When the press first caught wind of chrome they said that Microsoft was the likely target, and that Internet Explorer stood the most to lose from Google’s entry into the browser market. I however beg to differ. Internet Explorer has one advantage no other browser has: locked in marketshare in enterprise and all new copies of Windows. No one will ever fully displace Internet Explorer. No matter how shitty IE becomes, it has the advantage of already being there 90% of the time. So who should really be afraid of Chrome? Mozilla and Apple and to a much lesser extent Opera.
Firefox is the easiest target for Google to steal market share from of the bunch, and so they stand to lose the most in this browser war. I’m going to discount Opera’s share for the rest of this, as they really are only going to get their butts kicked in the mobile space as they lost the desktop wars long ago. Firefox is a self-installed piece of software, which means IT departments around the world need to willingly choose to put it into their installs, not like IE which is already there. With that in mind, it is up to firefox and firefox alone to keep their product as high quality as possible, or risk losing their existing momentum. For those of you that know me, you know I’ve been a mozilla fanboy for years, heck a part of my business is derived from Mozilla related stuff (Twitbin). But for my personal use, I’ve switched to Chrome, because its faster, more efficient, and less bloated, the exact things I started using firefox for originally.
Apple needs to fear chrome for other strategic reasons, but I suspect once apple switches everyone of the 250 Million iTunes users to iTunes Web (aka Safari), their user numbers will shift dramatically. As is there is no real compelling reason to use Safari on Windows when you have Chrome which is slightly faster, and has more flexibility.
So the one who stands to lose the biggest in this game is Firefox, as that is their core business. Even though they are open source, don’t forget that Google pays Mozilla 100+Million a year for search revenue share.
The government needs to be put back in place ASAP, even if it is put under a UN receivership of sorts with a strict timeframe for return set in place immediately. Say 5 years. The UN will come in and implement the best practices of the world's democracies it has experience with. The US system is unlikely to be the best solution as there needs to be something based on the existing Haitian system. Returning the semblance of stability will help every other facet to move smoothly. Note, I do not advocate trying to turn Haiti into the next Puerto Rico. I do think the US has a moral and geopolitical responsi ... Continue reading
Every time I hear someone talk about being personal branding experts, I kind of throw up a little in my mouth, but there is some value to the idea (its just so poorly represented by many of these newfangled social media experts and others). So this year I'm going to reinforce who I am through my content, speaking, and social activism efforts. I also am going to work more on not censoring myself and using this medium to share my opinions/theories more often, and hopefully spark some interesting discussions from them. Social media is a ... Continue reading
I think this is probably underway, but we have no idea how radical the overhaul is going to be. One rumor floated on techcrunch was they were going to adopt facebook connect, which would be a super freaking bold move by CEO Owen Van Natta (former FB guy). Lets say they do discard their own social graph data as its largely nonsense (like twitter's graph data will also turn out to be). So if Myspace decides to leverage facebook's graph, it is going to cannibalize some of its "value" initially and traffic/users ("why should i login to myspace if its just suggesting existing f ... Continue reading
Then again, a lot has changed in just 6 months. No, I am not retracting my previous statements about saving newspapers (some of my ideas are already being implemented, speaking of which, where is my consulting fee?). In the last six months we’ve seen the old media embrace digital and social tools to as best as they can so far. They haven’t fully figured out the whole puzzle yet, but they are trying in earnest to get it as quickly as possible. I mean six months ago if you told me the Miami Herald would ... Continue reading
My buddy Craig Agranoff wrote for the Palm Beach New Times recently that we were suffering from an identity crisis of sorts, or a disconnect with our communities down here, and he may have been right. I rarely venture north through Broward or even less frequently Palm Beach county (no one ever invites me up there, plus I thought all they did was play polo and talk about their gulfstream jets), so I can't really comment on what's going on up there, ... Continue reading
