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Microsoft and Apple should hate one another right now. I mean, really hate each other. After decades of domination, Microsoft has watched their rival move from death’s door to become the most valuable company in the world — over $200 billion more valuable than Microsoft itself. And it was Microsoft who helped get Apple there, remember, with a timely cash infusion in 1997.
Steve Ballmer laughed off the iPhone, which eventually helped kill off Windows Mobile — and it’s now bigger than all of Microsoft’s businesses combined. And the company shrugged off the iPad, even as it established a category, tablets, which Microsoft itself had been trying to establish for years.
Now Apple’s iOS ecosystem threatens the very fabric of Microsoft. Given the rise of the iPhone and iPad, and the halo-effect they’re having on the Mac, products like Windows and Office don’t hold the same importance that they once did in the computing world. And their shine is ever-diminishing. People are realizing that they just don’t need them anymore. Apple’s rise is slowly killing the Microsoft we’ve all known for years.
And yet, Microsoft rarely bashes Apple publicly anymore. In fact, they often take their side on arguments or come to their defense on issues. Again, these were once bitter rivals. And these times should be the battleground for their bloodiest battles yet. Instead, it’s all holding hands, s’mores, and Kumbaya.
Why? Because Microsoft has an enemy they hate much worse than Apple. And Apple has the same enemy. Google.
This is nothing new, but the animosity continues to build between the parties. Look at the news today, for example. Following last week’s headlines that Google was bypassing privacy settings in Apple’s mobile Safari browser, Microsoft today says that Google is doing the same thing to their own IE browser. Meanwhile, Google says that Microsoft is full of shit, while Apple is probably off in the corner smiling.
It wasn’t long ago that Apple and Google were aligned against Microsoft. Remember, then-Google CEO Eric Schmidt was on Apple’s board and the two sides worked closely on projects like the original iPhone. Then Android came along and destroyed that relationship. While Google probably didn’t consider it at the time, this set the stage for Microsoft and Apple to align on things like the Nortel patents.
Microsoft should probably be going all-in to combat the rise of iOS, but instead they seem far more concerned with spending obscene amounts of money to bolster Bing as a Google competitor. And they seem to truly enjoy undermining Android by way of licensing agreements with key OEM partners.
Meanwhile, Apple seems downright bored if you ask them about Microsoft as a competitor. But ask about Google (Android in particular) and the knives come out.
Maybe this all just means that Google is doing something right. They have all the biggest technology companies in the world pointing guns right at them. You don’t get to the top without pissing off people along the way. But the way Google has managed to unify all of these main rivals against them should at the very least give them pause. Microsoft and Apple are the two biggest examples. But Facebook and Twitter are finding common ground against Google as well thanks to the search giant’s foray into the social realm.
All of this makes for a fascinating situation in the tech world. On one side there’s Google. On the other side there’s basically everyone else, with new members seemingly joining on a daily basis. And this side is filled with rivals that under any other circumstance would hate each other. But here they’re allied. The enemy of my enemy is my friend.
[image: New Line Cinemas]
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A significant step for Twitter in its international growth: Yandex, Russia’s search giant, today announced that it will carry Twitter data in all of its search results.
The news also underscores one possible route to revenue generation for Twitter: Yandex describes this as a licensing deal. The terms of it were not disclosed but Microsoft reportedly paid Twitter $30 million for a similar search agreement.
The agreement with Yandex will see Twitter’s data firehose appear both in Yandex’s blog search, as well as through a dedicated URL, twitter.yandex.ru.
The Yandex agreement is similar to the real-time Twitter search that used to be offered by Google — a partnership that ended last year around the time that Google was launching its own Google+ service.
Yandex says it has licensed the “full feed of all public tweets,” covering all languages — but seems to highlight specifically those tweets that are in Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian or Kazakh, covering tweets from more than two million users. People will be able to search by usernames and hashtags, too. In total, Twitter has around 100 million active users, covering some 250 million tweets per day.
This looks like Twitter’s first big deal with a Russian portal, and could point to more local partnerships of its kind — useful for Twitter extending its coverage and usefulness beyond its home market and English.
For Yandex, the Twitter deal gives the search giant — which currently has around 60 percent of the market in Russia — a leg up in its own strategy to do more in social networking: Yandex already offers people Google-like features to share news and other content and this will enhance that.
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Startup Rocket Fuel claims to apply “rocket science” to ad campaigns, and it sounds like that science is turning into real revenue. The company says it made $44.5 million in revenue last year, compared to $16.6 million in 2010 and $2.4 million in 2009.
In fact, CEO George John tells me that in the fourth quarter of 2011, the company was profitable for the first time. Not that he plans to stay profitable — he says it would be “weird” for Rocket Fuel to be profitable all the time, since it’s trying to grow. Instead, he plans to be “slightly unprofitable” until Q4 2012, when it will probably be profitable again, thanks in part to seasonal cycles.
The company, John says, consists of “nerds trying to help the cool people in marketing do a good job.” Specifically, it works with ad agencies to ensure they’re reaching the audience they want — not just the audience that they think is desirable, but one that will actually click on an ad and buy a product (or convert in some other way). As a result, Rocket Fuel-optimized campaigns can perform twice as well as they did before, which could mean doubling the response rate or halving the cost per lead. John also claims that the software is genuinely fun to use, comparing the company to Mint in its efforts to create an engaging user interface.
Oh, and the “rocket science” thing isn’t a joke. John himself has worked at NASA, and (playing on the fact that he knows I’m a big science fiction fan), he says that he’s currently looking to hire “a couple of robot psychologists that can monitor the autonomous behavior of our adserver and bid-server and explain the macro and micro decisions being made and how this complex behavior emerges from simpler rules and goals that various AI agents have.”
As for his plans for 2012, John says the company plans to release a self-serve product in the second quarter, one that will focus on “self-service analytics, with direct visibility and transparency.” Over time, that self-serve product will include more controls to let the customer direct the ad placement process.
Rocket Fuel last raised a $6.6 million Series C from Northgate Capital and others.
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