Author Archive for Kevin Kelleher
Kevin Kelleher
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Saturday, July 11, 2009 |
9:00 AM PT |
Count me among the skeptics who see Google’s Chrome OS announcement this week as, first and foremost, an effort to induce pain in its longtime rival Microsoft. And a pointless one at that.
Many people writing about Chrome OS have argued that there’s a sound business strategy behind it, that of leading to more Google ads for us to click on. While I agree in principle, I also think it’s easy to overstate the benefit to Google: Isn’t most of its revenue already coming from surfers using Windows-based PCs? And yes, many PCs take minutes to boot up and hours to configure – as Google cattily pointed out in arguing how computers (read: Windows) “need to get better” — but will we really use the time saved to click on sponsored links? I doubt it. Continue »
Kevin Kelleher
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Friday, July 3, 2009 |
9:00 AM PT |
Things may finally be turning around for troubled satellite radio venture Sirius XM. Following a long and costly merger, the company became desperate for new financing just as credit dried up, and managed to avert bankruptcy only by selling 40 percent of itself to John Malone in exchange for a loan paying 15 percent interest. Last week, Sirius secured another half-billion dollars in high-interest debt, and CEO Mel Karmazin got a 20 percent raise and the option to buy 120 million new shares to celebrate his success.
Success, that is, if you define the word as simply avoiding failure. Things may be turning around, but Sirius XM has a long way to go before it finds true success. It needs to create a lot of new revenue to pay off all that debt. It needs to reverse the deterioration in the number of net subscribers that took place last quarter, when they fell 2.1 percent to 18.6 million. It needs to expand its allure beyond the car market, which will remain in a slump for the foreseeable future.
With the launch of Sirius XM’s iPhone app, the hope has emerged that the mobile market will provide the answer. The Sirius XM App is the fifth most popular download in Apple’s App Store, although the drop from the No. 3 spot since last week suggests demand is waning fast as current Sirius subscribers download it. That may help deter more subscribers from canceling their Sirius accounts, but will it lure in new ones? Continue »
Kevin Kelleher
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Wednesday, June 24, 2009 |
9:00 PM PT |
So now we know the dark, sinister story: Steve Jobs took someone’s liver in Memphis.
Yes, it’s true! I read it in the Wall Street Journal. After sequestering himself in the haunted, Faulknerian chambers of some abandoned manor in the city of Elvis and the ancient Greeks, Jobs enlisted some accomplices to procure the liver so that the filthy-rich old man might live. According to one accomplice, his prognosis is [ominously tapping fingertips together] “excellent.”
I exaggerate, but only slightly. After reading all the stories that have dominated newsfeeds, Twitterstreams and tech news aggregators, I had to resist the thought that Jobs was some sort of “X-Files” monster who fed off livers to preserve his nefarious life. After all, he belittled Apple’s board. He lied to Wall Street. He cut in line ahead of poorer patients. And so on.
There’s a perverse irony to all this. Jobs waged a long, initially fruitless yet over the decades highly effective PR war painting Microsoft as an evil force in the technology industry. And now, just as he sits atop the shrinking pile of revered business executives, he’s being tarred with the same black brush. Continue »
Kevin Kelleher
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Saturday, June 20, 2009 |
9:00 AM PT |
Ever since Netscape started storing cookies in its browsers, there has been a Jekyll-and-Hyde nature to the web. The Jekyll web promised a more personalized experience, with sites serving ads for products and services that you would actually be interested in — ads that are more like useful information and less like glaring interruptions. The Hyde web wanted sites to stalk you, recording little bits of data about your online life until they knew more than you’d be comfortable sharing even with some friends.
Internet media companies have long grappled with that contradiction inherent in targeted ads, and have had, at best, mixed success at resolving it. But it’s looking like they’ll need to solve it soon — or regulators will do it for them. Continue »
Kevin Kelleher
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Wednesday, June 17, 2009 |
11:26 AM PT |
As eBay tinkers with its e-commerce site, CEO John Donahoe has been making the case that the company is turning around. But as we’ve noted, while some of the changes look encouraging, it’s not clear whether enough buyers are returning to the site. Today, Citigroup analyst Mark Mahaney expressed similar concerns, noting that while he’s “incrementally more positive” about the company after meeting with executives, he sees “sustained declines in online traffic to the site as a clear negative.” Continue »
Kevin Kelleher
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Saturday, June 13, 2009 |
9:00 AM PT |
Is any tech CEO more reviled by his or her own customers than eBay’s John Donahoe? In online forums, sellers seethe about the higher fees and site changes he’s implemented. They write and sign petitions calling for his ouster. Even eBay employees voted him onto Glassdoor.com’s “Naughty List” of CEOs with the highest disapproval ratings.
But while just a few months ago, Donahoe seemed destined to steer the e-commerce giant into irrelevance, a consensus is now starting to emerge that he may instead be turning it around. Continue »
Kevin Kelleher
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Saturday, May 30, 2009 |
10:00 AM PT |
In the same way that there is an economic gap between rich and poor, there has emerged in the Internet sector a creativity gap. Instead of an upper class and a lower class, however, the creativity gap consists of a leading class and a lagging class. One way to tell the leaders is by the number of developers flocking to them. Continue »
Kevin Kelleher
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Saturday, May 23, 2009 |
9:00 AM PT |
Just how big a threat is the real-time web to Google? As Om has pointed out, real-time content marks a still-amorphous but important new phase of evolution in the web, allowing for the instantaneous discovery of newly added information. And Twitter and Facebook are emerging as an alternative to the traditional engine, which presents a big challenge to Google’s core business. As Larry Page admitted this week, the company finally gets that. Continue »
Kevin Kelleher
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Saturday, May 16, 2009 |
9:00 AM PT |
While the recession had many predicting the IPO market would be largely non-existent in 2009, several new tech stocks listed on public markets during April and now in May. The companies squeaking out of the IPO queue, however, are mature, profitable and cash-rich. Their proceeds are going to insiders, not corporate coffers.
It’s one of those cruel paradoxes common to the market these days: The companies raising capital through IPOs are the ones that don’t really need it. Continue »
Kevin Kelleher
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Saturday, May 9, 2009 |
9:00 AM PT |
In a footnote to Amazon’s 2008 letter to shareholders, Jeff Bezos related this moment of Zen:
At a fulfillment center recently, one of our Kaizen experts asked me, “I’m in favor of a clean fulfillment center, but why are you cleaning? Why don’t you eliminate the source of dirt?” I felt like the Karate Kid.
It may sounds like a koan for the anally retentive, but it says a lot about Amazon’s approach to innovation. While many tech companies are focused on new products, services and business models, Amazon is focused more on new ways of wringing efficiency from its operations. And in a year when consumer and business spending is slowing, focusing on new ways of improving how you do things may yield more returns than coming up with new things to sell. Continue »
