journal: win

Microhoo: this could get very messy

By Nick, February 3, 2008

What can you do with $44.6 billion?¹

You can fill the California state budget deficit three times over.

You can buy 7.8 Steve Jobses (according to his 2007 net worth).

You can buy nearly 111.8 million iPhones (before tax).

Or you can buy a struggling dot-com pioneer.

If you’ve been following the news lately, you already know which option Microsoft chose. Me? I would have chosen the iPhones.

So what do I think of the Microsoft-Yahoo buyout proposal? This could get very messy very quickly.

Dollars and cents

In buying Yahoo, Microsoft would burn through just about all of their cash on hand. While any large buyout or merger carries the risk of failure, Yahoo’s failing fortunes as of late makes me question the logic behind this move. According to their latest earnings report, Microsoft’s Online Services Business division is still losing money, and the losses have actually deepened over the same period last year.

So Microsoft’s online services are struggling. Yahoo is struggling. I’m confused. How is taking on a company with similar problems is going to help Microsoft?

Platforms

How is Microsoft going to incorporate a company based on open-source solutions into the fold? After all, the rest…
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Holy crap: Microsoft bids on Yahoo!

By Nick, February 1, 2008

Wow, who saw this coming?

MSNBC reports that Microsoft has made a $44.6 billion takeover bid for its search rival Yahoo! Inc. Now why would Microsoft want to do something like that? To take on Google, of course!

Yahoo has been struggling as of late. Granted, both Yahoo and Microsoft are well behind Google in the search engine market; MSNBC reports that Google’s market share is in the neighborhood of 60%, while Yahoo and Microsoft have a combined 33% share.

Some questions naturally arise from this buyout proposal. Will regulators allow Microsoft to buy Yahoo without without messy antitrust issues? What will happen to MSN and Windows Live Search? Will this really do Microsoft any good in the end? And what about other Yahoo properties such as Flickr? Is Microsoft overpaying?

Me? I’d be surprised--nay, shocked!--if this deal goes through without Microsoft being forced to give up quite a bit. That is, if this deal goes through at all. Time wil tell. I’m sure we’ll have more to say about this proposed buyout in the coming days.

As of this writing, Google’s share price is down nearly 8%, Microsoft is down over 6%, and Yahoo is up nearly 86%.

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Here’s What’s Wrong with Vista

By Mac Fan, December 24, 2007

In many ways, Windows is a giant game of "Where's Waldo".

Some people don’t think Windows Vista sucks, but I respectfully disagree. I think Windows Vista is a horrible operating system that is incredibly inefficient, unproductive, and requires the end user go through too many hassles and jump through too many hoops to accomplish basic tasks. What’s worse is that Microsoft spent billions of dollars and years and years developing it. It should be spectacular, or at least decent. It’s not.

I’m going to cover several common tasks that a typical end user goes through while using a computer. These typical tasks include changing the settings of your system, printing, opening and saving files, browsing for files, searching, switching between documents and applications, and accessing files and applications in the file browser. A typical user will do all of these many times in a given day.

In this first section I’ll cover using the control panels to change your system settings. End users sometimes find themselves wanting to access the system’s settings for various reasons on any given day. They might want to change the refresh rate of their monitor, or just check to see what its value is, or they might want to check to see what their IP address…
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Malware Dealers Game Search Engines to Dispense Payload

By Liam, November 29, 2007

According to Computerworld, some malware distributors have acted in a concerted effort to get their sites to the top of seemingly harmless search results. By using bots to spam comments of blogs and even blogs themselves along with other methods, they have abused the pageranking systems utilized by many search engines, such as Google, Live Search, and Yahoo! Search. These pages, though seemingly harmless, may try to trick users into installing fake codecs. Others may not be so upfront about it, installing malware if the user so much as clicks on the page. Most of these attacks use more than one method.

Computerworld interviewed several employees of Sunbelt Software (a security software development company) including Alex Eckelberry, the CEO:

"This is huge," said Alex Eckelberry, Sunbelt Software‘s CEO. "So far we’ve found 27 different domains, each with up to 1,499 [malicious] pages. That’s 40,000 possible pages."

Another employee, malware researcher Adam Thomas identified the core of the threat to users:

"[The page’s IFRAME] is what’s doing the most damage," he said. "It’s loaded with every piece of malware you can think of, including fake toolbars, rogue software and scareware."

According to them, most of these rogue results will have odd…
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The Enigma of Safari for Windows

By Liam, November 29, 2007

The important part is that, at least for the moment, Safari's vision is stabilizing.

Safari It’s quite an obvious fact that the first release of the Safari 3 public beta for Windows was beta in the very loosest sense of the word, with some venturing to label it “alpha” due to the amount of bugs that really should have been caught before opening up to the public. I’m talking obvious, it’s-right-there-how-could-you-possibly-have-missed-it bugs. The beta did come with a “report bug” feature and this was properly (over)used, but a report bug feature does not a strong case make.

At WWDC 07, Jobs announced the Windows port of Safari with several slides showcasing how much “faster” Safari was at rendering pages. Directly afterwards he dropped the whole “the Internet is the iPhone development platform” bombshell. At this point it seemed clear that Apple had chosen to port Safari to Windows to include more developers for iPhone apps, and wanted to gain some more marketshare in the process.

Once users got hold of the application itself, most were puzzled. Even in the context of the presentation they had either just seen or read about, the design of the browser seemed inclined for the iPhone developer far more than for the user. The font rendering from OS X was…
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