Entries Tagged 'microsoft' ↓

In more of what is wrong with brinkmanship, Todd Bishop from the Seattle PI is reporting that Jerry Yang is still interested in talking to Microsoft. So let me get this strait, you let the suitor walk away from the table during intense negotiations on what the deal with eventually cost, you keep on bringing up more money and more money, and Microsoft won’t do it. They tell you they won’t do it, and they take off.

Now Jerry Yang is sorry?

Executive Jerry Yang said he wasn’t necessarily closing the door on further talks with Microsoft. The comments came as Yahoo’s shares closed down more than 14 percent today following Microsoft’s announcement Saturday that it was withdrawing its acquisition bid. “We were negotiating a way to find common ground and then on Saturday they chose to walk away,” Yang told Reuters. “They started it and they walked away.” He added: “If they have anything new to say, we would be open … I am more than willing to listen.” Source: Seattle PI

That one boggles the mind, the deal is over with, Jerry is telling folks about all the great things that Yahoo can now go do, but still will be willing to go on talking?

This sounds more like stunt dating

But is it not, knowing that they are wounded, and needing to work out ways to keep themselves from collapsing, offering hope is about the only thing that Yahoo has left. There are “so many deals on the table” that our future is unlimited style of talking.

Placating angry employees, angry stockholders, and other issues along the way, hope is about all Yahoo has right now to offer. Hope that they will once again do good things.

If they can raise hope of an AOL, Google, Microsoft, Someone/Anyone kind of deal, then maybe the fallout of the deal breaking dollar amount can keep the company afloat for a few more years. Hope does not make a business, but it keeps people placated for a bit, until that hope fails to generate action.

Tags: yahoo, microsoft, google, aol, failed, takeover, money, wants to talk it over, sad

We were all wondering what today would look like for Microsoft and for Yahoo now that the deal is a dead issue. While there have been some outrageous things said in the press, the true test is how the companies ride this week out as investors vote on the idea with their shares of stock.

This snapshot of stock prices on pre-market action does not bode well for Yahoo, but surprisingly Microsoft is getting some traction this morning with their stock price. This is a good thing, as Microsoft stock has been mired in the dull drums for a while.

With any luck, Microsoft will have a great day, but that is also dependent upon many other things this morning, with almost no reporting today outside of the ISM report, The drama from Microsoft and Yahoo will probably be the big market mover of the day, unless something else bigger comes up.

Tags: Microsoft, yahoo, pre-market, indicators, stock, prices, humor, vote, dollars

If you have noticed, and one of the reasons that I am seriously thinking of switching hosting providers once the time runs out for the contract agreement is the ubiquitous fastCGI error that keeps on cropping up on this site when trying to get pages to load. The few times we have been slashdotted or otherwise showed up in a system that can deliver a lot of traffic fast, this place usually keels over.

And yes it is a word press blog, and yes we still love word press, but honestly we thought it was more an idea of crappy IIS with Zend and timeouts that are too low to properly support the site. Comes along coding horror, that might just change our mind about this.

If you are hosting word press on a windows IIS/PHP combination, you might want to read this article.

We see this error a lot on our web site

We see it every day, we see it when the system is not stressed (at least when we have 10 people per hour and see this) we see it just about every time we want to do something interesting with the blog. Frankly it will be hard to convince us that it is a word press issue and not an ISP issue, we sponsor another word press MU blog on a native Linux hosting provider, and have yet to see an problem, with our windows IIS/PHP provider, we have accepted the mediocrity that is running Word Press on a windows based system.

Frankly, a native Linux system works better, we have seen it, tried it, and proved it to our satisfaction. While the coding horror story is fun, it would be even more fun to see what the top output looks like for a word press blog on a Linux box. Just as a comparison to see if it is the underlying OS, web server, php installation, or some other issue that is causing the CPU overloads.

Keywords: cpu, wordpress, coding horror, linux, windows, apache, iis, php, zend, speed, loading

Most cloud computing has been at the business level, so Microsoft had to take it right to the consumer, which is not a bad idea. While there are a lot of pundits this morning talking about live mesh, and what it means to you, there are some things to know about that might keep this more difficult for users. Great for laptops that are being searched and seized at the border of the USA, interesting for people who have more than 5 gigs of stuff they want to store off.

Some cool screen shots can be found here. The picture below is from ZDNet. We agree with ZDNet, there are immediately useful things that people can do, which is a major plus when rolling out anything.

Many uses and applications are apparent here, storage space is not realistic, worth it if they offer a premium service in line with mp3tunes.com, where you pay for the storage beyond the initial five gigabytes that they give you.

The best demo is over on channel 10, you will need the silverlight plugin to watch the video, but the video is worth watching if you want to get a good overview.

Have you ever had to email yourself a file or found that you had four different versions of the same document on four different PC’s? Wouldn’t it be awesome if you had a synchronized copy of all your important files on each of your devices and access to them at any time via nothing more than a web browser? Source: Channel 10

The most interesting comments come from Robert Scoble, which is not surprising either. He goes on to state and we agree that:

It also gives key insights into how Microsoft is going to keep Windows relevant and keep us all from sliding into a Web that doesn’t rely much on the underlying operating system. Will Microsoft succeed in that? Well, they better otherwise we’re all very close to washing Microsoft out of our hair: forever. Source: Robert Scoble

Microsoft needs to succeed here, they need to move past the operating system as everything to everyone and into the next generation of computing where local storage is about dead, network or cloud storage and operations are what matters. While most everyone would like to see a stripped down OS that is simply an on ramp to the Internet where work is done (think extremely thin computing here), this is not a bad start, and with the right audience, the regular average consumer.

It is good to see Microsoft taking this step, but as with all things, it will boil down to adoption, will the proletariat use the system. Will the middle class adopt it, what are the legal ramifications of having all your stuff loaded into a Microsoft data center, how can it be broken, what are the security implications, and a whole host of other questions that we should be rightfully asking. While we look at data breaches in the web 2.0 space, you can bet that hackers are already at work with the beta trying to figure out how all this can be subverted. With EMI going after mp3tunes.com, how will Microsoft fair in the same space, or are they new lawsuit bait with deeper pockets?

Lots of questions, many that can not be answered any time soon, the first thing that needs to happen though is adoption.

Keywords: Microsoft, live mesh, channel 10, emi, mp3tunes.com, lawsuit, adoption, money, premium service, storage, cloud computing, money

Odds are unlikely that anyone at Microsoft will listen to Gartner. But it is great when the news gets slashdotted and techmemed.

The part about this is that people seem to be forgetting the normal business cycle, high growth at sometimes any cost, acquisitions, making tons of money. Then comes a stasis point where mistakes get made, like MS Bob, Windows ME, purchasing double click and letting tons of people go, warm body hiring, forgetting about quality in both skill and personality, ability to work well with others.

Everything becomes formalized, project managers take over, creativity in the organization collapses because the number of hours writing code is suddenly changed to hours of writing project proposals, the ability to have a project killed by one person saying no, not being able to make a good financial reason to take on the project (even if it was cool as all get out), it becomes a numbers game rather than a labor of love.

Then comes the collapse, people leave, the company draws down and fires a lot of its staff, the good staff flees the company and you end up with a shell that is carrying on by inertia only. The occasional good thing will come out of it, but when was the last time you saw anything good come from the US Auto Industry, or the US Steel Industry, or any other company that has gone through boom, bust, stasis.

Google is getting there, Yahoo is already there, Microsoft is already there, are we really surprised then that Gartner issued a report saying that MS is going to implode inwards on its own weight. Anyone who visits the campus already knows this, the good ones are going at an amazing rate (just like at Google now, just like at Yahoo 5 years ago).

Not surprising then that people would be calling for a make over, and yes that can happen, but entrenched interests in the company will make sure they survive at all costs, including throwing people under the bus.

We are seeing a normal business cycle, at least there is Linux to help fill the gap as this presents an opportunity for anyone to finally get a word in edgewise and develop the “perfect” operating system. Those are the folks we are betting on, there is some little group of folks out there that are developing what will be the next Microsoft, we wish them the best of luck.

Keywords: microsoft,yahoo, google, gartner

Georg Holzer whips out the camcorder at Mixx08 to catch Steve Ballmer yelling “Web Developers” in parody of his famous “developers” rant on stage at Microsoft. This simple act, caught on camcorder and available to watch here might be signaling not just a new direction for Microsoft, it also signals new direction for Microsoft in an increasingly Internet driven cloud computing environment.

There will always be a need for an operating system at the local level, on the individuals PC or on the server. We don’t literally “boot to the Internet” yet (although that is probably coming). We still need to run local applications to bring up our window on the world. All copies of web browsers are still local, meaning they rely on some interface between the hardware and the browser. While that is slowly changing in favor of mixed desktop web applications, we are still not there yet.

While the Internet has changed the world in often surprising and unexpected ways, we are still working with the computing interface that was developed back in the 1970’s at Xerox PARC park. With the interface well over 30 years old now (which is ancient in computing years) the focus on “Web Developers” by Steve Ballmer is a significant change in culture let alone attitude.

Famously starting with “The Internet will never go anywhere” from Bill Gates, through to the rant yesterday for “Web Developers” maybe that message has finally sunk into the Microsoft management hierarchy. The Internet has turned into more than a fad, it has turned into a way of life, a way of communications that transcends barriers like the “Great Firewall of China” or the recent debacle with Wikileaks.

Companies are quickly becoming if they are not already geographically diverse companies where teams seldom meet in person, where key players can be half way around the world. Startups can happen with a weekend of coding and 12,000 dollars max. Small startups thrive on the ecologies that social networking sites provide, audio and video delivery have been so transformed that the older rooted in physical products companies are falling apart and desperately trying to stay alive.

Microsoft needs to get this message not just at the top but all the way down to the lowest life form inhabiting a cube somewhere on campus. The Internet is where it is at today. While this does not mean that it will not be the same tomorrow, Microsoft needs to start leading the pack and moving well beyond the idea of “web developers”, they need to be working on what is next, and start screaming.

“Mobile Developers” and “Internet booting computing” and their fantastic table top computing system that is on the “we want one now please” list. Frankly, they need a leapfrog of innovation here, but that means shedding decades of culture, thousands of management positions, and as Mini-Microsoft states “Let’s slim down Microsoft into a lean, mean, efficient customer pleasing profit making machine!”.

If the “hostile” take over of Yahoo my Microsoft gets too bogged down, with take over numbers that would cripple Microsoft and yahoo for years, this could be the best thing that ever happened to Google. And while Google’s public comments are “NO!”, in reality the board has to be watching this one play out.

If Yahoo succeeds in getting Microsoft to over commit (like at 41 dollars a share), and can get Microsoft to commit to some bad money management (going from surplus to deficit in slowing economy) then Microsoft will be so busy focusing on internal issues, integration issues, and other problems that the company will basically be resting while it digests Yahoo.

Google could not ask for more. This would give Google the chance to really settle into the front runners position, and make the combined MicroHoo fairly useless along the way.

If Yahoo succeeds in getting AOL, or other low order drains on their own company (AOL Microsoft Yahoo) in place before the Microsoft buy, this would further distract Microsoft from what they need to do, or what they think they need to do to survive.

We are seeing shareholder revolt on this one. The next shareholders meeting should be very interesting if any of this goes through, because Microsoft has not really made a very good argument for the purchase of Yahoo other than seeing blood in the water.

Hate to say it, but if Yahoo succeeds with merger talks with AOL, Microsoft should just drop the pursuit course and wait a couple of years, then come back with an offer. Right now the Yahoo board is greedy, adding 10 dollars to the share price is an insane valuation for Yahoo.

Time to say “it was a fun distraction” and go back to work. Microsoft could end up being seriously crippled because of the actions of yahoo, and there is no time like the present to move along.