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December 29, 2004
Till next Year...
I am heading up the mountains for New Year eve so there will be a short break in communications. Back in the New Year.
Posted by Basileios at 05:30 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 24, 2004
Happy Christmas!
Posted by Basileios at 07:10 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 17, 2004
Froogle blues...
Well the good news is that now Froogle also includes reviews (mainly from CNET) of products. The bad news of course is that it took them so long to implement that all (most) the Christmas shoppers missed this feature. Oh well... we will use it next year I suppose...
Also don't you find all the noise from ebay products annoying in Froogle lately?
Posted by Basileios at 04:12 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 16, 2004
How Not to Do a Discount....
This will have to go down as one of the worse ways of trying to sell something in discount. Do you remember the **** up of Mercury back in the early nineties? (call anywhere in the world for free on Christmas day?). This comes very close to it...
Keki Bhote in The Power of the Ultimate Six Sigma does a calculation in which a defect in one car (not treated properly) costs the car company about $1M over a lifetime and not just the $30k that the car actually costs (the customer may be so turned off he will never buy off this car company again, and he will be bound to tell his friends about the problem).
I hate to think of the guys in Dell doing a similar calculation on how much this has cost them... ouch...
Posted by Basileios at 05:48 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 13, 2004
Google Suggests
Google has launched a new service in Google labs in which keyword suggestions are offered to you as you type your search. According to the F.A.Q.
'Our algorithms use a wide range of information to predict the queries users are most likely to want to see. For example, Google Suggest uses data about the overall popularity of various searches to help rank the refinements it offers. An example of this type of popularity information can be found in the Google Zeitgeist. Google Suggest does not base its suggestions on your personal search history.'
Good as all this sounds I must say that I do not find the service very useful since it seems to be working mostly on a popularity basis. The number of results that is also displayed next to each of the keywords is also totally meaningless to someone who just wants results in the search engine result pages and in most cases will not search further than page two, wether the number of results are 2,987,987,000 or 45,000. A thematic categorization and 'splitting' of the results as is becoming more and more common in all the other search engines is yet to appear in Google.
Posted by Basileios at 05:47 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 09, 2004
Its Not Just The PCs...
The news of the sale of IBMs PC unit to Lenovo the largest Chinese PC manufacturer took me a bit by surprise. The two companies were in negotiations for 13 months before the deal yesterday but I somehow could never believe that it would work the way it did. For me this is the most imprtant business news of the year as it represents the beginning in the shape of things to come over the next 3 to 5 years.
It is pretty obvious that IBM tried to dump a rather difficult and small margin market in order to gain a foothold in the Chinese server - and software? - market. However, I doubt wether everything will go as planned.
For me this move means that many things will change in both the PC and server market but also - and most imprtant really - in the software market. My feeling is that Microsoft has more to lose out of this move than HP or Dell will lose out of Lenovo.
Posted by Basileios at 05:54 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 06, 2004
Seth Godin, The Best of...
The list of the best postings of Seth Godin in the year 2004. Certainly worth a second look - although I think the benchmarking blog should have been there as well.
Posted by Basileios at 11:13 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack