All Things Ash » Microsoft

Microsoft Dividends

Ashutosh — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 05:13:32 +0000

I was reading an article in the WSJ about Steve Balmer and Microsoft, and realized something interesting. Microsoft has given considerable cash back to share holdings – in excess of $100bn when dividends and share buy-backs are added together. This is no small amount of money; had that cash stayed on Microsoft’s balance sheet, Apple would still have a long way to overtake Microsoft’s current market cap.

Bada Bing

Ashutosh — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 16:54:10 +0000

Microsoft’s Bing Search engine has launched. Reviews overall have been generally positive, and it’s great for search competition to have a serious player release a product to rival Google. Monopolies are bad for innovation, bad for progress, and Google with it’s nearly 70% market share has close to a monopoly on the search market.

I’ve decided to change my homepage from www.google.com to www.bing.com for one week and see how it works out.

How Microsoft Can Kill Google

Ashutosh — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 19:03:05 +0000

Google makes its money from advertising. Everyone knows this.

Earlier today, Firefox was not rendering a page correctly, so I switched over to Internet Explorer hoping it would. As I did so, something dawned upon me: I haven’t seen an online advertisement in over three years, let alone clicked one.

For example, one website that I frequent, GigaOm.com has a front page that is riddled with advertisements when opened in Internet Explorer, but none in Firefox. The reason? AdBlock Plus. AdBlock is an extension for Firefox that dynamically blocks advertisements using wildcard filters, etc. For example, three filters that were automatically applied to block all ad’s on GigaOm.com were “/magic-ads/*”, “.googleadservices.”, “.fmpub.net”.

GigaOm — Internet Explorer:

GigaOm — Firefox with AdBlock Plus:

Similarly on TechCrunch.com, a site I frequent more than 3-4 times a day, the filters that dynimcally blocked advertisements were, “.snap.com/$script”, “/ads/*”, “/openads/*?”, “.fmpub.net/”, and “http://ads.”

TechCrunch — Internet Explorer:

TechCrunch — Firefox with AdBlock Plus:

Similarly, NYTimes.com:

NYTimes — Internet Explorer:

NYTimes — Firefox with AdBlock Plus:

As AdBlock becomes more and more popular, the return that advertisers are receiving for their money is falling. Even though publishers will tout subscription numbers and daily uniques, the actual number of users that see the advertising is impossible to gage because AdBlock Plus blocks advertisements after the page has rendered, thus still loading the content, but just preventing it from displaying.

So back to the title? How can Microsoft Kill Google, and also entirely shake up how the internet works? Build AdBlock functionality into Internet Explorer 8. Sure it’d lose advertising revenue from Live.com, Hotmail.com, but is that Microsoft’s core business?

Microsoft has one advantage over Google that people always forget about. They make real products that people pay real money for. They aren’t resellers or organizers of information. But rather, they produce and sell products.

Kill online advertising and power returns back to the people who produce products that people demand. Game over. Checkmate.

Relaunched!

Ashutosh — Thu, 28 Sep 2006 05:14:21 +0000

http://photo.askthefool.com is back. It has new pictures from my Alaska trip and a few from this year. Oxford pictures are still down as they still need pruning, date fixing, enhancing, and tagging. The main problem with them is I need to synchronize timestamps from different people’s pictures.

Technical note: While my new photo gallery still looks similar, over 60% of it is completely rewritten. More efficient coding, pagination, gzip compression, URL rewriting, object oriented coding, brand new libraries, inline tagging, single page rebuilds, and a shiny new admin interface. flickrStash, my application that powers this site will be available for purchase October 16th. For more info contact me.