Archive for February, 2007
I found myself sitting next to a young chap on my flight back to San Fransisco. He was from Bangalore and was in the US for a couple of weeks of work. It turns out he needed a ride to San Jose and I offered to drop him off on my way home to Los Gatos.
We were having a polite talk about benefits and salary offered in India. When this person asks me out of the blue: Do you know what an MBA is? I replied, “what do you mean”. He replied, “Married but Available”.
I was somewhat taken aback. But asked him what the context was. He said well it was so much easier to go out with girls in Bangalore than it was in the US. And he went on and on. Now I am not sure if he was trying to impress me (would wonder why?) or this is just how it is. There is a large single population in Bangalore, which live away from home by themselves, have a lot of disposable income.
What do you think?
February 26th, 2007
That is the word on the street. Given EMC’s foray into buying management tool vendors, would it make sense for them to buy a provisioning system?
February 16th, 2007
This week tripwire announced their release 6.0 and they have adopted (blatantly copied) the Solidcore message of Visibility, Accountability and Control. Why would they do that?
- is the market adopting this message?
- is it really what the customers need?
It is also interesting to see how they are positioning their product capabilities:
1. Solidcore: Real Time Change tracking
Tripwire: Continuous Scanning with Real Time Alerting
2. Solidcore: Pro-active Enforcement
Tripwire: Detection & Rollback (using 3rd party tools)
Ofcourse my views are biased. Should I feel happy that is recognition of thought leadership from Solidcore or feel enraged? What do you think?
February 13th, 2007
“Behind The Firewall: The next time the sales rep from your anti-virus provider drops by, shake his hand, thank him and wish him luck in his future endeavors. You won’t be needing his services much longer, because the age of viruses and worms is over.”
– Dennis Fisher Link to article.
For enterprises Change Control is a much better alternative than using A/V or other traditional security products. For consumers or home users it may still be ok. But organizations which care and control what programs can access resources on their corporate network … A/V will be a thing of the past.
February 4th, 2007
We have been running a campaign on Google AdWords, and I was recently looking at the numbers: It turned out each click through was costing us $5 – $7 and about 1/10-20 of the click through was resulting in people registering on the site. Which made our cost of acquiring that registration about $50-$150. That seemed crazy to me or it caught my attention anyway.
So I began asking our SEO specialists: Were the keywords we had chosen to blame, thats what google said anyway. If you didn’t bid more than $5 on them, then the keyword did not become active. So I began choosing obscure keywords, keywords for which searches on google did not display any ads. And google took several of those keywords and said $0.10 is too low, it should be atleast $0.50 or $0.25. Why should that be the case if it’s purely a bid system?
After asking around it seems how the google ad system works is a mystery. And part of their revenue growth comes from this mystery, because no one can challenge whether they are doing any manipulation or price fixing. Given that they are getting to the size of a monopoly one would think someone will go and check that they are not just ripping us off?
Accidentally I also read in business week or fortune an article which said that several small retailers don’t find google profitable any more. Although Google spokesperson said that they were not experiencing this in a broad way. I decided to explore this further and went to adbrite.com and registered the keywords there at $0.10 cpc. The keywords got the same number of hits per day as they get at google and slightly better conversion rate.
Raises several questions: is google artificially raising bids? is it really the right option?
February 4th, 2007
