Skip to main content

Lessons from History: How Yahoo, Ebay, MSN Can Defeat Google ?

Google NapoleonThe Economist has an interesting story on what Yahoo/MSN/eBay can learn from the Napoleonic era to defeat their common enemy (read Google):
Prince Klemens Metternich, foreign minister of the Austrian Empire during the Napoleonic era and its aftermath, would have no trouble recognising Google.

To him, the world's most popular web-search engine would closely resemble the Napoleonic France that in his youth humiliated Austria and Europe's other powers.

Its rivals Yahoo!, eBay, and Microsoft would look a lot like Russia, Prussia, and Austria. Metternich responded by forging an alliance among those three monarchies to create a "balance of power" against France. Google's enemies, he might say, ought now to do the same thing.
Justin Post, an analyst at Merrill Lynch, said recently that Microsoft's "acquisition probability" is now so high that it may soon start pushing up the share prices of eBay and Yahoo! Mr Post thinks that Microsoft is most likely to bid for Yahoo! [Thanks, Amit]

The alliance against Google | Klemens Wenzel von Metternich

Related: Google, a common enemy | Microsoft may acquire eBay

Popular posts from this blog

How to Download Contacts from Facebook To Outlook Address Book

Facebook users are not too pleased with the "walled garden" approach of Facebook. The reason is simple - while you can easily import your Outlook address book and GMail contacts into Facebook, the reverse path is closed. There's no "official" way to export your Facebook friends email addresses or contact phone numbers out as a CSV file so that you can sync the contacts data with Outlook, GMail or your BlackBerry. Some third-party Facebook hacks like "Facebook Sync" (for Mac) and "Facebook Downloader" (for Windows) did allow you to download your Facebook friends' names, emails, mobile phone number and profile photo to the desktop but they were quickly removed for violation of Facebook Terms of Use. How to Download Contacts from Facebook There are still some options to take Friends data outside the walls of Facebook wall. Facebook offers the Takeout option allowing you to download all Facebook data locally to the disk (include

Learn to Create a Firefox Search Plugin in Less Than 2 Minutes

Almost every blog has a site search form where you just type in the search query and press enter to digg through the archives of that blog . The only drawback here is that you first have to visit the site homepage to locate the search box. And there's also a possibility that the site has no search form at all. This tutorial will show you a very simple Firefox hack that allows you to search any blog straight from the Firefox search bar without having to visit the actual blog . And there's something for IE users as well. Related: Firefox Search Bar Hacks First the not-so-good approach though it works with IE: Type the following query in the Google IE toolbar or in the Firefox Search Box with Google selected as the default engine: site:labnol.blogspot.com adobe captivate This query will retrieve all documents about Adobe Captivate on Digital Inspiration. You can replace labnol.blogspot.com with any site URL that you intend to search. You may have know the above trick already but i

Digital Inspiration

Digital Inspiration is a popular tech blog by  Amit Agarwal . Our popular Google Scripts include  Gmail Mail Merge  (send personalized emails with Gmail ),  Document Studio (generate PDFs from Google Forms ) and   File Upload Forms ( receive files  in Google Drive). Also see  Reverse Image Mobile Search , Online Speech Recognition and Website Screenshots , the most useful websites on the Internet.