Category Archives: Microsoft

An Open Letter to Jerry Yang

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From Joe Nocera, in the NYTimes…

It’s completely understandable that you wouldn’t want the company you and David Filo founded 14 years ago to fall into the clutches of Microsoft. You both loathe and fear the Evil Empire, as you Silicon Valley types used to call Microsoft. You don’t want Yahoo swallowed up into the Microsoft bureaucracy. You hate the thought that Yahoo, which once was every bit as cool as Google is now, would lose its status as an independent company. Let’s face it: you and Mr. Filo still think of Yahoo as your baby.

Here’s the problem, Jerry. It’s not your baby. It hasn’t been since 1996, when Yahoo went public. At that moment, you suddenly had to answer to your new owners: your shareholders. In fact, Jerry, as a board member since Yahoo went public, it has always been your job to look out for Yahoo’s shareholders. But we sure wouldn’t know that from the way you’ve acted these past months. I haven’t seen this much contempt for shareholders since Robert Nardelli ran Home Depot…

He’s right. Much as I dislike Microsoft, it seems to me that Yang and the Board failed in their fiduciary duty.

Mcdonalds outsourcing burger manufacture to Burger King

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Well, that’s what one observer said when he heard about the Yahoo-Google agreement. I also wrote an Observer piece about the deal. Excerpt:

Since Icahn has eaten other corporate boards for breakfast, it would be foolish to underestimate him. Especially as he’s claiming that Yahoo!’s standoffishness has destroyed ‘shareholder value’. Yahoo!’s leadership then looks for ways to undermine his campaign and ensure a Microsoft-free future. Since the date with Google seemed to go okay, they reason, why not ask them for a live-in partnership? Not a conventional marriage, you understand, but still the kind of relationship that makes you feel good at the end of a long day in the markets. Google may be awkward in an adolescent way, but it’s fabulously rich and successful. And it scares Microsoft to death.

Last week’s episode involved Yahoo! and Google signing their prenuptials…

Vista: success or failure?

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Interesting comment in response to Darren Waters’s post about Windows 7.

I would hesitate to call Vista a failure. A lot has been made of a perceived poor uptake by businesses but it’s worth pointing out that in early 2005 – four years or so into XP’s lifecycle – only 40% of companies were running it, the majority of the rest were using 98, 2000 or NT. In it’s first year XP was only installed on 10%.

Personally I think the hype around Vista has created a perception that isn’t supported by reality – it is selling well both to individuals and customers and it’s actually a pretty good OS. Businesses won’t move to Vista until there’s a compelling reason to do so, which was the same for XP.

Perhaps Vista can be considered a victim of XP’s success rather than a failure in its own right?

Darren wrote:

the biggest question about this public demo of Windows 7 is: what harm will its promise do to sales of Vista?

I just received an interesting note about Windows 7 from the Microsoft PR team. In it, it states: “Microsoft absolutely recommends customers deploy Windows Vista today.”

In other words, Microsoft are telling XP customers not to wait for Windows 7 but to grab Vista now.

Despite issuing more 140 million licenses for Vista worldwide, it’s seen by many as a failure.

Chatter in Cyberspace

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This morning’s Observer column…

Q: WHAT DO Cyberspace and Cranford have in common? A: Both are places capable of being driven wild by rumour. Viewers of the landmark BBC1 series will recall how the most trivial aside could instantly be transformed into an incontrovertible fact. When it was rumoured that the railway would be coming to Cranford, for example, Eileen Atkins exclaimed with horror that this meant that the Irish were coming, and promptly expired at the prospect.

I was reminded of this while listening to the chatter of the blogosphere on Thursday night…

Down on the server farm

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Interesting piece in this week’s Economist about the environmental impact of cloud computing.

Internet firms, meanwhile, need ever larger amounts of computing power. Google is said to operate a global network of about three dozen data centres with, according to some estimates, more than 1m servers. To catch up, Microsoft is investing billions of dollars and adding up to 20,000 servers a month.

As servers become more numerous, powerful and densely packed, more energy is needed to keep the data centres at room temperature. Often just as much power is needed for cooling as for computing. The largest data centres now rival aluminium smelters in the energy they consume. Microsoft’s $500m new facility near Chicago, for instance, will need three electrical substations with a total capacity of 198 megawatts. As a result, finding a site for a large data centre is now, above all, about securing a cheap and reliable source of power, says Rich Miller of Data Center Knowledge, a website that chronicles the boom in data-centre construction.

The availability of cheap power is mainly why there are so many data centres in Quincy. It is close to the Columbia River, with dams that produce plenty of cheap hydroelectric power. There is water for cooling, fast fibre-optic links, and the remoteness provides security. For similar reasons, Google chose to build a new data centre at The Dalles, a hamlet across the Columbia River in the state of Oregon.

Such sites are in short supply in America, however. And with demand for computing picking up in other parts of the world, the boom in data-centre construction is spreading to unexpected places. Microsoft is looking for a site in Siberia where its data can chill. Iceland has begun to market itself as a prime location for data centres, again for the cool climate, but also because of its abundant geothermal energy. Hitachi Data Systems and Data Islandia, a local company, are planning to build a huge data-storage facility (pictured at top of article). It will be underground, for security and to protect the natural landscape…

Why Microsoft wanted Yahoo

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From the New York Times…

It’s no secret that Microsoft’s online businesses have failed to gain leading market positions. But what is not widely appreciated, perhaps, is that the company’s online initiatives have lately been doing worse than ever.

The last year when Microsoft made a profit in its online services business was the fiscal year that ended on June 30, 2005. Its MSN unit used to do a nicely profitable business providing dial-up Internet access to subscribers. When its users began to switch to broadband services provided by others, however, the earnings disappeared. Microsoft’s Web sites brought in a trickle of advertising revenue, which did not grow fast enough to offset the disappearance of the narrowband access business. AOL suffered in similar fashion.

In the 2006 fiscal year, Microsoft’s online services produced a $74 million loss after the previous year’s profit of $402 million. Since then, the numbers have become uglier, as Microsoft’s online segment has added employees and absorbed growing sales and marketing expenses. In the 2007 fiscal year, the online businesses lost $732 million. In the next nine months, through March 31 this year, they recorded a loss of $745 million, almost double the amount in the period a year earlier. With $2.39 billion in revenue for the nine months, the online segment represents only 5 percent of the company’s total revenue…

XO+XP=POXX?

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This morning’s Observer column…

Much heat and little light were generated last week by the announcement, made jointly by Microsoft and the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, that Windows XP is to be made available on the project’s ‘XO’ laptop, the little green machine aimed at the world’s poorest children. Next month, trials of Windows on the XO will begin in what Microsoft – in a telling phrase – describes as ‘key emerging markets’.

The news has been hailed as welcome pragmatism on the part of Nicholas Negroponte, the project’s director. But among some of his colleagues and in the wider Open Source community, it has also been excoriated as a betrayal. Which view is correct? Both…

Getting the message

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Martin’s seen the light

I got a laptop from work last year with Windows Vista installed. I don’t use it much (I have a Vaio with XP which works fine), but it has become our media machine at home. Then yesterday it gave the message that the activation period had expired and this version of Windows was not valid. I tried entering the code on the sticker on the machine but no joy. I contacted tech guys at the ou who reckon I will need to plug it into the campus network for it to update. As I’m in Cardiff and in the US next week, this means it’s at least a couple of weeks before it will be usable again. I asked if they knew this would happen, and was told no. I wonder if other organizations know about this ‘feature’ of Vista? I’ve always been reasonably pragmatic about Windows as an OS, if everyone else uses it, then I’m happy to. But not being able to access a legitimate copy is rather stretching my agnosticism. So finally it may be a case of Linux, here I come.

Microhoo: the verdict

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Rory Cellan-Jones’s verdict…

So Google played a blinder, Yahoo was more adept in defence than in previous games, and Microsoft bottled it in front of goal. But I’ve a sneaking suspicion that we may get a rematch before the year is out.

And for a few bucks more, we’ll even throw in Windows 95

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Truly, you could not make this up. Latest report on the Vista downgrade story from Good Morning Silicon Valley…

The slings, arrows, snubs and insults just continue to land on poor old Windows Vista, the least-loved best-selling software in history. The latest is the decision by the three top PC makers to help their customers take advantage of an escape hatch in Microsoft’s OS program in a way that will keep Windows XP available, in a fashion, beyond the June 10 deadline for the end of retail sales. Both Vista Business and Vista Ultimate (but not Vista Home Premium or Basic) come with what turns out to be a valuable little feature — “downgrade rights.” Buyers of machines with those versions can legally wipe the brand new OS off their machines and retreat to the familiar comforts of Windows XP Professional.

With their interest in keeping their Vista-shy customers satisfied, Microsoft’s hurt feelings be damned, HP, Lenovo and Dell are now all offering product packages that include the downgrade option. HP and Lenovo will include an XP Pro recovery disk with qualifying systems, while Dell, lobbied heavily by its customers, will do the work for you, first installing Vista on your new machine, then cleaning it off and putting on XP, all in a little charade that lets Microsoft keep counting up the new Vista sales even among those who refuse to use it.

Don’t you just love the Dell ‘solution’? It’s almost as daft as having to press ‘Start’ to stop your computer.