Microhoo - Wall Street Poll & They Meet

A couple of interesting items about the proposed deal by Microsoft to acquire Yahoo! came out over the last couple of days.

Analysts Give the Thumbs Up to the deal

Reuters provided details on a poll they ran against the Wall Street analysts who cover Microsoft and Yahoo! Some breakout of the numbers given:

• 28 of the 30 respondents say the deal will be done
• 1 of the nay, holds out hopes for AOL
• 1 of the nay, thinks it will be blocked by regulators
• 14 expect MSFT to close the deal at the initial offer
• 4 expect MSFT to convert the deal to all cash
• 12 expect MSFT to raise the price between 413.50 & $35 per share

The full story was in the iht on Sunday.

Exec Meet & Greet

WSJ and others have reported that on Monday, Senior Execs from Microsoft and Yahoo! met so that Microsoft could outline what the vision for what a post-merger entity would look like. The agenda for the meeting was similar to those that Yahoo! held with AOL and News Corp. What’s interesting is that this is the first time the companies have spent some face time together since the unsolicited bid was announced.

Is Yahoo! being tactical by playing nice before Ballmer gets hostile ahead of the Yahoo! board meeting or is Jerry Yang realising that in the face of a hardening economy, he should probably shake hands on this one before it’s too late.

"Beacon Sucks": Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg Keynote from SXSW

The keynote interview of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg at SXSW’08 by Sarah Lacy has all ready had plenty of coverage. Generally, the coverage has been about the supposed awfulness of the interview and the Geek revolution that took place but from listening to the interview, AdViking believes that many people missed some very interesting insights into Facebook and in particular the Facebook strategy around advertising.

One important point that Zuckerberg was at pains to get across is that Facebook is really just part of the macro-trend about bringing technology to bear to facilitate the ease of connectivity and communication between people.

Advertising

Within seconds of Lacy turning the conversation towards advertising, a punter in the crowd neatly summarised the majority of opinion by shouting out, “Beacon Sucks!”. To which Lacy responds by promising that we’ll get to that.

AdViking thought that the primary takeaway about the Facebook monetisation strategy is that it’s going to be an organic evolution that is inline with how people use the platform, both on the site and across the wider web. Zuckerberg also admitted that they announced the basic idea (Beacon) too early and believes that the solution isn’t going to be found in the next couple of years but actually over the next couple of decades.

AdViking would argue that Facebook needs to take the thinking a bit further and provide Users with empowerment tools to become nano-publishers. That is, if Facebook is making money off people’s use of the platform, then those that are keen to do so should be able to get involved in that marketplace.

Beacon, WTF*?

To this question, Zuckerberg shrugs his shoulders and agrees with the indictment. He then takes a step back and takes the opportunity to explain the vision behind Beacon, which can be summarised as:

Beacon was first attempt at trying to tap into a growing trend (very web2.0) that social media interaction is quickly moving away from monolithic sites (e.g.: Facebook) to a collection of social services (e.g.: TripIt, Dopplr, 30Boxes) across the wider web. That is, Beacon was hoped to be a collection point for the usage of social services with a tie into the Facebook ad system and then turn those actions into ads/endorsements.

Another point that AdViking found interesting was that the development of Beacon was done by the Platform team and not the Ad team.

In response to what went wrong, it all came down to communication and in particular about how users can tune the permissions.

Microsoft

With regards to the $15 billion valuation that was gained through the Microsoft deal, Zuckerberg said that others focus on the deals but at Facebook, they believe that to realise their vision they need to build revenue quickly and this was one way.

As to if Microsoft are happy, this was skirted around but jokes were flying about calling Ballmer to ask him.

Adviking’s takeaway is that Facebook views this deal as some easy cash and resources that allows them to focus on the big picture.

The above image was an interpretation of the keynote by graphic artist Sunni Brown.

* WTF - Was Lacy’s rather interesting way of putting a burning question from most people’s minds.

Microsoft and FAST: Bill Gates at the SharePoint Conference

Off the main topic of AdViking, but interesting none the less. As predicted in the post about Getting Religion about Search, some more visibility into Microsoft’s thinking about the importance of Search and how they see FAST helping in this battle was revealed at the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2008.

In the Bill Gates keynote, he talks about the Microsoft approach to Enterprise Search, which is there are three levels to enterprise search and for each of these they have an offering:

1. Entry Level - Microsoft Search Server 2008 Express
2. Infrastructure - MOSS 2007
3. Specialized - This will be covered by FAST

As for FAST, Bill then goes on to say this:

FAST is best in class enterprise search, and it’s got great scale, it handles special data types. In a lot of businesses, this has turned out to be a very, very important tool for them.

Bill then introduces Richard Riley, Senior Technical Product Manager, who does a demo of Search Server Express but more importantly does two demo’s of FAST/SharePoint integration. The first being a great demo of FAST entity extraction to provide navigators mashed up with Silverlight to show the coolest document preview AdViking has seen so far. The second is a demo of zero-term search and how that can applicable to a SharePoint deployment.

You can get the video here (750 kbps) or you should be able to find it from this page: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/events/sharepointconference/materials.mspx

• Scroll to 14:25 to see Bill Gates last day at Microsoft (In case you haven’t seen it)
• Scroll to 47:50 to see Bill Gates discuss search and FAST
• Scroll to 54:45 to see the FAST/SharePoint integration

Also, Microsoft has made some interesting announcements about providing SharePoint and Exchange as online services. All of this, mapped up with the proposal to purchase Yahoo! reads to AdViking like Microsoft is starting the year very aggressively and are looking to take the fight to Google.

FASTforward 08 - Getting Religion about Search

I know I work at FAST but FASTforward is much much bigger than what our company does and when you hear so many keynotes that are talking about the importance of the now of search and how it’s become the key to enterprise success, one can’t help and become enthused and in the end Get Religion about Search.

Below I provide some short summaries on the following topics:

• Vertical/Local/Ad Networks
• Keynotes
• Microsoft acquisition of FAST

For further reading, the FASTforward blog has a consolidated and rich number of posts for more thoughts.

The validation of Vertical/Local/indy AdNetworks:

Elaborating on the stats that IDC provided in early 07 that 70% of searches in the US happen outside of GYM, Sue Feldman provided some stats that vertical sites, including those focused on Local, will have almost 3bill search queries in 2012, while Google will only have 250 million and in fact emerging AdNetworks will have more traffic than Google.

This is very exciting news and one that AdViking has been visioning for approximately 2.5 years.

To further validate this, there was a Local Search session where there were four customers of FAST (and more specifically of AdMomentum) who had exciting opportunities for each of their markets. What was exciting what that the customers were globally spread (Arab region, Chile, Germany and Ireland) and more so there were more customers in the audience doing the same thing in their markets.

Keynotes:

There were so many great talks from speakers like:

• Andrew P. McAfee, Associate Professor, Harvard Business School
• Bjørn Olstad, Chief Technology Officer, FAST
• Don Tapscott, Chief Executive, New Paradigm, the Business Innovation Company
• John Hagel, Author, Consultant, & Co-Chair, Deloitte & Touche Silicon Valley Research Lab
• Safa Rashtchy, Financial Analyst, Entrepreneur, & Past Managing Director, Global Internet Media, Piper Jaffray and Company
• Susan Feldman, Research Vice President, Content Technologies Group, IDC

From doing a quick straw poll people said that the presentations by Tapscott and Feldman were highlight keynotes.

For me, a personal highlight was a fascinating panel with Olsted, Hagel and Rashtchy. It was so deep that I couldn’t take it in to repeat anything worthwhile at this point. A video should be available soon, so once that is, I’ll be back by more. One that that did stick was in response to the question “What is the last thing you changed you mind about?”; Olsted responded without missing a beat, “Microsoft!”

Microsoft:

Microsoft, through Jared Spataro, gave a measured insight into why MSFT is acquiring FAST. He started the presentation with some anecdotes, including that a couple of days after the news of the offer was made, a NASCAR team approached them asking if they could actually have FAST sponsor their team!

The quick summary can be clustered under:

1. What’s in it for Microsoft?
2. What’s in it for FAST?
3. What’s in it for Customers?

What’s in it for Microsoft?

MSFT has figured it out that the user experience of the future is going to be shaped by search. To that end that had begun their own initiatives and taking Search seriously, but on the back of a visit to Redmond by the CTO and CEO of FAST, they realised that by purchasing FAST they would be able to take an aggressive leap forward.

What’s in it for FAST?

FAST has visionary innovations, passionate people and best-in-class technologies that with the power of Microsoft will be able to bring all of that to bear in the world and therefore the technologies and innovations will be available to all.

What’s in it for Customers?

For this cluster, Spataro, elaborated on their strategy for Search and in particular spent time focusing on the Enterprise and how Sharepoint is appearing to be a wild shooting star (approx $1billion in revenues for 08). The key takeaway is that customers will get all that they are use to from FAST but backed by a trusted infrastructure vendor. I’m sure more details will be forthcoming at the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2008