Amr Awadallah Blog

I cant believe it has been a year already, about this time last year I made the following blog posting predicting Google’s first miss:

Google will miss 2005-Q4 quarter revenue estimates

That blog posting was picked up by many folks, like Silicon Beat, John Battelle, Caterina Fake, Ken Norton (whom now works for Google!), and even CNN Money.

There were many skeptics calling me names and stuff, but Google announced and they did indeed miss. They did great, very nice growth, just missed what the analysts were incorrectly expecting.

Well, ever since then it was very hard to predict correctly, either Google learned the lesson and started smoothing out their changes, or the analysts learned their lesson and became more realistic.

Q4 of 2006 is no different, it is very hard to predict what is going to happen. Wallstreet analysts are expecting Google to deliver 18% sequential revenue growth. I think 18% might be hard to meet, since Comscore said that Google US Search PVs only grew by 8% from Q3 to Q4, hence that extra 10% has to come from improved RPS, or international growing much faster than US.

I did not see any significant changes to Google’s user interface to deliver strong RPS gains, but then Google now has many “levers” to play with. For example, they might have increased the minimum CPC bids required for many keywords, or they might have increased the number of ads they show at the top of their SERPs (they now control the number of ads on a per user basis, users whom click less on ads, see less ads, users clicking a lot get more ads). These things are very hard to track.

I don’t gamble, but if I had to bet, I would bet that they will not exceed the 18% sequential revenue growth, we shall see next week.

— amr

Gears of War is an outstanding new game for the Xbox 360, the graphics and animation for this game are the best I have ever seen, especially when played back on an HDTV at 1920x1080p resolution.

That said, the menu system for the game was kind of an after-thought and is not very intuitive. The part that I and many other folks suffered with are how on earth to get an xbox live guest signed in so that both you and the guest can play together in split-screen on xbox live? I tried searching every where and I could not find an answer, but luckily after several attempts I was able to figure it out.

Below are the exact steps you need to do to get a guest signed in:

1. Make sure the second controller is turned on and is not signed in to xbox live.
2. From the main menu select VERSUS then select XBOX LIVE PLAYER MATCH
3. At the bottom of the VERSUS PLAYER MATCH screen you should see this “Y Guest SIGN-IN” (see screenshot below)
4. On the second controller press Y then select “Guest Xbox Live” from the list that drops down.
5. That’s it, you are now ready to play with your guest

Cheers,

— Amr

I saw a couple of blog postings on CNET news and Web Pro news about how Yahoo beat Google 163 to 157 in tennis (you can see the source blog posting here and the photos here).

This reminded me of an Xbox Halo2 showdown between Yahoo and Google in early 2005 (I did not even have a blog back then). Even though Yahoo was defeated, I will still blog about it, because frankly we got smoked, which is proof that not all Google employees use their so-called 20% time to “invent” new things, some of them use that time to practice Halo 2 instead ;).

These are the scores and links to the score sheets on bungie.net:

• Coagulation Assault, Google: 2 bombs, Yahoo: 0 bombs.
  http://www.bungie.net/Stats/GameStats.aspx?panel=kills&gameid=54115777
• Ascension Team Fiesta, Google:100 kills, Yahoo: 49 kills.
  http://www.bungie.net/Stats/GameStats.aspx?panel=kills&gameid=54131484
• Zanzibar 1-Flag-CTF, Google: 2 caps, Yahoo: 0 caps.
  http://www.bungie.net/Stats/GameStats.aspx?panel=kills&gameid=54144695
• Coagulation Team Slayer, Google: 67 kills, Yahoo: 100 kills
  http://www.bungie.net/Stats/GameStats.aspx?panel=kills&gameid=54162736

Googlites, you up for a Gears of War showdown ?

Cheers,

— amr

PS: I have to admit that we cheated a bit, in the last match that we won (our only win), I called in the help of a close friend of mine who does not work for yahoo, however I am not sure all of the Google team did indeed work for Google either, they were just too good to be casual gamers.