In a post announcing the launch at Yahoo’s “Yodel Anecdotal” blog, Mayer talks about how the site has been redesigned to provide a “stream” of news and information that scrolls onward for as long as a user might like, instead of just a big static chunk of headlines. As she puts it:

“Since streams of information have become the paradigm of choice on the web, we’re introducing a newsfeed with infinite scroll, letting you experience a virtually endless feed of news articles. Whether you are a sports fanatic or entertainment buff, you can easily customize your newsfeed to your interests.”

We have a news feed just like Facebook!

Mayer is right that streams have become the paradigm of choice, but that particular boat set sail a long time ago — Facebook first introduced the News Feed, which has become the go-to news and information source for hundreds of millions of people, in 2006. Twitter, the other news source that pioneered the real-time stream of information, was also created in 2006 and how has hundreds of millions of users. Facebook, of course, recently crossed over the 1-billion-user mark.

That’s not to say a company couldn’t reinvent the real-time news stream, it just means that if Yahoo plans to do so, it’s going to have to try a lot harder than if it had embarked on such a strategy four or five years ago. All the new Yahoo page appears to do is let headlines scroll beyond the little box that the site used to put them in, something that even newspaper websites — hardly the epitome of innovation — started doing a long time ago.

A more detailed post on the changes from Yahoo’s VP of product, Mike Kerns, describes a great new feature that lets users “click a button that allows you to share the story via email, Facebook, or Twitter.” If that strikes you as something dramatically new, then you haven’t been paying attention.

We have apps too, just like Facebook!

Mayer also talked about new “applications” that Yahoo has added, so that users can always see their updated weather and sports scores, something that again feels like a revamping of a decade-old strategy. The customized portal with tiny news and information “apps” was something that was popular years ago via players like Pageflakes and Netvibes — and Google went after it with iGoogle, an offering it recently decided to mothball. Why? Because it wasn’t providing nearly enough bang for the buck, presumably.

Yahoo is also boasting about the fact that you can now log in with Facebook and see all your friends’ birthdays and other activity — a feature that Facebook first started offering with its Facebook Connect platform launch almost three years ago, and one that is now used by hundreds of thousands of news sites. This offering is not only late, but reinforces how much of Yahoo’s strategy seems to rely on partnering with others, something that is at best an unlikely route to success.

Some supporters of the company argue that Yahoo could reach out to developers of apps that it could run on its home page or in user’s streams, in the same way that Facebook has built much of its success on top of game or app companies like Zynga. But can Yahoo offer anything even close to what Facebook can, either in terms of reach or revenue? And are new versions of Candy Crush Saga or Farmville really worth banking Yahoo’s future on?

It’s true that Yahoo still has hundreds of millions of loyal users, but then so does AOL’s dial-up business — in other words, there may still be value there, but it is in a process of gradual (and likely accelerating) decline. Yahoo Finance still has its fans, and so does the site’s fantasy sports offerings, but the reality is that its overall traffic has been falling, and tweaks to its home page offerings are not going to reverse that in any significant way.

In that sense, Mayer’s much-hyped relaunch of the home page seems a lot like adding a new coat of paint and some racing stripes to your old Chevy. It may make you feel better, but it’s not going to go any faster.

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In the interview with Bloomberg (which is embedded below), Mayer listed all of the things that Yahoo doesn’t have — including any proprietary hardware, software, an operating system, a social network, etc. (she could have added a search engine as well, since Yahoo has outsourced that to Microsoft) — but tried to argue that this was actually a benefit, not a disadvantage:

“Given that we do not have mobile hardware, a mobile OS, a browser, or a social network, how are we going to compete? I think that the big piece here is that it really allows us to partner… we work with Apple and Google in terms of the operating system. In terms of social network, we have a strong partnership with Facebook. We’re able to work with some of these players that have a lot of strength in order to bolster our user experience that we offer on the Yahoo site.”

Why would Apple or Google care about Yahoo?

This is a valiant effort on Mayer’s part, but what exactly does Yahoo have to offer Apple or Google in terms of a “partnership” around their operating systems and platforms? The web portal may still have millions of visitors a month who come to its news pages or other sites, but how does any of that benefit Apple or Google? Are they going to pay for access to that? Unlikely. Do either of them — or Facebook for that matter — really care about whether they get anything from Yahoo? Also unlikely.

In her reply to another question, Mayer said that one of Yahoo’s strengths is that it is a player in all of the things that people like to do on their smartphones, whether it’s email, weather, news, photos or sports scores. Those daily mobile habits, she argued, are the key to Yahoo’s success:

“When I thought about the strategy for Yahoo I pulled the list of what people do on their phones in rank order of frequency. If you ignore a few exceptions… the list looks like e- mail, check the weather, check the news, share photos, get financial quotes, check sports scores, play games. The nice thing at Yahoo is that we have all the content that people want on their phones. We have these daily habits. I think whenever you have a daily habit and providing a lot of value around it, there is opportunity to not only provide that value to the end user but to create a great business.”

It’s true that Yahoo still has plenty of users who have Yahoo email addresses, check Yahoo News, share photos through Flickr (especially now that it has an actual usable mobile app) and look at sports scores or go to Yahoo message boards. But it’s also true that these numbers have not been growing very much at all lately — if anything, they have been shrinking, as other players like Google and Facebook and Apple (Yahoo’s alleged partners) carve away the businesses that Mayer is describing. What kind of future is that?

Yahoo’s goal is the same as everyone else’s

Mayer also talked about how the key to Yahoo’s strategy around these daily habits was to make sense of all the data about people’s activities and use that to show them relevant content — in other words, the exact same thing that Facebook and everyone else has their eye on. Yahoo may want to be the “Google of content,” but so does Google. The big problem for Yahoo is that there’s no reason to believe it can do a better job at this than any of those other companies, who have more data and more resources to devote to doing so.

Compounding that problem is the fact that Facebook and Apple and even Google are becoming less likely to want to share their data with others, not more. Facebook has been busy for some time cutting off access by outside parties, and there’s no reason to think that will stop — and while Yahoo may currently have a contract that gives it access to the Facebook graph (a prescient deal it signed in 2009), that contract comes to an end fairly soon. So what does Yahoo do then?

Mayer may be staking her future on the idea of outsourcing everything, but it is not a new idea at Yahoo: it is the same kind of approach the company has been taking ever since it decided to turn its search engine over to Microsoft. What does Yahoo actually own? Some pageviews and daily visitors (although it is mostly renting them, not owning them). The problem for Mayer is that the value of that asset is declining rapidly, and it’s not clear what replaces it.

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Every decade or so, we’re confronted with the arrival of a new mega-technology that has the power to shape our businesses in powerful ways. In the 1980s, it was personal computing. In the 1990s, it was the Internet. Now, we’re faced with cloud computing. It’s important that we choose a wise strategy for dealing with this technology. In order to understand the future, let’s take a look at the past.

Amazon chooses wisely

In 1994, Borders Group was already one of the largest book retailers in the world. That same year, Jeff Bezos founded Amazon.com recognizing that physical bookstores were limited in the number of titles they could stock. In contrast, an online storefront could “stock” as many titles as needed, delivering a huge competitive advantage in product selection.

These two organizations had vastly different Internet strategies. Without the Internet, Amazon simply couldn’t exist–the web was central to it’s business model. In contrast, Borders largely ignored the Internet through the 1990s. Instead, Borders pursued a traditional retail strategy, opening large stores in the U.S. and expanding internationally in Europe and Asia.

Borders finally took note of the Internet in 2001, deciding to open an e-commerce storefront. The company knew that it didn’t understand e-commerce, and so it made the decision to outsource its online operations to an expert — Amazon. In hindsight, the move was foolish, but it reflects a vastly different strategic vision and set of choices about how to view the new Internet technology. For Borders, the Internet was a way to take orders for books and augment transactions occurring at its retail stores. Amazon viewed the Internet as a competitive weapon that could deliver strategic differentiation through greater selection and ease of purchase.

Borders ended its Amazon alliance in 2008 and finally developed its own online presence, but the company never found its stride. In early 2011, Borders filed for bankruptcy and finally ceased operations in late 2011.

Lessons learned

There are some lessons here:

1. New technologies can significantly change the way that businesses operate, creating new business models and obsoleting old ones. Make sure you’re on the right side of that transition before you decide to move slowly with the adoption of a new technology.
2. The market will often take a wait-and-see approach with new technology, particularly established enterprises. While the Amazon vs. Borders comparison provides one of the starkest examples of Internet success and failure, Borders wasn’t the only company that “didn’t get it.” Barnes & Noble also struggled to incorporate e-commerce into its business model, for instance.
3. So, choose your technology strategy quickly and wisely. And remember that if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.

Making the wise cloud computing choice

Today, the Internet transition is behind us, but the cloud computing transition is upon us. The conventional wisdom says that:

1. The biggest benefit to cloud computing is the cost reduction associated with efficient external cloud suppliers, operating at massive scale.
2. The biggest risk associated with cloud computing is security.

Do CIOs have their heads in the sand?

Here are some questions that might help shape your thinking about a cloud computing strategy:

1. Is information technology be a core input to your business strategy? If you’re a Web 2.0 company, the answer is obviously, “Yes!” If you’re a manufacturing company in a very old, stable market sector, on the other hand, the answer may be “No,” but remember that Borders didn’t think the Internet was core. And they were right as long as book selling remained a brick-and-mortar business.
2. What is business agility worth to you? Again, if you’re in an inherently slow-moving business sector, the answer might be, “Not much.” But remember that book selling wasn’t very fast-moving in the 1990s either. But Amazon has used the Internet multiple times to evolve its business model, lately innovating with e-books. In 2011, Amazon reached the crossover point where it sold more Kindle e-books than physical books, which really starts to undercut competitors based on brick-and-mortar storefronts.
3. What is the risk to your company if your competitors embrace cloud computing first? If that’s troubling and you can think of ways the technology can be used against you, then you’ll want to move before they do. It’s important to think outside the box here and consider new market entrants. If you’re Borders in the 1990s, you need to be thinking about young upstart Amazon, not just your historical competitor Barnes & Noble.

The Amazon vs. Borders comparison puts technology adoption strategies in stark perspective. Cloud computing is upon you right now and its important that you create a proactive strategy for its adoption in your enterprise. It may be the case that you can slow-roll your adoption, taking advantage of the wisdom and experience of first-movers, but make sure you aren’t being lulled into a false sense of security, sustaining the status quo just because it’s easy and low risk for the moment. Border did that and got crushed in the process. They chose poorly and paid the price.

Dave Roberts is SVP of Strategy and Evangelism at ServiceMesh. He blogs here, and tweets as @sandhillstrat.

Indy image courtesy of Flickr user zombieite.

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So what’s the answer? The solution put forward most often is a buyout by Microsoft — already the company’s software partner. But reports suggest that although Redmond did take a look at the idea last year, it didn’t like what it saw. Similarly, rumors of a potential buyout by Samsung seem to have been ill-judged.

So if a sale is off the agenda, what else is there?

Here are five other options that have been suggested as possible paths to redemption.

Keep simplifying

One of the brutal-but-necessary cuts that Stephen Elop made was chopping back the mess of systems and services Nokia was trying to balance. After his burning platform memo laid out the situation ahead of the company, the plug was pulled on MeeGo, and Symbian while not quite dead was put on life support.

These days Nokia is shipping just 10 new handset models: six Asha phones running Series 40 and four Lumias.

That’s dramatically smaller lineup than in the past, but that’s not enough for everybody. Last year Twitter and Square co-founder Jack Dorsey suggested that Nokia “focus on 3″ products in an attempt to bring clarity back to its offering.

Nokia: you make too many products. Focus on 3.

— Jack Dorsey (@jack) October 26, 2011

Slimming down further is tough for a business like Nokia which is used to supplying product at all levels of the market, in many different segments. But it is making more progress down this route, offloading things like the blingy but incompatible Vertu brand. The question is which three products would it focus on?

Look to the past

Plenty of people think that while Nokia’s previous strategy was not perfect, it at least had it in control of the full stack: hardware and software. For some that means that there is still a chance that MeeGo, the Linux-based OS that emerged from work done by Nokia, Intel and others. The MeeGo-powered N9, for example, had a lot of fans.

In fact, MeeGo is still considered viable by Jolla, a startup of former Nokians who are trying to build it into a fully-featured OS. In an interview with the Arctic Startup blog, Jolla CEO Jussi Hurmola laid out a few details, including the fact that the phone “will offer a developer mode that developers and enthusiasts can use to get more out of the device.”

But there are a lot of unanswered questions here still:

A smartphone with out any apps is fairly undesirable these days, so building an app ecosystem will be a major challenge for Jolla. Hurmola only commented that they believe they have the answer to that problem, but it’s difficult to imagine how exactly they will build that support considering that Microsoft is pumping millions into its ecosystem (such as programs like AppCampus), with only fair results.

And then there’s Symbian: not yet abandoned by the company, and still being updated to service the millions of existing users out there. If Symbian keeps its head above water, does it become a viable plan B?

Go Android

Nokia has already said in the past that it considered working with Google but decided against becoming just one of dozens of manufacturers building on Android. And in a situation where it has, that argument makes plenty of sense — after all, why become yet another Android supplier when you can work closely with a software provider (in this case, Microsoft) in a productive, close relationship?

Except here’s the problem, Microsoft is not proving to be the partner Nokia expected: the appearance of Microsoft Surface tablet PC shows its apparent willingness to piss off OEMs, while the decision to make Windows 8 incompatible with previous versions left Nokia having to rapidly discount Lumia handsets.

That’s left plenty of people suggesting that maybe Android will be the way to go: from pundits suggesting that “only Android can refloat Nokia’s sinking ship” to the hackers who are trying to make it happen by getting the N9 running Android Jellybean.

Get rid of Stephen Elop

Like many former Nokia staff, Tomi Ahonen — now a prominent mobile industry analyst — is bullish about the company’s fortunes… if it chooses the right path. But right now, he suggests, what is happening is “carnage”, as the business jettisons its strengths in order to chase. The answer? A change at the top.

In a blog post on Thursday, Ahonen pointed out that the former Microsoft man has presided over a massive decline and suggested his removal would be best for the company:

When Elop took over, in the first full quarter he was in charge, Nokia’s smartphone unit sold 28 million smartphones and had 29% market share. Nokia was twice as big as Apple and three times bigger than Samsung. Nokia’s smartphone unit was growing sales strongly – the year 2010 Nokia had seen bigger growth in units sold of its own smartphones than Apple had with the iPhone! Now the unit sells 10.2 million smartphones, the market share is down to 6%.

[…]

Nokia has thrown away 4 out of every 5 loyal customers it held only a year and a half ago! Yes, we are witnessing history being made – history of the worst CEO of all time (And it will only get worse in Q3). Pay attention to this, this is the classic case study for MBA’s of the future to study how not to destroy your company, using methods like the Elop Effect.

Ahonen’s not alone. Former Nokia exec Lee Williams is another who has ripped into Elop’s management by saying “There’s no overarching vision for this company”, while former Apple and HP man Jean-Louis Gassée questioned his credentials.

“He has zero experience in terms of what makes a smartphone maker tick. And what is his experience in supply chain management? Zero,” he told Computing earlier this month.

There is one option not listed above, of course:

Don’t change anything

Elop is at least consistent in his messaging: turning Nokia into a winner will take time and pain.

And there were some notes from Thursday’s results that felt maybe, just maybe, like a tiny chink of light. For example the fact that Lumia shipped 4 million units in the last quarter, more than expected. There are caveats: shipping is not the same as selling, expectations were already low, and while 4 million may feel like progress it is really just a drop in the ocean (Apple, by contrast, sold more than 35 million iPhones in its Q2).

But certainly a few posters on my last Nokia story argued that things were on the right track. Here’s S Kyle Davis, for example:

“It’s just their low end phone business that is suffering, as the market overall is shifting to smartphones. Nokia is shifting with it, but it will probably take a year or more.”

Meanwhile Evster88 (who accused me of huffing glue) said things were improving.

“You are indeed missing the big picture here. Nokia’s restructuring is WORKING and public opinion on Windows Phone is steadily improving.”

The evidence for that is hard to see. The market, which had an initial small bounce after Thursday’s results, quickly reverted to its gloomy view of Nokia’s future. But Elop is convinced that if he keeps going, it will click. However, even if he is correct there’s another question: whether he’s got the money to keep the company afloat in the meantime.

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Philipp Humm is out at T-Mobile, and we don’t know why. Maybe he really was planning to leave all along, as he claimed in an internal memo. Maybe he’s being forced out by parent company Deutsche Telekom for the failure of the AT&T-Mo merger. Or maybe he was brought on board in 2010 for the sole reason of selling the U.S. subsidiary and now that a sale is longer feasible, he’s moving on to the next project.

Whatever the reason, the move is sudden, and T-Mobile finds itself looking for a new chief executive. We have some unsolicited advice for whomever that replacement will be, as well as acting CEO Jim Ailing: Don’t mess with Humm’s work.

T-Mobile may be suffering at the hands of its much larger rivals Verizon Wireless and AT&T, but the last thing T-Mobile needs right now is the strategy shake up that a new CEO invariably brings. After the failed merger with AT&T, Humm and his team put together a solid plan to become a competitive force in the market. Here are the reasons why we think T-Mo is on the right track:

• It has the most competitively priced data voice and data plans in the market. It may not have true unlimited data like Sprint, but it has a lot more options for cheap and plentiful smartphone bandwidth. It’s also challenging the long ingrained subsidy model in the U.S., offering customers lower rates if they pay for their devices up front. As our data consumption continues to grow, those innovative pricing policies will become a key differentiator from Ma Bell and Big Red.

• It amazingly has pulled an LTE network out of thin airwaves. T-Mobile has always been spectrum poor, but CTO Neville Ray has shown tremendous resourcefulness with the meager cards he has been dealt. By refarming T-Mobile’s GSM capacity and playing musical chairs with its networks, Ray not only managed to eke out an LTE network but even found room to expand its existing HSPA+ network.

• That future LTE network may not be as big nor as robust as its competitors, but T-Mobile is taking all the necessary steps to ensure it will become one. It wrenched the spectrum it needed from AT&T to complete its LTE network on the West Coast, and it negotiated a very shrewd pact with Verizon for the airwaves its needs on the East Coast. That deal may have been cynical, given its condemnation of Verizon in the recent past, but T-Mobile is a business. If T-Mobile is going to compete with the big operators it will need to make the same Machiavellian choices as the big operators.

• T-Mobile is set to get the iPhone. The same network reconfiguration that will give it LTE will also plant its HSPA+ network in the terra firma of the PCS band. That means any iPhone that works on AT&T’s network will work on T-Mobile. As I have written before, Apple isn’t stupid. When T-Mobile is iPhone-ready, Apple will jump at the chance to offer it on its network.

• Instead of fighting off the growing cadre of mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs), T-Mobile has started to embrace them. Last year T-Mobile opened its data networks to the resellers, and since then Straight Talk, Simple Mobile, GSM Nation and many others have all signed up, giving T-Mobile a lucrative source of revenue.

Wireless industry analyst Chetan Sharma believes T-Mobile is still weak when it comes to selling to businesses and vertical industries like health care. Sharma also thinks it needs to come up with more services like its Bobsled VoIP calling service in order to fend off the growing threat of over-the-top service providers. But for the most part, T-Mobile is on the right track, Sharma told me in an email:

T-Mobile has done a pretty good job on the network front under the leadership of Neville Ray. They upgraded their backhaul to Fiber and moved rapidly on HSPA+. Even the LTE deal was put together in record time. Normally, these things can take many quarters. Their marketing is always edgy. They put the top 3 operators on the back foot with their 4G marketing (rightly or wrongly). They are clearly positioned well to be a good value competitor. At this point, addition of iPhone is not going to tilt the scales too favorably. It is useful to prevent churn but expect no significant defections.

Of course, as Sharma implies, this wasn’t all Humm’s doing. Humm ran the company, but the groundwork for many of these initiatives was laid before he arrived in May 2010. As David Beren of TMoNews suggested on Twitter, T-Mobile may have accomplished what it has despite Humm’s presence:

I believe he was brought in to prep the company for sale, which left the company distracted from strategies that should have launched a long time ago . . . [While] the “challenger strategy” is great, [it] should have happened 18 months ago.

Regardless of whether T-Mobile’s current aggressive strategy is Humm’s legacy or the work of his team, we think it’s a good plan. T-Mobile’s next CEO should give it a chance to work.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock user Shawn Hempel

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At this point, the fact that Facebook is struggling with its mobile strategy is not really news. The company itself flagged the issue in its pre-IPO documents, saying advertising revenue is not keeping up with expectations, and its $1 billion Instagram purchase was widely seen as an admission that it needs a lot of help in the mobile department. But does it make any sense for the company to build its own phone? Some argue this would be a natural extension of the social network’s strategy, but others say it would be a monumentally stupid move to make and is almost inevitably doomed.

Talk of a dedicated Facebook phone resurfaced this weekend with a report from Nick Bilton in the New York Times that said the social network “hopes to release its own smartphone by next year” and has been hiring hardware engineers and developers — including several from Apple — as part of that effort. According to the sources Bilton talked to, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg sees the mobile-phone project as something crucial to the future of the company, which just went public in a somewhat rocky IPO. Said one Facebook employee:

Mark is worried that if he doesn’t create a mobile phone in the near future that Facebook will simply become an app on other mobile platforms.

There are also signs Facebook could be putting together all the elements that would be required for a device that could (theoretically at least) challenge Apple’s dominance in mobile: There is the new Facebook Camera app, which could be connected directly to a device’s camera; the social network recently launched its own Apple-style app store as a central repository for related services and software; Facebook Messages could be the company’s version of Apple’s iMessage; and there have been reports that the social network is planning to acquire the Opera browser.

This is Facebook’s third kick at the mobile can

As Bilton notes, this is Facebook’s third kick at the can when it comes to mobile. Two years ago, there were rumors the company was planning to release a phone made by handset maker INQ Mobile, the same company that released the first phone with a dedicated Facebook button in 2008. As Om detailed in a post in 2010, the idea was that Facebook would be a kind of social layer on top of a version of Android and that the social network’s functions would be deeply integrated into the device on every level. The INQ Cloud Touch, which released last year, offered at least some of these elements but didn’t take off.

Then came another report from All Things Digital that Facebook was actually working with HTC on a full-fledged Facebook device. That sparked a debate between our two mobile specialists — Kevin Tofel and Kevin Fitchard — over whether the social network needed a dedicated handset. Fitchard argued it did, because Facebook would be at a competitive disadvantage if it had to rely on other companies to host its Facebook buttons and other features. Tofel, however, said he didn’t think many users would want a phone that was so overwhelmingly connected to Facebook.

According to Bilton’s report, the current Facebook project is an expansion of the “Buffy” project that All Things Digital wrote about last year and reiterated earlier this year. And Facebook provided the exact same statement that it made when ATD wrote about the concept, which said:

We’re working across the entire mobile industry; with operators, hardware manufacturers, OS providers, and application developers.

Some have speculated Facebook could fast-track its mobile ambitions by simply acquiring INQ Mobile, in much the same way Google boosted its mobile plans by buying Motorola. Venture investor Eghosa Omoigui says the social network should hire some Qualcomm engineers and focus on emerging markets or possibly even acquire BlackBerry maker Research In Motion, which is on the ropes and cutting thousands of staff in an attempt to remain profitable. Former Wall Street analyst Henry Blodget, however, says getting into the hardware business would be a gigantic mistake, since it is “an extraordinarily difficult, low-margin, commodity business.”

Control the platform and you control the consumer

In many ways, the battle to control the mobile experience is a logical extension of the walled-garden building that both Facebook and more recently Google have been engaged in — that is, an attempt to control almost every interaction with users and thereby convince (or force) them to spend more time within the company’s ecosystem, where more data about them can be harvested. That was the rationale behind the launch of Google+, and it has been Facebook’s primary motivation for virtually everything, including the development of the “open graph” platform.

Facebook has had a somewhat fractious relationship with Apple and its market-dominant platforms: An attempt at a partnership built around Apple’s Ping social network failed, and Steve Jobs later said Facebook’s demands were “too onerous” — although it’s possible the Apple CEO recognized Mark Zuckerberg’s ambitions and decided they were more like competitors than partners. In any case, not long after that, Apple formed an almost unprecedented partnership with Twitter, which has been integrated as a kind of social layer throughout Apple’s operating systems and platforms.

As Bilton and others have pointed out, creating hardware is a very different business from building social software, and it’s not clear that Facebook would be able to bridge that gap, regardless of how many billions it throws at the problem. The company’s existing mobile-app efforts have been lackluster at best (although its new Facebook Camera software has gotten some good reviews). It’s also not clear how building a hardware business would necessarily help Facebook generate more revenue. IDC mobile analyst Kevin Restivo said in an email interview that:

Mobile phone production is a business Facebook has zero experience in. It’s also a business with considerable cost and risk attached [and] no amount of homework done by Mark Zuckerberg is likely to help bridge the operational knowledge and gap needed to compete against the market leaders.

After raising $16 billion in an IPO, Facebook obviously has the money to make some risky bets on building a brand-new business (or businesses). It clearly needs to do something to produce the kind of blockbuster growth that would justify what is still a phenomenally expensive stock price, and the company has said its future rests in large part on the mobile market. All of those factors have created a perfect storm of market conditions and desires, and the result could be a very big and potentially disruptive bet by Mr. Zuckerberg.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Olaf Gradin

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He was talking about a now-familiar bait-and-switch that Google keeps running on web businesses. First, the search giant offers a little traffic boost to sites that organize data in certain useful ways. Then it turns the game on its head and — without any notice — starts using that structured data to inform its own services. Finally, with a disturbing inevitability, it launches its own competing product that steps in and replace yours.

By the time it starts happening, you’re already in… and there’s no way back.

Google has done this across a number of areas, perhaps most famously in local listings — witness the clash between Yelp and Hotpot — and travel (upsetting Kayak)… and it just keeps on going.

“What’s happened in the past has made us wary of them,” said the founder, who asked to remain anonymous.

“I can’t imagine Apple or Facebook behaving like this. I mean, why build for Google?”

Little respect

Those comments are not unusual. In fact, they come as just the latest in a series of growing frustrations and irritations that seem to be building among the developer community. Initiatives like Google+ and Search Plus Your World want to turn Google’s substantial reach inside out and become a serious platform, yet the company treats third party developers with little respect.

The result is that it gets very little love back.

Last year our own Barb Darrow highlighted problems with Google App Engine and its cloud services in a piece called “Why Google gets no respect from developers”.

 Google’s cloud, as massive as it is, is seen as something of a roach motel for applications: you can check them in, but not necessarily check them out should you opt for another deployment choice. Developers say once they write for GAE, the application is locked in.

That’s difficult to stomach from a company that has built its vast mobile business — among others — on the idea that closed is bad and open is good. Faced with privacy concerns, the company is happy to trumpet data portability for users (though quite where they can take their liberated data is unclear), while at the same time developers and information are effectively locked in.

And then there’s the problem of delivering on your promises. Android developers across Europe have been reporting that payments due from Google have not been delivered.

All of this has built to a point where, now, the people who build web applications are becoming incredibly cautious about the company that is, for many users, synonymous with the web.

Take the decision by Foursquare to drop Google Maps — part of a trend of companies to defect to other mapping services. Yes, there are financial considerations — but there’s also an issue of trust.

Just this week, in a notorious post why he left Google for Microsoft, former engineering director James Whittaker suggested that there were few reasons for builders to trust a company that is increasingly losing its focus on innovation in favor of a focus on advertising:

The Google I was passionate about was a technology company that empowered its employees to innovate. The Google I left was an advertising company with a single corporate-mandated focus.

Technically I suppose Google has always been an advertising company, but for the better part of the last three years, it didn’t feel like one. Google was an ad company only in the sense that a good TV show is an ad company: having great content attracts advertisers.

Take it with a pinch of salt, but it’s an important signal.

Would you trust them?

Mathew wrote yesterday about the problem with Google+ not being design, but demand. That’s true. But there’s a deeper, longer-term problem taking root here too.

Google realizes that its services must be platforms to succeed. After all, the companies it now eyes up enviously did precisely that. Facebook only became a truly significant force when it turned into a platform. Apple too, leapt up the ladder when it became an app platform that enabled developers to connect with users all over the world. And, of course, Microsoft blazed the trail by turning the whole operating system into the most powerful platform (there’s a reason Steve Ballmer made a fool of himself by shouting “developers”.)

Of course all these companies have had their problems in relationships with developers — whether it’s money, access, transparency or something else. But there’s no doubt that where the benefits outweigh the drawbacks, developers will vote with their feet.

And, as an increasing number of developers feel that Google will treat them poorly, or that it is simply too much of a threat, it’s lost the future. Yet Larry Page is even telling his own engineers that they should leave if they don’t agree with his plan to focus on a “single, unified, ‘beautiful’ product across everything”. If that’s what’s happening inside the Googleplex, what hope for those on the outside?

Let’s go back to where we started: the startup founder who sees Google as a drug dealer looking to offer him a sweetener that gets him addicted. Since he doesn’t want that to happen, he’s left with that single question.

“I mean, why build for Google?”

Why indeed.

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Games for the Weekend is a weekly feature aimed at helping you avoid doing something constructive with your downtime. Each Friday we’ll be recommending a game for Mac, iPhone or iPad that we think is awesome enough to keep you busy until Monday, at least.

I have a simple movie rating system: if it’s an action movie, looks good and has lots of explosions, it gets at least two stars. I’m not looking for movie of the year; just a simple good time. By that rating system, Crimson: Steam Pirates would garner at least two stars. Your first mate is a pretty lady, and you spend your time blowing stuff up. What’s not to love?

This is by no means a historically accurate game, unless Blackbeard and his ilk had steam-powered pirate ships the history books failed to record. Crimson is a mix of real-time and turn-based gameplay. You plot out where you want your ships to go and the AI resolves the turn. Thankfully, it handles the fine details of combat and targeting automatically. Plotting your moves is fairly easy: You can tell how far your ship will move and there’s a shadow image of your boat that will tell you where it will end up. I wish there was an easier way to tell your ship to hold its position without futzing with the shadow. I also find myself forgetting I have more than one ship, and the other continues to sail off on its own.

There’s an ages-old adage I remember from the wise men who stood on the street corner in my old neighborhood: The first hit is free. Bungie Aerospace use the same theory. The initial cost of the eight missions that make up the first chapter is zero dollars and zero cents. Chapter Two, which has an additional eight missions, is an in-app purchase for $1.99. There are also two pass-and-play multiplayer duels. Sadly, it doesn’t appear to support multiplayer through Game Center.

The only issue I’ve found is the game won’t preserve your game if you quit the app. It’s not a huge issue, but an inconvenience if your boss walks in while you’re playing you get to your train stop and haven’t finished the mission. Crimson is a lot of fun, though, and I love that the developers let you try it for free. Right now, you can play a total of 16 missions, free and paid, and another eight are in the pipeline.

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“Dem bullets sure are pointy,” one grunt cautions when he’s hit. When the next volley takes him out, he dramatically proclaims, “Yer… Gonna… Miss me.” High on fun and short on seriousness, The Great Little War Game ($2.99, iOS universal) is this week’s featured title.

The voiceovers, done with a Southern drawl, actually add to the charm of this game. If you don’t like them, you can get different ones via in-app purchase. The cartoony graphics are somewhat reminiscent of Team Fortress 2, which is a good thing. While it’s a turn-based game, it does have a resource management component reminiscent of real-time games like Starcraft.

The Great Little War Game isn’t a new game, but it has recently been updated, adding 10 new levels to the previous version’s 20, and five new skirmish maps. The campaign also has a tutorial mode, easing you into the game’s mechanics. The biggest downside I’ve found is the lack of a manual or help file. While the tutorial does a good job at teaching you, it’s easy to forget concepts if you haven’t played for a bit. Also, there is no online mode; multiplayer is simply pass-n-play. Which is a missed opportunity, since this would be a great game for online play.

The Great Little War Game is a great iOS game. Quick enough to pick up and play, but addictive enough to make you miss an appointment or two. The recent update also makes additional voice packs “free for forever.” You can purchase two additional map packs are available for $.99 each.

I highly recommend this game to any fans of strategy games. Underneath the silly voices and cartoony graphics is a game with fantastic strategy mechanics worth hours of play.

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While many derided Google for bringing a knife to a gunfight, Google has responded today saying that Microsoft is trying to pull one over on everyone. Google’s David Drummond, SVP and Chief Legal Officer, said Microsoft’s offer to cooperate on the Novell bid was a “false gotcha,” that wouldn’t have necessarily afforded Google or other Android partners any protection had Google jointly purchased the Novell patents.

“Microsoft’s objective has been to keep from Google and Android device-makers any patents that might be used to defend against their attacks. A joint acquisition of the Novell patents that gave all parties a license would have eliminated any protection these patents could offer to Android against attacks from Microsoft and its bidding partners. Making sure that we would be unable to assert these patents to defend Android — and having us pay for the privilege — must have seemed like an ingenious strategy to them. We didn’t fall for it,” Drummond wrote.

What he means is that even if Google had won the Novell patents with Microsoft, Microsoft could have still licensed those same patents to another company, who could have in turn sued Google or other Android licenses. And then the Novell patents would not be a deterrent any more against attacks or would be weak leverage to force a cross-licensing deal.

The Novell patents were eventually bought by Microsoft, Apple, Oracle and EMC. But the Department of Justice in April ordered that the patents should be available for licensing at a fair price. Google is now hoping to get the DOJ to do the same with the Nortel patents, which Apple, RIM, Microsoft and others purchased for $4.5 billion last month, beating out Google in the process, something Google called “anti-competitive strategy.”

Frank Shaw, Microsoft Head of Communications, responded to Drummond’s latest comments on Twitter explaining why he thinks Google turned down Microsoft:

“Because they wanted to buy something that they could use to assert against someone else. So partnering with others & reducing patent liability across the industry is not something they wanted to help do.”

Drummond and Shaw raises a good points. Google wouldn’t want to buy something if it didn’t provide blanket protection. But Shaw points out that Google is only interested in using patents to force cross-licensing deals for itself.

The back and forth is certainly entertaining. But it still doesn’t undercut some of the other criticisms that Google has faced in the last day concerning Drummond’s original remarks. As John Gruber and others have pointed out, Drummond is quick to call the patents used to attack Android “bogus” but it didn’t say which ones nor did it explain why it was anti-competitive behavior when Apple and other bid on the Nortel patents but why it would be different if Google had won. And as some like Paul Thurrott have pointed out, Google is able to leverage its dominance in one market to offer a free product in another, disrupting the business of Microsoft, Apple and others.

Despite all the rhetoric, Google is in a tough spot. It has to obtain more patent heft. The company continues to rail against the patent system but has to work within it to compete. At some point though, if Google can’t come up with the necessary leverage or protection from regulators, it will have to start paying up. And that, Android’s competitors would probably argue, wouldn’t be anti-competitive but would actual restore competition, forcing the formerly free Android to compete against paid operating systems. We’ll just have to see whose definition of anti-competitive wins out here.

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