amitagrawal

I wish it were that simple but I find your analysis highly flawed. The early employees, founders and investors risked a big chunk of their resources and hence played a huge part in the creation of the company and are all the beneficiaries of those buybacks assuming they stick around for that long.

Argentina is not particularly a glowing example of an entity with such a long investment horizon given how frequently they've defaulted on their debt.

Quick Service Restaurant industry one of the most competitive. The reason why they were able to increase productivity and product quality might be because when you focus on a few core metrics like serving time and food prices it doesn't come at the expense of productivity but because of it.

It is basically due to their ownership in Alibaba.

First, the appointment of Condoleezza Rice to their board and now accessing and uploading folder information without explicit permissions!

I'm going to stop using Dropbox now.

Maybe the only thing common between Instagram and Oculus is the investor (Andreessen) and the acquirer (FB)..oh and that Mark Andreessen was a board member during both the acquisitions!

Adam Smith would disagree.

I think (and a lot of other would agree with me on this) that the Xbox division within Microsoft is the most customer-centric of any company in the entire world.

The people at Xbox are die hard gamers who really want to help you solve your problem whatever it might be. I don't know if spinning off one of the best divisions would be such a smart division specially when it is already profitable, unlike Bing.

That's probably one of the reasons why Amazon has been undercutting almost everyone time & time again. With their razon thin margins they have nowhere to go but up. Even when they don't go down as much as the markets think they would their stock goes up.

Other retailers & technology companies don't have that luxury. They can't lose money at the cost of margin contraction or market share expansion. Heck, they can't lose money at all the way Amazon has been doing since its inception!

It's high time Bezos repeated the "Steve Jobs's mistake". Not that Amazon shareholders want them to.

"Management teams of well-run companies spend very little time thinking about the formal financial statements."

Not true at all. Well run companies do spend a lot of time in preparing their financial statements. First, it is required by law, see - Dodd-Frank, Sarbanes-Oxley, etc.

Second, it can get well-run companies with good intentions into a lot of trouble with the SEC and investor lobbying groups.

Actually it's Designed by Apple in California. But I agree with you I liked it better when it was subtle.

With this decision, I have now come to believe that Google is not the company that it used to be in the past. The user-friendly company with a quirky personality.

Somewhere in the mindless fighting with becoming the dominant social and mobile force on the planet, it has forgotten about the very users it once strived to please.

This has been more apparent since Larry took over Google as the CEO. His "more wood behind fewer arrows" has somewhere down the line taken away the humor with which Google has largely operated. 20% time? Google Labs? Hugely popular Google products scrapped into oblivion.

The only products that matter beyond search are - Android, Google+, YouTube and Google Apps which are fairly mature by now and are a serious threat to competitors.

The thing is they didn't need to do it because they aren't starving of computing resources for more important products and the marginal costs of adding free users is almost nil (although it exists).

I somehow feel betrayed by this decision. Google, so far, has resisted the temptation to shut down products that were important to it's users unlike other companies like Microsoft and Yahoo! I have been using Google Apps since they launched it a long ago. It feels like bait and switch.

This is completely right and there is nothing wrong with them shutting down a free service as a business but somehow it feels so non-Googly.

Perhaps he's the only CEO right now that has audacious plans for the future, just like Steve! RIP Steve

I study in one of the largest universities in India. It is also fairly reputed within the country as well as outside.

During my 2nd year of engineering we had to complete a programming "mini project". If you're familiar with these you may know the quality of most projects.

Year after year you can see the same projects reappear, some even to the point that the old student's details aren't changed in the source code to reflect the new owner's!

So we had to complete this project by forming a group - minimum of 2 students and a maximum of 4. The guideline? It should have a UI (duh!) and a database. The clear instructions from the professor were to use only Visual Basic or Java. The syllabus booklet obviously mentioned that any suitable language could be used.

I went to him to ask if it was OK to do a "web based", "database-enabled" & "User Interfacing" application. To say that he was agitated would be a euphemism. It was like I had insulted him. To placate him, I respectfully pointed out that it was perfectly okay for me to use a language that I was comfortable in and that a web-based project was in fact a norm.

To avenge the dishonor I had brought him, he bullied another member of my group to leave my group just an hour before the demo to an external professor (a professor from some other college who is invited for the demo and viva voce).

Meanwhile the demo went great, the external was very satisfied with the answers to his questions although I can be sure he was a little happily surprised that I had coded it myself completely. My professor sitting next to him was fuming with rage. I gladly left the hall being sure of making it satisfactorily.

I was dumbfounded when I found it on my report card that I had failed getting only 10% of the total allotment for the project and the re-hashed project managed to score 90% and above.

The sad thing is most of my colleagues didn't even try to code or come up with an idea. Even sadder is the fact that if you do, the professors make sure to take it personally and pull you down instead of motivating or giving a helping hand.

If you come from a poor financial background, wouldn't it be good financial (and common) sense to accept the scholarship?

And as hashpipe rightly said, by turning down your reservation seat you probably let a less deserving (mark wise) reservation candidate over a more deserving candidate who probably won't even receive a scholarship let alone the seat. I would even go as far to say that you perfectly gamed the broken reservation system.

Luck is very real. Luck not as in winning a lottery but the place you're born, the kind of people in your family who support you in your endeavors, the talented people you get to surround with - it's all luck.

Luck is not everything, but a lot of things depend on luck for a majority of people.

Within the same industry there are people like Dan Porter and Notch. Both are at the top of their game. With one major difference..

One bad mouths a former employee because he refused to join the acquirer on grounds of principles. The other distributes wealth among employees.

I have no doubt Mr Pincus and Mr. Pierce will have a lot in common at Zynga.

FatCow isn't different. I've promoted their hosting services and they've consistently refused to pay me around $1K.

The only reason I've not brought their actions to light is that I still have some months before my account there expires and they can terminate the account without any reason.

But after reading this I'm very motivated to bring their shady tactics out before they make a buck more by scamming their own evangelists.

A division that is bleeding cash doesn't mean that it should be sold off or closed down.

Sometimes, products that don't make money or even make losses are part of a bigger strategy.

Look at Google, no one knows if YouTube is still profitable but it has positioned Google as the leader in online video and will no doubt help their social efforts.

Innovative things have happened from online video - online lectures, talks, short films and creation of internet stars wouldn't have happened faster without the massive reach of YouTube.

Bing is positioning itself in a way that when Google does something stupid (looks highly improbable right now) then Microsoft can be at the right place at the right time.

One of the more important things is a user's trust. Yahoo! & Microsoft are very notorious at abruptly closing down their services and so it becomes difficult to trust their products even if they're a notch ahead in terms of features than their close competitors. Another sale would hurt that trust, no doubt.

This looks like a nice number . How do you advertise your product?

I think Facebook's primary source of revenue is advertising too.

Facebook is taking the stance what Microsoft took a few years ago - getting in the way of it's users and making choices on behalf of them.

On the other hand by being open, Google has made a ton of money from it's competitors like Groupon which spends a big chunk advertising on Google.

I don't know if Facebook has made an official comment on this but from here on I think things might get interesting.

I agree. Those numbers are pretty good even for an AdWords advertiser. And the fact that you've been able to scale it really well is even more praise-worthy.

Do you have a blog/website that I can follow?

CTR matters for a couple of important reasons - profits & relevance.

Google, Facebook, Bing, etc use it directly to make more money on the same number of ad impressions.

Let's suppose there are 2 advertisers -

Andy who bids $1/click has 1% CTR & Bob who bids $0.60/click has 2% CTR.

When each of the ads are shown to users, Andy's will receive 1 click whereas Bob's will have twice as many clicks (every 100 times the ads are shown). The network (Google, FB, Bing, etc) will make $1.2 on Bob and $1 on Andy. That's some 20% profit right there without any special effort on the network's part while showing ads that interest more to the users. You only click something that interests you, right?

As you can see Bob, who bids a lot lower makes 20% more profit to the network for the same amount of ad impressions.

The second reason is relevance. One of the easiest ways to gauge it is CTR. Google, for one, places such a high importance on it that it has baked CTR right into determining how much you really pay to get that visitor in the form on Quality Scores. On Google if you increase your QS your ads start costing less and appear in better positions for the same (or lower) cost.

This is simple economics at play. If you see on the individual ad performance screenshot you can see that the ad that received 0.077% CTR has highest - - reach - social reach - connections - clicks and most important the least cost-per-click. Who wouldn't like to get all the benefits for a lower cost?

Happy Birthday, Ed!

The knowledge which is packed in the book will save a lot of blood, sweat and tears in the coming years down the line.

You're truly a blessing!

Stuff like this should be made a compulsive reading for hackers.

This solves a very basic problem with hacker-related knowledge - you don't know what to search until you know what to search!

And books like Ed's solve this by compiling it all in one place. Someone here did one for pg's essays and other articles and the result was a 12+MB file good to last you a few days if you're at it.

The last time I heard colleges like Harvard were built to impart education to anyone who wanted one and if they were capable enough to get it.

I don't think the founding motto of Harvard was to create any kind of elitism among the people who drank from it's fountain of knowledge but to spread the truth (as in an education).

Even if Harvard stopped handing out these extension degrees the knowledge they're opening up to anyone through their free content is unstoppable. Kudos to MIT, Harvard and countless other colleges for opening up the knowledge that was beyond the reach of a majority of the population all over the world!

Not everyone can attend elite colleges even if they deserved one!

edit: grammar correction.

This is an amazing experiment I actually liked the new design but I prefer the original one more, maybe due to a habit.

I second that the whitespace between the 2 articles is more than I personally feel comfortable with. Also, a bigger font and a darker font color for the number of comments would be awesome.

Great work, nonetheless!

Well, you're right - he might not care but next time he'd think a million times before killing yet another helpless creature and posting a shameless video of it.

I have had my domains with Name.com as well as NameCheap for more than half a decade.

Name.com's interface is a little confusing and NameCheap have great customer service!

Actually, it will. What if a 1000 customers like you who own 10 domains do it at the same day?

They sure HAVE to notice it. I've already transferred my domains and I'll make sure I won't buy any from GoDaddy again.

GoDaddy already has one of the scammiest UIs I've ever come across (with a possible exception of, maybe, MySpace) and the recent elephant killing was the last straw!