Antitrust worries destroy the proposed Yahoo!-Google “partnership”, and Yahoo isn’t happy
Well, it was an interesting thought, anyway. But it won’t happen, thanks to the paranoia that is the Justice Department. The deal was scrapped due to worries about legal entanglements that would follow such a formal partnership.
Yahoo! and Google were going to partner up, it was announced in June, to offer search results to one another and share some revenue. Yahoo was due to make about $800 million off the deal, for a company that really needed the cash after rebuffing Microsoft’s buyout offer and declining ad revenue.
What was wrong with this deal, you ask? According to the DoJ, a lot, I guess. Mainly they stated it would negatively affect prices and competition. Valid to a degree.
Here’s more detail about the proceedings: Link
Vista SP2 in beta testing - But will anyone care?
The next update to Windows Vista will enter beta next week, bringing with it support for Blu-ray drives and Bluetooth, and a few bug fixes, among other enhancements.
In a blog posting on Friday, Microsoft confirmed that a beta version of Windows Vista Service Pack 2 will be released next week, probably later in the week.
The software maker said earlier this week that it was working on Vista SP2, but wouldn’t go into detail.
In addition to the above fixes, it will include Windows Search 4.0, the latest version of Microsoft’s desktop search technology. Why they think it will replace Google is anyone’s guess, but it’ll be there anyhow.
I think at this point, those that use and like Vista will use it regardless, and those who could care less, won’t care about this service pack at all. It may be time for MS to cut their losses and move on to “Windows 7″ at this point.
Yahoo: A little bad news
Yahoo today reported a 64 percent drop in net income for the third quarter (that’s a LOT, boys and girls, almost 3/4 of their net income), issued cautions about a slowly diminishing advertising market, and confirmed that layoffs are definitely on the way.
The company anticipates reducing headcount “by at least 10 percent” by the end of the year, which could mean a lot of jobs lost.
With 14,300 employed at the end of last quarter, that means at least 1,430 are losing their jobs in 2008. And Yang indicated there could be further cuts in 2009 if the market doesn’t get better. Pushing away that Microsoft/Yahoo deal could be something they end up regretting.
More details about this eye-opening development here: Link
Google, Android and The Not-So-Secret Plan
Android may be an open-source operating system (and has been widely celebrated as such), but Google isn’t shy about the idea that it hopes to profit by underwriting its development. And with Google’s first Android phone, the T-Mobile G1, just about here it’s becoming clearer exactly how they want to benefit.
T-Mobile’s G1, otherwise known as the HTC Dream, is the first phone to go on sale with Google’s Android operating system built in.
Google executives have spoken about Android’s general benefits: the company wants to use it to accelerate the use and sophistication of mobile Internet browsing, and open the “hood” so to speak, for tinkering by outside parties. But judging from my testing of a G1 phone, it appears Google wants a more direct benefit for their own bottom line, too: more users of Google’s various online services.
Although there’s nothing stopping a G1 owner from using search engines and other services from Google rivals such as Microsoft and Yahoo (though most web users on PC/Mac desktop systems predominently use Google as their SE of choice), Google technology is built deeply into the G1 by design, and that trend will continue.
The hooks get a little more obvious when things get more personal. The Android phone asks you for your Google account information when you first start it up, and if you have a Google account, it immediately grabs your contacts, calendar appointments, and Gmail messages and loads them up for you. Convenient you might say, but very deliberate as well. This function does NOT exist for their rivals, such as Yahoo.
The tie-in to these personal services is telling. Google has dominated its competition when it comes to the search engine market, but it hasn’t been as successful when it comes to more more personal uses of its services such as e-mail and social networking. With Android, Google apparently hopes to establish more of this direct contact with Internet users and use the OS to leverage its position in the market.
And it’s still the very early days for Android. At the same time Google or others could write applications that dovetail with various services. And by the same thought process, given Android’s free software development kit and open Android Market for offering new applications, I’d expect mobile applications from Google rivals like Yahoo and MS as well. Whether they’ll be able to take center stage in Android is another matter.
Flash Player 10 released
Adobe Systems announced the release of a major update to its Flash technology to enable web sites to have better video and audio with the new version 10 Flash Player (code-named Astro) and it arrived just days after MS released Silverlight (reported here as an afterthought for many, which prompted a few comments of defense for the product).
Flash Player 10, a free download available at the link, includes a lot of new features, which include easier to use and access 3D graphic effects, better font handling for more intricate layouts when putting words and graphics together, and improved support for multilingual applications.
Also with increased capability is the sound subsystem, with better audio mixing of music and sound effects too, with more support for hardware based acceleration.
This should raise the bar for multimedia on websites and other related applications, and may effectively (more or less) bury MS Silverlight, if it works out to be fairly bug free.
In Tech Related News: At least the technology sector isn’t dead yet
The Dow Jones Industrial Index, which has been on a heck of a roller coaster lately, ran back up above 9,000 in its largest single-day point gain ever Monday, while Apple, Microsoft, Dell, and other tech companies grabbed double-digit gains. It’s a sign that the tech sector still has a lot of life in it, despite the completely crappy economy.
After taking investors on a soul-sinking decline last week, Wall Street didn’t disappoint predictions of a better week with the Dow jumping 936.42 points to close at 9,9387.61, which was a welcome sight given the eight straight days of losses previously. And tech stocks were a big part of that.
Big gains included Microsoft, Apple, Oracle, Cisco, Dell, and Research in Motion (the Blackberry people). All these stocks were among the most actively traded on Nasdaq as well. So the outlook is pretty rosy for tech at the moment, a good thing for those who read this blog and prize the inner nerd in themselves.
Commentary: Steve Ballmer interview strikes some interesting notes
Steve Ballmer, Microsoft head guru and CEO, did an interview for a newspaper recently, and the phrase “unqualified success” was thrown around an awful lot, without a whole lot of qualified data to support it.
For example: He stated Vista has sold 180 million copies (does that count licenses that came with systems, Steve?) and is an “unqualified success”. Never mind that its been snubbed by corporations as being ‘too unstable’, bashed by most users i’ve spoken with, and most mag reviews haven’t been very kind to it either. IMHO and based on the data presented there, Vista has been a huge commerical and critical failure, almost on par with Windows ME.
Same with the XBox 360. Another unqualified success, and another platform whose sales are slipping despite price cuts, WAY behind the Wii and with the PS3 now nipping at its heels. It’s been successful to be sure, but a total unqualified success? Not quite.
Office 2007: It’s a nice package, but its expensive, a total hog with system resources, and its required a lot of patching to get it to be really secure and stable. An unqualified success? Depends on the eye viewing it, I suppose.
More of the interview here: http://www.technewsworld.com/story/Microsoft-CEO-Steve-Ballmer-on-Vistas-Unqualified-Success-64723.html
If Microsoft Silverlight 2.0 is released and falls, and no one is there, does it make a sound?
Microsoft announced last week that it has completed version 2.0 of Silverlight, its rival to Adobe’s Flash that has had limited adoption so far by website designers.
A source has revealed that the completion of Silverlight 2.0 is imminent. Microsoft released Beta 2 of the software in June, while a “release candidate” version was offered up last month.
Why MS would continue down this path is beyond me, as its acceptance has been very limited, and Flash is a very entrenched technology that will be difficult to dislodge, even by MS.
The Operating System: To be Obsolete?
As the Internet becomes more of a focus on what we do, I wonder, is Windows — indeed, any personal computer operating system — still relevant to our day to day experience? Of course it is to a degree, but it isn’t as central as it once was.
Think about it for a second: do you care anymore which operating system you use? I honestly don’t. For a few years, I owned both a PC and a Mac. I could use Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, Apple’s Safari or Mozilla’s Firefox to access the Internet and general websites. I could write an article on one computer, send it via an email message to the other one, play games over the Internet, and it worked very well. One reason Apple and the Mac are suddenly gaining a little market share is that people have come to realize that they do not really need Windows or any OS anymore. Any OS will work just great for general application. The browser and the Internet have already rendered them largely irrelevant.
That said, the OS is not dead yet, and won’t be for some time, due to way things are engineered. But the day could come where an OS will simply fade into the background and be largely a blanket over the same bed you sleep on every night, so to speak.
Software (i.e. the OS) has to serve as the conductor between you and your hardware, overseeing memory usage, disk access and and related stuff. Those are the core functions of an operating system, and they’re still needed, even on a machine that relies only on the Internet. This is Computers 101.
How you interact with an OS remains an important thing. The operating system pilots and directs the interface between human and machine. If you don’t think the OS matters, spend some time talking to Windows hardliners and Macintosh fans. They have a real bond with the look-and-feel of their computers. It IS the computer to those users.
If you rely on the internet to find or store everything, this is a very bad idea, for many reasons. It is the weak link of a system, and it’s much more likely to fail than a PC’s hard drive is. So the operating system is here. For now. But within 10-15 years, that could definitely change.
Microsoft Hosted All-in-One Suite in final testing phase
Microsoft is putting the finishing touches on its suite of Microsoft-hosted services known as the Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS). It could change the way business is hosted and conducted online, if it succeeds (and maybe even put a few IT people out of work).
Microsoft is going to deliver pretty close to finished, near final candidate release today and is telling users that a final build of the BPOS product should be released within the next month, according to a September 25 posting to the Microsoft Online Services blog. From the new entry:
“On that date, BPOS will be available for purchase in the United States. Those that are in the BPOS TAP (Technology Adoption Program) program or are current Beta users will continue to enjoy the service free of charge until 30 days after general availability.”
BPOS is a bundle of Microsoft Exchange Online, Microsoft SharePoint Online, Microsoft Office Live Meeting conferencing, Microsoft Office Communications Online (the hosted version of Office Communications Server) and the Microsoft Online Administration Center management portal. It looks to be very useful indeed for businesses of all sizes. Thus… Microsoft is marketing its Microsoft-hosted services to customers of all sizes, not just large enterprises, which were the initial target of the product and its marketing.
Prices were not available at press time, but its a safe bet this will be a less expensive and time-consuming for IT people in a medium/large company than managing local software setups.
-
Recent Posts
- And pigs flew too: DRM-free songs from iTunes soon?
- Yahoo! CEO to step down, and leave a big mess behind
- Black Friday is coming, but are the deals what people are hoping for?
- Seven years for a patch? Say it isn’t so, Microsoft
- PC Makers, the Economy, and who will survive (and thrive)
- “Vista Capable”? Well, not quite…
- Reports: Windows 7 may not improve performance much
- iPhone 2.2 Firmware Update may be out on the 21st of November?
- Circuit City files for bankruptcy: And so the wheel turns
- MGM first to post feature-length films to YouTube
-
-
-