Did You Get the New Google Logo T-Shirt?

Last week I had the pleasure of attending the Casual Connect conference here in Tel Aviv. For those that don't know, Casual Connect is in the words of the website:

Casual Connect Tel Aviv is about matching the creativity of the games industry with new media innovation and investment to find the next big thing for the games industry. Tel Aviv is a fun and beautiful city filled with history, culture and representing the forefront of the burgeoning games industry.

I had volunteered to record the sessions and was given the last day of the event's marketing track, and a free pass to the show.

Having only slightly worked in the industry it was a chance to look into the minds and ideas around people that give corporate enterprises zero thought. Everything, and everyone, was hyper focused on the consumer and of course gaming or gambling games.

One of the things we received in our conference bags was what looked like a long bookmark and it had a Google logo on it and said to stop by the Google stand and pick up the new logo t-shirt. How could I resist, so in the name of research off I went to find Google.

They had a stand made out of large LEGO pieces with a fountain of marshmallows in the middle. perfect for the event. They had on hand people to help you with Adwords and other advertising aspects of the great Googleverse.

I stepped up and asked about the t-shirt. The woman at the stand said I needed to trade the bookmark for a shirt. Being an avid reader of physical paper books I asked if I could keep the bookmark, after all doesn't Google care about education? Nope, you must swap the bookmark for the shirt.

This reminded me of years ago when I worked on Broadway and the box office was charged per cup used and verified by how many drinks were ordered or served. Seemed like a poor way to manage the kiosk then, and this was not much more insightful.

I acquiesced and did the swap and then waited for the barcode scanner or a verification of my name or business card, they didn't ask for one. This got me thinking, was Google really all knowing that they knew who everyone was? Maybe they were getting the entire attendee list so it did not matter if they knew I picked up a shirt or not.

Maybe, this being Google, they were playing a math game. How many bookmarks were "delivered" to attendees, how many were returned for a shirt and how many shirts were actually given out. Like my Broadway kiosk seemed like trust was a factor, but for whom?

Why would Google waste time, resources, and money just to go to a conference which really was about the back office efforts of the gaming industry? If they really wanted to get their new logo and shirt out to the world they would have been better off at one of the main train stations down the road.

Could Google have been gaming the attendees? Was it an inside joke to see how any shirts could be given away without actually doing anything else? Were the shirts just leftovers from the recent rebranding exercise?

Maybe Google has gotten so big, the underlings just don't care, or know enough, because their own managers have no clue about business and how or why leads like this are important. Or maybe, because they are Google and literally see all our searches, posts and data that anytime they need leads they just do some SQL search on their raw data.

I don't know the answer. It was funny given how many people at the event were all about eyeballs and retention and while this gets eyeballs, not sure about retention.

Was it a waste of money for them? Is branding really important when you are Google? Is it because people don't want to be seen with a vintage shirt but a new modern version and Google was just playing with us?

I got a shirt, and a book called 'The Secret To App Success on Google Play" (pdf version) from Google, not sure what they got from me aside from this post.

Apps That Make Life Easier in Other Countries

On my travels lately we have been using extensively a few apps which some of you may need or want when you travel as well. I am not so excited by any of the lame efforts of gamification, so ignoring this GAM (Game Spam) the apps are:

Everyone knows about WAZE and if you don't, go get it now and never get lost or late anywhere you drive.

Like WAZE, MOOVIT does for you bus users and train users what WAZE does for drivers. A bit confusing of a UI but once you get used to it you will not stop. It handles multiple language inputs as well. Very useful when visiting countries for conferences.

Google Maps, no link, it's on your phone already, yes the basic keeps getting better. We now say in Google we trust as it has bus details as well as traffic.

What's App also has been extremely helpful in helping us in discussions with friends and family, groups or individuals. Cell phone based, needs a phone number, but so much easier and less battery drain than Skype or almost any other IM.

Google Translate app is also extremely useful if you do not speak the local language.

How did we survive before? Well, when you live in the same place for over 10 years you may not have a need. When you move to a new country or just visit for a conference or vacation, best to have as much help, in your native language, as possible.

No doubt there are more useful ones, currency converters come to mind, and hopefully you will all provide more for me and others to look into as well.

Google Beats Microsoft, Yes but beat IBM Notes? No Way

Google, I love you guys, I really do, you do some amazing things and the Doodles are the best!
But sometimes your business partners really have no clue what they are talking about and should rethink their marketing.

Case in point, a company produced a 3 page document(link to my server, not giving them the traffic) on why Google trumps MS Exchange as an alternative to IBM Lotus Notes.

The opening salvo is hyperbole at the best of times. People move systems back and forth and, although I can not name names, I know of a few well known companies that are coming back or at least increasing their Notes usage.

The document discusses how cloud is the key driver for IT and Mobility is also a trend. Funny, we had mobile apps and mail back in 1999 or 2000 on GSM phones with native Lotus Notes apps. I know because I was there at Lotusphere Europe in Berlin and ran the wireless phone system for the CXO's that came, still have one of the phones we did it on.

What took the world so long to catch up? Just like that chiclet icon map your iPhone and Android uses, came from the Lotus Notes workspace Release 1, 20+ years ago. Say what you want about IBM Notes, it was way ahead of its time.

I do not know about you, but if the word "dope" shows up in someone's advertising it usually implies one thing. A poor choice of words, or genius, given how the Cloud is so enticing, you try a little and beg for more. What? That isn't how it works? I don't know either what they are thinking.

"Gmail is familiar to most work-force as a personal email solution." This may be true, but the Gmail UI SUCKS! Sorry, showing my age there. I mean I am not comfortable with it because it doesn't do ANYTHING except email. Ok, so where is my integrated calendar? How do I schedule meetings? How do we handle archiving and offline email when traveling? Where is my integration into Facebook CRM, SAP, Vacation requests even? Training is only easy because....it does not do much of anything.

"Costing" is saved because "Migration costs, licensing costs and ongoing maintenance costs form a major point of decision. Google has a simpler, lighter cost structure." Yes and no, the basic license may be cheaper, in Year 1, but in Year 2, no way are you cheaper than IBM or MS on support licensing. Google is TWICE the price or more of a Lotus client license in Year 2-whenever. Migration costs are not free either and can become staggering when involved with vendors that are ill equipped to grasp the complexities of a Domino environment. One Google partner told me that Google has no advice for Lotus customers, they basically edited the Exchange checklist title!

"Google ecosystem has got built over time with millions of users adopting it and driving it based on their preferences on personal productivity and collaboration needs." And so few corporations. Personal productivity has nothing on corporate productivity. This is like saying my kindergartener edited my MBA thesis.

They do get two things perfect "MS Office has very powerful set of tools, but still not designed toward collaboration." and "In Lotus Notes alternative scenario, collaboration and groupware requirements trump individual productivity tool preference." WOW, didn't they just start off saying how great Google was for personal productivity? I know, splitting hairs, individual vs. personal, but this is just so much fun.

Notice they are discussing MS Office, not MS Exchange. So this is about Google Apps? Right, so there are Google Apps that handle international workflow processes? No? What about vacation requests? Conference room scheduling? No? And you want to play in the big leagues?

They must know or respect IBM Notes a bit, see this:

Then, there is a case of Business Applications. Large enterprises with an extensive Lotus Notes deployment typically have hundreds of Notes applications that play a key role in keeping the enterprise running smoothly. There could be hundreds of workflow Apps, and few very complex functional Apps (like CRM) built on Lotus over time.

Workflow apps by the way are complex usually, it is not just forward an email and click yes. They suggest the Google App Engine could replace these apps. If this were really true, IBM would not be spreading the news about XPages and the advances in the IBM Domino server that let it integrate into so much of that precious Cloud world they mentioned. IBM knows they have a product unlike anything else and it makes them quite a bit of money on an annual basis.

This was obviously another attempt by a vendor to portray their migration apps in a better light. But really, better subterfuges must exist than this SEO heavy document of theirs. If you are facing Google as competition, you have more than enough weapons about messaging and now you have some about applications too. No doubt other fellow bloggers and IBM Champions will give their input as well.

As an executive, your role is NOT to waste shareholder value or reduce your bonus by your stock dropping which is what happens to companies in the throws of a mail migration, no matter to/from whatever. Put those millions to better usage.

Google...Is it really Great? Evil? or a Teenager?

Some conversations in the last day or so prompted me to post a longer explanation.

Google says "don't be evil", well they did until 2009 when they took that bit out.

What changed? Did Google finally realize that hiring a huge amount of people, some extremely intelligent and others able to fake it well, could not steer 100% efforts to follow a simple rule?

When you are a small a company, it is easy to get everyone on board with a motto or an idea. But as one grows larger it is harder to maintain that simplicity.

For example:
Does the motto translate well into other languages aside from (American) English?
Do you force everyone to speak only in English?
Are prices different in parts of the country or world?
Do you use different date formatting once you branch outside of the US?
Do employee benefits change by state, region or currency?
Who gets stock options? Why?
And on and on.

I believe that at it's core Google really believes in itself and if you believe what you hear/read their goal setting is pure genius. I don't recall IBM ever asking me to do the impossible or even if it did, and if I succeeded at all, was rewarded for it. In fact sometimes the opposite was true. Yet Google will set goals, quarterly, monthly whatever they are, that appear impossible because the technology doesn't exist yet or may go down the wrong rabbit hole. That is where probably every other company, except for possibly Apple under Steve Jobs, fails in their goal setting.

Asking a sales person in a small territory to hit the million dollars in sales goals when it has never topped half a million is just unfair. Should they have targets and goals and incentives? Yes, but that is not what I am after here.

Is Google evil? No more than any other company. Sure there are people who give in to their darker side and either get caught or end up in a bind that the company looks bad from the outsider. I don't mean an Enron  fiasco, but insider trading, trade secrets, government legal issues, bribes and other acts that have tarnished nearly every company on Earth at one time or another, including Google.

Is Google out to kill Microsoft or Apple or IBM or HP or Oracle? Perhaps. Is that so bad? Look where it got all of the others? Survival of the fittest in the IT world usually is a short term ride with only a handful surviving the long haul. Kudos to IBM to making it to 100 years old.

Why do I think Google is a teenager? They like to talk publicly, sometimes well other times a bit fluffy, about a lot of things but when you ask about themselves they get very quiet. Compare this with Apple who really are very quiet in general, except when something new is coming out. Apple speaking at events? Not often. Apple doing interviews? Rarely. Get the picture? Now ask your teenager anything about them.

But when they have a new toy or product or something to beta test they still do not do much marketing. They rely on the word of mouth,  usage and analytics to guide them if their new idea is good or bad. If it is bad, it is dropped with as much fanfare as it started with a grunt or shrug. If it is good, then some effort is made to open up about it and spread good words. But still nothing concrete about the future or Google itself.

Google may be silently hoping Apple does the hard work for them. Microsoft, well Bill Gates, saw the world as unlimited licenses of Windows. IBM chose to see the world as corporations and businesses that would pay for hardware and software, something consumers did not always do and when they started to do so, IBM sold their consumer products side of the hardware. And now comes Google that says yeah that worked for Microsoft but now that people want nearly everything for free and an app can be bought for a few dollars, maybe an incremental stream of money is better than trying to hammer everyone with a big license of Windows. Or maybe while everyone is busy paying Google for advertising, Google can have some fun with new ideas that may turn the tables on Microsoft and others.

My kids Android tablet was pretty cheap, no, the touch screen is not as good as an iPad although not far off, it is not as good on battery life as an iPad, it does not have any video cameras (my choosing), but it does run software for me to do everything on it.

And if Google wants everyone to use Chrome, Android and other items for free, as long as Google can maintain that perspective, presumably from their advertising revenue, it will be very hard for anyone to deny them as doing anything but good.

The only problem is not every teenager makes it to adulthood.

So as we see Google get to a more mature stage, recent changes in leadership are too new to know if this will work out like when Michael Dell or Steve Jobs returned, or will they flounder around trying to define themselves as an adult company?

Google has the money to walk away tomorrow and pay everyone off, but keeps pushing for something new and maybe impossible.

I'd like to find other companies seeing the world this way, instead of changing names every year or rebranding products or changing colors or shrinking juice cartons or reducing candy sizes to maintain higher prices.

Customers deserve better. Customers expect better.

While IBM Smarter Planet initiatives are a step in the right direction, they still are one sided. It helps the utility company and helps IBM, but will those savings ever make their way to the customer?

Where did you go wrong?

Ever wonder why companies move to Exchange or Gmail for email? I often ponder this as well. I also deal with it weekly, sometimes too late in the game to save the poor souls.

I can understand the feeling that "it's just email", which we all know is not the way to keep a company on Domino. If they really only use it for email, they will leave Lotus eventually. Shame on me, you, IBM and others for not encouraging more workflow and application solutions in their earlier days of the network.

Maybe it stems from politics. A new CIO,or more likely a new CEO. They want "Outlook". Notice they never say "Exchange". DAMO (Domino Access for Microsoft Outlook) allows for your users to have Outlook and run a superior server on the back end....Domino. The CXO will never know. Yet rarely does this get done.

The admin left, got fired, the server is in the middle of nowhere and thus it is difficult to find a Domino admin. A lame excuse if I ever heard one, yet also commonly put out as a reason for dropping Domino. If you are reading this and this is your predicament, call me NOW! Because of a similar situation we have hired 3 people around the country to cover these types of situations.

Server crashes all the time. I don't think so. Not if you have set it up properly, maintained it properly and of course cluster it which would mean you have 100% uptime.

The Client crashes all the time. Not on every one's machine. Just like Windows, Java or any other program if you have a problem, fix it. When your car gets a flat tire, do you trade it in for a new car? Again, if this sounds like you, call me NOW!

The UI is ancient. Really? So a tabbed interface is ancient? which is why Microsoft and Apple and Firefox use it? Show me another mail client you can manipulate what you see and move things around, not to mention dock or undock pieces and parts to anyplace on your desktop. Sorry that is the R8/8.5 UI. You probably have an R5 or R6 or R7 client which your IT staff has failed to upgrade in years and thus you are stuck in an old client.

And Outlook 2003, going on 6 years old now, is really new, isn't it.

Yes, if this is the case call NOW and we will help you, against your IT staff's wishes move to R8. Hang on, you can do it for yourself, go download it from IBM's Lotus site.

"Sharepoint is our strategic direction". Excuse me while I fall on the floor laughing. I had someone recently give me that line and I asked if they could elaborate on what that meant or quantify it in a value and ROI way. Received a nasty look and they walked away. Next time I should not ask about the ROI I guess.

What should you be doing more regularly with your customers, especially the ones only using Domino for email?

Talk to your clients, but listen once you have them in a discussion and let them lead you more to a solution they envision which will be much easier to "sell" to them afterward.

Show them. Try pointing them to an app on your website, encourage dialogue to find how an application can fit into their world. Xpages apps, even simple ones will go far.

Communicate with them. Send them links to openntf.org and ask them what they want to try to use.

Show them again, planetlotus.org and your favorite developers blog posts.

If you really get stuck, skip over your contact and go for the CXO directly so they can't say no one ever tried to talk to them or show them what is out there for them. After all you have nothing to lose at this point.

The Cloud has Closed and Google has some prices

In an article I read in a magazine, (remember those?)called Information Week this week they discuss a Cloud company that is folding. Coghead.

Won't bore you with the details but a new business will be popping up from Binary Tree probably any day now announcing how to migrate from Gmail.

Anyway, Google pricing in the article is interesting:

With Google's first-time payment structure for the previously free-with-quotas Google App Engine, customers pay 10 cents per CPU core hour, 10 cents per gigabyte of traffic in, 12 cents per gigabyte of traffic out, 15 cents per gigabyte of data stored per month, and $1 per 10,000 e-mails sent.

EDITED to just say
Once you let someone or something else manage for you it will cost you in the long run, maybe not today or tomorrow but....

Google Joins Mozilla vs. Microsoft

In what will be a defining moment, sometime in our children's lifetime at this point, the EU will listen to Google and Mozilla discuss why Microsoft should not be allowed to include IE with Windows in the future.

This discussion could take place in the US, but unfortunately the vast majority of Capitol hill is non-technically inclined and wouldn't know the difference between sms,smtp,ssl or ssh let alone UML, XML, HTTP to name a few items. My own rep argued against digital voting, Florida does have its problems.

Read the ZD post here.
Thanks to Guy Kawasaki for posting it and saying this to go with it:

You have to almost feel sorry for Microsoft about this--or at least see the irony of Google's efforts

Now if IBM had a browser to go with Symphony, Notes, Sametime imagine a true Linux world.

The Lotus Pinball Machine

You pull the mouse plunger and watch the tcp/ip ball of data roll around your network surface searching for ways to collaborate and thus score more points(money/revenue) for you and your team.
Make sure you hit the data with the appropriate reply settings(flippers) and try to knock down all the targets on the left side (Exchange, Sharepoint, Office, Outlook, SQL and especially BOB) and the right side (123, Improv, Organizer, cc:Mail and of course e-suite).

If you can get up the middle ramp your email can flow and connect to the internet mode in which a Lotus Mail Protector device which uses a magnet drags your data to the top left corner of the table where you can bounce off the SMTP bumpers and Anti-Virus pop-ups to see if indeed you can crash your server with one too many hops.

After it leaves this zone it may get sucked into the Agent/Mail Rules hole. Now the fun begins, you need to watch fast as you never know if it will pop out of the Trash hole, the Filed Folder hole or the OOO hole. Once found you can continue on your mission which is to reduce your total cost of ownership by hitting the right drop lane where the Symphony kicker is waiting to put the data back in play, while reducing your overhead and thus making you more money.

If you have made it this far, I ran out of time but please comment with some updates for this.
I hope you have a great new year and have enjoyed my postings.
See you in Lotusphere!

Sorry to hear about your Small...

Don;t want spam traps to block my post but you might think this is going down a path we don't want to visit.

Well let's say we keep it clean and above board, for the minute.

Following another excellent post by Duffbert I found a gem to discuss in this article from Computer World.

Google gives you a 25GB mail file when you pay the $50/yr for their GAPE product as discussed previously.

Microsoft in their new found Cloud of Azure claims:

There are limitations in Exchange Online. Mailboxes default to just 1GB. Every additional gigabyte costs $2 per gigabyte per month. The maximum size is 4GB, despite the service being built with Exchange 2007, which supports mailboxes up to 16GB.

The 4GB limit is "to ensure the best performance in Outlook," said Betz. "Customers we talk to tell us that overly large inboxes create many problems for their organizations," which have to comply with rules around compliance and e-mail discovery.

Duffbert quoted this part too, but my interest is in the 2nd paragraph, overly large inboxes create problems? You don't say? So the answer is to limit the users to 4GB to prevent their inbox from getting too big?

HUH?!

Domino also doesn't like very large inboxes but that never stops you from having a 10gb file or larger, although your antivirus will not be happy with you nor will your autoindexing function as they slow down to a crawl but traffic in Manhattan has been the same for decades too.

Don't you think better mail filtering or even end user training could help?
No, just quota them to death, no wait charge them for it too. Google doesn't seem to have this problem....or do they?

By the way, Microsoft charges you for this benefit $15/month but I guess with the extra 3 GB that would add an additional $6 so $21 a month over the year is $252.
$202 MORE than Google is and you get what in return?

I know someone reading this is saying, yes but IBM just did the same thing. Well yes and no, IBM is billing the usage at $8/month, still more than Google no question but you get to keep your Notes apps and mail. At $46 more per user that's not funny either and the real question, if you are an SMB is what is more important to you, cost savings, reliability, long term leadership or ease and efficiency.

Google Gets one from Microsoft

While Duffbert and Ed discovered an interesting set of articles which you really must read, one thing was not discussed.

In this article from Cnet.com there is a little reference to Serena Software (800 users)

Just last week, Serena Software said it was switching to Google from Exchange in a move it said would save it $750,000 a year, according to several reports.

This equates to about $950 PER USER to make this move.

In an article in Eweek the explanation gets deeper, for $50/yr per user the cost for GAPE, the premier service

GAPE includes Gmail, Google's Postini messaging security software and 25GB of mailbox space, as well as greater uptime and 24/7 phone support. It also includes other Google productivity and collaboration applications, such as Google Docs word processing, spreadsheet and presentations, and Google's Sites wiki.

(I love the 25gb mailbox and who wouldn't?)
As noted in the article Serena is really only using Gmail right now because they have Sharepoint installed but are seeing a progression to the online apps. You will notice there is an implied additional expense if and when Serena moves the other 750 people to GAPE's sharing software. 50 are test users for now.

Google is learning to crawl and it's only a matter of time before they stand up and start running....possibly after your clients or organization or after Lotus and Microsoft's core clients.

Foolish Mortals

We interrupt the usual blog postings for another "what was he thinking" technical/marketing effort by this author.

While attempting to gain access to a hallowed grooup of individuals which requires a vote of acceptance and possibly some other almost secret society mischief, I was dumbfounded to find our website had been hijacked.

By me! And Google Anlaytics.

He was the first to let me know he had issues with my site, this was on my cell email so I couldn't see everything he sent me.

As soon as I could get on a PC I looked up our site, and sure enough, it was not our homepage. Argh!

Eventually realized the "tests" we were doing with Google had hijacked our site so badly no one could get past the first page.

Resolved the immediate problem. Now need to resolve the secondary pages.
The moral of the story is never mess with your homepage, it is a God.

Presenting Lotus Connections and dead silence

Today was the LCTY Miami event and for those who have not seen it yet, it covers the main points of Sametime, Quickr, Lotus Notes & Domino, Lotus Forms, Portal and Connections.
The IBMers in attendance and presenting were very helpful and Brian did a great job of demoing some items I could not(especially around Sametime UC).
Lotus911 was the sponsor and Jeff Kridder, Lotus911 COO, tagged me to present 3 sessions, Sametime, Quickr, Connections.

We had 20+ people attend and some lively discussion especially around MAC support.

In an interesting display of knowledge, when Jeff or I asked about Connections we got nothing. No one had seen or heard of it, or even looked into it.

A strange insight to what included 5 of the top companies based in South Florida.

What are they thinking about? How could we help them and let them know more? Perhaps I had failed in some way to keep people updated on developments at Lotus. As it turns out few had attended Lotusphere 2008 which also explains quite a bit.

Those of us NOT in a corporate setting can forget just how focused one can be when involved in the day to day of a business.

However more telling was that in a mix of admins, developers and business line or management no one had even tried to play with it or create a skunk works project.
What ever happenned to wanting to see what's new? Or having test labs for creative play time?
Maybe Google gets this one right, people should spend some part of their day on something not related to their primary task and see what comes from it.

I still get excited by new code, even if I can't always get it or load it immediately.

When did everyone else stop getting excited by this?

Forget Microsoft, Google's on the cusp

Following on the latest from Google, what if PostiniG is their leading edge?
Is Spam really such an issue? Doesn't everyone have a spam filter of some sort? Even at home? What are they getting to by ads like the one in March 24 Information Week issue with the "Messaging and Collaboration" section in bold. It is not about them, but a reference to some white papers they have produced over at www.informationweekreports.com.

Does SaaS make sense for email? Google of course argues it does. One of the Google White Papers even points out from 575 interviews of executives, 17% or 98 of them knew nothing about SaaS! There is an interesting discussion in itself.

Others argue it's a privacy issue or security and they would never do it. Why is Google(or any other SaaS vendor) better equiped to secure my data if every day we read about another failing bank, another credit card scam, more records stolen, laptops disappearing and other security issues?

Google, and most intenet companies are starting to realize that until the Star Trek transporter exists people will need to take data offline or off the grid or out of the cloud. Because right now you can not be online everywhere YOU want to be.
This may never change either. For some people they may never be offline unless on an airplane.

Friends of mine just took a cruise in the Caribbean and had cell phone coverage the entire time. They claim it's the first time the saw that in the last few years and they go on cruises 2-4 times a year.

Maybe Google really is on to something and we need to rethink our plans for our users and companies. I have seen a push for webmail and it means 20 years later I need to be an ISP again or 10 years later I need to be an ASP, except now I am called an SAAS provider.

Google's offline Apps, The time is now!

Read it here at Yahoo!.

I won't be the first or the last to say it, but welcome to the neighborhood.
Replication and offline working is THE killer app, 2nd to anything live on the net.

Noticed you were in attendance and sponsoring at Lotusphere the last few years and although we know you to be rather cagey about future plans, but what if?

Could it be? Would IBM sell Lotus to you, to someone in a possibly better position to break the Microsoft back?

The answer of course is no and yes.
No, because IBM just proclaimed they would spend so much millions on Sametime and UC and some other Lotus aspects.

And Yes because, well IBM isn't foolish, if someone wanted to buy Lotus at a reasonable(or unreasonable if IBM wanted to get rid of them)price, I am sure IBM from a business sense would jump on it.

Of course Google isn't likely to do so, but I am interested to see who else Google picks up or hires to join them as time moves along.

We live in interesting times, now I am off to play poker.

Software assurance and Yahoo Mail?

Sure we been there before. Hotmail which is dead, now comes office live, with mail live et al.

But what if this play is about Search to go up against Google and mail to go against Google and Lotus and anyone else.
Many of us still have and use Yahoo and this is troubling.
Not as troubling as Gmail which monitors your communications.

Microsoft has not had a great webmail solution for sometime, this could resolve it.
Also, when they buy the company they get their data centers which is really what Microsoft needs to compete with Google.

So who is right and who is wrong? Time will tell but I for one, am not happy about my yahoo email becoming one with Microsoft because anyone who uses MSN/hotmail knows Microsoft knows nothing about spam prevention.

Google won that one big with Postini.

Microsoft also gains an excellent, albeit dated, portal. And presumably revenues from this as well. Software assurance on your yahoo mail account anyone?