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.

As of today, I signed the offer letter I have got from Yahoo! I will be working as a full-time Technical Yahoo! starting July 9th.

I loved Yahoo!’s offer package. When you open it, it sings the famous slogan “Yahoo! hoo.”

Yahoo! Yahoo!

OOOHH! You scared me! Yeah right! I have got this message (Look below) from few of my friends, and this shows how quickly this types of messages spread over the net, jamming your email boxes. This is a hoax, meaning that it is not coming from a true source. I am guessing it is tied to April fool’s day, and this means that all of you who started to believe this message and passed it on, are fooled. The second possibility is that some sick person created this to cause panic among people, and I personally applause to his/her creativity.

This is what I did to discover it is a hoax and not a true message. First of all, what is the credibility of the writer? Someone who is a director of some known medical research institute at least has few publications. I search medical databases including thousands of articles and publication from scholars around the world and I did not find this person namely ‘Arvind KHamitkar.’

Secondly, what the hell ‘I.A.S.’ stands for? Maybe it is some medical term which a technology guy like me does not know, but if the writer is professional and knows the audience, he should have written the full title instead of its abbreviation.

As the third reason, ‘Chennai’ is the name of a city and not an institution.

The fourth reason is simple. It says the girl who was engaged dies of ‘Shock thought’! Oh, really. What does this mean? Can you explain it to me? Any decent doctor, knows how aid kill people, perhaps not by ‘Shock thought.’

There are also few grammatical, punctuation, and dictation errors which I am not going to list them all, but I can say the person who wrote this was a professional chatter. He/She used ‘ur’ instead of your in the last sentence. Though, that could have been written by somebody who passed it on.

Anyways, I gave my analogy. Please have fun sharing yours. And last but not least, here is the original message:

Dear All,
Be careful
(Don’t avoid Pls read this mail)
FROM
Arvind Khamitkar , I.A.S,
Director of Medical & Research Div,Chennai

Dear Friends and Public,

A few weeks ago, in a movie theater, a person felt something poking from her seat.When she got up to see what it was, she found a needle sticking out of the seat with a note attached saying “You have just been infected by HIV”. The Disease Control Center (in Paris ) reports many similar events in many other cities recently. All tested needles were HIV Positive.

The Center also reports that needles have been found in cash dispensers at public banking machines.We ask everyone to use extreme caution when faced with this kind of situation. All public chairs/seats should be inspected with vigilance and caution before use. A careful visual inspection should be enough. In addition, they ask that each of you pass this message along to all members of your family and your friends of the potential danger.

Recently, one doctor has narrated a somewhat similar instance that hppened to one of his patients at the Priya Cinema in Delhi . A young girl, engaged and about to be married in a couple of months, was pricked while the movie was going on. The tag with the needle had the message welcome to the World of HIV family”. Though the doctors told her family that it takes about 6 months before the virus grows strong enough to start damaging the system and a healthy victim could survive about 5-6 years, the girl died in 4 months, perhaps more because of the “Shock thought”.

We all have to be careful at public places, rest God help! Just think about saving a life by forwarding this message. Please, take a few seconds of your time to pass along.

With Regards, Arvind Khamitkar ,
I.A.S, Director of Medical & Research Div, Chennai.

Rather than forwarding irrelevant mails, kindly pass this to every one. Probably ur mail can help some save his/her life .

This post is disgusting. Don’t read it if you are easily disgussed.

I was watching the Discovery Channel while eating my dinner tonight and they had this show called Dirty Jobs. Out of all, one job came to be interesting to me, and that was making a complete reuse of cow’s poop.

Apparently some farmer and entrepreneur in a town somewhere in Kentucky, makes 100% use off cow’s poop. He has a farm with over 1000 cows and imagining each cow producing 6 pounds of shit every day, you do the math for 1000. What to do with all this shit? Well, he extracts butane gas from them and burns it for heating and cooking and he even sells the leftovers in gas tanks. Secondly, he uses a mechanical butt whole to extract the juice from the shit and uses it to water his crops. I bet the crops feel good about that! And lastly he uses the concentrated dried shit to make plant pots; in addition, his wife works of the flowers that are put in the pot, and together they do wholesale of those plants with the pots made at of the cow’s shit.

As an engineer, putting this whole situation into equations, we get:

Step 1:

g(Cow’s Raw Poop) = Butane Gas + Left Over Shit
g(x) = y is a function of extracting the gas (butane) from the given shit.

Step 2:

f(Left Over Shit) = Concentrated Dried Shit + Shit Juice
f(x) = y is a function of passing fresh shit through a mechanical butt whole which juices it.

Step 3:

p(x) = Plant Pot
p(x) = y is the function of making pots from dried shit.

Adding flowers we have:

Plant Pot + Flowers = Flower Pot

In conclusion, the cow’s poop is conserved in this system. When was the last time you made a good use of your poo?

A friend of mine at the registrar’s office told me a story yesterday which I could not resist from publishing it.

Roughly three days ago, on March 29th 2007, the second largest database security bridge of the year was reported by UCLA Registrar’s Office IT personnel. This database which contained student records was altered by a very sophisticated computer hacker who intentionally locked all administrator accounts, disabling them from accessing student records in any way. System Administrators have taken necessary steps to restore backups and bring up the system to the previous step, but according to an IT specialist who declined to state his name, the source of the attack is unknown and it seems that all backups are also infected with the virus or rootkit that hacker used to attack the systems. As a result, there is no way to bring the system back up to its operational state except performing a clean install on all systems located at registrar’s office. What this means is that all student records and course information apparently are lost and not modifiable, thus all of these information must be rebuilt and collected with the help of current and former students, faculty, and staff. The current system running URSA Online only holds the recent information for the spring quarter and some may be inaccurate so students are encouraged to frequently check their registration status.

UCLA’s Chancellor-elect, Dna Cube, said in a meeting that they are not going to address all the risks involved with the information bridge to the UCLA community, but this time they are going to take a more strategic way in handling such situation. Apparently, by accessing registrar’s database, other personal data can be pulled out from the records meaning that the hacker could have accessed student and faculty’s Social Security Number and addresses and telephone numbers, thus, introducing a big risk to the UCLA Community. “We think that our community has already notified their credit bureaus about the previous information security bridge which happened during last year. So, we are confident that there is no need to inform people about identity theft, and we are going to focus on how to get our information back,” Cube said.

But first things first, how they are going to retrieve the lost information? “We are going to introduce three methods for boosting the retrieval of the lost information. Students can either create a complete portfolio of their academic records or mail it to the registrar’s address by July 1st 2007, or professors can resubmit the final roster of the classes they have thought during past 12 years. As an alternative, we strongly recommend those who are interested to reapply to UCLA using UCLinks website and this time their admission is guaranteed, and the entire coursework must be repeated at the increased tuition fees,” Cube said.

Apparently FBI in a visit yesterday was able to trace the source of hacker to be from East Los Angeles near one of the most dangerous gangster neighborhoods. UCLA police department is going to issue a warning soon to notify the community to watch their neighborhood for any suspicious activity since the hackers group may attack individual trash cans and personal clothing. “The hacker’s intention for getting information and disabling the database is not clear yet. Despite issuing a warning soon, we also hired more officers from LAPD and replaced our ~100 Amp taser guns with ~200 Amp taser guns so that one shock will kill the person and thus there would be no after math or lawsuit of whatsoever regarding the usage of taser,” Sergeant Ching Chung Cho said in the same meeting, “we will kill those hacker bastards,” he added.

For more information about this issue feel free to email bridge-info@register.ucla.edu.