New Job site threatens monster.com

I just read a story in the Washington Post about a new domain, "jobs" that looks like a big threat to Monster.com and CareerBuilder.com. It could do to those job sites what CraigsList did to newspapers' classified ads.
The jobs domain was authorized by the Internet registry, ICANN. It was opposed by newspapers and long-term nemesis Monster alike. The jobs domain lets companies post help wanted ads for free. You go there by typing something like http://ma.usa.jobs/writing, and see a list of postings. Companies love it because they can put up ads for free. Monster.com charges up to $395 for an add, or $230 a piece for ten or more. For a big company with a lot of openings, it's a significant saving.
If you're job hunting -- or hiring -- its worth checking out.

Official Google Blog: An update from the Chairman

Official Google Blog: An update from the Chairman

http://billbulkeley.blogspot.com/2011/01/silicon-valley-boardroom-shakeups.html

Silicon Valley Boardroom Shakeups

Two of the biggest companies in Silicon Valley underwent big boardroom shakeups yesterday. At Google, Eric Schmidt, the professional manager who has headed the company since 2001 relinquished the CEO title to co-founder, Larry Page. At Hewlett-Packard, the world's biggest technology company by revenue, four board members departed with five new ones coming on.
The Google change is a big deal. I'd argue that Google is the most important company on the planet -- more so than Facebook, IBM, Apple or News Corp. The Google triumvirate has created an amazing business model. And it is also a cultural and political force with its own foreign policy. Google's stance against Chinese censorship (allegedly pushed by co-founders Larry and Sergey) was an important development in world affairs last year. Its stewardship of many individual's documents, e-mail, photos, videos, phone calls and blogs is a bedrock of Internet existence.
Eric Schmidt, who I met a few times while covering Sun and Novell, has an amazing ability to foresee how technology will impact business and the economy. Google has made a series of smart moves through acquisition and invention during the decade he has been there. I'm not a shareholder, so I don't have that perspective. But as a citizen of the globe, I hope the change won't derail Google.
The good news is that the co-founders presumably are more attuned to the company motto -- Don't Be Evil. The risk is that Schmidt's acute sense of how Google fits into the wider world will be subsumed to a Google-centric view.
Hewlett-Packard, on the other hand, doesn't really matter. It's a collection of unrelated commodity businesses that don't lead in anything but cutting prices. If the whole company blew up, someone else would license Canon's printer engine technology. The same Chinese factories would make the same PCs and laptops. Another Indian body shop would take over the offshored services. The Intel-based enterprise servers would be made by some other Microsoft spawn. And only the legacy enterprise equipment would retain an H-P identity. Mark Hurd managed to make H-P profitable, but the decision to slash R&D has made it largely irrelevant.

Chinese mothers

There was a fascinating piece in Saturday's Wall Street Journal by a Chinese-American mother who is a law professor at Yale. She contrasted her parenting style with that of typical American moms (and dads, including her husband). The message was that while her demands for perfection from her daughters sound autocratic and unreasonable, they produce superior children. The implication was that her methods are typical not only of Chinese-American mothers but of mothers in China as well, raising some interesting questions about the future competitiveness of our two societies.
I certainly haven't raised my children the way she did, and I suspect some of the reason is laziness and lack of self-discipline.
While her methods sound draconian, they are also incredibly time consuming. I don't think many American mothers or fathers have the discipline and determination to spend the hours working with their kids that being a Chinese mother seems to require. We all try to spend quality time with children, but not many spend the amount of time that Amy Chua seems to. I suspect her kids benefit from the amount of time and attention they get, even if they sometimes rebel at the content. She may sometimes tell them they're "garbage" but the amount of time she spends must tell them that she thinks they're incredibly important.
In one painful anecdote about forcing her daughter to learn to play a difficult piano piece, she describes spending at least four hours of yelling, screaming and listening to badly played piano. Not many parents have the energy or make the time for the sort of effort.
In the U.S., you sometimes hear about football or baseball players who are coaches' kids who spent that sort of time with their Dads. And then there's Tiger Woods. But very few parents will spend that kind of time practicing math or language or a musical instrument with a child. It's so much easier to put the kid in front of a video screen or a computer game.

Is Groupon really more valuable than Twitter?

I was surprised by the values placed on two of the hottest closely held companies -- Groupon and Twitter -- both for their sheer size and the fact that Groupon is worth more.

Groupon, a gimmicky coupon site, was valued at 50% more than Twitter, which has become core to the lives and marketing strategies of millions of people.

All Things Digital, the Wall Street Journal-affiliated Web site, is reporting that Google will pay up to $6 billion for Groupon.

And TechCrunch reports that VC giant Kleiner Perkins wants to invest in Twitter at a valuation of $4 billion.

Those are eye-popping numbers -- reportedly ten times Groupon's anticipated revenue this year, and nearly 30 times the Twitter revenue for 2010 that was projected in some stolen documents a year ago.

Groupon has a lot of revenue for a two year old company. But it only has 12 million users, and it already has a lot of competitors. As a happy user of Groupon, I can't differentiate it from the other coupon sites I use like EverSave. Setting up a local couponing site would seem to be easy to do for anyone who can inspire a sales force. Yellow Book salespeople, whose jobs would seem to be in jeopardy now, would seem like obvious competitors.

Twitter has 175 million users and it has a huge role in the social-media zeitgeist. In terms of mindshare it's already the equivalent of Facebook and YouTube. It's going to be very hard for anyone to compete for its niche. Even better micro-blogging technology wouldn't give many people a reason to shift away or add another service.

Obviously, the Groupon valuation is based on real money. Twitter's value is much more conceptual. Still, if I had the opportunity to own 1% of either company, I'd opt for Twitter.

O'Reily shouldn't Joke about beheading reporters

I'm horrified by Fox host Bill O'Reilly's "joke" about beheading Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank. Dana's alleged sin was failing to acknowledge that Fox had more than one Democrat on air on election eve as it celebrated the Republican victory.
Dana is a good friend and former colleague in the WSJ Boston bureau. Because he's hilariously funny and understated, he's a perfect foil for the overheated, angry Fox commentators. Dana writes about his feelings about O'Reilly's attack on him in the Washington Post today. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/09/AR2010110906643.html
He notes that jokes about beheading reporters are especially painful for those of us who worked for the Wall Street Journal when our colleague Danny Pearl was beheaded by militant Islamists in Pakistan. It's ironic that WSJ reporters and Fox commentators are all part of the News Corp. family.
O'Reilly is probably also miffed about Dana's terrific new book on his Fox stable mate, Glenn Beck: "Tears of a Clown." In the book, Dana describes the histrionic Beck, whose weepy monologues are enhanced by smearing mentholatum gel under his eyes, with devastating accuracy. Using Beck's own excuse Dana says he can't be misrepresenting Beck if he quotes his own words.
The book will tell most people far more than they want to know about what Beck says without ever really answering the question of whether he believes all of it. It struck me as a brilliant examination of how a propagandist can use innuendo and subtle misstatements to create a world that is very different from the one most of us live in.
Dana has succeeded in writing an exhaustive case study of how the paranoid mind can spin and spread conspiracy theories. Some 9 million people listen to him every week on TV and radio, so in a country of 300 million, he's only reaching a tiny fringe. But those folks scare Congressmen in conservative districts, and many of them go to tea party rallies. Unfortunately, Beck's technique and his world view matter.

Google suit over Microsoft contract hurts U.S. Gov operations

Google is stepping up its game in office software with a lawsuit against the Interior Dept. for picking Microsoft Office for a $59 million upgrade. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704141104575588641430182832.html?mod=WSJ_hps_sections_business
I'm not sure of the merits of Google's case. But I know the resulting delay won't be good for governement operations.
The endless litigation over government IT contracts is a big reason the government IT systems are so antiquated. Every effort to upgrade IT in government agencies requires months or years of writing RFPs followed by public comments, followed by amendments, followed by bids, followed by selections, followed by litigation. This is further complicated by quadrennial turnover of agency heads and deputy under-secretaries requiring the new leader to be updated on everything that went into the contract RFP and its aftermath.
The goal, of course, is fair competition for government procurement that will result in the best systems and the lowest price. The alternative would probably be companies lobbying congressmen with campaign contributions which isn't good either. But the game for bidders now is to get into the RFP process and put in criteria that make your company's product the only one that can fulfill the RFP. That's what Google says happened at Interior.
There's also a game of pulling together many competitors into consortia with different ones taking the lead on different contracts.
Maybe the Google lawsuit will result in a better system in 2012 or 2013. But Interior will lose a couple of years of enhanced productivity, and Microsoft may end up winning anyway.