The marketplace can define what it considers broadband. Government only needs to ensure there is a marketplace free of monopolies (that's the big reason why things aren't improving). With a free marketplace in operation, people can vote with their wallets for what they consider to be broadband.
Win2k, WinXP SP2, SQL Server 2005, SSIS and SSAS with their related tools, VS2005 and VS2008 (especially 2008),.NET 2.0, 3.0, and 3.5 (1.0 and 1.1 were trash). MSDN in general. Office 2007 (the price may not be right, but the product is good). Windows Powershell. Windows Server 2003. IIS 6 and 7.
These are just the known one that an average Slashdoter MAY have heard about. But there's also a LOT of stuff Microsoft makes that isn't everyday news that are excellent products, too, but I'll leave it at that for now.
But none of these was innovative, they were just improved from previous versions. Except.net, which if I recall right was aimed at other technologies like Java and JSP, perl, php, or Ruby on Rail. Your XP SP2 gives it away, SP2 meaning Service Pack 2. MS had to release SP2 because XP was buggy. And Apple has had something like MSDN for years, the Apple Developer Connection. Linux has had it's versions for years as well. Maybe I'm wrong, but can you say what.net brought that wasn't already available in one form or another?
I don't know if you are in the communications business, but not too long ago, when I was working for an ISP, I clearly remember that last-mile is the most expensive part of a communications system. Since you are not taking into account the density, population and size of the countries, it's hard to understand this. Running fibers or cables to connect the people in US might not be as easy as connecting the people in Canada.
But it's easy, and with high population densities feasable, to run fiber in NYC, Chicago, or LA. With a population of 3.8 million and spanning over 469.1 square miles, round it up to 470 sq miles, LA has more than 8000 people per sq mile. Are many people in these cites able to get Fiber? How about any sort of broadband? If they're lucky they may be able to get both DSL and cable, but I doubt many can get both, and the rare person can get fiber.
Also, given that over half of the households in the US now have broadband access
Where do you get your stats from? According to the OECD, Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, the "United States has the largest total number of broadband subscribers in the OECD at 58.1 million." SiliconValley.com says "the United States had 66.2 million broadband subscribers as of June". The 58.1 millions from the OECD, is less than 20% and is a long way from 50%, and the number from SiliconValley.com isn't much better.
How many houses does 1 mile of fiber service in the US? How many houses does that same 1 mile of fiber service elsewhere?
This would be relevant if it were applied only to rural areas or maybe suburban areas however in cities like NYC, Chicago, or LA with high population densities it makes no sense at all. Thousands if not tens of thousands can be provided service in 1 sq mile in these cities. Yet they aren't.
AT&T is out there trying to legislatively and financially rebuild their monopoly.
However it was one of the baby bells, Bell South, that bought AT&T. Not that it matters much anymore. At least for phone service as many people are switching to using just a cellphone. I now pay less for my cellphone service than I paid for my landline phone. And long distance is included.
Our broadband policy is working great! Might be true, if the average slashdotters policy is to never have sex with a girl, then their policy works GREAT!
No, No, No. The Christian right wants people to reproduce and multiply.
A month or so ago, just for yuks, I checked with Verizon again. They told me that we can't get DSL, because we're too far away. Speakeasy's DLS goes over a line leased from Verizon, of course, since Verizon is the local monopoly. Verizon can't (or more likely won't) supply DSL on their line, but at the moment they're required by law to lease it to other companies. It turns out that two of those companies (Covad and speakeasy) are collaborating to do with Verizon's line what Verizon can't be "arsed" to do.
I wonder if the people at Verizon are ignorant. They're obviously missing out on having you as a customer.
OTOH, Verizon is actively pushing their FIOS in our neighborhood.
In Minneapolis we have both Sprint and Verizon are laying FIOS though it's not widespread yet. Sprint is also rolling out WiMax. What I'd like to see is somebody to lay fiber all over the city then allow anyone to offer services using it. In northeastern Utah a group of communities are doing this and creating a Broadband Utopia. I just wonder how their paying for it, I'd rather not have tax payers left to pay the bills, if you use it pay but those who don't shouldn't have to.
Not necessarily. When you're talking about creating a market like Google's AdSense, having more customers competing for the space is going to raise prices and increase the quality of the ads. And more than doubling your market share, as this purchase would do, is a great way to get more customers. The more market share you can offer them, the more it's worth it for smaller places to bother with putting ads in your system as well as Google's.
However Yahoo! may lose eyeballs if MS buys it. As others have pointed out when MS buys some company they tend to mess it up. Messing up Yahoo! will only drive users to another search engine, like Google. Yahoo! currently uses open source software and has many employees working on OSS. With Ballmer dead set against OSS, he's likely to end that, and switch Yahoo! to MS software. Google can then say, "come over here, we welcome you."
Microsoft has been a decent company, deliver quite a few decent products
What are these good, "decent" products MS has released? The last, only maybe?, product I can think of half way decent product MS released was the Altair BASIC Bill Gates programmed.
And with "decent" I mean software that does what it's supposed to do and is stable and usable. Then again, using that definition I have to say Windows NT4.0 was decent for me.
Not 10 years ago people were proclaiming the death knell for Microsoft because it missed the internet... then they bought "Internet Explorer" and... well you know how that turned out.
It turned out not that great for them, the part where they actually make money, the server market has played out miserably for them because of that mistake.
MS is second in webservers. According to Netcraft as of this month, January 2008, MS's market share for webservers is more than 35%. Port80 reports MS IIS Server is on 55% of the Fortune 1000's servers. Doing a search of webservers iis marketshare shows IIS is gaining market share and Apache is losing it.
Except it's Microsoft who calls themselves an innovator. The Ayn Rand Institute even said during the MS trial that MS should be allowed to innovate. And MS had it's own Freedom to Innovate campaign.
Can they do this against Google? From a customer stand-point I'm not sure. I'm not just going to use Microsoft Search(tm) over Google so long as Google remains free and provides decent results. So Microsoft can't really win there. But they can steal ad revenue from Google by making their business/web-ads side more appealing to businesses. Get that, control the ad market and you'll be able to embrace and extend Google...
However to beat Google in ads a competitor has to deliver more eyeballs. Many people use Google because it's clean and returns relevant search results. MS may have a viable competitor with Live.com but until Google no longer provides decent results I won't switch and I don't think too many others will either. Even when Google doesn't return good results though I still won't use Live, as it is now when Google doesn't return what I'm looking for I use Teoma (now Ask.com), Mooter, or About.com. Once in a while I use Alta Vista.
They started doing this once IBM gave them an exclusive contract to provide MS-DOS for the original IBM PC. By the time Compaq and co. had their clones ready, MS-DOS was the only game in town. Later, when DR-DOS came around, it started making *serious* inroads.
You have things mixed up here, originally IBM went to DR DOS creator Digital Research to create DOS. But because of a disagreement between the two companies IBM eventually went to Microsoft.
I don't see why not - They let Ma Bell reassemble herself, let Adobe buy Macromedia, and so on. Republican administrations do not enforce corporate laws well, and have never been known to enforce anti-monopoly laws.
Another thing most people don't know about is about Republicans and the environment. Most people think Republicans are anti-environmentalists, however it was Teddy Roosevelt who "set aside more land for national parks and nature preserves than all of his predecessors combined, 194 million acres". And Republican President Nixon was the one who created the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
To answer your first question, they are called risk arbitrageurs. They essentially buy the stock of the target company and short sell the stock of the acquiring company
If they are buying stocks then they aren't selling short. Short selling is selling something you don't have in the hopes that it's price will decline. With an option to sell, a put option or just put, something at one price you make money by buying it later at a lower price. In this case it won't work though because MS offered more than the list price. You may be able to make money by buying a call option which allows you to buy something at a set price. When it's price increases you exercise the option then sell at the higher price.
All of Google's other 'betas', picasa, desktop search, 'google office' etc. those are all vulnerable to MS' modus operandi. They can leverage their existing lock-ins to keep people away from those services. Google doesn't have the traction there.
I don't see how MS could prevent people from using these tools Google offers. They are free, can be used online, and at least some, can be used offline as well.
Along comes the internet, and decent PC only games like Doom.
You know, well actually you probably don't, but 10 years ago a statement like that would really have amused a lot of people I knew then seeing as how they said Macs were only good for playing games. I'd get into debates with them about what Macs, and Amigas, were capable of. There were plenty of business apps for Macs but if you still weren't convinced Macs could also run Windows and any Windows program they wanted. As for the Amigas, they could not only run Amiga software but they could also run both Mac and Windows software as well. Using Apple ROM the Amiga would run Mac OS and with an addon card they could run DOS/Windows.
The postive feed back loop gets stronger, pushing traditional Mac developers to switch to PC only releases. Adobe follows suit,
Excuse me but Adobe still releases software, including Creative Suite 3 for Macs. Looking at system requirements CS3 runs on both PPC and Intel Macs. Hundreds if not 1000s of programs are still available for Macs, some of them only come with Mac versions. While not as many titles as there are for Windows, I can find a lot of software for Macs, in brick and mortar stores and online.
Oh yeah - it probably wouldn't be a bad idea to thrown Solitaire into Leopard either.
Apple has more than 700 games Mac users can download, including Solitaire. You know now that I think about it when I used Windows and Linux I spent maybe a quarter of the tyme I was using my PCs playing games, but I haven't spent 1 minute playing any game on my Mac in the 5 months I've had it. I didn't even know chess was on it. There it is, in the application folder, along with MS Office 2004 for Mac test drive.
Silverlight might as well be. I for one don't trust Microsoft will keep up their cross-platform commitment in the slightest; As soon as it's beaten Flash to the ground, the Mac version will mysteriously disappear and the Linux version will be lacking any significant modules. And all other platforms are unable to play the content.
I guess as long as you're willing to admit that you're basing that on your own paranoia rather than the current state of reality then there's not much I can say to argue with it.
There are very good reasons to believe MS will in fact do this. MS has already threatenedApple to discontinue Mac software.
Assuming they keep Yahoo's current net revenue level and scrap their current Online division and its bleeding of red ink, it's going to take several decades to pay off the purchase
It won't take that long for MS to pay off it's purchase of Yahoo! f they do buy it. Microsoft's gross profit for 2007 was $40,429,000,000.
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The marketplace can define what it considers broadband. Government only needs to ensure there is a marketplace free of monopolies (that's the big reason why things aren't improving). With a free marketplace in operation, people can vote with their wallets for what they consider to be broadband.
That's what Ron Paul's position is too.
FalconWin2k, WinXP SP2, SQL Server 2005, SSIS and SSAS with their related tools, VS2005 and VS2008 (especially 2008), .NET 2.0, 3.0, and 3.5 (1.0 and 1.1 were trash). MSDN in general. Office 2007 (the price may not be right, but the product is good). Windows Powershell. Windows Server 2003. IIS 6 and 7.
These are just the known one that an average Slashdoter MAY have heard about. But there's also a LOT of stuff Microsoft makes that isn't everyday news that are excellent products, too, but I'll leave it at that for now.
But none of these was innovative, they were just improved from previous versions. Except .net, which if I recall right was aimed at other technologies like Java and JSP, perl, php, or Ruby on Rail. Your XP SP2 gives it away, SP2 meaning Service Pack 2. MS had to release SP2 because XP was buggy. And Apple has had something like MSDN for years, the Apple Developer Connection. Linux has had it's versions for years as well. Maybe I'm wrong, but can you say what .net brought that wasn't already available in one form or another?
FalconBut it was Microsoft who called themselves innovators.
FalconOn average, the communications infrastructure has to cover a larger area for a given number of people.
Yea, LA only has 3.8 million people in 470 sq miles. At 8000 people per sq mile that's too low a population density. NOT!!!
FalconI don't know if you are in the communications business, but not too long ago, when I was working for an ISP, I clearly remember that last-mile is the most expensive part of a communications system. Since you are not taking into account the density, population and size of the countries, it's hard to understand this. Running fibers or cables to connect the people in US might not be as easy as connecting the people in Canada.
But it's easy, and with high population densities feasable, to run fiber in NYC, Chicago, or LA. With a population of 3.8 million and spanning over 469.1 square miles, round it up to 470 sq miles, LA has more than 8000 people per sq mile. Are many people in these cites able to get Fiber? How about any sort of broadband? If they're lucky they may be able to get both DSL and cable, but I doubt many can get both, and the rare person can get fiber.
FalconAlso, I think it's important to remember that US is larger than other countries.
That does not explain why NYC with a population of millions doesn't have broadband for everyone.
FalconAlso, given that over half of the households in the US now have broadband access
Where do you get your stats from? According to the OECD, Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, the "United States has the largest total number of broadband subscribers in the OECD at 58.1 million." SiliconValley.com says "the United States had 66.2 million broadband subscribers as of June". The 58.1 millions from the OECD, is less than 20% and is a long way from 50%, and the number from SiliconValley.com isn't much better.
FalconHow many houses does 1 mile of fiber service in the US? How many houses does that same 1 mile of fiber service elsewhere?
This would be relevant if it were applied only to rural areas or maybe suburban areas however in cities like NYC, Chicago, or LA with high population densities it makes no sense at all. Thousands if not tens of thousands can be provided service in 1 sq mile in these cities. Yet they aren't.
FalconAT&T is out there trying to legislatively and financially rebuild their monopoly.
However it was one of the baby bells, Bell South, that bought AT&T. Not that it matters much anymore. At least for phone service as many people are switching to using just a cellphone. I now pay less for my cellphone service than I paid for my landline phone. And long distance is included.
FalconOur broadband policy is working great! Might be true, if the average slashdotters policy is to never have sex with a girl, then their policy works GREAT!
No, No, No. The Christian right wants people to reproduce and multiply.
FalconAmerica has plenty of oil, and gas. We have no need for nuculear or alternative power.
Except Bush is pushing for more nuclear power plants to be built, with subsidies.
FalconA month or so ago, just for yuks, I checked with Verizon again. They told me that we can't get DSL, because we're too far away. Speakeasy's DLS goes over a line leased from Verizon, of course, since Verizon is the local monopoly. Verizon can't (or more likely won't) supply DSL on their line, but at the moment they're required by law to lease it to other companies. It turns out that two of those companies (Covad and speakeasy) are collaborating to do with Verizon's line what Verizon can't be "arsed" to do.
I wonder if the people at Verizon are ignorant. They're obviously missing out on having you as a customer.
OTOH, Verizon is actively pushing their FIOS in our neighborhood.
In Minneapolis we have both Sprint and Verizon are laying FIOS though it's not widespread yet. Sprint is also rolling out WiMax. What I'd like to see is somebody to lay fiber all over the city then allow anyone to offer services using it. In northeastern Utah a group of communities are doing this and creating a Broadband Utopia. I just wonder how their paying for it, I'd rather not have tax payers left to pay the bills, if you use it pay but those who don't shouldn't have to.
FalconNot necessarily. When you're talking about creating a market like Google's AdSense, having more customers competing for the space is going to raise prices and increase the quality of the ads. And more than doubling your market share, as this purchase would do, is a great way to get more customers. The more market share you can offer them, the more it's worth it for smaller places to bother with putting ads in your system as well as Google's.
However Yahoo! may lose eyeballs if MS buys it. As others have pointed out when MS buys some company they tend to mess it up. Messing up Yahoo! will only drive users to another search engine, like Google. Yahoo! currently uses open source software and has many employees working on OSS. With Ballmer dead set against OSS, he's likely to end that, and switch Yahoo! to MS software. Google can then say, "come over here, we welcome you."
FalconMicrosoft has been a decent company, deliver quite a few decent products
What are these good, "decent" products MS has released? The last, only maybe?, product I can think of half way decent product MS released was the Altair BASIC Bill Gates programmed.
And with "decent" I mean software that does what it's supposed to do and is stable and usable. Then again, using that definition I have to say Windows NT4.0 was decent for me.
FalconNot 10 years ago people were proclaiming the death knell for Microsoft because it missed the internet... then they bought "Internet Explorer" and... well you know how that turned out.
It turned out not that great for them, the part where they actually make money, the server market has played out miserably for them because of that mistake.
MS is second in webservers. According to Netcraft as of this month, January 2008, MS's market share for webservers is more than 35%. Port80 reports MS IIS Server is on 55% of the Fortune 1000's servers. Doing a search of webservers iis marketshare shows IIS is gaining market share and Apache is losing it.
FalconExcept it's Microsoft who calls themselves an innovator. The Ayn Rand Institute even said during the MS trial that MS should be allowed to innovate. And MS had it's own Freedom to Innovate campaign.
FalconCan they do this against Google? From a customer stand-point I'm not sure. I'm not just going to use Microsoft Search(tm) over Google so long as Google remains free and provides decent results. So Microsoft can't really win there. But they can steal ad revenue from Google by making their business/web-ads side more appealing to businesses. Get that, control the ad market and you'll be able to embrace and extend Google...
However to beat Google in ads a competitor has to deliver more eyeballs. Many people use Google because it's clean and returns relevant search results. MS may have a viable competitor with Live.com but until Google no longer provides decent results I won't switch and I don't think too many others will either. Even when Google doesn't return good results though I still won't use Live, as it is now when Google doesn't return what I'm looking for I use Teoma (now Ask.com), Mooter, or About.com. Once in a while I use Alta Vista.
FalconThey started doing this once IBM gave them an exclusive contract to provide MS-DOS for the original IBM PC. By the time Compaq and co. had their clones ready, MS-DOS was the only game in town. Later, when DR-DOS came around, it started making *serious* inroads.
You have things mixed up here, originally IBM went to DR DOS creator Digital Research to create DOS. But because of a disagreement between the two companies IBM eventually went to Microsoft.
FalconI don't see why not - They let Ma Bell reassemble herself, let Adobe buy Macromedia, and so on. Republican administrations do not enforce corporate laws well, and have never been known to enforce anti-monopoly laws.
Actually one of the early monopoly and trust busters, was Theodore, Teddy, Roosevelt, a Republican though his appointed successor William Howard Taft "began the most of the anti-trust proceedings".
Another thing most people don't know about is about Republicans and the environment. Most people think Republicans are anti-environmentalists, however it was Teddy Roosevelt who "set aside more land for national parks and nature preserves than all of his predecessors combined, 194 million acres". And Republican President Nixon was the one who created the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
FalconTo answer your first question, they are called risk arbitrageurs. They essentially buy the stock of the target company and short sell the stock of the acquiring company
If they are buying stocks then they aren't selling short. Short selling is selling something you don't have in the hopes that it's price will decline. With an option to sell, a put option or just put, something at one price you make money by buying it later at a lower price. In this case it won't work though because MS offered more than the list price. You may be able to make money by buying a call option which allows you to buy something at a set price. When it's price increases you exercise the option then sell at the higher price.
FalconAll of Google's other 'betas', picasa, desktop search, 'google office' etc. those are all vulnerable to MS' modus operandi. They can leverage their existing lock-ins to keep people away from those services. Google doesn't have the traction there.
I don't see how MS could prevent people from using these tools Google offers. They are free, can be used online, and at least some, can be used offline as well.
FalconAlong comes the internet, and decent PC only games like Doom.
You know, well actually you probably don't, but 10 years ago a statement like that would really have amused a lot of people I knew then seeing as how they said Macs were only good for playing games. I'd get into debates with them about what Macs, and Amigas, were capable of. There were plenty of business apps for Macs but if you still weren't convinced Macs could also run Windows and any Windows program they wanted. As for the Amigas, they could not only run Amiga software but they could also run both Mac and Windows software as well. Using Apple ROM the Amiga would run Mac OS and with an addon card they could run DOS/Windows.
The postive feed back loop gets stronger, pushing traditional Mac developers to switch to PC only releases. Adobe follows suit,
Excuse me but Adobe still releases software, including Creative Suite 3 for Macs. Looking at system requirements CS3 runs on both PPC and Intel Macs. Hundreds if not 1000s of programs are still available for Macs, some of them only come with Mac versions. While not as many titles as there are for Windows, I can find a lot of software for Macs, in brick and mortar stores and online.
Oh yeah - it probably wouldn't be a bad idea to thrown Solitaire into Leopard either.
Apple has more than 700 games Mac users can download, including Solitaire. You know now that I think about it when I used Windows and Linux I spent maybe a quarter of the tyme I was using my PCs playing games, but I haven't spent 1 minute playing any game on my Mac in the 5 months I've had it. I didn't even know chess was on it. There it is, in the application folder, along with MS Office 2004 for Mac test drive.
FalconSilverlight might as well be. I for one don't trust Microsoft will keep up their cross-platform commitment in the slightest; As soon as it's beaten Flash to the ground, the Mac version will mysteriously disappear and the Linux version will be lacking any significant modules. And all other platforms are unable to play the content.
I guess as long as you're willing to admit that you're basing that on your own paranoia rather than the current state of reality then there's not much I can say to argue with it.
There are very good reasons to believe MS will in fact do this. MS has already threatened Apple to discontinue Mac software.
Falconshould Google do anything in response to this announcement?
No!
FalconAssuming they keep Yahoo's current net revenue level and scrap their current Online division and its bleeding of red ink, it's going to take several decades to pay off the purchase
It won't take that long for MS to pay off it's purchase of Yahoo! f they do buy it. Microsoft's gross profit for 2007 was $40,429,000,000.
Falcon