Here’s operating income by business unit from Microsoft’s last quarter:

3,770 M Business Division
2,952 M Windows
1,738 M Server & Tools Division
(229) M Entertainment and Devices
(479) M Online Services

6,374 M Total income

If you compare Microsoft’s earnings history to these recent numbers, the trend is clear: solving problems for companies that have a lot of money is very lucrative. Microsoft’s strategy, smartly, has been to focus on them. Most new consumer-focused initiatives lose money, and those failings are disproportionately public, hence the negative sentiment toward Microsoft as a company.

This is the story of Flickr. And how Yahoo bought it and murdered it and screwed itself out of relevance along the way.

The lesson is clear – if you want your acquisition to continue to grow, concentrate on continued innovation first and corporate integration second. I see parallels with Oracle and all of the industry-leading companies (Siebel, Peoplesoft, etc) they bought. For corporate integration in Yahoo’s case read Fusion in Oracle’s.

The site that once had the best social tools, the most vibrant userbase, and toppest-notch storage is rapidly passing into the irrelevance of abandonment. Its once bustling community now feels like an exurban neighborhood rocked by a housing crisis. Yards gone to seed. Rusting bikes in the front yard. Tattered flags. At address, after address, after address, no one is home.

It is a case study of what can go wrong when a nimble, innovative startup gets gobbled up by a behemoth that doesn’t share its values. What happened to Flickr? The same thing that happened to so many other nimble, innovative startups who sold out for dollars and bandwidth: Yahoo.

Here’s how it all went bad.

I used to be quite active but I haven’t posted in months and visited in weeks. Interestingly, the last image I posted was an Instagram shot.

Read the full article here

If you’re sick of the sad, hopeless stories coming out of Africa, here’s one that made my year. New statistics show that the rate of child death across sub-Saharan Africa is not just in decline but that decline has massively accelerated, just in the last few years. From the middle to the end of the last decade, rates of child mortality across the continent plummeted much faster than they ever had before.

Africa’s Child Health Miracle

Extraordinary not because McLeish came from Villa’s rivals, Birmingham City. Extraordinary because McLeish had just suffered his second relegation with Birmingham in three Premier League seasons. And extraordinary because he is synonymous with a brand of football that, to borrow the former Villa manager Graham Taylor’s recent description, “looks [like] you are preparing a side not to lose”.

If these two standards sound like precisely the opposite of what gets you on talk radio or active in anonymous chat rooms, you’re right. Running your business or your campaign or your non-profit or your sports team based on what you hear on talk radio is nuts.

It’s remarkable to think that it’s 20 years since the Bosnian War started. The war of my generation. The photos that Time has produced also has the stories from the photographers who took them. It’s really interesting to read all of the stories and so many memories of the conflict also come back.

The Guardian’s Maggie O’Kane also features today recounting her experiences. Link to video here.
It’s incredible to think that there was so much passivity in allowing the conflict to go on for so long. Will the same thing be said about what is happening in Syria currently?