OzWebMasters

I have at times been very impressed with the efforts some Microsoft departments have made to be hip & cool. But in so many ways they are stil idiots!

Hotmail - bulk delete of spam, no “are you sure”
Microsoft Partner Program UK - unable to enrol using FireFox. No respect for the possibility that FireFox is the best browser, but SilverLight rules as well.
IE7 - hit the close button, no “are you sure, close ALL tabs”

These are simple things. Being cool won’t cost them. But there seems to be some evil little accountant overlord misguidedly pulling the strings. Fire the prick!

(oh yeah, and Vista - some aspects of it are so bad it should never have been released. A disclosure as to why would be cool)

eBay has asked for special permission to have PayPal as the only means of paying for items on their site. A good discussion as to why this should not be allowed is at IT Wire.

Knowing how addictive it could be, I have been putting off adding Scrabulous to my FaceBook. Good thing as well, because like many folk I had just assumed that they had the rights to make it. Turns out the 2 lads from India didn’t, and they’ve been making money from Hasbro’s product.

It has been claimed that the brothers are receiving $US25,000 ($A27,853) per month in advertising revenue from Facebook.

From 500,000 users per day, that is 1/6th of a cent per user, per day.

Obviously Hasbro could have sent their cease and desist a long time ago - my guess is they were waiting until their own FaceBook app is ready to roll, and they will instantly get a massive userbase.

If you are one clued-up, web-savvy, marketing-oriented chappy (or chappess) - there are several ways to make your mark on the world, and million$ in the process

1) Go alone
2) Go alone but hire others
3) Work for others

It seems to be that, if you are full of beans and talent, and a potential employer is on the verge, then a relationship is quite likely. And, when hired, you and a bunch of similar young studs (or studettes), are the factor that makes your company a success, well:

a) You will hopefuly have made lots of money from shares & options
b) You will have seen how it all works at corporate level
c) You’ll have become cocky enough to go solo

The folk behind these sites all started out at PayPal:

Facebook
Slide
Yelp
Digg
YouTube
LinkedIn
and more

Read about the PayPal Mafia at CNN

I’m only guessing the improvement. Up until this week, I have read emails and then clicked on the delete button at the bottom of the page. That button has now disappeared, forcing me to scroll back to the top to delete the email.

Unexpectedly, I am finding myself noticing the banner ads at the top of the page, like never before. Whoever thought of this at Microsoft deserves a promotion!

That’s revenue, not profit, because they are a not-for-profit entity. Their financial statement shows what a sensible, conservative operation they are, and I look forward to seeing what they will do with the tens of millions of dollars and convertible assets they now have.
This is a great example of how to create a successful business via giving away a product - FireFox. The revenue is mostly from Google, who pay them search royalties from when users search using the default search function. So to help FireFox stay popular, and force IE to keep improving, use that search box! Or buy a t-shirt.
Just because your business is non-profit, doesn’t mean you can’t pay yourself a good salary - although Mozilla don’t seem to be paying a fortune to any of their 90 programmers - they average $200K each, which is probably about right.

And remember, if you are non-profit, and do good not evil, many people will choose to use you over Microsoft et al

I’d have to say I’ve been wondering how they managed to sell CDs so cheap. I’ve bought dozens of CDs from them, and they are usually under $AU20 delivered.

In the UK they’ve been found guilty of illegal importing. If they have the $US81M in the bank, then they must’ve been (until now) making a fortune. If they don’t, then I guess they’ll go bankrupt, so I’ll need to keep an eye out for whoever copies their model so I can buy from them instead. Obviously the model will need to be adjusted to avoid the UK.

It will happen, it’s just a case of working out the best implementation…

Virgin Mobile UK have been showing ads in exchange for minutes of talking - that’s a good model. Other ideas fail because they rely on folk clicking on something, and we really don’t want to do any nore than is necessary on our phones….

There have been blog posts discussing the huge amount of revenue that Wikipedia is missing out on by non running ads ($10s of Millions I presume), and what they could use such cash for (give it to charity?)

I reckon:

1) If you start out saying “there will never ever be any ads”, you need to stick to that, because that is the basis on which people helped the service

2) Google did it before with Google Directory (a copy of DMOZ with ads attached), and could quite easily do it with Wikipedia and out-rank Wikipedia in search queries

3) It is extremely important to consider immense success when creating your website - because it just might happen. Freecycle is having similar problems right now - a massive user-base but a vow to always be non-profit. This leaves you vulnerable to big business, without the funds to fight back.

Why would you not buy shoes online?

1) You prefer to try them on first!

Amazon’s new store selling shoes and handbags not only offers free shipping, but also free return shipping!

This means that the ultra-canny amongst us can order products, try them on, send them back (all for free) and then order the ones we really like from somewhere cheaper, (somewhere that does not have the extra cost factor of free return shipping).