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Oracle and Adobe both announced their earnings after the bell yesterday, and both companies were being closely watched as possible indicators of the overall health of the tech sector in what’s pretty obviously at least an economic hiccup on the way to recovery.  Both the companies reported quarters that included upside surprises, sending both stocks up in after-hours trading.  The details of the two were different, and of course so are the implications for the industry.

Oracle beat the estimates in profits and their license numbers did particularly well, which suggests that database and application software sales are still strong among enterprises.  That would be a key metric in my view because these are the two software components most directly linked to corporate productivity, and thus the two that would be most likely to reflect “project” spending rather than just orderly enhancement of IT budgets.

The hardware end of the business, acquired with Sun, was the weak point in the numbers; hardware sales dipped for the quarter.  Oracle said that it would be focusing on profitable “appliances” more in the future, which would be likely to improve both sales and margins on hardware.  It’s also, in my view, a reflection of a basic truth, which is that servers are a commodity item where it will be difficult to sustain margin and profit growth in the future.  Take note, HP!  Oracle’s decision to de-emphasize the x86 models in favor of Sparc models is a further indication of a flight from a commodity space.  Powerful Sparc appliances are likely the best strategy against the SAP/IBM and SAP/HP combinations too.

Adobe actually had a weak quarter but offered high-end-of-the-range guidance.  The highlight may have been the fact that CS5.5 revenues were consistent with the run rate for CS3, the last of the Creative Suite versions to do really well in the market (it came along before 2008).  However, I’m not sure that the Street is getting the full picture here.  I don’t see much of an indication that Adobe is pushing Creative Suite beyond the base audience it enjoyed with CS3, meaning that it’s not selling new players.  Moreover, I see little sign that Adobe is capturing a growing share of the consumer editing space with its various Elements products.  There again they seem to be upselling within the same audience.  Acrobat was perhaps its greatest overall success, the only place where it demonstrated it might be gaining market share in a convincing way.  Acrobat here means the “professional” or authoring piece of the PDF process.

Adobe’s other long-term problem is HTML5 and the flight from Flash.  Adobe’s professional video tools and web tools have benefitted from the dominance of Flash in web video, and it’s pretty likely that dominance is coming to an end.  Microsoft’s decision to reduce Metro’s dependence on plugins mirrors Apple’s moves, and while Android will surely continue Flash support to tweak Apple’s nose, the handwriting is on the wall here.  HTML5 will open up web video to competitors in a big way, and just having HTML5 capability on what was once a pure Flash server product isn’t going to save Adobe here.  Adobe is pushing a new version of Flash and AIR, its rich media environment, but I wonder if AIR can withstand the tablet revolution.

 

 

 

 

 

We want to provide our Netwatcher subscribers, blog readers, and other interested parties with a summary of the topics we’ll be covering in our technology journal, Netwatcher, this fall.  Here’s how the editorial schedule is lining up so far!

In September, we’ll feature the fourth segment in our service-layer series, which looks at the practical question of implementing a service layer and at the service-layer approaches of the network equipment vendors who lay claim to some service-layer functionality.  We’ll also be looking at the application models that enterprises believe are most amenable to cloud computing, and what might happen to realize their opportunity.

In October, Netwatcher will round out our service-layer series with a look at standard and open solutions to the service layer.  We’ll also cover the OpenFlow architecture and its notion of software-defined networks (SDNs).

November’s Netwatcher will include an extra section, this one in the form of an “open letter” from me to the management of the leading network vendors.  If I were giving the executive teams private advice, this is what I’d say!  The issue also includes a feature on the enterprise mobility space, and in particular what industries represent the real mobility opportunity.  We’ll offer some practical guidance in addressing mobility opportunity, too.  Finally, we’ll look at the so-called “emerging markets” in networking, asking what it is about these players that make them different from the primary markets…if anything.

December is our Annual Technology Forecast, and this year for the first time we’re integrating this issue with the results of our fall survey of enterprises and service providers to provide a one-stop shop for a vision of 2012.

If your company subscribes to Netwatcher, they have the right to distribute it freely within the company, so you can get a copy from your internal resource.  Contact us at netwatcher@cimicorp.com to find out who that is.  If you are not with a subscribing company, this same email can be used to request subscription information.  A sample issue and a table of contents for back issues is posted on our website.

 

NSN is making another wave in the market, this time by extending the notion of adaptive networking in the mobile/EPC world from the RAN (where its product is Liquid Radio) to the network core, with Liquid Net (including Liquid Core and Liquid Transport).  These products are aimed mostly at the mobile/metro space, where the explosion in wireless traffic has created considerable stress on access infrastructure.  Mobile services, because of the dramatic changes in mass-user location through the day and week, can strand considerable capacity and NSN is aiming to let operators run their metro networks more efficiently, freeing capacity and optimizing traffic routing for performance.  Underneath the covers, this is all a part of a shift by NSN toward a more cloud-based network infrastructure, something we’ve noted even in the way that it supports the service layer.  By hosting the “Liquid Core” logic of mobility and gateway functionality (IMS and the related elements like SGSN, MGW, etc plus the circuit- and packet-switched network) at the control level on ATCA platforms, NSN is focusing itself on functionality and not on hardware, an exceptionally smart move in a market that’s crying out for network vendors to embrace a more hosted mindset.

What’s particularly interesting to me here is that NSN has been a wallflower for ages now, a player who barely articulated anything.  Now suddenly it’s getting not only smart but very smart.  What will be interesting to see is how this impacts the rest of the players.  NSN is strong in mobile and metro but not particularly so in the IP layer, where it OEMs gear from Juniper.  You could argue that the ATCA position of Liquid Core is calculated to refocus investment and management attention on something NSN does make, taking it from what they don’t.  Might that then undermine IP devices?  Might Ericsson, who has a similar problem of IP-layer incumbency, follow suit and create a trend?  What will Alcatel-Lucent, Cisco, and especially Juniper do?

Liquid Core could also make EPC (Enhanced Packet Core) more of a mainstream issue.  There’s been some back-and-forth between whether metro infrastructure should have a lot of EPC or as little as possible, and the notion of “core liquidity” or flexibility and controllability through EPC could catch on even outside the pure mobile space.  That would again pose questions for traditional metro players who have no strong mobile position, Cisco and Juniper again.

 

Apple is always a wonderful target for rumors, and the current one is that the company is getting into the TV business for real, launching not only a service but a line of TV sets that would link to it.  The idea has the media agog of course, but no matter who is supposed to be fielding streaming substitutes for channelized TV, there are formidable issues involved both technical and non-technical, and there’s so far no indication that Apple is dealing with any of them.

The first technical problem is that about a quarter of US households couldn’t receive HDTV streaming properly because their Internet connection is too slow.  That means that to save money by cutting the cord, they’d have to spend more money.  And there’s no guarantee that it would work for them anyway, because many broadband users streaming video at one time could congest the networks.  Users could also get to whacked with usage-over-cap charges if they watched a lot of TV.

The second problem is that multi-TV houses would be even more likely to have a problem with quality because multiple streams would almost certainly create issues.  Remember that you can’t easily buffer live delivery of channels because you’ll get behind the program schedule, so congestion events could be a disaster.

Then there’s the big non-technical problem, which is getting rights to the material in the first place.  The networks own their own shows, and there is no legal obligation on their part to sell streaming of contemporaneous episodes, which would mean that the material available couldn’t be the normal channelized programming.  Cutting the cord from the cable bill is one thing; cutting off your programs is another.

The final non-technical issue is advertising.  Online ads in streaming video bring in a thirtieth of the amount that broadcast commercials bring.  If users had to pay the difference, it would cost over $170 per month, which is way more than the cable bills.

So what’s really up here?  I think it is very likely that Apple is creating a line of TVs, and that these will be tightly integrated with iTunes.  I think it is very unlikely, bordering on the impossible, that they plan to field a streaming TV service aimed at competing with channelized TV.  The recent Verizon moves to beef up their VoD sales show the real aim of Apple, in my view.  They’re going to leave channelized TV alone and go for VoD only, which means that their sets will still tune channelized TV and they won’t alter the basic economics of TV viewing very much.

Netflix launched another round of angst with a comment by the CEO that it would be virtually separating the DVD and streaming services, even to the point of separate websites.  While this is upsetting their customers even more, it may reveal something about the motivation of the pricing changes.  I’m hearing that the negotiations for streaming rights are getting more complicated and Netflix doesn’t want to tie them too tightly with negotiations on DVD rental, which are a completely different issue.  Thus, the current flap may be a signal that there’s a lot going on in streaming negotiation, which could be because Apple is now looking at the model a bit more closely.  There’s been speculation all along that Apple’s iCloud should stream video; maybe it will.

 

RIM has demonstrated why it’s never a good idea to rest on your laurels in a market you’re not leading in the first place.  The current-model Blackberries sold OK but older models were down in sales and the PlayBook was a disaster.  Now the company is pushing for a next-quarter refresh, the line of everyone who has no clear prospects for getting refreshed at all.

The big problem, according to some pundits, is the refresh of RIM’s old OS platform for the acquired QNX.  One of several (including iOS, Android, and MeeGo) Linux/UNIX variant platforms for appliances, QNX was originally designed for embedded systems, meaning small industrial computers and communications.  It is much friendlier to developers familiar with other “x-OSs” but the GUI RIM intends to plant on it is said to be not compatible with either iOS or Android, which means it wouldn’t be a seamless shift for applications.  The delays in QNX release have stalled efforts to recruit developers but have also given competitors plenty of time to push onward on their own.  The tablet market is also clearly getting mature, meaning getting harder to create a role in, harder to sustain profits.

I think that QNX is less an issue than simple inertia.  Every company who succeeds at anything, via any strategy whether deliberate or serendipitous, fights the tendency to hunker down on their newly won ground and take root.  This, despite the fact that the market itself virtually signals the need for change.  RIM, when Apple launched the iPhone, could have and should have realized that larger form factors were next.  Had they moved at that point, they’d have been number one or two at worst in tablets, and likely in a strong position today.  The market has signaled again; cheap tablets are the only new game possible, and that’s a game that RIM can’t afford to play.

Netflix also has its problems, not that I’d not expected this when they announced their new pricing plan.  The news to me is less that Netflix lost customers (who gains customers by raising prices?) but that the streaming business was so precarious a balance between demand and margins.  Portal plays like Netflix and so many OTT businesses are really parasitic business models; they depend on essentially free transport and free goods, meaning that their profit is based on an unrealistic assumption that others in the food chain aren’t making one.  As you get a streaming movie service going you can draw on old cheap material, but you’re continually pushed to get newer stuff simply because there’s not enough old stuff to keep your subscribers happy.  The new stuff not only costs more naturally, your own success prompts the owners of the content to recognize their higher value, and the next thing you know, you’re caught in a squeeze.  We’ll see if Netflix finds a balance here; there may not be one that works for all.

In the enterprise space, Huawei has announced lofty ambitions as a provider of network equipment to businesses.  The company expects $7 billion from this segment in 2012, though most of that will come from the China market.  It’s widely expected that Huawei will push more into the enterprise market internationally even in 2012, though.  There’s considerable price pressure on enterprise network operations managers because there’s been a general lack of new benefits to drive up spending without compromising overall return.  That mirrors the situation in the service provider market, of course.  Huawei is a formidable risk to any network equipment vendors who don’t learn a lesson from RIM.

 

 

I sent out the survey material for our fall strategy sweep, and as usual I asked both service providers and enterprises to respond quickly with the answers to the following questions; “What’s the hottest network issue”, “What’s your biggest concern”, and “What’s your biggest surprise”?  The answers were quite interesting.

The hottest issue for both enterprises and service providers was “the cloud” by a large margin, larger in fact than prior surveys.  In my own view, the broad fascination with the cloud is more than just the typical response to media hype, it’s a reflection of the fact that cloud computing is an explicit marriage of a lot of technology trends, a kind of IT Unified Field Theory.  Enterprises in particular need some strategic mantra to drive their project spending, some way of linking change to benefits, and “the cloud” seems to be even more favored in that role with each passing quarter.

In the “biggest concern” category, fear of another global economic ranked as the clear leader among enterprises, but with the service providers it was in a virtual tie with “declining revenue per bit” or a variation on that theme.  Network operators fear disintermediation and commoditization, a world where traffic growth pushes them to make more investment while revenue either stagnates or falls, the latter coming from the displacement of traditional services (notably TDM voice and even leased lines) by packet-based Internet OTT services.

The “biggest surprise” was a bit of a surprise to me.  Both enterprises and service providers said that “the technical and business aspects of cloud computing are not what we expected”.  While I knew from prior surveys that there was a considerable shift in enterprise attitude about the cloud as companies advanced the state of their own cloud planning, I wasn’t sure that the enterprises themselves saw this change.  It was also interesting that enterprises listed “failure of the benefit case to prove out in our cloud projects” as a “biggest concern” enough times to give that issue the top spot among the technology responses.

If you reflect on the fact that Cisco’s Chambers says that the company is going to tighten its focus and build a strategy around product areas, you have to wonder whether “the cloud” is among them.  We found in our last survey of enterprises that Cisco had actually lost strategic influence in cloud computing despite the fact that more enterprises said they “knew” Cisco’s cloud strategy than felt that way about competitors’ approach.  I’d speculate that Cisco was pushing the role of UCS a bit too strongly; buyers of network equipment expect Cisco to offer a network-centric cloud view.

There’s also a sense in Chambers’ words that Cisco is prepared to discount significantly to buy market share, or revenue.  The question is which of these two Cisco is going after.  Just buying revenue sets a new lower floor on your prices that you’re unlikely to be able to make up.  Buying market share implies that you have some specific plan to enrich profits with follow-on business and you’re getting a foothold with pricing.  Cisco did say that they expected to mine profits with services and software, both of which are higher margin.  They didn’t say it, but that would put them perhaps more on a collision course with HP.  While Cisco’s Juniper vulnerability comments got most media focus, Cisco also said that HP had a strategy problem, and that’s certainly true.  With so many fundamental changes in the works, and with their future more linked than ever to the data center, HP has to not only do well there, they have to triumph.  The cloud is obviously the only pathway to that goal.

 

The FCC is finally going to publish its net neutrality ruling (some time in the next couple of months), and while the move isn’t going to change a darn thing in ISP behavior (people have been complying anyway), it will open the door for a flood of appeals of the ruling.  It’s also likely that Republicans will try to get it overturned through legislation, though most everyone believes that a bill like that wouldn’t pass the Senate at this point.

I’m on the fence with this bill.  Most of it is reasonable; non-discrimination of traffic based on website or traffic type.  Where I’m not sure is in the fact that the rules appear to bar “pay for priority” services where the paying party is the content provider.  The FCC has said that this would put smaller players in the market at a disadvantage, and I believe that the problem is that smaller players aren’t likely to have free access to content to distribute under such agreements.  What the order really does is make over-the-Internet delivery of something that requires some QoS less attractive, because it would force the user to accept best-efforts delivery or elect to pay themselves.  I also think, based on my own (unsuccessful) attempt in the 1990s to develop pan-ISP standards for QoS-based peering, that there is little chance for customer-pays services developing that cross ISP boundaries.  Content providers would have some leverage there.  So I think the FCC’s rule here could hurt—but where my waffling comes in is that it probably won’t.  There is little chance of content being delivered end-to-end anyway; the CDN is on the rise.

In any event, the Order will soon be tested, not on grounds of reasonability of its measures (the FCC is the “Court of Fact” in communications issues) but on jurisdiction.  At least one Court of Appeals has already said the FCC lacked the jurisdiction to enforce neutrality; does it have the jurisdiction to impose this order, then?  We’ll see.

Cisco held its investor meeting yesterday, and the Street view of the event was considerably more favorable than its view of rival Juniper.  The analysts appear to agree with Cisco’s Chambers when he says that Juniper is “vulnerable”.  My readers know that I wrote about this Cisco view some time back.  Cisco says this is because Juniper is spread too thinly between service provider and enterprise.  Along the way, Chambers indicated that Cisco would be taking an edgier position against HP, and acknowledged that Huawei was a strong competitor.

So what’s really going on here?  Is Cisco going to give us the networking equivalent of the negative ad campaign, and if so, why?  Negative ads are designed not to influence voters but to disgust them, to keep the dangerous unaligned out of the polling places so your party hacks matter more.  Keeping the buyer out of the market is exactly what Cisco is risking here, and why take that risk?  It could be because Cisco is hoping to make something happen, and they want Juniper in particular to be on the defensive.

Juniper is a habitual counter-puncher; they have let Cisco set the stage time after time and boxed against the Cisco initiatives.  The fact that Cisco thinks Juniper is spread too thin almost invites everyone to believe that Juniper might “un-spread” itself, and that could only come by reducing its enterprise commitments—Juniper depends too much on the service provider side.  If that’s what Cisco wants, then it wants it because Juniper’s upcoming QFabric might be harmful to Cisco’s data center and content strategy.  If Juniper responds to Cisco as usual, by simply rebutting the comments Cisco makes, then Cisco will control the market dialog.  If you want Juniper to talk about something, attack them there and they’ll help you drag the issue around the media circuit.  If you don’t want something discussed, then just stay mum; Juniper will not raise the issue either.  So for Juniper here, the right answer is to forget what Cisco is saying and focus on what Cisco doesn’t want Juniper to talk about.

 

 

Broadcom is acquiring semi-rival Netlogic in what’s surely a big buy, but the range of products in the Netlogic portfolio make it hard to be sure just what Broadcom’s target for the deal is.  Netlogic generally makes smart chips, things that are a bit like the network processors of old but more focused on packet processing and inspection than on protocol hosting.  Their products make sense in smart appliances as a way to separate real-time streams from the packet/web chaff, but they could also figure rather prominently in networks as packet handling tools.  In fact, the company has some biggish deals with network equipment vendors in that area.  Netlogic has also been looking deeper into the cloud and data center of late, not only for security but also even for application performance management.

One of the things that the move demonstrates is that packet processing and intelligence is probably a key element in any move to create service value that has a network component.  The network’s ability to recognize services discretely often depends on the examination of data streams, particularly where the network transport web has no integrated service layer that can inject application knowledge/awareness.  That’s one of the reasons we think that whether you’re talking about enterprises or service providers, the service layer is important.

Juniper held its “Innovations Day” meeting yesterday, but the outcome appears to me to have been more evolutionary than revolutionary.  The Street is divided on whether Juniper can create a significant upside in revenues in the near term with the products it’s announced in the past (some of which are targets of the Cisco attack I noted yesterday).  UBS now concedes that it’s unlikely Juniper will make a major headcount reduction and thus seems to be reconciled to a year or so of anemic profit growth because of the longer selling cycle on the hardware that’s already been announced.

I don’t understand either Cisco or Juniper, frankly.  Network gear has a fairly long expected useful life and it’s expensive, so you can’t swish it around at will to track the ebbs and flows of market needs.  For years it’s been clear that software has to be the impedance-matching layer, the adapter that makes glaciers look agile.  That’s how it’s worked in IT for decades, and how it has to work in networking now.  Cisco seemed to have realized this early on, but its software activity was (typically for Cisco) focused on near-term sales goals and it never established any true strategic position for itself within Cisco or its products.  I’d argue it still hasn’t.  Juniper caught on to the notion that software had to somehow be linked strategically to the network and came up with their whole “Junos ecosystem” thing, but they’ve been unable to make anything of it other than an enhanced operations tool.  Get your heads out of the bits, guys, and look at the IT world.  What makes the hardware-to-user connection there?  Learn a lesson.  Watching these guys is like watching two guys fighting on a raft about to go over the falls.  Sometimes you have to view “winning and losing” in a broader light.

Many of those who have followed my views and work over the years know about my open-source ExperiaSphere project, designed to create Java proof-of-concept execution for service-layer technology that tightly couples network assets to service monetization plans.  I’m pleased to say that I’ve completed a very extensive document describing how the ExperiaSphere framework could execute multi-screen video applications.  This document was produced with input and review from seven global network operators, and it’s the most extensive description of multi-screen that you’ll find anywhere.  It’s available at http://www.experiasphere.com/MultiScreenVideoAppNote.zip.  I’ve included the document PDF (almost 25 thousand words) and all 27 figures in a separate file to make reference easier.  We’re no longer taking comments on the document for future revision, but I’d still be happy to hear from anyone with thoughts on it!

 

 

 

About a half-dozen years ago, Juniper made news with a series of aggressive cartoon ads that stuck it to arch-rival Cisco in various ways.  Now Cisco is apparently taking that same tack, at least to a degree, with a website that’s a pretty clear swing at Juniper.  The focus of the site is the claim that Juniper is over-promising and under-delivering.  Well, gosh, Cisco, how many times has that been said about you, or pretty much any other player in the space?

Both Cisco and Juniper have public events coming up, and I’m not of the view that either is likely to say much of substance at them.  To me, both companies have the same fundamental set of issues.  In fact, one of the two reasons we think that Cisco is embarking on this campaign right now is that Cisco and Juniper are the most direct competitors, the most alike.  In the current market, that means not that they share common strengths as much as that they share common limitations.

When you’re in the bit-pushing business, everything is a bit to you.  That’s not a bad focus when bits are the thing the buyer is going after, and during the decade of the ‘90s when IP supplanted IBM’s SNA and enterprises were limited in their productivity visions more by connectivity than by applications, you needed “power IP”.  Bandwidth was expensive so equipment costs were smaller relative to network costs overall.  Today, both in the carrier and enterprise world, bandwidth cost is declining.  Capital costs now matter, but more significantly we’ve solved the connectivity problem enough to grab all the low-hanging benefits.  More network spending is contingent on more productivity for enterprises, or more profits for carriers.  Revenue drives investment, not “demand”.

Neither Cisco nor Juniper has been able to create a convincing connection between their product strategies and monetization for the operators.  Neither has been able to tout a credible productivity-enhancing vision for the enterprise.  Thus, neither has been able to attack the benefit side of ROI at a time when that’s what the buyer is demanding.  Competitors like Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson, and NSN who have a direct monetization strategy are gaining steadily in strategic influence in our surveys, and both Cisco and Juniper are losing ground.  In the enterprise space, both Cisco and Juniper are under threat from the big IT giants like HP, IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle.  Even if they don’t sell network gear (or if they OEM your own) these players are tapping off buyer influence, driving projects.  That means those projects are likely spending more on servers and software and storage than on networks.  And Huawei is waiting in the wings, ready to strike at any market that truly is cost-driven.

Remember I said there were two reasons for Cisco’s timing?  What’s the other one.  Well, the story is that Cisco believes from its account contacts that Juniper is truly vulnerable now.  There’s no point trying to deliver a knock-out blow to a competitor who’s fresh and strong, in Cisco’s view, so why waste negative campaign ads when they won’t really change anything?

Is Juniper really vulnerable?  In one sense, as I’ve said, they share the stage in the Benefit Disconnect Waltz with Cisco.  But Cisco is an incumbent, with much stronger account relationships.  They can weather a short-term storm better than Juniper.  Which is in my view the key point to Cisco’s strategy.  If they believe that they are on the edge of solving the benefit-case problem in the market, then it makes sense to try to tackle Juniper right now and leave the path to the goal-line open.  If they aren’t going to fix their own problems quickly, then this is going to backfire.

 

 

 

Google’s decision to buy restaurant-rating firm Zagat is a validation of a trend I’ve been blogging about; the whole notion of how advertising is monetized online.  It’s also an indication of what Yahoo could have, should have perhaps, and didn’t do.  Maybe even an indication of why it’s too late for them to do anything at all.

Generally, advertising serves three interdependent goals.  One is to build brand recognition, one to build demand, and the final one to influence purchases.  If you think about it, only the last of these three is a sure winner.  Your brand can be a household word and people not buy you; look at Xerox.  You can spend on ads to build demand, but others may get the money.  But if you influence the buyer during the purchase, you’ve struck gold.  That’s why search ads have been the sweet spot of advertising, and why Google has done so well.

What Google is doing with Zagat is recognizing that mobile broadband can take the “influence purchases” paradigm to a whole new level.  Mobile lets you go to the shopping area, even to the store, with the customer.  Nobody these days shops or eats without a phone (most, in my personal view, should learn to keep it in their pockets while eating!) and what Google is aiming for with its latest buy is to get the purchaser to check out restaurant (and obviously, over time, other purchase) reviews at the last minute, that critical Golden Minute when the buyer waffles and then commits.

Where Yahoo comes into this is at two levels.  First, they have had mobile aspirations all along but they’ve failed to recognize the most fundamental truth about mobile advertising, the truth I opened with here.  Mobile is different because it supports point-of-purchase manipulation of the buyer.  You don’t do mobile searches for the same reason you do searches at home.  You’re out there, ready to buy.  Earth to Bartz (yes, a retrospective question at this point); why not focus Yahoo search on MOBILE and forget about all those “relevance” and other issues.  What’s relevant to a mobile user is what’s surrounding that user.  You make your choice from what’s available.  Yahoo COULD have taken a leading role there.  And since Zagat has been on the block with no really interested parties looking at it for ages, Yahoo could have had them too.

A major investor group is calling for a new board, citing all of the value that Yahoo should have on paper.  The Internet industry doesn’t exist on paper, not really, not in the way that other industries do.  Yahoo is a recognized brand, but in Yahoo’s market brand is less important than you’d think.  The Internet is an information engine, and getting the right information to people at the right time is the formula for success.  Replace Bartz, replace the board, and you still have a thousand Yahooheads in key positions in the company who can’t think outside their own narrow gully of past experiences.  Startups are trained by their VCs to cling to a notion until they either win everything or lose everything.  Yahoo was trained as a startup, and unless they get that thousand inertial thinkers out of their gullies, they’re toast.