Shooting from Carol Bartz's Hip: Apple's iAds Are Just Awful, Which Is Why Yahoo Buys Them!

ITt

Thanks for your thoughts, although I think you can hardly compare their records of innovation. The new plan is fine, although, as John P wrote for us, table stakes.

You’re not quite right.

Apple wants control over its own products and they also want an open Web. These 2 things are not at all mutually exclusive, because Apple wants to feature the Web on their products, but if the Web is not open, that means someone else has control over it, ergo they have some control over Apple’s products. Apple has already been through this … IE was the default browser in Mac OS for about 5 years at one point.

Here are some things that might surprise you about Apple with regards to the Web:

- they were the first PC vendor to ship an HTML5 browser as the default browser
- the WebKit browser engine from OS X is one of the most successful open source projects ever, and is used in products from Google, Adobe, RIM, Nokia, Palm, Boxee, and others
- every Apple PC ships with a complete open source Web development toolkit installed and ready to run: Unix, Apache, PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby, MySQL, and more
- the Web was invented on a NeXT workstation, the grandpa of today’s Mac Pro, and the Web’s creator credits Apple’s advanced, object-oriented tools for making that possible

If you look at iOS, it has 2 developer API’s … it can run 2 kinds of applications. One is CocoaTouch which are native apps and they are very tightly controlled by Apple and audited for quality, but the other is HTML5, totally open, no mediation, nothing between the developer and user, the apps install from the developer’s server locally onto your device. It’s like a yin yang of apps … the user can choose managed or open, whichever they prefer. Offering only one or the other would be totalitarian.

“Apple’s stock-market capitalization was ‘dead a– flat’ for a number of years after Mr. Jobs returned in 1997, Ms. Bartz said”

Well this is an interesting assertion by Ms. Bartz. Jobs took over as interim CEO in July, 1997. The stock was about $7/share at that time, ($3.50 adjusted for the later 2:1 split). From there:

July, 1998, one year later, $16, 2.3x increase.
July 1999, two years later, $28, 4x increase.
July 2000, three years later, $56, 8x increase.

So if that’s “flat” growth to Ms. Bartz, I’d sure like to see what one of her run-ups looks like. Now she did say “capitalization, but if she really meant market cap instead of stock price, why is that relevant? Who’s talking about Yahoo’s market cap?

all things digital sucks
who made kara a knowledgeable person?
she is just another big mouth talker
hey kara — every run a real company?
you have not qualifications for posting anything really.

Ok so a new CEO walks into the office vacated by the previous CEO and finds three envelopes on the table. The envelopes are numbered one through three. Written on the first envelope is the words ‘open these envelopes in order when things are going badly’.

The CEO dives into the first envelope: ‘blame your predecessor’. So the CEO buys themselves six months or so.

Eventually things become a bit rocky and they open the second envelope and it says: ‘reorganise’. The reorganisation begins and new blood is brought into the business, departments are folded, businesses hived off to other companies.

But the share price and business performance is stubbornly poor and the CEO reaches for the third envelope, opens it up and it says: ‘write three envelopes’.

The CEO is crushed and feels that everyone has let them down. It’s not their fault, they haven’t been given enough time.

That story was told to me as a joke by a tutor when I was in college. But it sounds eerily familiar when I think about Bartz time at Yahoo!. She should think herself lucky, Jerry Yang didn’t get three envelopes.

It’s time for Carol Bartz to spare stakeholders more grief and write her three envelopes.

“Apple’s stock-market capitalization was ‘dead a– flat’ for a number of years after Mr. Jobs returned in 1997, Ms. Bartz said”

I think it’s unwise in the extreme for the CEO of Yahoo to compare her company’s current position with the resurgence by Apple. For one thing, it implies that she’s as smart or as talented as Jobs. ‘Nuff said.

But more importantly, she’s comparing Yahoo’s resurgence to a one-in-a-million event. Maybe it’s even more than one-in-a-million. Has any company ever risen from it’s own ashes to soar above its industry the way Apple has?

Pointing to Apple and claiming it’s proof that Yahoo can succeed too is like saying: “We can bee successful because we could hit the lottery too.”

I hate ads. And ignore them if at all possible. I’ve deleted apps or purchased ad-free “upgrades” to spare myself the visual assault.

From what Jobs mentioned at the announcement of iAds is that viewing iAds is optional. The user decides if they want to look at them… or NOT.

That’s a BIG difference, I believe.

I’m not sure I understand how this ad appears in the first place. You seem to be on your iPod.app listening to a track, and now an iAd appears? Frightening. Can you please explain?