Four years ago or so, a handful of big, lumbering old-media companies, desperate to show investors and the technorati alike that they had a clue when it came to the Internet, created the new position of digital strategist-in-chief.
Oracle pounced on Sun Microsystems a week ago, agreeing to buy the battered server maker for $5.6 billion, excluding Sun’s cash.
The “Web toy” is hot. Who cares how Twitter will make money?
Metaphorically speaking, Google is killing the newspaper industry. Online news is quickly hollowing out the traditional paper–the Christian Science Monitor eliminates its print edition, Tribune Co. declares bankruptcy, Detroit’s two dailies slash home delivery to three days a week–while Google rakes in advertising profits. Turns out that Google CEO Eric Schmidt professes a passionate desire to lend a hand.
A couple years ago, right around the time Dell’s exploding laptop batteries were getting a fair amount of media attention, I had breakfast in San Francisco with a senior Dell executive. He was seriously annoyed by all the focus on Dell, even though his company wasn’t the only one with the spontaneous combustion problem caused by Sony’s batteries.
Nature abhors a vacuum, but apparently not in Silicon Valley, where it may not be easy to fill some very prominent vacancies. Right now you’ve got Jerry Yang abdicating at Yahoo, and Microsoft is looking for someone to run its online division. And there are persistent rumors that another huge job might be opening up at Google.
Let’s start with some uncomfortable truths. We wouldn’t be publishing an article about the under-the-radar guy who’s most likely to succeed Steve Jobs as chief executive of Apple if Jobs himself hadn’t shown up at a company event in San Francisco in June looking frightfully skinny and pale.
I wrote Friday about the daunting math that Microsoft suddenly faced if it didn’t significantly boost its stake in Yahoo. In short, though Yahoo insiders and generally supportive institutions control less than 40% of Yahoo’s outstanding shares, they easily control a majority of shares likely to be voted in a hostile proxy contest. Average Joes rarely vote in such fights, boosting the power of the pros. Why Microsoft’s bankers at Morgan Stanley didn’t figure this out sooner–or why CEO Steve Ballmer didn’t listen–is one of the intriguing tales that may yet be told. As of the opening bell Monday morning, however, the math changes immediately …
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