All Things

Google has been catching some criticism for its deal to pay $1 billion for a 5% stake in AOL, but I can see several reasons why it may make sense, at least for them.

First of all, the deal is a defensive move, in multiple ways. Google can afford the billion but doesn’t want to lose a substantial portion of its revenues and cash flow. As any experienced entrepreneur knows, managing cash is Job 1. Maybe Google is so big it could afford to be a bit sloppy in this area, but it’s good they are being disciplined about this and defending their revenue and cash flow first before worrying about maximizing return on investment.

Of course, it’s also defensive in that it locks Microsoft out, thereby sustaining Google’s online ad momentum while restraining Microsoft’s. Though some seem to view things differently, I think Google’s brand, on the net, is still way more valuable than Microsoft’s, and the brand must be defended.

Second, AOL’s valuation seems to be nearly completely a function of the perspective from which it is viewed. At the time of the merger (with Time-Warner), it was viewed as a top internet property/portal/brand that was key to driving traffic, and was given a sky-high valuation. Today it is viewed as just a dial-up ISP going the way of the dinosaurs.

A couple of weeks ago, I got another AOL disk in the mail (what does that make - about one a month for a decade?). This one, however, was different, and got me thinking. Instead of just trying to sign me up for AOL, the cover says, “Get Your Business Online”. This was such an obvious growth direction for AOL that I’m surprised I hadn’t thought of it before.

It seems to me that AOL’s members align pretty well with Sams Club shoppers, i.e. upper middle-class folks who often own their own businesses. Of course, these are all switching to broadband and AOL is no longer viewed as the premium ISP. As someone noted the other day, however, AOL’s core competency may really lie in getting newbies (or now their businesses) on the web.

Of course, AOL has a lot of work to do if it wants to make this really profitable, but considering that the local web is something that really hasn’t happened yet, at least most places, there’s still a lot of growth potential there for helping small business owners. Those who have been AOL customers and used to the web are likely smart enough to know there’s more their business could do online, if it was simple enough to implement.

Consequently, a third reason Google’s deal may make sense is that it solidifies its relationship with AOL, which has already proved to be a strong partner in generating ad revenue. Google hasn’t really tried to be a portal like Yahoo, Excite, or the others, but AOL could provide that part while Google drives development of new online services.

One opportunity I keep waiting for Google to tackle is local classifieds, which would capitalize on their compelling brand and near 100% user base. A single, strong brand for local classifieds seems so obvious (and needed), I don’t know why they haven’t been more aggressive about it. Maybe they’re just trying to be merciful to the print newspapers.

I enjoy reading about how Google is turning the business/venture capital world on its head. I use Google every day, and haven’t paid them a dime, yet they’re making billions. It’s interesting … fascinating!

After using a Mac for nearly 22 years and enduring Apple’s long decline in the late ’80s to 90s, it’s not possible to look at Palm without wondering if it’s deja vu all over again. The PDA maker has made so many questionable and even seemingly bizarre moves (such as buying the BeOS) that its survivability is certainly now in question.

As with Apple and the Mac in the 90’s, Palm still has a lot of enthusiastic and even loyal users, but the platform hasn’t thrived in years. The simplicity and reliability of the Palm OS and hardware (at least until recent years) is likely even more of an advantage in the handheld space than in PCs, yet Palm has failed to capture a lot of new users lately, despite its lower-cost Zire line. The Palm OS has been steadily losing ground to Pocket PCs and now, increasingly, to the Blackberry as well, which seems to be evolving rapidly.

In other Words, Palm (or PalmOne, or whatever they call themselves these days) is a company, like Apple in the mid 90s, that had a lot going for it, but has pretty nearly blown that advantage, and desperately needs to home back in on their core market and competencies before it’s too late.

In any case, this is the perspective I’ve had in mind as I’ve pondered the events of the past few days. It all started when my wife mentioned she wanted to get the new Zire 22. I was both glad and somewhat surprised, because she had had a frustrating experience with her first handheld, the Zire 21, and had finally returned it.

Susan is the kind of person who would probably be happy just running her life out of a shoebox of records (perhaps you have encountered the type), except there’s way too much information to keep track of nowadays, and even one shoebox would be too much to carry around. Though she had given me a Palm several years ago, she didn’t show much interest in getting one for herself until about a year ago.

She was working as a drapery designer and just had so many people, numbers, and project notes to keep track of that it was getting impossible to keep everything with her all the time. Increasingly phone numbers and other things would be at work or someplace else when she needed them, so she finally went for it and got a Zire 21 last spring.

At first, she was delighted with the 21, and its design was good even though it was a pretty basic PDA. If you haven’t used a PDA but have been considering it, the biggest gain comes from having all your information in one place, and being able to carry it with you (and back it up). It’s just a different experience when you can be working, shopping, travelling or whatever and pull out your notes right then and there from projects, Consumer Reports, past trips, etc.

Unfortunately, after a few days the 21 started having hard resets every so often. I looked it up on the web and was dismayed to find that this was a well-known problem linked to certain kinds of phones (she had a Motorola Nextel phone at the time). Apparently whoever designed the 21 failed to include shielding at a critical point, and so some phones cause a reset when going off close to the Zire (and, of course, she needed to carry them both in her purse).

Most perplexing was that the problem had been known for a year or so and as far as we could tell, PalmOne had not made any design changes. We tried to work around it for a week or so, but after losing her day’s data for the third or fourth time, Susan had had enough. Palm lost an enthusiastic customer, perhaps (I thought) for good. Interestingly, despite their return policy, OfficeMax took it back without a question. Apparently we weren’t the first to have a problem with it.

Anyway, fast forward to the other night when, Christmas money in hand, Susan and I walk into several stores looking for the new, improved Zire 22 (with color screen and flash memory). It turns out that no retailers around us seem to have any left, for either of two reasons, one ominous, one promising. First, the bad news. A lot of the mass merchandisers have dropped the Palm line, most recently Target (Best Buy’s selection has seemed pretty meager lately, too). It would seem the strategy of using the Zire line to penetrate these distribution points hasn’t worked out.

On the positive side, stores that do still carry the Palm brand were apparently uniformly out of Zire 22s in our area. This includes OfficeMax, Office Depot, and at least two nearby Radio Shack stores. While I heard lots of news coverage of how the iPod was selling well this Christmas, I wonder if the Zire 22 was selling as well in other places as it was here. Perhaps this will be a harbinger of better things to come.

While there are an unlimited number of features a PDA maker could supposedly try to cram into a handheld, I hope Palm will re-focus on the basic PDA functions and make sure these remain simple to use and the hardware rock-solid. I have heard enough stories of Palm users who loved their PDAs that I remain convinced there are still millions of potential customers out there if Palm will just get the basics right.

The industrial design of the Zire line seems quite good, but I hope the engineering has improved. As for Susan, she ended up instead buying a Kodak camera yesterday at OfficeMax (we’ve loved the other one we have). She says maybe she’ll still buy a Zire eventually. I wonder if Palm will still be trying to win her business.

New Scientist is reporting that Ramesh Sharda at Oklahoma State University has developed a practical neural network (artificial intelligence) program that 75% of the time can successfully predict, within a fair degree of accuracy, a film’s theater receipts.

The interesting thing about this to me is that Sharda has apparently gotten the neural net to identify seven key parameters that reliably predict film receipts. He fed a large database of hundreds of films into the neural net, effectively “training it” (which is how neural nets work), presumably with initially many more than seven parameters for each film.

While being able to predict a film’s success would certainly be useful information, simply being able to identify a limited set of key parameters for a given activity could itself be highly worthwhile. For example, say a restaurant chain such as McDonald’s wants to improve their real estate selections. Presumably they would have a large database of sales information that they could plug into a neural net, which might then be able to pinpoint which parameters are truly key (e.g. traffic count, demographics, proximity to other restaurants, etc.).

If certain parameters over which the company had control could be found that would yield substantial improvements, then this might better guide improvements to present locations (or processes, products, etc.), while the neural net could be used to analyze future potential locations.

In general, the state of the artificial intelligence field seems pretty obscure nowadays. I’ve been wondering lately whether many practical applications are finally taking hold, and whether these involve neural net technology or some other approach. In the mid-80s, languages such as Prolog and Lisp were being touted as tools for building elaborate knowledge bases, etc., but I wonder if anyone is still working with these.

In the second half of the 80s, neural nets seemed to pretty much eclipse language-based artificial intelligence. Way back then I took a serious look at Prolog, which the Japanese had favored for their research. The notion of declarative programming still fascinates me, but without a background in predicate logic or computer science I didn’t have much confidence in my assessment. For one thing, I never could see how one would go about debugging a Prolog program!