

How Marissa Mayer Almost Killed AdSense (and she names Paul Buchheit as the real AdSense inventor) - nickb
http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2007-09-03-n78.html

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henning
The sad thing is that at bigger companies like IBM dozens and dozens of
billion-dollar ideas have been rejected out of hand for no good reason, far
out of line with unfortunate serendipity. IBM rejected xerography,
minicomputers, personal computing, and ignored the work its researchers did on
relational databases.

Back in the 19th century, there were people who thought telephony was a lousy
idea.

Things will always be like this.

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michaelneale
Thats what startups and small teams and companies are for ;)

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henning
Often times people have families and other obligations that keep them from
taking the huge risk that is starting up. Or they just don't have the courage.
Or whatever. To the detriment of the business world and consumers.

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far33d
Wow. Marissa Mayer is a serious self-promoter. When she can't take credit for
an idea, she tries to take credit for "not killing" an idea?

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eusman
hey, anyone at that time that wanted to keep something free was against
advertisments, and many were trying to find a way to do just that. obviously
you are too young to remember that, and obviously Google did it first with
Paul and AdSense. A lot of ad skepticals changed their view of ads when
adSense came. So, I would say its good that she recognizes that

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far33d
This was my impression after reading a valleywag article. Probably bad form on
my part, but whatever.

Also, I doubt I'm "too young" to remember much about google, since I remember
when it didn't exist.

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bharath
I for one have never quite understood the whole argument with how gmail
"reads" people's emails. Yes.. it does get a little spooky at times. But how
much more spookier is it than Google (or for that matter any other search
engine) keeping track of what you search for? Fact is, privacy is non-existent
and the onus is on the end user to protect it.

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paul
The closer analogy is actually spam filtering -- it's a very similar process
(computers processes message content in order to classify it). The computer is
processing and storing the data anyways, so there is no impact on privacy
(eliminating spam filtering or ads won't improve your privacy in any way).

