Introduction I posed a question to ponder: Is eBay or Amazon a better company? Recently, I have covered eBay in detail, and this week, we will analyze Amazon. I will reserve the answer to the question until after. Meanwhile, I do encourage you to think about the question. I will give you my analysis later.
Conclusion Microsoft has been reorganizing and rebranding its online properties. The Company has rebranded MSN Messenger and Hotmail as Windows Live Messenger and Windows Live Hotmail. Microsoft is working on improving the underlying technology behind MSN and introducing new features but all this is yet to trickle down to the bottomline. There are rumors of
Acquisition Strategy Microsoft acquired Medstory and aQuantive this year. Actually both were very good acquisitions. Online Health is a large segment with 31% of the total U.S. Internet users or 55.3 million U.S. Internet audience visiting health information sites each month during the first quarter of 2007. Buying aQuantive was a shrewd move. With the
Vertical Strategy MSN (an abbreviation of Microsoft Network) is a collection of Internet services provided by Microsoft. MSN provides a range of Internet services and it services have changed significantly since its release. We will take a look at the Company’s various online businesses below, with a special emphasis on its verticals. Horizontal Search MSN
Introduction MSN is the all in one Internet portal of Microsoft. The Company has divided its core business into three divisions – Platform products and services division, Business division and Entertainment and Devices Division. The online services group comes under the first division. Microsoft, through MSN, has significant presence in the online business and owns
SM: What is your philosophy of recruiting leadership? Is it domain expertise, leadership skills, both? BH: Yes, yes and yes! It is all of those things. It is a cultural fit. It is an excitement. There are not many maintenance jobs given the speed that we are growing at. We are looking for people with
SM: In terms of where you are today, and from a business / financial point of view, what is your strategy? BH: For us, the near term is focused on scaling. The opportunity is big. Every time I say that, I end up doing an acquisition. We clearly do them and we have them in
Acquisition Strategy eBay acquired online ticket marketplace, StubHub for $307 million in May 2007. It also acquired social bookmarking discovery service, StumbleUpon, for $75 million. These are mostly acquisitions by eBay to strengthen its verticals and community features. Going forward we could see eBay making many more acquisitions to strengthen its key verticals, but also