This is not poker. There are (very valid) analogies you can draw, but this is not a game for MS or Yahoo.
It's still a game. The stakes are survival, but that just means it's a serious game. Whatever dude. You say game, I say survival - whatever. Original posters point about this being a poker game was:
Personally I suspected Microsoft's offer might be fake pretty early on. And that's what I was debating (in addition to all the other stuff backing up that claim). I already conceded that your poker analogy is valid and can be applied to just about anything in life. Anything can be called a game. Is that your point? If so, let me repeat - consider it conceded.
Well why not? They can work out that yahoo will probably not go for the bait and that this will affect their ability to function. If they balk, use the instability to poach some talent (and don't spend the $44B). If they go for it, you've bought some of your competition, perhaps at a premium, but you now have a big chunk of the market. If it's low probability and you can take the hit, then go for it. ???
Sorry if I sound rude, but I honestly find this amusing, and also symptomatic of/. thinking in all matters MS. When you think super-high-level or are just feeling intellectually lazy, a statement like that seems to actually make sense, but when you actually think about it -- it completely falls apart. Let me explain...
Affecting their ability to function: Mergers/acquisitions cause instability - this is true. But the instability that really matters comes when the deal actually goes through (the 'realizing the synergy' part). Until then, people don't jump ship en-masse. Yahoo might be a bit bloated, but it's still a company, complete with divisions, sub-divisions, hierarchy, etc. and people know their jobs. Their roles didn't change overnight when MS offered 44B. They aren't running helter-skelter not knowing what to do right now.
Using the instability to poach talent: Even if we assume that this 'instability' causes mass exodus, talent poaching is much more targetted than this. Of the 16,000 working at Yahoo, there's probably 1% of them that have the talent that can help MS in this field (i.e. MS minus Yahoo). The ones who have the vision to know how to develop online presence, or the technical prowess to improve the quality/efficiancy of MS's services. These are the people MS needs, and the odds that they have a knee-jerk reaction to an acquisition offer are fairly low -- people of this quality do a poor headless chicken impression. MS's silicon valley base is very small, so only a fraction of the defectors will go to MS. Just picking up anybody who leaves yahoo for MS achieves nothing. If MS could fix their problems by just making up the numbers they would have already done that.
If it's low probability and you can take the hit, then go for it.: I don't even know what to say. A $44B bet is basically betting the company. For literally the first time ever, MS will not have surplus cash at its disposal and would have to borrow money to complete an acquisition. For at least a couple of years they won't be able to sink billions into unhealthy units that they expect to turn around in the long run (like say the xbox division) unless they take loans. From what angle does this look like 'a hit they can afford to take'? The fact that MS's stock only lost about 10% since the acquisition news and Yahoo's stock jumped almost 60% indicates that the shareholders (the ones whose money is where their mouth is) think this is nothing but good for yahoo, and risky but workable for MS. MS execs themselves must have shat a mountain before making the offer. Make no mistake: if they acquire yahoo and the integration goes sour, they are foobar'd.
This is not poker. There are (very valid) analogies you can draw, but this is not a game for MS or Yahoo. MS has realized for a while that their Windows+office business model is slowly getting obsoleted, and they have maybe 2 more release cycles they can safely rely on. They know what they need to shift to, but they've had very little success in getting a foothold. But they are refusing to give up, because they probably realize that if they do not succeed on the web, they will eventually just disappear into the ether. This is a company with a very healthy balance sheet, that has realized the challenges it faces before the balance sheet went south. I don't know how else to convince you that MS is in a fight for its survival, and not a poker game.
No, a 44B offer is absolutely a poker bet. Just because the numbers are big doesn't mean that the rules change. Poker is about psychology, and that doesn't vary with the stakes. That's more of a universal statement, than something that applies to this topic. When you look at it that way anything/everything/nothing (whatever you prefer) can be looked at as a poker game.
But I seriously doubt that the acquisition offer began with Ballmer and the other top dogs saying "let's screw with yahoo's mind, because we can, and by our machinations we could actually get yahoo to disintegrate and we'll snap up 5% of the online ad revenue market in the process".
In any case, going along with your poker anology, keep in mind that poker is not just psychology. It's also got a bit of cold hard math. The online ad revenue martket is projected to reach $80bn/year soon. Yahoo has 20% of this market. Assuming they maintain parity after the merger, that's 16B/year -- a 44B investment is recovered in 3 years.
Yahoo's been losing market share so maintaining parity isn't a given. Yahoo's brand is stronger than MSN/Windows Live, but nowhere close to Google. And Yahoo has been on the decline. But the synergies can actually be made to work in this case. And I don't mean that in a management-jargon-bs kind of way. If you consider the online properties MS and Yahoo have, you'll notice in terms of just actual presence and features, they are at parity (search, ads, mail, auction, photos, blogging, the list goes on..). Now that's where the synergy comes in -- there are common problems that yahoo and MS have been solving idependantly to offer these services: Cost of storage, fault tolerance, log compression, analytics, indexing, search algorithms, etc. etc. There's bound to be at least an 80% overlap in their technologies for dealing with these issues. The other 20% is where both sides get rapid gains.
Some of the synergies come even more easily. Maybe they discover that MS's ad-platform is better than yahoo's (or vice-versa). It can be plugged into yahoo's pages without it's users ever noticing a thing. Just the back-end provider changed, but the relevancy (and hence monetization) shot up overnight. Same is possible with search too.
Some cost-cutting will probably come easily as well. By yahoo's own admission at 16,000 people, the company is quite bloated (and they had layoffs recently to prove it). Some job cuts are almost guaranteed.
Now the acquisition offer has been rejected by yahoo, so for now this is a moot point. But even if it had been accepted it would be foolish to suggest that the advangates are easy to achieve, or without risk -- no, it would be a hard grind for both parties. Handling Yahoo's brand correctly and delicately is the part MS is most likely to fuck up. But they themselves must surely be aware that they are woefully bad in this department, and yahoo is light-years ahead of them, so it makes sense that they would defer to Yahoo and let them lead the way in this area (otherwise what's the point of this acquisition).
Bottom line: to suggest that the offer was nothing but a poker bluff intended to mentally disintegrate yahoo and magically pick up 5% when this happens is just nuts! It's a gross oversimplification, and puts too much stock in the "ms always has malicious intent" line of thought.
Disclaimer: I think most of my numbers are close to the truth in this post, but I didn't really bother to look them up:P
Personally I suspected Microsoft's offer might be fake pretty early on. I don't know man -- a 44 billion dollar offer isn't something you treat like a game of poker. And MS hasn't backed down yet either. 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.
It actually does sounds a lot like that.. talks with Google (for ads and search), Newscorp, AOL etc. but then turning down MS's offer. This is getting curiouser and curiouser by the day..
Seriously, wtf is Sony gonna do, at *worst* - cut you off from some games or movies? Now think about the worst-case of a company whose technology controls 90% of computers. But MS doesn't produce any content. So they have no control over who chooses to set the ICT bit and who doesn't. HDCP is only going to come into play when you're playing back hi-def content from a blu-ray or hd-dvd disk.
Ok, so the DRM isn't as intrusive as Gutmann said, but it is still there, and intrudes when you play back "premium content", right? Pretty close: HDCP is an encrypted link between your device and your monitor/TV. Most of it is in your graphics card -- but yes, the HDCP implementation is still a part of the system. "Premium content" (like say bonus features) is what's incorrect there. On a non-HDCP compliant system, while viewing media with the ICT bit set you will be able to view your entire movie, and bonus features -- but your playback will be limited to a resolution of 960x540 (finally looked it up:P). On media without the ICT bit set, there is nothing you can't do.
And how do you know that the Reduced functionality mode is actually gone? No idea about that. Just wanted to address the DRM issue I keep hearing about on/.
Maybe I am pissed at the whole industry, then. I am not going to get a Blu-Ray or HD-DVD player until Helios Labs makes one without the DRM. I think you made the right choice there:). Of course, note that if Helios does come out with such a player, it's going to have the drawback I mentioned above (reduced resolution for media with ICT bit set). If it doesn't, it means Helios have implemented HDCP.
Apple has already implemented HDCP in Leopard: http://arstechnica.com/reviews/hardware/aluminum-and-glass-a-review-of-the-new-imac.ars From the link: "There's also HDCP support built in, so future support for Blu-ray and HD DVD is not out of the question." I had read a more direct reference on Apple's site but I couldn't find that link right now.
Please don't interpret this as an anti-Apple rant though. Rather, as I said in my original post, get pissed at the entire industry, or nobody at all.
Apple never had a choice in the matter, and neither did MS. If you want your system to play HD-DVD or BluRay media once the ICT bit is set, you have to have HDCP support otherwise the playback resolution has to be degraded.
Whether you implement this in software or hardware (firmware) of course, is entirely up to you.
Correct. But that means that if you want to watch BluRay or HD-DVD on your linux machine you have the following options:
- Only watch media that doesn't have the ICT bit set (we are at the publishers mercy on this one as to when they decide to set it)
- Come up with an HDCP implementation for Linux systems (yes -- that's DRM)
- Watch HD media with the ICT bit set, at a degraded resolution of roughly 950x550 (I forget the exact numbers) instead of 720p or 1080p.
Like I said, get mad at the entire industry or don't bother getting mad at all. Singling out MS isn't going to achieve anything if defeating DRM is your goal.
Didn't bother to read the links before posting a rebuttal right?:)
Your media tank does indeed provide an HDCP path. Either that, or when the ICT bit is set on media shipped in 2010 onwards, your playback will degrade to roughly 950x550.
The nutshell version. If you're mad at Vista for including HDCP support -- Leopard, the PS3, or any HD-DVD or BluRay player on the market has it as well. Get pissed at the entire industry or don't bother getting pissed at all.
In fact, the MSN (Windows Live) group in MS is rumored to have a head count of about 4,000. Yahoo has 16,000 employees. So in terms of cash, this is your normal big-fish-eats-little-fish type acquisition, but in terms of the business units affected, it's quite the other way around.
Considering Yahoo is light years ahead of MS in their online presence, branding, number of visitors etc., its highly unlikely that MS will try to make yahoo more like MSN -- the other way around makes much more sense. And if that's indeed the case, then it's more of a situation of MS's cash influx helping yahoo (and consequently MS) in the long run.
Microsoft has a google fixation? Or envy complex??
MS woke up late to the internet. Once they woke up, their attempts at gaining a foothold were more or less unsuccessful. The offer on Yahoo is just them realizing that their web strategy needs a course correction pronto. They've built a good search engine (live.com) and ad-platform, but they can't monetize it right now because nobody goes there. Acquiring Yahoo is one of they ways to solve that problem. Yahoo has other assets that will tie in well with a software+services strategy.
It's really that simple. MS realizes that its business model is under threat, and it's making adjustments before the pain is felt rather than after. No fixation, no envy -- just business as usual.
Here is what I wonder: How will the suites that provide emulation and Windows-compatible API hosts deal with Vista? lol.. that's easy -- the EU will force MS to sell all their IP for the APIs to interested parties for 10,000 Euros, and they will keep rejecting the API documentation until it's practically the same as handing over the code itself. Author of TFA will be posting on/. in glee when that happens.
I checked Live.com the day it was announced. When it bitched about not using IE (when I tried to login my passport account) , I never visited it back. Dude, live.com has been multi-browser since day one. The passport sign-in page is a common one no matter which site you are signing in from -- and has always worked with just about every browser out there -- it's just a simple user/password login page.
They can't live with the fact that there is a thing called HTML standard, TCPIP standard and Internet is platform neutral from beginning. IE8 builds are already passing ACID 2. Windows' TCP/IP stack is completely standards compliant (they used BSD's stack).
They use every opportunity to alienate other OS/Browser users. Dude, they invited the FF guys to redmond to prep. firefox for Vista changes. The FF devs had very positive things to say about the experience.
Ok, now that we're done with all the MS-bashing points:
Yes: yahoo's search engine has never been that great. live.com however is a pretty good search engine. The problem for MS? Nobody uses it, therefore they can't monetize it. Same case for all MS's online properties -- they've worked really hard on making a good search engine, but they can't monetize shit until they actually start getting user clicks. That's what this acquisition is about.
It's not going to be easy. It's going to take serious balls and serious hard work to execute. MS's online branding is woefully bad, so they need to have the sense to defer to Yahoo's strategy on that. There are many things that can go wrong. But none of them are for the reasons you stated.
Oh, and this is a *good* thing for us. Just as MS's (previously) unchallenged stake in desktop OSes was a bad thing, Google's unchallenged stake in search is a bad thing.
What's the point? The DoJ has achieved less real change in the past decade than the EU has achieved in past two years. I don't understand. What is the purpose of the consent decree? Is it to enable other companies to compete, or is it to reduce Microsoft's market share by any means necessary?
The reason I ask: your statement (requesting 'real change') reminds me of what Neelie Koroes (EU judge) said when MS threw in the towel in Europe: "You can't draw a line and say exactly 50 (percent) is correct, but a significant drop in market share is what we would like to see"
Both statements don't seem to make sense. If the EU or the US DOJ look at MS's dominance they can easily see 2 key factors to it. Proprietary file formats and proprietary protocols. It's also easy to see how this came to be -- technology generally outpaces the law, and there are no (or few) laws regarding interoperability/openness of file formats and protocols. Passing such laws (to be adhered to by all companies, not just MS) would have been a much more just solution. Having done that, if MS maintained it's market share, well, good for them. If Apple or Linux started dominating, good for them. But make sure all players are playing by the same rules. Looking at market share as a metic for fairness of competition makes no sense. That implies that the guy with the largest market share is always the most unethical competitor, the larger their share the more unethical they are, and at some (undefinable) threshold of un-ethical-ness they suddenly need to be penalized!
I think that extends even to issues such as bundling software into the OS, and having exclusivity contracts with OEMs (for loading OSes on their machines). If its illegal for MS, it should be illegal for everybody. If it's ok for anyone, it should be ok for MS as well. I mean, looking at the way Apple is on fire these days, maybe in 10 years from now, Apple will go past say 60% of the PC market and be on its way to say 90%. At that point will the DOJ and EU come up with another set of arbitrary rules to cripple Apple until their market share falls below 50%? The EU have already gone after Apple over the iTunes/iPod lock-in and Apple just about managed to get out of that particular tight spot. Regulations governing opening of file-formats and protocols for all companies would easily cover all these issues without having to come up with arbitrary rules specific to each company. After that, if any company manages to hold on to 90% of a market, it will definitely be because they are doing a better job. But penalizing MS becuase the law was trailing waay behind technology makes no sense.
And this is especially important for the 'bundling' issue. Exclusivity contracts are a completely run of the mill thing in business. It makes no sense that a contract that is compeltely legal/ethical/unremarkable at 10% market share becomes unethical/extortion at 90%. What's much worse -- there is no defined threshold at which this type of contract becomes illegal, and to complicate matters further, such a threshold may or may not be crossed depending on how you define the market. How on earth is a company supposed to know when a particular action, which was perfectly legal for say the last 10 years, has suddenly become illegal even if no new law was passed regarding it?
Man.. this antitrust stuff stinks.. Bandaid in law is just as bad as bandaid in code..
DRM requires that you give the key to the attacker to allow for the legitimate uses, enabling the key to be intercepted and used for (in the distributors eyes) illegitimate purposes Again, not true, but I understand your point (i.e. that existing DRM technologies don't take fair use into account, and need to be circumvented by whatever means (not necessarily the one you describe) to ensure your rights.
I think thats the meat of the DRM argument. That's where we as consumers need protection. We need the courts/government to step in a very clearly legislate something along the lines of:
- Identifying Fair Use (a, b, c,..., constitute 'fair use' for media types x, y, z,...)
- Enforcing Fair Use in DRM schemes (no company may implement a DRM scheme for x, y, z media types that does not respect rights a, b, c,...)
- Preventing lock-in/enforcing interoperability (formats f1, f2, f3,... must be supported and inter-operable with said DRM schemes.)
Now once we have that, consumers really have no reason to object to DRM, and companies have no reason not to distribute their media through multiple digital channels. Now DRM schemes will always be circumventable at some cost or the other. But once the DRM schemes themselves respect fair use rights, there's nothing getting in the way of companies/artists/whoever that want to sue people for infringement. Plus, DRM's job is only to keep the infringement at a manageable number (say 5% of sales), at which point going after offenders isn't really worth the effort.
Having said that, there's still the whole pricing issue. The beauty of it is, this is a completely irrelevant issue as far as DRM is concerned, yet it gets brought into the picture so often. The point being, if a label prices tracks unreasonably and people are unable to pirate the tracks, the tracks will not sell well and the label loses. They chose to price themselves out of the market and the customers chose not to buy something they could not afford. But being unable to infringe (pirate) the tracks, they did not obtain the tracks from any other source -- fair enough. OTOH, if some label prices its tracks correctly, they will sell well, customers are happy, label makes money. Bottom line: Price and DRM are not related. But DRM and Fair Use and Interoperability are.
All DRM tries to work by hiding the Implementation - Universally, it fails. That's not true. Obfuscation is just one of the layers in any DRM system (and also in security in general). Relying on obfuscation alone is what's bad practice -- not the presence of obfuscation itself.
DRM technologies work on essentially the same principles as PGP. The content being protected will usually be encrypted/decrypted using a symmetric key. This key is then protected using PKI (i.e. the content key is encrypted using each user's private key) -- that's the key management part of it.
I do agree that given the open nature of open source, I don't see how it's possible to come up with a viable DRM stack. I mean, if someone comes up with a working implementation, the code is out there in the open, so it's dirt simple to just take that stack itself, remove all protection mechanisms from it, recompile, and now you can attach debuggers/plugins to your DRM-enabled application to capture the data once it's decrypted.
The wattage doesn't actually make a difference. It's the voltage that'll make the difference between a bearable shock and your hair standing on end.
To simplify, your body has a more or less fixed resistance (and capacitance). So voltage will decide what kind of current passes through you, and that's what you're experiencing as 'shock'. A 110V shock is generally going to be a (relatively) bearable jolt. A 220V shock (Europe, most of Asia) will get an instant cat-on-a-hot-tin-roof reaction.
Microsoft is huge, bigger in revenue than IBM, and enormously rich. Actually MSFT's revenue was 54B last year and IBM's revenue was 96B. In terms of headcount too, IBM is a vastly larger company than MSFT and has it's fingers in many more pies.
Many things in, say, Java, or C are "deprecated". That does not relieve a developer of the need to implement those features anyway in order to maintain backward compatibility with older documents/programs. As a programmer, if you rely on a deprecated class/method/member/keyword/anything you're really painting yourself into a corner. It's happened several times in the past that Java has made good on its deprecation promises.
I don't know if you're talking from the perspective of developing a compiler. I guess that would make sense, since that would involve implementing the standard (for whichever language) which is what this whole topic is about. And I can understand a compiler developer being forced to extend support for deprecated features for backwards compatibility reasons. But having given notice they are well within their rights to yank it, and for any actively maintained codebase replacing the deprecated parts shouldn't be that difficult.
So where this might become relevant to the current discussion: does anyone know what office 2007 uses 'FormatLikeWord95' for? i.e. is it used for backwards compatibility when saving documents to be read by word 95. If so that would mean that most documents generated by office 2k7 will not use this feature, and most OOXML implementations could safely leave it out, thereby accelerating it's obsolescence.
Now -- would you care to tell us who you are and who you actually work for "Anonymous"? Just for the record, AC wasn't me, and I don't work for MS. Not sure why that's needed to qualify my statements. If you were an OOo developer your comments would get more weight, not less.
Deprecated actually means 'marked for obsolescence'. i.e. you take a fairly large risk by relying on deprecated parts of a standard, because you have been given notice that they will not be supported in future implementations.
I did read those parts of the article. There's an important distinction to make there. His stance is definitely not anti-DRM in the parts you quote. Here's why I think so:
When we first went to talk to these record companies -- you know, it was a while ago. It took us 18 months. And at first we said: None of this technology that you're talking about's gonna work. We have Ph.D.'s here, that know the stuff cold, and we don't believe it's possible to protect digital content. This is not anti-DRM (in a pro consumer sense). This is just talking about the difficulty of implementing DRM. True enough, it's not easy. However, the purpose of any DRM system is not to be 100% unhackable. It's just to make hacking sufficiently difficult/expensive/inconvenient to make the effort not worth it, for a majority of customers. FairPlay does that job well. So this line parses as "at first we told the record companies that DRM-protection is not technically feasible, and then...". Please note - I'm not saying Jobs is saying/implying anything evil here. My only point is, that to read this as pro-consumer, and anti-DRM isn't right either.
What's new is this amazingly efficient distribution system for stolen property called the Internet -- and no one's gonna shut down the Internet. And it only takes one stolen copy to be on the Internet. And the way we expressed it to them is: Pick one lock -- open every door. It only takes one person to pick a lock. Worst case: Somebody just takes the analog outputs of their CD player and rerecords it -- puts it on the Internet. You'll never stop that. Similar case here. Here he's talking about how DRM alone is no guarantee for eliminating piracy. A working business model that is compelling to consumers is more important. Again, he's perfectly correct in this assessment, but to read it as anti-DRM is again not accurate. It's merely a call for correcting the business model, instead of just relying on DRM
We said: These [music subscription] services that are out there now are going to fail. Music Net's gonna fail, Press Play's gonna fail. Here's why: People don't want to buy their music as a subscription. They bought 45's; then they bought LP's; then they bought cassettes; then they bought 8-tracks; then they bought CD's. They're going to want to buy downloads. People want to own their music. There is nothing anti-DRM in this quote at all. This is just a case for online music sales (i.e. describing a working business model, to replace the failed one above).
I think the bottom line is: you and I can certainly disagree on the finer points of what Jobs meant, and whether his hands were tied by the RIAA in terms of what exactly he could say, etc. But to interpret this interview as "Jobs was publicly arguing against DRM in 2003" (from Daniel's original post in this conversation) is certainly a stretch. That's what I was pointing out. There are many people who have really put their necks on the line for a lot longer to fight DRM. Now that their work is (very slowly) starting to pay off, it's a little upsetting to see it all distorted like this so that the credit (or any credit at all) goes to Steve Jobs. We on slashdot ourselves have probably done more against DRM (through educating people, and making a stink about it where ever possible) than Steve Jobs has.
Your last paragraph I mostly agree with. Jobs didn't get to where he did without being sharp as a tack. The links at the end are hard to understand though. It's like you're throwing bait at me to defend OneCare or Vista (unrelated to this conversation), or Kindle and the Big Dig (that are even less on-topic).
Google "Steve Jobs 2003 RollingStone" or read the links I provided So I re-read the rolling stone interview. Not one anti-DRM stance in the entire article.
I'm sure you find it more convenient to repeat what you think you know. I'm sure you find it more convenient to invent an anti-DRM stance on Job's behalf where one didn't exist.
Apple didn't owe Real's shitty DRM any handout. Real didn't ask for one. They tried to license FairPlay (licensing = pay money for IP. handout = alms for beggar). Apple was not interested in interoperability because they had (and still have) the market by the balls. Does this behavior remind you of a particular company you love to despise?
Had Apple supported Real or WMA... Real did not want support. They reverse engineered FairPlay. Apple did not decline support. They willfully made modifications to break Real. Does this behavior remind you of a particular company you love to despise?
..., there wouldn't be any market for MP3 commercial music from the big labels, there'd only be worse DRM with more restrictions than Apple's, not less. That's fairly non-sequitor. Real was merely trying to open the market (to keep themselves from being locked out). How does an open market translate to more DRM? The labels would not have cared about Real's reverse-engineering, because Real did not strip the DRM from the track.
Chew on that until you get it. I can always count on you to keep it friendly.
Daniel Lyons Cries Wolf... Unfortunately, that's all you ever do. The world (and Apple and Microsoft) are simply not as black and white as you seem to think. Chew on that until you get it.
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Sorry if I sound rude, but I honestly find this amusing, and also symptomatic of /. thinking in all matters MS. When you think super-high-level or are just feeling intellectually lazy, a statement like that seems to actually make sense, but when you actually think about it -- it completely falls apart. Let me explain...
Affecting their ability to function: Mergers/acquisitions cause instability - this is true. But the instability that really matters comes when the deal actually goes through (the 'realizing the synergy' part). Until then, people don't jump ship en-masse. Yahoo might be a bit bloated, but it's still a company, complete with divisions, sub-divisions, hierarchy, etc. and people know their jobs. Their roles didn't change overnight when MS offered 44B. They aren't running helter-skelter not knowing what to do right now.
Using the instability to poach talent: Even if we assume that this 'instability' causes mass exodus, talent poaching is much more targetted than this. Of the 16,000 working at Yahoo, there's probably 1% of them that have the talent that can help MS in this field (i.e. MS minus Yahoo). The ones who have the vision to know how to develop online presence, or the technical prowess to improve the quality/efficiancy of MS's services. These are the people MS needs, and the odds that they have a knee-jerk reaction to an acquisition offer are fairly low -- people of this quality do a poor headless chicken impression. MS's silicon valley base is very small, so only a fraction of the defectors will go to MS. Just picking up anybody who leaves yahoo for MS achieves nothing. If MS could fix their problems by just making up the numbers they would have already done that.
If it's low probability and you can take the hit, then go for it.: I don't even know what to say. A $44B bet is basically betting the company. For literally the first time ever, MS will not have surplus cash at its disposal and would have to borrow money to complete an acquisition. For at least a couple of years they won't be able to sink billions into unhealthy units that they expect to turn around in the long run (like say the xbox division) unless they take loans. From what angle does this look like 'a hit they can afford to take'? The fact that MS's stock only lost about 10% since the acquisition news and Yahoo's stock jumped almost 60% indicates that the shareholders (the ones whose money is where their mouth is) think this is nothing but good for yahoo, and risky but workable for MS. MS execs themselves must have shat a mountain before making the offer. Make no mistake: if they acquire yahoo and the integration goes sour, they are foobar'd.
This is not poker. There are (very valid) analogies you can draw, but this is not a game for MS or Yahoo. MS has realized for a while that their Windows+office business model is slowly getting obsoleted, and they have maybe 2 more release cycles they can safely rely on. They know what they need to shift to, but they've had very little success in getting a foothold. But they are refusing to give up, because they probably realize that if they do not succeed on the web, they will eventually just disappear into the ether. This is a company with a very healthy balance sheet, that has realized the challenges it faces before the balance sheet went south. I don't know how else to convince you that MS is in a fight for its survival, and not a poker game.
But I seriously doubt that the acquisition offer began with Ballmer and the other top dogs saying "let's screw with yahoo's mind, because we can, and by our machinations we could actually get yahoo to disintegrate and we'll snap up 5% of the online ad revenue market in the process".
In any case, going along with your poker anology, keep in mind that poker is not just psychology. It's also got a bit of cold hard math. The online ad revenue martket is projected to reach $80bn/year soon. Yahoo has 20% of this market. Assuming they maintain parity after the merger, that's 16B/year -- a 44B investment is recovered in 3 years.
Yahoo's been losing market share so maintaining parity isn't a given. Yahoo's brand is stronger than MSN/Windows Live, but nowhere close to Google. And Yahoo has been on the decline. But the synergies can actually be made to work in this case. And I don't mean that in a management-jargon-bs kind of way. If you consider the online properties MS and Yahoo have, you'll notice in terms of just actual presence and features, they are at parity (search, ads, mail, auction, photos, blogging, the list goes on..). Now that's where the synergy comes in -- there are common problems that yahoo and MS have been solving idependantly to offer these services: Cost of storage, fault tolerance, log compression, analytics, indexing, search algorithms, etc. etc. There's bound to be at least an 80% overlap in their technologies for dealing with these issues. The other 20% is where both sides get rapid gains.
Some of the synergies come even more easily. Maybe they discover that MS's ad-platform is better than yahoo's (or vice-versa). It can be plugged into yahoo's pages without it's users ever noticing a thing. Just the back-end provider changed, but the relevancy (and hence monetization) shot up overnight. Same is possible with search too.
Some cost-cutting will probably come easily as well. By yahoo's own admission at 16,000 people, the company is quite bloated (and they had layoffs recently to prove it). Some job cuts are almost guaranteed.
Now the acquisition offer has been rejected by yahoo, so for now this is a moot point. But even if it had been accepted it would be foolish to suggest that the advangates are easy to achieve, or without risk -- no, it would be a hard grind for both parties. Handling Yahoo's brand correctly and delicately is the part MS is most likely to fuck up. But they themselves must surely be aware that they are woefully bad in this department, and yahoo is light-years ahead of them, so it makes sense that they would defer to Yahoo and let them lead the way in this area (otherwise what's the point of this acquisition).
Bottom line: to suggest that the offer was nothing but a poker bluff intended to mentally disintegrate yahoo and magically pick up 5% when this happens is just nuts! It's a gross oversimplification, and puts too much stock in the "ms always has malicious intent" line of thought.
Disclaimer: I think most of my numbers are close to the truth in this post, but I didn't really bother to look them up
It actually does sounds a lot like that.. talks with Google (for ads and search), Newscorp, AOL etc. but then turning down MS's offer. This is getting curiouser and curiouser by the day..
Apple has already implemented HDCP in Leopard: http://arstechnica.com/reviews/hardware/aluminum-and-glass-a-review-of-the-new-imac.ars
From the link: "There's also HDCP support built in, so future support for Blu-ray and HD DVD is not out of the question." I had read a more direct reference on Apple's site but I couldn't find that link right now.
Please don't interpret this as an anti-Apple rant though. Rather, as I said in my original post, get pissed at the entire industry, or nobody at all.
Apple never had a choice in the matter, and neither did MS. If you want your system to play HD-DVD or BluRay media once the ICT bit is set, you have to have HDCP support otherwise the playback resolution has to be degraded.
Whether you implement this in software or hardware (firmware) of course, is entirely up to you.
Correct. But that means that if you want to watch BluRay or HD-DVD on your linux machine you have the following options: - Only watch media that doesn't have the ICT bit set (we are at the publishers mercy on this one as to when they decide to set it) - Come up with an HDCP implementation for Linux systems (yes -- that's DRM) - Watch HD media with the ICT bit set, at a degraded resolution of roughly 950x550 (I forget the exact numbers) instead of 720p or 1080p. Like I said, get mad at the entire industry or don't bother getting mad at all. Singling out MS isn't going to achieve anything if defeating DRM is your goal.
Didn't bother to read the links before posting a rebuttal right? :)
Your media tank does indeed provide an HDCP path. Either that, or when the ICT bit is set on media shipped in 2010 onwards, your playback will degrade to roughly 950x550.
Time to do some FUD-busting ;)
Everything you've read about Vista's DRM is wrong:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=299
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=304
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=309
The nutshell version. If you're mad at Vista for including HDCP support -- Leopard, the PS3, or any HD-DVD or BluRay player on the market has it as well. Get pissed at the entire industry or don't bother getting pissed at all.
(posted something similar earlier, but I'll repeat it anyway)
- Yahoo has more frequent visitors than any MS website
- Yahoo has more online properties of value (games.yahoo.com, flickr, groups, launch, many more)
- Yahoo has a waay larger employee headcount compared to MS's online business division
- Yahoo's branding strategy and customer loyalty is waay higher.
- The Yahoo! brand doesn't have an image problem (people like Yahoo or are more or less neutral about it)
On the other hand..- MS has a huge branding problem with it's online properties
- A lot of people aren't even aware of most of these properties
- Hotmail and MSN.com are probably MS's only sites that get as many clicks as any of Yahoo's sites -- but they can't be monetized.
So why would MS pay 44B for yahoo only to turn it into MSN?In fact, the MSN (Windows Live) group in MS is rumored to have a head count of about 4,000. Yahoo has 16,000 employees. So in terms of cash, this is your normal big-fish-eats-little-fish type acquisition, but in terms of the business units affected, it's quite the other way around.
Considering Yahoo is light years ahead of MS in their online presence, branding, number of visitors etc., its highly unlikely that MS will try to make yahoo more like MSN -- the other way around makes much more sense. And if that's indeed the case, then it's more of a situation of MS's cash influx helping yahoo (and consequently MS) in the long run.
Microsoft has a google fixation? Or envy complex??
MS woke up late to the internet. Once they woke up, their attempts at gaining a foothold were more or less unsuccessful. The offer on Yahoo is just them realizing that their web strategy needs a course correction pronto. They've built a good search engine (live.com) and ad-platform, but they can't monetize it right now because nobody goes there. Acquiring Yahoo is one of they ways to solve that problem. Yahoo has other assets that will tie in well with a software+services strategy.
It's really that simple. MS realizes that its business model is under threat, and it's making adjustments before the pain is felt rather than after. No fixation, no envy -- just business as usual.
Ok, now that we're done with all the MS-bashing points:
Yes: yahoo's search engine has never been that great. live.com however is a pretty good search engine. The problem for MS? Nobody uses it, therefore they can't monetize it. Same case for all MS's online properties -- they've worked really hard on making a good search engine, but they can't monetize shit until they actually start getting user clicks. That's what this acquisition is about.
It's not going to be easy. It's going to take serious balls and serious hard work to execute. MS's online branding is woefully bad, so they need to have the sense to defer to Yahoo's strategy on that. There are many things that can go wrong. But none of them are for the reasons you stated.
Oh, and this is a *good* thing for us. Just as MS's (previously) unchallenged stake in desktop OSes was a bad thing, Google's unchallenged stake in search is a bad thing.
The reason I ask: your statement (requesting 'real change') reminds me of what Neelie Koroes (EU judge) said when MS threw in the towel in Europe: "You can't draw a line and say exactly 50 (percent) is correct, but a significant drop in market share is what we would like to see"
Both statements don't seem to make sense. If the EU or the US DOJ look at MS's dominance they can easily see 2 key factors to it. Proprietary file formats and proprietary protocols. It's also easy to see how this came to be -- technology generally outpaces the law, and there are no (or few) laws regarding interoperability/openness of file formats and protocols. Passing such laws (to be adhered to by all companies, not just MS) would have been a much more just solution. Having done that, if MS maintained it's market share, well, good for them. If Apple or Linux started dominating, good for them. But make sure all players are playing by the same rules. Looking at market share as a metic for fairness of competition makes no sense. That implies that the guy with the largest market share is always the most unethical competitor, the larger their share the more unethical they are, and at some (undefinable) threshold of un-ethical-ness they suddenly need to be penalized!
I think that extends even to issues such as bundling software into the OS, and having exclusivity contracts with OEMs (for loading OSes on their machines). If its illegal for MS, it should be illegal for everybody. If it's ok for anyone, it should be ok for MS as well. I mean, looking at the way Apple is on fire these days, maybe in 10 years from now, Apple will go past say 60% of the PC market and be on its way to say 90%. At that point will the DOJ and EU come up with another set of arbitrary rules to cripple Apple until their market share falls below 50%? The EU have already gone after Apple over the iTunes/iPod lock-in and Apple just about managed to get out of that particular tight spot. Regulations governing opening of file-formats and protocols for all companies would easily cover all these issues without having to come up with arbitrary rules specific to each company. After that, if any company manages to hold on to 90% of a market, it will definitely be because they are doing a better job. But penalizing MS becuase the law was trailing waay behind technology makes no sense.
And this is especially important for the 'bundling' issue. Exclusivity contracts are a completely run of the mill thing in business. It makes no sense that a contract that is compeltely legal/ethical/unremarkable at 10% market share becomes unethical/extortion at 90%. What's much worse -- there is no defined threshold at which this type of contract becomes illegal, and to complicate matters further, such a threshold may or may not be crossed depending on how you define the market. How on earth is a company supposed to know when a particular action, which was perfectly legal for say the last 10 years, has suddenly become illegal even if no new law was passed regarding it?
Man.. this antitrust stuff stinks.. Bandaid in law is just as bad as bandaid in code..
I think thats the meat of the DRM argument. That's where we as consumers need protection. We need the courts/government to step in a very clearly legislate something along the lines of: ..., constitute 'fair use' for media types x, y, z, ...) ...) ... must be supported and inter-operable with said DRM schemes.)
- Identifying Fair Use (a, b, c,
- Enforcing Fair Use in DRM schemes (no company may implement a DRM scheme for x, y, z media types that does not respect rights a, b, c,
- Preventing lock-in/enforcing interoperability (formats f1, f2, f3,
Now once we have that, consumers really have no reason to object to DRM, and companies have no reason not to distribute their media through multiple digital channels. Now DRM schemes will always be circumventable at some cost or the other. But once the DRM schemes themselves respect fair use rights, there's nothing getting in the way of companies/artists/whoever that want to sue people for infringement. Plus, DRM's job is only to keep the infringement at a manageable number (say 5% of sales), at which point going after offenders isn't really worth the effort.
Having said that, there's still the whole pricing issue. The beauty of it is, this is a completely irrelevant issue as far as DRM is concerned, yet it gets brought into the picture so often. The point being, if a label prices tracks unreasonably and people are unable to pirate the tracks, the tracks will not sell well and the label loses. They chose to price themselves out of the market and the customers chose not to buy something they could not afford. But being unable to infringe (pirate) the tracks, they did not obtain the tracks from any other source -- fair enough. OTOH, if some label prices its tracks correctly, they will sell well, customers are happy, label makes money. Bottom line: Price and DRM are not related. But DRM and Fair Use and Interoperability are.
DRM technologies work on essentially the same principles as PGP. The content being protected will usually be encrypted/decrypted using a symmetric key. This key is then protected using PKI (i.e. the content key is encrypted using each user's private key) -- that's the key management part of it.
I do agree that given the open nature of open source, I don't see how it's possible to come up with a viable DRM stack. I mean, if someone comes up with a working implementation, the code is out there in the open, so it's dirt simple to just take that stack itself, remove all protection mechanisms from it, recompile, and now you can attach debuggers/plugins to your DRM-enabled application to capture the data once it's decrypted.
The wattage doesn't actually make a difference. It's the voltage that'll make the difference between a bearable shock and your hair standing on end.
To simplify, your body has a more or less fixed resistance (and capacitance). So voltage will decide what kind of current passes through you, and that's what you're experiencing as 'shock'. A 110V shock is generally going to be a (relatively) bearable jolt. A 220V shock (Europe, most of Asia) will get an instant cat-on-a-hot-tin-roof reaction.
I don't know if you're talking from the perspective of developing a compiler. I guess that would make sense, since that would involve implementing the standard (for whichever language) which is what this whole topic is about. And I can understand a compiler developer being forced to extend support for deprecated features for backwards compatibility reasons. But having given notice they are well within their rights to yank it, and for any actively maintained codebase replacing the deprecated parts shouldn't be that difficult. So where this might become relevant to the current discussion: does anyone know what office 2007 uses 'FormatLikeWord95' for? i.e. is it used for backwards compatibility when saving documents to be read by word 95. If so that would mean that most documents generated by office 2k7 will not use this feature, and most OOXML implementations could safely leave it out, thereby accelerating it's obsolescence.
Now -- would you care to tell us who you are and who you actually work for "Anonymous"? Just for the record, AC wasn't me, and I don't work for MS. Not sure why that's needed to qualify my statements. If you were an OOo developer your comments would get more weight, not less.Deprecated actually means 'marked for obsolescence'. i.e. you take a fairly large risk by relying on deprecated parts of a standard, because you have been given notice that they will not be supported in future implementations.
Rick,
When we first went to talk to these record companies -- you know, it was a while ago. It took us 18 months. And at first we said: None of this technology that you're talking about's gonna work. We have Ph.D.'s here, that know the stuff cold, and we don't believe it's possible to protect digital content. This is not anti-DRM (in a pro consumer sense). This is just talking about the difficulty of implementing DRM. True enough, it's not easy. However, the purpose of any DRM system is not to be 100% unhackable. It's just to make hacking sufficiently difficult/expensive/inconvenient to make the effort not worth it, for a majority of customers. FairPlay does that job well. So this line parses as "at first we told the record companies that DRM-protection is not technically feasible, and then...". Please note - I'm not saying Jobs is saying/implying anything evil here. My only point is, that to read this as pro-consumer, and anti-DRM isn't right either.I did read those parts of the article. There's an important distinction to make there. His stance is definitely not anti-DRM in the parts you quote. Here's why I think so:
What's new is this amazingly efficient distribution system for stolen property called the Internet -- and no one's gonna shut down the Internet. And it only takes one stolen copy to be on the Internet. And the way we expressed it to them is: Pick one lock -- open every door. It only takes one person to pick a lock. Worst case: Somebody just takes the analog outputs of their CD player and rerecords it -- puts it on the Internet. You'll never stop that. Similar case here. Here he's talking about how DRM alone is no guarantee for eliminating piracy. A working business model that is compelling to consumers is more important. Again, he's perfectly correct in this assessment, but to read it as anti-DRM is again not accurate. It's merely a call for correcting the business model, instead of just relying on DRM
We said: These [music subscription] services that are out there now are going to fail. Music Net's gonna fail, Press Play's gonna fail. Here's why: People don't want to buy their music as a subscription. They bought 45's; then they bought LP's; then they bought cassettes; then they bought 8-tracks; then they bought CD's. They're going to want to buy downloads. People want to own their music. There is nothing anti-DRM in this quote at all. This is just a case for online music sales (i.e. describing a working business model, to replace the failed one above).
I think the bottom line is: you and I can certainly disagree on the finer points of what Jobs meant, and whether his hands were tied by the RIAA in terms of what exactly he could say, etc. But to interpret this interview as "Jobs was publicly arguing against DRM in 2003" (from Daniel's original post in this conversation) is certainly a stretch. That's what I was pointing out. There are many people who have really put their necks on the line for a lot longer to fight DRM. Now that their work is (very slowly) starting to pay off, it's a little upsetting to see it all distorted like this so that the credit (or any credit at all) goes to Steve Jobs. We on slashdot ourselves have probably done more against DRM (through educating people, and making a stink about it where ever possible) than Steve Jobs has.
Your last paragraph I mostly agree with. Jobs didn't get to where he did without being sharp as a tack. The links at the end are hard to understand though. It's like you're throwing bait at me to defend OneCare or Vista (unrelated to this conversation), or Kindle and the Big Dig (that are even less on-topic).
I'm sure you find it more convenient to repeat what you think you know. I'm sure you find it more convenient to invent an anti-DRM stance on Job's behalf where one didn't exist.
Apple didn't owe Real's shitty DRM any handout. Real didn't ask for one. They tried to license FairPlay (licensing = pay money for IP. handout = alms for beggar). Apple was not interested in interoperability because they had (and still have) the market by the balls. Does this behavior remind you of a particular company you love to despise?
Had Apple supported Real or WMA... Real did not want support. They reverse engineered FairPlay. Apple did not decline support. They willfully made modifications to break Real. Does this behavior remind you of a particular company you love to despise?
..., there wouldn't be any market for MP3 commercial music from the big labels, there'd only be worse DRM with more restrictions than Apple's, not less. That's fairly non-sequitor. Real was merely trying to open the market (to keep themselves from being locked out). How does an open market translate to more DRM? The labels would not have cared about Real's reverse-engineering, because Real did not strip the DRM from the track.Chew on that until you get it. I can always count on you to keep it friendly.
Daniel Lyons Cries Wolf... Unfortunately, that's all you ever do. The world (and Apple and Microsoft) are simply not as black and white as you seem to think. Chew on that until you get it.