Andy flagged it first and now the Wall Street Journal has made it into big news — Microsoft plans to enter the VoIP market in a big way next year, CEO Steve Ballmer said during a speech today in Japan. Although Microsoft currently offers VoIP functions, mostly through MSN Messenger, the software titan now plans to incorporate the technology across the company’s operating system, desktop applications and server software, as well as unify it with email, video and, of course, instant messaging.
It’s not clear, but it sounds like Microsoft plans to unveil the VoIP push as part of its Vista operating system, slated for release in January. Andy thinks they’ll make a big splash at CES, preceded by a heavy press blitz.
Andy also says that Microsoft is “[n]ever first, usually not second, but always a tour de force,” and I agree with the first two of these assessments. Given how difficult it has been to get PC-based VoIP into the mainstream, Microsoft has got to incorporate VoIP in a way that is so compelling that IP-based voice services are as easy as point-click-talk.
Microsoft doesn’t really do anything in a simple, user-friendly kind of way and I think that’s the only way the company could produce anything remotely resembling a tour de force with VoIP. More than likely, Microsoft’s applications and software will be cluttered with VoIP dongles that rarely get used.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 4:07 PM | Print | Comments (0)
Technorati’s Dave Sifry has posted his latest “State of the Blogosphere” report and the data he presents depict a robust and still-growing blogosphere. Growth has slowed somewhat, although Technorati claims to be cracking down even more on the inclusion of junk “splogs” in its index.
Technorati is currently tracking 57 million blogs, with 100,000 new blogs created every day in October, down from the peak of 160,000 new blogs every day in June 2006, although Sifry stresses that the boom in splogs, which Technorati now more carefully weeds out, may have been driving the higher growth numbers in June.
About 55% of the 57 million blogs are “active,” meaning they’ve been updated at least once in three months, with the number of aggregate postings per day around 1.3 million.
Sifry adds an interesting twist to his usual analysis by looking at the characteristics of blogs based on their Technorati level of “authority.” (Technorati assigns “authority” rankings to blogs based on the number of links each blog receives. Low authority is 3 to 9 incoming links while high authority is 500+ or more incoming links, with two additional levels of authority between these two extremes.) Not surprisingly, the highest authority blogs are the oldest (530 days) and have the highest number of postings (on average 53 per month).
Fascinating stuff, but it would be great if Sifry offered some bigger picture thoughts on what it all means, aside from the fact that blogging is still growing at a scorching pace. What else has grown at such a torrid rate, climbing from zero to fifty-seven million in little more than three years? Not much of anything that I can think of, really.
Certainly the number of web pages, the number of URLs and other key Internet metrics have grown at this fast a clip, but those statistics don’t count because they’re meaningless — e.g. any web site can have countless pages, most of which might contain nothing of value. But blogs represent voices, individual, and in many cases corporate, voices that presumably want to say something. It’s an amazing phenomenon, that’s for sure.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 2:50 PM | Print | Comments (0)We all know that cable operators are winning at the triple-play game — that’s because it’s far easier for cable operators to offer phone service than it is for phone companies to offer video service. AT&T and Verizon are both pursuing fiber-based upgrade strategies to remedy their narrowband technological inferiorities and it’s slow-going given the cost and complexity of the rebuilds/upgrades.
But, often overlooked is the fact that the phone companies are already offering triple-play packages pretty much everywhere. The video components of those packages, however, come from DBS partners EchoStar and DirecTV. And, surprisingly, the phone companies continue to gain video customers from those partnerships at a healthy clip.
According to the tally we’ve produced over at Emerging Media Dynamics (and published today in IP Media Monitor), the four phone companies topped the two million video customer count by the end of Q3 06, serving a collective 2.2 million subscribers via its DBS partnerships. The net gains during the quarter were the highest of all but one of the past seven quarters – the companies added 229,000 net new DBS-related customers, 38% more than the 166 net adds during Q3 05 and up 4% sequentially.
Qwest, the lone telco with no clear-cut video-over-IP strategy, was the biggest gainer, tacking on 100,000, or 44%, of the collective gain. Verizon, the telco with the most active video-over-IP plans, added the least number of DBS-related video customers, adding only 11,000 net new customers during the quarter. (On the other hand, Verizon added 63,000 net new customers with its FiOS TV fiber-to-the-premises service.)
AT&T, busy trying to get its U-Verse fiber-to-the-curb video service off the ground, added 53,000 net new DBS customers, the second lowest number of gains during the quarter. BellSouth, slated to merge with AT&T, added 65,000 net new DBS partnership customers.
Clearly it’s better for the phone companies to offer truly integrated voice, video and data services and not rely on third parties, who also have a pesky way of wanting to share the profits. But, for the time being, 2.2 million video subs. isn’t bad — collectively the four incumbent phone companies encompass as many video subscribers as the 6th largest cable operator in the U.S., Newhouse-owned Brighthouse Networks.
| Incumbent Telco Video Subscribers via DBS Partnerships (000s) | |||||
| Telco | 3Q05 | 4Q05 | 1Q06 | 2Q06 | 3Q06 |
| AT&T | 419 | 457 | 491 | 533 | 586 |
| BellSouth | 460 | 523 | 628 | 691 | 756 |
| Qwest | 151 | 183 | 228 | 273 | 373 |
| Verizon | 305 | 349 | 415 | 485 | 496 |
| Total | 1,335 | 1,512 | 1,762 | 1,982 | 2,211 |
| Net Change | 166 | 178 | 249 | 220 | 229 |
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 2:07 PM | Print | Comments (0)
Chris Bower’s campaign at MyDD to “Google bomb” the mid-term elections has paid off. To recap, Chris kicked off an initiative to get bloggers to link to negative articles regarding a number of Republican candidates. The goal was to boost the Google ranking of the bad press when a user typed in the candidate’s name.
Well, the campaign has worked. According to this update, the negative articles come back within the top five search results on the candidates’ names more often than not, and almost always appear on the first page of search results. Several of the linked articles appear even before the candidates’ own official web sites.
The New York Times’ Tom Zeller, Jr. uses the success of this campaign to delve into the notion that search results aren’t always as unbiased as most users believe.
While it’s clear that ordinary users can band together and massage the outcome of a search, we remain, by and large, incredibly naïve users of search engines. Numerous studies have shown that precious few sleuths go beyond the first page of search results. “If it’s not on the first page, it might as well be invisible,” Mr. Sullivan [Search Engine Watch’s Danny Sullivan] said.
Yeah, yeah, but look at what it took to affect the Google rankings of the negative articles. MyDD is one of the top political blogs and Bowers had to beat the drum loudly for other bloggers to incorporate the links. And everybody was motivated by passion — the desire to oust Republicans from office at a critical juncture in time.
How often do scenarios like this crop up? You need a big organizer, lots of interested people with blogs and the desire to get something done. It’s true that Google results do not always reflect the best or most objective web sites, but my guess is that “Google-bombing” is rarely to blame.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 9:32 AM | Print | Comments (0)The New York Times’ Geraldine Fabrikant has this piece today about CBS’ move to coordinate its web properties by hiring an investment banker, Quincy Smith, formerly of Allen & Co., to organize the company’s web efforts and to hunt for acquisitions. Out the door is Larry Kramer, President of CBS Digital Media, who oversaw the company’s wholly owned web sites.
CBS President Les Moonves claims that Smith’s hiring is an indication of the company’s desire to unify its various web properties.
Leslie Moonves, the chief executive of CBS, said in a telephone interview yesterday that “we have different divisions with interactive strategies and there needs to be some unification. There are silos in the various divisions and there needs to be someone to connect the dots.”
That may very well be true, but the complexity of CBS’ web and interactive properties can’t hold a candle to the vast Internet properties run by sister company Viacom (the companies used to be unified but are now separate, although both are controlled by Sumner Redstone). Just look at the table below (from our TV 2.0 report on Viacom over at IP Media Monitor), which details Viacom’s Internet and wireless businesses globally.
The fact that CBS is making a fairly high-profile move to coordinate its web businesses — and perhaps make purchases — further underscores that CBS is becoming the favored child of Redstone, a reversal of how the two companies got out of the gate when they both went their separate ways late last year. Back then, Viacom, headed by popular cable veteran Tom Freston, was the favorite.
But now Freston is gone, and CBS, under Moonves, seems to have greater momentum.
Update: Reuters’ Kenneth Li has a more revealing article on Smith’s hiring, including a transcript of his interview with Smith. Basically, Smith is appealing to just about every start-up in Silicon Valley to come talk to CBS. Here’s an excerpt:
Reuters: What types of properties will CBS seek?Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 8:07 AM | Print | Comments (0)
Smith: I’m looking for the next YouTube, only a year earlier, when they were 1/32nd of their size, without building out stuff that we would find duplicative like sales force. The core engineering team is always important.
But the one thing I’ll say, particularly to your audience, is I want to make sure that this is an appeal to every entrepreneur of every company size. This is a notion that CBS is reaching out to Silicon Valley and a little bit of New York with the Allen & Co. pedigree. But keep in mind most of my clients are out there.
We want to see them all. We want to see everyone in there. And we want to learn.
And you’re going to call me, hopefully, consistently…once a week and be asking, “”We hearing you’re talking to so and so and you know I’m not going to comment.”
We want to be the first ones called.
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