Logitech was all too eager, when Google came calling about Google TV. Logitech thought by partnering with Google, they would grow big and become a world leader.

Nothing could have been further from the truth. Logitech, failed to do its due diligence or was misled to believe, that Google TV was a real product. Not a project to garner headlines for Google, in its war with Apple.

Days before the launch of Google TV at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Google informed its TV partners Logitech, Sony, Toshiba, LG and Sharp, that it will not be there. The partners were humiliated.

Logitech had to stop production of Google TV and had to eat the costs. Since the misadventure, the market capitalization of Logitech, the leading mouse maker has dropped from $6 billion to $1 billion and change. Essentially, the mouse maker has become a mouse in the world of business.

When Logitech reported earnings on Jan 26, 2012, its dropped 12.47%. The Google misadventure was still costing it a later. See image below.

Logitech, risked its core business with a side project Google was experimenting with and has become the butt of jokes in the television industry.

My advice is don’t let that happen to your company.

Logitech was all too eager, when Google came calling about Google TV. Logitech thought by partnering with Google, they would grow big and become a world leader.

Nothing could have been further from the truth. Logitech, failed to do its due diligence or was misled to believe, that Google TV was a real product. Not a project to garner headlines for Google, in its war with Apple.

Days before the launch of Google TV at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Google informed its TV partners Logitech, Sony, Toshiba, LG and Sharp, that it will not be there. The partners were humiliated.

Logitech had to stop production of Google TV and had to eat the costs. Since the misadventure, the market capitalization of Logitech, the leading mouse maker has dropped from $6 billion to $1 billion and change. Essentially, the mouse maker has become a mouse in the world of business.

When Logitech reported earnings on Jan 26, 2012, its dropped 12.47%. The Google misadventure was still costing it a year later. See image below.

Logitech, risked its core business with a side project Google was experimenting with and has become the butt of jokes in the television industry.

Don’t let this happen to your company.

Apple’s earnings were so huge here is a little perspective on how big it was.

Who would have thought 10 years ago that Apple would make more money than Microsoft. This quarter Apple’s revenues came in at $46.33 billion, more than Microsoft’s $20.9 billion. Apple also earned a profit of $13.06, again, more that double Microsoft’s $6.62 billion.

Apple’s profits for the last quarter exceed Google’s entire revenue for the last quarter. Apple’s profit for the entire year now beats Google’s revenue for the entire year.

The Apple iTunes Store alone generated 50 percent more revenue than all of Yahoo did last quarter. The amount Apple paid to third-party developers via the App Store last quarter ($700 million) is more than double Yahoo’s overall profits.

Apple’s profit last quarter was $3 billion more than all of Hollywood’s gross box office receipts for all of last year.

Apple’s stock popped nearly 10 percent from where it closed to $460 a share, after hours. That pushes Apple well beyond the $400 billion market cap — and once again past Exxon as the most valuable public company in the world.

Microsoft (MSFT) is expected to layoff hundreds of people as part of a company wide restructuring of its marketing operations reports Bloomberg.

It not known exactly how many people will be let go but the cuts will start within the next 30 days according to Bloomberg’s sources. Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer doesn’t think the company is getting enough return on the billions it spends annually on marketing, the sources said.

The cuts would eliminate overlap in job responsibilities and are designed to help the company better respond to threats from Apple (AAPL), Google (GOOG) and Amazon.com (AMZN), which are increasingly targeting Microsoft’s corporate-computing customers.

“The changes may include shifting some of the more technical marketing workers to engineering groups, cutting employees who don’t have needed skills or whose work is duplicated by other workers, and revamping how marketing groups are organized and where they fit into the rest of the company”, the sources told Bloomberg.

Microsoft spent $13.9 billion on sales and marketing in fiscal 2011, up 5.5 percent from the previous year. Microsoft said then that it had 25,000 workers devoted to those tasks, without breaking out how many are focused on marketing. The company had about 90,000 full-time employees in total.

Consumer-focused technology companies like Apple are making inroads in the business world, forcing the information- technology industry to regroup. Apple will sell $10 billion worth of iPads and $9 billion of Mac computers to corporate customers this year, a 58 percent jump, according to Forrester Research.

Microsoft also is facing rising costs because of a shift to cloud software, which is stored in the company’s data centers and delivered over the Internet. Its $8.5 billion purchase of Skype Technologies SA and Xbox gaming products are increasing expenses as well.

The WSJ reports 8 of 10 most read business stories in 2011 were Apple related. Apple dominated news media making headlines with product launches that stoked frenzy to the somber news of Steve Jobs’s death.

1. Death of the Steve Jobs
Steven P. Jobs, the Apple Inc. chairman and co-founder who pioneered the personal-computer industry and changed the way people think about technology, died in October at the age of 56.
(Oct. 5, 2011)

2. Verizon Finally Lands the iPhone
The move for the first time let U.S. consumers choose the network that carries their iPhone.
(Jan. 7, 2011)

3. Jobs Quits as Apple CEO
Steve Jobs, the ailing tech visionary who co-founded Apple Inc., said in August that he was unable to continue as chief executive of the technology giant and handed the reins to Chief Operating Officer Tim Cook.
(Aug. 24, 2011)

4. Apple’s New iPad in Production
Apple Inc. by February had started manufacturing a new version of its iPad tablet computer with a built-in camera and faster processor.
(Feb. 8, 2011)

5. Sprint to Get iPhone
Sprint Nextel Corp. would begin selling the new version of the Apple iPhone in mid-October, filling a huge hole in the No. 3 U.S. carrier’s lineup and giving Apple Inc. another sales channel for its popular gadget.
(Aug. 23, 2011)

6. New iPhone Bows but Fails to Wow
Despite upgrades to its internal components and some new software capabilities, the iPhone 4S looks like its predecessor physically and doesn’t make a big leap in its overall capabilities.
(Oct. 4, 2011)

7. Apple’s Showman Takes the Stage
Steve Jobs asserted Apple Inc.’s command over the hottest market in computing and demonstrated his flair as high-tech’s most celebrated pitchman.
(March 2, 2011)

8. Apple, Google Collect User Data
Apple Inc.’s iPhones and Google Inc.’s Android smartphones regularly transmit their locations back to Apple and Google, respectively, according to data and documents analyzed by The Wall Street Journal—intensifying concerns over privacy and the widening trade in personal data.
(April 21, 2011)

9. Borders Forced to Liquidate, Close All Stores
Borders Group Inc. said it would liquidate after the second-largest U.S. bookstore chain failed to receive any offers to save it.
(July 18, 2011)

10. Microsoft Co-Founder Hits Out at Gates
Bill Gates schemed to take shares in Microsoft Corp. from his co-founder during the early days of the software company following his partner’s treatment for cancer, according to a memoir by the billionaire co-founder, Paul Allen.
(March 30, 2011)

Google employees were told that they did a good this year and to thank them the company gave them an Android Galaxy from Samsung.

The employees were required to line-up like how customers line-up outside an Apple store to buy iPhones.

The device had a customised back cover, with various Google and Android icons. However many were disappointed and dismayed upon learning that they would be getting a crappy Galaxy. They felt that, if Google was going to give them a phone, for all their hard work, then it should have given them the best phone on the market, the iPhone.

Google employees are some of the lowest paid in the tech industry and a special gift like the iPhone would have gone a long way to boost moral. Many Google employees already use the iPhone, secretly though, out of fear for their jobs.

This editorial is part of our GREAT DEBATE feature on Android Vs. iPhone.

This is a difficult comparison because the iPhone is a phone and Android is a set of files on an FTP server.

In order to make a meaningful comparison it’s necessary to use some measure of performance that both share.

The challenge is that they share few measures which are directly comparable. As a product, the iPhone’s market performance is measurable through standard financial metrics.

It has an average selling price, it has volumes of shipments, it has sales value and, with a bit of inference, we can measure the operating profit it generates. On the other hand, Android is not a tradable good — there is no money or contract or property changing hands between a buyer and a seller.

It has no price and hence there are no ways markets can signal demand or value creation. Furthermore, Android is not being offered to users like the iPhone. Android’s “customers” are phone vendors who package the software with additional value-added hardware and sell the combination to operators or distributors who then package it further with services and offer the total to end users.

So obviously, comparisons between Android and iPhone center on instances of Android used in real products and the “market performance” of Android therefore relies on these proxies for Android — the aggregate sum of products that have some form of Android in use.

There is another slight wrinkle in that market measurements for these products sometimes count units which are not using bona fide Android but versions which have been “forked” and are not what Android’s developers intended. Thus activations and the total number of units sold may not match. Absent any way to measure the difference have to rely on the best estimates and that may include Android and Android-like versions.

Instances of use will allow comparison of volume (and hence share) but do not offer any measure of value, a necessary second measure of performance. Since Android does have a cost in terms of development, the value assumption behind Android is that the usage rather than the sale creates value for Google. Therefore in lieu of sales value and profit we need to measure the increase in value to Android’s creators, namely the impact on Google itself.

So my task becomes to compare market share of the platforms vs value change of the companies involved. The result would be a measure of shareholder value created for every unit of market share gained over time. ($/unit of share over time.) To that end I prepared the following two charts showing the market share vs. share price performance of Apple and Google over the lifetimes of iPhone and Android respectively.

The patterns themselves are as interesting as the endpoints of the paths. iPhone has gone through cycles of share gains and share declines corresponding to the generations of iPhone products. It has gained share overall in spurts and the company’s share price has increased overall but not always in concert with the share increases.

Obviously there is more to Apple than the iPhone but it should be noted that a vast majority of Apple’s profits are now due to iOS products and hence one should presume that there is more correlation between share price and share of smartphones in the recent past. To date the iPhone could be said to have contributed $4.3 of share price appreciation for every point of market share gained per year.

Android entered the market after the iPhone and I tracked its share since January 2009 when Android devices became more widely available. Unfortunately that period of time was in the depths of a recession so Google’s price was quite depressed and perhaps not reflective of inherent value. The stock price recovered back to $500 within three quarters. During that time Android share increased from zero to 3%.

After that, Google’s share price has remained uncorrelated with Android. Platform share grew monotonically to nearly 60% but the stock price remained in a narrow band. The data shows that Android created $1.23/point of market share/year over the market life of Android. However if we measure value creation from October 2009 after the recession lifted, we get about 21c of share price appreciation for every point of market share gained for Android per year. That’s a very small impact given the share price of more than $500.

Since Google’s non-Android business has grown throughout the period, it would seem that Android as an independent business has in fact been an overall value destroyer. Those pennies per share are very likely not higher than what the effort cost.

In defense of Android we could argue that markets are not efficient. Sometimes the benefits take time to show up and share prices don’t reflect all the value in a company. However, Android is coming up on three years of market presence. Its growth is phenomenal and highly visible and widely noted at 60% share and over 200 million users. There is nothing obscure and mysterious about this performance. Google shareholders must feel quite frustrated.

So the comparison of iPhone and Android is one of two successes of a different kind. The product strategy of Apple has been financially rewarding with a solid installed base of 250 million iOS units sold. The usage-first strategy of Google has also been a success with 200 million users obtained even more quickly. But this strategy it has not yet shown rewards to the company.

Looking forward, these 450 million combined points of use are but a drop in the bucket of a future 5 billion connected smart devices. There is much more growth to come against non-consumption. Even a modest market share of 20% of that total will be the equivalent of 1 billion units in use. That seems like a fine target to shoot for and one which both platforms are likely to achieve.

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See Also:

• Android, Destroyer Of Wealth. iPhone, Creator Of Wealth
• Android’s Cheap, Low Quality Apps Make It Feel Like A Technological Ghetto
• Even For An Apple Fanboy, Developing For Android Is A Must

I don’t think there’s any question that you need a web presence to survive in today’s business climate. But do you still need a traditional website, or has the web moved on in that regard?

Do you still need a website to be succesful online? Share your thoughts.

First off, let me be perfectly clear in that I’m not advising anybody not to have a website. That said, there are a lot of ways to have a web presence without actually having a site, and let’s face it – maintaining a site (let alone a successful one) takes time, money, and resources.

According to data from Compete, Facebook has become a bigger traffic source than Google for some sites, and for many others, it is right up there with Google as a major traffic source. If it can drive the traffic, then that means the people are already at Facebook. You can be on Facebook without having your own website. Businesses can build a Facebook Pages, complete with analytics provided by Facebook itself, and they can spend time making that page a good one. Here are some tips on how to do that. Facebook pages are perfectly capable of being found in search engines. In fact, they are often right on the first results page.

You know what else is often right on the first page? A set of local search results from Google Maps, courtesy of Google’ Universal Search integration. Within those results (which are very often right at the top of the SERP) are links to individual businesses’ “Place Pages”. From here, users can find coupons, reviews, store hours, etc. There is a very good chance users will find this before they find your site anyway.

Google is actually going to great lengths to get people using these Place Pages. They are even sending out stickers with barcodes for stores to hang on their windows. When a user scans this barcode with their mobile phone, they will be taken to the business’ Place Page. Social media profiles can also appear on these pages (although so can website links of course).

I probably don’t have to tell you that the web is rapidly becoming more mobile. Smartphone usage and mobile broadband subscriptions continue to accelerate, and people are using a variety of devices, operating systems, browsers, and apps. Making sure you have a site that looks right across all of these is no easy task. This is not so much of a worry when it comes to Facebook pages, Google Place Pages, and other third-party entities.

In many cases, it seems that small business sites are becoming harder to find through organic search. If you look you can find them, but users want convenience, and they are probably not going to look too hard if they can find what they are looking for on the first search results page (or right within Facebook where they’re already spending their time).

Social profiles show in up in search, and often early. The very nature of social media is viral. If one Facebook users becomes a fan of your Facebook page, that user’s friends are going to see it. Then, maybe a couple of them also become fans. Then maybe a couple of their friends become fans, and that trend can continue on and on. The more people who become fans, and the more exposure that page gets, the more chance that page has of acquiring links, which of course can lead to better search engine rankings, not to mention a larger presence on Facebook itself, where a large percentage of Internet users are already spending a great deal of their time. Your reputation and following within the social networks themselves may do your profile well in the eyes of Google too.

If you sell things online, there are obviously many different options out there without having to sell from your own site. In fact, even Facebook and e-commerce are on the road to becoming more and more closely attached. People can buy/sell physical goods through Facebook.

A great deal of focus has been placed on Facebook in this article for the simple fact that it is the world’s most popular social network. That could all change in time. But that doesn’t mean the points would not sill apply to other services. Google is going to be placing a lot of emphasis on Google Buzz this year, and it’s going to become integrated with more and more Google products. Currently, Google profiles are kind of the central place for a Buzz presence. Users can include any links they wish right into that profile (Facebook page, Twitter account, blog, eBay/Amazon listings, etc.)There’s no telling how big Buzz can be, and there’s always the possibility that something else will come along and take the world by storm. And that is one of the reasons…

Why it Still Pays to Have a Site

Can you be successful without a site? I think so. However, having a site gives you a more stable foundation, and still creates more opportunities than if you didn’t have one. When you have a site, you have control. You don’t have to adhere to the policy guidelines of any third-party platform. If Facebook decides to shut its Pages down (as Yahoo did with GeoCities, for example), you still have your own site that they can’t touch. For that matter,having your own site certainly lends credibility to your brand.

Still, social networks continue to work on making data more freely able to flow among one another via a number of open standards like Activity Streams, AtomPub, OAuth, PubSubHubbub, Salmon and WebFinger. “The idea is that someday, any host on the web should be able to implement these open protocols and send messages back and forth in real time with users from any network, without any one company in the middle,” says Google software engineer DeWitt Clinton. “The web contains the social graph, the protocols are standard web protocols, the messages can contain whatever crazy stuff people think to put in them. Google Buzz will be just another node (a very good node, I hope) among many peers. Users of any two systems should be able to send updates back and forth, federate comments, share photos, send @replies, etc., without needing Google in the middle and without using a Google-specific protocol or format.”

Google itself, even has its own site dedicated to making user data for its various products exportable. That’s just Google, but the web in general appears to be moving more in this direction.

I’m not saying that you shouldn’t have a site, or even that you don’t need one, but I think it’s an interesting discussion. For now, I’m going to say having your own site is still in your best interest, but has a more social Internet with more portable data made a standalone site less critical? Is having a website going to be less important in the future? I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on the subject. Comment here.

–Chris Crum

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RESTON, VA, February 11, 2010 – comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, today released its monthly comScore qSearch analysis of the U.S. search marketplace. In January 2010, Americans conducted 15.2 billion core searches, with Google Sites accounting for 65.4 percent search market share. Microsoft Sites grabbed 11.3 percent market share, up 0.6 percentage points versus December.

January 2010 U.S. Core Search Rankings

Google Sites led the U.S. core search market in January with 65.4 percent of the searches conducted, followed by Yahoo! Sites (17.0 percent), and Microsoft Sites (11.3 percent). Ask Network captured 3.8 percent of the search market, followed by AOL LLC with 2.5 percent.

* Based on the five major search engines including partner searches and cross-channel searches. Searches for mapping, local directory, and user-generated video sites that are not on the core domain of the five search engines are not included in the core search numbers.

Americans conducted 15.2 billion searches in January, up 3 percent from December. Google Sites accounted for 9.9 billion searches, followed by Yahoo! Sites (2.6 billion), Microsoft Sites (1.7 billion), Ask Network (574 million) and AOL LLC (375 million).

* Based on the five major search engines including partner searches and cross-channel searches. Searches for mapping, local directory, and user-generated video sites that are not on the core domain of the five search engines are not included in the core search numbers.

January 2010 U.S. Expanded Search Rankings

In the January analysis of the top properties where search activity is observed, Google Sites led the search market with more than 14 billion search queries, followed by Yahoo! Sites with 2.7 billion queries and Microsoft Sites with 1.8 billion searches. Bing experienced large growth during the month with an 11-percent increase in query volume to reach more than 1.5 billion searches. Craigslist jumped one position to #6 with 636 million searches, while Facebook grew to 395 million searches, representing a 13-percent increase from the previous month.

About comScore
comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR) is a global leader in measuring the digital world and preferred source of digital marketing intelligence. For more information, please visit www.comscore.com/companyinfo.

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The real-time Web is here. Google has officially jumped into real-time search, taking full advantage of its recent partnerships and changing the face of search engine optimization. Conduct a search on Google and you might now see a sizable part of the page dedicated to real-time search. This is a scrolling, live update of content from across the Web about your query and one of the most significant public-facing changes Google has made in a long time. It’s also one of the biggest changes to SEO (as it applies to Google) in recent history.

The real-time updates – or “Latest results” – take up a significant portion of screen space. After the sponosored listings at the top of the page, then the top organic result comes the real-time updates. In some cases, the box is also very close to the fold. In short, as it stands today, your company’s organic listings might have already changed dramatically. While the total number of results does not seem to have changed, you might have dropped below the fold. That means checking your search positions immediately, and getting to work on improving them.

Below is a Google results page for “Obama health care.” The first result is the top result, then you will see the real-time results. The bottom result after the real-time box is just above the fold. This is a hot topic, so keep in mind that not all queries will produce real-time results, or results will be ordered differenlty. For example, a search for “zhu zhu” (a popular toy this holiday season) shows real-time results, but at the very bottom of the page. Also impacting the position of real-time results and normal organic listings will be the number of paid search results.

One thing is for certain – Web professionals’ stock in Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku and Identi.ca just went through the roof. Those companies are now partners, waist-deep in the Google mix; and that’s where many of the real-time results are coming from. In short, if you’re not on some or all of these networks, it’s time to get started. And you must go beyond just making a profile. These real-time results will take into account your social graph – the connections you make and your “authority” in the space, as well as the content you provide on these networks. We’re talking quality here. Businesses must provide value to their social connections. For example, if you tweet an important piece of information and it gets re-tweeted by your followers, you can bet Google will take notice. Google will be examining accounts’ social stock and including those in the updates – on the first page of Google. You will also notice that real-time results are not limited to social networks, but include blogs and other websites. Content creation and optimization (creative copy, keyword-friendliness, etc.) becomes a mission-critical business objective.

It will also be interesting to see if these new partner networks get flooded with “content noise,” once publishers realize the opportunity.

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