Just do it!

There are a few people at work I enjoy having conversation with, and one of them is a software engineer with a lot of interest in marketing and starting a company.

One day he and I had a discussion about high-tech marketing strategies. I gave examples and principles from books I have read like Crossing the Chasm, Inside the Tornado, and Innovator's Dilemma. But, he basically discarded them as garbage and they are all just after-the-facts, trying to explain what made companies successful. Hindsight is always 20-20, and it is easy to justify actions after success. I try very hard to make counter his points, but it didn't fly.

The truth is that he was right. None of the authors - neither Geoffrey Moore and Clayton Christensen - has ever run a successful company. Also, so many successful companies in the valley have been accidental success. Look no further than Google. Larry Page and Sergey Brin never wanted to start a company. After successful prototype, they just wanted to sell the technology. Nobody including Yahoo wanted to buy the technology. Everyone thought search market was mature enough with no room for new player. They sat on a $100,000 check made out to "Google, Inc." from Andy Bechtolsheim, mulling over whether to start a company or not. The same with Craig Newman from Craigslist.org, which is arguably one of the most visited websites in the world. He started out by managing a bunch of mailing lists, which was a pain and took a lot of his time. He wanted a better way to manage the mailing lists, and that's how Craigslist.org was born. Mark Zuckerberg from Facebook never intended to create a company of current Facebook. He just wanted to find a way to see who's who in his freshman class, and that's how Facebook started. Similar stories exist for other companies like eBay and Paypal. Have they all followed the strategies and tactics laid out in marketing books? I am not sure. But, it is surely easy to tell the world - after such huge success - why certain actions taken at the time were so brilliant. But, who knows at the time it was motivated entirely differently?

In addition, most successful start-ups happened to be started by engineers, not marketing-types. From HP to Cisco, Sun Microsystems, Yahoo, and Google, all of them were founded by engineers.

Guy Kawasaki from Garage Technology Ventures said that one common mistake an entrepreneur makes is writing a business plan first. Instead, he or she should start building service or product and starting selling them first. It's utmost important to get customer feedback as soon as possible. By incorporating customer feedback and improving service or product, the entrepreneur could build his/her business. If more capital is required for further growth, it's much easier to raise funding with proven business model.

So, to my fellow entrepreneurs, JUST DO IT!

Security: Tech's all-time top flop

InfoWorld recently ran a story about high-tech's all-time top 25 flops, and security took the honor of being the first place. The list included pretty familiar flops like IBM's OS/2, Apple's Newton, and IPv6. As someone who works in the security industry, the finding isn't all that surprising. It was actually pretty amusing, because my colleagues and I all knew security would in in that top 25. As in my previous blog entry, the number of malware is reaching an epidemic level and there are many variations of past and current malware including virus, worm and spyware.

It looks like the security industry has reached its limitation with current techniques.

Microsoft + Yahoo is a bad, bad move

Bad for Microsoft shareholders and probably good for Yahoo shareholders. 62% premium above Thursday's closing price is a good offer, and board of directors at Yahoo must consider it very seriously.

Why is it bad and why it wouldn't work? Let me count the ways...

1. Two mediocre companies - mediocre in terms of Internet world - will not create one better Internet company. Windows Live sucks. Yahoo has been losing its market share in search market and its new ad marketing system, Panama, hasn't made difference to Yahoo. I really can't see how the combined company will compete with companies like Google better.....

2. Mega merger rarely works. The reason why Cisco has been successful in M&A is because Cisco targets mostly small companies. There are a few exceptions, but it takes enormous amount of work to integrate large companies. It will take long time for Microsoft and Yahoo to work through integration, and competition will be far ahead of Micrsoft+Yahoo by then.

3. Microsoft has bullied its way into browser world by including internet explorer with its operating system, but these days, especially to web 2.0 companies and their web applications, browsers do not matter. Their applications are browser-agnostic in most part. Google returns the same result whether you have IE or Firefox or any other browser. Other Google services (or applications to an extent) will run the same whether on IE or Firefox or any other browser (if there is difference, it would be minimal). Furthermore, they are also OS-agnostic. Whether you run Linux, Solaris, or Windows, these web applications and web sites are made to run
the same no matter what OS and what browser you use. This is precisely why Microsoft should and is worried about Google and the whole slew of web 2.0 companies (look at Facebook and its huge list of applications - Facebook is already its own platform).

However, motivation is clear, and the proposed deal looks enticing to both Yahoo (for capital, financial and resource reasons) and Microsoft (for technology and market share gain reasons).... But I can't help but feeling that this will mark the time Microsoft finally jumps the shark......