Beautiful Oops!

This Saturday I went with my wife and son to the Texas Book Festival to see our friend and renowned children's book author Barney Saltzberg. He came all the way from Los Angeles to promote his new book "Beautiful Oops" (click on the picture to see the video).

After singing a song with a raunchy audience of toddlers Barney reached for the trash can, pulled out some wrinkled pieces of paper, a cardboard box and some tape out of it and made a beautiful bird on the flip chart. Made me think that as we grow we get so set on being right, throw away things that did not turn out the way we expected them to and miss the opportunity to experiment a little. We also lose all the fun in the process. How would a future of open-mindedness would look like?

The Microsoft/Yahoo! deal redux

After three years it seems that the Microsoft/Yahoo deal is back on the table, this time at $16-$18/share, instead of $31 and without employee retention plan. It is clear (at least to me) the search traffic generated by Yahoo! and served by Bing is of critical importance to Microsoft and Bing - Yahoo! still brings more search queries to Bing than Bing itself, according to the September 2011 ComScore Ranking. Without the Yahoo! search traffic Bing will end up with a lot of unused capacity, even bigger financial losses and no hope of competing with Google whatsoever. Imagine what would happen if Yahoo! decides to arbitrage its 15% search share and give to to the highest bidder, split it between several providers or in-source it again.

With that said, the only way I can see such merger being even partially successful is by Microsoft acquiring a controlling stake in Yahoo! and leaving it alone. Maybe Microsoft can bring some new management, fold in parts of MSN and Hotmail, leverage some shared data center infrastructure, but overall they should leave Yahoo! alone. The cultures don't mix, the technologies don't mix, an acquisition will very likely be followed by even faster brain drain from Yahoo!.

The bigger question is whether it's worth another $25bn to the $9bn that Microsoft has lost on their online business? This article has a good breakdown of the numbers.

Open Networking Summit

Paul Lappas and I co-authored a talk for the Open Networking Summit @ Stanford on "OpenFlow/SDN for IaaS Providers". It was a lot of fun to collaborate with Paul on this project and I believe we were able to capture and summarize key insights into what are the drivers for OpenFlow (and similar technologieand what is going to change in the way we build large-scale network infrastructure, both for service provides and enterprises.