Name: Jecca Cervero

Section: O0C

Case study Chapter 1

 

Max Levchin

Beginnings of Paypal

 

            The creators of PayPal; Max Levchin and his partner, Peter had many ideas. They thought about security in the net. PayPal is an e-commerce business allowing payments and money transfers to be made through the Internet.

Peter Thiel and Max Levchin founded PayPal in 1999 under the name Confinity. The idealistic vision of the company was one of a borderless currency free from governmental controls. However, PayPal's success quickly drew the attention of hackers, scam artists and organized crime groups, who used the service for frauds and money laundering. New security measures stemmed the tide of fraud and customer complaints, but government officials soon stepped in. Regulators and attorney generals in several states, including New York and California, fined PayPal for violations and investigated the company's business practices. Some states, such as Louisiana, banned PayPal from operating in their states altogether. PayPal has since received licenses that allow them to operate in these places.

Despite the initial turmoil, PayPal's market share continued to grow. At first PayPal offered new users $10 to join, plus bonuses for referring friends. The service grew so quickly that it soon became the default online payment service. Buyers wanted to use it since so many merchants accepted it, and merchants accepted it because so many buyers were using it. PayPal owes much of its initial growth to eBay users who used the service to pay for items and accept payments for their online auctions. PayPal even beat eBay at the online payment business, trumping eBay's in-house payment system Billpoint so thoroughly that in 2002, eBay bought PayPal. Then it phased out Billpoint and integrated PayPal into its services. Sellers with PayPal accounts can place icons in their auctions and buyers can simply click on a PayPal logo when they win an auction to make an immediate payment.

Three things I learned

·        In making software, it is important to think about the satisfaction, the needs and also the wants of the users or buyers. 

·        In math, you have to show how much you can squeeze out of it, and in the user interface, you have to make it feel like it’s not taking that long, even though it really taking like 2 seconds, which is really long time.

·        Making something is all about people and if you are doing anything completely alone, it’s really hard. We need companions that will encourage us and support us in everything we do. And if we have a good team, we basically half way there,- to the peak of success.

 

---

Name: Jecca Cervero

Section: O0C

Case study Chapter 2

Hotmail

 

Sabeer Bhatia

 

The original Hotmail service was founded by Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith, and was one of the first webmail services on the Internet. It was commercially launched on July 4, 1996, American Independence day, symbolizing "freedom" from ISP-based e-mail and the ability to access your inbox from anywhere in the world. The name "Hotmail" was chosen out of many possibilities ending in "-mail" as it included the letters HTML - the coding used behind all web pages.

Hotmail was initially backed by venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson. By December 1997, it reported more than 8.5 million subscribers. It was sold later that month to Microsoft for a reported $400 million, and it joined the MSN group of services. Hotmail quickly gained in popularity as it was localized for different markets around the globe and became the world's largest webmail service, and reported more than 30 million active members by February 1999.

In December 1999, Microsoft neglected to pay their annual $35 'passport.com' domain registration fee to Network Solutions. The oversight made Hotmail, which used the site for authentication, unavailable on Christmas Eve, December 24. A Linux consultant, Michael Chaney, paid it the next day ,  hoping it would solve this issue with the downed site. The payment resulted in the site being available the next morning. In Autumn 2003, a similar good Samaritan helped Microsoft when they missed payment on the 'hotmail.co.uk' address, although no downtime resulted.

Hotmail originally ran on a mixture of FreeBSD and Solaris operating systems. Microsoft initially tried to move the FreeBSD portion of the architecture to a Windows NT 4.0 based system, but this failed. Later a project was started to move the system to Windows 2000. In June 2001 Microsoft claimed this had been completed; a few days later they retracted this and admitted that in fact some functions of the Hotmail system were still reliant on FreeBSD.

Later development saw the service tied with Microsoft's web authentication scheme, Passport , and integration with Microsoft's instant messaging and social networking programs, MSN Messenger and MSN Spaces. A security issue appeared in Hotmail during this period that permitted anybody to log into any Hotmail account using the password 'eh'; it was at the time called "the most widespread security incident in the history of the Web."

After a period of technological stagnation, the webmail industry received a significant boost in 2004 when the Google search engine announced its own mail service, Gmail. Featuring vastly increased storage space, speed and interface flexibility, this new competitor spurred a wave of innovation in webmail. The main industry heavyweights – Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail – introduced upgraded versions of their e-mail services with greater speed, security and advanced features.

Microsoft's new e-mail system was announced on November 1, 2005 under the codename "Kahuna", and a beta version was released to a few thousand testers. Other webmail enthusiasts also wanting to try the beta version could request an invitation granting access. The new service was built from scratch and emphasized three main concepts of being "faster, simpler and safer". New versions of the beta service were rolled out over the development period, and by the end of 2006 the number of beta testers had reached the millions.

The Hotmail brand was planned to be phased-out when Microsoft announced that the new mail system would be called Windows Live Mail, however the developers soon backtracked after beta-testers were confused with the name change and preferred the already well-known Hotmail name, and decided on Windows Live Hotmail. Development of the beta was finished in April 2007, Windows Live Hotmail was released to new registrations in May 2007, and the 260 million MSN Hotmail accounts worldwide now have access to the new system.

The Hotmail development and operations teams are based in Mountain View, California.

Three things I learned from Sabeer Bhatia

·        When communicating ideas, make sure you write a business plan because it will crystallize your thoughts.

·        In a business, you’ve got to own the customer and make sure there is a full loop between your product and that it has the least amount of resistance before you get to your end customer.

·        To become an effective businessman or person, you need to have the ability to communicate. And to become a good communicator, we should try to answer every possible question that a person could raise.

---

 

Name: Jecca Cervero

Section: O0C

Case study Chapter 3

 

Steve Wozniak

Co founder,  Apple Computer

Steve Wozniak met Steve Jobs and created the company Apple Computer. They went into several paths that made them sad or happy.

Steve Wozniak designs a machine that crystallized what a desktop computer is The Apple. Wozniak have a technical ability while Jobs have his mesmerizing energy. When jobs landed a contract with byte shop from 100 pre assemble machines. Apple was launched on a rapid ascent. Then he soon followed it with a machine that made the company apple II. Apple II was a machine that bought computers onto the desk of ordinary people. This company went public on 1980 in the largest IPO creating more instant millionaires than any other company. Apple II is differed from its major rivals, the TRS-80 and Commodore PET, because it came with color graphics and an open architecture. While early models used ordinary cassette tapes as storage devices, they were superseded by the introduction of a 5 1/4 inch floppy disk drive and interface, the Disk II.

The Apple II was chosen to be the desktop platform for the first "killer app" of the business world—the VisiCalcspreadsheet program. VisiCalc created a business market for the Apple II, and gave home users an additional reason to buy an Apple II—compatibility with the office. According to Brian Bagnall, Apple exaggerated its sales figures and was a distant third place to Commodore and Tandy until VisiCalc came along.

By the end of the 1970s, Apple had a staff of computer designers and a production line. The Apple II was succeeded by the Apple III in May 1980 as the company competed with IBM and Microsoft in the business and corporate computing market.

Jobs and several Apple employees including Jef Raskin visited Xerox PARC in December 1979 to see the Xerox Alto. Xerox granted Apple engineers three days of access to the PARC facilities in return for US$1 million in pre-IPO Apple stock. Jobs was immediately convinced that all future computers would use a GUI, and development of a GUI began for the Apple Lisa.

What was even more amazing was that Woz's design had significantly better performance ( data density, reliability, cost) than existing controllers. When Woz started this design, he did not look at how other people had done it. He thought about how it should be done. Using this process he created something remarkable.

Three Things I learned

• Money is not a hindrance to achieve our goals.

·        You should be open to your coworkers/workers.

·        Diligence is the key to success. Without this you will achieve noting