New Delhi Times

Google, as we all know, is in the business of selling ads. They display ads related to the what you are searching for. So the typical experience is that the user searches for some keywords and sees  a whole lot of search results in the middle of the page and related ads on the right panel. Now, at this point, the user can take two actions – either click on an actual search result OR click on the text ad on the right. Guess which of those clicks makes money for Google? Does the search engine want the user to click on the actual search result or on the ad? This discussion came up yesterday and it made me think that as long as Google is a dominant force in the search engine space, improving their search results doesn’t seem very compelling from their perspective. If search engine technology was perfect then it would return the best and most relevant search results. So when a user was specifically looking to buy something online (which is when they are most likely to click on google ads), they would anyway get the best results in the middle of the page and never need to click on an ad.

Of late there has been lot of noise about how Google search has started to deteriorate and how SEO companies are manipulating Google results. This appears to be quite similar to how Microsoft had stopped working on IE once they had annihiliated the competition (netscape). It took emergence of Firefox to shake Microsoft out of the slumber. So, we really need MSN, Yahoo and other search engines to give a decent fight to Google so that they would start putting more of their billions into improving the search experience!

The official Google blog must be the most boring blog ever. It reads like a series of press releases. Google has this “incredibly fun place to work for” image but the blog doesn’t reflect that at all. The posts are so formal sounding and adveritisory (sic) in nature that its no fun reading that blog. This is one area where Microsoft has scored over its rivals. They have really harnessed the power of the blogosphere to the max. Microsoft bloggers also tend to write many more anecdotal posts about working at Microsoft. Lot of hard core techies also blog which makes for excellent reading for developers outside of MSFT. Lastly, many MSFT bloggers have openly questioned internal policies and decisions publicly on their blogs and not gotten fired for doing that!
I did write an email to Google complaining about the boring nature of their blog but never heard back. So maybe this post will catch their attention
Disclaimer: I am ex-Microsoft so my views could very well be biased

You can “design” software, you can “architect” solutions and you can “optimize” systems to your heart’s content. You can create specs. You can develop information architectures. You can blog about software. You can sell software. You can speak about it. There are a million and one things that go into software development.
But, at least once in a while, you just have to roll up your sleeves and dive into code. Because nothing beats cranking out code. Late in the night. That is the biggest high for any self respecting software developer. And that is what gets your respect from other developers. A project manager who doesn’t understand code often has a hard time managing a strong development team. So, no matter if you are “designing” or “architecting” or “optimizing” solutions – don’t fall for your own hype and every once so often, crank out some real code!

We have all heard (and even predicted ourselves!) that browser based rich internet applications will replace desktop applications. But amongst so much talk, I had not come across a browser based application that could really match desktop apps in terms of user interface and responsivness. Sure there is Gmail which is fast and zippy – but the UI left much to be desired. But today I saw the demo of LaszloMail – an email service developed on top of OpenLaszlo which is an open source platform for developing rich internet applications. It is the single most impressive utility application I have seen inside the browser. Completely mind blowing! Its email on steroids. And it makes feel much more sure that all this web 2.0 talk is not just hype!
Check out LaszloMail here.

(via Gigaom) According to this post on the Skype blog, the rumors of the Ebay-Skype deal were leaked by a New York cab driver who had given a ride to some Ebay execs.

I kid you not — the week before the announcement, we received a comment in our Customer Support from some NYC taxi driver about eBay acquiring Skype, and we downplayed this as a rumor, which is what it still was for us at that time. The taxi driver replied “look gentlemen, you may disregard it all you want, but I know the facts since I just gave a ride to some eBay execs who discussed exactly what would be happening”.

We had our Geek/blogger/Micro-content dinner last night here in Gurgaon. Marc and Ashish have already blogged the event. The attendees were Marc, Ashish, Manish and myself (from Tekriti), Alok (newly VC and successful entrpreneur – jobsahead.com), Sunil (fellow entrepreneur, blogger and semantic web researcher – he is from the RDF camp), Jatin from Indiastreams.com, Siddharth and Sudesh from WebChutney, Neeraj from Times of India, Sachin from Makemytrip.com, Amit from Uzanto and Kunal (ex-TRAI and telecom entreprenur who will cringe on seeing Marc call him a “government official”!). So it was a mix of entreprenurs, bloggers, media people and geeks in general.
Not surprisingly, the hot topic of discussion was the Ebay-Skype deal. Sunil talked about his wireless startup and his ideas around semantic web and RDF. When asked to choose between XML and RDF, Sunil gave the diplomatic reply of “well practially XML works better but…”. Alok is going to be India’s first VC blogger! Cool! The guys at Web Chutney are doing some really creative stuff for very impressive clientele. They have also promised us to help us find good design folks – a skill we really need desperately here at Tekriti. Marc and myself independently made the observation that Kunal has a resemblence to Anil Dash. Marc even found the accent similar. I find it really funny that Marc thought of him as a government official. He looks anything but that. Sachin mentioned that Makemytrip.com is providing domestic ticketing as well . I hope we get something like priceline here in India soon! Amit, Neeraj and Marc had an animated discussion about something that I can’t seem to remember. But I did point out to Neeraj that indiatimes.com is like Web 0.5 website in a Web 2.0 era and they are totally missing the boat on this. I spotted Manish and Jatin discussing his media streaming technology and how it could possibly get used in many of our projects.
This was a great event to have! It took effort to organize but it was totally worth it. I heard many “we should have more of these” comments. So hopefully such blogger dinners will become a more regular feature in the Delhi tech circle. There is no better way to get to know fellow techies, exchange ideas and help each other out!

Bernard Moon as a very interesting post on what motivated the VCs to fund Skype (which has of course given them mind boggling ROI). In particular the following lines exactly echo what I had written a few days back
What really seems to have sold them, however, was the ease and reliability of Skype’s software, which they initially tried out in beta. Specifically, this was one of those rare pieces of software that Stavis and a far-flung colleague could download at the same time and be using five minutes later. No firewall issues, no “this doesn’t work on my PC” problems. It may sound basic, but think about all the times you and a colleague have tried to download a piece of software (particularly communications software), only to find out that it works far better on his computer better than on yours.
“Regardless of the firewall, it would traverse the network and find the connection,” Stavis explains. “And then it worked 100 times better than anything else we had seen.”
Now the sales and marketing folks can’t stop telling us techies that its not what you are selling, its how you are selling that matters. Well, take that! Here is a piece of software that stood on its own – sheer raw power of the code. No gimmicks, no fancy advertising, no $100 million marketing budgets. Pure technology. I think we will see more and more of that in the coming days. Because the web is opening up, it is no longer the playground for just the Yahoos, Googles and Microsofts of the world. No amount of marketing or sales will be able to make up for bad code. In the end, better technology will prevail!

On a day when it rained like never before here in Delhi, something even more incredible and unheard of happened – Ebay bought Skype for $4.1 billion. The immensity of that number left me speechless. The blogosphere will be plenty abuzz with this news over the coming days so I will not give my opinion on whether this was a fair price or not. But I will like to point out that Skype is one of those rare pieces of software that flourished purely on technological superiority.
Voice over internet had been around for much longer before Skype came into the picture. Bigger players like Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL had voice solutions available with their instant messengers for many years before Skype. You know how those worked – if they worked at all. The voice quality was poor, there was no multi-party conferencing features and worst of all, most of these didn’t work at all behind NATs and firewalls. So, it was an incredible achievement to create a piece of technology that worked flawlessly in almost all network configurations, provided excellent voice quality and allowed several parties to conference simultaneously. “It just works” is what made Skype such a raging success. I won’t be exaggerating if I said that my work life revolves around Skype. I spend several hours a week over Skype talking to clients across the world. I have myself convinced several people to download and install Skype. The fact that it takes less than 5 minutes to get Skype up and running is what makes it so attractive to the masses. The geeks could always punch holes in their firewalls. But for humans, this was sheer magic.
So for me, Skype is a story of pure technical innovation. More often than not, sales and marketing make or break a product. But for Skype, technology made it what it is. Hats off to their dev team in Estonia! You guys rock!