Omid Kordestani (business founder at Google) steps down

An interesting note in today's Google earnings announcement was that its business founder, Omid Kordestani is stepping down. Omid was a Stanford GSB alum and he spoke at the school one time when I was there.

When Kordestani got to Google, they had no revenue and no business model. He experimented with a lot of different revenue models at Google before they figured out that text link advertisement was a winner. If they hadn't figured that out, it's unlikely Google would be anywhere today.

The Google founders had a great technology insight - links can be used as a voting mechanism to rank search results. Kordestani had a breakthrough business insight- when someone is looking for something, it's a heck of a time to serve them an advertisement. Other companies (like Overture) tried similar things, but Kordestani really proved that monetizing search intent was a "homerun".

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Recent Developments – After ten years of building and managing our global sales and partnership operations, Omid Kordestani has decided to hand over the reins to Nikesh Arora, currently President of International Operations, and take on a new role as Senior Advisor, Office of the CEO and Founders. Continued growth is essential to our future success and no one is better placed to advise on new revenue opportunities than Omid, the business founder of Google. In his new role as President, Global Sales Operations and Business Development, Nikesh Arora will have responsibility for all Google's revenue and customer operations, as well as marketing and partnerships. He has a proven track record at Google, having spent the last four and a half years building our European operations into a substantial business.

Kumo.com showing up in my google analytics

Rumor has it that Microsoft will be launching a new search engine called Kumo.com. This morning when I was checking the Google Analytics of this blog, I noticed that Kumo.com was referring traffic to the this site.

See source #6 in the chart below. Not sure if this means anything (or if it's always been there), but it stood out to me. Does this mean Kumo.com is about to launch? Your guess is probably better than mine.

Rest in Peace Microsoft Encarta

Microsoft announced this week it was shuttering its Encarta service. In the analysis about the decision, most people are rightly pointing out that Wikipedia simply made Encarta obsolete and ineffective by comparison. In effect, Wikipedia was the "Encarta-killer".

However, Encarta was one of the first steps in making the world's information freely available to everyone. Before Encarta, a set of encyclopedias cost thousands of dollars. Having a set was a beyond the reach of most people. Encarta came in and made all this information available to anyone for $60. Overnight, the economics of information changed. Encarta was the "Britannica- killer".

One of the transformative shifts in our society is that information is becoming free and widely available. Microsoft Encarta was an important step along the way as we move from information being expensive and scarce to free and plentiful. Rest in peace Encarta.