Microsoft should buy Yahoo & Name Marissa Mayer CEO

People are speculating right and left about what Microsoft should do. Here’s a thought.

Marissa Mayer obviously felt dissed by Google and had no plans to just lay down and play dead. She’s doing a great job at Yahoo from what I hear from every friend who works at Yahoo.

However, Yahoo does not have the power and resources to actually compete with Google. Now if Microsoft were to buy Yahoo and name Marissa CEO? All of a sudden, you have a company poised to really give Google a run for its money.

I’m sure she’d be chomping at the bit to prove to Larry Page that he made a blunder by reducing her power at Google. As a bonus, the tech media would have the ready made comparison to how Steve Jobs sold NeXT to Apple, became CEO and transformed Apple.

I would love to see this happen. Even if she didn’t succeed in besting Google, the result would be interesting to watch.

What do you all think?

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Imagine if The Washington Post came bundled with Amazon Prime?

Prime has an estimated 10 million members. Providing a Post subscription would probably sell more Prime memberships. Going by numbers I’ve seen quoted about the NYTimes (see http://www.businessinsider.com/new-york-times-print-versus-online-2011-5 ), a print subscriber is worth ~$385 per year in advertising alone.

I would assume that the ~$385 in additional advertising Amazon could sell, would cover the cost of sending every Prime Subscriber a “free” copy of WaPo.

Why would that be attractive to Bezos?
Don’t forget, Amazon is working very hard on improving the speed of delivery to the home and bringing down delivery costs is a byproduct of scale. If they’re already coming to your house every day, then delivering another product quickly at the same time, can only improve margins.

Of course, a big question comes up. Is this feasible considering Bezos bought WaPo personally? I don’t know.

Remembering my Dad on his birthday

Dad @ JPL

Today my Dad would have been 88. Before I head to the cemetery to pay him a birthday visit, I thought I’d share a few brief words.

Although I haven’t been as mentally present in this year’s preparations for Global Accessibility Awareness Day, I am humbled and proud to see how people around the world are working on bringing awareness of accessibility to the builders, the people behind the technology we use today. Awareness is the first step and we have not fully taken this step yet. We have lots of work to do.

#GAAD would not exist today if not for the frustration of seeing my Dad try to deal with inaccessible banking sites. I was so happy he was able to attend the first Accessibility Camp LA. Although he enjoyed it a lot, in all honesty, that is where I first sensed something was up with him physically. What I didn’t know was that less than a mere four months later, he would be gone.

My friend Brian Sletten pointed me to the lyrics of a song by Laurie Anderson. “When my father died we put him in the ground. When my father died it was like a whole library Had burned down.” To be more accurate, it’s like ALL the libraries burned down.

My Father’s greatest regret at losing his father in the concentration camps, at what is now my age, is that my Grandfather never knew of the existence of the extragalactic universe.

From Google Glass, to 3D printers, to every new science story that comes out, I miss discussing it with my Dad. I wonder when the next massive discovery in the same magnitude of the extra galactic universe will come out. I have mixed emotions about discovering what’s next, because the joy was in sharing it with someone special.

It is hard to understand that my Dad is gone and now it’s all memories. I’m heartbroken. I really miss him. Happy Birthday Dad.

Don’t miss Accessibility Camp LA!

Don’t miss Accessibility Camp LA On October 20th. Details can be found here. As a side note, Laura Legendary did a nice interview with Jennison and me about the event.

Getting your talk accepted at Semtech, Zendcon & conferences in general. Redux.

I’ve already written a post about how to get accepted at a major conference. But since I was invited back to be on the advisory boards of Semtech and Zendcon again, why not add a couple more insights…

• Note the policies of the conference in terms of remuneration and freebies. It’s unfortunate that money has anything to do with which talks are accepted, but life costs money. And running a conference costs a LOT of money. If you can help out with the costs because your cousin lives next door to the hotel, don’t neglect to mention it!
• Contribute to open source projects. A core developer on the topic will be chosen ahead of anyone else offering that talk, 9 times out of 10.
• This is something I’ve neglected to pay much attention to in the past, because once the advisory committee votes, the organizers make the final choices…but basically, each track often has X number of slots. Many of the final choices relate to juggling the speaker costs and filling up the tracks appropriately.
  I don’t think you’d have to work hard to figure out which slots will tend to have less competition. Your goal may be to get into a competitive track 1 talk, and on the strength of the abstract alone, would get rejected.
  But if your track 4 talk helps fill that track, and your expenses are already covered, you may turn that rejection into an approval.
• If you’re going to be a show-offy know-it-all in your proposal, then you better make it one hell of an abstract. A couple of them were so sure they’d get in that they didn’t bother to provide detail on their talk. Us dummies can’t just trust it’ll all be wonderful. You need to tell us what your talk is about. I’d say the #1 cause for rejection of talks was lack of a detailed enough abstract.
• Spell check dammit 🙂 Write EVERYTHING you plan to give us down on a notepad at the least. Check it. Double check it. Spell check it. Wait a day. Check it next day to see if it’s still clear to you. When you’re totally happy, THEN show it to someone else. THEN submit it. That’s the difference between a professional abstract and a sloppy one.
• Pay attention to the goals of the organizers. They usually have goals and a focus. Tailor your talk on that focus. For example, semtech is now called semtechbiz. So consider submitting a talk about how the Semantic Web is useful to business.

That’s it for now…