Randy Weber

Well, evidently it was. At least until this week when AOL shut it down.

The original CompuServe service, first offered in 1979, was shut down this past week by its current owner, AOL.  The service, which provided its users with addresses such as 73402,3633 and was the first major online service, had seen the number of users dwindle in recent years.  At its height, the service boasted about having over half a million users simultaneously on line.

I remember Compuserve (and Prodigy, and eWorld, and AOL). I ran up some huge monthly bills on these services. But they were great for their time, except for Prodigy which sucked.

Farewell CompuServe.

We talked about excellent customer service on 1/17. Here’s the flip-side.

We all make mistakes but doing things that are plainly unethical, that’s different. I found this on CrunchGear. Here’s what happened:

A site called The Daily Background found evidence that Belkin Bizdev guy, Michael Bayard, is paying folks 65 cents to write good things about Belkin routers.

Here’s Belkin’s response (also from CrunchGear):

We’ve acted swiftly to remove all associated postings from the Mechanical Turk system.

We’re working closely with our online channel partners to ensure that any reviews that may have been placed due to these postings have been removed.

I wouldn’t say that they fixed the problem. Yeah, they got rid of the reviews but they didn’t mention firing the employee (which I think should be a given for something this stupid and blatantly unethical), nor did they mention refunds for customers that may have purchased the products based on the false reviews.

The moral of the story - be careful what you do on the Internet.

Why do people go to work at Google? Why do they stay at Google? Why do they leave Google? Here’s an interesting take on this from former Google employees allegedly taken from a private Google Group set up by Google to understand why people leave. Posted on TechCrunch.

Here are the recurring themes:

• excessively long hiring process
• below market pay
• poor management
• decreasing benefits

But it wasn’t all bad. Many former Googlers chimed in about having a good experience.

I know both current and former Googlers that fall on both side - some love it, some hate it.
It’s long, but an interesting read.

It’s OK to make mistakes as long as you admit it, apologize for it, and fix it. This is a great example from Hulu on doing just that found at 37signals:

This note, however, is not about the fact that episodes of ’’It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’’ were taken down. Rather, this note is to communicate to our users that we screwed up royally with regards to how we handled this specific content removal and to apologize for our lack of strong execution. We gave effectively no notice to our users that these ’’Sunny’’ episodes would be coming off the service. We handled this in precisely the opposite way that we should have. We believe that our users deserve the decency of a reasonable warning before content is taken down from the Hulu service. Please accept our apologies.

Given the very reasonable user feedback that we have received on this topic (we read every twitter, email and post), we have just re-posted all of the episodes that we had previously removed. I’d like to point out to our users that the content owner in this case – FX Networks – was very quick to say yes to our request to give users reasonable advance notice here, despite the fact that it was the Hulu team that dropped the ball…

Well done.

This little tidbit adds some color to my earlier comments on Google products that make money and how many of their products are “also-ran’s.” This comes from Search Engine Land:

Google’s announced they’re closing or ceasing development of a variety of products as part of an already continuing move to keep efforts focused on other products with greater usage. These include an end to video uploads to Google Video, closure of Google Catalog Search, Google Notebook, Dodgeball, the microblogging service Jaiku and the Google Mashup Editor.

Ouch! At least they know when it’s time to pull the plug.

Google Blogoscoped has an elaborate chart of all the google products and how they are monetized. It’s very confusing. So lets make this simple:

• Google has 10 products that are relevant - search, adwords/adsense, maps, gmail, toolbar, youtube, analytics, doubleclick, their affiliate network, and news. Everything else is an also-ran.
• Of these 10 products, the only ones making any real money are search/adwords/adsense, doubleclick, and their affiliate network. You could also say the toolbar makes money since it drives revenue through search.
• Perhaps chrome, apps, android, and reader will matter one day soon, though this doesn’t necessarily mean that they’ll make any money.

Now, wasn’t that easier?

Let’s cut to the chase - No, it is not bad for small guys to partner with big guys.

Bronte Media references a post from Albert Wenger about small companies partnering with big Internet companies - Avoid David and Goliath Partnerships. The rationale:

Partnering with the biggest of the big on the other hand tends to be problematic because they are unlikely to be sufficiently responsive. […] So whenever possible, as a startup you should rely on mid size well established companies when it comes to strategic partnerships.

OK, I have lots of experience with this on both sides of the equation. All I can say is that there is some truth to this, but in general this is bad advice. At Verizon we worked with a few small companies and ended up essentially building their businesses and keeping them from dying during the dot.com bust. But I’ve also seen Verizon treat small partners poorly and likewise for other big companies that I’ve worked for. The key for the small player is to have a good contract that lays out how the relationship is to work and has sufficient penalties for not playing nice. Having an extremely responsive account management team also makes a huge difference.

Of course getting a solid contract is easier said than done. I didn’t like giving other companies much power over us when I was at Verizon. Likewise, the guys that were bigger than us didn’t like giving us much power. But if you can focus on win-win and genuinely add value to the bigger player, you can get to a place that works for both parties.

It’s worth noting that big companies in general don’t like doing deals with smaller players because of the risk that they won’t be around to fulfill their obligations. I was the guy that had the unfortunate task of delivering the bad news to hundreds of small guys that we wouldn’t do business with them and often the reason was that they weren’t established enough. Big guys tend to want to go with established players.

The thing that I think is most overlooked is that if the small guy can work a good deal with the big guy, it can make their business. It makes them a legitimate player and opens things up for additional deals with other large players and additional funding. This far outweighs the risk of the partnership not working out.

The Kelsey Group Blogs discusses a Citysearch Mashup that combines Citysearch data with Google Maps. It looks nice, but there’s no content. Try a search for pizza in north Dallas. There’s nothing there. Google Maps, Yahoo, and the IYP sites have more/better content. But the UI is nice.

Looks like Netflix has done some thinking. Profiles feature NOT going away. Nice to see that companies can get it right sometimes.

Yes, Yahoo lost out on search and PPC advertising to Google, but they’re beating everyone else. I’ve always been told that there’s room in the market for 2 dominant players. Yahoo is number 2.

But more to the point, there’s more going on at Yahoo than just search and PPC advertising. Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land has written a great piece on where Yahoo stands as a whole.

Kick-Ass Properties: Yahoo has fantastic properties. Time magazine this week awarded Yahoo two of the 10 picks for its “10 Essential Sites” special feature. Yahoo Finance and Flickr both got nods. No other company got recognized more than once (for the record, the others were Wikipedia, Craigslist, ESPN, Yelp, Facebook, Digg, Google, and TMZ. And yeah, I know, some of those hardly seem essential. And hey Time, next time give me one frakking page listing everyone. Geez!).

Let me add to Time’s picks a few more properties that do well for Yahoo. Delicious. Yahoo Answers. Yahoo Mail. Yahoo News. Oh, Yahoo Search. All of these are either the leaders or strong players in their categories.

There’s more, so click over to the article to see what else Yahoo has going for it.