Keeping Up: Chronicling Technology Innovation Online

Amazon.com's Best Friend....

I saw an interesting graph posted by Sam Decker - CMO of Bazaarvoice at the Bazaarblog regarding Amazon's growth and overall retail market share trends.  The graph below shows Amazon growth in % as essentially the mirror opposite of overall retail e-commerce.  Clearly Amazon's customer base, email marketing, and overall customer experience continue to grow the business.  However, I would offer that this chart is heavily related to the growth of another company that provides traffic to Amazon.  Anyone want to throw out one guess who I am talking about?  Yes of course, Google again.  If you search on most retail product-oriented terms on Google, there is an extremely high likelihood that Amazon will show on page 1 (ie. my camera the "canon eos rebel" - Amazon shows in the 3 & 4 position on my search).   The chart showing Amazon's growth continuing to march upwards over the last 6 years is roughly the same trend that Google's traffic has been on.  If Google were to lose share or even decide not to rank Amazon as well any more, I would be willing to bet this curve would take a right turn quickly. 

I am sure Amazon knows this quite well and probably sends flowers to the Googleplex often.

I searched the Hitwise blog to see if I could find a % of upstream traffic from Google to Amazon with no luck.  Maybe someone else can find it?

MSN Adcenter Doesn't Like My Browser

I will give you one guess which browser I was using this morning when I tried to login to MSN Search Adcenter and of course, it locked up.  Let's see, it starts with *OOGLE and ends with CHROM*.  Being a conspiracy theorist about this sort of thing, I quickly opened up a Mozilla browser and it went through quickly.  So the question is:

Is it Microsoft not bothering to code well, is it Microsoft deliberately blocking sessions, or is it the inverse and Google trying to prevent $ being spent at AdCenter? 

My guess is that its a simple coding issue but could it be more? I would be curious to hear what you think.  If its Microsoft not playing nice, soon enough, Chrome will have large enough adoption that MSN Adcenter will HAVE to make sure the sessions work or say "bye bye" to a decent chunk of ad business.

Google takes it on the chin - Verizon Goes with Microsoft

In the grand plans of Google to dominate the mobile market and rightly so as it clearly is the "next big thing", this is a huge setback in my opinion for them. The article doesn't say how long the deal is...I wonder if they will change their mind when users get a look at the goods.  Google loses Verizon to Microsoft.