Peter Yared's Musings

This post was also published in VentureBeat. Yes, Microsoft is a slow, lumbering giant. It has been working on cloud for years, with numerous iterations, that took so long cloud proponent Ray Ozzie got fed up and left . Microsoft had to work through cannibalizing reseller arrangements, reconciling how to reach consumers versus businesses and a host of other issues. With Office 365, Microsoft has finally delivered an end-to-end cloud platform for businesses that encompass not only its desktop Office software, but also its server software, such as Exchange and SharePoint. Contrary to Google’s narrative, cloud based office software is still a wide open market. The three million businesses that have “Gone Google” — proclaimed on billboards in San Francisco airport’s new Terminal 2 — are for the most part Gmail users, who are still happily using Microsoft Office and even Microsoft Outlook. Gmail is a fast, cheap, spam-free and great solution for business email, especially relative to ...

This post was also published in VentureBeat. After falling far behind in the shift to cloud computing, Apple’s much-anticipated iCloud offering fell far short of expectations. Rather than a cloud locker that could stream media to a variety of clients, iCloud turned out to be a glorified file synchronization service like Dropbox. iCloud will automatically sync all of your apps, settings, and files to all of your iOS devices . Syncing all of your files is definitely a useful feature for consumers, but it is starkly different from the approach of other industry titans. Google and Amazon were so terrified of Apple streaming music that they both pushed shoddy beta-quality music lockers out the door in the past few weeks. Instead, Apple shipped the ability to recognize ripped or illegal music on a user’s hard drive and then automatically sync copies of songs at higher quality across devices. While recognizing that a user already has ripped a CD and skipping the upload does not seem li...

This post was also published in VentureBeat. This is the second of two articles on likely changes to Twitter. The first article focused on consumer-facing changes to Twitter and this one focuses on monetization. Twitter has experienced tremendous traffic growth , and more importantly has permeated into the collective consciousness with constant Twitter quotes by news organizations and entertainers. Twitter’s valuation has gone up as people expect it to monetize its traction with both consumers and brands. Here are a few of the features that would seriously inflect the Twitter revenue curve. Bring on the banners Twitter has struggled to scale advertising revenue, because like most social sites it tries to inflict strange ad units on both its users and advertisers. From the users’ perspective, things like promoted tweets or Facebook’s social ads are intrusive to their content experience. From the advertisers’ perspective, they can’t use their normal ad units and track results...

This post was also published in VentureBeat. This is the first of two articles on likely changes to Twitter. This article focuses on changes to Twitter’s consumer-facing side and the second article focuses on Twitter monetization. Twitter reportedly acquired TweetDeck today , and that’s likely to be the first of many changes. There is a broad consensus that Twitter had stalled out in terms of product innovation, , which even creator Jack Dorsey noted upon his return to Twitter as head of product. With Dorsey’s return, we should expect more changes, and very quickly. BusinessInsider recently suggested that Twitter only has 21 million active users , and a lot more people who read of those users’ tweets. While at first blush this number may look really bad, it is actually an indicator that Twitter has matured. Twitter is a microblogging platform, and has followed the same trajectory as blogs. At first, everyone blogged. Now only a few blogs really matter. Consumers want Twitt...

This post was also published in VentureBeat. LinkedIn’s massive 2x pop this morning when it went public reflects that everyone, including the underwriters, seriously underestimated the demand for the shares. There was a time, especially during the .com, when underwriters such as Morgan Stanley would attempt to artificially go out the door with a low price in order to create a pop, but companies going public nowadays are much more sophisticated and discerning about leaving so much money on the table. So why is there so much pent up demand? It is not just, as Jim Kramer claims , the limited number of shares. Hot, second wave Internet companies are taking a long time to go public and the stock is only available to a select few. Only accredited investors could invest in hot Silicon Valley companies through secondary exchanges like SecondMarket . On top of that, early stage investors and management are much more patient due to the liquidity gained through secondary markets and the wil...

This post was also published in VentureBeat. Although many are heralding the advent of “social commerce” , the biggest e-commerce wave of the last couple of years has in fact used the most basic Internet technology. Enormously successful deals companies such as Groupon, LivingSocial, and Gilt Groupe send simple e-mails. Users click through those emails to a single landing page whose only goal is to get users to hit “Buy”. There is no innovative technology at play here, rather a simple email op-in that asks consumers what regions or products they are interested in when they join the mailing list. Although Groupon likes to tout its tipping point algorithm where a certain number of users have to purchase in order for a deal to happen, there is such volume that all deals go through, every time. Net net, nothing social going on here. The social revolution has made brands think they can invert how people think. Sure brand ambassadors are great, but they are few and few between, and lo...

This post was also published in VentureBeat. The social era of computing has produced three multi-billion dollar companies: Facebook, Twitter and Zynga. As light is increasingly shed on the formation myths of Facebook and Twitter, a lot of new information casts doubt on the ethics and motivations of their respective founders. It is ironic that Zynga has had no such drama, since the company’s founder Mark Pincus has been lambasted for being unethical due to what TechCrunch dubbed “ScamVille” . Was ScamVille really a scam? There is no question that the offer ad networks like OfferPal that Zynga was using were shlocking uninstallable toolbars and illicitly signing people up for mobile subscriptions. However, numerous major Fortune 500 companies were also using scammy offers at the time, which TechCrunch itself later noted . As I have written before, TechCrunch has a repeated inclination to quash people’s reputations with tabloid-style posts . For the technology audience, “Marc Pincus...

This post was also published in VentureBeat. There’s a reason Lady Gaga recently visited Google and snubbed Facebook . The music industry is on the precipice of another huge transition from downloads to streaming, and Google has the opportunity to own this transition. It can circumvent both Facebook’s growth as a media channel and Apple’s forthcoming streaming service . There was a time when Myspace was people’s first stop after hearing about a new band. They would immediately go to the band’s Myspace page, where they could listen to tracks, see what people were commenting, and read what the artists were posting themselves. Now people are going to YouTube first. As the Rebecca Black “Friday” video showed , YouTube is the hands down best platform for media to go viral. YouTube is definitely right up the artists’ alley; artists can add a fun background image on the channel, see how many video views they have, post a message to their fans, and also check out what all the comment t...

This post was also published in VentureBeat. Google has finally unveiled its +1 social initiative , largely aimed at stemming Facebook’s ability to learn what links are relevant to others in a social graph. The Google +1 implementation, where people can recommend individual items within search results, is definitely a step in the right direction. However, it could also hurt Google’s revenue stream — I predict that adding a +1 option to keyword ads will have a negative effect on clickthrough rates. Google has been gradually embedding interactivity in search results, lately even asking directly in search results if a particular Twitter handle is yours. The new +1 feature harkens back to a 2008 Google experiment that mimicked Digg’s interface and let users move search results up and down, and even comment on them . This new feature where users can directly like particular search result links definitely will help Google better rank search results by involving crowdsourced humans i...

This post was also published in VentureBeat. For a so-called social utility, Facebook has been getting more and more useless. At first, Facebook friend overload was an early-adopter problem for overnetworked Silicon Valley insiders. But now, friend overload is hitting the mainstream consciousness . Many people who have been using Facebook for a few years find themselves inundated with friend requests by everyone from elementary school classmates to work colleagues. The resulting mess of casual acquaintances on Facebook has quickly overwhelmed newsfeeds with uninteresting minutiae and people you really don’t care to see. In response, there has been a lot of recent activity by startups exploring concepts related to small groups of friends. Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley has long talked about how his location-based service has a more “real” social graph — people with whom you’re willing to share your location. Path is run by Dave Morin, a well-known ex-Facebook employee, and is deli...