In today’s economy where almost every company has taken a beating in profits and revenues Google seems to be chugging ahead rather strongly.

Let’s just take a quick look at the numbers:

• For the quarter the company reported a net income of around $382 million
• For the same quarter last year the company reported a net income of around $1.21 billion. Now this is seen as a huge drop in revenue.

This drop in revenue can be attributed  to two non-cash charges writing down the value of its investments in AOL and Clearwire at $726 million and $355 million respectively.  Which means, if you put all this together Google’s revenue for the quarter is at a staggering $1.62 billion!!

How on earth did they manage to pull this off when everyone else seems to be losing money?

Well, a lot more people performed Google searches and Google showed search ads more often.  The company has invested a lot to ensure its search engine remains competitive, with over 250 improvements made to it in the last year alone.  They have also started using universal searches ( a blend of all aspects of content ) to give the user a larger variety of results and we can be sure of further improvements in the days ahead.

Another aspect high on their priority list is balancing between the quality of ads opposed to the quantity. High quality ads show less number of times thereby impacting revenue though initial indications show that they are tackling this issue rather well and already have a comfortable lead in the coverage department.

Google has also become very careful with which initiatives they are willing to support. The aim here is to maintain a very tight control over costs. The worry here is that Google might not expand as aggressively as it seemed to be before.

Another move that will affect their balance sheets is an exchange program that will allow employees to exchange their worthless “underwater” stocks with ones based on Google’s current price. This will set the company back $490 million to get this done.

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Sony is expected to post a record annual loss of close to $ 3 billion primarily due to the rapidly deteriorating global economy. In a move to address this issue it plans major restructuring  that will include factory closures and layoff’s in large numbers. The company projects an operating loss of 260 billion yen, about $2.9 billion, for the current business year, compared with a profit of 475.3 billion yen a year earlier.

Sony has taken a massive hit across all its major lines of business from games to movies. Pressure from competitors and reduced demand for its products due to the consumer credit crisis hasn’t helped either.

“The massive economic upheaval being experienced across the world is sparing no one in the consumer electronics world,” the Sony chief executive, Howard Stringer, said at a Tokyo news conference.

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In a bid to stay competitive Advanced Micro Devices ( AMD ) cut prices on its processors as a result of Intel announcing price cuts. It has also sold its Handel business to Qualcomm for $65 million. The reason? They have a serious cash crunch and this move will help inject vitally needed liquidity into their business. This sale is supposed to be part of large operation  to streamline the company. This is a huge step forward for Qualcomm as they get into the hand held business on a strong foot. As part of this deal the design and development teams have also been retained.  Qualcomm said the acquisition bolsters its multimedia capabilities and sets the stage for delivery of more advanced products that redefine next-generation mobile user experiences.

“With the sale of these handheld technology assets and resources to Qualcomm, we are better able to focus on our core business and leverage our unique position as a leader in both x86 computing and high-end graphics,” said Robert Rivet, chief operations and administrative officer and CFO of AMD. “We believe the talented AMD Handheld employees will be a great asset to Qualcomm.”

This acquisition opens up new avenues of growth for the company. While the smartphone market does tie in with Qualcomm’s core competencies the sale of the shader architecture would allow the company to start developing performance products for the mobile industry.

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There was a question posted in a Linkedin forum around the subject of Service and Product companies and what the pro’s and cons of working for both of them were.

While it is difficult to group both product and service companies under the same umbrella there are certain factors that come to the fore when taking a decision to work for them.

Using the stereotypical definition of service and products company i think the benefits would be:

Product companies tend to be a lot more innovative. Most of their employees seem to work in a very focused area unlike service companies which are all over the place ( there are very few service companies that stick to a particular technology or industry domain ). Product companies tend to give there employees a lot of flexibility in terms of breaking new boundaries, though they do follow standards.

With a service company you tend to experience a variety of technologies and industries ( quite the opposite of a niche product player ). The high levels of quality and process standards that seem to drive a services company ensure that discipline in maintained and there is a “right” way of doing things. The focus seems more towards meeting SLA’s than trying to do anything different.

In a nutshell both have their long list of pro’s and con’s and lets not forget that the culture of the company plays a huge role in this. At the end of the day it boils down to what you are looking for in an employer.  Happy hunting!

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Source : Kaj Arno’s Blog ( VP of Community Relations@ MySQL )

This morning, Sun Microsystems announced plans to acquire MySQL AB.

After all the industry speculation about MySQL being a “hot 2008 IPO”, this probably takes most of us by surprise — users, community members, customers, partners, and employees. And for all of these stakeholders, it may take some time to digest what this means. Depending on one’s relationship to MySQL, the immediate reaction upon hearing the news may be a mixture of various feelings, including excitement, pride, disbelief and satisfaction, but also anxiety.

Being part of the group planning this announcement for the last few weeks, I have had the fortune to contemplate the consequences during several partially sleepless nights (I usually sleep like a log). And over the coming days and weeks, I’ll provide a series of blogs with various viewpoints of the deal.

First of all, let’s point out a couple of facts about Sun Microsystems — since all MySQL stakeholders may not be fully up to speed about Sun.

Facts on Sun Microsystems

• Founded 1982 by Andreas von Bechtolsheim, Vinod Khosla, Bill Joy and Scott McNealy
• 34.200 employees worldwide, 13.9 billion dollars (9.4 billion euros) in revenues FY 2007, market cap (total value of all Sun shares) about the same as yearly revenues
• Grew astronomically with the Web, suffered from the Web bubble, now profitable over the last four quarters
• Lead by Scott McNealy until 2006, now by Jonathan Schwartz (a prolific blogger)
• The world’s biggest contributor to Open Source: Open Office, Java (now under GPL), GlassFish, NetBeans — and soon MySQL
• Environmentally friendly; large numbers of distributed employees working at least partially from home
• Headquartered in Santa Clara, California, just south of Cupertino (MySQL’s North American headquarters)
• Counts some of the worlds most brilliant innovators amongst its current and past employees

For me personally, I’m excited to get the opportunity to actively contribute to the successful integration of MySQL into Sun. I want to make an impact in merging our corporate cultures, and I look forward to making that a bi-directional process. Since I am based outside the US, I am particularly excited about meeting the many Sun engineers located in Hamburg (Germany), Grenoble (France), Prague (Czech Republic), St Petersburg (Russia), Beijing (China) and Bangalore (India).

But let me now turn to the more general planned implications of Sun’s acquisition of MySQL AB.

What does the acquisition of MySQL by Sun mean for MySQL users?

Given Sun’s proven track record as the largest contributor to Open Source, I think MySQL users have plenty of reason to feel happy about the acquisition. There are many companies that attempt to ride the wave of positive attention towards Open Source, but in my judgement, Sun gets it right. Sun gets Open Source. Java has been released under the GPL. There’s the OpenSolaris operating system. There’s Open Office / Star Office. There’s the GlassFish application server. There’s the NetBeans IDE tool. And more.

Sun’s track record is embodied by individuals with a solid set of FOSS values, such as Simon Phipps (Sun’s Chief Open Source Officer), Ian Murdock (Debian founder, now Sun’s Chief OS Strategist), and Josh Berkus (PostgreSQL lead). I’ve met all three in various FOSS arenas, I respect their work, and I am looking forward to be working closely with them.

Anxiety on the part of MySQL users may stem from Sun’s success with Java and Solaris. Will MySQL’s support for other programming languages and operating systems now be given less attention?

Absolutely not. MySQL is still being managed by the same people, and the charter is still the same. There is no need for reducing the set of platforms or languages. It only makes sense for us to continue to support defacto Web development standards like LAMP, as well as emerging ones like Ruby and Eclipse. This deal is about addition, not subtraction.

But let’s dwell on the topic of Solaris a bit. Solaris has a special position in the heart of MySQL, as it was the first platform under which MySQL was developed. Linux came second. Internally, code coverage tests were long performed just on Sun. And with the DTrace probes planned as part of 6.0, some types of optimisation of MySQL applications are the easiest on Solaris.

I would expect that having access to the topmost Solaris and Java experts within the same company will accelerate our development for the benefit of MySQL users on the Solaris platform, and in the Java environment, respectively.

But I don’t expect that in any way to be at the cost of other popular operating systems (Linux, Windows, Mac OS/X, other Unixes etc.) or development environments (PHP, Ruby on Rails, Perl, Python, ODBC, C++, C#, VB etc.). MySQL grew with LAMP and MySQL without LAMP at its core is simply unimaginable. It was MySQLs part of LAMP that interested Sun in the first place. Hence I don’t see Sun having a platform migration strategy, but to continue to be an integral part of the dot in .com.

So while the news may be especially good for MySQL users on Solaris and/or Java, the news is definitely good irrespective of environment: As part of Sun, the MySQL database will have immediate access to technical, marketing, OSS developer relations and sales rescources that would have taken us years to build as an independent company.

What does the acquisition of MySQL by Sun mean for the core MySQL community?

I’d like to think that the acquisition of MySQL by Sun will be seen as good news also by the core group of users who form the active MySQL community. This is because Sun is a safe haven for MySQL. Sun knows Open Source, and to the extent things change, I expect Sun to add value to our community. I don’t expect huge change, though. We continue to work with our quality contributors, we continue to provide our MySQL Forums, the Planet MySQL blog aggregator, we remain on the #mysql-dev and #mysql channels on Freenode, we provide MySQL University lessons, we meet at the MySQL Users Conference. We’ll put effort into connecting the many FOSS enthusiasts and experts at Sun — whom we will now learn to know better — with our active user community.

What does the acquisition of MySQL by Sun mean for the MySQL employees?

Admittedly, this blog is not directed at MySQL employees. We have a different, internal blog called “Village MySQL” for that purpose (as opposed to “Planet MySQL”). But many of our users, community members, customers, and partners have close relationships with MySQL employees — and you may be interested in what Sun’s acquisition of MySQL means for the employees.

For employees, Sun’s acquisition means continuity. Mårten Mickos will continue to lead us, and our executives and key engineering leads plan to join Sun. In addition, our existing engineering staff will be invited to come over as well. Sun executives have made us feel very welcomed and valued.

Very important for our employees is the fact that we can continue to work on Free and Open Source software. We can continue to work from home (as most of us do, including myself). Titles, reporting structures, and long-term goals may change, but as acquisition goes, the Sun culture as I’ve experienced it so far seems fairly similar to ours.

And — whether it’s destiny, divinity or just good luck — we get the opportunity to digest all of this together, during the MySQL All-Company Meeting here in Orlando. It goes on this week until Saturday 19 Jan.

Being acquired by Sun is unique for all of us MySQLers. But for two very special employees, it’s something even more. I’m thinking of our founders, Michael “Monty” Widenius and David Axmark. I’m very happy for them. Sure, the transaction has a financial impact on them, and it’s positive. But we’re humble Scandinavians, so we don’t flash money, nor even talk about it. More importantly, I can see their heritage being in good hands at Sun. They didn’t develop MySQL in order to Get Rich Quick; in fact, they rejected offers that would have accomplished that goal during the Bubble. They developed MySQL in order to have a positive impact on the world of computing. And as a step in that direction, they took in venture financing.

VCs are more motivated by money than our founders, and obviously look for a return on their investment. That involves either an IPO or a trade sale. Of all candidates to acquire MySQL, I cannot imagine a more ideal buyer from a founder perspective than Sun Microsystems. If I know our founders right (and I’ve known Monty since the late 1970s and David since the 1980s), they will use this deal as an opportunity to accomplish even more within the space of Open Source and Sun Microsystems.

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For those of you curious, this is a list of the acquisitions made by Google over the past few years. If you take a closer look the trend seems of acquisitions seems to be growing at a rather rapid rate each year. I found this information on Wikipedia, and thought it might make for an interesting read.

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BPO is one of the fastest growing markets in the industry right now, and with the increasing number of companies trying to capitalize on this area existing players are finding that they’re margins are being squeezed. Boosting margins and not loosing business as a result of high costs are right at the top of any corporates “To-do list “, one way of accomplishing this is to use low skilled individuals at a low cost to boost margins. The biggest disadvantage of this as every knows is the that the quality of the work suffers a great deal which could very easily lead to loosing clients.

So how do you increase your profit margins and still keep quality high? The most logical way would be to improve the efficiency and the effectiveness of your agents on the floor and Knowledge Management provides a method of doing just that.

The focus areas would be :

Efficiency

• Decreasing average handle time
• Minimizing talk time

Effectiveness

• Increasing first call resolution
• Decreasing call escalation percentages
• Reducing repeat calls
• Reducing agent training time
• Provide consistent, accurate answers

Innovation

• Creating oppurtunities to cross-sell
• Increasing customer satisfaction
• Decrease employee turnover

Knowing which areas to improve performance is the first step to establish a KM framework that could tackle these issues.

The biggest disadvantage BPO’s face is that a large number of them deal with highly confidential client information that is so safely guarded that most processes work as separate entities within the BPO. There isn’t any information sharing outside this area, however capturing ideas like best practices and replicating them across the organization and in every client process would display an immediate improvement, an approach most BPO’s do not follow in a structured manner.

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I just completed reading a rather interesting survey done by The McKinsey Quarterly. This was done to identify if and how businesses are using Web 2.0 within their organization. I was pleasantly surprised to note that a large percentage of companies have started taking a serious look at Web 2.0 technology implementations within their ranks.

This perhaps is driven by the fact that user-driven online services like MySpace, Wikipedia and YouTube are gaining popularity. The technologies that these applications use however are known to most corporates, social networks, blogs, p2p networking and web services.

However most of the companies that have invested in Web 2.0 technologies have stayed away from popular trends like blogs, instead they’ve placed greater emphasis on technologies that enable automation and networking.

Over 50% of the executives surveyed said they were pleased with the results of their investments, the early movers however were much more satisfied than those that started out later. The general feel was that a majority of the respondents wished they had started this a lot earlier. Of all the Web 2.0 technologies, Web services seemed to be the most popular with collective intelligence and peer-to-peer networking coming in a close second.

A survey by industry showed that Retail and Hi-tech leads the pack when it comes for future plan in Web 2.0 investments. In the Region category, India leads the pack with an 80% of respondents stating that they have plans to implement web 2.0 technologies over the next year.

How they use them : Another interesting observation was the end use for these technologies. 70% of the respondents said they use it for interfacing with customers, 51% use it to interface with suppliers and partners and 75% for managing collaboration internally.

Again, the most popular Web 2.0 technology being used by corporate today seems to be Web-services.

From a purely Knowledge Management perspective, the most popular Web 2.0 Technologies seem to be Collective intelligence ( 36%), Peer to peer networking ( 65%), Social networking (60%) and Mash-ups (70%).

The most successful of these implementations were performed at the grass roots level. The advantage of this approach was that most of these projects were taken up by their natural owners within the organization.

The value of these technologies are already having an impact on business, customers are now able to have dialogues with the companies.

Read the full survey here:

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