What happened to AltaVista and Yahoo? From innovator to imitator to forgotten Paul Graham of Ycombinator wrote an excellent blog on "What happened to Yahoo?". (YHOO) It reminded me of what happened to AltaVista, the first and most popular search engine. Yahoo thought they were a media company, not a software company. Simple, yet deep implications. AltaVista was hatched inside DEC, a hardware compa

The Freemium business model is normal for consumer applications, but can it work for enterprise software? Freemium usually means a free service with an "up sell" to paid premium subscriptions. Examples include Skype, LinkedIn, Flickr, Ancestry.com, Typepad, Dropbox, and many others. Freemium differs from Free Trial in that a free trial is the fully functional product but only for a limited time. F

So, what is it like working at Google? How is it different than working at Microsoft? I have answered that question at least 500 times in the past 6 months, so I thought I should write a more detailed answer. Google still feels like a startup. Larry and Sergey are very visible and active. Larry sat at the table next to me at dinner last night at 8:00PM on campus. Everything moves fast, and can cha

If they aren't ready to listen, it doesn't matter what you say Every salesperson knows this, but many entrepreneurs don't. If they aren't ready to listen, it doesn't matter what you have to say. Saying it five different ways won't help. Saying it louder, faster, more often, or getting other people to say it for you won't help either. Better to move on to the next opportunity, and come back to this