on January 31 because I believed that a combination of our two companies would have created real value for our respective shareholders and would have provided consumers, publishers, and advertisers with greater innovation and choice in the marketplace. Our decision to offer a 62 percent premium at that time reflected the strength of these convictions.

In our conversations this week, we conveyed our willingness to raise our offer to $33.00 per share, reflecting again our belief in this collective opportunity. This increase would have added approximately another $5 billion of value to your shareholders, compared to the current value of our initial offer. It also would have reflected a premium of over 70 percent compared to the price at which your stock closed on January 31. Yet it has proven insufficient, as your final position insisted on Microsoft paying yet another $5 billion or more, or at least another $4 per share above our $33.00 offer.

Also, after giving this week’s conversations further thought, it is clear to me that it is not sensible for Microsoft to take our offer directly to your shareholders. This approach would necessarily involve a protracted proxy contest and eventually an exchange offer. Our discussions with you have led us to conclude that, in the interim, you would take steps that would make Yahoo! undesirable as an acquisition for Microsoft.

We regard with particular concern your apparent planning to respond to a “hostile” bid by pursuing a new arrangement that would involve or lead to the outsourcing to Google of key paid Internet search terms offered by Yahoo! today. In our view, such an arrangement with the dominant search provider would make an acquisition of Yahoo! undesirable to us for a number of reasons:

•	First, it would fundamentally undermine Yahoo!’s own strategy and long-term viability by encouraging advertisers to use Google as opposed to your Panama paid search system. This would also fragment your search advertising and display advertising strategies and the ecosystem surrounding them. This would undermine the reliance on your display advertising business to fuel future growth.
•	Given this, it would impair Yahoo’s ability to retain the talented engineers working on advertising systems that are important to our interest in a combination of our companies.
•	In addition, it would raise a host of regulatory and legal problems that no acquirer, including Microsoft, would want to inherit. Among other things, this would consolidate market share with the already-dominant paid search provider in a manner that would reduce competition and choice in the marketplace.
•	This would also effectively enable Google to set the prices for key search terms on both their and your search platforms and, in the process, raise prices charged to advertisers on Yahoo. In addition to whatever resulting legal problems, this seems unwise from a business perspective unless in fact one simply wishes to use this as a vehicle to exit the paid search business in favor of Google.
•	It could foreclose any chance of a combination with any other search provider that is not already relying on Google’s search services.

Accordingly, your apparent plan to pursue such an arrangement in the event of a proxy contest or exchange offer leads me to the firm decision not to pursue such a path. Instead, I hereby formally withdraw Microsoft’s proposal to acquire Yahoo!.

We will move forward and will continue to innovate and grow our business at Microsoft with the talented team we have in place and potentially through strategic transactions with other business partners.

I still believe even today that our offer remains the only alternative put forward that provides your stockholders full and fair value for their shares. By failing to reach an agreement with us, you and your stockholders have left significant value on the table.

But clearly a deal is not to be.

Thank you again for the time we have spent together discussing this.

Sincerely yours,
Steven A. Ballmer
Chief Executive Officer
Microsoft Corporation

Not that any serious website owner should take note of it anymore, but PageRank is one of those “vanity” things. Reassurance to your own self that all your hard work has paid off (if you’re a blogger) or a webmaster.

That little green indicator at the top of your browser (which by the way you have to install) causes more arguments and blog posts in the blogosphere and forums than you’d care to count.

A high PageRank number alone has little to do with traffic, engagement and total content.

It’s also no indication, if you’re an advertiser, that you should pay more on a site with high PageRank.

Having said all that, I smiled just a little this morning when I discovered this humble blog growing by one more peg on Google’s radar.

Means nothing to you. And will mean nothing to me once I’ve had lunch and something alcoholic to drink.

The only numbers we should be looking at are the numbers that our web analytics interface shows us. Period.

Google blew the numbers out of the weeds. Again. There’s a lot of people who are predicting the slow demise of the search giant in the paid click space and who are salivating like Pavlovs dog, waiting for the day that they miss their numbers (even so slightly).

But they’ll have to wait a little longer.

The Mountain View company is on a 2008 revenue trajectory of US$20 billion. Profit is up 30% this quarter alone.

The financial markets may be melting faster than the arctic ice cap, but Google is proving that it’s business model is solid and sustainable.

I’ll let you know what the mood is like when I’m there next week.

This is a good thing. And completed with the 20% time by 3 Googlers. Bravo.

I wish I could write as well as this.

From Avinash Kaushik, the world’s coolest web analytics practitioner. I was fortunate to meet Avinash early last year at Web 2.0. More fortunate that he replied to an email after his presentation. And eternally grateful for the 2 visits to Google and him saying yes to working with us.

Read his post twice. It’s all the brain food you need this week.

And if you’ve not witnessed Avinash’s passion before, there’s video of him throughout this blog. Just search for his name.

The games are about to begin. David Drummond, Google’s most respected legal eagle, fired the first shot across the bow regarding the hostile takeover offer for Yahoo! by the software giant, Microsoft.

Microsoft are well versed in anti-trust laws. They’ve been battling it out in Europe and the US for years now. And they are hardly to be intimidated by momentum in the blogosphere or mainstream press. Nor will they care what Drummond has to say.

The lawyers and Public Relations folks must be salivating like Pavlovs dog right about now. They will be the clear winners. The consumer - well, I’m not too sure.

I still think the deal will get done, if and its a big if, the regulators allow it.

About 5 years ago, we discovered Google AdWords. More importantly, we met Perry Marshall, a guy who I still regard as the world’s leading authority in the pay per click space. He’s got an interesting take on the Yahoo! and Microsoft gig. There’s a link at the very bottom of this post to a 60 minute interview with another highly respected web authority - Ken McCarthy. And I’ve copied an extract of an email Perry sent to his list over the weekend. The email is worth a read. And the audio is true content. Have a listen. All the details are right below.

Unless you’ve been hiding in a cave, you know that Microsoft now intends to acquire Yahoo so together they can make up the ground they’ve lost against Google.

Let me be very clear that even though my books, coaching programs, etc. are about Google AdWords, nobody would be happier than me for the world to have a really good alternative to Google AdWords for buying clicks. I’m ALL for competition. I would LOVE for Yahoo Search Marketing to be a formidable opponent to Google. (It’s useful, but I sure wouldn’t pretend it’s formidable at this point.)

I would LOVE for MSN AdCenter to be super-cool and powerful, but… alas, it’s not. It’s anemic. And I’m being kind.

Yes, I would love for Microsoft and Yahoo together to be able to kick Google’s butt. Nothing is better for you and me than serious competition for our ad dollars.

Unfortunately…. In My Humble Opinion, expecting Microsoft and Yahoo to be better than Google by getting together is like pairing up two people each with an IQ of 75 and putting them in a spelling bee and hoping that together they’re a 150 genius.

NOT. They’ll just argue with each other about how to mis-spell everything.

For the record, I do hope I’m wrong.

So anyway… how did Google beat Yahoo at its own game? After all, Overture (the former company that was acquired by Yahoo) had a 3-4 year start on Google. At one time they were king. Now they’re scrambling to hang onto a distant 2nd place.

Ken McCarthy and I talk about that very question on this MP3. I describe what it was that pulled Google into the lead, and more importantly, how YOU use exactly the same principles to dominate in YOUR market:

Perry Marshall Interview