Slashdot Mirror
AT&T possibly to purchase MSN-No Deal
vab writes "Perhaps looking to further weaken the U.S. Gov't
anti-trust case with another MegaMerger/Deal Microsoft is
in talks with AT&T to sell AT&T MSN and other Microsoft media properties, possibly in exchange
for cash and Windows NT promotion. If the
deal goes though it would make AT&T's WorldNet the second
largest ISP, second only to AOL, and allow Microsoft to dump some yet-to-be-profitable projects. " Apparently, the deal is not going through. Funny thing-AT&T considers the talks to be done, while MS considers the talks to be "on-going".
It is sad but that is how you win the war. It's a PR game these days and it doesn't matter who has the best technology or even who gets the job done quicker, better, and cheaper. It all comes down to how many dollars can you spend to convince your potential customer base that you are the greatest thing since sliced bread compared to how many your competition can spend. Let's look at it this way... OS's like Linux are succeeding and getting into mainstream periodicals WITHOUT spending megabucks on advertising. We should consider ourselves lucky that we're leaking into an arena that Microsoft and other commercial vendors completely dominate because they have vast amounts of resources to (like it or not) buy good press via their advertising dollars.
This news piece leaves out a few noteworthy facts. First, the Citizens for a Sound Economy is hardly a "consumer" group as mentioned, but rather a conservative group that opposes antitrust action in any form.
The piece doesn't mention when the study took place, as I suspect opinions have (and will) change somewhat against M$ over the course of the trial.
And it's also noteworthy that there's a large discrepency between how many in the poll find that M$ should be found innocent, as compared to how many have a favorable view. If 24% want "guilty", and only 44% want "not guilty", there's a heck of a lot of people who don't seem to have knowledge or an opinion either way.
So don't tire in fighting the FUD... it's not too late.
I find it hard to believe that 44% of Americans even _CARE_ about the MS antitrust lawsuit.
Don't get me wrong; I care, and I follow it closely, I'm just wondering how they found a group of Americans, most of whom aren't computer professionals and many of whom don't even own a computer, who cared about something as relatively dry as the MS antitrust suit... Interesting.
But then again aol probably trademarked that one, eh?
I saw the same results on a similiar survey by usa or newsweek or usnews or something. It showed 78% have a favorable impresion of microsoft and 85% favorable impression of Bill Gates. The story was agaisn't microsoft and for the doj but it mentioned that the people will be ferious for picking on poor microsoft. The group may be biased but I believe the poll to accurate. Almost everyone I know loves ms. All my computer friends think Bill did some pretty awefull things but they think anyone who uses linux is nuts. They are undereducated. They just go to www.zdnet.com and see all hype about windows every day and I think people are effected physcologically by hearing and seeing nothing but ms everywhere. This is how people join cults.
Its called brainwashing. In a cult people lose contact to anyone outside their organization. In return all the indivudlas become the group so to speak. This is how islam was spread during the middle ages. Join the church or die. All the christians eventually became muslims over time. It has nothing to do with indivudal beliefs but rather human nature. THis is why I am so in favor of linux users group because it gives uses a chance to think for themselves rather then an eventual conversion to windows. I also blame the computer magazines today for hyping over every ms product. I actually thought windows95 on my 486 was more stable, better written and faster then a dec unix computers because of 2 years of hype. I had a 486 with 8 megs of ram and after I installed windows95 I thought wow this is fast even on a 8 meg machine. I showed my friends and they all thought I was nuts. They said dang! what happened to the speed of your computer! I replied that it tripled in speed and I said that microsoft makes the world best products. My friends said that it slowed down to a crawl and I didn't believe them. The fact is, I had the performance results right in my eyes and I just didn't believe them. My conscious noticed speed and not the performance problems. I was brainwashed. There was only a graphics improvement from win3.1. I later relized that it sucked after it crashed and when I ran office 97 a few months later and my machine went to a standstill. I fell for it because of the hype by the ms marketing department. I can't believe that I was this stupid. I am glad that I use linux now.
Att owned bbnplanet which was a part of "worldnet" then they sold it off to gte.
Umm... Islam was surely spread by fire and sword, as well as by the more traditional cult persuasion techniques. By and large it was not being spread among christians, however. Contrary to popular american predjudice, the entire world didn't start off christian and then sort of wander away from the truth.
Christianity itself spread using these exact same cult persuasion techniques, plus a good dose of fire and sword starting roughly with Constantine.
Off topic? Yes. Pedantic? Yes. Why? I feel I must.
;)
what is AT&T thinking? why would they want MSN? it's lost enough money you'd think it would scare buyers off..
and at&t DID invent unix. they still use it, don't they? actually, it woudn't even be possible for them to use NT, i don't think, seeing as the great complexity of what they do would require a level of flexibility you could only get with open-source software.
i don't think it would exactly help microsoft's case against the government if they forced AT&T to adopt NT. If that isn't hurting rival OSes at the consumer's expense, i don't know what is.
everyone who remembers eWorld, raise your hands?
NT with IIS can only support 50 or so virtual domains. That's one reason it's a fucking joke in the real world where things need done.
I hear it from a little birdie that works for msn, and they already sold the msn in canada to at&t! Just my 2 cents!
I mentioned a few months ago that I saw a poll that showed 80% of all americans favoring Bill Gates and I forgot the name of the source. Well here is another poll. http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2184 293,00.html AND NO THIS IS NOT BY ZDNET!
Depends on how you define standard, I suppose. To my mind the opposite of "proprietary" is "standard". Since MS is proprietary, they can't be standard.
Anybody have a dictionary handy?
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
They've realized that 'net access has become a commodity. Microsoft doesn't want to be in the commodity business (that's why they create non-standard OS's).
MS knows that they have no experience competing on price and service, so the ISP business isn't for them.
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
M$ Lackey: "AT&T doesn't want to buy MSN."
Cap'n Bill: "They're buying it."
Lackey: "Uh.. they said they don't want it."
Bill: "And I said they're buying it. Now go reboot the 500 box NT cluster, I want to play solitaire."
Fascinating that this happens just when MS is dumping more money into ads that say:
"The people who have made your PC fast and reliable with Windows now do the same for your Internet access."
#include <1984.h>
#include <minitruth.h>
#include <doublespeak.h>
while (perception == bad) {
fix_definition("fast");
fix_definition("reliable");
fix_history("Windows", "fast", "reliable");
assert_history("Windows");
}
PS. Wish we could use PRE tags... :(
I keep hearing this statistic about how Windows runs on 90+% of desktop computers.
For some reason, I find it very difficult to find any numbers indicating what percetage of world computers are classified as desktop computers... I dunno, maybe I'm wrong to think that maybe MicroSoft's stuff runs on a minority of the world's computers, but I can't find anything to confirm nor deny.
AT&T using and promoting NT. AT&T, where Unix was written first. Now that'd be ironic. Really ironic, not Alanis-ironic.
they're the only ones that have them on the 64bit platform. they are the only ones that make nt somewhat reliable and somewhat scalable (okay ibm too). and they have good hooks to unix.
--
And Justice for None
people were writing in with their suspicions that this poll was biased towards Microsoft. Sorry no links, but it was Macintouch or MacOSRumors that covered it (forget which one, maybe both).
:-D
It's always a clue a poll is tainted when you're asked to rate something 1 to 5, where for one question 1 means "very much" then the next minute 1 means "very little"..
The only way MSN is ever going to increase membership is if they give the service away FREE. I'll bet Microsoft would be toying with the idea if it weren't for the antitrust trial. Wouldn't want to let the rest of the industry believe it's OK to think for yourself; Netscpe MUST be crushed for trying.. :-/
Of course, AOL is a much bigger fish. I'm waiting to see when Microsoft buys an actual vendor like Micron...
microsoft isn't doing well with msn. aol now has a possible avenue to the desktop (netscape + sun|linux + corel|applix partnership) and a successful cash flow to fund it (isp business). at&t is a huge communication company that could hammer isp sompetition if they had a larger customer base. microsoft now wants to sell msn to at&t *and* get some free promotion. if it goes through, aol and at&t can beat each other up and microsoft ends up with one or two softer semi-competitors - one of which will be quite grateful.
pretty damn smart actually. if the people who wrote code at microsoft were half as smart as the marketting/business folks nt would have multi-year uptimes...
US Citizen living abroad? Register to vote!
FreeBSD rules!
:)
But I'm using Linux just to be with the crowd
Andrew
Ever notice that it's Microsoft that is alwasy doing the buying and selling? I mean, none of the headlines say "AT&T buys MSN" it's "Microsoft sells MSN to AT&T" And, AT&T is only getting coustomers, most of which will probably jump ship when the deal takes place(remember CiS being bought by AOL?) while M$ is getting another media giant to puch M$ standards. That's a good deal who's only price was a service that wasn't profitable anyways.
Why is it that everytime something bad happens on AOL(child porn, stalking, etc.) it's refered to as "the internet"? I mean, how many stories have you read about children being lured out of their homes by 40+ year old men that blantenly happened on AOL and not one mention of AOL in the actually story, and then an editorial about how evil "the internet" is? But when it's something good(the "You've Got Mail" movie, etc.) AOL's name is all over it?
And Clinton...well....that's enough said right there.
Customers purchasing *products*, not ISP services. On a closed system like AOL, one can understand how AOL can get a cut of purchases within their closed system. But on a publicly accessible system like MSN, it unlikely that MSN subscribers patronize MSN sites at any higher rate than non-MSN subscribers. Especially since the default config of MSIE dumps you into MSN through the home page and channel bar, no matter who your ISP is.
Back to the original point - buying MSN is like buying Netcom, minus the equipment and network.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
I thought pretty much all of MSN's services are now availible to every web user, and MSN itself was now a standard PPP dial-in ISP. (No more funky client.) Furthermore, they've got no 'network' of their own, but lease bandwidth on UUnet.
If so, ATT is really not buying a online service, but just buying customers. Who cares.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
I liked AOL or MSN as a whole, just that one aspect...the rest of it can drop off the planet =P
I never thought I would be saying this. But AOL and MSN are good for one reason IMHO. They keep the newbies in one arena for the most part.
The ads say, "I'ts fast and easy". Well it is. Log on and everything is spoon-fed to you. And with all the marketing crammed down everyone's throat, people who are not computer enthusiasts, who just wanna surf and email, AOL and MSN are perfect.
My mother has used MSN for three years or so. She has always been happy with it. She isn't a computer power user or anything. SHe surfs a little and does email. Blam, simple and easy.
I could sit here and ramble for days why i hate MSN and AOL. But I challneged myself to find something positive. This is what I came up with. And I do feel better about it becuase AOL and MSN won't go away anytime soon. And quite frankly all this bitching gets on your nerves after awhile.
So look at it as a place for newbies to stay and gather and leave well alone. Let them hang out in the safe walls of MSN and AOL. SUre, some of them creep out and explore the real Internet world, but soon they go back to thier playpen.
All this post is for is just to make someone laugh or make them "Think Different" about something.
If not, flame me all you want, I could care less.
may have been a bit off the subject.
Call it a vent triggered by the mere mention of MSN and AOL...heh, brainfart mayhap.
Frankly, I'm not suprised at any deal/merger/buyout anymore.
Sure. Microsoft's days are numbered. But the number is probably higher than you can count.
All empires must fall. But now is not the time for Microsoft.
Linux is fantastic, no doubt. But have you noticed that Microsoft makes dozens of fantastic products, that appeal to millions of people, and they are releasing more each day?
Probably not, because the applications and OS don't appeal to you personally.
Have you considered that other people may actually like their products?
No. Microsoft will be around for a long time...
So, if the deal goes through, AT&T has to use NT as its "OS of choice"? It would be amusing to see NT try and run a telephone switch.