Jerry Yang knows that Yahoo's days are toast. He's just messing with Ballmer cuz Ballmer deserves it. Then the top guys at YHOO will cash out and start their own company again. Leaner and meaner.
If Yahoo really wanted to shake off MS, it could have set up a new subdomain and show the strength of loyal Yahoo users who will leave when MS takes over by asking them to sign an online petition saying so. MS will be shock by the numbers, I think.
MS is basically admitting to the world that it cannot build an online empire on its own to take on Google without Yahoo's help, so why shouldn't Yahoo play up its value?
Remember a story a few years ago where Dell basically threatened some city/county in the states that they won't build a plant there unless the government help pay for it. And now they're dumping off those workers that they used as an excuse to get corporate welfare ("we create jobs").
The only thing companies like Dell knows is how to do is play with margins, skim quality, cut worker cost to create a business all for the bottom line for the short term. Their problem is that there are a 1000 other companies around the world now that can put commodity parts together better than they can and for less cost.
Dell and companies like it are nothing special. They create nothing of real value in the long run. They invent nothing. They innovate nothing. They can't even provide basic service when service industry and not manufacturing is about the biggest thing left. It's no wonder their boom and bust follow the same trend and short life span as the dot-com and housing meltdown.
This deal has the same disturbing sense as the single mother unable to find a job and forced to *uck the ugly fat landlord to pay rent.
If the shareholders do not believe in the leaders of the company as chosen by the board. Fine. But if all anyone should care about is the stock value in the moment, isn't that what led to the mortgage meltdown and the economic downturn and consequently Yahoo's current bleak outlook?
Prediction: Yahoo will be taken over. Half of its brightest people will stay to take their chance with MS and toil away anonymously for the next 3 years; the founders and other half smart people will go on to help Google or startup something new. The 16M unique visitors will drop in half. After taking 2-3 years to integrate the back-end technology and infrastructure of the 2 companies, it'll cost MS 3X the original price tag. Consumers will be so confused by the 250 different desktop-tied-in online services and the 500 different names by which they will be called as offered by MicrosofToo that remaining old Yahoo users will finally give up. After Windows 7 flops the new name the entity will be known is Micro-Who?
My advise to Yahoo shareholders: Sell to MS. Then buy Google, AT&T, and VM & network hardware vendor stocks.
If you are writing a doctorate thesis or a novel, or your C*O or director must have that perfect letter head to send out their decree, yeah, MS Office is better for the job. Actually a Mac would be really what you want, since MS actually makes Office better on the Mac than the PC version. And Pages and Keynote from Apple give your professional document templates and presentation on a par, if not better, than most Word and PowerPoints you'll see. Not to mention the additional Adobe design tools you can use to embellish your docs even more.
My IT dept looked at SheerPointless and decided it's not worth the hassle. Yet those Word and Excel files that people sent and re-attached and CC'd/BCC'd round-and-around are the exact reasons why IT limits our mailbox size to the ridiculous, and email server backups now take longer and longer and ever more tape. I've stopped using work emails and Office for things I do not want to delete, since Google practically gives me unlimited space for all my email and documents.
What do people think of wikis? Have you tried Bootcamp, Zoho, or ThinkFree? For a lot of my IT work documentation, especially *live* documents while the project is ongoing, Word to me is just obsolete. There are tons of online/collaboration document/project tools now. All the people outside of Redmond developing these apps in new and novel ways together is a challenge even for a 800-lb gorilla like MS to keep up. For the past 2 years that I've used Google Docs, the improvements have been pretty dramatic, not necessarily in new office features, but in advancing the application platform as a whole to work near flawlessly on all major recent browsers. When was the last groundbreaking, really productivity boosting feature added to Word (that you didn't have to be trained to do)?
It's a race as to who can improve faster to keep ahead of the trends. I say use the right tool for the job, but don't get too attached to one software or hinge your workflow on some particular arcane feature no others have, or you'll end up like places I've worked for where WordPerfect is stil around.
than on FF or IE... so far that has been my experience on my XP on 3 different boxes. If you browse to a site and a pop up comes up that says 'Do you want to install this porn program?' - do you just automatically click OK/Yes? You are offered a choice to decline, just like you are free to turn off your TV or radio on mouthy commentators. It is pretty clear and obvious update screen. At the most this is a trial ware offer, like the Firefox+Google toolbar bundle - THAT is deceptive as well as all other typical software updates from Adobe, Real, or Norton - those don't even tell you clearly what you will be downloading and disguise them in various ways. Big deal over nothing.
I'm sure somebody will port Android to an iPhone. There are too many people with too much free time. If he did it on a cheap iClone from Asia it may be great. If he bought an iPhone to do it I'm sure Apple will pretend they are mad, like they care if people load Windows or Linux on their Macs. Apple still make money. Why stop there? Maybe somebody will port a miniVirtualBox onto it too, and load up multiple OS's just to do it. That would not make people impress by the iPhone hardware at all. Yeah.
It's been 10 years since I picked up a Mandrake CD. Lots of places sell pre-bundled Linux machines now, but I'm still waiting for the Linux desktop market share to rise above miniscule. In the meantime Apple has resurrected from the dead, brought out more innovation and consumer friendly services from behind established players than MSFT+RMAA+Hollywood+Mobile industry combined, and proved that Michael Dell is just a bottom feeder.
A quick Google of 'Gphone games' returned 1 major game - Wifi Army. A quick search for the source code for Wifi Army returned nill. So you think Android developers are just bathing in communal love and sharing really worthy code? Even as they are developing their entries to try to win the $100K top prize in the Android Challenge? Sure... Lots of Macphiles are going ahead with knowledge sharing, NDA or non-NDA. I just learned how to hack the SDK to make it work on a PPC intead of the supposedly required Intel Mac. And tons of open blogs and new forums are forming. And if you've never coded obj-C before, picking up a book is probably a good idea. Online help for any language is spotty and disjointed at best.
How will Google make money in this? Will they get revenue through some deal with the handset manufacturers or some Wifi deals? Ads? On my 19-in monitor I can ignore the crappy site design in 99% of the Web today so I can benefit from 'free' apps like Google Docs. I sure do not want any unwanted ads cluttering up my handheld screen.
The Android emulator sucks. On my PC w/ 2GB RAM it takes 5 minutes for a simple Hello World message to show up. At the same time all other desktop apps responds likes sleeping snail. Hello? Multi-threading? And the other famous sample app - Notepad - sure looks great compared to the other iPhones apps I can gleam around the Web right now. Yeah.
Many people are not so religiously into Us vs. Them. I look forward to checking out a real Gphone and maybe even buy one - people can have more than one toy - if Sun doesn't decide to sue Google and delay a release this year. But before that I'm gonna get an iPhone when the App Store is released, and load some sweet games on it and have fun, and enjoy surfing the web on an open source based (WebKit) browser without the f**king annoying Flash. When I'm done maybe I'll go back to my spare box with the ever changing Linux distro and attempt some more FOSS package compiling.
I keep wondering has Google gone dumb? If their future resides in 'Cloud Comuting' anyway, why bother with an OS? Shouldn't they invest heavily instead into WebKit or Mozilla or their own open browser development to make them into amazing OS-agnostic platforms that will do so much more than today? If CISCO/Sun/Oracle/Novell/VMWare are even half right, the Network will become the Mothership. And looks like Mark Andressen's prediction then may come true too - the Browser will become the Desktop.
Ultimately I don't think iPHone or Gphone need to compete with each other. Just like their desktop counterparts they will always have fans, and people will still buy the iPhone just like they ignore non-iPods. The real challenge will come when Chinese and Tawanese made Linux phones come knocking. That's the great thing about Linux. Somebody else could very well build a better & more solid OS than Android. While a Gphone may sell for 1/3 of an iPhone when it comes out, but if you can get another openly hackable phone for even cheaper and still use Google Apps, Android will just be another distro./d
Thank you for your voice of sanity and moderation. So many comments here focus negatively on what one CANNOT do and not the possibilities of what one CAN do. I don't think I've ever seen a consumer device inspire so much passionate creativity from all angles -anti or pro license restrictions.
WOW this crazy thread / website just crashed my IE7, froze my Firefox 2.0, and Opera 9.2.4 can't even show all the correct format and links. The only browser that is left working and refresh each page the fastest is the Safari 3.0.4 that I'm typing this reply on from my XP. How dare those guys at Apple try to shoot for such quality product! How do you think this discussion will render on all the mobile handsets, mmm?
By open I guess you mean you are going to deploy your finished XNA game to not only the XBox or Windows, but also to the Mac, the iPhone, PS3 & Wii, and all the Linux distros, plus a run-anywhere Java version, is that right? Is that what you mean by 'Open'? Tell me how MS is going to help you compile your game for all those targets? Or do you just mean free/cheap? Yes, the XNA Game Studio EXPRESS is free, the Pro (real) version cost$. Have fun. Thanks for protecting MS monopoly./d
Thank you all for turning against the only realy competition to Windows Mobile. By the time Android gets on 3 phones on the market in NY and LA, MSFT will be eating RIM's territory.
iPhone != PC or typical device. Limited resources; better quality than other handheld/smartphone.
Would somebody give an example of a major killer Java app on a handheld that is actually helping to sell more units and is as popular as iPod/iPhones or known by people who don't use those handsets?
Do people actually believe smacking down something that has yet taken off and other options are better? Think Android is 'open'? It's just Google's Trojan Horse to commoditize hardware (i.e. beat down manufacturer customization unless its their own) and get you to work for them for free to make it so popular every manufactures eventually has support it. Why don't people ask Google to release it's home-grown Linux kernel, their OS, the search engine, and cluster software so we can openly develop with it too? Why do you think Google is using its own VM for Android and not Sun's? When people develop crapware and bloated interpreted programs or sue Apple they will just ruin iPhone's goal to give consumers (not hackers) a truly quality product, and MSFT will simply stand back and laugh at how the open source guys killed off the only real competition threatening MS mobile. When the next gen web browser comes along many apps we think have to go native will probably work just as well over the web. While people here are whining half of the people around the world will be making really cool apps to offer to the average consumers. Instead of bitching somebody smarter than me build an universal JIT Mac OS compiler so other developers can simply package their Java apps to run native on the iPhone from any OS. Don't knock the SDK until you've released a really cool app.
1/ Lots talk here but no one point out a solid business model/plan/reason that will pay for programmers to do the game and earn a living. Will they be providing service and support on these open-source games and game platforms? Since non-work-critical Linux usually get slapped on the cheapest boxes, I don't see them giving you the best gaming experience either. But where is the major open source Linux game project like we have for a distro or other FOSS? What is the Linux equivalent of Halo? I read 5-6 major Linux magazines a month and haven't seen it. So where is the demand? What studies or stats can back up the investment unless one starts coding for one's own enjoyment?
2/ This is Linux - dudes interested in the command line, hacking a config file, tweaking kernels, using free stuff, and coding P** in vi or emacs for Penguin's sakes. Figuring out how to get the NDISWrapper to wrok for the el cheapo WIFI card on my 8-year-old P-II is "game" enough usually for me afterwork. If somebody wrote a 'command console' game it'll probably explode (just a small joke:). But seriously, the super smart graphics guys spent all their brainpower just to get Beryl or Compiz working and pay the bills. No time left to build games.
3/ Don't get me wrong. I love Linux. Although Linux is big in under the hood in most major Internet hosts and portals, it's puzzling to see no major consumer take-home success yet (other than the Everex gPC). I think the fundamental problem is that the FOSS community is still trying to follow the success of exiting markets instead of leapfrogging ahead into the next decade. At the current trend, by the time Linux creep up to respectable desktop and game console consumer numbers, Windows would've already moved on to more Web based SaaS and online gaming. Windows won't dominate the Web/Cloud/mobile futures. That will probably be Google, but I consider Google closed source. Just how many different distros will really compete with Android? In other words, Linux has to build the unexpected next big thing instead of keep thinking how we're going to lure the PS/XBox/Wii gamers away to back to the desktop. Forget the desktop - build a gaming console and game server with new types of games and ways to play! Talking about Linux games is like hoping Linux will someday overtake other mobile device OS - Not Gonna Happen unless you give a really compelling reason. PC gamers will not abandon Windows until you show them a super high quality game that has no equivalent on a platform that they can count on for ever more better titles. That's a tall order. To do that you need to solve Question #1, and so the chicken-egg argument continues...
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Jerry Yang knows that Yahoo's days are toast. He's just messing with Ballmer cuz Ballmer deserves it. Then the top guys at YHOO will cash out and start their own company again. Leaner and meaner.
If Yahoo really wanted to shake off MS, it could have set up a new subdomain and show the strength of loyal Yahoo users who will leave when MS takes over by asking them to sign an online petition saying so. MS will be shock by the numbers, I think.
MS is basically admitting to the world that it cannot build an online empire on its own to take on Google without Yahoo's help, so why shouldn't Yahoo play up its value?
Someday Alibaba will buy MS with chum change.
Remember a story a few years ago where Dell basically threatened some city/county in the states that they won't build a plant there unless the government help pay for it. And now they're dumping off those workers that they used as an excuse to get corporate welfare ("we create jobs").
The only thing companies like Dell knows is how to do is play with margins, skim quality, cut worker cost to create a business all for the bottom line for the short term. Their problem is that there are a 1000 other companies around the world now that can put commodity parts together better than they can and for less cost.
Dell and companies like it are nothing special. They create nothing of real value in the long run. They invent nothing. They innovate nothing. They can't even provide basic service when service industry and not manufacturing is about the biggest thing left. It's no wonder their boom and bust follow the same trend and short life span as the dot-com and housing meltdown.
This deal has the same disturbing sense as the single mother unable to find a job and forced to *uck the ugly fat landlord to pay rent.
If the shareholders do not believe in the leaders of the company as chosen by the board. Fine. But if all anyone should care about is the stock value in the moment, isn't that what led to the mortgage meltdown and the economic downturn and consequently Yahoo's current bleak outlook?
Prediction: Yahoo will be taken over. Half of its brightest people will stay to take their chance with MS and toil away anonymously for the next 3 years; the founders and other half smart people will go on to help Google or startup something new. The 16M unique visitors will drop in half. After taking 2-3 years to integrate the back-end technology and infrastructure of the 2 companies, it'll cost MS 3X the original price tag. Consumers will be so confused by the 250 different desktop-tied-in online services and the 500 different names by which they will be called as offered by MicrosofToo that remaining old Yahoo users will finally give up. After Windows 7 flops the new name the entity will be known is Micro-Who?
My advise to Yahoo shareholders: Sell to MS. Then buy Google, AT&T, and VM & network hardware vendor stocks.
Asus commercial web site runs on Windows back-end. Note the use of ASPX pages - [http://www.asus.com/products.aspx]
correction: meant to say Basecamp, not Bootcamp. duh
If you are writing a doctorate thesis or a novel, or your C*O or director must have that perfect letter head to send out their decree, yeah, MS Office is better for the job. Actually a Mac would be really what you want, since MS actually makes Office better on the Mac than the PC version. And Pages and Keynote from Apple give your professional document templates and presentation on a par, if not better, than most Word and PowerPoints you'll see. Not to mention the additional Adobe design tools you can use to embellish your docs even more.
My IT dept looked at SheerPointless and decided it's not worth the hassle. Yet those Word and Excel files that people sent and re-attached and CC'd/BCC'd round-and-around are the exact reasons why IT limits our mailbox size to the ridiculous, and email server backups now take longer and longer and ever more tape. I've stopped using work emails and Office for things I do not want to delete, since Google practically gives me unlimited space for all my email and documents.
What do people think of wikis? Have you tried Bootcamp, Zoho, or ThinkFree? For a lot of my IT work documentation, especially *live* documents while the project is ongoing, Word to me is just obsolete. There are tons of online/collaboration document/project tools now. All the people outside of Redmond developing these apps in new and novel ways together is a challenge even for a 800-lb gorilla like MS to keep up. For the past 2 years that I've used Google Docs, the improvements have been pretty dramatic, not necessarily in new office features, but in advancing the application platform as a whole to work near flawlessly on all major recent browsers. When was the last groundbreaking, really productivity boosting feature added to Word (that you didn't have to be trained to do)?
It's a race as to who can improve faster to keep ahead of the trends. I say use the right tool for the job, but don't get too attached to one software or hinge your workflow on some particular arcane feature no others have, or you'll end up like places I've worked for where WordPerfect is stil around.
than on FF or IE... so far that has been my experience on my XP on 3 different boxes. If you browse to a site and a pop up comes up that says 'Do you want to install this porn program?' - do you just automatically click OK/Yes? You are offered a choice to decline, just like you are free to turn off your TV or radio on mouthy commentators. It is pretty clear and obvious update screen. At the most this is a trial ware offer, like the Firefox+Google toolbar bundle - THAT is deceptive as well as all other typical software updates from Adobe, Real, or Norton - those don't even tell you clearly what you will be downloading and disguise them in various ways. Big deal over nothing.
I'm sure somebody will port Android to an iPhone. There are too many people with too much free time. If he did it on a cheap iClone from Asia it may be great. If he bought an iPhone to do it I'm sure Apple will pretend they are mad, like they care if people load Windows or Linux on their Macs. Apple still make money. Why stop there? Maybe somebody will port a miniVirtualBox onto it too, and load up multiple OS's just to do it. That would not make people impress by the iPhone hardware at all. Yeah.
It's been 10 years since I picked up a Mandrake CD. Lots of places sell pre-bundled Linux machines now, but I'm still waiting for the Linux desktop market share to rise above miniscule. In the meantime Apple has resurrected from the dead, brought out more innovation and consumer friendly services from behind established players than MSFT+RMAA+Hollywood+Mobile industry combined, and proved that Michael Dell is just a bottom feeder.
A quick Google of 'Gphone games' returned 1 major game - Wifi Army. A quick search for the source code for Wifi Army returned nill. So you think Android developers are just bathing in communal love and sharing really worthy code? Even as they are developing their entries to try to win the $100K top prize in the Android Challenge? Sure... Lots of Macphiles are going ahead with knowledge sharing, NDA or non-NDA. I just learned how to hack the SDK to make it work on a PPC intead of the supposedly required Intel Mac. And tons of open blogs and new forums are forming. And if you've never coded obj-C before, picking up a book is probably a good idea. Online help for any language is spotty and disjointed at best.
How will Google make money in this? Will they get revenue through some deal with the handset manufacturers or some Wifi deals? Ads? On my 19-in monitor I can ignore the crappy site design in 99% of the Web today so I can benefit from 'free' apps like Google Docs. I sure do not want any unwanted ads cluttering up my handheld screen.
The Android emulator sucks. On my PC w/ 2GB RAM it takes 5 minutes for a simple Hello World message to show up. At the same time all other desktop apps responds likes sleeping snail. Hello? Multi-threading? And the other famous sample app - Notepad - sure looks great compared to the other iPhones apps I can gleam around the Web right now. Yeah.
Many people are not so religiously into Us vs. Them. I look forward to checking out a real Gphone and maybe even buy one - people can have more than one toy - if Sun doesn't decide to sue Google and delay a release this year. But before that I'm gonna get an iPhone when the App Store is released, and load some sweet games on it and have fun, and enjoy surfing the web on an open source based (WebKit) browser without the f**king annoying Flash. When I'm done maybe I'll go back to my spare box with the ever changing Linux distro and attempt some more FOSS package compiling.
I keep wondering has Google gone dumb? If their future resides in 'Cloud Comuting' anyway, why bother with an OS? Shouldn't they invest heavily instead into WebKit or Mozilla or their own open browser development to make them into amazing OS-agnostic platforms that will do so much more than today? If CISCO/Sun/Oracle/Novell/VMWare are even half right, the Network will become the Mothership. And looks like Mark Andressen's prediction then may come true too - the Browser will become the Desktop.
Ultimately I don't think iPHone or Gphone need to compete with each other. Just like their desktop counterparts they will always have fans, and people will still buy the iPhone just like they ignore non-iPods. The real challenge will come when Chinese and Tawanese made Linux phones come knocking. That's the great thing about Linux. Somebody else could very well build a better & more solid OS than Android. While a Gphone may sell for 1/3 of an iPhone when it comes out, but if you can get another openly hackable phone for even cheaper and still use Google Apps, Android will just be another distro. /d
Thank you for your voice of sanity and moderation. So many comments here focus negatively on what one CANNOT do and not the possibilities of what one CAN do. I don't think I've ever seen a consumer device inspire so much passionate creativity from all angles -anti or pro license restrictions.
WOW this crazy thread / website just crashed my IE7, froze my Firefox 2.0, and Opera 9.2.4 can't even show all the correct format and links. The only browser that is left working and refresh each page the fastest is the Safari 3.0.4 that I'm typing this reply on from my XP. How dare those guys at Apple try to shoot for such quality product! How do you think this discussion will render on all the mobile handsets, mmm?
By open I guess you mean you are going to deploy your finished XNA game to not only the XBox or Windows, but also to the Mac, the iPhone, PS3 & Wii, and all the Linux distros, plus a run-anywhere Java version, is that right? Is that what you mean by 'Open'? Tell me how MS is going to help you compile your game for all those targets? Or do you just mean free/cheap? Yes, the XNA Game Studio EXPRESS is free, the Pro (real) version cost$. Have fun. Thanks for protecting MS monopoly. /d
Thank you all for turning against the only realy competition to Windows Mobile. By the time Android gets on 3 phones on the market in NY and LA, MSFT will be eating RIM's territory.
iPhone != PC or typical device. Limited resources; better quality than other handheld/smartphone.
Would somebody give an example of a major killer Java app on a handheld that is actually helping to sell more units and is as popular as iPod/iPhones or known by people who don't use those handsets?
Do people actually believe smacking down something that has yet taken off and other options are better? Think Android is 'open'? It's just Google's Trojan Horse to commoditize hardware (i.e. beat down manufacturer customization unless its their own) and get you to work for them for free to make it so popular every manufactures eventually has support it. Why don't people ask Google to release it's home-grown Linux kernel, their OS, the search engine, and cluster software so we can openly develop with it too? Why do you think Google is using its own VM for Android and not Sun's?
When people develop crapware and bloated interpreted programs or sue Apple they will just ruin iPhone's goal to give consumers (not hackers) a truly quality product, and MSFT will simply stand back and laugh at how the open source guys killed off the only real competition threatening MS mobile. When the next gen web browser comes along many apps we think have to go native will probably work just as well over the web. While people here are whining half of the people around the world will be making really cool apps to offer to the average consumers. Instead of bitching somebody smarter than me build an universal JIT Mac OS compiler so other developers can simply package their Java apps to run native on the iPhone from any OS. Don't knock the SDK until you've released a really cool app.
1/ Lots talk here but no one point out a solid business model/plan/reason that will pay for programmers to do the game and earn a living. Will they be providing service and support on these open-source games and game platforms? Since non-work-critical Linux usually get slapped on the cheapest boxes, I don't see them giving you the best gaming experience either. But where is the major open source Linux game project like we have for a distro or other FOSS? What is the Linux equivalent of Halo? I read 5-6 major Linux magazines a month and haven't seen it. So where is the demand? What studies or stats can back up the investment unless one starts coding for one's own enjoyment?
2/ This is Linux - dudes interested in the command line, hacking a config file, tweaking kernels, using free stuff, and coding P** in vi or emacs for Penguin's sakes. Figuring out how to get the NDISWrapper to wrok for the el cheapo WIFI card on my 8-year-old P-II is "game" enough usually for me afterwork. If somebody wrote a 'command console' game it'll probably explode (just a small joke :). But seriously, the super smart graphics guys spent all their brainpower just to get Beryl or Compiz working and pay the bills. No time left to build games.
3/ Don't get me wrong. I love Linux. Although Linux is big in under the hood in most major Internet hosts and portals, it's puzzling to see no major consumer take-home success yet (other than the Everex gPC). I think the fundamental problem is that the FOSS community is still trying to follow the success of exiting markets instead of leapfrogging ahead into the next decade. At the current trend, by the time Linux creep up to respectable desktop and game console consumer numbers, Windows would've already moved on to more Web based SaaS and online gaming. Windows won't dominate the Web/Cloud/mobile futures. That will probably be Google, but I consider Google closed source. Just how many different distros will really compete with Android? In other words, Linux has to build the unexpected next big thing instead of keep thinking how we're going to lure the PS/XBox/Wii gamers away to back to the desktop. Forget the desktop - build a gaming console and game server with new types of games and ways to play! Talking about Linux games is like hoping Linux will someday overtake other mobile device OS - Not Gonna Happen unless you give a really compelling reason. PC gamers will not abandon Windows until you show them a super high quality game that has no equivalent on a platform that they can count on for ever more better titles. That's a tall order. To do that you need to solve Question #1, and so the chicken-egg argument continues...