Archive for the ‘Microsoft’ Category
- In: Bid | Board | Meets | Microsoft | New York Times | on | YAHOO
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Microsoft’s chief executive, Steven A. Ballmer, in persuasion mode before a technology fair in March. Mr. Ballmer is said to have made calls recently with a pitch to large Yahoo shareholders.
Microsoft’s directors met Wednesday to discuss how to proceed with the company’s attempted takeover of Yahoo, according to a person briefed on the discussions.
The board was expected to consider a range of options, including Microsoft raising its offer in an attempt to break the stalemate between the companies, this person said.
In recent days, Microsoft has considered increasing the bid, currently valued at $29.06 a share, to $32 or $33, said this person, who asked not to be identified because he was not authorized to speak about the discussions.
Microsoft’s chief executive Steven A. Ballmer, has personally called some large Yahoo shareholders to get their support for a bid in that range.
But Microsoft executives have been frustrated by signs that such shareholders are holding out for an even higher offer — in the range of $35 to $37 a share. Without that higher offer, those shareholders have been unwilling to press Yahoo’s management into entering serious negotiations, this person said.
A Microsoft spokesman declined to comment.
Earlier in April, Mr. Ballmer threatened to start a proxy fight to oust Yahoo’s board if the two companies did not reach a negotiated deal by April 26. The deadline passed without an agreement or substantive negotiations between the companies.
- In: applications | Business | eyes | Microsoft | Models | new | Office
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Subscription and ad-supported versions of Office applications in the cards
For many computer users around the world when they think of typing a letter or a research paper, the first thing they think of is Word from Microsoft’s Office suite. The problem for buyers of new computers is that the application typically doesn’t come with a new computer and Office costs in the area of $400 for some versions.
In light of the high price for software that many people simply don’t utilize completely, there are a number of open source alternatives taking some of Microsoft’s thunder away because they are free – applications like OpenOffice and Google Docs for example. Google Docs is especially becoming more interesting to users looking for a Microsoft Office alternative thanks to its recently added offline functionality.
To try and gain back some of what it perceives to be market loss, Microsoft is said to be looking at new business models for its Office applications. According to PC World, Microsoft is considering two new access methods for Office applications including a subscription based model and a free ad-supported version of Microsoft Works.
Exactly what the pricing would be on a subscription version of Microsoft Office is unknown, but as PC World points out it would have to be under $33 per month to remain competitive with the straight purchase option. Many would have a hard time stomaching a subscription-based model.
Windows XP SP3 Goes RTM
Posted on: April 24, 2008
- In: center | Download | Goes | Microsoft | RTM | SP3 | Windows | Windows UpdateDailyTech | Windows XP SP3 | XP
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Windows XP SP3 is finally finished
DailyTech reported last week that Service Pack 3 (SP3) for Windows XP would be released to manufacturing (RTM) on April 21. The initial reports from Neowin came true and Microsoft today officially announced SP3.
Microsoft’s Chris Keroack posted the news in the TechNet Forums:
Today we are happy to announce that Windows XP Service Pack 3 (SP3) has released to manufacturing (RTM). Windows XP SP3 bits are now working their way through our manufacturing channels to be available to OEM and Enterprise customers.
We are also in the final stages of preparing for release to the web (i.e. you!) on April 29th, via Windows Update and the Microsoft Download Center. Online documentation for Windows XP SP3, such as Microsoft Knowledge Base articles and the Microsoft TechNet Windows XP TechCenter, will be updated then. For customers who use Windows XP at home, Windows XP SP3 Automatic Update distribution for users at home will begin in early summer.
Thanks to everyone here who installed the public betas — you not only gave us detailed feedback but also helped each other out with timely troubleshooting. Through the beta program we found several important issues and were able to confirm some essential fixes. We couldn’t have done this without you.
We will still be monitoring this forum during the next few weeks in case you have more feedback about the release of Windows XP SP3.
Windows Connect and MSDN/TechNet Subscribers should be able to download soon. The public will have to wait until April 29, however, to download the update from the Microsoft Download Center and Windows Update.
“Rumors about the acquisition of Farecast are accurate – in a very brief blog post CEO Hugh Crean says they’ve been acquired by Microsoft.
SeattlePI, which first broke the rumor last week, says the price tag was $115 million. While the two companies are an understandable fit given their proximity and partnership over MSN Travel, SeattlePI reports that Farecast entertained multiple offers before accepting Microsoft’s.
Farecast is an airfare pricing comparision tool that also uses a predictive algorithm to recommend when you buy your ticket. So the idea is to show the user not just who has the cheapest ticket, but whether or not waiting might make sense as well. The site has also guarantees tickets at its predicted prices for an extra charge. As of this past fall, it also began helping travelers determine the fairness of hotel pricing.
The deal follows the acquisition of competitor SideStep by Kayak in December.
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CrunchBase Information
Farecast
Farecast image
Website: http://www.farecast.com
Location: Seattle, Washington, United States
Founded: January 1, 2003
Acquired: April 17, 2008 by Microsoft for $115M
Farecast offers a unique service by providing its users with intelligent airfare predictions. Founded in 2003, Farecast has since gained very healthy funding from several venture funds totaling $20.6 million. Unlike other travel companies, Farecast… Lea”
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While Microsoft and Yahoo! engage in their odd mating ritual, they are benefiting the very company that is driving them to seek partners. Internet advertisers can’t figure out what the two companies will look like in six months, so search leader Google is set to profit from the confusion.
“We find this to be a very advantageous situation for Google,” Cantor Fitzgerald analyst Derek Brown said Thursday. “The longer this gets dragged out, the better for Google.” He added: “The more complicated a deal gets, the more difficult it becomes to satisfy all parties, and the more complicated the integration gets, the more it favors Google.”
As Yahoo! (nasdaq: YHOO – news – people ) blows hot and cold — more cold — about teaming up with Microsoft and casts around for other partners, the outlook is getting increasingly unclear. “This is the first time that we have seen real feasible alternatives that could derail the Microsoft deal,” said analyst Jeffrey Lindsay of Sanford C. Bernstein.
On Friday, Microsoft’s chief operating officer said at a news conference in Mumbai that his company had made a fair offer to Yahoo! and that no matter what happened with the deal, the company was determined to grow in online advertising capabilities. We believe we’ve made a very fair offer to Yahoo’s board of directors,” Kevin Turner said. “Currently, it’s in their hands to decide the outcome of that offer,” he said.
Turner said Microsoft would “continue to drive market share from a search standpoint within the consumer space, and that’s a strategy we’re committed to in the long term.”
The Yahoo bid was “a tactic and a strategy” toward that end, Turner said.”The rest is now up to their board,” he added. “With or without the acquisition we are committed to becoming a world-class digital-advertising company.”
Yahoo’s resistance to Microsoft’s offer of $31 per Yahoo! share, made on Feb. 1, recently took a turn when Google (nyse: GOOG – news – people ) it announced a two-week “trial advertising” partnership with Yahoo!. The tester program involves Yahoo! allowing Google to show advertising links alongside up to 3.0% of its U.S. search results. (See: ” Yahoo! Gets In Bed With Google“)
- In: AOL | Fence Sitting | Google | Microsoft | Next | Week | YAHOO
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A Yahoo board meeting Friday authorized talks with both Microsoft and Time Warner (AOL) next week.
According to a New York Times report quoting sources, Yahoo’s board met to evaluate Microsoft’s takeover bid and other alternatives but did not make a formal decision on which option to pursue.
The fence sitting from Yahoo provides some solace to Microsoft after a week where an AOL-Yahoo deal was said to be close at hand.
The Times also quoted a “person briefed on the discussions” between News Corp and Microsoft for the former to join the bid for Yahoo as describing the discussions as being only “conceptual..suggesting that a joint bid was unlikely.”
(source img credit: RedBrick Blog)
Bloomberg.com: U.S.
Posted on: April 12, 2008
- In: Bloomberg.com | Google | Microsoft | U.S | YAHOO
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“Yahoo! Inc. directors meet today to consider Microsoft Corp.’s $44.6 billion bid for the Internet company, a person familiar with the talks said.A takeover by Microsoft, the world’s biggest software maker, is the most likely outcome, analysts and shareholders say. The board, which rejected the offer as too low, is weighing its alternatives, said the person, who declined to be named because the meeting is private.Time is running short for Yahoo Chief Executive Officer Jerry Yang to find a solution. Microsoft chief Steve Ballmer threatened a proxy fight in about two weeks if the board didn’t give in. Yahoo has courted Time Warner Inc.’s AOL and is testing advertisements from Google Inc. to thwart Microsoft’s offer.”“Microsoft remains the most motivated and best capitalized alternative for Yahoo,” Stanford Group Co. analyst Clay Moran said in a note yesterday. “A Yahoo-AOL merger does not provide Yahoo shareholders value equivalent to the existing Microsoft bid.” Boca Raton, Florida-based Moran advises investors to hold on to Yahoo shares.A Piper Jaffray & Co. survey of 20 shareholders indicated a majority would favor Microsoft’s cash and stock offer to no deal, analyst Gene Munster said in a note this week.Yahoo, based in Sunnyvale, California, fell 25 cents to $28.34 in Nasdaq Stock Market trading at 4 p.m. New York time. The stock has gained 22 percent this year. Microsoft shares fell 83 cents to $28.28 and have declined 21 percent this year.Yahoo spokeswoman Tracy Schmaler declined to comment, saying the company doesn’t confirm when its board meets.The BoardYahoo’s 10 directors, who are up for re-election at the next shareholder meeting, are split between members who have served for more than a decade and relative newcomers.Yang, Eric Hippeau and Arthur Kern have served on the board since before Yahoo’s initial public offering in April 1996. Kern is an investor in several media and marketing companies, and Hippeau is managing partner of venture capital firm Softbank Capital Partners. Its parent company, Softbank Corp., helped start Yahoo’s European and Japanese operations in 1996.Edward Kozel, who is the CEO of network platform Skyrider Inc. and one of the board’s three trained electrical engineers, joined in 2000. Gary Wilson and Ronald Burkle joined in 2001. Chairman Roy Bostock and Activision Inc. CEO Robert Kotick joined in 2003. Mary Wilderotter, the only woman on the board, and Vyomesh Joshi, an executive vice president at Hewlett- Packard Co., both arrived in the past three years.`First Instinct’“It’s quite possible that the first instinct of people who’ve been there from the outset would be to look to see if keeping the company independent would be viable,” said Jeffrey Lindsay, a New York-based analyst for Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. “The newer members don’t have the same sentiment or associations with the company.”Lindsay predicts Yahoo shares will perform in line with the rest of the market. He doesn’t own stock in Microsoft or Yahoo.Joshi, Kozel, Bostock and Yang weren’t available to comment. Calls made to numbers listed under Arthur Kern weren’t returned. The other directors didn’t return calls seeking comment.Yahoo hasn’t announced the date of its next shareholder meeting. The last occurred June 12, and under Delaware law, the company must hold one every 13 months.Yang’s ChoicesYang’s alternatives may look less appealing to shareholders than a Microsoft takeover. Investors would get cash and stock up front in exchange for their stakes in Yahoo, whose revenue growth has slid. Analysts including UBS AG’s Heather Bellini in New York suggested that Microsoft might even switch to an all- cash offer or raise the bid.The other options are more complex. In an AOL transaction, Yahoo would gain control of the Internet company, receive an investment from Time Warner and give up a 20 percent stake in the combined entity, a person with knowledge of the talks said this week. The investment also would let Yahoo buy back billions of dollars in stock, the person said.Yang, 39, also forged an agreement this week to run some of Google’s advertisements alongside Yahoo’s Internet search results. The deal, which will include no more than 3 percent of search queries during a trial lasting as long as two weeks, may be another way for Yahoo to bolster revenue as an independent company.Lawmakers LookLawmakers already have said they would examine a Yahoo- Google tie-up if it were made permanent, throwing doubt on whether that is a long-term solution for Yahoo investors.The $31-a-share bid was 62 percent more than Yahoo’s closing price Jan. 31. Because of a decline in Microsoft’s shares since then, the purchase is now valued at about $29.94 a share, as of today’s close.Yahoo has recorded eight straight quarters of declining profit as Google took market share and advertising dollars in the online search engine market. Google accounted for 59.2 percent of Internet queries in February, according to Reston, Virginia-based researcher ComScore Inc. Yahoo had 21.6 percent, followed by Microsoft with 9.6 percent.Ballmer is interested in Yahoo because it would boost his company’s slice of the online advertising market, which Microsoft said may nearly double to $80 billion by 2010.Microsoft “is just getting eaten alive in the fastest growing market, which is search,” Larry Haverty, associate portfolio manager at Gamco Investors Inc., said in an interview on Bloomberg Television yesterday. Gamco managed about $31 billion in assets as of Dec. 31, including shares of Microsoft and Yahoo.To contact the reporters on this story: Amy Thomson in New York at athomson6@bloomberg.net; Zachary R. Mider in New York at zmider1@bloomberg.net.
- In: AT and T | Atlanta | Microsoft | New York City | Redmond | San Antonio | San Francisco | Stores | Surface
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Microsoft’s Surface computer will make its commercial debut April 17 in AT&T stores in New York City, Atlanta, San Antonio and San Francisco.
Microsoft first unveiled the Surface back in May 2007; the coffee-table like computer allows touch screen interaction with various surfaces, can recognize objects places on it and even interact with things like mobile phones.
AT&T said it planned to use the Surface to allow customers “to learn about the growing universe of mobile applications and devices.”
I had the opportunity to have a quick play with a Surface earlier this year and it’s one of the cooler things to come out of Redmond in the last 12 months, but I can’t help but wonder: isn’t putting a Surface in an AT&T store like driving an Aston Martin into a Ghetto? To be fair, interacting with a Surface at an AT&T store will be better than trying to interact with AT&T staff; not only will it be quicker (even if you queue for an hour to use it), it will actually be more polite and be able to explain the product its offering competently.
A demo video from May as follows:
Google Search Results Page
Posted on: April 1, 2008
- In: Domain | Google Search Results Page | live | Microsoft | msn | Talk | Television | Trendalyzer | Video | Webmasters | WiFi | wordpress | Writely | Xtra | YAHOO | Your | YouTube.google
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Search Results Page
Your search results page is packed with information. Here’s a quick guide to decoding it.
Each underlined item is a search result that the Google search engine found for your search terms. The first item is the most relevant match we found, the second is the next-most relevant, and so on down the list. Clicking any underlined item will take you to the related web page.
Here’s a sample search results page, along with brief explanations of the various types of information about your results that you can find there.
| A. | Google navigation bar Click the link for the Google service you want to use. You can search the web, browse for images, news, maps and videos, and navigate to Gmail and other Google products. |
| B. | Search field To do a search on Google, just type in a few descriptive search terms, then hit “Enter” or click the “Search” button. |
| C. | Search button Click this button to submit a search query. You can also submit your query by hitting the ‘Enter’ key. |
| D. | Advanced search This links to a page on which you can do more precise searches. [ Learn more about Advanced Search ] |
| E. | Preferences This links to a page that lets you set your personal search preferences, including your language, the number of results you’d like to see per page, and whether you want your search results screened by our SafeSearch filter to avoid seeing adult material. |
| F. | Search statistics This line describes your search and indicates the total number of results, as well as how long the search took to complete. |
| G. | Top contextual navigation links These dynamic links suggest content types that are most relevant to your search term. You can click any of these links in order to see more results of a particular content type. |
| H. | Integrated results Google’s search technology searches across all types of content and ranks the results that are most relevant to your search. Your results may be from multiple content types, including images, news, books, maps and videos. |
| I. | Page title The first line of any search result item is the title of the web page that we found. If you see a URL instead of a title, then either the page has no title or we haven’t yet indexed that page’s full content, but its place in our index still tells us that it’s a good match for your query. |
| J. | Text below the title This is an excerpt from the results page with your query terms bolded. If we expanded the range of your search using stemming technology, the variations of your search terms that we searched for will also be bolded. |
| K. | URL of result This is the web address of the returned result. |
| L. | Size This number is the size of the text portion of the web page, and gives you some idea of how quickly it might display. You won’t see a size figure for sites that we haven’t yet indexed. |
| M. |
Cached |
| N. |
Similar pages |
| O. | Indented result When Google finds multiple results from the same website, the most relevant result is listed first, with other relevant pages from that site indented below it. |
| P. | More results If we find more than two results from the same site, the remaining results can be accessed by clicking on the “More results from…” link. |
| Q. | Plus Box results Clicking the “plus box” icon reveals additional info about your search result. You’ll see this feature for pages related to publicly traded U.S. stocks, local businesses, and Google and YouTube videos. |
| R. | Related search terms Sometimes the best search terms for what you’re looking for are related to the ones you actually entered. Click these related search terms to see alternate search results. |
- In: IEEE | LAN | Microsoft | Security | Technologies | Windows Vista | Wireless
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Benefits of Wireless LANs
Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) 802.11 wireless LAN networking provides the following benefits:
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Wireless connections can extend or replace a wired infrastructure in situations where it is costly, inconvenient, or impossible to lay cables. This benefit includes the following:
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To connect the networks in two buildings separated by a physical, legal, or financial obstacle, you can either use a link provided by a telecommunications vendor (for a fixed installation cost and ongoing recurring costs) or you can create a point-to-point wireless link using wireless LAN technology (for a fixed installation cost, but no recurring costs). Eliminating recurring telecommunications charges can provide significant cost savings to organizations.
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Wireless LAN technologies can be used to create a temporary network, which is in place for only a specific amount of time. For example, the network needed at a convention or trade show can be a wireless network, rather than deploying the physical cabling required for a traditional Ethernet network.
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Some types of buildings, such as historical buildings, might be governed by building codes that prohibit the use of wiring, making wireless networking an important alternative.
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The wiring-free aspect of wireless LAN networking is also very attractive to homeowners who want to connect the various computers in their home together without having to drill holes and pull network cables through walls and ceilings.
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Increased productivity for the mobile employee. This benefit includes the following:
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The mobile user whose primary computer is a laptop or notebook computer can change location and always remain connected to the network. This enables the mobile user to travel to various places—meeting rooms, hallways, lobbies, cafeterias, classrooms, and so forth—and still have access to networked data. Without wireless access, the user has to carry cabling and is restricted to working near a network jack.
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Wireless LAN networking is a perfect technology for environments where movement is required. For example, retail environments can benefit when employees use a wireless laptop or palmtop computer to enter inventory information directly into the store database from the sales floor.
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Even if no wireless infrastructure is present, wireless laptop computers can still form their own ad hoc networks to communicate and share data with each other.
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Easy access to the Internet in public places.
Benefits of Wireless LANs
Support for IEEE 802.11 Standards
Support for IEEE 802.11 Security Standards
Checklists and Resources
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