Have you ever received an email from someone who you haven’t heard from for a while? You probably have, and I also receive emails from such people time to time. And guess what? They are not personal at all, but they are simply hoaxes which are being spread over the Internet to gather attention or cause social panic. What interests me is the motivation that causes a person to forward such emails to hundreds of their contacts. I found that most of these emails have few things in common:

1. They all carry a message which concerns most people. For example the issue of gas prices going up, or spreading HIV virus in society.

2. They all have some sort of conclusion at the end which convinces the reader that if they forward this message to 10-30 more people, they have served something for a good cause.

3. Finally, they all have false credits.

I am writing this post in regards to the gas price hoax email I have been receiving from friends during the past few weeks. In brief the message suggests a price war that can help stop gas price hikes to $4 per gallon. The message says that if we stop purchasing gas from Exxon and Mobile (Exxon and Shell in a different version of the message), presumably largest gas companies in the U.S., they eventually reduce their prices to attract customers and make profit again, and it will cause other gas companies follow the same price to stay in competition. So, in conclusion if 30 million Exxon or Shell customers stop purchasing gas from these companies, the gas price would not go up, but blowny!! It won’t work as thought. Gas demand would not change and people will still need to fill up their car tanks, so they have to go to other gas stations causing huge lines form in front of other gas stations than in front of Exxon or Shell. Other gas stations will ran out of gas quickly since the demand is higher at their station, Exxon and Shell will offer their gas to other companies to satisfy their customer demand. They sell their gas at pretty much the same price and they can lay back and close their gas stations, reducing their operation cost. So, they can actually benefit from it. It is a method of indirect sale and is very beneficial.

So please do yourself a favor and stop spreading spam and hoaxes over people’s inboxes and think about the situation and the method of raising awareness and credential of such emails. I owe much to Professor Bristow of my Entrepreneurship class who helped me understand why the price war does not work.

Bellow is he original message with some of my notes in double parenthesis, and also attached is a power point version of the hoax. It is virus free.

Original message:

GAS WAR This was originally sent by a retired Coca Cola executive ((What Coca-Cola has to do with gas? Perhaps they are going to sell corn syrup as a fuel alternative!)). It came from one of his engineer buddies who retired from Halliburton. It’s worth your consideration. Join the resistance!!!! I hear we are going to hit close to $4.00 a gallon by the end of this summer and it might go higher! !! Want gasoline prices to come down? We need to take some intelligent, united action. Phillip Hollsworth ((Who the f… is this person? I could not find any credibility.)) offered this good idea. This makes MUCH MORE SENSE than the "don’t buy gas on a certain day" campaign that was going around last April or May! ((Yeah! This was another hoax too.))The oil companies just laughed at that because they knew we wouldn’t continue to "hurt" ourselves by refusing to buy gas. It was more of an inconvenience to us than it was a problem for them. BUT, whoever thought of this idea, come ((Using proper English! Use past tense buddy! i.e. “came up”)) up with a plan that can really work. Please read on and join with us! By now you’re probably thinking gasoline priced at about $1.50 is super cheap. Me too! It is currently $2.79 for regular unleaded in my town ((And your town is ? I may consider buying gas at your town. It is darn cheap.)). Now that the oil companies and the OPEC nations have conditioned us to think that the cost of a gallon of gas is CHEAP at $1.50 - $1.75, we need to take aggressive action to teach them that BUYERS control the marketplace….. not sellers ((Negative on this one! Take some economics course.)). With the price of gasoline going up more each day, we consumers need to take action. The only way we are going to see the price of gas come down is if we hit someone in the pocketbook by not purchasing their gas! And, we can do that WITHOUT hurting ourselves. How? Since we all rely on our cars ((I’ll recommend using public transportation instead.)), we can’t just stop buying gas. But we CAN have an impact on gas prices if we all act together to force a price war. Here’s the idea: For the rest of this year ((This hoax was originated in 2006)), DON’T purchase ANY gasoline from the two biggest companies (which now are one), EXXON and MOBIL. If they are not selling any gas, they will be inclined to reduce their prices. If they reduce their prices, the other companies will have to follow suit. But to have an impact, we need to reach literally millions of Exxon and Mobil gas buyers ((Good job! You hunted me.)). It’s really simple to do! Now, don’t wimp out at this point…. keep reading and I’ll explain how simple it is to reach millions of people. I am sending this note to 30 people. If each of us sends it to just ten more (30 x 10 = 300) … and those 300 send it to at least ten more (300 x 10 = 3,000)…and so on, by the time the message reaches the sixth group of people, we will have reached over THREE MILLION consumers. If those three million get excited and pass this on to ten friends each, then 30 million people will have been contacted! If it goes one level further, you guessed it….. THREE HUNDRED MILLION PEOPLE ((Don’t you think it is a little overestimation for two gas companies customers?))!!! Again, all you have to do is send this to 10 people ((Beg me! I am not going to do it.)). That’s all. (If you don’t understand how we can reach 300 million and all you have to do is send this to 10 people…. Well, let’s face it, you just aren’t a mathematician. But I am, so trust me on this one.) How long would all that take? If each of us sends this e-mail out to ten more people within one day of receipt, all 300 MILLION people could conceivably be contacted within the next 8 days!!! I’ll bet you didn’t think you and I had that much potential, did you? ((Thanks for thinking it out for me. I cannot think myself. Did you do to gifted kids school?)) Acting together we can make a difference. If this makes sense to you, please pass this message on. I suggest that we not buy from EXXON/MOBIL UNTIL THEY LOWER THEIR PRICES TO THE $1.30 RANGE AND KEEP THEM DOWN ((I kept it down. I just blogged about your BS plan.)). THIS CAN REALLY WORK.

Funny ha!

Power Point Version

The following post represents my personal opinion and not that of my prospective employer.

I have a stock portfolio which I check every day around noon (PST Time Zone), and that is the time which stocks are usually at their picks. I was surprisingly shocked seeing Yahoo! made a big jump from $29 to $33 a share. I am a big fan of Yahoo! and I had the opportunity to cheer up and celebrate the big jump, but the news that made the big move in Wall Street did not come appealing to me. The rumor was that Microsoft and Yahoo! are back in talks to merge.

The prospective merger has its own benefits and drawbacks. The one benefit which I could see is that Microsoft and Yahoo! may, and I am going to stick with ‘may’ here, join forces to become a giant competitor for Google, but it follows a series of problems. I think that if both companies merge, there is a bad sign for the market that they cannot compete with Google individually, and makes Google simply look unbeatable. The second drawback could come from the differences in each company’s corporate culture. Yahoo! is a fast paced creative company whereas Microsoft is a bureaucratic slow follower in products and services development. This means that merging the companies both together, may not result in a happy outcome as the insiders may feel the differences in two cultures resulting in lack of motivation and productivity. The second wow to the merger could be that Microsoft and Yahoo! have too much in common. They both offer services like email, messenger, maps, and search, thus the merger would be like which products to keep? They could keep both brands but, what is the merger deal then? And it would be waste of resources to keep two versions of services running. They have already jointed Yahoo! Messenger and Live Messenger together such that users can instant message in between two platforms, but I don’t think if this methodology is applicable for maps, and email. There is just too much overlap there.

However, I am proposing a resolution. Microsoft may offer Yahoo! $50 billion dollars for the merger, but I am thinking they should instead give up their MSN network to Yahoo!’s hands so that they can control their revenue making machine, and I believe that with the new Panama platform that is doable. The rest of the resolution remains on how they are going to split the revenue.

After all, what both companies should think about is that how they can attract users to use their search engine service. Lots of the problem is that not too many users use MSN for search, and proposing a merger cannot be a definite solution.

I just walked out of my entrepreneurship class thinking how Google can be defeated, in particular by Microsoft. I have no grudge against Google, but these are just simple thoughts which occasionally circulate in back of my mind to understand the business model of such companies, so I thought it would be interesting to share it with fellows and seek comments.

First let me explain why I chose Google versus Microsoft in my battle. Statistically, Google holds 50+% of market shares in search whereas Yahoo! holds 22+% and Microsoft 12-%. And these figures are relatively few weeks old. We see that Google and Yahoo! both are eating Microsoft’s stake in search marketing, but Google is a bigger competitor than Yahoo! to Microsoft for few reasons. The first reason is that Google is an advocate of Open Source software which is opposite of Microsoft’s principal, thus as long as Google is around, there is a potential and it is inevitable for some new product like Google OS or some easy to use version of Linux like Ubantu replacing Microsoft Windows. The second reason is that Google’s approach to product development is very software centric, meaning that all information and applications will be stored in massive data centers eliminating the user’s need for purchasing expensive Windows applications. And last but not least, Google opened a unit in Redmond, WA right next to Microsoft and is actively recruiting Microsoft employees. Moreover, Microsoft and Yahoo! are already having a contract over the vase service of instant messaging, providing users of both company’s messenger service to be able to send instant messages across both Yahoo! and Windows Live platforms., making them partially friends. Thus, we see that Google remains as the big competitor over the search market.

The Google’s money making machines, AdSense and AdWords, might be the best products of their own time to monetize users search and emails using text based advertisements, but it is a drawback for them being the only source of income for the company. Google has a wide range of services which are free, but the whole idea is to monetize that user’s usage of Google products by using the two major products states above. Having said so, Google makes almost 95% of its profit from advertising. The rest comes from the sales of Google Search Appliance and other gadgets or services which they are actually charging for. And now we discuss the plan to defeat Google.

It is very simple. I use this module in my Firefox called Adblock which blocks whatever advertisement material it finds on a webpage including those of Google’s Sponsored Links generated by their advertiser platform, but installing such module is voluntary. Now what Microsoft needs to do is to make a version of Adblock integrated with Windows and embed it into IE and Mozilla Firefox. This can be a separate module operating in the background working on Network Application Stack. Microsoft Windows holds more than 80% of the OS market share, so imagine what happens if Microsoft pushes this tool as a critical update to user’s machines and turns it on by default! Google will lose majority of its profit from its advertiser platform and eventually loses its cash flow and boom!

Explaining why I chose Microsoft and Google took longer than the resolution, but this shows how simple it could be to defeat Google. However, what remains questionable is that whether any regulation holds Microsoft from doing such thing, or it is simply unethical?

Please give me your feedback, as I want to know what you think about this idea.