Development costs would be higher, but in the long run these systems would be much cheaper to mass-deploy.
Most of these systems, like the US customs box or some specialized equipment, are contracted through a tender. For government agency, who has this program financed it's important that development costs are low to begin with, and that's why the lowest bidder usually gets them.
Your company has been in black for a few quarters and generally has shown good growth tendencies for analysts to give your stock good ratings and Buy recommendations.
Your exit from the desktop Linux market was an attempt to focus the company on enterprise editions, which bring in more contracts and revenues.
How big of a business was desktop Linux for you in the first place and what was your revenue structure in that market? How much do you expect to add to bottom line by concentrating on enterprise market?
I collected them from a bunch of different sources, personal homepages and what's not. I have never worked at Microsoft myself, so the purity of the dictionary is not guaranteed.
I keep a collection of Microsoft Jargon, the MSFT equivalent of the Jargon File. Many words and phrases are so commonday right now, that it's hard to consider it jargon anymore. Many terms are adopted at other corps as well, like BizDev and config.
They currently have an opening for Associate Field Analyst in Las Vegas, NV. Good luck finding anyone willing to visit each and every strip club and bar in town, write down their addresses, and get paid while you're doing it.
Apparently they have been looking for someone to do that since June.
I had not heard about that; I knew their losses had declined over the last few quarters, but I didn't know they ever managed to hit the pont of breaking even. Do you know anything else about this?
MSN, the company's Internet service, posted its first quarterly operating profit since its inception in 1995. It came much sooner than executives had previously predicted. Yusuf Mehdi, corporate vice president in the division, said in a July speech that MSN would reach profitability "in the next couple years."
Then can you explain why Microsoft opted to buy Hotmail instead of developing their own webmail system?
At the time of purchase Microsoft was looking for a search engine and free e-mail. Hotmail was way ahead in the free e-mail rivalry, and since MSFT was going into ISP business to fight AOL, a free e-mail system would boost both Web properties, name recognition and ISP portion of MSN. I think they figured marketing costs into acquiring that many users and figured it was worth it.
If Google was up for sale for 300-500 mil, my suspicion is that MSFT would be there in a jiffy to get a deal. When we're talking billions, you've got to take things into account, like what exactly are you paying for? Google has the largest index, 3.3B pages and good search technologies for Web, images, groups and whatnot. Can you replicate the huge index? Yeah, with some investment in the million-dollar range. Can you replicate the search technologies? More or less yes, with people you already have.
Or why Yahoo! and AOL are still kicking MSN's ass all over the place
Define "kicking ass". MSN was profitable as of last quarter. Yes, took a while to get there with gazillions of dollars spent, but it's in the black now. MSFT has to report to its shareholders on profitability, not market share. I personally use Yahoo! services and prefer them to MSN, but since I don't pay for Yahoo! Mail or Briefcase or Launch videos, I fail to see that MSN is losing money, except some ad revenue.
Other than that I agree with most of the things you've mentioned.
But Microsoft re-brands everything they buy. Maybe I am missing something, but everything in software division gets rebranded with MS logos, graphics and colors, everything in Web division is now called MSN something with butterfly attached.
Buying up Google and running it as a separate company might be a good idea for them, but it would probably be merged into MSN division sooner or later, to avoid the overlap in sales, accounting, marketing, engineering, etc.
Remains to be seen how real the takeover offer was in the first place. Microsoft has thousands of employees and 50 bil in the bank, which pretty much allows them to develop any search technology they want and hire the best people in the industry.
Even the purchases that Microsoft has made usually reflect either small companies with little capital and some interesting technologies (Connectix), or medium-size companies with tons of clients that Microsoft wants access to (Great Plains, Navision). Seeing Microsoft buy Google would also raise all sort of anti-trust concerns due to Google's dominance.
While among the Silicon Valley startups the popular way to get attention is to announce that Microsoft is interested in takeover. Strange to see Google succumb to this tactics of boosting the pre-IPO evaluation price, but perhaps I am wrong on that.
Now, as you probably know, Michael Doyle (Eolas's CEO and sole formal employee as I understand it), wrote to the net about his technology and eventually intent to patent this. So of course people (including me) wrote back informing him of prior arts. I'm not a lawyer but as I understand it one is supposed to disclose to the PTO any relevant prior art for the PTO examiner to assess. Doyle and I exchange letters, and I told him about this embedded capability in Viola, gave him a paper on viola, which contains pointers leading to more information including even the viola browser source code. Doyle ends up mentioning the browsers Cello and Mosaic, but interestingly not Viola! Now, Viola came before both Cello and Mosaic, and non of those two other browsers had any kind of embedded interactive capability at the core of the discussions.
Unlike traditional media, which has a staff responsible for reviewing new books, Slashdot's book reviews are submitted by users. There is little, if any, incentive, to read the books that are worthless or of little value.
This was intended as humor, perhaps misunderstood by moderators. Of course OS-level security (where you depend on underlying OS code) is different from app-level security (where anyone writing the app can introduce serious holes).
it really should, in this day and age come with a good stateful firewall
By not having the firewall in their server product and user product until Windows XP, Microsoft has allowed a cottage industry of independent software vendors to appear that sell such software.
Bundling something complex and of high quality with the product will basically kill off those guys, and give them good reasons for antitrust investigation.
From a different perspective, Microsoft did buy that Romanian security vendor, although an antivirus company, not network security company, but who knows what projects are currently being set up for the team.
Have you tried the Smart Playlist yet??? Winamp could never be so good.
I still don't get it. Yeah, Smart Playlist is cool, I don't use it a lot (I prefer to listen to the whole music library at once), but that's just me.
Not to turn this into a flamewar, but if you have Windows XP + XP Plus + Windows Media Player 9 (yeah, bite me for quoting MS apps), you have the same features via voice recognition. You can launch the WMP9, then say something like "Media Player, play genre Jazz", and get a new playlist with that genre on the fly, or something like "Media Player, play artist Britney Spears" would get you can probably guess what.
And you don't see what Apple has done for the "PC" community, have you???
In general, or with iTunes? I see contribution of Apple and Steve Jobs to the PC market historically, but fail to see that with iTunes specifically.
Apple was late to the digital music player market, and even though in terms of sales they might boast a nice market share, the market saturation is not that high.
Also, from my personal experience - when I got a PDA (first it was Sharp Zaurus, later on - Dell Axim), I stopped using my MP3 player and sold it on Amazon Marketplace, since I couldn't see any value in it. Track management and options are just so much easier on PDA, and you can plug in CompactFlash cards of any size (up to a gig for now, but I never actually had a need to store 20 gigs on a device).
However, what rocks, as far as I know, is being able to listen to an audiobook on PC, then sync to iPod and continue listening where you've left off. According to Steve Jobs' presentation, that was kickass feature. Yeah, no one else does that for now.
Slashdot Mirror
Development costs would be higher, but in the long run these systems would be much cheaper to mass-deploy.
Most of these systems, like the US customs box or some specialized equipment, are contracted through a tender. For government agency, who has this program financed it's important that development costs are low to begin with, and that's why the lowest bidder usually gets them.
Something like this?
Interesting to note that in this book, the author gives a different explanation to Ellison's dressing style.
The suit, Symonds claims, is the way for Ellison to "give a finger" to Silicon Valley's mandatory business casual attire.
Out of 10 analysts it's a healthy mix:
3 - Strong Buy
3 - Buy
4 - Hold
Your company has been in black for a few quarters and generally has shown good growth tendencies for analysts to give your stock good ratings and Buy recommendations.
Your exit from the desktop Linux market was an attempt to focus the company on enterprise editions, which bring in more contracts and revenues.
How big of a business was desktop Linux for you in the first place and what was your revenue structure in that market? How much do you expect to add to bottom line by concentrating on enterprise market?
Chapter 3, Server Types and Security Modes, is available online for free.
I collected them from a bunch of different sources, personal homepages and what's not. I have never worked at Microsoft myself, so the purity of the dictionary is not guaranteed.
I keep a collection of Microsoft Jargon, the MSFT equivalent of the Jargon File. Many words and phrases are so commonday right now, that it's hard to consider it jargon anymore. Many terms are adopted at other corps as well, like BizDev and config.
Among my favorites are Buzzowrd Bingo and FYIV.
They currently have an opening for Associate Field Analyst in Las Vegas, NV. Good luck finding anyone willing to visit each and every strip club and bar in town, write down their addresses, and get paid while you're doing it.
Apparently they have been looking for someone to do that since June.
It was reported just last week, so you might have missed it.
Also available here - Microsoft Says MSN Makes Its First Profit, the exact numbers are somewhere on EDGAR, I am too lazy to dig up.
I could only find this patent belonging to Google. It does not describe PageRank specifically, maybe I was looking in the wrong place.
Then can you explain why Microsoft opted to buy Hotmail instead of developing their own webmail system?
At the time of purchase Microsoft was looking for a search engine and free e-mail. Hotmail was way ahead in the free e-mail rivalry, and since MSFT was going into ISP business to fight AOL, a free e-mail system would boost both Web properties, name recognition and ISP portion of MSN. I think they figured marketing costs into acquiring that many users and figured it was worth it.
If Google was up for sale for 300-500 mil, my suspicion is that MSFT would be there in a jiffy to get a deal. When we're talking billions, you've got to take things into account, like what exactly are you paying for? Google has the largest index, 3.3B pages and good search technologies for Web, images, groups and whatnot. Can you replicate the huge index? Yeah, with some investment in the million-dollar range. Can you replicate the search technologies? More or less yes, with people you already have.
Or why Yahoo! and AOL are still kicking MSN's ass all over the place
Define "kicking ass". MSN was profitable as of last quarter. Yes, took a while to get there with gazillions of dollars spent, but it's in the black now. MSFT has to report to its shareholders on profitability, not market share. I personally use Yahoo! services and prefer them to MSN, but since I don't pay for Yahoo! Mail or Briefcase or Launch videos, I fail to see that MSN is losing money, except some ad revenue.
Other than that I agree with most of the things you've mentioned.
But Microsoft re-brands everything they buy. Maybe I am missing something, but everything in software division gets rebranded with MS logos, graphics and colors, everything in Web division is now called MSN something with butterfly attached.
Buying up Google and running it as a separate company might be a good idea for them, but it would probably be merged into MSN division sooner or later, to avoid the overlap in sales, accounting, marketing, engineering, etc.
Remains to be seen how real the takeover offer was in the first place. Microsoft has thousands of employees and 50 bil in the bank, which pretty much allows them to develop any search technology they want and hire the best people in the industry.
Even the purchases that Microsoft has made usually reflect either small companies with little capital and some interesting technologies (Connectix), or medium-size companies with tons of clients that Microsoft wants access to (Great Plains, Navision). Seeing Microsoft buy Google would also raise all sort of anti-trust concerns due to Google's dominance.
While among the Silicon Valley startups the popular way to get attention is to announce that Microsoft is interested in takeover. Strange to see Google succumb to this tactics of boosting the pre-IPO evaluation price, but perhaps I am wrong on that.
Unlike traditional media, which has a staff responsible for reviewing new books, Slashdot's book reviews are submitted by users. There is little, if any, incentive, to read the books that are worthless or of little value.
Catch a cold and you're out of job!
No thanks, I need more stability, I think I will apply for that VB programmer job.
Print-quality high-res pic of the new player
This was intended as humor, perhaps misunderstood by moderators. Of course OS-level security (where you depend on underlying OS code) is different from app-level security (where anyone writing the app can introduce serious holes).
Once again, wasn't intended as a flamebait.
it really should, in this day and age come with a good stateful firewall
By not having the firewall in their server product and user product until Windows XP, Microsoft has allowed a cottage industry of independent software vendors to appear that sell such software.
Bundling something complex and of high quality with the product will basically kill off those guys, and give them good reasons for antitrust investigation.
From a different perspective, Microsoft did buy that Romanian security vendor, although an antivirus company, not network security company, but who knows what projects are currently being set up for the team.
Have you tried the Smart Playlist yet??? Winamp could never be so good.
I still don't get it. Yeah, Smart Playlist is cool, I don't use it a lot (I prefer to listen to the whole music library at once), but that's just me.
Not to turn this into a flamewar, but if you have Windows XP + XP Plus + Windows Media Player 9 (yeah, bite me for quoting MS apps), you have the same features via voice recognition. You can launch the WMP9, then say something like "Media Player, play genre Jazz", and get a new playlist with that genre on the fly, or something like "Media Player, play artist Britney Spears" would get you can probably guess what.
And you don't see what Apple has done for the "PC" community, have you???
In general, or with iTunes? I see contribution of Apple and Steve Jobs to the PC market historically, but fail to see that with iTunes specifically.
Apple was late to the digital music player market, and even though in terms of sales they might boast a nice market share, the market saturation is not that high.
Also, from my personal experience - when I got a PDA (first it was Sharp Zaurus, later on - Dell Axim), I stopped using my MP3 player and sold it on Amazon Marketplace, since I couldn't see any value in it. Track management and options are just so much easier on PDA, and you can plug in CompactFlash cards of any size (up to a gig for now, but I never actually had a need to store 20 gigs on a device).
However, what rocks, as far as I know, is being able to listen to an audiobook on PC, then sync to iPod and continue listening where you've left off. According to Steve Jobs' presentation, that was kickass feature. Yeah, no one else does that for now.
Oh, you can do that? Thanks for the tip, I didn't realize that was available, I thought the radio selection was pre-selected by Apple and that was it.