Tag Archives: “Microsoft”
Yahoo is Screwed
So Yahoo officially announced that its talks with Microsoft have concluded they have once again failed to reach any kind of deal. There are reports that Yahoo may soon announce a search deal with Google. They’ll basically be outsourcing search to Google. Throwing away a core competency key to its long-term success for short-term gain. In my eyes I feel like Yahoo really botched this whole thing.
Digg Looking for Buyers
So TechCrunch recently reported that Digg is looking to be acquired. Note that this is not official and is an unconfirmed report. Among the parties bidding on Digg are Microsoft and Google. I think it’s about time and if Digg doesn’t sell soon, it’s going to have to lower its expectations more and more. Honestly, apart from their “algorithm” which can easily be reproduced or emulated, there’s nothing special about Digg other than its large user base. That in itself is not a unique advantage. Yahoo just released a similar site called Buzz and I think Yahoo can find ways to leverage its massive user base and channel traffic through Buzz.
Microsoft Offers to Buy Yahoo for $44.6 Billion
Well I fire up my RSS reader and of course the big news everybody is talking about this morning is Microsoft’s proposed acquisition of Yahoo. I always thought this would be a good thing considering there’s just no way Microsoft by itself can compete with Google in search. Microsoft’s share is just too small and while Yahoo is ailing, it has lots of valuable assets and web properties (aside from the obvious main Yahoo portal), hence the enormity of the offer. If it happens, it would be one of the largest, if not the largest tech takeover. Microsoft can probably fund a huge chunk of this acquisition using cash they have on hand.
Thinking About Picking Up a Zune
I’m looking into purchasing a Zune 8GB player. The 80GB version is too big for my taste. I’d like something light that will fit comfortably in my pocket. Plus I don’t need to carry around that many songs at any given time. The only reason I’m not opting for a iPod Nano is because it doesn’t have FM radio, which I’ll probably use half the time.
IE8 Passes Acid2 Test
Many of us web designers/developers never thought we’d witness Internet Explorer pass the Acid2 rendering test but Microsoft announced yesterday via IEBlog that their internal version of IE8 has done just that. Now if they could push this browser out sooner, it’d be great because the sooner IE6 gets ditched, the better.
Facebook Valued At $10 Billion?!
So apparently Microsoft is in talks with Facebook to possibly buy a 5% stake in Facebook that would value the company at $10 billion. Read that again - yes, $10 billion. Google has expressed interest as well. Give me a break. Bubble bobble..
Internet Explorer 7
So I’ve been holding off installing IE7 mainly because with my work, I still need to do a lot of compatibility testing in IE6 and there really wasn’t any elegant solutions for running IE6 and IE7 side by side, at least not until recently. Microsoft made their Virtual PC 2004 software free which allows you to run other operating systems simultaneously. They also released a free image of Windows XP SP2 with IE6 that will last until April 2007. This allows web developers to run both IE6 and IE7 simultaneously and since I’ve slowly started receiving client requests for IE7 compatibility, I thought might as well take the plunge.
Xbox 360
I’ve been gaining interest in purchasing a next-gen console, specifically the Xbox 360. Especially since there are some pretty interesting games coming out exclusively on the Xbox like Gears of War and Lost Planet. And I guess Halo 3 but I’ve never been into the whole Halo craze.