I think [Yahoo] should be more open minded about ways to solve their problems. If running a big company isn’t easy, divide it up into a few small companies. 
— Alibaba CEO Jack Ma, who had plenty to say about his big purple stakeholder at D9 last night
via markcoatney: “In which Joy Victory reminds us that the Washington Post’s romance with Facebook may be getting out of hand.”
Oh. Hot. Damn.
The bottom line is that this is a good, old-fashioned commercial peering dispute. —
Comcast’s view of its fight with Level 3 over the cost of Netflix’s traffic.
We remember when Grandpa had a good, old-fashioned fight with the next door neighbor about ownership of a chicken. -Stacy
photo: All Things D
All Things D has a great 3 a.m. post about part of Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s speech at TechCrunch Disrupt yesterday. The gist, according to All Things D: Google is the inverse of Apple.
“Apple’s core strategy is closedness,” Schmidt said re: mobile products. “With Apple’s model … you have to use their development tools, their platform, their software, their hardware,” Schmidt added.
Google’s Android system, on the other hand, often receives praise from mobile developers for its open platform.
Of course, none of this is new news. But All Things D makes a good point: For all its claim of openness, Google is really open only on products that don’t generate a lot of revenue. Apple’s “closedness,” on the other hand, nets the company a good chunk of change on its mobile model. Inverse though the strategies may be, so far it seems to be working well for both. -Julianne
photo: Charis Tsevis
“Mark’s contributions were frequently broken, late, or non-existent, and in the end our final project didn’t function largely thanks to him. Of course, to Mark none of that mattered.” —Aaron Greenspan, in a HuffPo article posted today titled “The Legend of Mark Zuckerberg.
It’s an interesting read, as Greenspan is a former Harvard classmate of Facebook CEO Zuckerberg. Greenspan claimed he had a hand in developing the social networking giant, and the case was settled last year.
Greenspan emailed me the link this morning; he and I had chatted last month about a court filing he’d made, asking for an extension of time to file an opposition to Facebook’s attempt to trademark the word “face.”
The piece is long but compelling, and Greenspan doesn’t pull any punches. He calls out everyone from Zuckerberg to Harvard administrators to the creators of the upcoming biopic The Social Network.
“By replacing his awkward, stilted speech pattern with an unending stream of Aaron Sorkin’s intellectual zingers, Mark’s legend will benefit in a way that Bill Gates’s never did,” Greenspan writes.
He also skewers what he calls “Facebook’s doublespeak, redefining ‘friend’ as ‘someone you barely know’ and ‘utility’ as ‘something that sucks up your free time’ … These linguistic gymnastics are non-trivial and should frighten us all given how significant they have become in the daily lives of many.”
It’ll leave you with a chill. -Julianne
photo: Colin McDonald
Yup, he went there. On today’s Oracle earnings call — notable for being the first featuring Mark Hurd, who was doing HP earnings reports a scant four months ago — Ellison trash-talked SAP but saved his real fightin’ words for those who would question Oracle’s Sun takeover.
“To quote one of our great presidents, ‘Mission accomplished,’” Ellison declared. “We think it’s going to become more profitable over the fiscal year.”
We’ll turn it over to Jon Stewart for a reminder of how well the year went after Bush hailed the end of “major combat operations.” We’re pretty sure Oracle won’t have to fend off insurgent bombings, but you never know — Sun engineers can be feisty. -Stacy
