Wall Street Journal – Bright, shiny objects!

: Image by Getty Images via Daylife

If there were ever a CEO who was rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic without knowing it, it’s Steve Ballmer. Read on…

“Steve Ballmer must be on crack. Or something. In a fascinating interview with the Financial Times, Ballmer has the cheek to call Google a one-trick pony (this from the company that has only managed two break-out successes so far), can’t seem to come to grips with the fact that he hasn’t budged his stock price in eight years, and takes solace in the fact that the company only has “one way to go, and it’s up, baby, up, up, up, up, up!”

Please pass the vial, Ballmer.

One place where he comes down to earth is in his admission that he hasn’t figured out how to compete with open source:

I’ve got to tell you, in every – other than the battle with Open Source, every other competitor, I love being able to come into a room and saying we’re better and we’re cheaper. We’re going to try to say we’re better and we’re cheaper basically. [Editor; big lie!]

In the case of Linux vs. Windows, anyway, Microsoft is neither better nor cheaper. In its other products, too, it’s losing that argument.

But it’s really in deriding Google that Ballmer looks ridiculous. When asked about Google, he opines:

I mean, come on. They have one product. It’s been the same for five years – and they have Gmail now, but they have one product that makes all their money, and it hasn’t changed in five years.

I mean, they have a gestalt, but gestalt is gestalt. Let’s talk about the reality. The reality is one product makes 98 percent of all of their money, search.

Pot, meet kettle. As the Wall Street Journal noted in response to this Ballmer comment, “The definition of death, in corporate America, is believing you don’t have any competition. The definition of being in a coma may be underestimating that competition.” Ballmer even said that Microsoft has only had two hits – Office and Windows – in the interview.” Ballmer to Google: You’re a one-hit wonder | The Open Road – The Business and Politics of Open Source by Matt Asay – CNET News.com

Click the link to read more…

A client approached me today and asked whether or not I thought it would be a good thing for her to advertise in the Yellow Pages. I said I dunno — let’s look at the numbers…

Over the past 13 months, her Yellow Pages campaign had generated 5,500 impressions and a little over 60 clicks. In one year. Perhaps the thing that amazes me most about that is that our county tends to lag behind a little technology-wise and you would think the Yellow Pages would still be popular here. Perhaps even our humble county is falling prey to this national trend….

The White Pages, where many of us have found residential phone numbers over the years, are slowly being phased out in a number of states. NPR reported on this in early October, and now New York is part of the movement, too.

There will still be Yellow Pages, for the time being — it’s just the residential listings that phone companies are seeking permission to stop printing, except for customers who specifically request them. Everything from environmental concerns to the ubiquity of online directories to the decline of land lines has added heft to the cause, and in a growing list of states, you already won’t get the White Pages automatically.

But the piece in The Wall Street Journal notes that where AT&T has stopped printing the White Pages automatically, 2 percent of customers still request them. It’s not a lot, but it’s something.

It’s not hard to imagine a day when the Yellow Pages, too, will no longer be able to justify their existence, and the entire concept of a hard-copy phone directory will be something almost nobody remembers and almost nobody can imagine using.

via npr.org

Now let’s take a look at Facebook ads. Here’s the report summary for a little campaign I did a few weeks ago…

In brief, for a cost of $20.92, my ‘facebook ad using’ client got 25 times more impressions, almost the same amount of clicks, in a much more targeted audience than my ‘yellow page using’ client got in the previous 13 months for less than %1 of the cost. Oh — I forgot to mention the first client spent $3,900 to get her 60+ clicks…

I don’t know — you tell me. Should client #1 continue to use Yellow Pages or test the waters on Facebook Ads? I think even I can figure that one out…

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