Marketing

Marissa Mayer talking about Google's new ad strategy:

"Matching graphical-display ads with image searches ``represents a large opportunity, and there's lot of potential for advertising revenue there,' Marissa Mayer, a Google vice president, told Bloomberg Radio today. At the same time, the company must ensure such ads don't drive users away, she said..."
(Source: Alley Insider)

It doesn't drive users away, it just leads more people towards Ad-block systems (e.g. Adblock Plus).

It's a bad deal for Google and a bad deal for every other ad sponsored portal. One of Google's biggest achievement was a conservative ad placement strategy. In my opinion it was one of the keystones of Google's success.

Open Flash Charts history:

And it’s really free?!
Yes. Once upon a time I had to deal with a company who sell flash charting components, their component had a bug that I needed fixing, so I emailed them about it asking when it’d be fixed. (Remember that I had paid real money for this software.) They were so incompetent, rude and obnoxious that after three or four weeks of emails I thought to myself “I could learn Flash and Actionscript and write my own charting component, release it as Open Source, host it on sourceforge and build up a community of helpful coders faster than they can fix a single bug.” And that is what I did. And that is why it is free. I guess the moral of the lesson is: don’t piss off your customers.

[Discovered by Thomas Vander Stichele: Free software at work]