Category Archives: Microsoft

Asleep at the Wheel

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Om Malik is not impressed by the way the Yahoo Board has dealt so far with the Microsoft bid.

What has taken them so long? Nearly a week has passed since Yahoo received an unsolicited offer of $44.5 billion from Microsoft.

Since then everyone — including Google — has had his or her say on the deal. The only group that has been silent on the topic – Yahoo’s board of directors -– is the one that really matters. Reuters is running a long piece on Yahoo’s board and its role in this merger. It is a bit of PR puffery; it tries to position the board as key players in the deal, and notes how they need to deliberate everything in order to get it right.

Malik believes that the Microsoft offer is a great deal (in financial terms) and I agree with that. Nobody in their right mind wold pay a premium for Yahoo in its present state. So he thinks the Board should just bite the bullet and take the cash.

While it is easy to blame the management, Yahoo’s board of directors can’t duck the blame. It was on their watch that a culture of mediocrity enveloped this once-iconic company. The board, instead of being proactive, sat idly by as the company lost its direction, focus and eventually, its market leadership.

If Wall Street and the media were aware of Terry Semel’s rumored lack of interest in the job, why wasn’t the board aware of it? Instead they decided to reward him with $71 million, much to the chagrin of the investors, before showing him the door. As one talented executive (and engineer) after another left the company, looking to go chase opportunities at either Google or with other Silicon Valley startups, what, exactly, was Yahoo’s board doing?

Where was the board when the company was making one strategic blunder after another -– losing its technology focus and instead chasing the ephemeral opportunities in la-la land? Where were they when politics and bureaucracy started to eat at Yahoo’s insides?

Whatever spin you might read in the news media about Yahoo’s board, simply put, they have failed in their duties.

Good stuff. I see an intriguing parallel between what happened to Yahoo and what happened to Apple after Steve Jobs was fired. Terry Semel plays the role of John Sculley in that analogy. The problem is that there was no Steve Jobs to return to turn Yahoo away from its corporate torpor. And, in any event, there’s less of a possibility of a charismatic individual being able to do that in a non-hardware company anyway.

Google moves to kill Microsoft-Yahoo deal

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Now there’s a surprise. The last thing Google wants is serious competition (even if it’s unlikely that a MS-Yahoo merger could provide it). It’s almost enough to make one feel sympathetic to Microsoft.

This is going to get very boring over the next few months.

Meanwhile, Microsoft continues to be one of the few companies that still funds basic research. It’s just announced that it’s opening a new research lab next door to MIT. Headed by a woman too. Hooray!

Word-count for TextEdit

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A writer friend asked me if I could recommend an alternative to Microsoft Word. He’s a Mac user, so I asked him if he’d considered TextEdit, the free word-processing application that comes with the Mac. He hadn’t, so we looked at it. “Has it got word-count?” he asked. We checked, and it doesn’t.

But a few seconds Googling found a neat — and free — little app which watches the current TextEdit window and displays an updated word count as you type. You can download it from here.

So is it really a big deal?

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A Newsnight journalist rang me on Friday evening, just after we’d arrived in deepest Suffolk, to see if I’d be interested in coming on the programme to talk about the Microsoft-Yahoo deal. I declined gracefully on the grounds that (a) I like being in deepest Suffolk, and (b) I wasn’t sure the story was such a big deal anyway. Now, it looks as though I’m not alone in thinking that. Here’s John Markoff of the NYT on the subject:

SAN FRANCISCO — In moving to buy Yahoo, Microsoft may be firing the final shot of yesterday’s war.

That one was over Internet search advertising, a booming category in which both Microsoft and Yahoo were humble and distant also-rans behind Google.

Microsoft may see Yahoo as its last best chance to catch up. But for all its size and ambition, the bid has not been greeted with enthusiasm. That may be because Silicon Valley favors bottom-up innovation instead of growth by acquisition. The region’s investment money and brain power are tuned to start-ups that can anticipate the next big thing rather than chase the last one.

And what will touch off the next battle? Maybe it will be a low-power microprocessor, code-named Silverthorne, that Intel plans to announce Monday. It is designed for a new wave of hand-held wireless devices that Silicon Valley hopes will touch off the next wave of software innovation.

Or maybe it will be something else entirely.

No one really knows, of course, but gambling on the future is the essence of Silicon Valley. Everyone chases the next big thing, knowing it could very well be the wrong thing. And those who guess wrong risk their survival….

Update: Newsnight ran a piece with Charles Arthur and Robert Scoble. See it on YouTube here.

Microsoft-Yahoo: What Will Stay And What Will Go?

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Intriguing speculation about the detailed implications of a Microsoft-Yahoo merger.

While the tech world waits to see whether Yahoo will accept Microsoft’s $44.6 billion takeover bid, Microsoft and Yahoo employees sleep restlessly at the prospect of massive staff cuts if the takeover goes ahead. There’s a lot of duplication between Yahoo and Microsoft’s internet arms and services will shut and/ or be downsized as content and services from each cross-pollinate across the merged entity.

Here’s some upcoming clashes and which side/ service may continue into the future…

From my point of view, the only interesting question is what would happen to Flickr.

The Davos gabfest

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It’s that time of year again — the world’s bosses have gathered in Davos to do some schmoozing and pretend they have social consciences. Bill Gates delivered his plea for a kinder, gentler capitalism*, for example, which is bit like hoping that wild boars will learn to respect suburban flower-beds.

Needless to say, the Google boys are there — and there’s a substantial YouTube presence as a result. See, for example, the Davos question where the fat cats post their answers to the question “What one thing do you think that countries, companies and individuals must do to make the world a better place in 2008?”.

*Footnote: latest kinder, gentler capitalist results. Microsoft sales up 30%, profits up 79%.

Xbox Live is not dead, just half-alive

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The really puzzling thing about the continuing problems with Microsoft’s XBox Live service is why the company apparently is unable to get a grip on the situation. After all, if Microsoft aspires to get into ‘cloud’ computing, then it’s got to be able to handle volume. And that’s what it clearly has been unable to do over the recent Christmas period.

If Microsoft wants to rev up the online business generated from its Live strategy, it didn’t engender a lot of confidence among customers in recent weeks. The Xbox Live online service suffered outages and intermittent service for almost two weeks and even the Zune marketplace shut down temporarily.

The outage began Dec. 22 — the Saturday before the week of Christmas — and continued through the end of the year.

High traffic levels seem a likely suspect for the problems, which may have been exacerbated by high traffic stemming from new users beginning on Christmas Day…

Er, I write with feeling about this, not because I’m an online gamer, but because some of the younger members of my household are!

Google vs. Microsoft

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Useful New York Times review of the current state of play.

“For most people,” [Google CEO Eric Schmidt] says, “computers are complex and unreliable,” given to crashing and afflicted with viruses. If Google can deliver computing services over the Web, then “it will be a real improvement in people’s lives,” he says.

To explain, Mr. Schmidt steps up to a white board. He draws a rectangle and rattles off a list of things that can be done in the Web-based cloud, and he notes that this list is expanding as Internet connection speeds become faster and Internet software improves. In a sliver of the rectangle, about 10 percent, he marks off what can’t be done in the cloud, like high-end graphics processing. So, in Google’s thinking, will 90 percent of computing eventually reside in the cloud?

“In our view, yes,” Mr. Schmidt says. “It’s a 90-10 thing.” Inside the cloud resides “almost everything you do in a company, almost everything a knowledge worker does.”

What If Gmail had been designed by Microsoft?

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This is lovely.

Today I want to ponder the question: what if Microsoft, not Google, had created Gmail? What would be the differences in that web mail client for users today? What if we apply some of the same design rules that brought us Hotmail, for instance?

Read on. Great illustrations. Reminds me of the spoof put together by Microsoft folks meditating on what the iPod packaging would be like if done by Redmond.