According to Greg Linden, despite their best efforts, Yahoo and MSN keep losing the search war against Google.

What is the problem at Yahoo and MSN? After four years of trying, they just seem to be slipping further and further behind. First, MSN showed a drop in web search market share, down to 12.9% from 15.3% a year ago.

As someone who does not own any stock in any of these companies and who does not have a vested interest in any of these companies, I am actually quite pleased that a company run by engineers wins over “traditionnally managed” companies. Naturally, Microsoft is a large company and places like Microsoft Research are not exactly full of suits seeking the latest acronyms. I am quite certain that Yahoo has also large components mostly run by engineers, but I do get the feeling that Google is unique in that the entire company is ran by engineers and scientists. When Google wins, creative technology people win.

Greg Linden is a good example of what a technology person can do despite the suits running the show. Greg is responsible for making collaborative filtering ubiquitous through the Amazon recommender system.

Paul Graham gives us excellent startup advice:

Time after time VCs invest in startups founded by eminent professors. This may work in biotech, where a lot of startups simply commercialize existing research, but in software you want to invest in students, not professors. Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google were all founded by people who dropped out of school to do it. What students lack in experience they more than make up in dedication.

What Paul is saying is that you may know a lot more than the other guy, you may have trained your brain a lot longer and a lot harder, but if you are not as dedicated, as desperate as the other fellow, you’ll lose.

This is why, a lot of eminent professors have what we called, when I was still a graduate student, the accident. What is “the accident”? That’s what happens when a brilliant guy becomes an academic success and he has 20 or 30 graduate students working for him and $2 millions in grant money. He becomes as brain dead as any CEO. He can’t think of new ideas. His students have to explain everything to him twice and he still doesn’t understand what they are talking about. He can’t write code anymore. He can’t build anything anymore.

(And no, becoming a big shot doesn’t imply you can’t build anything because you are out of time. Tim Berners-Lee still writes code. Paul Graham writes his own essays. Scott Adams draws his own cartoons.)

This is also why, when you see someone you know succeeding, you may think to yourself that such a person is a fraud. “I’m much smarter than he is, so he must be cheating his way to the top.” You might be smarter, but if you aren’t as desperate, as dedicated, forget it.

From Ian I got to this Observer article. The story is that university education is becoming less attractive as the costs increase and the salaries for graduates don’t correspondingly increase. The net result is that universities might be in an increasingly competitive game as western universities progressively lose their edge in the world wide market and as students look for more cost efficient alternative.

(…) more and more A-level students ask about alternatives to university, said the author of the research, Peter Brown, director of Gabbitas Educational Consultants. (…) we are seeing Chinese universities [are also] more financially attractive.

Asian universities stand to win big. In the western world, the first university to offer high quality, but significantly cheaper university education, by essentially cutting down on the fat and keeping what really matters, is going to win big time.

We are at a pivotal point where it might be good timing for a radical rethinking of university education.

Did I mention that you can listen to Stanford lectures on your ipod? See http://itunes.stanford.edu/. Chances are good that Stanford will be among the winners.

Here’s a picture of Bill Gates in his office.

I’m not impressed.

Slashdot reports that the sex.com domain name sold for $14 million. Recall that people spend billions every year buying software, which effectively costs nothing to copy.

The best route, these days, to become really rich is to find a way to create something that effectively costs nothing to produce, though it may cost a lot to design, and then, find a way to make sure you are the only one who can make an infinite number of copies for free. The problem is that we are collectively wising up to this get-rich-quick scheme.

I think that a more durable model, though a much less effective one, is to find a way to offer a service nobody else can match. Google comes to mind. It is a model based on constant hard work which appeals a lot more to the Catholic boy in me.

According to slashdot, Microsoft CEO, Ballmer, wants to kill Google:

Ballmer then launched into a tirade about Google CEO Eric Schmidt. ‘I’m going to f***ing bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I’m going to f***ing kill Google.’

I just don’t get this type of behavior. I strongly suspect these people are not very happy.

With the recent increase in the price of oil, Harold nails a very important idea:

An interesting dichotomy is appearing in our world. The price of communication is decreasing while the price of transportation is increasing. Most of our transportation systems rely on oil and it is becoming more expensive to travel any distance.At the same time, many of us have the luxury of cheap global communications, with fixed monthly long-distance rates, e-mail and more recently - voice over IP.

Unlike Harold, I suspect this will not help telework since the reasons why people want to have their employees over company desks is a matter of control. No matter how much it costs, people will want to feel they can control their employees’ time. And this is not some kind of evil plan. The reality is that most people are unreliable: when left alone, most people will not work on their assigned tasks or not at all. I’ve supervised enough students to know what can happen, even with the brightest people.

We have to look at this new phenomenon in relationship with the aging population.

As consumers, we may come to choose to expect goods and services to come to us. The large mall everybody drives to, might be replaced by smaller local stores people can walk to. Night classes might be replaced by online classes.