User-Centered Design - Kelikuru.com

The voice is loud and clear! Quite a number of Internet users including Yahoo shareholders want their CEO Jerry Yang to step aside.  From “Boy wonder” to “underdog”, it is not a very pleasant experience to Mr Yang indeed! 

“I am Yang, Jerry Yang”

As Yahoo has experienced a prolonged period of turbulence, Jerry Yang took the reign to run the company over the past nine months. Mr Yang described it as his “passion” to save the internet company from state of chaos and disorientation. That reminds TG of James Bond, a fictional character who will brace for dangers and step out with his dinner jacket or tuxedo to save the beleaguered world.

With loads of secret weapons and the guidance of M or Q,  James is invincible, fears no one, finishes his mission with girls falling in his arm at the end of movie.    

The reality is somewhat different. Jerry has faced a lot of challenges in 2008 despite his efforts to pinning down strategic plan of building a consumer brand for Yahoo. Time is not on his side, he was questioned again for not accepting Microsoft’s acquisition offer in the latest Web 2.0 interview.  Mr Yang was apparently upset as news of Google’s decision to walk away from a 10-year search advertising deal with Yahoo surfaced last week.

It takes more than courage to keep a distance

If TG were Jerry, I would have considered learning from Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. Steve left his company Apple once - again not his own will, continued his quest for new adventure. He graciously returned to Apple after building NeXT and later found another renowned company, Pixar Animation Studios. Getting too close to Yahoo, Jerry may not be able to see the whole picture. It may cool off his head when distancing himself from the company for a while.

There are two things TG would suggest: 

• Jerry can relief himself from daily operation and management, focusing more on planning and product development. Creativity needs space and time! 
• He can spread the news that he’s looking for Mr M or Q to create ultimate weapons for Yahoo. Great prize can be awarded to the think tank.   

Before the Judgement Day, nobody knows who’s going to be a loser or winner.

Life has a lot of ups and downs… Keep going, Jerry!!

Related Articles:

• Yahoo!- backfill with Google ads
• Yahoo says yes to Google ad deal
• Microsoft walks away from Yahoo! acquisition plan

written by TG

Our behavior in using Internet, which include the time we spend on a web page and the pages that most of us visit oftentimes will potentially become major barometers of page importance, according to Microsoft research team.  

Here is an excerpt from “BrowseRank: Letting Web Users Vote for Page Importance,”, an academic paper co-authored by Microsoft researchers Bin Gao, Tie-Yan Liu, and Hang Li; Zhiming Ma of the Chinese Academy of Sciences; Yuting Liu from Beijing Jiaotong University; Shuyuan He from Peking University; and Nankai University’s Ying Zhang.

In this paper, we propose computing page importance by using a ’user browsing graph’ created from user behavior data….In this way, we can leverage hundreds of millions of users’ implicit voting on page importance. Experimental results show that BrowseRank indeed outperforms the baseline methods such as PageRank and TrustRank in several tasks.

Should it be implemented, ordinary internet users will truly become the Internet voters. They cast their ballots by visiting their favorite pages more often and devoting additional ”quality time” with them. TG does not have a good idea  of how the mathematical computation was done, but I am quite sure that many users like us would love to see the internet development in the future would consider “user-centered design”.

written by TG \\ tags: BrowseRank, Microsoft, Search

Yahoo Inc reached an agreement with Google Inc yesterday to allow her archival to put search ads on her site.  We believed that Yahoo is pinning her hope to fend off Microsoft Corp’s revived acquisition by making her stand with Google, her primary competitor in search advertising.

Yahoo‘ s ads and Google’s would be pitted againist each in an auction style process that would make a deal easier to pass regulatory approval. The deal is expected to raise challenge from anitrust law in the US.

Microsoft had sought a tie-up with Yahoo for more than a year and by early May had offered up to $47.5 billion, or $33 per share, to buy the Internet company. Microsoft eventually walked away from the deal in her first strike as reported in our previous post. 

Although Yahoo has narrowly escaped from Microsoft’s on-again and off-again takeovers this time, we are still anxious to see how Jerry Yang and his team to turn the tide.  Jerry is simply giving up his main sources of profit to his competitor and no one can predict what happen next.

written by TG \\ tags: Google, Microsoft, Search, Yahoo

Microsoft finally dropped her acquisition plan against Jerry Yang’s Yahoo! after months of negotitations ever since January, 2008. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer sent Yang thank-you-very-much letter on May 3rd and warned him against his partnership with search giant Google, which would jeopardize Yahoo! ultimate interests in paid advertising.

 Below is the details of the letter:

May 3, 2008Mr. Jerry Yang
CEO and Chief Yahoo
Yahoo! Inc.
701 First Avenue
Sunnyvale, CA 94089

 

Dear Jerry:
After over three months, we have reached the conclusion of the process regarding a possible combination of Microsoft and Yahoo!.

I first want to convey my personal thanks to you, your management team, and Yahoo!’s Board of Directors for your consideration of our proposal. I appreciate the time and attention all of you have given to this matter, and I especially appreciate the time that you have invested personally. I feel that our discussions this week have been particularly useful, providing me for the first time with real clarity on what is and is not possible.

I am disappointed that Yahoo! has not moved towards accepting our offer. I first called you with our offer on January 31 because I believed that a combination of our two companies would have created real value for our respective shareholders and would have provided consumers, publishers, and advertisers with greater innovation and choice in the marketplace. Our decision to offer a 62 percent premium at that time reflected the strength of these convictions.

In our conversations this week, we conveyed our willingness to raise our offer to $33.00 per share, reflecting again our belief in this collective opportunity. This increase would have added approximately another $5 billion of value to your shareholders, compared to the current value of our initial offer. It also would have reflected a premium of over 70 percent compared to the price at which your stock closed on January 31. Yet it has proven insufficient, as your final position insisted on Microsoft paying yet another $5 billion or more, or at least another $4 per share above our $33.00 offer.

Also, after giving this week’s conversations further thought, it is clear to me that it is not sensible for Microsoft to take our offer directly to your shareholders. This approach would necessarily involve a protracted proxy contest and eventually an exchange offer. Our discussions with you have led us to conclude that, in the interim, you would take steps that would make Yahoo! undesirable as an acquisition for Microsoft.
We regard with particular concern your apparent planning to respond to a “hostile” bid by pursuing a new arrangement that would involve or lead to the outsourcing to Google of key paid Internet search terms offered by Yahoo! today. In our view, such an arrangement with the dominant search provider would make an acquisition of Yahoo! undesirable to us for a number of reasons:

• First, it would fundamentally undermine Yahoo!’s own strategy and long-term viability by encouraging advertisers to use Google as opposed to your Panama paid search system. This would also fragment your search advertising and display advertising strategies and the ecosystem surrounding them. This would undermine the reliance on your display advertising business to fuel future growth.
• Given this, it would impair Yahoo’s ability to retain the talented engineers working on advertising systems that are important to our interest in a combination of our companies.
• In addition, it would raise a host of regulatory and legal problems that no acquirer, including Microsoft, would want to inherit. Among other things, this would consolidate market share with the already-dominant paid search provider in a manner that would reduce competition and choice in the marketplace.
• This would also effectively enable Google to set the prices for key search terms on both their and your search platforms and, in the process, raise prices charged to advertisers on Yahoo. In addition to whatever resulting legal problems, this seems unwise from a business perspective unless in fact one simply wishes to use this as a vehicle to exit the paid search business in favor of Google.
• It could foreclose any chance of a combination with any other search provider that is not already relying on Google’s search services.

Accordingly, your apparent plan to pursue such an arrangement in the event of a proxy contest or exchange offer leads me to the firm decision not to pursue such a path. Instead, I hereby formally withdraw Microsoft’s proposal to acquire Yahoo!.

We will move forward and will continue to innovate and grow our business at Microsoft with the talented team we have in place and potentially through strategic transactions with other business partners.

I still believe even today that our offer remains the only alternative put forward that provides your stockholders full and fair value for their shares. By failing to reach an agreement with us, you and your stockholders have left significant value on the table.

But clearly a deal is not to be.

Thank you again for the time we have spent together discussing this.

Sincerely yours,
Steven A. Ballmer
Chief Executive Officer
Microsoft Corporation

written by TG \\ tags: Google, Microsoft, Yahoo