Month: November 2009

google killer

~ ginsu ~ 3 Comments

By my own admission, I’ve become a complete hack, for using the term [blank]-killer.  A lot of people are asking whether News Corp would really block its content from Google’s index, and make a deal with Microsoft for exclusive search access.  And if they did, and others followed, would this represent a serious threat to Google?

The tech-über-alles crowd would have you believe that “de-indexing” from Google would be suicide for any publisher.  The assertion there is that Google drives the majority of web traffic, so if you’re not findable through Google, you might as well not be on the Internet.

But that assertion flies in the face of another observation from the technoscenti – social media like Facebook and Twitter are becoming increasingly important as traffic drivers (though this importance may be overhyped).  We may be heading towards a future where the links are shared through social media are more valuable than search links.

More importantly, and against the prevailing wisdom in some circles, content still matters.  People use media services because of the content on it.  Other factors are important too:  the features must be complete, the UI has to be easy, the price has to be right, yadda yadda yadda.  But would any of those other factors make up for terrible content?  No, content is, if no longer king, still the jewel in the crown.

If Bing is able to be the exclusive search partner for the right content, Google is dead.  Of course, what’s “right” can vary quite a lot from person to person.  For me, it’s as simple as two publications:  If the New York Times and Wikipedia are de-indexed from Google, I’m going to stop using Google in favor of the search engine that has those two.  I might think it’s unfair, I might think it’s a triumph of soulless MBAs over tech heroes, I might think it’s the desperate grasping of dying empires.  But I want the content I want, and those principles aren’t enough to prevent me from switching.

Bing doesn’t have to make deals with every content provider, just a dozen or so critical ones that will cause another 40% market share gain (they’re at 10% now).  Sure it’ll be expensive to acquire the best content, but Microsoft’s got more cash than Google.  Once it’s 50/50, it’s anybody’s ballgame but the advantage goes to the one who has the content.

I’m pretty sure that Google is not going to sit back and smugly assume that Murdoch’s gambit will fail.  They’re going to get involved, they’re going to try to start locking down their own partnerships.  If I were them, I’d start with Wikipedia, one of the most important search result destinations on the web – it’s in the top five results of just about any search you do.  Sure, they’re a non-profit, but non-profits need money too.

sudden emptiness

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p. 60:

A sudden emptiness seemed to flow now from the windows and the great doors, endowing with complete isolation the figure of the host who stood on the porch, his hand up in a formal gesture of farewell.

I love the energy ascribed here to emptiness, a concept that is ordinarily quiet and passive.  Here the emptiness is a kinetic force that fills the house and overflows out the windows and doors, so powerful that it blankets Gatsby in a protective cocoon.

Another wild party is over, and the host stands in the doorway alone, with his true mission still incomplete – the girl of his fevered dreams didn’t come.  He’s chased her across years without seeing her, other than in his boundless imagination.  Now she’s just across the bay, and surely she must see his mansion alight with festivity, night after night, a beacon calling to her to come and join him at last.  But she doesn’t come this night, and all the people and music and laughter that evening have only fed the emptiness which now fills the house and his heart.

the age of illusions

~ ginsu ~ 1 Comment

The NY Times asks what we should name this decade.  I’m going to go with The Age of Illusions.  It certainly matches the experience of those of us in the United States.

In the very first minute of the decade, we found out that the looming Y2K disaster wasn’t real.  Then the dot-com bubble burst, proving that vast paper fortunes weren’t real.  Most of us voted against GWB for president in 2000, but he took office anyway, showing that popular democracy isn’t real.  The September 11 attacks seemed too horrible to be true, and we began a War on Terrorism with no real evidence that our target was involved in the attacks.  But the real illusion turned out to be the hope that “nothing will ever be the same again” – we quickly returned to ironic humor and emotional distance.

The Web 2.0 bubble came and went without a meaningful public company being created.  Massive investments in complex financial instruments that ultimately had no real basis for valuation led to a worldwide financial crisis.  A nation that stands as the apotheosis of capitalism turned to massive government bailouts, ultimately saving at least one sector of the economy:  big banking, whose leaders rewarded themselves handsomely for work they didn’t do.

Yep, the Age of Illusions it is.  Naughty Aughties, don’t let the door hit you on the way out.

new york state of mind

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There’s nothing like New York City – this has been said so many times in so many ways that it hardly bears repeating.  But the compulsion to declare love for New York is like the compulsion for love itself:  it doesn’t matter that countless generations have found this magic and proclaimed their discoveries to the world, each person still engages in a distinct journey for a song of one’s own heart.

I was born in New Jersey, grew up about 45 minutes outside of the city, and went to school and started my career in NYC.  I’ve been out in the San Francisco bay area for over a decade now, and I’m firmly rooted here with family and career, but the thought of going back to The City (the one and only “The City” – pretenders begone!) still occasionally buzzes in my head like a bee in a speeding car.  However, on a trip back to New York last week, I realized that one of the things that prevented me from moving back is my own very New York attitude.

Over the past few months, a few New York based technoscenti have carried a conversation about NYC as a startup environment.  Chris Dixon said conditions are ripe for a new NYC tech revival, Fred Wilson and Charlie O’Donnell agreed but noted that NYC has been a strong tech scene for years, and Dixon and Wilson came together to agree again that the NYC startup sector is special.  All this caused me to reflect on why I left the city that I love to pursue a tech career in Silicon Valley, and why I’d do it again.

It all goes back to why I went to NYC in the first place.  I was learning the law, I wanted to be a dealmaking lawyer.  And while there’s law and lawyers all over the world, the pinnacle of the practice is in New York.  Routine transactions in New York would be considered fantastically complicated almost anywhere else, and complex transactions in New York are so far above other places that they can’t be considered the same category of endeavor at all.  So if I was going to be a lawyer, I had to try to do it in the belly of the beast.

And it was a great time, but after a few years I realized I wanted to be more connected to the creation of something from nothing, rather than the financial engineering of something into vast amounts of money.  That meant working in startups, because startups aren’t about money but about value creation (a distinction often lost on New Yorkers).  So I shifted the path of my journey, but I retained that New York attitude of wanting to play on the biggest possible stage, and in the startup world, that meant going to Silicon Valley.

There are other great startup scenes in the world, and New York is certainly a special startup environment.  But if you’re a stage actor, you don’t go to New York dreaming of playing Off Broadway; you dream of your name in lights on the Great White Way.  Because I grew up as a New York dreamer, dreaming of a startup career meant leaving New York for the biggest and baddest startup scene in the world.

It’s all a bit ironic, and I’m not saying this “big stage” attitude is right.  In fact, it’s almost certainly not a healthy way to live.  A healthier attitude would be less entranced with the size of the stage, and more focused on the production and your role within it.  I think that’s the attitude held by Chris, Fred and Charlie, and I really look forward to seeing those guys continue the public conversation (and private work) about making New York into one of the great startup locales in the world.  For those interested, Elie Seidman is another good new voice in the thread, and of course Joel Spolsky is a longtime stalwart for software engineering in NYC (or anywhere).