According to Yahoo Finance, Microsoft has 61,000 employees. Yahoo is a lot leaner–they have only 9,800. Google is a relative pipsqueak at 5,680 (though I hear they are now hiring at a clip of ~1,000/month). Sometimes size has its advantages, but it’s amazing how much a small team can accomplish with […]

Business Models | 11 Comments »

Given recent coverage of Google’s new Finance portal, I hadn’t noticed that they’ve also begun to integrate their core search product with Google Base.
For example, Googling “cars” produces an option to “refine your search,” as shown here:

Then, clicking “search vehicles” takes you directly to Base.

Similar things happen for searches on jobs and […]

Business Models | 5 Comments »

Interesting to think about the relationship between web site traffic volume and stock market valuation for Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo (Microsoft is probably an outlier here given their legacy software businesses, but I included them anyway because internet strategy is an increasingly important part of their overall business).
In particular, it looks like […]

Technology Trends, Business Models | 6 Comments »

Good weekend reading in Barron’s article on Google. Read on for speculation on stock price moves and thoughts about competition, click fraud, and the amount of money Google executives have made selling shares since the company’s IPO (thanks, Anthony).

Business Models | No Comments »

Vonage finally filed the paperwork for its long-rumored IPO. Stellar growth, but it’s clear from a look at the income statement that the company faces tremendous competition and, to date at least, has responded by ratcheting up its marketing budget. For the nine months ending 9/30/2005:

The company generated $174 million in revenue.
Revenue […]

Business Models | 5 Comments »