October 18, 2006
Google buys YouTube: Prelude to Bubble 2.0 ?
The recent acquisition of video-sharing site YouTube by Google for a spectacular USD 1.65 billion in stock has started people thinking that the crazy and insane valuations of the 90s which led to the first dot-com boom were back (read e.g. the New York Times article).
In these days where everybody puts his or her thoughts on-line in the form of a blog or newsletter, it is not difficult to find people that do not agree with that statement. One example is Tristan Louis of the TNL.net weblog, which has listed the recent acquisition prices of dot-com companies, and comes to the conclusion that although the YouTube price is hefty (but not as hefty as the price EBay paid for Skype), there is no sign yet of a Bubble 2.0.
Meanwhile, research analyst Gartner warns Google that it won't realize the full potential of its YouTube deal if it does not clean up the mess with copyrighted materials at YouTube.com. Major media companies including News Corp. (which was not happy with the Google/YouTube deal), GE's NBC Universal and Viacom plan to take action against YouTube if the company doesn't do more to keep unauthorized use of copyrighted media out of the videos posted to the site. Those lawsuits could cost Google much more than what it paid for YouTube in the first place (and in stock).
Why Oracle bought ETL specialist Sunopsis
The acquisition of data integration specialist Sunopsis by Oracle has many analysts puzzled. Sunopsis is a so-called pure-play ETL tool vendor (or ELT - extract, load and transform as they call it themselves) with over 500 large customers worldwide, but mainly in Europe.
Most industry analysts only look at the data warehousing side of this deal, and say Oracle's main interest may have been the acquisition of these 500 customers and the elimination of a competitor, as those Sunopsis products overlap heavily with Oracle's own data integration products called Oracle Warehouse Builder (OWB), which is very Oracle-centric and - as the name suggests - heavily targeted towards BI applications. However, we believe that the Sunopsis products - in particular their active integration and real-time solutions - will be used to fill the gaps in Oracle's upcoming Fusion offering. Because these products are higly performant and very open, the acquisition gives Oracle a strong piece of technology to strengthen its Fusion middleware layer on which all of Oracle's future applications will be built.
Anyway, the local Sunopsis consultant F-IT Consult thinks the acquisition is very good for his business, as Gartner will not be able to neglect Oracle's Sunopsis products in the same way as it neglected Sunopsis, although this had already made it into the visionary quadrant of Gartner's May 2005 assessment of the ETL market.
October 12, 2006
Google Launches Google Docs and Spreadsheets
When Google acquired the Writely collaborative on-line word processor in March 2006, many expected Google to build an Office suite. The new service Google Docs & Spreadsheets that was announced today is a combination of the Writely stuff and Google Spreadsheets product released in June. Although it is still far from the Office suite everybody (except Microsoft) wants Google to compete with, it is a very useful tool for the occasional user, particularly if (s)he has to share and interact with others.
You can find out more about Google Docs and Spreadsheets at: SearchEngineWatch, GoogleWatch, TechCrunch and of course Google Docs & Spreadsheets itself.
Update: Computerworld's article "Toy or Tool? Google Docs & Spreadsheets Reviewed" comes to the conclusion that you would only use Google docs in "any but the most desperate circumstances". After some "network error" messages and slow response times, you'll start to wonder where you have left that other word processor.