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Open source software as a customer capture tool

I just started messing around with a product called SugarCRM which is an open source sales contact management tool much like Salesforce.com.

SugarCRMThey’ve done a really clever thing which is to build a revenue model around the added services rather than try to charge for the core software. You can download the same app that everyone else uses and install it yourself for free. But if you’re not up to the installation challenge, you can let them host it for you and get started in about 5 minutes for a $40/month usage fee. They charge more for additional services that larger groups may require.

I simultaneously started playing with the Salesforce.com free 30 day trial so that I could compare products. But I quickly realized that my learning curve for operationalizing any CRM system as part of my business was much more than 30 days. I also realized that I wanted the ability to do some major customizations which most likely need to happen at the code level. And I figured a Salesforce.com rep was going to call me and start selling to me which seemed like a fair price to pay but one I could actually do without. In fact, I got a call within 24 hours.

I wouldn’t have considered any of these issues as requirements except for the fact that they are available to me. I downloaded the SugarCRM software, installed it, configured it and uploaded a bunch of data in one afternoon. I now have a view into my customer pipeline that is going to simplify both strategic decisions as well as synthesize the variety of conversations happening across the business.

Now, I’m sure that Salesforce.com is more robust and that they have a lot of services and data integration methods I can’t get with SugarCRM. It must work better for larger organizations. I’m sure that Salesforce.com is more reliable, has fewer bugs, has more 3rd party developer tools, etc. At InfoWorld I learned that the cost of open source software becomes time and customization work which is sometimes more expensive than paying service fees (Aug. 2002, April 2006).

The San Francisco Chronicle noted this week that Salesforce.com is in a strong position with its model:

“A growing number of small businesses already realize that, despite recent problems, on-demand software makes more sense than setting up your own computer network.”

A sales manager at Salesforce.com informed me that he has never personally had to sell against SugarCRM in any of his calls. The market for it is probably pretty small.

However I just can’t help but I wonder if SugarCRM is in a position to do to Salesforce.com what Salesforce.com once did to Siebel, undercutting on price and extending efficiencies further out to the edge. The edge used to be self-serve style software as a service. SugarCRM went further and took the edge all the way out to the open source community.

A CRM app isn’t core to running my business. I can do what I need with spreadsheets. But if this tool makes my life easier or allows me to spread intelligence further or faster or if I’m able to make decisions I couldn’t otherwise visualize in my head, and I suspect it might, then I will definitely invest more heavily in it. At that point I may be calling on SugarCRM for additional services.

This software model also has the nice effect of helping me drive myself through the customer marketing funnel at my own pace. At the end of it, I won’t mind paying them for their services, and, in fact, I might be asking to pay for them. What sales person wouldn’t rather receive calls than make them?

Of course, the moment I need services that are worth paying for, I may need to switch to Salesforce.com. SugarCRM is banking on the possibility that I’ll reach user lock in before I get to that point. If I have to make that decision, then it means things are going well. And for that, SugarCRM will already have “loyalty” checked off in their column of my product comparison chart.

Online media revenues breathe life into print-centric thinking

Media executives are admitting publicly that the print publishing model doesn’t appear to have a happy ending to the heavy beating it keeps taking. Folio ran a story this week titled “The Revenue Tipping Point“. It refers to the point at which online revenue gains outpace the print revenue losses at a magazine publishing company.


Photo: therese flanagan

“While online revenue is still dwarfed by print revenue for most publishers, many are starting to see real revenue growth online exceed the real revenue loss in print on a quarterly basis. That’s a huge justification for publishers investing online; a final warning shot for publishers resisting (and yes, there are still plenty of them out there) online investment.”

The business magazine master himself, Pat McGovern, confirmed the trend:

“At the American Business Media Spring Meeting in May, IDG Communications chairman Pat McGovern, head of a company that has been criticized for not committing sooner to the Web, spoke of how the company is now making more money online than it is losing in print.”

Agencies and marketers have been telling publishers that they were shifting budgets away from print to online media for several years. Circulation has been flat or falling across the print world. Readerhsip time spent figures have all been pointing online.

Colin Crawford also of IDG added his thoughts (and warnings) on the trend:

“Every year our print ad market contracts in terms of total advertisers and total pages and revenue and our print circulations fall. There is nothing on the horizon that indicates any sort of reversal of this trend…Transformation involves a deep cultural shift in attitude to put online first and stop over protecting print.”

The signals are everywhere, crystalized for the shortsighted in big red figures on the balance sheets.

But until only recently the investment and tradition behind print publishing and the print brands have made it very difficult for executives to tell their own staff not to mention the press that print magazine models are failing.

Why is it ok to open the kimono now? Because there’s now a story to match the strategic direction. As online revenue builds, investment will shift away from print at a reasonable pace. “We won’t have to close shop afterall,” Mr. Publisher says. “We’ll make up the losses with online revenues. Everyone just calm down and get back to what you were doing before.”

It’s a step in the right direction, but I find this story a little bit dangerous. This strategy implies that the print model has enough life left in it to make the transition only a matter of shifting money from one pocket to the other. I think many publishers will interpret this strategy as a way to hold onto their jobs while they wait for the combined print and online revenues to match pre dotcom bust earnings. It’s then that they plan to release a big sigh and head back to the golf course.

But the competition for online ad budgets is heating up, too. Unfortunately for the old school print sales guys out there, the online ad model doesn’t look the same as the print model. Banners are not the same as print pages, and, it turns out, there are several other effective and often more profitable methods for marketing online than standard banners. Many of them don’t require the overhead of a sales team. And many of them are based on totally new content production models, in case the editorial staff bought the rhetoric, too.

I guess what I’m suggesting is that spending time thinking about this tipping point is merely the first step in admitting you have a problem. But the race is on, and no doubt a bunch of publishers are going to get crushed both in print and online if they don’t actually really make the investment to turn their online businesses into valuable media vehicles.

Video for education (or Really Simple Video)

I had some fun putting together a screencast recently to showcase an internal Yahoo! technology that my team is working on. I downloaded Camtasia, wrote a short script and then produced what turned out to be somewhat high quality video production with surprisingly little effort.

All you have to do is turn on the Camtasia recorder and then click around on your screen while you talk. It records everything and then outputs a prefab web page with the embedded flash video. The time I spent building it probably broke down like this:

5% – downloading software and setting up a quiet space in a conference room.
5% – learning Camtasia.
30% – preparing. I mean writing the script and practicing.
50% – recording. admittedly, I ran through the script over and over again to get a few stutters and ums and uhs out of the monologue.
5% – output and posting the page
5% – telling people about it

I think it took less than 3 hours in total, but I got lost in the process a bit, so it could have been much quicker. The most interesting thing to note about the process here is how little time was spent dealing with production issues and how much time was spent on content.

Camtasia is actually advanced enough for you to do more sophisticated editing if you wish. But it served my need just perfectly. I wanted to show people what was happening on my screen, and I wanted to post that as a video on a web page. They perfectly isolated all the functionality I needed to do that with as little user interface overhead as possible.

Jon Udell has been pushing this concept as a really important educational device for a while now and has demonstrated some interesting ways to apply it. It’s not just the ease with which a person can do high quality productions that he finds powerful. It’s the inherent sharability of the output. When people start to see that sharing video can be about more than entertainment and exhibitionism, then they may turn to screencasts to share what they know with the world. The format is particularly well suited for demonstrations and how-to types of educational video.

It’s just so simple, there’s no reason not to try it.

What makes a good leader of a participatory community

I’m very interested in what leadership lessons we can learn from the people who drive the successful peer production models on the Internet. What is it about Craig Newmark, Jimmy Wales, Rob Malda, Stewart Butterfield and the other pioneers of participatory media that make the brands that they’ve created so powerful?


Photo: heather

Yochai Benkler breaks down the incentives for participation in peer production models in a very sensible and fascinating paper called Coases’ Penguin and discusses the economics of collaboration in his PopTech talk now available on ITConversations. But there’s a missing thread in his analysis that I think is crucially important.

The creators of the platforms on which peer production unfolds must have some common characteristics that enable these reputation models to reflect back on the people who invest in the platform instead of the company, brand or leader of that vehicle.

No doubt the participants are what make the products sing. But there’s something in common about the way these shepherds have approached their products and their customers that create an environment of trust, utility, gratification, expression, community, etc.

I don’t think any of them one day woke up and said I want to build a massive community of people posting content. Rather they probably stumbled onto ideas that started in one direction and ended up a little different than what they intended. I wonder what it is about the way they approach problems and lead teams that made them capable of identifying where the sweet spot would be for their idea.

I suspect that all of them share a handful of key qualities that make them unusual leaders including things like…

  • Total dedication, focus and passion for the service the community is providing to itself
  • A laissez faire attitude toward conflict but quick to identify resolutions
  • Motivated by a desire to do something important, not by money. They want to be part of something bigger than themselves.
  • A very creative mind that thrives on solving problems though not necessarily skilled in traditional artistic disciplines
  • Collaborative leadership styles, the extreme opposite of authoritarian, mandate-driven leadership

I don’t think they are attention seekers. I don’t think they are self righteous. They probably were mischief makers as kids and grew up to be anti-authoritarian. I’m guessing they were heavy video game users at one point if not still and love to compete.

I’m sure all of them also understand the decentralized and collaborative mentality, not as a translation from another model but rather baked into the way they think about what they are building.

I don’t know any of these guys personally, so this is perhaps wasteful conjecture. But I’m very curious about how the mainstream media business is going to approach the idea of participatory and social media given the cultural chasm and even conflicting styles of the leaders in the two categories. So far, it seems, people like Rupert Murdoch (and Terry Semel) have been smart enough to let these companies run and let these leaders lead.

It won’t be long before mainstream media companies start rolling out their own concepts for participatory media models, and I suspect those ideas will often fall flat…and it won’t be because the idea is bad but rather a lack of the key qualities required to shepherd a community.

Measuring success through innovation

Product roadmaps can often become innovation roadblocks. If the roadmap gets translated into a timeline, then the team is forced into an the awkward position of having expectations against which they can only fail.


Photo: Baron von Flickrhoffen

The time required to meet most project deadlines is usually underestimated. There are ways to fight that like padding estimates and shifting resources, but deadlines are meant to be missed. And there are always new challenges and opportunities that popup midstream that you’ll never be able to predict.

As a result, the team gets rewarded for cutting out work and reducing the scope of a project in order to meet the goal. Hold on. That doesn’t make any sense. People get rewarded for delivering less?

In a discussion about Yahoo!’s tendency to focus on time-driven roadmaps with some colleagues yesterday, one person suggested that Product Managers should be rewarded for the number and quality of the features that make it into production. The roadmap then becomes more like a strategy or possibly just an approach to driving toward a vision.

I really like the idea that innovation is the goal rather than beating the clock. I can imagine the lively discussions happening up and down the management hierarchy, too. How much more interesting would it be watching a weekly report that showed all the cool stuff in development rather than a big timetable of all the projects that are running late?

No doubt it would be a lot more fun to congratulate your staff for the bright ideas that they’ve come up with and delivered rather than for the all-nighter they pulled to push out the same old s*#!t.

The fashion of business

Umair Haque equates the poor investment Americans make in their personal fashion with the cultural emphasis on productivity. He argues that people who are “stylish” are perceived as frivolous and unproductive in America. In a comment on Umair’s post Russell Davies flags the style conscious eyes and ears of the English and Japanese:

“In an essay somewhere William Gibson talks about how the British and the Japanese are so naturally expert in branding because they’re brought up to instantly spot the status inference in the tiniest marginal signal – accent, appearance, language. This must apply to style too.”


Photo: pinkbelt

True, though a bit short-sighted. I think Americans are also more forgiving of misplaced style signals or even completely ambivalent to the overbranded constructs that English and Japanese cultures use to reinforce conformity.

On the other hand, I would never argue Americans favor substance over style. Umair is right. We’re often lacking both. But America is also more ready and willing to accept a new idea or to support radical innovation than any place more stylish.

This is particularly true in business.

Look at California where the Internet business, in particular, continues to boom on the shoulders of new business models. Business itself is a type of fashion where the catwalk is loaded with hot startups and cool prototypes. For example, every online media company has been browsing through all the social networking sites and working on plans to at least accessorize their online offerings with social media in some way now that social media is the model du jour.

The tech business fashion model gets built into product strategy, too. Upon returning to Apple in 1996, Steve Jobs’ first step toward turning around the once-hot now-not desktop computer company was to reinvent the Apple style with the iMac. His bet on fashion was a winner which gave him the confidence to reinvent the MP3 player as a new fashion accessory.

It wasn’t until the flickr acquisition did I think Yahoo! was much more than a fashion follower. I’m still not sure I fully understand how fashion fits into the Yahoo! culture, but it’s clear that style is a priority in the search business.

While talking with some colleagues once about how Jeff Weiner would view a really new approach to the search user experience the response from one of the more senior people at the company was, “Jeff has a great sense of style.”

I remember my first day here nearly a year ago. I expected to see black denim and long back action and was instead surprised to see that most everyone looked rather polished if not trendy. Even one of my Nebraska born and raised colleagues shops at H&M.

Again, a shirt or two from Hennes does not make one a fashionable dresser, but style can be about more than what you wear. It’s also a vantange point from where you choose to make decisions or an awareness that enables you to spot important trends. Americans may not be dressed as smartly as Europeans, but their business sense is acutely tuned to fashion in the markets in a way that is still unmatched around the world.

A swap market concept

I’ve been playing around with a concept for a swap market that started out almost as a joke, but now that I have a prototype working I’m wondering if this could be a new approach to the classifieds market.


Photo: HapaK

My daughter has either outgrown or has lost interest in several of her toys that I’d love to pass on to someone else rather than store in our increasingly muddled basement. I’ve got a perfectly decent baby rocking horse, some slightly chewed books, a bunch of stain-free clothes, an immaculate car seat and a functional though well-worn stroller.

I’m sure I’m not alone with an excess of toys floating about. Actually, I’m fairly confident that there is a ton of kiddie gear in San Francisco that should be recycled through other children rather than relegated to each house’s used stuff cemetary. And I’d much rather trade my stuff than pay for new stuff.

So, I started running architecture scenarios through my head for getting a workable prototype of a web site that my wife and her friends could use to swap their used baby gear. It seemed completely out of my league the more I thought about it.

But as luck would have it I found that Jon Aquino built a Craigslist application for Ning that covers about 80% of what I need. I was able to setup and configure a site that looks and operates nearly identically to Craigslist in concept if not in function, as well. People can post things they want to sell. And shoppers can search and browse through lists of things in reverse chronological order. You can comment on posts and discuss topics, too. I was also able to configure the shopping categories for this particular vertical in just a few minutes.

You can see what I’ve prototyped so far here: http://flipstash.ning.com/. Again, it’s about 80% done, but it’s that the last 20% that’s the most important part of the prototype.

How do I facilitate the swap? How does a person decide that what they are offering is of at least a similar value to what they are getting?

One idea is to approximate 3 tiers of value and have users assign a value tier to their swappable items. Another is for FlipStash to approximate values of things posted and credit the user’s account which they can use to spend on other people’s things. Both these methods seem awkward.

A better way to solve the problem might be to allow you to post a dollar value for each item you post and then credit you with that amount to spend when someone claims your item. You would have to build an eBay-like reputation system to keep people from cheating.

And then there’s the revenue model. It seems this would be a great case for using subscriptions. Say, for example, you could trade items up to $5 in value for free, but if you wanted to buy or sell anything worth more than $5, you would have to pay a monthly fee.

Of course, I could just let people post prices and let them pay each other. But what’s the fun in that? It’s already been done. Much more entertaining to try and shake up the model a bit, eh?

A good marketer doesn’t have to advertise

The real power structures behind the advertising industry appear to be staring at the Internet for the first time. The big agencies, in particular, are wondering how to make money as the vehicles they once relied on lose influence in the market. It was probably people like Warren Buffett who finally convinced them that something actually really scary is happening:


Photo: Thomas Hawk

“The outlook for newspapers is not great. In the TV business, a license from the government was essentially the right to a royalty stream. There were basically three highways to people’s eyeballs, and companies like P&G, Ford, Gillette, and GM would pay a significant amount of money to be get on those highways and advertise their products to a mass audience. But as the ways to get in front of people’s eyeballs increases, the value of those highways goes down.”

What’s a marketer to do? They are desparate for attention. In many cases they even threaten to drop campaigns if they don’t get editorial coverage.

“Almost 50 percent (48.9%) of senior marketing executives reported paying for an editorial or broadcast placement – and almost half of those who haven’t said they would…If 65% of consumers assume that the products, companies or services they read about are there because someone paid for them – and half of marketers have actually paid for media coverage – the press, PR industry and news consumers are all in trouble.” (via Forbes.com)

Buying coverage isn’t how you get people to spread the word about your product. It’s also shortsighted if not suicidal to damage the credibility of the vehicles that you rely on to communicate trusted messages with your customers.

There is another way, however.

I’ve been watching Colin Roche turn his PenAgain invention into a real story with real coverage from big outlets over the past 3 years or so now. I don’t think he has spent a single dollar in marketing, yet media coverage only improves and as a result sales keep soaring.

This stratgegy is not for the weak. Colin keeps a handful of pens in his pocket at all times. He hands one out to everyone he talks to pointing out the latest enhancements such as the new packaging or the new flip cap spring. He makes people feel like they are helping a guy startup a cool little company with him.

He slips it into conversation whenever he gets a chance. He sends his pens to famous people. He sends them to reporters and editors. He chats with store owners who are selling his pen knowing that they are going to help sell it, too.

Everyone is not only a customer in Colin’s eyes, everyone is a potential marketing vehicle for him.

Colin has also refined the “story” of his company. It’s all true. He did in fact dream it up in detention in high school. And the name did come to him after someone woke him up and he said, “I was dreaming about that pen again.” But it’s these anecdotes that make his company feel human and interesting to talk about.

Colin also just started blogging and is now collecting photos of people using the PenAgain on flickr. His flickr photo stream looks like the walls of a New York City diner covered with images of people shaking hands with the owner.

He’s doing all the right things to help people who love his product share his enthusiasm for it.

Contrast his marketing efforts with traditional advertising agencies and you’ll find people stuck with a system that doesn’t work. Agencies get paid more for the expensive print and television campaigns than they ever will for search marketing. They have no incentive to jump into the online space and will continue to sell their clients on the virtues of big expensive branding efforts.

And then you have the media buyers who get paid for allocating a big budget across media vehicles that meet the agency’s campaign goals. But since the goal is usually wide exposure, media buyers have to use vehicles like TV and big circulation magazines to justify their existence. And there’s no incentive to spend less than the budget…quite the contrary. The more they spend, the harder their job is which means they can justify billing for more.

Agencies and buyers are both wrapped up in a dynamic that profits from the waste they create. This worked when there was more friction in the distribution process, as Umair Haque will tell you, but media has taken a lube bath on the Internet and the need for an expensive shoehorn to squeeze expensive campaigns through no longer fits. (yikes…bad mixed metaphor there. sorry.)

“Edge platforms have a number of key features. The most familiar are that they’re often massively distributed, and open-access….they can usually almost completely vaporize the fixed costs of production from most of the resources that are necessary and sufficient to compete in those industries.”

Similarly, Jeff Jarvis sees a tipping point coming for the advertising industry:

“Advertisers can get away with moving slowly – for now – because they are the ones with the money. Funny how that works. But this won’t last for long, as one client and then one agency discovers that the lazy, traditional, one-stop-shopping of TV upfront and the big-media lunch circuit is inefficient, wasteful, untargeted, irrelevant, and ultimately damned irritating to your customers.”

At the end of the day, the product vendor doesn’t want to work as hard as someone like Colin to sell their product. If they did, then they would be inventing their own things and selling them to the world. The moment they hire an agency to take on that work, they have jumped into a spending whirlpool.

What they should be doing instead is talking about their product every day with everyone they meet and crafting the story that will get other people talking about their product for them. They need infectious enthusiasm for their products, not clever billboards.


Photo: jjjjjjj

Product sales isn’t getting any easier. In fact, it might be getting harder. Since the Colin Roche’s of the world are learning how easy it is to manufacture interesting products, and anyone with a computer can tell their story on the world’s stage, it probably means that selling things is more competitive than ever before.

If marketing industry leaders want to retain the downtown office spaces, nice chairs and designer clothes by riding on cushy vendor marketing budgets, they have to reinvent themselves in ways that make them invisible again. Forget about the Clio awards. You need to get back to work finding ways to get your clients and their customers talking with eachother about eachother.

I recommend starting out by pretending you have no budget before that becomes the reality.

Idealizing media business models

Jon Udell notes that WSJ’s landlocked articles may in fact help them drive revenue but at what expense:

“PaidContent.org reminded me that WSJ.com is considered a major success not only in the realm of paid online circulation, but also in comparison to newspapers…This may be a successful model of publishing, but it seems to me a curious definition of success.”


Photo: niznoz

How do you measure the opportunity cost of gating your content? The most obvious way is to estimate the number of page views an article would get outside a gated wall and then extrapolate revenue off CPMs.

However, this equation has a fundamental flaw that is not so easy to calculate. It’s the core question of every media company. How do you measure success? Do you exist to make money or do you exist to connect people?

It’s easy to say that media companies have to be both. But which powerpoint slide are you going to show your board of directors first? One of those will ultimately drive every decision at the company.

But even those two metrics fail to measure success in media as I’d like to see it. I’d like to see media brands measuring success based on the quality of the relationships they are able to catalyze. And I don’t see why that’s not possible…it might be hard, but it should be doable.

For example, it’s not how many people read an article that matters, necessarily. It’s how deeply did a story help a person. It’s not how many ad impressions were served, nor is it how many clicks or even the number of sales that result from an ad on a media property. It’s about the types of ways the media property improved the relationship between a vendor and that vendor’s customers.

Imagine how much easier strategic decisions would be if you could look at a report each morning that showed how many of your site visitors were getting promoted in their jobs or referring their friends to particular vendors that advertise on your site.

Imagine going into the board room each quarter and showing that as a direct result of the activity at your web site the average visitor income level increased or productivity in the industry improved or something more substantial like the number of homicides in the area decreased or more people voted in the last election.


Photo: infomaniac

Imagine telling an advertiser that working with your media brand meant that their customer retention metrics would improve or that people would be talking about their products more or even that they could drive up shareholder value. Imagine the rates they would pay to work with you for those benefits.

And imagine the types of people that would want to work at this kind of company and the amazing products that would come out of it as a result of these measures of success.

Yeah, pipe dream, I know. At the end of the day, most of us just want to get paid for their work and live a simple life. There’s nothing wrong with that, and I certainly fit in that camp a lot of the time.

The question in my mind is: Are qualitative success metrics like these measurable and attainable? If they’re not, why not? And if they are, why would you pursue anything else?

Copycat ad networks threaten Google’s stability

Any successful business model is going to have imitators.  Google knows this as well as anybody.   But now the stranglehold on the distributed ad model is feeling weaker than ever with new competitors every day.

The magic formula = isolate revenue collection system into a platform + make it available to other web sites – share earnings back to transaction/click source.

Yahoo! rolled out a similar offering about a year ago with YPN.  eBay launched their own version recently.  Amazon has had their affiliate program for years.  Kanoodle, IndustryBrains, Feedburner and a host of others all know this solution with their own twist on it.  Media networks such as IDG smartened up to the opportunity, as well.

The magic formula is showing cracks, though.  Click fraud is not being measured effectively by independent audits nor is payment being adjusted to compensate for it.  And Google has no short term incentive to solve the problem just as Microsoft once had no incentive to fix Windows security threats.

Linux gave Microsoft reason to change.  I wonder who will push Google into panic mode.  They may just sleepwalk into the death trap as long as their search market share remains strong.

Though have no doubt that Google can change.  At some point Schmidt’s insistence that Google is a technology company may actually trickle down and create some revenue opportunities that are more service based.  If they can scale their office products for mass adoption and perhaps create a browser optimized for those products, then they will finally have a potential revenue model to match the rhetoric.

The question is whether the market share losses surely in AdSense’s near future will fracture Wall Street’s love affair with the company before they can not only diversify but also stabilize on a mix of technology service revenue streams.

I can’t even imagine the complexity of the cultural war that will wage internally when/if the “technology” part of the business actually becomes a real slice of Google’s revenue pie.  Manufacturing consent will probably work while Google continues to grow.  I’d still hate to be on a “technology” product team at a company where 99% of the revenue comes from media products…wait…from one media product.

The Google Phd’s are probably predicting the copycats, the corporate positioning conflicts and internal competitive challenges as I write this, but are they smart enough to get their Product Managers and Biz Dev guys to help them actually figure out how to solve the problems, or do they just write papers and send long emails with subject lines in all caps?

“CORPORATE STRATEGY RESEARCH STUDY: IMPACT OF ‘TECHNOLOGY’ MARKET POSITION IN THE FACE OF MULTI-FRONT WAR ON ONLY REVENUE STREAM MAY CAUSE INTERNAL STRIFE”

Maybe Microsoft’s MSN team has some advice for Google’s technology product teams about operating in the shadow of the cash cow.