Category: Links

Shayndi Raice:

>Daily deals site Groupon Inc. said it was restating its financial results “to correct for an error in its presentation of revenue,” and said its chief operating officer was exiting after just five months.

>As a result of the restatement, Groupon’s revenue for 2010 fell by more than half from what was previously reported — to $312.9 million, down from $713.4 million.

Oops…

Larry Dignan on why Netflix had to split out the DVD business before an Amazon acquisition would be likely:
>The tax issue is that an acquisition of Netflix’s DVD business would give Amazon more sales taxes to collect.

You know what Amazon is 100% opposed to paying: sales tax. This idea isn’t as far fetched as the headline makes it seem, now Netflix may not have decided that Amazon is the suitor when they did this — but damn would an Amazon acquisition make a ton of sense.

Such an acquisition does a few things for a service like Netflix:

1. Better and faster infrastructure for serving a larger base and scaling.
2. Access to millions of credit cards.
3. Gives the streaming service leverage over studios — Amazon has to sell a disproportionate amount of the DVDs which they could easily threaten to stop if studios don’t play nice on streaming.

I really like the prospect of Amazon buying Netflix.

Jenna Wortham:
>The primary reason Color fell flat on its face after it was released, its creators say, was because there weren’t enough people using it to make it interesting enough to revisit on a regular basis.

Chicken and egg problem here. Apps like Color rely on mass usage to be interesting to users, but users won’t become users if a service isn’t interesting when they sign up.

An app has 30 seconds from the time I launch it to interest me, otherwise I move right on.

I gave Color 5 minutes, all of which were spent on trying to figure out what the hell the app was all about.

A great breakdown of Eric Schmidt’s Senate hearing by Paul Thurrott. What’s interesting isn’t that Schmidt admitted Google is probably a monopoly, but that he sounds like he is saying: “Yes we are a monopoly, but remember we are **not** evil.”

As if to say it is OK for Google to be a monopoly. I don’t know if that his just how is statements sound, or if that is actually what Schmidt thinks. If I had to guess I would say it is the latter.

Title says it all. HP’s board [should be fired](http://blogs.wsj.com/deals/2011/09/21/hewlett-packard-worst-board-ever/?mod=e2tw) if this is true — terrible move.

MG Siegler on the Microsoft “Online Services” loss:
>Microsoft’s real problem here is that in order to beat Google in search, they can’t just be better — they have to be *exponentially* better to get people to switch. And I’m just not sure that’s possible.

That’s a great point and is best shown in how the iPhone took over the cellphone world. In 2007 the iPhone wasn’t just better than every other phone, it was better in the way that Excel is better than a solar powered calculator. That’s what Bing needs to be to Google and I think Siegler is right — it’s probably not possible.

Aaron Ricadela and Carol Hymowitz reporting for Bloomberg on rumors that current HP CEO Leo Apotheker is on his way out:
>Whitman, who joined Hewlett-Packard’s board in January after a failed bid to become California’s governor last year, had a mixed record at EBay. As CEO for a decade, she took the company public and pioneered online commerce for small businesses. Yet she also failed to halt a slowdown in revenue growth and overpaid for Skype Technologies SA after a three-way bidding war with Google Inc. and Yahoo! Inc.

She wouldn’t be my pick to run any company, here’s a [better post about Whitman from a New York Times blog post in 2008](http://theboard.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/25/going-going-gone-meg-whitman-leaves-ebay/) that states two important things:

#### 1
>There has also long been grumbling that Ms. Whitman made eBay too corporate, taking it too far from its countercultural roots. The old eBay had a lot of Mr. Omidyar’s personality — eBay’s quirky, colorful logo, its designer once told me, was intended to have “a little bit of the ponytail about it.”

and:

#### 2
>It’s difficult to quarrel with Ms. Whitman’s financial success over the past decade. EBay went from $4 million in annual revenue in to nearly $ 8 billion today. The stock has risen 5,600 percent, and Ms. Whitman herself became a billionaire along the way, ranked # 261 on Forbes’ 2007 list of the wealthiest Americans.

Remember that was written in 2008. The first item, the corporate culture, is exactly what HP does not need. The second, the financial success, that is what HP needs. From everything I have read about Whitman, she is not the one to run HP — even on an interim basis. Again from what I know she is the ‘adult supervision’ type, not the innovative turn this ship around type.