Expression

Everyone in the world knows that this evolutionary phone is on the shelf today at 6:00pm - well, except for the babies who like milk bottle better and corporate people who find black berry more handy. Reporters keep reporting the waiting line in major cities and readers keep reading.

One of them is reading the news and about to take off for today. He’s going home and off to the mall with his most beautiful lady who’s also coming home from work to have a chance trying this piece of technology. He knows she’s not into the tech but she loves what he’s doing. How lovely she is. His soon-to-be-expired contract with AT&T just makes him want to get the phone right away. Sadly, he knows he’s not going to buy it now because of its low priority. But it’s been numbered on his wish-list.

Ah, he just spotted a news. Philly mayor was in the line in front of Apple store in NYC but he left silently after a kid asked him, “How can you sit here with 200 murders in the city already?” The mayor said “I’m doing my job”. Alright. This is what they call madness :))

Now what. Under the iPhone effect, Verizon goes crazy today as it announces to upgrade its EV-DO network to Revision 1 which allows to speed the downloads to 8 or 9 times. As compared to iPhone which is known for slow Internet speed beyond wifi area, this move is obviously to keep the customers awake and aware of the service quality over the appealing appearance.

They said iPhone technology will soon change human computing world. Let’s see. There’s also rumor that later this year, Apple laptop will be equipped with this multi-touch technology. Microsoft is pushing the production of Microsoft Surface Computing which also uses multi touch technology. His friend said that Sprint and other carriers are planning to sell similar phones as iPhone. European phone companies such as Motorola and Siemen are working hard on R&D, hopefully to release their products soon enough before iPhone takes all the market share.

Businessweek said it’s Job’s revenge. Sound reasonable to some extent.

Filed by Tran Nguyen at 7:02 pm under Daily thoughts
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Việt Nam gia nhập WTO rồi. Kinh tế thông thoáng và công ty nước ngoài bắt đầu nhòm ngó công ty nội địa. Mua bán và sát nhập công ty ngày càng được nhắc nhiều trên báo chí. Nhiều hợp đồng đầu tư chiến lược của các công ty nước ngoài vào công ty Việt Nam cũng được đề cập đến. Gần đây thì tập đoàn bảo hiểm Daiichi của Nhật mua lại công ty bảo hiểm nhân thọ Bảo Minh CMG để bước chân vào thị trường Việt Nam. Lúc biết được tin đó thì giựt mình, tự hỏi thị trường Việt Nam đang trở nên tiềm năng và có sự chú ý rồi ư? Còn nữa, nhớ ngày xưa đọc báo, nghe tin Kinh Đô mua cổ phần của Tribeco hoặc Kinh Đô mua nhãn hiệu kem Wall của Unilever, mình chỉ đọc lướt qua và chẳng thèm để ý vì nó chả ảnh hưởng mô tê gì đến mình. Bây giờ biết nhiều thì lại thích và còn có thể dùng nó để khoe về Việt Nam nữa chứ.

Thích đọc để hiểu tầm nhìn chiến lược của những thương vụ mua bán và sát nhập. Đọc để biết mà xoay sở với cán cân của thị trường toàn cầu nữa. Lúc bên này, lúc bên kia. M&A đơn giản là một chu trình của toàn cầu hóa. Nhưng nó không đơn giản chỉ là để mở rộng thị trường hoặc tăng khoảng cách cạnh tranh với đối thủ. Có rất nhiều yếu tố quan trọng đằng sau của những thương vụ này và mỗi công ty sát nhập (hoặc bị sát nhập) lại có những yếu tố hoàn toàn khác nhau.

Điểm sơ sơ cũng đã thấy trên dưới 10 vụ mua bán sát nhập được đăng trên báo - nội mua ngoại hay ngoại mua nội hay nội ngoại hợp tác với nhau. Chưa kể những vụ nhỏ hơn mà mình chưa nghe đến. Chắc phải làm thêm một mục để lưu trữ những thông tin này quá. Đến mai mốt có khi lại ú ớ không biết nhãn hàng này là của Việt Nam hay nước ngoài thì chắc quê lắm.

Filed by Tran Nguyen at 5:17 am under Daily thoughts
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Vui…
Mệt…
No…
Lạnh…

Filed by Tran Nguyen at 4:25 am under Daily thoughts
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Jerry Chang, one of the two Yahoo co-founders, has taken the CEO seat after the unsuccessful effort of ex-CEO Terry Semel. This is a good and breaking news for Yahoo users and its stock owners who have worried for the company’s lay-back in recent years. Terry decided to leave at the right moment when the company’s performance is going down radically and disappointment is increasingly spreading among its shareholders.

Bad news about the company has evolved lately. Yahoo’s advertising revenue is bypassed by Google. Except for Flickr, the most efficient service to date, other acquisitions of the company haven’t got much public attention while Google is building up its ambition with two significant acquisitions: YouTube ($1.6 billion) and DoubleClick($3.1 billion). And recently, the company announced the closings of its inefficient services including Yahoo Photos and auction site for Hong Kong users. What a year for Yahoo.

Yahoo is trying to catch up with Google. One was founded in 1995 and the other was founded in 1998. Now the latter is speeding ahead with a right and focus revenue model: advertising. Yahoo is doing the same but its range of products is broad and dispersed.

Lack of keenness to the evolution of the Internet keeps the company stayed behind the game. Social networking is an outstanding example for this. Google quickly publicized Orkut, a social networking project built by Orkut Büyükkökten while working at Google, in 2004 when it saw the potential future of such service. Around that time, Friendster and MySpace were getting hyped also, but Yahoo still hasn’t got involved. And until now what Yahoo has is the Y360 blog service which has bugs here and there and hasn’t rolled out from its beta yet.

Sustaining a competitive advantage in the Internet industry is not as easy as saying. I bet many people have got to the point where they didn’t know where to go on the Internet and decided to land themselves on Yahoo homepage simply because it has many categories to see and explore. I’m not an exception. Yahoo homepage was the very very first website that I typed up in my browser when I first got dial-up connection in 1997. Then 1998 and 1999 were the time when I struggled through tons of links from Yahoo to find scholarship info and study opportunities in the US (dial-up connection is not fun btw).

Anyway, I said a lot more than I intended. Probably I need to mention something or else the title doesn’t make any sense.

We’ve seen a couple of founders who have returned to their CEO positions to keep the company up and running better for the sake of their shareholders. Steve Job returned to Apple with his iPod idea. Michael Dell took back the position to reform Dell strategic operation. More examples came from Businessweek. Should we expect a significant change for Yahoo from Jerry Chang who’s been with the company since its infancy and understands it better than anyone else? Why not.

Filed by Tran Nguyen at 7:16 am under Daily thoughts, IT
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Quite sometimes, many times, a lot…

Many people do that.

Senders: putting their thoughts on the keystrokes and quickly sending the mail as if trying to get it out of the way.
Receivers: having question marks all over the places. Feeling disrespected? Angry? Because of (the following)
Reasons: misspelling, confusion, misinterpretation, misunderstanding…you tell me

Ok, let put it this way. Email communication is a process. A process is what takes various inputs (senders’ thoughts, intentions), transforms them (using keyboards to compose that thoughts to an email message) into an output. It then has to directly delivers that output to the customers (receivers). Email won’t be called a process without going through these steps. An incomplete step could break email communication. Wrong email communication can happen at any where of the process, either the sender side or receiver side or transforming side. Many people, (how do I put this?), take into account the input and output but totally neglect the transforming step. It’s so simple that many mistakenly consider this critical one obsolete. It’s unacceptable but it happens quite often. It pisses you off when you are a receiver of a “broken” email process (like a customer buys a defective product)

Should people get back to old-school mailing postage where they pay more attention to their handwriting and words coming out from fresh ink?

People sometimes say to think carefully before doing something. My version would be thinking and typing carefully before hitting the send button.

Filed by Tran Nguyen at 8:34 pm under Daily thoughts
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