You may have noticed the blog has had an evolving look and feel over the past week as I've been tinkering with different templates - Om Malik's recent redesign sparked this "project". At the end of the day, Blogware's templates were pretty limited so I ended up settling for a new name: "Northern Telecom..and Tech" - a wink, wink, nudge, nudge play, of course, on Nortel's old corporate moniker (shhh, don't tell CEO Mike Zafirovski!) and the fact I live in the Great White North. I've come to the sad conclusion I need to learn some basic HTML so I can be a little creative. Any suggestions?

 

 

With Google breaking through $400 last week, BusinessWeek must have felt obligated to put the company on the cover this week. The thrust of the story is that with $120-billion market capitalization, Google has tremendous buying power and, as a result, it's changing the M&A, venture capital and start-up landscapes. What I found disappointing is the story's lack of depth. For example, it talks about how Google could easily make a mega-acquisition but then fails to identify potential targets that would be sense. (AOL, eBay, Knight-Ridder, etc?)  Tell me why Google should or should not buy AOL. Instead, the magazine rolls out the usual suspects such as Piper Jaffray analyst Safa Rashtchy who says "If they were to buy AOL or Ebay, it would hurt the stock". That's fine but why would iit hurt the stock and what does it matter in the short-term if you're acquiring an attractive asset that can potentially provide you with long-term growth and strategic flexibility. Wouldn't investors applaud a move that would protect Google from losing the 12% of sales it now gets from AOL? To puncuate the story's shortcomings, it wraps up by talking about some "glaring holes in [Google's] product lineup". What are these mysterious holes (content? services? technology?) Why are they so glaring? Wat should Google do to address them/resolve them? Reading the BusinessWeek story felt a lot like having dinner and feeling hungry an hour later.