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If Steve Jobs is a crook, he's not very good at it

Really interesting analysis of the Steve Jobs options thing in Fortune. Geoff Colvin, who is a former colleague and super smart, says that while he can't prove Jobs is innocent of options chicanery, he CAN prove that Jobs didn't manipulate his pay package to get richer. How? Colvin says he's done the math and concludes that Jobs, by exchanging his options for restricted stock in 2003, left a gigantic amount of money on the table. His restricted stock is worth about $900 million. His options, had he held onto them would be worth $3.6 billion.

 

Google 10k cliff notes

10ks - effectively, a company's annual report -  are usually deadly boring documents filled with legalese with an occasional interesting tidbit buried within. Google's 10k,   like the company, is anything but boring. I read through all 101 pages of the document, filed late last week.

I learned that:

The company's headcount has doubled in the last year to 10,600 employees

It has $11 billion of cash in the bank

That 7% of its revenues came from AOL last year, and that a year ago it valued AOL at $20 billion when it bought 5%.

That it has to generate at least $900 million in advertising traffic in the next four years from ads placed on MySpace pages in order for its deal with Fox to make any money.

That the runnup in Google's stock price after it announced the You Tube acquisition last year enabled it to pay 27% less than originally planned, or $1.2 billion instead of $1.65 billion.

And that Google has taken $150 million in stock out of that price and put it in escrow to cover copyright lawsuits.    

You also learn that Google is offering its advertisers something called Site Targeting "a service that lets advertisers target specific web sites with text, image and Flash ads, so that they can more effectively reach specific sets of customers. In addition to targeting sites by content, advertisers can choose placements on sites based on user demographic attributes. To protect user privacy, we use only third-party opt-in panel data to map the demographics of sites in our networks." (bold is mine)  

Does this mean that Google is marrying its treasure trove of online  data on users with third party offline data to create advertising profiles? Sure looks that way. I personally don't care what Google knows about me, but I bet lots of other folks wouldn't mind a little more detail on how specific this database gets. Does Google know where I live and my searching and spending habits? Or does it just have anonymous data for people in my zip code?

I'm worried about vista

I'm not one of those writers that mindlessly bashes Microsoft. But I can't help worrying about the buzz or lack thereof surrounding Windows Vista. It's been out for a month, and it's hard to find anyone with more than a tepid "cool graphics" to say about it. Indeed, the complaints about it in the blogosphere are starting to come fast and furious. In the past week I've tripped across web sites crabbing about Vista  here, here, here, and here.  It's expensive: $300 for the top of the line version. You need to buy new antivirus software. The fanciest graphics won't run on many computers, and on and on. Netscape founder Marc  Andreessen, a long time Windows supporter, said earlier this week he was switching to a Mac.

And then there is me: The company sent me a copy of Windows Vista two months ago, and I haven't installed it. That's remarkable to me. I've spent the last six years working at companies where Apple was the dominant OS, and I have always refused to switch, claiming, to the occasional irritation of my editors, that Windows was better. But now I own a Macbook and switch back and forth between OSX and Windows running in Parallels and just don't feel compelled to change. With Windows 95 I upgraded instantly to take advantage of the huge improvement in the user interface. With XP I upgraded to get rid of the blue screen of death. But with Vista I don't see how better graphics are going to offset the problems always associated with upgrading. For Microsoft investors' sake, here's hoping there are not too many people like me out there.