Microsoft went public in 1986. Less than a decade later, the company found itself on the wrong end of a US Justice Department consent decree forbidding it to bundle new products with Windows. Undaunted, the company went on to plough $300m into a mind-bogglingly ambitious marketing campaign for Windows 95. Microsoft’s competitive mantra — embrace, [...]
Web-linked touchscreen tablet that repurposes print content unveiled by SkiffIt is thinner than a CD case and is made of a flexible sheet of stainless steel foil that won’t shatter if you drop it. Yet the Skiff Reader, a touchscreen device unveiled las…
In the wake of the dot.com bust, against the backdrop of continuing declines in most major advertising markets, search and online display hauled the digital economy out of recession. During the next four years, digital advertising rose from less than 2 per cent of UK ad spend to over 10 per cent. Today, you could [...]
You can take the boy out of Wall Street, but you can’t take Wall Street out of the boy. Hence the sight of disgraced financial analyst Henry Blodget, founder of Silicon Alley Insider, doing what comes naturally. Blodget spent much of last year talking down online ad markets. Credit to him: he was ahead of [...]
Jerry Yang, the co-founder of Yahoo, calls APT the “next generation of advertising”. Slightly awkwardly, he adds on his blog that APT would be to 2009 “what radio was to 1924, TV to 1947, color TV to 1965, and the Internet to 1993″. You get the idea. Actually, APT is intended as a market, an [...]
How vulnerable is digital advertising? In the US, ValueClick — the second-largest online ad network in the country — yesterday announced weak earnings and cut its financial forecasts. Logically enough, the company’s boss told investors that advertisers are becoming “increasingly performance-oriented”. In other words, they’re less interested in branding, more interested in lead generation. Theoretically, [...]
Eric Schmidt, the chief executive of Google, is not what you’d call a loose cannon. This is a man who, in previous incarnations, became an arch-enemy of Microsoft’s expanding monopoly during the 1990s. Now, at the top of a company surrounded by anti-monopoly moaning, the poacher has become a gamekeeper. It’s been fascinating to watch [...]
If we’re seeing the beginnings of a proper debate about Google’s dominance (monopoly?) in the UK, something similar seems to be happening in the US. There, Michael Arrington, the Web 2.0 guru who runs TechCrunch, spent part of his Sunday penning a lengthy article entitled “The Importance Of A Competitive Search Market”. In some respects, [...]
Helen Alexander, chief executive of The Economist Group, has been a low profile but stunningly successful boss. When she took the top job 11 years ago, the Economist sold 264,000 copies. It now sells more than 1.3m worldwide. Now, however, Alexander is going to her great reward: a job as adviser to Bain Capital, the [...]