My Fantasy League Pick for Yahoo's Board: Steve Jobs

Over 11 years ago, after seeing one of the release candidates for Windows 98, I wrote “The browser wars are over, Microsoft won.” I took a lot of heat from the Netscape and Mac faithful, but at the time it was obvious that whatever the default was in the late 90s was going to win.

That was one prediction that I got right. But saying “the search wars are over, Google won” isn’t a prediction, but rather a statement of what already happened. Here’s a screen shot from a recent day’s worth of search traffic for TVbytheNumbers:

If search is the focus, combining Yahoo and Microsoft doesn’t really make up much ground. I’m mostly for Yahoo staying a separate entity because it has such massive scale overall. It’s lagging in search, but its other properties ranging from mail, to MyYahoo, to Yahoo sports perform very well. My theory, boneheaded as it may be, is with that much scale you ought to be able to figure out how to make more money. The one problem I have with the combination isn’t really Microsoft, it’s that combining the companies doesn’t seem like it will wind up increasing the scale that much.

Today Fred Wilson posted a list of board members he’d like to see in light of Carl Ichan’s recommendations. To be honest, I’d rather see Mark Cuban than a lot of Fred’s recommendations. Though I loved Fred’s pick of Bill Gross, overall there are too many deep-thinking smart people on his list. I’m not sure anything ever gets accomplished when you throw that many deep thinkers in a room. And with the mix of people Fred recommends I’d worry about the testosterone warrior mentality of making Google the target of all strategy. I think that would be a bad strategy. I’ve seen what happens when companies make their major competitor the sole focus, and it doesn’t usually work out well.

The one guy I’d really like to see on Yahoo’s board if we’re doing fantasy league is Apple’s Steve Jobs. Think about it. Apple stopped making Microsoft its direct focus, all doing so got it was the need to ask for Microsoft’s help to bail it out! Which Microsoft did.

It took a while, but then came the iPod and now Mac and its OS are very steadily gaining share too. The Apple Store? A retail hit! The Microsoft Store? Not so much. Jobs seemingly knows how to ride these things out better than anyone. Marc Andreesen may be a great product guy and Tim O’Reilly may be a genius at seeing the future. But Jobs has the practical experience of actually surviving something similar.

Why I Don't Care About News Aggregators

I’m old school, that’s why. Old school meaning old. I have nothing against news aggregators like TechMeme at all. I’m just in the tiny percentage of people who developed a habit of RSS and between that and the sites I visit the news aggregators seem like completely unnecessary overhead for me.

First of all in the case of TechMeme, I just don’t personally have any need to know about some topic that’s “hot” right at this moment. If it’s that hot, one of the feeds I read will cover it anyway. I do like seeing multiple viewpoints to a story – a few anyway, but I feel like I get them. I read TechCrunch, Fred Wilson’s AVC, Kara Swisher, and Jason Calacanis via RSS. Then, other than the stuff I’m following for the TV biz, I subscribe to maybe about 50 other RSS feeds. I do peek at Valleywag for the entertainment value. If I wasn’t doing any of that already, I’d find TechMeme very useful.

Perhaps I just like picking my own sources instead of someone picking them for me. I first met Fred Wilson in the mid 90s when I wrote a newsletter about online and Internet stuff (and too much about AOL for many people’s tastes). Fred was a VC back then but he didn’t have a blog. I wish he had, because usually when I’d hear from him it was to hear how wrong I was about something! : ) Then as now, I don’t always agree with what Fred thinks, but I like how he thinks very much.

Same for Swisher, and Calacanis (both of whom I’ve also known for years) and Arrington (who I’ve never met). These and others become my news aggregators. If they link to something I think I want to or should read – I click it. Even though I may not always agree with what they are saying, I trust them to speak their minds. How Calacanis behaves or how Arrington handles embargoes, I just don’t really care about any of that stuff. I read them and others for their thinking and to help me think about things.

I read a lot of other blogs besides those “A-List” folks, but mostly I am a New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune and LA Times guy. And because I live here, the San Francisco Chronicle (mostly for sports and restaurant reviews).

Angela Penny, knowing that I loved baseball told me about BallBug from the makers of TechMeme (essentially TechMeme for MLB). But I read the Chronicle, the NY Times, The Washington Post, ESPN, etc – how many versions of “Paul Byrd took HGH” do I need to see? Honestly, I didn’t even need to see the one, the bigger story on that front would be “Player X can prove he didn’t take performance enhancers!” But I promised no more steroid rants.

Can We Get Everything We Want...for Free?

Fred Wilson wrote a great post about the need for two-way openness. He was referring to the features where you can receive things like Facebook friends’ status updates via RSS. Fred likes that this is available, however it’s not enough for him. He wants two-way openness. He wants to be able to update his status on Facebook via Twitter.

As an end user, I’m right there with Fred Wilson: let me use whatever I want, to do whatever I want! But if I were working at Facebook I’d be scratching my head and thinking, “How the hell are we going to make Fred happy AND generate lots of revenue?”

This, by the way is a problem, for even one-way openness. Especially as RSS usage increases – and I believe this is inevitable because you really can finally create “The Daily Me.”

I read Engadget religiously. But they send full feeds out via RSS, and I never (or hardly ever) actually go to Engadget’s web site. I don’t see ANY of the ads on their site.

I know sites are struggling with full-feed vs. partial feed for this very reason. I’d much rather see Dave Winer focusing on the issue of how to utilize RSS to the fullest and still make money than to worry about Jason Calacanis’ mid-life crisis or Mahalo. And that’s with ONE way communication.

Now enter two way communication. Let’s take Fred’s example. He wants a world where he can find out whatever is happening in his Facebook world via RSS, and he wants to be able to update things via services like Twitter. When will Fred ever actually log on to Facebook? How will Facebook make any money on him?

While Fred and many others (perhaps even me) might be willing to pay $10/mo. for such flexibility, I don’t think the masses would. And maybe that’s the model: Give Fred what he wants, but make him pay.

Will there be a company that rolls up a bunch of great content sites and packages “Full Feed RSS without ads!” for a fee? Will there be subscription models that allow us to use whatever tools we want without actually ever visiting a web site?

I think there will have to be.

For Fred Wilson (and others) to Ponder

I do like the variety of non-technology issues Fred tackles on his blog and the sometimes lively (and thoughtful) discussion it generates. Fred seems to be enamored with the idea of change, but he never actually thinks about the problem of change realistically. He focuses on specific issues, but the problem when it comes to change is that no matter what the issue, we're the same people.

I believe the bigger issue to tackle is how to accommodate human nature in the best way possible to produce actual results (change). My belief and it can somwhat be quantified is that on very difficult issues where the change necessary is palpable, it’s very hard to move the needle much, if at all, because of human nature. We gravitate towards things that make us feel good and run away from things that cause us pain and that's just how we operate in general.

Whether it be global warming, healthcare, poverty, hunger,issues with obesity, or whatever, it seems that nothing actually happens because the pain to change is greater than the perceived threat of current or future pain.

Regardless of what the issues are, the principles of pleasure/pain are at play. Change is hard and usually comes with some “pain”, which we naturally avoid. Throw capitalism on top of it, and it becomes even a steeper hill to climb. If the people like Fred who suggest that something needs to change with our current health care system are in fact correct, how much do you think will be spent to keep things as they are? I’m guessing in the billions of dollars would be spent by the insurance lobbies to preserve the status quo.

Is the world really better off because of anything that happened with Live Aid, Comic Relief, etc., etc. I wouldn’t dispute that some individuals were helped by these events, but did it actually change anything? If you try to quantify this based on anything statistical the answer seems overwhelmingly to be: no.

All it seems to have accomplished was making people “feel better”. I view this as not much different than what goes down with the people who are self-employed as panhandlers in San Francisco. They do provide a service, they make people feel better about themselves by allowing people to think they made a difference when they gave the panhandler money.

I am not sure it matters what in particular you’re looking to change is, people will generally be resistant to any lifestyle change or anything that costs more money and if it’s something that someone else makes a lot of money on already, they will spend heavily to keep things as they are.

Can this generic problem be solved for? If it can, it can be applied to anything and everything that “needs change”. I’m not certain there is not a solution to this generic problem, but I’m certain it isn’t easy and even more certain that without solving for this, you will not be able to solve any individual circumstance where it seems that change is required.

Is it possible to come up with a new way of thinking about these things and get people to embrace such thinking? I don’t think you get to “real change” without it seeming pretty radical for a large % of people, and the notion of “radical” on some level equates to pain, which by human nature we avoid.

My question for anyone with a mind to think about this is: can this be overcome and if so, how would you overcome it? It seems that if you can’t solve for this generic problem, thinking on health care, global warming, obesity, whatever, is just in the realm of mental masturbation. Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE thinking about it, but I’d love to actually see some things change too. Can you point to some examples of thinking paradigms that produced REAL change when there was no immediate threat to our overall survival as a species?

Finally, is there a way to actually promote radical thinking that would produce actual change without it seeming radical?