If you use Microsoft’s Windows or Apple’s OS X and for some reason an application crashes, you know the drill. A dialog box opens automatically ready to report what just happened back to Redmond or Cupertino. It is an opt-in procedure so you can decide not to send the report, which is what I tend to do the third or fourth time the same crash happens. For an Apple or a Microsoft this capability of seeing, immediately and automatically, what went wrong is invaluable for planning that next service pack or security update.

Alas, this kind of diagnostic capability hasn’t been available to those developers who don’t also happen to own the operating system as Apple and Microsoft do. But that fact is changing and now there is a way for many third-party developers to put this same capability into their applications.

{ Robert X. Cringely | Continue reading }

photo { Kalle Gustafsson }

Yahoo and Time Warner are “closing in” on a deal where Yahoo would merge with Time Warner’s AOL Internet unit, brushing aside Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo.

{ Reuters | Market Watch }

These things called acquisitions continue to surprise me. Especially how they, quite openly, can get entangled with the personal aspirations and career progress of the companies’ executives.


For example, often it is thinly veiled that the single biggest hurdle to a particular merger, determining whether the deal will go through or not, is the question “who will be in charge” afterwards; the current CEO of company 1 or the CEO of company 2?

To me, these kinds of negotiations suggest that the logic for a deal may have more to do with advancing the careers of the people in charge, rather than advancing the value of the combined companies.

{ Freek Vermeulen | Continue reading }

Historically, mergers have often failed to add significantly to the value of the acquiring firm’s shares.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

This morning, MICROSOFT is in a bid to buy YAHOO for about $31. THEY ARE NUTS! Why pay up so much for a declining business with a declining stock? If I was running MICROSOFT, I would have waited as this was a stock heading into the low to mid-single digits and at the very most , would have offered maybe a 10% premium to the market price.

{ Gary Kaltbaum | Continue reading }

Yahoo’s board plans to reject Microsoft’s $44.6 billion hostile bid ($31 a share) in a letter on Monday, saying the offer undervalues Yahoo. (…) In response, Microsoft is likely to mount a behind-the-scenes campaign directed at Yahoo’s largest shareholders, hoping they will put pressure on Yahoo’s board, people familiar with Microsoft’s plans said. Hedge funds have bought up much of Yahoo’s stock since Microsoft made its bid, and they typically favor a quick sale as opposed to holding shares for the long term.

{ NY Times | Continue reading | Read more }

Wow… How about the news today that Yahoo has basically said “Fuck Off” to Microsoft to their unsolicited $44.6 billion acquisition offer. I mean… Hellloo! This is a company that is on the slippery slope to nowhere… But hey, good for them, if they play it tough enough, they may get to drive the offer up to $32 a share, which will mean bucket loads of money in the pockets of the fucking management and the Board of Directors as they leap off to their various Condos in the fucking Caymans, with their various Bimbos, as half the fucking working staff is laid off!

{ George Parker | Continue reading }

illustration { Blip magazine, 1983 }

related { a nasty little bug in Excel 2007: 850*77.1=100,000 }

Microsoft quickly shut down Santa Claus’ Web privileges after it found out the automated elf it created for instant messaging with kids was talking naughty, not nice.

Last year, Microsoft encouraged kids to connect directly to “Santa” by adding northpolelive.com to their Windows Live Messenger contact lists. The Santa program, which Microsoft reactivated in early December, asks children what they want for Christmas and can respond on topic via instant messaging, thanks to a bit of artificial intelligence.

Microsoft’s holiday cheer soured this week when a reader of a UK news site reported that a chat between Santa and his underage nieces about eating pizza prompted Santa to bring up oral sex.

{ KIRO7 | Continue reading }

unrelated { How Thriller changed pop music }

Most of you probably never heard of Gary Kildall. Maybe that’s due to a single bad decision Gary made - if he decided otherwise he might be a rich and famous man today, and nobody would know about a certain Bill Gates.

Gary Kildall, born in 1942, was a computer scientist, pioneer and entrepreneur. In 1973 he he developed the first high-level programming language for microprocessors, called PL/M, as well as one of the first operating systems for personal computers, called CP/M. He then created his own company, Digital Research (DRI), to market his new OS.

To allow using CP/M on various hardware platforms, Kildall invented a method to implement hardware specific code in a single library - the BIOS concept was born. Within the next few years, the CP/M BIOS design allowed CP/M to became the most important operating system for computers. By 1981, at the peak of its popularity, CP/M ran on 3000 different computer models and DRI had $5.4 million in yearly revenues.

In 1980, IBM was designing its new Personal Computer (PC) to challenge the popular home computer systems Apple and other companies were offering. A small company called Microsoft was due to ship a BASIC interpreter for the upcoming IBM PC. The founder, Bill Gates, suggested to license CP/M as standard OS for the new PC.

But then, Gary made a huge mistake. A meeting with IBM had been arranged, but Gary decided to deliver software using his private airplane and missed it.

Instead the IBM representatives met with Gary’s wife Dorothy, who managed the company’s business affairs. IBM requested the signature of a non disclosure agreement (NDA), but Dorothy refused this on the advice of her attorney. Apprently the IBM managers were frustrated about the results as they quickly needed an OS for their machine, they returned to Bill Gates and asked him to find another OS for them.

A few weeks later, Gates decided to license a CP/M clone from Seattle Computer Products (SCP). IBM shipped the CP/M clone as PC-DOS, and Microsoft shipped it as MS-DOS. (…) Microsoft became the most important OS company in the world, only by marketing a non-official CP/M clone under their own label.

{ Kirps }

Kildall obtained a copy of PC-DOS, examined it, and concluded that it infringed on CP/M. But the intellectual property law for software was not clear enough to sue (the law later developed in what might have been DRI’s favor). Instead Kildall only threatened IBM with legal action, and IBM responded with a proposal to offer CP/M-86 as an option for the PC in return for a release of liability.

Kildall accepted, believing that IBM’s new system would not be a significant commercial success. When the IBM PC was introduced, IBM sold its operating system as an unbundled (but necessary) option. One of the operating system options was Microsoft’s PC-DOS, priced at US$40. CP/M-86 shipped a few months later at $240. (…)

Novell acquired DRI in 1991 in a deal that netted millions for Kildall. (…)

On July 8, 1994, Kildall sustained an injury at a Monterey restaurant and refused treatment. The circumstances of the injury remain unclear, with various sources claiming he fell from a chair, fell down steps, or was assaulted. He died three days later at the Community Hospital of Monterey Peninsula, and the coroner’s report identified the cause of death as blunt force trauma to the head consistent with a fall.

{ wikipedia }

Google shares rose above $700 this week, making the search giant worth more than Cisco, Intel, Apple, or IBM, but still less than Microsoft and General Electric, if just barely. Is the company really worth that kind of money or is this just the effect of a bubble market? Google is on a tear, that’s for sure, but I see a few potholes ahead that the company could avoid but probably won’t. Part of this stems from Google starting to look, in some ways, a bit like Microsoft. (…) This week I want to point out where Google is screwing up.

My first point is small but significant. If you are a resident of the U.S. you may have used a service called free411.com or 1-800free411. It is a simple service that looks up directory listings for free, saving callers fees of a dollar or more per inquiry. You can look up listings online, but most people call the toll-free number. Where free411 makes its money is by forcing users to listen to an ad before they get the number they are looking for. The service is incredibly successful averaging more than 25 million calls per month.

Free411.com has competitors, of course, and the most daunting just appeared on the market from Google - Goog-411. Goog-411 is actually a bit more sophisticated than free411, offering product and service classifications and suggestions, which, of course, also generate more revenue. But for the most part the two services are comparable.

They should be since Google took a long look at investing in or acquiring free411 under a nondisclosure agreement between the two companies, only to abruptly break off discussions and start its own competing service. Is this beginning to sound familiar? This strategy of getting start-ups to explain their business models and share their technologies was practically invented by Microsoft, which would then break off talks, start a competing product or service and use pressure on industry partners to put the smaller company out of business.

Google doesn’t have to behave like this. At their current share price they can acquire any company — and I mean ANY company — for little or no cost. Killing little free411 after first cozying up to them is mean-spirited and, if Google continues to behave like this in the future, will hurt the company’s reputation long-term. Maybe having a good reputation means little to Google, but it should.

It’s time to grow up, kids.

{ Robert X. Cringely | Continue reading }

Apple and Microsoft have always disagreed in how to display fonts on computer displays. Today, both companies are using sub-pixel rendering to coax sharper-looking fonts out of typical low resolution screens. Where they differ is in philosophy.

• Apple generally believes that the goal of the algorithm should be to preserve the design of the typeface as much as possible, even at the cost of a little bit of blurriness.

• Microsoft generally believes that the shape of each letter should be hammered into pixel boundaries to prevent blur and improve readability, even at the cost of not being true to the typeface.

Now that Safari for Windows is available, which goes to great trouble to use Apple’s rendering algorithms, you can actually compare the philosophies side-by-side on the very same monitor and see what I mean.

{ Joel on Software | Continue reading }

{ Microsoft’s Photosynth takes a large collection of photos of a place or object, analyzes them for similarities, and displays them in a reconstructed 3-dimensional | BBC }

Some years ago, someone at Microsoft noticed that they were having a Human Resources problem. There were a whole lot of job openings (thousands, in fact) and a whole lot of applications (hundreds of thousands, in fact), and no easy way to match the right applicants with the right jobs. So they decided to reinvent the Job Interview.

Traditionally, job interviews are used to ascertain two things: how competent the candidate is and how well his personality will fit in with the organization. With their introduction of Job Interview 2.0, Microsoft added one additional: how the candidate responds when presented with asinine, utterly pointless, and completely ridiculous brainteaser questions. If you haven’t seen any of the Job Interview 2.0 questions offered by Microsoft, here are a few.

Thankfully, Microsoft realized that the type of people who enjoy these riddles aren’t always good programmers, and good programmers aren’t always the type who enjoy these riddles. In fact, some of the folks who can solve these riddles are precisely the type of people you don’t want as programmers. Unfortunately, Microsoft’s realization came too late: a whole mini-industry has spawned around the concept of Job Interview 2.0.

{ Worse Than Failure | Continue reading }

Microsoft’s formerly tame blogger has bitten the software company that made his name when it employed him as a “technology evangelist”.

Robert Scoble writes the Scobleizer web log, one of the most-read sources of technology commentary on the internet. He owes his status to the three years he spent at Microsoft, where he was given free rein to comment on the company’s affairs from the inside. The Economist magazine has credited Scoble with playing a significant role in softening the software giant’s former reputation for monopolistic bullying.

In the past, Scoble has tended to be sympathetic about Microsoft’s failings. However, he was provoked into stinging criticism last week after a series of triumphalist remarks, including some disparaging comments about Google made by Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive.

At a “”global summit” of its most-valued software developers, Microsoft repeatedly declared that it would “win” in search and other parts of its Windows Live internet strategy. “The words are empty,” Scoble responded. “Microsoft’s internet execution sucks (on the whole). Its search sucks. Its advertising sucks. If that’s ‘in it to win’, then I don’t get it.”

He continued: “Microsoft isn’t going away. Don’t get me wrong. They have record profits, record sales, all that. But on the internet? Come on. Stop the talk. Ship a better search, a better advertising system than Google, a better hosting service than Amazon, a better cross-platform web development ecosystem than Adobe, and get some services out there that are innovative.”

Scoble’s comments reflect wider concerns — shared by some Microsoft insiders — that the poorly understood Windows Live initiative is failing to make the impact expected when it was unveiled 18 months ago.

{ Times | Continue reading }

image { Junko Terashima lunch boxes }

A US man has sued Microsoft because its operating system was so insecure the FBI could crack it and find his collection of sex videos.

Michael Alan Crooker said that he went to great lengths to keep his computer secure because it contained sexually explicit videos of him and his girlfriend, his medical records, family photographs, and emails between him and his laywers. However when the FBI investigated him over a gun related charge they also seized his computer. Apparently they were able to access the files by making a mirror image of the hard drive.

Crooker purchased a Compaq Presario PC loaded with Windows XP, Internet Explorer, and several security utilities in 2002 at a Circuit City in Holyoke Massachusetts. Crooker, has written in court papers that he “felt secure in Circuit City’s claims of impenetrability and security”, no really.

He wants Vole to pay $200,000 in compensatory and punitive damages. He said he had set Internet Explorer to delete his Internet history every five days. “Any day beyond those parameters is supposed to be permanently deleted and is not supposed to be recoverable,” Crooker says in the lawsuit. He also claims Compaq’s DriveLock security system should have stopped the FBI from looking at his hard drive.

According to Information Week, Crooker has already reached settlements with Hewlett-Packard, which owns Compaq and Circuit City. He is still in jail over the gun charge.

{ The Inquirer | Thanks Shampoo }

Image { Exciting magazine, 1969 }