rsmiller510 writes "Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, has a plan to kill Google by paying the top 1,000 sites a cool million each to leave the Google index and move to Microsoft. But could such a plan ever work, and would it be worth the risk to abandon Google?"
There is a gotcha in this plan Remove the top 1000 sites from Google, and another top 1000 will replace them.
Personally, I will never use anything affiliated with M$. My bias does them no harm, but I just feel better for it.
Bing is just another crazy idea to compete in a marker place they will never devote themselves to 100%. M$ has a long history of making gutted applications and giving away for free merely to steal market share from producers of quality products.
Although I have not, and will never use bing, it might be okay for some, but not in my world. Sites taking the bait, dumping Google and switching to M$ will just remove themselves from 50%+ of internet searches. Another stupid idea takes shape...
by Anonymous Coward
on Monday November 16, @01:38PM (#30118874)
Maybe a better analysis:
Mark Cuban was sitting around one day smoking something and wondered, "How can I prove that I am really, really stupid?"
Oh, I know. Wow! I've got it. Microsoft could pay a billion dollars to prove to everyone that it can't compete, that it has to pay to get results. Why the advertising alone would be worth 50 billion. Everyone would associate Microsoft with puking.
True. The plan takes zero account of the strength of the Google brand; if companies did desert them then people wouldn't stop finding companies in Google overnight. They would simply find other (suddenly very happy) companies.
I'm in SF. All $1M would mean to me is a downpayment on a very reasonable but well-located house. And I'd have to use Google to research the neighborhoods I'd consider moving into.
And I'm just a dude. We're talking about companies here. I work for a relatively small software lab, and $1M is less than 1 month's payroll, bennies, and taxes.
What the heck is that all about? Google generates much much more than a million dollars to the top 1000 e-commerce websites, and in a few days. This has to be a joke.
Seriously, the USERS decide which search engine is best, not the website owners. And why in the world would the top 1000 sites listen to an anonymous rich fool instead of Google which has provided a decent flow of clicks to their websites for ages....
This is just Mark Cuban's way of getting his name in the papers. I can't imagine that any big company would be willing to try to remove their name from Google's search results. I just don't see how Cuban's plan is going to work. If it could hurt Google, Microsoft would have removed their sites from Google's index long ago.
Mark Cuban has a love affair with microsoft [google.com] and so this is just another part of his love affair. Basically, that's all it is. Bing won't dominate because it's quality is crap, and buying out a lot of customers won't make up for the fact that there will be a: less profitability and b: less quality.
If this Mark Cuban person has a love affair with Microsoft, then it's the sort of love affair where Microsoft is deeply embarrassed about their drunken one night stand and desperately wishes the other party would shut up about it. Honestly, this is terrible publicity for Microsoft: "Come to us - we're so bad that people have to be paid not to use our competitors". As if any of these big sites would accept such a bribe anyway. I'm fairly sure this wouldn't be legal in the EU either so unless these great big companies have no presence in the EU (yeah right), then the deal would be complicated anyway.
Bing is actually fine. Its problem is that Google is already there and is so successful that their name has become a verb. Displacing that is going to take either very long term and sustained effort or some sort of PR disaster for Google (maybe their search engine is powered by Puppy juice). Bing needs a boost of some sort for certain. Pairing up with Wolfram Alpha is a good thing. Stunts like this (I sincerely hope MS had the sense not to okay this) are sooooooo not a good thing.
Doesn't matter. Google's name has already achieved the marketer's dream: a generic name/verb. Which means it's in the same league as Coke, Kleenex and Xerox. Their name has become so big and so common it's replaced the real term. No one get's a soda, they get a coke, even when that 'coke' is a Pepsi. When was the last time anyone asked for a tissue instead of a Kleenex? And when you want something copied, you 'xerox' it. No one I know under the age of 40 searches for anything one the web, they 'google' it.
So it doesn't matter what this guy pays, Google is simply too big to be replaced at this stage in the game. If Microsoft is smart, they'll work to make Bing number 2. If not, instead of becoming the search engine equivalent of Pepsi, they'll become the next Royal Crown Cola.
Actually, that's not necessarily the marketer's dream. Kleenex and Xerox have also had headaches because when the name becomes that ubiquitous, you have some issues keeping the rights to it. If the courts decide that your name has become a generic word, then you're in trouble in terms of legal enforcement of your trademark. Xerox in particular has discouraged people from using 'xerox' as a verb, because they're concerned about losing the trademark. From their own website's company factbook [xerox.com], italic emphasis mine:
The Xerox Trademark Xerox is a famous trademark and trade name. Xerox as a trademark is properly used only as a brand name to identify the company's products and services. The Xerox trademark should always be used as a proper adjective followed by the generic name of the product: e.g., Xerox printer. The Xerox trademark should never be used as a verb. The trade name Xerox is an abbreviation for the company's full legal name: Xerox Corporation. XEROX is a registered trademark of Xerox Corporation.
The difference in my opinion is that people often use kleenex and xerox to refer to using items of another brand, I have yet to hear anyone use google to mean searching for something without using Google.
Is anyone going to point out that this isn't bribery [wordswarm.net] in any meaningful sense of the word? Paying someone to act a particular way is not a bribe, unless the guy being bribed has some moral or legal obligation to act contrary to the briber's interest. So do these websites have a moral or legal obligation to support or cooperate with Google? Oh yeah, and you're trolling.
The real question is, who would be stupid enough to listen to a man who made almost all of his money soley on the chance decision of buying the domain name "Broadcast.com" and convincing Yahoo! that it was work ~$6 billion dollars to buy out.
P.S. In case anyone thinks that his $6 billion jackpot somehow displayed hidden skill or insight, I also point out that he's currently worth a little over $2 billion. That's right, he's lost $4 billion in networth since being bought out by Yahoo!
First, It was $6B of Yahoo Stock, not $6B cash. I'm sure there are laws on how much you can sell and when.
From Broadcast.com's Wiki.
The record IPO made instant financial successes out of the company's employees through stock options, making 100 employees millionaires on paper (although most of them were unable to exercise their options and sell their shares before the stock price dropped) and founders Cuban and Wagner billionaires.
Second, it may have been 'pure luck' it doesn't look like this was his only venture into entrepreneurial endeavors.
Finally, that's still $2B dollars. From what I've read and the brief interaction in the time I met him (IU vs Purdue Alumni Rugby Match. Flew up in his personal Jet.) He has to be hands down one of the coolest Billionaires I've heard of.
He supported Grokster in the MGM vs Grokster case. He buys random companies and starts random websites. Like bailoutsleuth "a grassroots, online portal for oversight over the US government's $700 billion dollar "bailout" of financial institutions."
Not to mention he spouts off to NBA refs and other players. And shrugs his shoulder when they fine him. "Cuban has been fined by the NBA, mostly for critical statements about the league and referees, at least $1,665,000 for 13 incidents". (Matching each fine with a donation to a Charity). When he said something against Dairy Queen, he voluntarily worked at a DQ for a day.
You can't honestly tell me if you came up with some idea (no matter how stupid) and convinced someone to buy it at the height of a bubble. You wouldn't take your billions and have a ball. Spending the rest of your life drinking, flying around in your jet, yelling at professional sports officials, supporting any cause you thought was cool.
Hell. You could have a "Chyeld Day" on slashdot. Pay off Taco to change banner at the top for a few million.
Yeah these numbers just don't add up. First off, I'm going to assume that this is a million dollars a year (or somesuch), otherwise it's ridiculous on the face of it. No high-profile web company is going to sign a perpetual contract like that. Now, the top 1,000 sites depend on internet traffic. No doubt their advertising budgets are more than a million dollars. Telling them that they can get one million dollars if they give up a huge chunk of their internet visibility is ridiculous. It's worth much more than that to them.
Conversely, this whole plan would cost 1 billion dollars to pull off. Sure, Microsoft could afford that, and would pay that much to destroy Google. But this is a poor plan. If Google no longer listed the top 1,000 sites (which is a big if, since many of those sites have no particular love of Microsoft...), then would Google crash and burn? Or would the sites currently ranked 1,0001-2000 suddenly see a huge upsurge in their traffic and profitability?
Lastly, how would this work on a technical level? Sure, you can configure your server to reject all requests from googlebot, preventing them from indexing sub-pages, but you can't technically (or legally) prevent Google from returning a link to "wsj.com" when someone searches for "Wall Street Journal". So any "de-indexing" wouldn't be complete.
This "plan" fails on so many levels. I'm sure Google is not too concerned about this. Any companies that participated would be signing their own death sentence: their web visibility would drop, public opinion of the company would drop, they might open themselves to legal attacks... and all for a "cool million".
Sigh. I know it's waaay too much to ask, but if you actually read his blog post [blogmaverick.com] it's not a plan at all - just some ideas that he's throwing around. The headline in TFA (and thence TFS) is misleading.
The American Airlines Center where the Mavs play seats about 20,000. There are 82 games in a basketball season, meaning the Mavs will have about half that at home. Let's round it to 40 games. If they make the playoffs, that number could potentially double, so doing a little basic math here... yeah... I don't see any reason to expect them to be in the playoffs, let alone have home court advantage, so we'll keep the game total at 40.
20,000 seats times 40 games is 800,000 seats. $1 billion / 800k = $1250 per seat per game.
My suggestion for Google's response: Buy every seat to every Mavs home game for a year. Pay people $1000 each to go to the game and root for whoever the Mavs are playing that night, while wearing Google t-shirts.
They are surely a top-1000 site. Will they get the cash to de-list themselves?
P.S. The guy is an idiot. People go to Google not to get stuff from a top-1000 site, but to find stuff that is not found in the search bars of the top-1000 sites.
TFA makes it pretty clear that this (on his personal blog) is a thought experiment, not an actual plan he has any intention to follow through. More, he is speculating about moves that Microsoft or others might take to bring Google down and what that would do to the market.
Frankly, it as much use as mine our your random musings on business: the only motivation for it making the Slashdot front page seems to be that this guy coincidentally happens to have a billion dollars.
1 million is peanuts. Amazon, one of the top 100 sites, makes that during a coffee break.
Why opt out of free product placement (Amazon usually ranks high in google) worldwide, for a pittance?
Cuban's mojo has left the room.
1 million in a coffee break? At first I thought this was an exaggeration, but then I ran the numbers. Amazon had 5,449 million USD in revenue last quarter, so that's about $60mil/day, or 1 million every 24 minutes (obviously this assumes a flat time distribution which is clearly not true, but lets keep going). A 24 minute coffee break is a bit excessive, but not completely out of the question. Once you take the non-averaged distribution into account, you can probably make a million in a 5-8 minute coffee break.
From wikipedia: "In 1982, Cuban moved to Dallas, Texas. Cuban first found work as a bartender,[13][14] then as a salesperson for Your Business Software, one of the first PC software retailers in Dallas. He was terminated less than a year later, after meeting with a client to procure new business instead of opening the store.
Cuban started a company, MicroSolutions, with support from his previous customers from Your Business Software. MicroSolutions was initially a system integrator and software reseller. The company was an early proponent of technologies such as Carbon Copy, Lotus Notes, and CompuServe.[15] One of the company's largest clients was Perot Systems.[16] In 1990, Cuban sold MicroSolutions to CompuServe--then a subsidiary of H&R Block--for $6 million.[17] He retained approximately $2 million after taxes on the deal.[18]
In 1995, Cuban and fellow Indiana University alumnus Todd Wagner started Audionet, combining their mutual interest in college basketball and webcasting. With a single server and ISDN line[19], Audionet became Broadcast.com in 1998. By 1999, Broadcast.com had grown to 330 employees and $13.5 million in revenue for the second quarter.[20] In 1999, during the Dot-com boom, Broadcast.com was acquired by Yahoo! for $5.9 billion in Yahoo! stock.[21]"
This man is not a business genius. He is a good self-promoter, and has leveraged this to making a lot of money. Re-read the last couple sentences. he had a business with 13.5 million in revenue in 3 months (not profit... with 330 employees, it was much, much lower). He then sold it for likely a 500+ P/E ratio.
The tech stock market bubble made this man. I don't disparage him for that. However, any business advice coming from this man is virtually worthless. Self-promotion... he's up there.
... but if he's going to just throw a billion dollars away, why doesn't he do something decent with it like feed the poor or cure a disease or give computers to schools or fund music programs?
Or start a new business to help America get its shit together and beat this recession?
Before Microsoft tries to take over from the most successful search engine in the world they really need to get a better name. Can you really imagine youself using "bing" as a verb in mixed company?
The person who came up with that name must be the same one who thought it was a good idea to sell devices that allow you to "squirt" pictures of your kids.
Looking at Mark Cuban's robots.txt file ( http://blogmaverick.com/robots.txt [blogmaverick.com] ), I see that he's not blocking Googlebot. Therefore, he is listed in Google's index. So why should someone take $1 million from him to leave the Google index when he clearly does not want to leave Google's index himself?
Bribery (Score:4, Insightful)
I know bribery is accepted practice in the US but here in the EU it is still frowned upon.
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Re:Bribery (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Bribery (Score:5, Insightful)
Ask Intel how that attitude worked out for them in Europe. They could give you about 1.06 billion reasons as to why this is not a smart plan.
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Re:Bribery (Score:5, Insightful)
Or 9.39 billion reasons why it is:
http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20091013/intel-profit-sales-beat-street/ [allthingsd.com]
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Re:Bribery (Score:5, Insightful)
There is a gotcha in this plan
Remove the top 1000 sites from Google, and another top 1000 will replace them.
Personally, I will never use anything affiliated with M$. My bias does them no harm, but I just feel better for it.
Bing is just another crazy idea to compete in a marker place they will never devote themselves to 100%. M$ has a long history of making gutted applications and giving away for free merely to steal market share from producers of quality products.
Although I have not, and will never use bing, it might be okay for some, but not in my world. Sites taking the bait, dumping Google and switching to M$ will just remove themselves from 50%+ of internet searches. Another stupid idea takes shape ...
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Bribery proves 2 things: Cuban is stupid. MS can't (Score:5, Funny)
Mark Cuban was sitting around one day smoking something and wondered, "How can I prove that I am really, really stupid?"
Oh, I know. Wow! I've got it. Microsoft could pay a billion dollars to prove to everyone that it can't compete, that it has to pay to get results. Why the advertising alone would be worth 50 billion. Everyone would associate Microsoft with puking.
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Re:Bribery proves 2 things: Cuban is stupid. MS ca (Score:5, Funny)
Mark Cuban's plan to kill top 1000 web sites
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Re:Bribery (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Bribery (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Bribery (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Bribery (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm in SF. All $1M would mean to me is a downpayment on a very reasonable but well-located house. And I'd have to use Google to research the neighborhoods I'd consider moving into.
And I'm just a dude. We're talking about companies here. I work for a relatively small software lab, and $1M is less than 1 month's payroll, bennies, and taxes.
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Re:Bribery (Score:5, Insightful)
What the heck is that all about? Google generates much much more than a million dollars to the top 1000 e-commerce websites, and in a few days. This has to be a joke.
Seriously, the USERS decide which search engine is best, not the website owners. And why in the world would the top 1000 sites listen to an anonymous rich fool instead of Google which has provided a decent flow of clicks to their websites for ages....
Are we the 1st of April or anything?
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Re:Bribery (Score:5, Insightful)
This is just Mark Cuban's way of getting his name in the papers. I can't imagine that any big company would be willing to try to remove their name from Google's search results. I just don't see how Cuban's plan is going to work. If it could hurt Google, Microsoft would have removed their sites from Google's index long ago.
Apparently, money is not an indication of sense.
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Re:Bribery (Score:4, Insightful)
Mark Cuban has a love affair with microsoft [google.com] and so this is just another part of his love affair. Basically, that's all it is. Bing won't dominate because it's quality is crap, and buying out a lot of customers won't make up for the fact that there will be a: less profitability and b: less quality.
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Re:Bribery (Score:5, Informative)
If this Mark Cuban person has a love affair with Microsoft, then it's the sort of love affair where Microsoft is deeply embarrassed about their drunken one night stand and desperately wishes the other party would shut up about it. Honestly, this is terrible publicity for Microsoft: "Come to us - we're so bad that people have to be paid not to use our competitors". As if any of these big sites would accept such a bribe anyway. I'm fairly sure this wouldn't be legal in the EU either so unless these great big companies have no presence in the EU (yeah right), then the deal would be complicated anyway.
Bing is actually fine. Its problem is that Google is already there and is so successful that their name has become a verb. Displacing that is going to take either very long term and sustained effort or some sort of PR disaster for Google (maybe their search engine is powered by Puppy juice). Bing needs a boost of some sort for certain. Pairing up with Wolfram Alpha is a good thing. Stunts like this (I sincerely hope MS had the sense not to okay this) are sooooooo not a good thing.
Muppet!
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Re:Bribery (Score:5, Insightful)
Doesn't matter. Google's name has already achieved the marketer's dream: a generic name/verb. Which means it's in the same league as Coke, Kleenex and Xerox. Their name has become so big and so common it's replaced the real term. No one get's a soda, they get a coke, even when that 'coke' is a Pepsi. When was the last time anyone asked for a tissue instead of a Kleenex? And when you want something copied, you 'xerox' it. No one I know under the age of 40 searches for anything one the web, they 'google' it.
So it doesn't matter what this guy pays, Google is simply too big to be replaced at this stage in the game. If Microsoft is smart, they'll work to make Bing number 2. If not, instead of becoming the search engine equivalent of Pepsi, they'll become the next Royal Crown Cola.
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Re:Bribery (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, that's not necessarily the marketer's dream. Kleenex and Xerox have also had headaches because when the name becomes that ubiquitous, you have some issues keeping the rights to it. If the courts decide that your name has become a generic word, then you're in trouble in terms of legal enforcement of your trademark. Xerox in particular has discouraged people from using 'xerox' as a verb, because they're concerned about losing the trademark. From their own website's company factbook [xerox.com], italic emphasis mine:
The Xerox Trademark
Xerox is a famous trademark and trade name. Xerox as a trademark is properly used only as a brand name to identify the company's products and services. The Xerox trademark should always be used as a proper adjective followed by the generic name of the product: e.g., Xerox printer. The Xerox trademark should never be used as a verb. The trade name Xerox is an abbreviation for the company's full legal name: Xerox Corporation.
XEROX is a registered trademark of Xerox Corporation.
Wikipedia has a little information on this, too: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox#Trademark [wikipedia.org]
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Re:Bribery (Score:5, Insightful)
The difference in my opinion is that people often use kleenex and xerox to refer to using items of another brand, I have yet to hear anyone use google to mean searching for something without using Google.
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Re:Bribery (Score:5, Funny)
Cuban did just offer them a million dollars...
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Re:Bribery (Score:5, Insightful)
Paying someone to act a particular way is not a bribe, unless the guy being bribed has some moral or legal obligation to act contrary to the briber's interest.
So do these websites have a moral or legal obligation to support or cooperate with Google?
Oh yeah, and you're trolling.
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So, the question is... (Score:5, Insightful)
Is it worth $1 million to leave Google? I'm guessing most of the sites would say no, that's incredibly short sighted.
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Re:So, the question is... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah if you're one of the top sites on Google a million probably doesn't mean nearly as much as Mark Cuban thinks it does.
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Re:So, the question is... (Score:5, Funny)
Unless the top 1,000 sites happen to be, by odd math, shady viagra sales, knockoff Rolex retailers, and spammers.
In which case, go right ahead, Mark! We're behind you all the way!
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Re:So, the question is... (Score:5, Informative)
The real question is, who would be stupid enough to listen to a man who made almost all of his money soley on the chance decision of buying the domain name "Broadcast.com" and convincing Yahoo! that it was work ~$6 billion dollars to buy out.
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Re:So, the question is... (Score:5, Informative)
P.S. In case anyone thinks that his $6 billion jackpot somehow displayed hidden skill or insight, I also point out that he's currently worth a little over $2 billion. That's right, he's lost $4 billion in networth since being bought out by Yahoo!
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Re:So, the question is... (Score:5, Insightful)
First, It was $6B of Yahoo Stock, not $6B cash. I'm sure there are laws on how much you can sell and when.
From Broadcast.com's Wiki.
The record IPO made instant financial successes out of the company's employees through stock options, making 100 employees millionaires on paper (although most of them were unable to exercise their options and sell their shares before the stock price dropped) and founders Cuban and Wagner billionaires.
Second, it may have been 'pure luck' it doesn't look like this was his only venture into entrepreneurial endeavors.
Finally, that's still $2B dollars. From what I've read and the brief interaction in the time I met him (IU vs Purdue Alumni Rugby Match. Flew up in his personal Jet.) He has to be hands down one of the coolest Billionaires I've heard of.
He supported Grokster in the MGM vs Grokster case. He buys random companies and starts random websites. Like bailoutsleuth "a grassroots, online portal for oversight over the US government's $700 billion dollar "bailout" of financial institutions."
Not to mention he spouts off to NBA refs and other players. And shrugs his shoulder when they fine him. "Cuban has been fined by the NBA, mostly for critical statements about the league and referees, at least $1,665,000 for 13 incidents". (Matching each fine with a donation to a Charity). When he said something against Dairy Queen, he voluntarily worked at a DQ for a day.
You can't honestly tell me if you came up with some idea (no matter how stupid) and convinced someone to buy it at the height of a bubble. You wouldn't take your billions and have a ball. Spending the rest of your life drinking, flying around in your jet, yelling at professional sports officials, supporting any cause you thought was cool.
Hell. You could have a "Chyeld Day" on slashdot. Pay off Taco to change banner at the top for a few million.
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Re:So, the question is... (Score:5, Funny)
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wow, a whole million? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'll give the top 1000 folks on slashdot who eat bread a nickel never to eat it again.
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Re:wow, a whole million? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:wow, a whole million? (Score:5, Insightful)
Conversely, this whole plan would cost 1 billion dollars to pull off. Sure, Microsoft could afford that, and would pay that much to destroy Google. But this is a poor plan. If Google no longer listed the top 1,000 sites (which is a big if, since many of those sites have no particular love of Microsoft...), then would Google crash and burn? Or would the sites currently ranked 1,0001-2000 suddenly see a huge upsurge in their traffic and profitability?
Lastly, how would this work on a technical level? Sure, you can configure your server to reject all requests from googlebot, preventing them from indexing sub-pages, but you can't technically (or legally) prevent Google from returning a link to "wsj.com" when someone searches for "Wall Street Journal". So any "de-indexing" wouldn't be complete.
This "plan" fails on so many levels. I'm sure Google is not too concerned about this. Any companies that participated would be signing their own death sentence: their web visibility would drop, public opinion of the company would drop, they might open themselves to legal attacks... and all for a "cool million".
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Re:wow, a whole million? (Score:5, Informative)
Technical level is easy: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=156412 [google.com]
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Re:wow, a whole million? (Score:5, Informative)
Sigh. I know it's waaay too much to ask, but if you actually read his blog post [blogmaverick.com] it's not a plan at all - just some ideas that he's throwing around. The headline in TFA (and thence TFS) is misleading.
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Re:wow, a whole million? (Score:5, Funny)
20,000 seats times 40 games is 800,000 seats. $1 billion / 800k = $1250 per seat per game.
My suggestion for Google's response: Buy every seat to every Mavs home game for a year. Pay people $1000 each to go to the game and root for whoever the Mavs are playing that night, while wearing Google t-shirts.
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What about Google? (Score:5, Insightful)
They are surely a top-1000 site. Will they get the cash to de-list themselves?
P.S. The guy is an idiot. People go to Google not to get stuff from a top-1000 site, but to find stuff that is not found in the search bars of the top-1000 sites.
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Motivation? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Motivation? (Score:5, Funny)
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Calm down, y'all (Score:5, Informative)
TFA makes it pretty clear that this (on his personal blog) is a thought experiment, not an actual plan he has any intention to follow through. More, he is speculating about moves that Microsoft or others might take to bring Google down and what that would do to the market.
Frankly, it as much use as mine our your random musings on business: the only motivation for it making the Slashdot front page seems to be that this guy coincidentally happens to have a billion dollars.
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Re:Motivation? (Score:5, Informative)
Why in the world does the summary list to some stupid guys take on Mark Cubans blog post instead of the actual post?
http://blogmaverick.com/2009/11/13/google-murdoch-madoff/ [blogmaverick.com]
Not that it answers any of your questions, other than maybe he is a publicity hound.
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Why? (Score:4, Interesting)
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1 million is peanuts (Score:5, Insightful)
Why opt out of free product placement (Amazon usually ranks high in google) worldwide, for a pittance?
Cuban's mojo has left the room.
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Re:1 million is peanuts (Score:5, Funny)
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illegal? (Score:5, Interesting)
The phrase tortious interference comes to mind (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tortious_interference)
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Re:illegal? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:illegal? (Score:4, Funny)
or Taurus Indifference, which is what most people have been feeling towards Ford since about 1999.
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Other People's Money (Score:5, Insightful)
So, is he offering this out of his own pocket? (a billion dollars).
Or is this just a hare-brained idea that he is tossing out there to get some spin on his own name.
Let's see the Dallas Mavericks remove themselves from anything Google first. Oh, that's right, he must have already, never heard of the team before...
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Cry Wolf (Score:5, Funny)
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Mark's Resume (Score:5, Insightful)
From wikipedia: "In 1982, Cuban moved to Dallas, Texas. Cuban first found work as a bartender,[13][14] then as a salesperson for Your Business Software, one of the first PC software retailers in Dallas. He was terminated less than a year later, after meeting with a client to procure new business instead of opening the store.
Cuban started a company, MicroSolutions, with support from his previous customers from Your Business Software. MicroSolutions was initially a system integrator and software reseller. The company was an early proponent of technologies such as Carbon Copy, Lotus Notes, and CompuServe.[15] One of the company's largest clients was Perot Systems.[16] In 1990, Cuban sold MicroSolutions to CompuServe--then a subsidiary of H&R Block--for $6 million.[17] He retained approximately $2 million after taxes on the deal.[18]
In 1995, Cuban and fellow Indiana University alumnus Todd Wagner started Audionet, combining their mutual interest in college basketball and webcasting. With a single server and ISDN line[19], Audionet became Broadcast.com in 1998. By 1999, Broadcast.com had grown to 330 employees and $13.5 million in revenue for the second quarter.[20] In 1999, during the Dot-com boom, Broadcast.com was acquired by Yahoo! for $5.9 billion in Yahoo! stock.[21]"
This man is not a business genius. He is a good self-promoter, and has leveraged this to making a lot of money. Re-read the last couple sentences. he had a business with 13.5 million in revenue in 3 months (not profit... with 330 employees, it was much, much lower). He then sold it for likely a 500+ P/E ratio.
The tech stock market bubble made this man. I don't disparage him for that. However, any business advice coming from this man is virtually worthless. Self-promotion... he's up there.
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Not to be a communist here... (Score:5, Insightful)
... but if he's going to just throw a billion dollars away, why doesn't he do something decent with it like feed the poor or cure a disease or give computers to schools or fund music programs?
Or start a new business to help America get its shit together and beat this recession?
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Microsoft's real problem (Score:4, Funny)
Before Microsoft tries to take over from the most successful search engine in the world they really need to get a better name. Can you really imagine youself using "bing" as a verb in mixed company?
The person who came up with that name must be the same one who thought it was a good idea to sell devices that allow you to "squirt" pictures of your kids.
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You first, Mark (Score:5, Insightful)
Looking at Mark Cuban's robots.txt file ( http://blogmaverick.com/robots.txt [blogmaverick.com] ), I see that he's not blocking Googlebot. Therefore, he is listed in Google's index. So why should someone take $1 million from him to leave the Google index when he clearly does not want to leave Google's index himself?
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