The version released for free download is only at the beta - testing - stage, but users and critics have been quick to pass early judgment. The consensus? Google Chrome is attractive, fast and has some impressive new features, but may not - yet - be a threat to its Microsoft rival.

Here is a selection of reviews from some of the most respected technology blogs and writers on the web. Click on the links to read the full reviews, or post your first impressions of Google Chrome in the box at the bottom of the story.

All in all, Google Chrome, after just a little time using it, is superb. It’s not only fast, but it’s useful. It’s not only elegant, but it understands what you really want to do with a browser. And although it suffers from some setbacks that shouldn’t be overlooked, it’s still a highly-capable browser. Download Chrome. You won’t regret it.
TechCrunch

Google has produced an excellent browser that is friendly enough to handle average browsing activities without complicating the tasks, but at the same time it’s powerful enough to meet the needs of more-advanced users. The search functionality of the Omnibar is one of many innovations that caught my attention.
PC World

While Chrome’s performance is a little better than that of Firefox, in practical terms, it is far less useful, because it lacks the broad array of third-party add-ons programs like Flashblock that make Firefox so customizable. With time, it might catch up, but in the meantime, I’d recommend giving the new Internet Explorer a spin.
The Associated Press

The interface in Chrome is very different from other browsers and takes a little getting used to. Instead of the traditional Netscape/IE-style toolbar across the top, Chrome puts tabs across the top. Moreover, the tabs are detachable, so the terms “tabs” and “windows” become interchangeable within Chrome.
CNET

Will Google Chrome shape the way Web browsers are developed and designed? It is too early to tell, but Google has certainly come up with something appealing and unique. Will Chrome replace Internet Explorer or Firefox? Perhaps not in its present form, and not for a very long time. Overall, Chrome is a killer little application to have and offers a nice break from tradition when surfing the Web. While there’s plenty of room to for growth and improvement, the first beta release is impressive.
The Tech Herald

Chrome is a smart, innovative browser that, in many common scenarios, will make using the Web faster, easier and less frustrating. But this first version — which is just a beta, or test, release — is rough around the edges and lacks some common browser features Google plans to add later. These omissions include a way to manage bookmarks, a command for emailing links and pages directly from the browser, and even a progress bar to show how much of a Web page has loaded.
Walter S Mossberg from the Wall Street Journal

It munches through media sites with ease, streaming music and video and handling Flash very smoothly. PDFs open so suddenly that you might not even realise you’re using them. Opening a new tab brings up not your home page (although you can switch to that) but a thumbnail view of your nine most visited sites, plus recent bookmarks and a box to search your history. Overall, my first impression of Chrome is 9/10 for speed, 8/10 for ease of use and 7/10 for stability. And those figures should have Microsoft and Mozilla very, very worried.
TechRadar

What I discovered was a product that has some clear advantages over Microsoft’s, but also some shortcomings that, overall, hardly make it a killer - at least today. To be sure, Chrome is a work in progress. In addition to being a test version, outside developers are invited to make improvements. But it faces a stiff challenge from Microsoft, which also is making improvements with its latest iteration, which includes some of the same features as Chrome, like tabbed browsing.
San Francisco Chronicle

Our first impression of Chrome is that it’s nice and fast. There’s very little lag opening pages and the entire interface feels very streamlined. Dragging tabs in and out of windows is awesome, with a transparent version of the page pulling away with your mouse. The fact that you can pull tabs out of windows as well as combine windows is a great touch. Everything involving the tabs feels very, very smooth.
Gizmodo

Google partner SMS Management and Technology has emerged as the leading bidder to supply the NSW Department of Education with 1.5 million student email services using a customised version of the search giant’s Gmail service. This will be one of the largest private deployments of Gmail in the world.

The win is Google’s second major victory in the academic sector after Macquarie University signed up for Gmail in September last year. It could have massive implications for the Australian software market, as it places Gmail’s online word processing software, Google Docs, in a strong position to challenge Microsoft’s Office software suite in the education sector.

The education department’s Gmail roll-out will increase current email storage allocated to students by a multiple of 170 times from 35MB to 6GB. Gmail is hosted offshore and the university chose not to extend the service to staff due to concerns that it would generate excessive bandwidth bills retrieving messages.

Quoting from the post:

“…The company has been testing the new sales product with a number of partners, including BlogTalkRadio, BlogCritics, BlogCatalog, BlogTV, Technabob, GPSMagazine, GeekAlerts and NerdApproved. CEO Richard Jalichandra says these blogs reach a combined audience of approximately 17 million unique monthly visitors. Early advertisers on the network include Honda, Acura, Toyota, t-mobile, Adobe, HP, Sandisk, MSFT, Verizon, Sun, Sony, Visa, Nike, Scion, Chevrolet, Paramount, Universal Pictures, 20th Century Fox and Best Buy.

Technorati has explored selling ads for third party sites for some time, but this is the first time they’ve opened the service up to anyone. Unlike Glam and Federated Media, they will take all comers, and say they expect blogs, from the large players on down through the long tail, will find they do a better job monetizing sites than the current options.

Ads are sold on a CPM basis. They will not make revenue guarantees, says Jalichandra, but the split between parties is negotiable. He declined to state what rates have been negotiated with beta partners. This is similar to what Six Apart promises, which is also targeting the long tail of blogs.

Jalichandra also says Technorati is uniquely positioned to sell ads at premium rates, even through small blogs, because they will be able to use descriptive tags/keywords, along with their existing blog indexing technology, to better match ads with content…”

It is heartening to read about the inventory that they are expected to carry, and the higher CPM that they will manage to generate, hopefully.

The end of the digitization project

Microsoft will keep the current Live Search Books and Live Search Academics databases, and the data will be included in regular web search results. The databases will not be updated though, as Microsoft is also closing down its “digitization initiatives,” including the library scanning and their in-copyright book programs. This means that Microsoft is, in essence, giving up fighting Google in an area that many has considered an important part of the future of search.

Google is clearly planning to become the one stop portal for all kinds of information, including the printed word, and book scanning and indexing is an important part of that strategy.

Too strong focus on short term profits

Our guess is that Microsoft has come the the conclusion that such an adventure would not be profitable, and that the main focus for search should be the regular web searcher, and not experts, academics and researchers.

The Live blog says:

Given the evolution of the Web and our strategy, we believe the next generation of search is about the development of an underlying, sustainable business model for the search engine, consumer, and content partner. For example, this past Wednesday we announced our strategy to focus on verticals with high commercial intent, such as travel, and offer users cash back on their purchases from our advertisers.

We are not so sure if this is a sensible approach. The scholars and experts belongs to the main opinion makers on the Web, and they were the ones that made Google a success by promoting it for free in their circles.

Moreover, they have a lot of purchasing power and there are bound to be more of them as the educational levels are raising all over the world.

Finally, there will have to be changes in international copyright laws, making written content more easily available, and when that happens “paper-based” high quality content will be a very attractive source of information.

Not all of Microsoft’s work in this area is wasted. They intend to provide publishers with digital copies of their scanned books. They are also removing their contractual restrictions placed on the digitized library content and making the scanning equipment available to their digitization partners and libraries.

The two search services include some 80 million articles and 750,000 scanned books.

The Swedish blog Internetbrus argues that this is a serious setback for academic search, as Live’s product has been much better than Google Scholar.

Multitouch uses Surface technology, introduced last year by Microsoft, which harnesses touch and multitouch capabilities to provide users with a more natural way to interact directly with computing devices.

Expect to see the table-like Surface devices in hotels, retail establishments, restaurants and public entertainment venues, Chris Flores, a director at Microsoft working on the Windows Client Communications Team, said in the Windows Vista Team blog on Tuesday.

Video: Multi-Touch in Windows 7

In a demo to the Wall Street Journal’s D: All Things Digital conference, Julie Larson-Green, Microsoft’s corporate vice president for Windows experience program management, showed a number of applications that could use the multitouch technology, including photography applications that enable a user to handle photos on the screen more easily.

The user can drag and drop snaps, zoom in, and rotate snaps with his fingers. The musically inclined can play with their fingers on an on-screen piano keyboard.

In a blog entry on Tuesday, Flores said that the long-term architectural investments Microsoft introduced in Windows Vista and then refined for Windows Vista SP1 and Windows Server 2008 will carry forward in Windows 7.

Contrary to some speculation, Microsoft was not creating a new kernel for Windows 7, he said. One of the design goals for Windows 7 is that it will run on the recommended hardware specified for Windows Vista and that the applications and devices that work with Windows Vista will be compatible with Windows 7, Flores added.

Microsoft has tried almost everything to get more people to pick its search site over Google, without much luck. So maybe a little cash will do the trick.

A screenshot of the Live Search cashback site.

That is the idea behind a new Microsoft program that will return money to online users who find and buy selected products through its Live Search engine. It’s an unusual move that illustrates the lengths to which the Redmond company is willing to go in its struggle to gain ground on the Internet search king.

Microsoft’s “Live Search cashback” site, set to be unveiled Wednesday, promises to pay back a portion of the purchase price — ranging from about 2 percent to more than 30 percent — to people who use it to find designated products and buy them online from participating retailers.

The company has signed up a long list of merchants to participate in the program - including the online sites of large retailers such as Barnes & Noble, Sears, Home Depot, J&R Electronics, Office Depot and others.

The company is expected to unveil the Live Search cashback program at a conference in Redmond where Bill Gates will be speaking to online advertisers. Microsoft last weekend said there would be a major search announcement but declined to provide specifics. A Microsoft spokesman declined to comment Tuesday evening.

However, the Seattle P-I discovered an informational portion of the Live Search cashback online site — spelling out the new program in detail — that was publicly accessible as of Tuesday.

One snippet on the site also makes reference to moving a user’s “cashback and payment service from Jellyfish to Live Search.” Jellyfish Group is a U.K.-based search advertising firm that specializes in a type of payment model for advertisers that is similar to the one the new Microsoft service will use.

The nature of Jellyfish’s involvement in the initiative wasn’t clear as of Tuesday evening. Microsoft has been making a series of acquisitions in an effort to bolster its online efforts.

A list of frequently asked questions on the Microsoft site includes one that many potential users will no doubt ask: “Why are you paying me cashback?”

Answer: “We want to earn your loyalty and reward it with cashback savings for your everyday online shopping. We are ‘The Search That Pays You Back’!”

Cashback programs have been tried by smaller search engines, with mixed results. Because of Microsoft’s big online presence, its new initiative could get lots of attention in the industry and among consumers.

“Assuming that the rebate amounts are enough to be appealing to people, which it sounds like they are, that definitely could attract a fair number of consumers,” said industry analyst Van Baker, a Gartner Inc. research vice president, when the site was described to him. “But what they may do is just go to that site when they’re thinking about buying something, and use Google the rest of the time.”

It’s not clear how much money Microsoft has allocated to the cashback program, or how long it is scheduled to last.

Read full story

NEW YORK - Microsoft Corp., the software maker that scrapped a $47.5 billion bid for Yahoo! Inc. this month, may forge a partnership with the Internet company in the search-advertising market to challenge Google Inc. Microsoft, which abandoned its takeover attempts May 3, said Sunday that it’s exploring a transaction with Yahoo and may renew attempts to buy the entire company. The two may combine units that sell ads that run next to Internet search results, said Morningstar Inc. analyst Toan Tran. Billionaire investor Carl Icahn is pressuring Yahoo to ally itself with Microsoft to compete with Google, which dominates the Internet search market. Icahn, backed by investors such as hedge-fund manager John Paulson, plans to oust Yahoo’s board if Chief Executive Officer Jerry Yang fails to sell to Microsoft. ‘Carl Icahn is in this to make a quick buck, so whatever helps him make money he’ll be happy with,’ said Tran, who is based in Chicago and doesn’t own shares of either company. ‘What Carl Icahn definitely wants is an outright sale of Yahoo to Microsoft at some price higher than what it is now.’ Microsoft has offered to buy Yahoo’s search unit and take a minority stake in the company after Yahoo gets rid of its holdings in Asia, Reuters reported Monday, citing a person familiar with the talks. Microsoft spokesman Frank Shaw declined to confirm or deny the report, while Yahoo spokeswoman Diana Wong declined to comment. Microsoft, based in Redmond, Washington, fell 53 cents to close at $29.46 in Nasdaq Stock Market trading. Sunnyvale, California-based Yahoo rose 2 cents to $27.68, while Google dropped $2.55 to $577.52. The new talks may bring Microsoft closer to a full acquisition of Yahoo, said Mark May, an analyst at Needham & Co. in New York. On Monday, he changed his recommendation on Yahoo’s stock to buy. He had advised clients to hold on to the shares since April 2007. ‘Microsoft sees an opportunity where their negotiating position has improved,’ May said. ‘They clearly have some very large shareholders on their side now and they realize that they can make some moves.’ Icahn, 72, owns 10 million shares and options to purchase 49 million more. He proposed a slate of board nominees last week including Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban and former Viacom Inc. CEO Frank Biondi Jr. Icahn didn’t return phone messages. Paulson said last week that he would back Icahn’s slate and that he was disappointed Yahoo didn’t reach a deal with Microsoft. Paulson & Co. owned 50 million shares of Yahoo as of March. All 10 of Yahoo’s directors are up for re-election at the annual meeting July 3. Yahoo and Microsoft trail Mountain View, Calif.-based Google in Internet search traffic. Together they account for about a third of total Internet searches in the U.S., or about half of the share Google has, according to research firm ComScore Inc. Google CEO Eric Schmidt and co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin are meeting in Britain to discuss Google’s response to the Microsoft talks with Yahoo, according to a British Broadcasting Corp. report. They were traveling to attend an event for the company’s European operations, the BBC said. Google didn’t respond to an e-mail. With reporting by Crayton Harrison in Dallas.

Superpages.com Network and CareerBuilder both jumped eight spots in the ranking to positions 18 and 30, respectively.

Content categories showing gains in April included job search, career resources, and television sites.

The top-gaining categories in April were Pharmacies and Retail-Food, both up 8 per cent from March.

According to comScore, Google’s unique U.S. audience in April was up 18 percent from the same month in 2007, while Yahoo’s audience grew 7 percent.

However, according to the Associated Press, Yahoo still leads in page views, meaning visitors spend more time there or return more often. Many Google users make a simple search request and quickly go elsewhere based on the results. Yahoo had 33.6 billion page views to Google’s 28.7 billion.

“Despite all the controversy over Microsoft using Silverlight to take over the rich internet market from Adobe Flash, the software giant seems to be not even trying. In fact, even most Microsoft web sites are using Flash instead of Silverlight.

A quick check through Microsoft properties reveals that only the Microsoft Home Page and the Microsoft Developer Network use Silverlight; MSN Video, Zune.net and the new WWTelescope all use Flash.

Microsoft even appears to be on par with Adobe when it comes to platforms outside of Windows. Silverlight works on Safari for Mac or PC, as well as on Firefox and other Mozilla-based browsers.”

So what is Silverlight?

At its simplest, Silverlight is a plug-in that renders XAML-based user interfaces within a browser. Specifically, it supports modern incarnations of Internet Explorer 6+, Firefox 1.5+ & 2 and Safari 2 on the latest Windows (XP, Server 2003 and Vista) and Mac OS X platforms. Freely downloadable from Microsoft, the plug-in weighs in at a few megabytes, but it does contain some neat features, including the ability to update itself automatically and, more importantly, support for playing different media formats (VC-1, WMA and MP3) without requiring either the .NET Framework or Windows Media Player to be present on the client.

There is, however, much more to Silverlight than just a simple browser plug-in for playing some media files. For example, Microsoft is currently working on a new service, snappily entitled “Microsoft Silverlight Streaming by Windows Live”, which provides an online home for Silverlight applications and their corresponding media content for those who don’t want to set up their own media-streaming facilities.

Silverlight architecture

Chief Executive Steve Ballmer told employees in a company assembly Thursday that he knows how much he’d spend to buy Yahoo and accelerate his company’s Internet play.

“We’re willing to pay for that at some level, and beyond that level we’re not willing to pay for it. I know exactly what I think Yahoo is worth to me,” the executive said. “I won’t go a dime above, and I will go to what I think it’s worth if that gets the deal done.”

But he didn’t offer a figure, and he didn’t say whether Microsoft is considering raising its unsolicited bid, worth $44.6 billion at the time it was made in early February.

The offer is currently worth about $42.4 billion, or $29.48 per share, based on Microsoft Corp.’s closing stock price Thursday. Yahoo Inc. has rejected the offer, saying it undervalues the company. Microsoft’s board has been considering whether to raise the bid to as much as $33 per share, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Ballmer didn’t provide any new insight into the company’s efforts to buy the Silicon Valley pioneer during the meeting at Microsoft’s Redmond, Wash., headquarters, but he did indicate that an end to months of speculation was near.

“We ought to announce something in relatively short order,” Ballmer told employees.

His comments were first reported by Silicon Alley Insider, an online technology news site, and confirmed by a Microsoft spokesman.

Ballmer added that buying Yahoo is just one of many moving parts in the software maker’s strategy to compete with Google Inc. in search and Web advertising, and that if neither a friendly nor a hostile deal “look good,” he’s willing to walk away.

Microsoft’s board met Wednesday but reached no decision on a next step, the Journal reported. The software maker had given Yahoo until last weekend to agree to a deal or face the prospect of an ugly proxy fight.

Meanwhile, Yahoo is exploring a possible advertising partnership with Internet search leader Google Inc. or a merger with the online operations of Time Warner Inc.’s AOL as possible defenses if Microsoft tries a hostile takeover.

Impressed by a two-week test completed last month, Yahoo could firm up a long-term deal within a week, according to the Journal. Any alliance between Yahoo and Google would face intense antitrust scrutiny, however, because the two companies control more than 80 percent of the U.S. market for search advertising.

Yahoo and Google hope to allay those concerns by structuring their deal so their rivals, including Microsoft, could participate in an auction-based system, the Journal said.

Microsoft-bashing was in vogue the last century!!!

My partner asked me recently why people hate Microsoft so much and it’s a question I’ve been pondering for a while, as well as thinking about my own attitudes towards the world’s largest software company. I consider myself to be in an unusual position in that I’m a Java developer who does actually like Microsoft. This is considered heresy by many in the Java world where the assumption made is that you can’t like both. I may just have lost some readers who visit this site for the occasional Java content, but I don’t take such a binary view of the world. I think that Microsoft is just about the best place to work if you’re passionate about developing software and even those who work for competitors grudgingly agree. I should love to work as a developer at Microsoft if I were a lot cleverer and if I could stomach living in America (no offense intended if you do).

It’s not accidental that a large proportion of the brightest people in the business work for Microsoft. Some would claim that this is down to the lure of MS cash. I don’t buy that argument because for people this smart remuneration would be generous at any company, besides which the acquisition of wealth is not their prime motivation. It’s the opportunity to do great stuff and reach a large number of people. As I’m writing this I’m deliberately trying to be as objective as I can and I’m trying not to just come across as an MS fanboy because I don’t think I am. I’m certainly not reticent about criticising Microsoft when I think they need to do better; indeed you can find several examples on this site.

I welcome diversity in the computing arena and I actively take opportunities to learn about non-Microsoft technology. For example, today whilst I should have been working I read quite a lot about Apple OS X—which I think is a great OS—and I also burnt a CD with Knoppix Linux on it (more about that another time).

What really annoys me is when people are so blinded by their hatred of Microsoft that they lose all objectivity and go about spouting drivel to others, when they haven’t even thought about what it is they’re actually saying and why they’re saying it. Often they’re just repeating the anti-MS mantra because that’s what you do. When so-called IT professionals display this prejudice in an official capacity in meetings, I’m afraid I lose all respect I may have had for them. I flip the bozo bit. The same goes for those who refer to M$ or Micro$oft.

I believe that competition is healthy and improves the breed. I’m glad that Linux exists and continues to improve because it keeps Microsoft focused on improving the Windows operating system that I choose to use. Witness Windows Longhorn, which is shaping up to be the most exciting and interesting realise of Windows for a decade. I may not always choose to use Windows (or whatever its successors are called) but it serves my present needs well. Similarly, Java and J2EE forced Microsoft to do something about its mediocre developer tools offering at the time of Visual Studio 6, which led to the creation of .NET. This in turn has forced Sun to wake up and improve its technology. It’s no co-incidence that Java 1.5 is the most interesting version of Java in years and features language improvements—such as generics—that are also debuting in C# soon.

Talking of Java, it’s often claimed that Microsoft tried to destroy Java because they added Windows-specific extensions to their J++ variant. It’s easy to see how Microsoft would feel threatened by Java, which is after all a platform in its own right that to an extent makes the underlying operating system irrelevant, no matter what it happens to be. There were/are undoubtedly executives within Microsoft who made or make it their top priority to neutralise the Java threat. However, people don’t generally see the other side of the coin, which is that there are developers within Microsoft who are Java enthusiasts and who wanted to make it a great platform for developing Windows applications. And to do that, they had to add in some platform-specific features which you could take advantage of if you knew you were writing for Windows only and if you wanted to. It’s also worth remembering that for a time the Microsoft JVM that shipped with Internet Explorer was the fastest one around that actually ended up on user’s machines. Of course it’s hopelessly out of date now, which benefits no one.

Anders Hejlsberg, the powerhouse behind Borland Turbo Pascal and one of the brains behind Borland Delphi, was involved with the creation of J++, which in many ways laid the groundwork for what was to follow with .NET. C# is often called a rip-off of Java, but it’s not a shameless clone because it added some neat new tricks of its own. And Sun Microsystems aren’t the origin of everything original within language and framework design any more than Microsoft or any other single company are; Borland helped Sun design their JavaBeans component architecture because Sun were impressed by Borland’s VCL created by…Anders Hejlserg et al.

I don’t view Microsoft as some monolithic entity, with 50,000 employees focused on the one aim of destroying their closest rivals. It’s hard enough trying to get tens of people pulling together in the same direction—believe me I know—let alone tens of thousands! Time and time again the accounts coming out of Microsoft from insiders are of a company that in many ways is run along Darwinian lines, with different groups competing against each other and not co-operating. Hardly an environment conducive to nurturing grand conspiracies.

I think that the two biggest threats to Microsoft right now are previous versions of its own software and its reputation. The two are closely linked because Microsoft’s current reputation is largely formed from what it’s done in the past and not what it’s doing today. I’m thinking in particular about Windows and its reputation for being insecure and unstable. I’m not saying that reputation is undeserved because both of those things have been true about Windows for a long time, but I genuinely believe that the situation is getting better and that’s happening because Microsoft’s customers are demanding it. Windows XP Service Pack 2 does a lot of right things in the area of security and Windows has been a stable operating system for years now. I haven’t seen a blue screen of death on either my home or work PC for at least three years. Really.

Windows has got such a bad reputation that there are those within Microsoft who are even suggesting the unthinkable: that Microsoft throw away the Windows brand name plus all that’s invested in it, and call the next version something else. I don’t think it will happen but it’s an intriguing idea. It’s very easy to criticise Windows over security and stability without really thinking about why it’s the way it is. What many of the naysayers don’t consider is the fact that the direction of Windows is driven by consumer demand. The top priority at Microsoft when developing software has almost always been to preserve backwards compatibility, because Microsoft knows full well that customers won’t tolerate not being able to run their existing software using a new version of the OS. This has informed the design direction of Windows and has led to many complex trade-offs involving compatibility, security and stability. If you don’t believe me then go and read Raymond Chen’s blog—it’s a real eye-opener. This stuff is damn hard to get right. Don’t forget that Apple have completely broken backwards-compatibility more than once and a fraction of the software that Windows has to support runs on the Macintosh.

It’s amazing how many jokes Windows has become the butt of, particularly when it comes to stability. It’s even entered mainstream culture. We’ve all heard those jokes, some of us have probably made them too. I regularly get exposed to them at work. There’s a Java related website I visit that features a different programming question every day in the style of the Sun Certified Java Programmer exam. I came across this question recently:

“Your chief Software designer has shown you a sketch of the new Computer parts system she is about to create. At the top of the hierarchy is a Class called Computer and under this are two child classes. One is called LinuxPC and one is called WindowsPC. The main difference between the two is that one runs the Linux operating System and the other runs the Windows System (of course another difference is that one needs constant re-booting and the other runs reliably). Under the WindowsPC are two Sub classes one called Server and one Called Workstation. How might you appraise your designers work?”

—Amongst the possible multiple choice answers were:

“3. Ask for the option of WindowsPC to be removed as it will soon be obsolete.”

These aren’t official questions from Sun and I didn’t dignify this one with an answer. Yes, Windows 9x wasn’t a paragon of stability but then it was never designed to be. It was designed to be as stable as possible within the constraints of the other requirements that it had to meet. The top requirement was that it had to run all your old 16-bit Windows and MS-DOS software as well as the new 32-bit applications. Of course, no customer actually asked for instability in Windows 9x, but they ended up with some because it’s a trade-off. The vastly superior Windows NT was always planned to replace it, it’s just taking years for that to happen.

In terms of security, of course Microsoft have to do a lot better and I believe that they will. Their biggest headache is the masses of machines out there connected to the Internet that are running a legacy version of Windows that was developed when the explosion of the Web caught Microsoft by surprise. Consumers weren’t demanding security then. I draw parallels with the automotive industry, which is also driven by consumer demand. In Europe, for years only the luxury car manufacturers offered safety features over and above the basic. I’m thinking of technologies such as airbags, side impact protection and anti-lock brakes. Now safety has become a major selling point and differentiator that can make the difference between the car buyer closing the deal or walking away. It’s the same with computer security, which is now Microsoft’s stated top priority.

There’s no denying that things that used to be turned on by default in previous versions of Windows are turned off by default in Windows Server 2003. The focus has shifted 180 degrees from ease of use with positive action required to make things secure, to secure by default with positive action required to make things less secure. Interestingly, I was in a meeting last week where someone pointed out that the Oracle 9iAS J2EE application server comes with a lot of features turned on by default post-installation, some of which could be exploited and used to compromise the system. I know it’s a different order of magnitude from millions of computers running Windows but I don’t hear Oracle getting it in the neck even slightly over that.

Windows is often mindlessly criticised for being bloated, as if its EXEs and DLLs are somehow padded out with zeroes in a grand conspiracy to use more disk space and sell more hard drives. The code taking up the space does actually do something you know! The people who whinge that Windows is a bloated behemoth would be the first to complain if they couldn’t run all their software under a Diet Windows or if using it was unfathomable to them.

Over the years I’ve noticed that those who hate Microsoft often fit into one or more of the following categories:

• People who hate Microsoft because of their size. Microsoft is a high visibility target. There’s a nice quote I like by Windows spelunker Andrew Schulman that says that Microsoft aren’t the biggest fish in the ocean, they are the ocean. It wasn’t always thus. Lots of people hated Apple Computer in the 1980s at the time when Apple was the giant ruling the computer industry with an iron fist and bullying the lesser players with endless lawsuits.
• People who hate Microsoft because it’s the thing to do. In other words, lots of other people do it. Microsoft bashing has become a popular pastime. Just as no one ever got fired for buying Microsoft, so no one ever got beaten up for hating Microsoft. Well, maybe in Redmond.
• People who hate Microsoft because they think the software is rubbish. I’m sure if you asked the Windows developers at Microsoft if there were things they’d have done differently given the opportunity to start afresh with no backwards compatibility constraints, they’d have been giving you suggestions all week. In fact, that’s what happened with the Windows NT architecture. And it worked, because it’s been with us eleven years now (sixteen years if you include development time).
• People who hate Microsoft because of the antitrust actions. You can tell these people because they take great delight in using the terms “Microsoft” and “convicted monopolist” together whenever they refer to the company. Did the antitrust actions really achieve anything apart from make some lawyers richer and produce a funny video clip of BillG looking awkward whilst testifying?
• People who hate Microsoft because they’re just whingers. After all, complaining is far easier than actually taking positive steps to improve their own software. This is also known as The Larry Ellison Syndrome. Scott McNealy was also a sufferer of this but has recently been cured by a large injection.
• People who hate Microsoft because of Bill Gates. Everything I’ve read about Bill Gates indicates that money is not his prime motivator. That doesn’t mean that he doesn’t care about it and he certainly doesn’t appear to squander it! It would seem that Bill’s passion is improving people’s lives through software. Microsoft software, yes but then what do you expect? That’s his company! It’s called c-a-p-i-t-a-l-i-s-m, get over it. Someone has to be the richest man in the world and I’d rather it was someone like Bill Gates who gives an awful lot of his money to charity. It’s easy to be cynical about these things but I’d rather live in a world where philanphropists pour huge sums of cash into AIDS research (for example) than not.
• People who hate Microsoft because Microsoft are phenomenally successful. I’ve never understood the notion of excessive profits or the idea that businesses should somehow be penalised for being too successful. Who sets the bar on these things? Great fortunes can be built in business and great fortunes can quickly be lost by businesses when they take their eye off the ball. IBM ruled the roost for years. I genuinely believe that you can be successful if you build a better mousetrap and persevere.

And me? As I stated at the beginning, I like Microsoft and its software. I don’t think Microsoft are perfect and I know that their software isn’t, but I think that they get more things right, more of the time than most of their competitors do. The important point is that I make up my own mind about things and try to keep it open.

Source: John Topley

Most Wall Street analysts believe Microsoft now faces a drawn-out proxy campaign to win its unsolicited takeover of Yahoo!, according to the poll.

By contrast, the general view in February when Microsoft announced its offer was that Yahoo! would agree to a friendly merger if Microsoft only sweetened its bid. By mid-March a Reuters poll showed that Wall Street expected Microsoft to buy Yahoo! without raising its price.

Microsoft last week repeated chief executive Steve Ballmer’s three-week-old threat that his company will go hostile, or even call off its bid, if Yahoo! did not agree to a deal before this weekend. Microsoft executives said they will reveal their next move this week.

“I’m betting that Ballmer is bluffing with his ‘walk away’ comments and that he’s going hostile,” said Jefferies & Co analyst Youssef Squali, who believes Microsoft will stick with its current $31-per-share offer.

Nineteen brokerages now say they expect Microsoft in coming days to move forward with a hostile bid after being frustrated in a three-month effort to entice Yahoo! to reach a negotiated deal, the survey reveals.

Due to a drop in Microsoft stock, it is now worth $42.7 billion.

Another three Wall Street houses see Microsoft walking away rather than raising its offer. Many Microsoft shareholders fear a higher-priced deal would dilute the value of their shares and have an uncertain payback. Were Microsoft to walk away, Garrity estimates Yahoo!’s stock could drop around 14 per cent to $23 a share, while Microsoft’s stock might jump about 17 per cent to $35 a share.

Fourteen brokerages say they expect Microsoft to begin a campaign to unseat Yahoo!’s board and encourage the company’s shareholders to accept its current $31 bid. Another five brokerages expect Microsoft going hostile at a lower price.

To counter Microsoft, Yahoo! has held talks with Time Warner Inc on a deal to merge Yahoo! with Time Warner’s AOL unit in return for Time Warner taking a stake in Yahoo!, several sources familiar with the negotiations said earlier this month.

A Yahoo!-AOL tie-up would be part of a three-way deal in which Yahoo! may partner with rival Google Inc. to use Google’s advertising system to sell ads alongside Web search results Yahoo! serves up to its users, these sources said.

Yahoo! executives told investors on a quarterly conference call last week it was “premature” to discuss whether a trial run of the Google ad partnership will lead to a deal between the two companies, but declined to comment on progress Yahoo! is making on a deal with AOL or other alternatives to Microsoft.

AOL’s Internet media and advertising assets represent the closest thing to Yahoo! and would significantly enhance Microsoft’s Web audience, he said. Microsoft has reportedly talked with News Corp, owners of the MySpace social network, about a joint bid for Yahoo!, but Moran believes MySpace is less promising than Facebook, albeit one that is unlikely to sell at a price Microsoft would be ready to pay.

The Reuters poll drew responses from 17 Microsoft analysts and 15 Yahoo! analysts from 25 different Wall Street brokerages. It was conducted on Friday, a day before Microsoft’s three-week-old deadline expired for Yahoo! to reach a deal.

What will happen if Microsoft adopts a full hostile takeover strategy. There is a superb analysis done at pmrca.

The possible scenarios from here, in roughly decreasing order of probability, include:

• Hostile Takeover: Microsoft moves forward with a full-fledged hostile takeover — trying to replace Yahoo’s board and/or taking its offer directly to Yahoo’s shareholders.
• Higher Offer: Microsoft raises its offer or otherwise modifies its offer terms to make them more attractive — for example, Microsoft could shift to an all-cash offer — in an attempt to make the deal happen without going fully hostile.
• Walk Away: Microsoft drops its offer and walks away; Yahoo’s stock drops to its pre-offer level of $19.18, give or take. Lots of moves and countermoves could follow: Microsoft could come back later with a lower or higher offer; Yahoo could cut a Google advertising deal to boost its revenue and margins and make itself harder to buy; Microsoft could take its $44 billion and go buy virtually every new Internet company of any consequence founded in the last 10 years; etc.
• Yahoo Caves: Yahoo’s board caves and accepts the current Microsoft offer.
• White Knight: Another bidder enters and offers Yahoo a higher price.

Let’s assume the Hostile Takeover scenario, which seems to me to be the most likely given Microsoft’s strategy and explicit public statements. What happens then?

There are two primary hostile takeover tactics:

• A tender offer, which we can equivalently call an exchange offer since the offer includes Microsoft stock that would be exchanged for Yahoo stock. This would be an offer by Microsoft to acquire Yahoo shares from existing Yahoo shareholders directly. Note that this hasn’t happened yet; Microsoft’s offer up until now has been made to Yahoo the company — in a tender offer, the offer would be made directly to Yahoo’s shareholders.
• A proxy fight by Microsoft to take control of Yahoo’s board of directors — to put in place a new Yahoo board that would accept Microsoft’s current offer.

These two tactics could be used alone or in tandem.

In the case of a tender offer: if shareholders owning more than 50% of Yahoo’s shares agree to the offer, Microsoft gains control of Yahoo directly.

(Actually, Microsoft probably wouldn’t need to own a full 50% of Yahoo’s shares — it could own, say, 40% and then have effective control, because only one-sixth of Yahoo’s remaining shareholders would have to vote with Microsoft on any issue in order for Microsoft to exercise control.)

Yahoo’s best defense against a tender offer is its poison pill. The poison pill works like this: if Microsoft acquires more than 15% of Yahoo without Yahoo board approval, the poison pill kicks in and issues a flood of new Yahoo stock into the market in such a way that Yahoo becomes much more difficult and expensive to buy. Poison pills have been used as defensive mechanisms by public companies against hostile takeovers for years, and the dilution they cause is so huge that no poison pill of this type has ever been triggered.

Rather than trigger the poison pill, Microsoft would most likely condition its tender offer on Yahoo’s board cancelling its poison pill. If the Yahoo board refused to cancel the poison pill, Microsoft could sue in a Delaware court to force a cancellation of the pill. (Any and all litigation to force Yahoo to come to terms will be in Delaware, since that is where Yahoo is incorporated.)

Delaware courts give some deference to target boards in resisting hostile takeovers, especially in the early stages of a takeover fight, but in many cases the courts have been unwilling to allow targets to “just say no” in the face of a well-financed offer at a significant premium — which is the situation Yahoo is facing. It’s impossible to predict what a court will do, but Delaware courts are more likely to force a poison pill to be cancelled when a target board has had plenty of time to drum up alternatives to the hostile offer, and where the hostile offer is well-financed and represents a significant premium to the company. This gets even more likely if the bidder has raised its price during the process, which hasn’t happened here — yet.

In the case of a proxy fight, which Microsoft has overtly threatened: Microsoft would nominate an alternate slate of directors for election to the Yahoo board in place of the current directors. If Yahoo shareholders favor the Microsoft bid, they can vote for Microsoft’s alternate directors, who — if elected to Yahoo’s board — would approve the Microsoft bid.

A proxy fight may have special appeal for Microsoft for a couple of reasons.

First, it could work in one fell swoop.

Many public companies have a “staggered” board, where some directors are up for election or reelection each year, but the entire board is never up for reelection in a single year.

Yahoo, however, has its entire board standing for reelection each year.

In retrospect, this was not a good idea — whoever set this up at Yahoo made a serious mistake. In a proxy fight with a staggered board, target management can lose a proxy fight and still control two-thirds of the board. In Yahoo’s case, if Microsoft wins one proxy fight, it takes out the entire Yahoo board.

It would be practically impossible for Yahoo to change to a staggered board now — in fact, trying to do so would immediately give Microsoft its opportunity to nominate its slate of directors.

Second, Yahoo can’t block a proxy fight via a poison pill or any other mechanism. They can delay it — a bit — but they cannot block it.

Microsoft gets control of Yahoo if it puts up a slate of directors for election and they win at Yahoo’s 2008 annual meeting. All that is needed for Microsoft’s slate to win is to get more votes at the meeting than Yahoo’s incumbent directors. Since not all Yahoo shareholders will bother to vote, Microsoft doesn’t need a majority of all shares to win — it just needs more votes.

As it turns out, Microsoft has leaked to the press the fact that it has already assembled a slate of directors who have agreed to run against Yahoo’s board in the event Microsoft moves forward with a proxy fight. The Microsoft slate includes several former CEO’s, COO’s, and CFO’s — individuals certainly qualified to sit on a corporate board.

If Microsoft wins the proxy fight, then its acquisition of Yahoo is probably a foregone conclusion. Microsoft’s slate of directors would be expected to vote to cancel the Yahoo poison pill, allowing Microsoft to make its tender offer for Yahoo’s shares. However, the new Microsoft-installed board would still have to exercise its fiduciary duties and carefully assess whether the Microsoft offer is in the best interests of Yahoo shareholders — if the new board acted rashly to rubber-stamp the Microsoft takeover, it could theoretically be sued by pro-Yahoo shareholders, although that lawsuit would be an uphill battle. Further, Yahoo’s poison pill would throw some procedural hurdles Microsoft’s way: the pill says that for a 180-day period following a successful hostile proxy fight, the new board can only cancel the pill if it follows certain procedures, including getting an independent financial advisor to opine that cancelling the pill is in the shareholder’s best interests. All this would do is slow down Microsoft’s takeover — it would still happen.

Yahoo has taken other steps to respond to Microsoft’s unwanted advances.

In February, Yahoo adopted a takeover-related compensation plan covering every full-time employee. The plan would issue large cash payments and 100% accelerated stock option vesting to Yahoo employees who are terminated “without cause” or who quit “for good reason” in the two years following a takeover. The devil is in the details — if the definitions of “cause” and “good reason” are broad enough, the plan could give Yahoo’s entire employee base easy access to 100% option acceleration and large severance cash payments after a takeover. The plan has the effect of making a takeover of Yahoo more expensive — and Microsoft has responded by saying it might lower its offer price as a result.

Yahoo has also bought time by amending its bylaws to delay the deadline for making board nominations for this year’s board election, and could buy additional time by delaying the date of its 2008 annual shareholder meeting.

Previously, Yahoo board nominations had to be made by March 14. While searching for an alternate bidder, Yahoo did not want to face a proxy fight starting in March, so it amended its bylaws to require board nominations to be made within a 10 day window after Yahoo announces the date for its 2008 annual shareholder meeting.

Yahoo has not yet announced the date for its 2008 annual meeting. However, under Delaware law, Yahoo has to have its annual meeting by July 12 — the 13-month anniversary of its last annual meeting — or Microsoft can sue to force a prompt annual meeting. Microsoft would almost certainly win that lawsuit, and the court would probably force a meeting within 60 to 90 days. So Yahoo can at least delay its annual meeting and therefore the board election process until July, and perhaps as late as October if it is willing to force Microsoft to sue to schedule a meeting.

So this may yet come to remind you of the Democratic presidential primary season — it may last a while.

You should read the full story at pmrca.

This is also being discussed here: Microsoft Watch, Financial Times, Between the Lines, Scobleizer, TechCrunch, Tech Check with Jim Goldman, TECH.BLORGE.com, Tech Trader Daily, GMSV, Hacking Cough, Valleywag, mathewingram.com/work, rexblog.com, Marc’s Voice, franticindustries, Search Engine Land, Tech Ticker, MediaFile, WebProNews, Digital Daily, WebProBlog, Mashable!

“We are taking open to a whole other place,” Balogh said. “We are rewiring Yahoo from the inside out with a developer platform that will open up the assets of Yahoo in a way never done before, making the consumer experience social throughout and provide hooks to developers.” He noted that Yahoo has 10 billion latent connections across its properties, such as mail, messenger and fantasy sports.

Balogh discussed the technical architecture–known as YOS, or Yahoo Open Strategy–including an application platform that will allow developers to create apps for consumers to keep their data protected and to chose what data to share and with whom. In addition, Yahoo will unify all profiles for users and developers, which will allow the company to leverage the 10 billion relations and 500 million users to create the social graph of relationships and to manage the event stream.

“We are not creating another social network. We will rewire the entire experience to make it social. We don’t think of social as a destination but as a dimension,” Balogh said. Along with Google and MySpace, Yahoo is a member of the OpenSocial Foundation, which is developing a specification for building social applications.

The underpinnings of Yahoo’s effort include development tools, an application platform, a social platform that unifies all profiles throughout Yahoo (again, like Facebook or MySpace, this is a social graph that lets users make connections and view events) and the total rewiring of properties to make all this possible.

Yahoo’s new architecture, called YOS (Yahoo Open Strategy) proves that the Internet is made of tubes (Source: Yahoo)

The heady plans are smart but, quite likely, come too late.

Here’s the meat of the announcement:

It’s worth pointing out what’s missing in the list above: we have no plans to create a traditional desktop product for the consumer market in the foreseeable future.

An explanation: as a public, for-profit company, Red Hat must create products and technologies with an eye on the bottom line, and with desktops this is much harder to do than with servers. The desktop market suffers from having one dominant vendor, and some people still perceive that today’s Linux desktops simply don’t provide a practical alternative. Of course, a growing number of technically savvy users and companies have discovered that today’s Linux desktop is indeed a practical alternative. Nevertheless, building a sustainable business around the Linux desktop is tough, and history is littered with example efforts that have either failed outright, are stalled or are run as charities. But there’s good news too. Technical developments that have become available over the past year or two are accelerating the spread of the Linux Desktop.

But I have been thinking, why would RH want to do this? Over the years, RedHat was *the* brand that was almost synonymous with Linux which has support. Corporates and businesses when asked the techies “who will support open source” almost always got some pointers in RedHat’s direction. And then this!

What is Red Hat really scared of - Microsoft? But this exit of RedHat will announce in no uncertain terms the victory of Ubuntu too! Today, if XP etc rule the desktop market, Ubuntu has slowly got the mindshare of the Linux users and is the most dominant Linux distribution today.

Does Red Hat’s exit now leave the desktop Linux field open to Ubuntu? I would say, yes!

“Microsoft fundamentally, as a whole, has changed dramatically as a result of open source,” Ozzie said. “As people have been using it more and more, the nature of interoperability between our systems and others has increased.” That means that from the very start when Microsoft begins developing new products, it considers what components it will want to open up to outside developers, he said.

Still, that doesn’t mean that Microsoft is changing its approach to business. “We have a software business that is based on proprietary software. We tactically or strategically will take certain aspects of what we do and open source them where we believe there will be a real benefit to the community,” he said. The open sourcing of the .Net framework is an example of that, he said.

Ozzie also spoke a bit about Microsoft’s vision for using the Web to connect devices and content, in what may foreshadow an announcement the company plans for next week. “The Web really is a hub. It can be viewed conceptually as a hub for a social mesh and device mesh,” he said. Using the Internet as a hub for a social mesh means people can connect a wide range of online content like information they tag and rank, content they publish and information they subscribe to, he said.

Ozzie’s vision could hint at a service, Live Mesh, that Microsoft plans to unveil on Tuesday. The company has not revealed any details about the offering except to say it will be unveiled next week during the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. Ozzie briefly described a similar mesh vision earlier this year at the Mix 08 conference.

Microsoft already offers an online sharing service, SkyDrive, which is still in beta. SkyDrive is an online storage system that users can access from their PCs and from any other device with a browser, like a smartphone.

Beyond content, the Internet can also serve as a hub for devices, Ozzie said. “From a device standpoint, the Web can be a hub in terms of bringing devices we have together,” he said. While enterprises often connect and manage thousands of computers in a business, individuals have a variety of devices such as phones, PCs, media centers and music players that are mostly unconnected, he said.

Microsoft has already done some connecting of devices, including a service that lets Xbox and Zune users share media between the devices via the Web.

That model can also be extended to broaden the way that enterprises connect devices, he said. For example, a mobile user could take a photograph and use the picture in a project the user is working on via a PC and the Web, he said.

Ozzie also touched on two other principles guiding the work at Microsoft, including getting the mix of software and services right and moving away from “monolithic” programs to fragmented pieces of software that end-users can choose to use as appropriate.

Virtualization is another area that Microsoft thinks will be increasingly important. “Within the enterprise, virtualization is the simplest and most straightforward way to make the best use of data center resources,” he said.

Ozzie also praised the work the MVPs do in providing feedback to Microsoft. The software industry “used to be so supply constrained,” he said. “You could build almost anything and there’d be an audience waiting for it.” Today, however, there’s an abundance of software and services that users can choose from. That means Microsoft’s challenge is to better understand what users want in order to best target their needs, he said.

About 4,000 technology experts make up Microsoft’s MVP program. Nearly 1,800 of them met this week in Seattle at an annual summit.

Source: PCW

For the last two-plus months, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and others have been in a slow dance as everyone tries to get what they want out of the MicroHoo deal. Google wants to keep the two firms apart. Microsoft wants to acquire Yahoo. Poor Yahoo just wants to be left alone, it likes dancing by itself. In the last few days, things have become more interesting, with AOL, and News Corp. joining the dance. Fivesomes rarely work out, though. Someone is going to come away from this dance empty-handed and disappointed.

If Eric Schmidt has anything to do with it, it ain’t gonna be Google.

The New York Times is reporting that Schmidt has turned to his old crony, Quattrone, for help. He has hired Quattrone’s new law firm, the Qatalyst Group, to provide legal counsel and help it strategize the movements of this dance. Schmidt and Quattrone have worked together in the past. Quattrone was one of the first investment bankers to consult with Google when it was but a lowly startup in the late 1990s. Further, Schmidt was party to the creation of Quattrone’s new firm.

Quattrone, of course, was beset by the U.S. legal system for years on obstruction of justice charges. After two trials, Uncle Sam gave up on one of the charges, and he was cleared of another conviction when the presiding judge misinformed the jury about how to interpret the law. Technically, he’s not a criminal. Are his hands clean? Who is to say.

Whatever happened in Quattrone’s past, he’s obviously looking to recapture the former glory of a life lived in the business spotlight. As the impact of this acquisition will reverberate around the Internet for years to come, any role he might play is sure to affect us all.