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Is Microsoft just Screwing with Yahoo's Mind?
The Narrative Fallacy writes "This week Cringely offers up a speculative piece asserting that Microsoft might not really care if its bid to buy Yahoo succeeds or not — Bill Gates just wants to disrupt Yahoo and poach the company's employees. 'Microsoft's offer for Yahoo has thrown that company and several others into a tizzy. Yahoo can't be getting much work done, that's for sure ... Redmond's real goal may be simply to poach people from Yahoo, and this deal could help them do just that.' Cringley says there is plenty of precedent for Microsoft's behavior — Microsoft's bids for Borland and for Intuit back in the 1990s sent both companies into a tailspin. 'A failed Microsoft bid, even one involving a termination fee, could lead to horrific results for the company. Remember that Yahoo is staggering here while Intuit was at the top of its market and its game.'"
but is Microsoft capable of this? I'd say that's a given.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Yahoo is treading water. Microsoft is treading water. Neither company has innovated to grow new business for the last 5+ years. Meanwhile, Google has created growth. It has built and grown a large, growing advertising business. Now Microsoft has a paw on Yahoo, treading water next to it.
Has Cringely FINALLY gotten something right?
anything like fair?
/. this should come as no surprise AT ALL.
Sure, all MS has to do is either make their products better than anyone else's or scare everyone from investing in a competitor's business and products. Either one will result in Microsoft's favor.
Business-wise, since Google isn't going to suddenly lose market-share it is necessary to gain market share, either by purchasing it, or causing your own product to gain market share.
Some very large corporations in North America have been found guilty of this same type of practice. With all the MS bashing on
Whether they actually buy Yahoo or not, MS wins in the business side.
Sure, to the average joe it is hard to see the win, but if Yahoo loses revenues MS will begin to take them (what Google doesn't get anyway). In the business of becoming the largest in your field of endeavor having better products/services than your competition is only marginally more important (if at all) than your competitor being worse than you at the game of business. We all know that MS is very successful at business, not so much so at creating innovative products and services.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
Who are Intuit?
In either case, here at Microsoft, we feel standards are important. And we have fun, too. Doug Mahugh, Microsoft
I'm pretty sure I could stay focused on my tasks at hand just fine, especially if some idiotic behemoth came in and made an offer that caused the market to instantly re-evaluate all my stock and options at a significantly higher price.
The idea that Yahoo is going to be bewildered and knocked astray by this is absurd. But that said, consider the source. He's a twit who makes his living by purposefully trolling people into discussions. He's not a serious analyst, nor does he offer any interesting insight.
It's a shame slashdot got trolled again. You'd think people would learn to stop linking to the tard, but time and time again he makes front page. Pathetic.
Didn't Yahoo's stock price go up from this, while the price of MSFT stock went down? Isn't Microsoft doing more harm to themselves?
Besides, I thought Balmer was in charge now. What's with all this talk about Bill?
You know your business plan is in trouble when columnists start making 'this plan is so crazy it might just work' type articles.
Seriously. The guy talks out his ass so much he'd be more profitably employed as a ventriloquist.
It appears to me that MS is serious. It may have been a planned side benefit that Yahoo is distracted if the buyout does not happen. Unfortunately MS is also distracted. I mean how many MS employees started looking for new jobs when this was announced? There was also a shakeup in leadership last week too so MS is not clearly focused either.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
TFA is being hyperbolic to claim that the purchase bid "alone has some value for Microsoft." Not quite. We're definitely in "a little bit of both" territory here
MS was serious about its announcement about buying yahoo. If yahoo had been openly amenable to the idea, then the deal would be moving forward right now.
The secondary effect (since yahoo was NOT amenable) was to destabilize yahoo, who is a competitor.
So, MS did a cost/benefit actuarial analysis and found that if they bought yahoo for a certain price, then they would benefit. Yahoo doesn't want to sell, but MS still gains b/c of the uncertainty that the bid caused. It was a win/win situation for them. This is how big business works.
Thank you Dave Raggett
Being at the "top of its market" is a liability - it forces you to look beyond your core business in hopes of continuing to expand. This is what happened to Borland - at one point, Borland owned the programming languagess market, with a 66% market share - more than Microsoft and everyone else combined. Then they went nuts. "Desktop / Professional / Enterprise" versions of compilers were one fo the first signs that rot was setting in. So was the buying and selling of WordPerfect and dBase. The dBase acquisition made sense - it let them compete directly with CA-Clipper. Dumping it later on didn't.
Apple didn't get smart until it had it' near-death experience.
So if Yahoo! isn't at the "top of their game" they can afford to concentrate on what they're doing. Microsoft, on the other hand, has nowhere to go bud down - their #1 competitor is themselves (see Vista vs. XP as a good example).
"Redmond's real goal may be simply to poach people from Yahoo, and this deal could help them do just that.'"
I think not. It's more likely that Google would do so, I expect that their recruiters are quite busy calling Yahoo employees at the moment. If this is Microsoft's goal they've just aimed a double-barreled shotgun at their feet and pulled the trigger. They just gave their no. 1 competitor a huge opportunity. Where would you, as a brilliant Yahoo employee, work next? Google or Microsoft?
"I'd rather have a full bottle in front of me than a full frontal lobotomy"
If only Microsoft found so much energy and effort to fix it's own products first!
Take Nobody's Word For It.
If that's true, that'd give me a whole new respect for MS. They are certainly capable of it, that's a given.
( Note: I am an asshole, and I approve of this message )
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
...where someone writes about some random theory in an attempt to milk the MSFT+YHOO story without having any new facts to report.
(Sing to the tune of Master Exploder by Tenacious D)
Ahhhhh, ahhhhhh, ahhhhhhh, ahhhhhh, ahh ahhh ahhh ahhh
ahh ahh ahh ahhhh AAAAAARRRRRGGGGHHHHH YEAH!!
I do not need, (he does not need)
The Yahoo Bid (the yahoo bid)
Our Company is freakin, (freakin)
POWERFUL!
Aaaaaah yeah!
Arghhhaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!
[Yahoo explodes]
Sorry
I did not mean, (he did not mean)
To screw your mind (to screw your mind)
But that stuff happens to us,
All the time!
Now take a look (take a look)
In to heaven? (In to heaven)
It's coming soon, WINDOWS SEVEEEEEENNNNNNNN!
AAAH! ArghhhAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!
Lyrics copyright to bobmarleypeople. w00t!
Cringley's an idiot. There are far cheaper ways to do this. BillG could stand on the sidewalk in front of Yahoo and hand out hire-on-bonus checks if all that MS wanted was employees, and MS would have been far, far ahead, stock-price-wise.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is insufficiently documented.
It wouldn't solve their problem. They need market share at all costs, _destroying_ Yahoo wouldn't help because most users would turn to Google anyway. I think they'll raise their bid to 50 billion dollars and try again. If this gets through, it will be so unfortunate for Yahoo because they did so much for the web and FOSS in general. You can buy pretty much anything, but you can't buy good karma. 40 billion dollars even less so.
... that Microsoft's business acumen in providing a better product over the years has overflowed into their Corporate Finance department.....
Jokes apart, there is a possible explanation which implies no wickedness on the part of MS: MS investments in his search engine + ad seller has been less effective than Yahoo's. MS would never be allowed to bid for Google, so it must settle for second best, which is not a bad place to be if you are much lower in the totem pole.
Given the cash pile burning a hole in MS pocket the cash pile burning a hole in MS pocket, the pressure to put the money to work somewhere, or return it to shareholders, is enormous, and they cannot or would not invest it in making a better product overall.
"If a boss demands loyalty, give him integrity. But if he demands integrity, give him loyalty." (John Boyd, 1927-1997)
I've ever heard. And I've played catch with rock hammers.
MS did it because they wanted to consolidate a larger advertising and search engine position, and a major internet portal. It was probably still a bad decision, but who can really say what the results would have been ten years down the line?
Look at what MS Stock did. It had broken out of a major rut--a rut not justified by its earnings--for the first time in years following an earnings report last year. Now it's down 24% off its high. Twenty-Four percent. Balmer has lost $3.6 Billion, Gates has lost twice that, and even employees who've only lost twenty or fifty or seventy thousand aren't happy about it--because that is a big chunk of their savings. Now that price change isn't all yahoo, by any stretch of the imagination. But a big chunk of is it from the Yahoo offer.
You don't take that hit for an offer you aren't interested in following through on.
Consensus in our group is that anything MS does will be 3-6 months before a sale closes, then 3-6 months (minimum) before any technology changes. Putting things at 6-12 months before any major (technology) changes related to a MS bid occur. Definitely not "ZOMG, I must quit immediately".
... I assure you projects like those have been in the works for a while, you don't just do a yahoo-scale project in 3 weeks.
... 2 - checkbox featuritis (adding features just because market competitors have them, not because it's what the users need). 3 - general lack of inspiration ... it's different when a startup builds a product that scales from 10-100-1,000-10,000 users. Yahoo builds crap that starts at 10,000 users and the minimal feature set needed at that level is kindof staggering (leading to development by checkboxes rather than organic growth ... a lack of inspiration).
You've got tons of speculation about Yahoo! ramping up frequency of releases
Look at it this way - Yahoo! just had layoffs (all apologies to those affected). Even apart from MS, the types of smart people who don't like being in a company going through layoffs are going to be looking around. The types of smart (or dumb) people who don't like working with MS technologies, or MS business practices might also now be looking around.
While the MS offer is a significant event, in my opinion, most things are just business as usual. Stay on top of your kick-ass projects, push out improvements, new things, etc. Don't do crappy work if you can avoid it. With some of the changes in focus / structure, I'm optimistic about Yahoo's future. I might be opening myself up for criticism, but point me to a *bad* Yahoo product (and ask.yahoo.com doesn't count).
The biggest criticisms you can level against most yahoo products are: 1 - the advertising
--A.Yahoo
Don't forget SAP.... MSFT really sent them into a tizzy, right?! What absolute rubbish! yahoo's value is in it's websites and the traffic that it commands. Not in it's employees. Yes, there is a relationship between the two, but Yahoo's most valuable assets are its sites! A few missing employees won't send those sites into a tailspin.
msft doesn't *have* to do anything. They can just wait and buy them for $25 this time next year... if they're willing to wait. There were rumors of Msft buying out Yahoo within 12 months ago... stock went up to $35. This time stock price only went to $30. The problem with waiting though, is that Goog just keeps pumping along and continues to build out value for their own sites, blanketting anything that Yahoo and Msft can possibly put together.
keep any eye on Google's Finance pages. Already, it's allowing developers to pull in more information and data than Yahoo finance. It doesn't get quite the same number of eyeballs as yahoo finance, but it's a good product. Google finance can overtake Yahoo finance in 2 years.
Same with flickr vs. picasa. Picasa is a good, solid product. I can put a thousand images for free, unlike flickr which only shows 200 for free. Right now, I prefer Flickr, but with the right decisions, Picasa can overtake Flickr in 2-4 years too. Flickr team is much more responsive than the rest of Yahoo though, so this may not happen. I don't get the feeling that Flickr is resting on their laurels. Notice that when Yahoo Photos closed last year, they didn't give users a choice to migrate photos to picasa?
Msft has to make themselves more developer friendly... but they don't have *anything* worth giving out like Google (apart from their OS, which we know won't happen). In this web2.0 world, that's what we developers want, isn't it? Data and resources? Collecting it ourselves is way too time consuming. By the time that we amass enough datapoints, Google is already there giving it out for free. With Yahoo NOW and freeing up some of their resources with some good decisions, they might be able to create something pretty amazing. Yahoo won't be able to do it themselves - if they give everything out, they can be left with nothing of their own.
Nobody makes a $40B+ offer just to screw with another company. That's WAY too much money. While business disruption might be a desirable side effect, especially if the merger doesn't go through, it isn't why MS made the offer. When MS tried to buy Intuit, it was because they wanted to dominate personal finance software, not because they wanted to screw with Intuit. If memory serves they were blocked from the merger by the government due to the effective monopoly the merger would cause.
If I was a shareholder (I'm not) and it ever came out that MS was doing that with their cash hoard instead of finding market beating investment opportunities, I'd have my lawyer on the phone faster than you could say "class action lawsuit".
I don't know what's gotten into Cringely. He seems to have lost his touch. There is nothing refined, intelligent, clever about Microsoft's attempts to take over Yahoo: it's just a simple hostile takeover attempt, and that's it. No hidden agenda, just a desire to get back at Google. And it will fail of course.
Beauty is in the beholder of the eye.
Our *three* weapons are fear, uncertainty, and doubt... and an almost fanatical devotion to blue screen.... ...
Our *four*
Perhaps you can't forgive the pun. But...
There seems to be nothing that can pull the Geek out of denial.
Microsoft posted breathtaking results in its first and second quarters. 15-20% growth in Windows. In Office. In servers. In home entertainment.
That kind of growth isn't fueled by massive "upgrades" to Win XP.
67 cents of every new retail dollar spent on PC software goes to Microsoft Office.
Microsoft gambled on "the ribbon" and won.
For the quarter, Microsoft sales increased 30 percent in emerging markets, 20 percent in established markets like Europe and 15 percent in the United States. Microsoft has become very well insulated from a recession in the states.
Online services are still posting a loss, but ad revenues are up damn near 40% from fiscal 2007 to $623 million.
There are 427 million Windows Live IDs.
Which suggests that estimates of one billion Windows users world-wide are on the money.
Microsoft has been paying dividends, buying back stock. It holds $20 billion in liquid reserves and doesn't owe a dime to anyone.
Microsoft Q2 2008 By The Numbers
If M$ is truly interested in Yahoo! to strengthen its ad play, then they should just buy Yahoo!'s ad business. M$ should agree to that, right?
Yahoo! can then outsource their ads to somebody else. There's been speculation that they would do it to Google, but at that point, the market is much more competitive since M$ has strengthened its ad play--M$ and Google (and anyone else) can compete for ad Yahoo!'s business.
Thus everyone supposedly wins:
Twelve-and-three-quarter inches. Unyielding. This wand belonged to Bellatrix Lestrange.
If MS buys Yahoo, what happens to Zimbra? Yahoo just bought them, and I'm 100% sure MS will kill that project the day they take over, they don't want any competition for exchange, and certainly not open source competition.
Zimbra might not be the greatest software, but it is in my opinion the best open source collaboration/email software out there. It is the only serious competitor to exchange in the open source world. And it will be gone if MS completes this takeover.
Computer History 5 - Personal Computers by William H. Gates III, (C) 2008 by National Academy of Engineering.
Emphasis, mine. Interjections, mine. Brackets, mine. After the Intel 8080 microprocessor was chosen for the Altair, two young computer buffs from Seattle, Bill Gates and Paul Allen, won the job of writing software that would allow it to be programmed in BASIC. The weedy buffs win again, no fair. Nowhere was interest in personal computing more intense than in the vicinity of Palo Alto, California, a place known as Silicon Valley because of the presence of many big semiconductor firms. Electronics hobbyists abounded there, and two of them--Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak--turned their tinkering into a highly appealing consumer product: the Apple II, a plastic-encased computer with a keyboard, screen, and cassette tape for storage. Holy Tinker Bell, Batman. Pass the duct tape, Robin. Among them were three kinds of applications that made this desktop device a truly valuable tool for business--word processing, spreadsheets [VisiCalc], and databases. The market for personal computers exploded, especially after IBM weighed in with a crap product in 1981. Its crap offering used a crap operating system from Microsoft, MS-DOS, but due to a truly superior keyboard was quickly adopted by other manufacturers, allowing any given program to run on a wide variety of machines. Nothing clacked quite like the original IBM PC. Hardware like the [Xerox] mouse made the computer easier to control; operating systems allowed the [Xerox] screen to be divided into independently managed [Xerox] windows; applications programs steadily widened the range of what computers could do; and processors were lashed together--thousands of them in some cases-in order to solve pieces of a problem in parallel. Meanwhile, new communications standards [Xerox, AT&T, Berkeley] enabled computers to be joined in private networks or the incomprehensibly intricate global weave of the Internet. To be fair, Xerox gets its due in the timeline section. 1970 Palo Alto Research Center (PARC)
Xerox Corporation assembles a team of researchers in information and physical sciences in Palo Alto, California, with the goal of creating "the architecture of information." Over the next 30 years innovations emerging from the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) include the concept of windows (1972), the first real personal computer (Alto in 1973), laser printers (1973), the concept of WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) word processors (1974), and EtherNet (1974). In 2002 Xerox PARC incorporates as an independent company--Palo Alto Research Center, Inc. Here he finds a fancy way to explain he still lives in his parent's basement: 1975 First home computer is marketed to hobbyists
The Altair 8800, widely considered the first home computer, is marketed to hobbyists by Micro Instrumentation Telemetry Systems. The build-it-yourself kit doesn't have a keyboard, monitor, or its own programming language; data are input with a series of switches and lights. But it includes an Intel microprocessor and costs less than $400. Seizing an opportunity, fledgling entrepreneurs Bill Gates and Paul Allen propose writing a version of BASIC for the new computer. They start the project by forming a partnership called Microsoft. A fledgling is a young bird that has recently left its nest (it has fledged) but is still dependent upon parental care and feeding.
Speaking of which, the other history-rewriting seizure-in-residence, Darl McBride, appears to have finally come to the end of his feather.
MS and YAHOO and complete different services than google.
.NET is positioning themselves to go all out, all online, even all crossplatform if they have to. They've basically aligned the entire Win32 development army to produce the most portable rapid developemnt environment around.
.NET. It's taken awhile and too many version and code changes, but they will have the most awesome integrated framework for making any apps. I think you'll see that more and more with online apps and web pages. The fact is, the non MS development community has dropped the ball on a full featured devlopment suite such as .Net and the power and support it has and they are going to pay in yet another decade of MS rule.
Google is a fiscal service for advertisers with free user services to get viewers to the add content.
MS and Yahoo are user services that use advertising since they already have the users there. The motivation is cleary and entirely different between these companies. Google is all ads, MS wants you on their platform and subscriptions with some ads on the side. Yahoo must have a mountain of email accounts that perhaps MS wants to eat up in order to integrate them with the new MS email/office combination.
I must say, google and the rest of the world are slacking on getting onlnie apps out. At this rate MS is going to eat them alive and google is going to have some shitty plain Ajax wordprocessor to pretend to be competative against Word online.
MS having ported to
Who cares about Vista, the right move was
It's funny because of all the platforms, MS needs development tools the least, because they have the most, yet they know where their strength is and have expanded their lead their.
The difference is that Yahoo and MS are sustainable, and Google is reliant on ad revene. Though, you could say Yahoo isn't all that susnstainable in the long run, but google is BY FAR not sustainable.
As soon as ad spending goes down, so does Google's revenue with it.
Google's is a more opportunistic model and the only reason it's good is because it's realiable. Yahoo and MS have unclear reasons for doing things while Google's reasoning is pretty much always fiscal based. You can bet on Google to piling up services to draw more revenue and you can count on them to stick with that same basic strategy.
Google is being more and more exploited everyday and in time it's highly unlikely it can keep it's good reputation and without a doubt it's search results aren't as good as they used to be.
Google's business model is unsustainable because it relies on completely immoral ad revenue. No matter how good the serice, in time, the force of profitablity will erode google because the HEART of google is generating money through ads. That's just a very shaky place to draw the majority of your revenue. Look what happened to TV, the news. These services started out with a much more individualistic and unbaised position and over time as profitability proved more powerful than morality these servies lost integrity.
Google, at it's current rate, will do the same and the plethora of rip off artists using it are a sign of this.
You're probably not going to be able to rely on one search engine in the long term any more than you can rely on one news source to provide you the truth.
Perhaps MS just want to buy Yahoo's user base, statistics, logs and such from them.
MS might also be suspecting the fall of Yahoo and trying to buy the equity of the company at a relative loss to yahoo and gain to MS.
I certainly don't see that it's worth 45 billion though, since yahoo is the new lycos.
Yahoo will die on their own because like so many web services, they forgot to make money. Perhaps yahoo has patents on online apps that MS wants also since they will be going full force with office online soon.
I think whoever buys yahoo is bound to take a loss on the investment, so with that in mind News Corp can have them. Yahoo had the edge, lost it, and failed to innovate. Yahoo answers is about the only new buzz they have going on.
"Defined crappy computing" - now that's accurate.
you had me at #!
> Ok, perhaps it is true, but if Microsoft were investing so
> much time and energy being evil in every move they make,
> don't you think they wouldn't be the #1 company in the field?
> (profits wise). I'd have thought they'd have slipped a while back.
Your logic is flawed. Microsoft is #1 precisely *because* they make evil moves. Being ruthless in business is good for your company as long as it does not push any of your customers away. And in this case the average consumer could not care less what is going on between two giant companies, and as such Microsoft will lose nothing, while putting their opponent out of balance. So being evil is the logical move, as long as it does not generate too much bad press for themselves. Had they not done this because of "ethics", they would not have reaped the benefits of the move, and would be in a worse position.
Ethics is not mentioned in the rulebook of Capitalism chess.
That would be just too cool.
Which department decided to bundle Microsoft's desktop apps into what is known as MS Office? Answer = Microsoft's Marketing Dept.
You must be very young to believe Microsoft simply BOUGHT all of their products, or that everything successful is simply the result of their money.(Did I mention MS Office?)
Love them or hate them, but you would be foolish to think Microsoft never built anything on their own towards their success. They didn't buy Excel, they didn't buy Exchange Server, which spawned Active Directory, so give them their due.
Nobody told the folks at Lotus or Netscape that they got beat by money, rather than products that kicked theirs in the teeth. Who did they buy Visual Studio or the .NET Framework from? Something tells me, Microsoft will be just fine for the long term.
... right on time.
Hey guys ! I heard Microsoft dumped babies out of incubators in Iraq!!
We should invade them!!!
"Yahoo doesn't really seem like a good match for Microsoft."
Yes, but they are a bit similar: Microsoft has proven, over many years, that it does not know how to run a search engine. Yahoo has proven, over many years, that...
"So what? I'm RICH, Bitch! Borland didn't pay me, baby!"
It amazes me that the geek still fantasies about MS-DOS.
Microsoft was incorporated in 1975 and by 1980 was dominant in languages for the microcomputer. Microsoft was moving up and moving fast.
There would be an MBASIC for the IBM PC and much, much more to come.
Gates promised to deliver a cheap, serviceable, OS in time for the projected launch of the IBM PC, an OS that would sell for about 1/6 the price of CP/M 86.
That was all IBM needed to know, that was all IBM wanted to know.
But it was Bill Gates who had the imagination to see the enormous potential for growth and profit in the MS-DOS PC that was almost - but not in its beginning - an IBM PC-clone.
...without Iliad's take.
No, this was a real offer. They don't care if they "screw" with Yahoo. Yahoo isn't a real threat to Microsoft. The biggest threat to Microsoft is Google. So who in their right mind would mess up Yahoo so that Google slides in and gains another 10% share of search and advertising?
I mean, if you forget the theories of MS having malicious intent etc., the math becomes a lot simpler. Yahoo has 20% of market share and MS want to buy that 20%. Plain and simple.
However MS has to know it won't get all of Yahoo!'s market share. Sure it will get some but others who use Yahoo! will switch if MS acquires it.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Does Microsoft not make enough money? Why do they need a search engine so bad? Can anybody please explain that to me. They can't make that much more money off of simple web advertising, or can they?
21st Century Renaissance Man
It was the Intel exec that gave Linux 0.8% of the desktop.
In the January W3 Schools OS Platfrorm Stats Vista is poised to overtake OSX and Linux combined in a month or two.
Not a bad showing for an OS whose greatest strength in 2007 was in the high end of the OEM consumer market, where the Vista Premium and Ultimate PC competes directly against the Mac system bundle.
the rise of the low end markets where they simply can't compete
Microsoft's $3 "Student Innovation Suite" bundles Learning Essentials for MS Office, Microsoft Math, Office Home and Student 2007, Windows Live Mail, and XP Starter Edition.
The Vista Starter Edition will arrive somewhere down the road.
At first glance, the pricing is shockingly low considering the broader value of the software. For example, in the United States, Office Home and Student 2007 retails for about $150. But further examination reveals pricing not so out of line with what college students might see in the United States. It's fairly typical for universities to provide students with Microsoft software for as little as $5 or $10 a copy under a Microsoft Campus License. It's a bit out-of-box thinking. It is very clever," said Clive Longbottom, service director of Business Process Analysis for Quocirca. "We wouldn't see millions of licenses sold through educational institutions in established markets. You will see thousands."
But in markets like China, "you will see millions."
What is Microsoft's Unlimited Potential?
What did Microsoft make that was cool or innovative? That is other than Atari BASIC?
FalconShould there be a Law?
Yahoo must have a mountain of email accounts that perhaps MS wants to eat up in order to integrate them with the new MS email/office combination.
And Yahoo! will lose one of them, mine, and I bet others will switch as well if Microsoft acquires Yahoo!.
I must say, google and the rest of the world are slacking on getting onlnie apps out. At this rate MS is going to eat them alive and google is going to have some shitty plain Ajax wordprocessor to pretend to be competative against Word online.
I couldn't care less if Google, MS, or anyone else wins with online apps. To tell the truth this kind of puzzles me. Personal computers became such a big market, taking market share away from mainframes and minis, because people wanted to run software and store data locally. Now they want to go back to timesharing. Me, I still want to run my apps locally and to have my data local as well, unless I'm traveling but then I can use my laptop and vpn into my home server if I need to.
The difference is that Yahoo and MS are sustainable, and Google is reliant on ad revene. Though, you could say Yahoo isn't all that susnstainable in the long run, but google is BY FAR not sustainable.
Shouldn't you let all those financial analysts know what they're doing wrong?
As soon as ad spending goes down, so does Google's revenue with it.
And when ad revenue goes back up so will Google's.
Google is being more and more exploited everyday and in time it's highly unlikely it can keep it's good reputation and without a doubt it's search results aren't as good as they used to be.
Yea, as tyme goes by I use Teoma, now ask.com, and Mooter more for searches. However Google isn't totally dependent on searches, with adwords Google places a lot of ads on blogs as well as other websites.
FalconShould there be a Law?
A small tribe near the Arctic Circle.
No, they are the Inuit, living in Nunavut. That is the Canadian Inuits, others live in Iceland while related groups live in northern Europe. Such as the Sami and Lapps.
FalconShould there be a Law?
OTOH,I have Xandros 4.01 running with full 3d effects on 512Mb of ram and multiple apps running and it isn't even breaking a sweat.The Asus EEE purrs like a kitten.With the economy in the toilet folks want affordable and reliable.They are also hanging on to their machines longer since the majority of home users(and working fixing Windows machines for 10+ years I know this to be true) are rarely doing anything that takes more than a 1.0-2.0Ghz machine.So what does MSFT do? Gets rid of Win2K(which EVERY business I've had contact with simply loves)and is now trying to phase out WinXP. All for an OS that for the first time since WinME has folks coming to me asking "can you PLEASE put XP on this? I really hate Vista."
MSFT made an OS that is simply not made to run on the sub $500 machines with any kind of speed.And with prices at sub $400 for laptops and sub $300 for desktops there just isn't a way for OEMs(even if MSFT gave the Vista for free,which they don't) to stuff the hardware Vista needs into a sub$400 pc and make any profit.As someone who has bought every MSFT OEM over the years(And I'm still waiting for my apology for WinME,Mr. Gates!) this is the first time I am going to avoid a new MSFT OS.There simply isn't enough value to make up for the hassles and bloat.And from what I have dealt with when it comes to customers I'm not alone.
If MSFT really wants to treat their customers right they will keep WinXP alive at least until sub $300 machines come with 2Gb of ram standard.Until then sell XP on all the sub $500 machines and keep Vista for the new quad core 4Gb of ram "elite" machines.And Home Basic really needs to be taken out back and put down.It is just painful to deal with.
But if you want to keep believing that is your thing.I suggest you take a non-student in to buy Office+Vista at your local pc store and see if it doesn't end up costing you MORE than a new Everex.Most folks are going to look at the price and go with what is cheapest,and for the sub $300 market MSFT can't even compete.But as I said in my earlier post,My 02c YMMV.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
This column has been a piece of crap from day one and this is no different. Anyone with any semblence of a clue knows that no one with a brain at Yahoo! would work for Microsoft unless they'd exhausted all of their (very generous in California) unemployment benefits. "Cringely" shows once more what a clueless bastard he/she is. Gods I wish I could get paid to be a moron like this.
One word for you: enron
That is the Vista Premium System Builder price from Newegg.com. Microsoft Windows Vista 32-Bit Home Premium for System Builders Single Pack DVD - OEM No bundled hardware.
The fully assembled Acer dual core Vista Premium desktop with 2 GB of RAM is $500 at Newegg.com Let me know how many people you think build their own laptops.
So as far as I see it half of the reason Vista has become so hated is because of MSFT pushing it onto machines that simply aren't able to run it instead of using a less resource hungry OS like Win2K or XP. This is where the Linux builds are going to take off.An OEM instead of paying 20-25% of the MSRP of the low end machines for Vista can instead pay a greatly reduced price and have a custom branded OS(Like the Xandros OS made for the Asus EEE) or they can use one of the multitude of free distros and either support it in house or through the community.And as more and more of the things we use computers for move onto the web(I have customers that wouldn't give a damn what OS they had as long as they can get to Facebook) there simply isn't a need in most households for the 2Gb+ Dual Core rig.
In the end I think it is MSFT that will lose,simply because of mismanagement and lack of long term vision.The reason that Vista became such an overblown resource hog was MSFT trying to "outbling" Apple.Same for all the DRM,which was put in there to try to get everyone to hook their pc to the tv and watch whatever format MSFT and the studios want to push,hoping to become the video version of iTunes.But instead we are going to end up with light and cheap desktops and laptops all over the place,to which MSFTs answer is Vista Home Basic(yuck).And of course the big money spenders will go to Apple for the "cool" factor and the lack of hassles.
MSFT still has a chance to turn this around,but the attempt to buy Yahoo tells me that Ballmer thinks he can buy his way out.Which I just don't see working.Not as long as they are pushing Vista onto machines like they sell at Wal Mart and Best Buy.BTW,I am not a "fanboi" of any OS.I have bought 95-XP and beta tested for Vista. But as the margins for the OEMs get ever tighter the "MSFT tax",both on the amount of hardware required to give a decent Vista experience as well as the price paid for the OS,will become more of a factor for the OEM builders who will be looking for any way they can to cut costs.And the web looks just as nice on my Xandros laptop with 512Mb of ram as it does on a 4Gb Vista rig. Anyway my 02c YMMV.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
The history of the web appliance is crash and burn.
There is always something more that makes the full-featured PC the better value.
I have yet to see hard numbers for sales of the gPC at Walmart.
The gPC shipped with a non-functional modem. Walmart has a lot of customers in rural areas and small towns who can afford AOL Essentials at $10/mo but can't get broadband at any price.
BTW the Everex Vista Basic Desktop is $278.
Point is,Vista Home Basic has NONE of the features that your average user will care about,and is JUST AS SLOW on low end hardware as premium.That poor pc thrashed like mad when you would boot it up and averaged 75-90% ram usage constantly.That is of course with default settings,becasue as we know the non-tech users rarely change from default.THIS is why Vista has left a bad taste in everyones mouth.If you buy a new machine with 2Gb+ that was built for Vista,then yes it runs just fine.I have worked on a few of those myself and can attest to the fact.But on low end hardware,like the type that Joe Average finds at Best Buy,Wal Mart,Circuit City,etc it runs like a total dog.And nobody wants to bring home a new pc and have to go make dinner while they wait on the thing to quit thrashing.
As I said in an earlier post WinXP runs wonderfully on weaker hardware such as this,and if MSFT were to keep selling it(along with lowering the license for XP Home for OEMs) they would win simply by inertia.Folks will stick with what they know if they can.But Ballmer is determined that you will take Vista on EVERY pc whether it will run it or not.This is what is hurting Vista more than anything else.And unlike previous versions XP has no major show stopping bugs to make folks give it up for a slower machine.Even Bill gates said Vista would be designed for 4Ghz machines with 4Gb of ram,because that is where they thought the market was heading.I don't believe we will get to that point for a number of years.And I don't believe we will end up with Web appliances either.Because folks like to think they can use their machine for anything,even if all the do is go to Youtube,Facebook,etc.
Anyway this is why I think Vista is a mistake for the sub $500 market,if you actually like Vista Home Basic then congratulations! You are the first person I ever met who does.Of course as always my 02c,YMMV.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
No folks, Ballmer is Google Obsessed. Making money and core business no longer seem to matter for him. Attacking Google (profitably or not) is all he cared about. He'll spend 40-odd bn for Yahoo, but put 5bn into developing Vista (core business). He's just bought Danger (a deliberate attempt at Google Android).
The dumb thing though is that Yahoo is a sinking ship and buying them would only give a small cosmetic market share.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
... just look at their name.
"Follow me" the wise man said, but he walked behind.