I rarely praise a product by Microsoft, but Bing forced me to do so. In fact, you will find a bunch of articles in praise of Bing today. Here, rather than discussing the features or UI of Bing, I would discuss a few core issues – namely vertical search and network effects, which will play an important role in the search engines war. Read the full article »

This is not a blog on “in defense of”, but I wanted to paint a picture that is different from what many people tend to think of Facebook. A CEO in one of my classes called Facebook and third party developers “rubbish”. I argue that there are several third party developers who are making tons of cash on Facebook platform. Facebook has built a thriving platform, which is growing fast and can be a great source of additional revenue for Facebook. Read the full article »

With due respect for all Twitter bashers (see here for an example), I would like to make a few comments in defense of Twitter.

I certainly agree that it is easy and tempting to flow with the hype, and internet bubble of late 90’s and recent real estate bubbles are good examples of that. Therefore, I am not going to suggest that Twitter is going to be next Google, though it’s important to note that nobody could have imagined that Google would threaten Microsoft so soon so fast. However, few would disagree that social media is here to stay. Very few understood blogging when it started, but today it has opened up the long tail of journalism. Video sharing has become a phenomenon in itself, and though Youtube is still struggling to make money, there is little doubt that it has opened up a new world of opportunities for wannabe artists, producers, journalists etc. I believe that micro-blogging is also going to create an impact that not many people can anticipate today. Read the full article »