Microsoft announced today that they are going after the holy grail of advertising: integrated ROI measurement and tracking. The big problem with online ROI measurement that Microsoft is targeting is the inability to assign quantifiable value to brand advertising, e.g. banner ads, and which results in disproportionate value being assigned to search advertising — the […]

Perhaps you don’t need any more explanations of the significance of Microsoft’s offer to buy Yahoo, but I don’t want to lose my media/tech blogger license, so here’s mine.

Microsoft’s acquisition of Yahoo is akin to newspaper industry consolidation over the last few years — combining business with solid cash flow to achieve some efficiencies and […]

Kudos to Publicis Groupe and Digitas for imagining an all-digital advertising future, for planning to solve the deep structural problems of advertising 2.0, and for not sitting still while Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft take over the advertising industry.

The most provocative idea to emerge from the New York Times profile of Publicis/Digitas’ digital advertising strategy is […]

Why should Google buy Yahoo? With the exception of search, Yahoo’s strengths map to Google’s weaknesses, almost precisely. Consider the following:

Never underestimate Steve Jobs. After all of the hand-wringing over Apple’s iPhone being a closed platform, today Apple announced that the iPhone will indeed be open to third-party applications — ingeniously, through integration with Apple’s Safari web browser, which has just been released for Windows (which itself is a huge smack against Microsoft, which has […]

Steve Jobs and Bill Gates did a joint interview at the D5 Conference, and the D5 blog was savvy enough to create a video highlighting the funniest moments — and they are FUNNY.

Be sure to watch about 6 minutes in where Kara Swisher asks what’s the greatest misconception about Steve and Bill’s relationship — […]

Google has finally taken a major step to bring online applications into the mainstream — by making them available offline. Despite less-than-credible denials, Google will now be competing overtly head-to-head with Microsoft Office. But Google isn’t content to just compete with Microsoft for control of the office application market — after all, Google has already […]

Google may be forever denying that it is a media company (and an ad agency), but Microsoft is embracing the transformation of software into media and the overall convergence of media and technology. Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft’s senior vice president and chief advertising strategist, said in reference to denying rumors of a Microsoft acquisition of Yahoo […]

It’s clear now that the media and advertising industries, which thanks to Google and Web 2.0 now include the software industry, will be dominated by a new breed of company — the vertically integrated media and advertising company. Google’s AdWords created a new model by combining a media company — Google’s search results and its […]

Perhaps there are good reasons why Microsoft should acquire Yahoo, but beating Google probably isn’t one of them. The reason is simple:

Microsoft and Yahoo have businesses that leverage the online network.

Google increasingly IS the network.

Google has clearly transformed the software industry’s approach to business models, as evident in the hundreds of online software companes (i.e Web 2.0) planning to “monetize” through advertising. But Google may also be influencing the software industry in less obvious but equally significant ways, through its ethos of simplicity and its obsessive (and often hyped) […]

I’ve been thinking a lot about media brands and whether they still matter in the new media landscape. The more I think about, the more it seems that brands are the only thing that still matters in media. What’s changed is not the importance or the role of media brands, but rather what defines a […]

Google is the new Microsoft, and therefore direct competition with Google should be avoided at all costs — that is Paul Graham’s takeawy from the news that Kiko, a web calendar play done in by Google Calendar, is autioning off its assets:
The best solution for most startup founders would probably be to stay out of […]

Great technology brands — Google (search), Prius, iPod, — have one thing in common: they always work. Sometimes in the quest for best features, snazziest design, lowest price, biggest buzz, etc., technology companies lose sight of one of the most important — if not the most important — driver of customer loyalty: reliability.

Anyone who attempted […]

The future of Web 2.0 and the web app revolution will hinge on one critical issue — where the data is stored. The advantages of hosted, instantly upgraded, never-have-to-install applications on the web are obvious and many — anyone who has ever struggled with software installation and upgrading knows this intuitively.

But there is a downside […]

Never before in the history of business has the collision of two industries caused so much confusion. According to CEO Eric Schmidt, Google is not in the media business:

It’s better to think of Google as a technology company. Google is run by three computer scientists, and Google is an innovator in technology in our space. […]

So Scoble has left Microsoft — judging by the frenzy over on Techmeme, you’d think the Pope had left Catholicism.

Understanding Google’s strategy requires a different world view — let’s call it “Googlism”:

Conventional wisdom: Google Spreadsheet is a Microsoft Excel killer.

Googlist View (Nick Carr): Google is going to live off of Microsoft apps like a leech, the same way it does with online content.

Google launches an Excel killer. Microsoft launches a Gmail killer.

And the rest of the media landscape is starting to look like Tokyo real estate.

It’s official — Microsoft is no longer a software company. With the launch of adCenter, Microsoft will be joining the ranks of Google and other media companies:

“Ad-supported software services are an integral part of Microsoft’s plans to give consumers access to a broader variety of digital media, whenever they want and on whatever device they […]

So Microsoft is going after IBM with a $500 million marketing campaign, which apparently doesn’t include a large role for blogs or other “hot” viral marketing tactics? Hmm, go figure:

The campaign began yesterday with eight-page advertisements in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and other newspapers. The $500 million to be spent […]