Peter Yared's Musings

This post was also published in VentureBeat. People use Facebook a lot. They use it to share photos. They use it to invite people to events. They use it as an address book and messaging system. They use it as a games platform. The growth has been so staggering that Facebook is by far the most popular website and can’t even fill its existing ad display inventory . When a company has achieved complete market domination, it usually hones in on its core features and makes every effort to keep things clean and simple. This is the reason Google’s homepage and search results barely changed for 10 years while Google’s revenue and profits skyrocketed. Facebook, however, has different ideas. Despite the often rumored Facebook fatigue , Mark Zuckerberg thinks that sharing will double every year . Now that we can already Like everything on the web, what else can we possibly share? Enter the rumored Read/Watch/Listen features that are expected to be launched on Thursday at the Facebook f...

This post was also published in VentureBeat. HP has had to face tough realities this week. Fortunately, there is a way for it to survive: Embrace the inevitable trend favoring “vertical” companies. In the first part of the 2000s, IBM and HP went in two vastly different directions: HP acquired Compaq to bolster a horizontally-integrated PC business, while IBM sold its PC division to Lenovo and focused on creating a vertical stack of enterprise products. In the early 2010s, HP’s decision to attempt to dominate PCs has come back to haunt it. Even though HP is the number one PC seller, the low-margin business doesn’t pay, so the company is exiting both the desktop and mobile consumer computer business. Now HP needs to act fast to remain competitive in the enterprise. Rule of three Earlier I described how the consumer computing business is consolidating based on the “rule of three” economic theory and that three big players would dominate the industry: Apple, Google and Mic...

This post was also published in VentureBeat. While it comes as a big surprise that Google is buying Motorola Mobility , it is just as surprising that Apple launched a cloud service that will eventually fully compete with Google’s services and Microsoft essentially turned Nokia into its own private Foxconn and will compete with Apple’s devices. All of these moves actually fit economic theory perfectly: Personal computing is now pervasive throughout our society, and the 30-year-old industry is maturing into a “rule of three” phase, where three large players will dominate the industry: Apple, Google and Microsoft are the GM, Ford and Chrysler of our era. Each of these “big three” players needs to build a full vertical stack and extract efficiencies between and from each layer: mobile operating systems, mobile devices, desktop operating systems, personal computers, web browsers, productivity applications, content distribution and cloud services. Now we know why Apple needs Safa...

This post was also published in VentureBeat. Aol released its earnings today a week after Time Warner, its former dot-com merger partner, announced earnings. The two businesses, once considered completely disparate and deemed one of the worst corporate mergers of all time , are now increasingly complementary as the industry shifts beyond delivery mechanism to content as the value differentiator. Time Warner reported stellar earnings last week , with income up 14% year over year and strong 11% growth in television networks such as TNT and CNN, 18% growth for premium content such as HBO, and 13% growth for Warner Bros movies. The one thorn in Time Warner’s side is Time, Inc. — the division grew a moribund 3% . The anemic growth at Time is coming primarily from online revenue , but it is a tough transition since Time does not sit on a premium editorial perch like the New York Times or Wall Street Journal. And although Time is currently profitable, the Time Warner CFO has warned tha...

This post was also published in VentureBeat. You know a web service has reached massive scale when it can charge brands to reach their own customers. Google has been doing it for years, Facebook has been doing it for the past couple of years, and now Twitter has just entered this hallowed territory with its new promoted tweets feature , which lets brands keep their tweets alive in your stream only if you have already followed that brand. The irony here is that you are only seeing these promoted tweets if you already followed that brand – so the brand is paying to advertise to users that already like it. Now if advertising is usually about getting new customers, why would brands pay to market to their existing customers? Many years ago, Google had a stroke of genius: to put ads above the search results and then charge brands to own the top spot where the brand inevitably would have been the first result. So when people search for BMW, BMW does not want Mercedes getting the top s...

This post was also published in VentureBeat. The Internet is about to hit its fourth major shift in server architecture. The early days were powered by simple Perl applications. As the dotcom hit, Java application servers running on highend UNIX machines powered the majority of the web and created a multibillion dollar per year industry. In the 2000s, scripting languages such as PHP and Ruby running on cloud based Linux infrastructure have spawned massive growth at companies like Rackspace and Amazon with its Amazon Web Services service. Each of these shifts in server architecture brought greater efficiencies and the ability to more cheaply deliver more sophisticated Internet services. We are now on the verge of hitting another inflection point with JavaScript running on the server. JavaScript came onto the scene in 1995 as the browser language in Netscape’s Navigator browser and was primarily used to implement simple user interface elements such as menus. With the wave of Web ...

This post was also published in VentureBeat. There has been a huge scrum amongst the smartphone players to capture the market for phone-based purchases. In a very surprising move, the major US-based carriers just folded their mobile payments hand, and folded it hard. Isis, the mobile payment system sponsored by Verizon, AT&T and TMobile, announced that it had signed deals with Visa, MasterCard, American Express and Discover to its touch and go payment systems. In the European and Asian markets, mobile carriers are payment providers, and people use their phones to pay for goods and services and then pay their carrier, and the carriers get a cut. So why are US carriers not going after this incredibly lucrative market? There’s actually a very simple reason. Payment providers require trust, and the US carriers decidedly do not have their customers’ trust. When your Verizon bill shows up and you see that it is $50 over what you expect, your first reaction is that they are scre...

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...