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Microsoft has overpaid for deals in the past
This would be the biggest takeover ever for Microsoft
Academic studies suggest mergers tend to destroy more value than they create
Steve Ballmer already looks stretched managing the company
Microsoft has struggled to crack the online-advertising market

Despite all this, the authors think the large drop in the stock price is an over-reaction.

Bloggers are supposed to offer opinions, but when it comes to Microsoft buying Yahoo, the opinion of the stock market is much more interesting than anything I might say.

What’s scaring off investors? The article suggests:

An article in the Wall Street Journal today (Chicken
Little Investors? by Robert Cyran, Rob Cox and Dwight Cass of breakingviews.com) points out that since the proposed deal was announced, Microsoft’s stock price has fallen 12%. In terms of market value, that translates to $41 billion. This over a deal valued at $44.6 billion.

Time will tell.

YouTube videos will be coming to high-end TiVo DVRs soon. In a brief announcement, TiVo said that YouTube video access would be available on the company’s latest TiVo HD and TiVo Series3 models “later this year.” (Owners of older Series2 TiVos look to be out of luck.) On-screen access to YouTube videos joins a host of other Internet-delivered entertainment options on TiVo, including Amazon Unbox video rentals, Rhapsody’s subscription music service, access to Photobucket and Picasa photo galleries, TiVoCast Web videos, podcasts, and Internet radio. While ancillary to TiVo’s primary mission of recording and playing back TV shows, the inclusion of such Web-friendly features helps the company delineate its products from the wide range of “free” DVRs that are available from local cable operators. (Disclaimer: CNET is one of several content partners that provides videos to TiVo’s TiVoCast service.)

As for YouTube, its appearance on TiVo may be the first of many new venues. The TiVo news was timed to coincide with YouTube’s announcement that it’s expanding its APIs to allow third parties more direct access to the service. That said, YouTube is already available on quite a few home and mobile gadgets. Aside from the high-profile Apple TV, you can also find YouTube on your TV with the Netgear Digital Entertainer HD–as well as any product with a full-function (Flash-enabled) Web browser, such as the
Nintendo Wii and
Sony PlayStation 3. In the handheld world, the once unique YouTube offering on the iPhone has since been joined by phones from Helio and the Nokia N810 Internet Tablet. Also, the new Skyfire browser promises to bring YouTube (and any other Flash video site) to a wide range of Windows Mobile phones.

YouTube will be available on Series3 TiVos later this year

Having played with YouTube on some of these devices, we’ll say this: Yes, it’s cool to have access to YouTube on your TV or on your phone–but you may actually come away a bit disappointed in the end. Because YouTube has such a social component–sharing cool or funny videos with your friends–the experience can often be a bit isolating when viewed on a device without ready access to your e-mail, instant messaging, or social network of choice. You know the feeling: a million channels to watch, and nothin’s on.

(Credit:
CNET)

Trust me — it can happen.

Everyone has been down on Yahoo lately. And while most have good reason to feel that way, there is still some hope for the company. Let’s face it — this is a firm that still enjoys huge profits and has a user base that exceeds 500 million people. With that kind of leverage, there’s no reason to suggest it can’t turn the tide and create a better business model.

The future may be brighter for Yahoo than some are willing to admit, but if the company doesn’t realize what’s good for it and it doesn’t follow through with social networking, it could have a major problem on its hands. But if it does, look for Yahoo to make a serious comeback riding the coattails of MySpace and Facebook.

Let’s be honest — Yahoo’s biggest strength is not its services per se, but rather its huge user base and its ability to bring boatloads of people on to its varied sites each day. And it doesn’t capitalize on those people, it has nothing to show for it.

And although I’m not the most keen on social networks and think it’s a very fickle business to be in, Yahoo can significantly change everything by leveraging its users and creating a social networking element that will dwarf MySpace and Facebook.

All in all, social networking is the only way Yahoo can readily capitalize on its huge user base. Let’s face it — out of those 500 million registered users, I’d venture to say that a fraction are still using Yahoo services on a daily basis and the chances of that many people actually remembering they had Yahoo accounts is probably quite slim. But if Yahoo can create an environment that would coax more people to its side, why wouldn’t it help the business?

A few weeks ago, Yahoo fired its opening salvo in its desire for social networking. According to the company, it plans on streamlining its social networking element and creating an environment where users can interact with each other and its services across its entire set of offerings.

As it stands, Yahoo is getting beaten quite handily on the search front in the US. To make matters worse, its stock price is floundering in the mid-$20s and there is currently little chance that it can gain any ground on Google in advertising. Realizing all that, why wouldn’t it try to capitalize on one of the most important elements of the entire industry and do what it can to turn an even greater profit?

“We are going to rewire the entire experience at Yahoo to make it social in every dimension,” Ari Balogh, Yahoo’s chief technology officer said.

According to Yahoo, it plans on creating an environment across all its services that will allow its users to pick and create widgets that can be added to any of its offerings and expand their usefulness. Most importantly, it’s going to make its user experience much better and allow its users to work together and interact in ways that have yet to be announced.

And if you ask me, Yahoo couldn’t have made a better decision.

“We show you general information about your viewers in anonymous and aggregate form, based on the birth date and gender information that users share with us when they create YouTube accounts,” the company said. “This means that individual users can’t be personally identified.”

YouTube now lets those who have uploaded videos see details about the types of people watching them.

Insight now has a “demographics tab that displays view count information broken down by age group (such as ages 18-24), gender, or a combination of the two, to help you get a better understanding of the makeup of your YouTube audience,” Google said in a blog posting Thursday.

The company has added a demographics section to an analytics tool called Insight that YouTube released in March.

The move dovetails with Google’s high priority of making more money from YouTube through advertising. Chief Executive Eric Schmidt last week promised new YouTube ad possibilities, and advertisers and marketers love demographic information as well as the detailed records of media consumption the Internet can provide.

User privacy also is protected, Google said.

Google on Wednesday introduced a new way to buy ads at YouTube called buzz targeting, in which ads are placed around videos that are booming in popularity by word of mouth.

(Credit:
AppleOwner.com) (Credit:
AppleOwner.com) (Credit:
AppleOwner.com) (Credit:
AppleOwner.com)

Are these really leaked pics of a redesigned MacBook, widely expected later this year? Probably not, as Apple has always done an excellent job of keeping its new designs under wraps. But the Interwebs are abuzz with this series of shots that generally fit in with the conventional wisdom–that the MacBook line is getting an aluminum makeover, to look more like the high-end MacBook Pro.

Mac accessories store AppleOwner.com and a Taiwanese site called apple.pro are both showing off the allegedly leaked shots, which don’t offer much in the way of detail, besides an aluminum chassis with the MacBook name stamped into it. Check out the pics for yourself after the break and let us know if you think they’re legit or fake.

In a moment of calm, Plattner said, “We have many things in common. Let me give you some advice, but you might not take it because you are younger: don’t overestimate your platform.” Sage advice.

In August 2007, Plattner’s proxy, SAP CEO Henning Kagermann, characterized Salesforce.com as follows:

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.–Two titans in the enterprise software business faced off Thursday at a Churchill Club event at the Computer History Museum here, and a bit of history was made.

Debate partners: Marc Benioff and Hasso Plattner

To put this debate in historical context, Benioff has been known to disparage SAP, which generated $15 billion in revenue for 2007 with a 26 percent margin, as a company that doesn’t innovate. In an interview with News.com’s Charlie Cooper and myself a few weeks ago, Benioff said:

Benioff summarized the future of enterprise software during the debate in this statement: Software-as-a-service will not happen without Microsoft, Oracle, or SAP. But they are holding on to the past. The new Internet companies–Amazon, Google and ebay–what they have done and the new young internet companies is really the next generation.”

Benioff, who I declare the debate winner by nontechnical knockout (no references to in-memory database systems), stuck to his vision of the future. “You have to buy into the fundamental premise that the world has to change, and because we have a global network and a new architecture with massively parallel servers, we can build technology with a level of automation previously unimaginable.

As salesforce.com evolved from CRM to application platform, Benioff has been making that claim the client/server model is doomed. Plattner touted SAP’s developer community. “We have 1.2 million software developers on our platform, 2,000 partners developing addition software,” he said. “We have the largest software development project in our history, with 2,500 developers developing on demand,” Plattner added.

The evening started off more calmly, with Benioff describing the new generation of enterprise software companies, which he said will look more like consumer companies, such as Google, Yahoo, and eBay on the back end, but serve up traditional business functionality.

Plattner was asked if he would consider buying Salesforce.com. “It always makes sense to look into something. If the Apex platform (the Salesforce.com platform) is really as good a he thinks it is, we should look even more,” he said. Plattner also said that he thinks Oracle, where Benioff worked for 13 years, will end up acquiring Salesforce.com

The history footnote of the evening came from Benioff, who challenged Plattner to build SAP applications on the Salesforce.com platform. “I want to figure out how to get SAP to build on our platform,” Benioff said. “SAP needs to write its new apps on our platform, and I need to help him do that because there is no way he can figure that out…we will be in a war to get more developers on our platform.”

“You have 2,500 developers and 2,100 interfaces. All that and no customer success,” Benioff taunted.

With SAP, you really have not seen innovation in the last 10 years. If you think about what is the one thing that SAP has ever innovated, what have they created that’s unique to the industry or value-added technology? I have a hard time thinking about what SAP is going to be known for at the end of the day.

“I would be scared at what you just said. If you extend that to whole enterprise system, I would be scared to death,” Plattner responded.

Plattner, who was writing software when Benioff was in grade school, wasn’t biting, and became a bit exercised. He questioned whether Salesforce.com could keep thousands of on-demand service interfaces consistent as its platform grows and as customers write code to integrate with the platform.

Benioff said Salesforce.com is aimed at all sizes of companies and across industries. “We have been passionate about moving obstacles out of the way of the old enterprise software companies,” Benioff said. “We are at the verge of a breakthrough, and it is as big as the software-as-a-service business has been. We see platforms emerging where we can accept customers and ISV code and run it natively, just as R/3 ran natively on Oracle. This means you can run the business processes of any company in the world. We are moving now to platform-as-a-service, and it’s biggest the threat to SAP, MS, Oracle, and BEA architectures.”

Benioff claimed that the Salesforce.com platform could run any kind of enterprise application. He asked Plattner why Salesforce.com beat out SAP for the Dupont business. “We had a shitty CRM system,” Plattner said. He then said that the new SAP CRM 7.0 is the best product in the field. “You had a good time and now we are. If you are really successful how much are you worth?” Plattner said.

Salesforce is like best of breed in the old days. It’s always an advantage, but you cannot be best at everything worldwide. That’s our advantage–we can run an entire business.

Fundamentally, companies will find it more practical and cost effective to deploy enterprise software from the cloud over the next decade. As I said earlier, Benioff won the debate, but he has a long way to go to unseat Plattner’s company.

Plattner rambled on about betting on modification-free software with SAP R/3 in 1993, only to find that customers wanted to customize it. SAP’s plan today is to provide 2,100 service interfaces in Business ByDesign, its forthcoming hosted suite of applications for the mid-market. Those interfaces will mesh with each other but will not be customizable. He differentiated Business ByDesign from Salesforce.com by virtue of the completeness of the SAP suite. SAP has been working on Business ByDesign for four years with 2,500 developers on the project, and it won’t be generally available until later this year or 2009.

“All 41,000 Salesforce customers are on the same version. When we release the new version in June, we don’t break the links. In some cases they have to re-implement, but you still have a managed environment,” Benioff countered.

(Credit:
Dan Farber)

For SAP, software is about serving larger businesses with a complete, integrated suite of applications with “wall-to-wall functionality,” Plattner said.

“We have many things in common. Let me give you some advice, but you might not take it because you are younger: don’t overestimate your platform.” –Hasso Plattner to Marc Benioff

Speaking of old, SAP was founded in 1972 and Salesforce.com in 1999. Salesforce.com is approaching $1 billion in annual revenue, and a much smaller margin than SAP, with its software-as-a-service platform and subscription business model. SAP has been slow to adopt the software-as-a-service model, but is prepping to launch Business ByDesign. It will be more directly competitive with NetSuite than Salesforce.com, which is built primarily around CRM applications.

The sage, 64-year-old Hasso Plattner, co-founder and Chairman of SAP, and the upstart, 43-year-old Marc Benioff, co-founder and Chairman of salesforce.com, debated the future of enterprise software, fielding questions from Quentin Hardy of Forbes and the audience.

This high-end designer boutique in a trendy part of Seoul sells these bags at higher than Louis Vuitton’s full prices, which is not nearly as hilarious as Louis Vuitton’s unique methods in fighting back counterfeiters these days. Just look at this fake set-up of a fake bag seller that sells real bags during a recent exhibit launch party in New York. (via Notcot)

(Credit: Ravi Chhatpar)

Microsoft has opened up, removing any advantage it may have granted Novell in that department. Novell would do well to listen to Joe Brockmeier, its new OpenSuse community leader. Joe gets open source. Give him a chance to speak. He can help you chart the way.

Well, Novell gained a few quarters of “coupon cash” from the deal (though my sources at Novell say that customers aren’t renewing their subscriptions at a rate that Novell would like), but I hope it recognizes the value in standing firm for openness. What little wind it got puffed into its sails from its interoperability lock-up with Microsoft just dissipated.

Microsoft’s pledge to truly interoperate with the rest of the planet, including open-source developers (both commercial and community), leaves two clear victors in the Linux camp: Red Hat and Ubuntu. While Novell capitulated to Microsoft’s early demands for a patent stooge, Red Hat and Ubuntu stood firm.

Today, they, like the rest of the industry, got their due: a truly open pledge for open APIs, open protocols, and data portability from Microsoft, as well as what appears to be fair and reasonable terms for patent grants/licenses.

Where does this leave Novell?

As well it should. Novell has a great engineering team. It doesn’t need patent FUD to sell its products. Novell can now get back to the business of selling value to customers, not limited interoperability and covenants not to sue. Consider this a learning experience. There is no value in back-room interoperability deals and patent pledges. Not for customers, anyway.

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When I gave it a go the location service was off by several blocks on my first attempt. Though even standard GPS systems aren’t perfect, the margin of error was still too big. Fortunately, the second time I tried the location service it was much more accurate and I liked that I could zoom in quite close. Yet it’s worth noting that the functionality won’t work when you’re away from wireless civilization, which typically is a time when GPS services come in really handy. I’m glad to see this feature added, though.

Movies and music Going forward the iPhone will support Apple’s iTunes movie rentals, which jobs also announced at the show. And when watching films, you’ll be able to through the movies by chapter and select alternate language tracks and view subtitles. Also, when playing music in the
iPod player, you’ll be able to see lyric overlays. All in all, these fixes sound pretty neat.

iPhone with the new Google Maps feature

Shake up the home screen The iPhone’s home screen is slick but up until now it hasn’t offered customization options. But with today’s update, you’ll be able to add your personal touch. By pressing and holding any icon, all the the icons on the display will start to wiggle. You then can move icons around and rearrange them at will. By moving icons to the right you also can access a second menu page and you can add or remove on the “dock” at the bottom of the display. It’s clear that with this new feature Apple is readying the iPhone for more applications, particularly as the company prepares for next month’s SDK. To stop the icons from wiggling, just press the Home button.

Better SMS This may be the most basic part of the update but it’s the one that I’m most excited about. While previously the
iPhone would let you send a text message to just one person at a time, today’s update will allow you to send a message to several people simultaneously. No, it’s not new and no, it’s not sexy, but it is without a doubt useful. I think the iPhone should have had such capability from the very beginning, but that’s another story.

Safari bookmarks Though you’ve always been able to bookmark Web sites in the
Safari browser today’s update lets you add those bookmarks to the home screen in the form of icons. When viewing your favorite site, just tap the bookmark icon and you’ll find a new “Add to home screen” option. After clicking that and naming the bookmark whatever you’d like an icon with a miniature version of the Web page will appear on the home screen. You can add multiple icons (thanks to the new second menu page) and you can move them around using the aforementioned home screen customization feature. Also, you can delete “web clips” (as Jobs called them) at will. I think this is a also a useful feature as it saves you a few clicks inside the browser.

Location, location, location The Google Maps functionality gained a new degree of functionality with a location service. It doesn’t magically become a GPS device GPS (you can’t add a GPS chip via a software update) but it will let you pinpoint your approximate location on the Goggle Maps feature. As Jobs demonstrated in his keynote, when you tap the new icon in the lower left corner of the touchscreen, a circle will show where you should be on the map. But rather than connecting to a satellite, it finds you by connecting to nearby Wi-Fi hotspots and cellular towers and pinpointing their location (sort of a back door locater). You then can find directions using your pinpointed location.

What’s missing? Quite a few things are missing, actually. Though a 3G iPhone remains the grand prize, I was still hoping for a few other improvements. In particular I’d like to see Adobe Flash playback, more memory, cut and paste, multimedia messaging, stereo Bluetooth and video recording. And one more thing…how about some SDK news? But on the whole it was decent show but I can’t wait more.

(Credit:
Apple)

The next mapping feature is pretty cool. By pressing the new icon on the lower right corner of the touchscreen you can drop a pin wherever you like on the map. You can move the pin around and you can use it as a location for determining directions.

It’s now been a year since Apple first unveiled its iPhone and today the company announced a series of updates to the super-hyped device. Though 3G-capability remains on the horizon (it will come this year, however) now has the capability to do a couple things its should have done form the outset. Speaking at the Macworld 2008 keynote in San Francisco, Apple CEO Steve Jobs promised a handful of features in update 1.1.3 including Google Maps location triangulation and the ability to send a text message to multiple recipients. The result is a more useful device, but we were hoping for a bit more. The update is available today–you need only to download the latest version of iTunes–and unlike the similar updates for the iPod Touch that were also announced today, it is free.

By the numbers Jobs said that in the 200 days that the iPhone has been selling, Apple has sold four million units for an average of about 20,000 a day.

McInnis did not say if Southwest’s service would limit what kind of sites or applications passengers could access, as does JetBlue’s recently added service.

Southwest Airlines plans to begin trials of satellite Internet service this summer.

As a frequent Southwest traveler, I guess I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, it would be great to have connectivity while on the go. On the other, as many have discussed previously, bringing Internet to the few places where it’s not currently available limits the places you can get away from work.

That means that in the early going at least, the service–which will allow passengers to access the Internet if they have their own Wi-Fi-enabled laptops–will be available at random.

Southwest Airlines announced Wednesday that it plans to begin trials of satellite-to-airplane broadband Internet service sometime this summer.

It’s not entirely clear what benchmarks Southwest will use to determine the success or failure of the trial. McInnis said that the airline will examine whether the technology works and whether it performs according to plan.

Still, I suppose I’m in favor of the advance. Now if only airlines can work on bringing power outlets to all seats–not just those in business or first class–so that those of us in coach flying long flights can power up the whole way.

But she pointed out that because the service is satellite-to-plane–whereas JetBlue’s, for example, is ground-to-air–it would ensure consistent connectivity, even over water.

Spokeswoman Marilee McInnis said Wednesday morning that initially Southwest plans to test the service on four planes. But because the airline’s planes fly many different routes, she did not anticipate–at least not yet–that travelers would be able to plan to fly on one of those planes.

(Credit:
Southwest Airlines)