networking-info

Confirming what we already knew, today Microsoft announced they are acquiring Yammer for $1.2 billion in cold cash. Here's a blog post by David Sacks , the CEO of Yammer. Microsoft doesn't report a revenue breakdown for their individual products but SharePoint is believed to be one of the fastest growing products with annual revenue of more than $1 billion. Regardless of how Microsoft markets and positions SharePoint, it has always been collaboration software and not really social software. Microsoft does seem to understand the challenges it faces in moving their portfolio of products to the cloud, including SharePoint. Microsoft also understands value of having end users on their side even though SharePoint is sold as enterprise software. Microsoft's challenges in transitioning to the cloud are similar to the ones faced by other on-premise enterprise software vendors. But, I really admire Microsoft's commitment by not giving up on any of these things. Skype's acq...

Last year I ran a highly unscientific experiment. I would regularly put a DVD in an open mail bin in my office to mail it back to Netflix, every late Monday afternoon. I would also count the total number of Netflix DVDs put inside that bin by other people. Over a period of time I observed a continuous and consistent decline in the number of DVDs. I compared my results with the numbers released by Netflix. They matched. I'm not surprised. Even though this was an unscientific experiment on a very small sample size with a high degree of variables, it still gave me insights into the overall real data, that I otherwise had no access to. Proxies are as useful as real data. When Uber decides to launch a service in a new city or when they are assessing demand in an existing city they use crime data as surrogate to measure neighborhood activity . This measurement is a basic input in calculating the demand. There are many scenarios and applications where access to a real dataset is either pr...