May 24th shall be known as Facebook Day

That’s right, May 24th will go down in history as a day when Facebook became a Man.  Today Facebook announced “Facebook Platform”, where it is giving amazing control to developers, and users where they will be able to add third party apps, and lot of other good stuff.

So here is what will happen next:

This confirms that Facebook is really smart, Yahoo is really regretting not buying Facebook when it had the chance.  So now Google and Microsoft will be fighting each other to buy these guys.  Let’s see how high they can go. 

 

But the real question is, does Facebook want to be bought out?  I

Here’s what I think:  i don’t think Facebook will be bought out by either one of the two giants.  It will go on its own.  It’s a great social networking site, way better than MySpace, clean interface, no junk, no spam, users love it, advertisers love the target audience that uses Facebook, what else do you need?  It now needs it own search engine or search engine that will provide it results (Go with Live.com 🙂 ).

If FaceBook want to be bought out, Microsoft should do everything possible to buy them and not let this deal go to Google or anyone else for that matter.  Of course my opinions are biased.

Other news that shadowed Facebook announcement was MSN lost market share, not 0.5 but whole 1%, how in the world?  Acquisition of aQuantive will not bring up that market share.  Let’s see.

Tejas

Mark Cuban Rocks

I’m regular reader of Mark Cuban’s blog.  How many CEO’s you know has time to blog on regular basis, not that many.  Yesterday he posted a blog entry titled: “Donald – Need a Job?”.  That was sooo hilarious.  It’s amazing how this guy has so much guts and speaks his mind without worrying about what other people might think of him.  It is great.  Way to go Mark – You rock.

 

Wow, this is third post in 3 days 🙂

Tejas

The Buying Frenzy in Online Advertising Space

What in the world is going on?  Everyone is buying they get their hands on and might I add paying way more than its worth.  Yes it is known fact that more eyeballs equals more advertising dollars, but buying everything you get your hand on, reminds lot of people of dot com era.  Recently, there is lot of buzz in the industry of online advertising bubble bursting.  Are critics just being overly cautious or are they right?

After acquisition of aQuantive for $6 Billion by Microsoft, news of Yahoo purchasing Bebo.com for $1 billion is in talks and Google going after Feedburner.  Let’s see who else is left in the market?  Facebook.com – now that’s the site i really like and i believe Yahoo was in talks with them few months ago but apparently it didn’t work out.  Main question would be, if Facebook were to be on sale, how much would it go for?  Easily in billions considering how three giants (Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft) have open their wallets to everyone and anyone.  Craziness if you ask me.  First it was Google buying YouTube, then Microsoft buying portion of (80% i believe ) of CareerBuilder.com, Google buying DoubleClick, Yahoo buying Right Media, MySpace buying Photobucket, Microsoft buying aQuantive, and now talks of Yahoo buying Bebo.com and Google going after Feedburner – holy smokes. 

Like i was saying earlier, only player that remains to be bought out is Facebook.com – just came across an article on it TechCrunch.com.  I kinda agree and disagree with portions of the post on Techcrunch.  Yahoo is definitely out, so it comes down to Google and Microsoft.  Yes it does make sense for Google to buy it, but it ALSO makes sense for Microsoft to purchase it.  It will be MS’s entry into social networking, plus Microsoft already has existing banner advertisement deal with Facebook, why not take it to the next level and purchase the darn company.  I’m not quiet sure if Facebook going public makes lot of sense.

So let’s see who eats up Facebook.com and how far, G, Y, and M will go to purchase this hot property.

Tejas

aQuantive for $6 Billion – that’s a Billion with a B

(Read the disclaimer)

WOW.  $6 Billion to acquire an ad agency is lot of dough.  Is this to remain in the game or is it desperation move, or “if you can do anything I can do better”?  If Microsoft had paid $4 bil for DoubleClick and beat Google in that negotiation process, that would have been so much better than to pay $6 billion for aQuantive.  Overall i think its a good purchase, may be little over-priced in my opinion, but its an imp acquisition.  Its the biggest acquisition in company’s history and feels great to be a part of it when this is all happening. 

Feeling in my group was of excitement.  Finally, we won a negotiation deal 🙂  And a big one too.  We work with this agency pretty frequently and like CEO of aQuantive said, we have exchanged employees over the years.  Even my boss’s boss’s boss is from Ave. A/Razorfish.  Now he was hoping if he held on to those stocks, he’d be millionaire along with other employees of aQuantive.  Craziness, $6 billion is lot of money, was the company worth this much?  will this investment pay off over time?  only time will tell.  But its good to be part of the company that can afford to spend $6 billion to purchase another company, very exciting stuff.  I certainly hope in long run, MSFT buys Yahoo, now that’d be something awesome.  Definitely would boost our market share and put us in number 2 position, just a little closer to big G.  I’m loving the competition and how everyone is trying to be different and pumping out products left and right.  Google’s latest “Universal Search” is not actually a new product but an attempt to popularize some of the products that are not used so much.  Can’t recall anything cool that G released recently.  Looking forward to G’s version of PowerPoint, let’s see how it compares to Office 2007 (which I’m loving it…).  Whatever G is working on right now i’m sure its pretty cool, i love how easy to use and fast their products and services are, an industry should take a note of that and learn lot from them.  My favorite G product is GMail.  Search is good, but Windows Live search is almost same as G.  Except the market share part of course 🙂  On the other hand, Microsoft is on roll releasing some cool stuff:  Vista, Office 2007, Silverlight, getting “Windows Live Mail” out of Beta and changing the name to “Windows Live Hotmail”, PopFly (i’m still waiting for my invitation), and finally “Microsoft SharedView Beta” – which i think is really cool, makes sharing application etc, so much easier. 

Well it’s really exciting to be part of this industry at this time.  What’s even better is, it is pleasure to be part of company that is serious about winning and trying it’s best to improve market share and go from may be number 3 player to number 2 and eventually number 1.

P.S. Using “Windows Live Writer” right now and it has this really cool feature which allows you to select date and time of when you want the post to be published.  I think this functionality should be added to email applications, where you write an email and you choose when you want that email to be sent – now that’s a cool feature request.