I didn't see this coming. Yahoo has actually
given
in to corporate raider Carl Icahn
, and is allowing him and two others of
his choosing to join the Yahoo board. Icahn now controls three out of the 11
seats.
As owner of 5 percent of Yahoo shares, it makes sense to have Icahn on the
board. Then again, he's actively trying to dismantle the company. If I were
the Yahoo chairman, I'd treat Icahn like a Mexican jalapeno and steer clear!
Posted by Doug Barney on July 22, 20080 comments
Doug
asked
readers
recently what they would do if they ran VMware and needed to take
on Hyper-V's pricing (read: free). Here are some of your suggestions:
What would I do if I was VMware? PANIC.
-Anonymous
Well, I would ultimately slash the price of the ESX products, give away
the Workstation and servers for free (but have fees for support), add more
hardware vendor support or alliance, and publish more books or best practice
guide documents.
-Cornelio
Here is a plan for VMware: Provide a hypervisor and a VM maker for home
users. Servers are where the money's at, but if you want users to keep your
name, you have to provide the same wares at home. Well, maybe not the same,
but something that will transfer readily between work and home.
What I envision is a VM platform that would allow a home user to run
one or more OSes independent of the hardware. When it's time to upgrade your
hardware to a better system, you just package up your system as-is, copy it
somewhere (online storage, DVD, whatever), get your new machine and drop it
down. How many people are forced to move to Vista (for example) because they
got a new laptop? If it were a VMware microkernel, they could just mount their
old OS on a new system -- no fuss, no settings to reset, no new or significant
nuances to learn. No doubt people would pay a PC premium for this ease of
use, and it would knock down Microsoft significantly as it cannot force a
vendor to upgrade to its new OS package since any VMware-ready machine would
be OS-independent.
-Tom
A price increase might work for Smirnoff vodka, but it won't work for
software. It's the death knell for VMware. Just ask your corporate managers
who will force you to go with the lower-cost alternative -- especially from
a name-brand vendor like Microsoft.
-Mike
More
Posted by Doug Barney on July 22, 20080 comments
Research in Motion just
plugged
a hole in its BlackBerry
that could allow hackers to use PDFs to break into
BlackBerry servers. The company suggests that customers patch by moving to BlackBerry
Enterprise Server version 4.1, service pack 6 for Exchange.
I have a BlackBerry and love the e-mail. I hate, though, the way it deals with
attachments -- or doesn't deal with attachments. Talk about a kludge. No wonder
so many are switching to the iPhone.
Posted by Doug Barney on July 22, 20080 comments
Rumors have been circulating that Steve Jobs was ill when he showed up to the
latest iPhone debut looking thin and gaunt. Apple reps claimed that Jobs was
getting over the flu, but rumors persisted, especially since Jobs was diagnosed
with cancer of the pancreas several years ago.
Wall
Street flipped out over the rumors that Jobs is seriously ill after the
company refused to talk about his health on a recent earnings call. Investors
promptly started dumping the high-flying stock.
More
Posted by Doug Barney on July 22, 20080 comments
As Chico Escuela might say, software has been berry, berry good to Microsoft.
And despite the over-hyped Google threat, Microsoft keeps printing money faster
than the U.S. mint (though slower than a Chinese bank these days).
Case in point: the most recent fiscal year wherein Redmond brought
in over $60 billion (and by Redmond, I mean the company, not the magazine,
unfortunately).
More
Posted by Doug Barney on July 21, 20080 comments
I've pointed out many times -- some may say too many times -- that Google has
too much power. It knows too much about us (and this is only getting worse),
has too much control over Web advertising (which it somehow achieves without
creating any of its own content) and now it wants to completely corner the market
on Web ads with a
proposed
deal with Yahoo
More
Posted by Doug Barney on July 21, 20080 comments
Some developers interested in trying out the beta of Live Mesh are a bit disappointed.
No, not in the software -- in their ability to get it. It seems there's a
waiting
list
to get the test software.
I've read up on Live Mesh and still don't completely get it. Here's what I
think I know: Live Mesh isn't a product, but a set of tools that let developers
build applications. These applications are designed not just to share data across
the Internet, but keep it synchronized, as well. This is a very Lotus Notes-ian
concept, which used replication to sync end user machines with databases stored
on servers.
More
Posted by Doug Barney on July 21, 20080 comments
There's an old story about economics that I think my dad once told me. It seems
that Smirnoff vodka was losing market share to its lower-priced rival, Wolfschmidt,
back in the '60s. Instead of slashing its prices to match those of Wolfschmidt,
Smirnoff did something no one expected: It raised 'em. All of a sudden, Smirnoff
was a premium brand, and sales rose.
Apparently, VMware is the Smirnoff to Hyper-V's Wolfschmidt. Over in Europe,
VMware
is raising prices, at the exact same time that a nearly free Hyper-V is
coming to market.
More
Posted by Doug Barney on July 17, 20080 comments
Microsoft is
sounding
an alarm
over the Google/Yahoo ad deal, calling it a monopoly in the making.
Coming from Microsoft, this might be ironic -- but not that surprising:
Ironic? No, it's about time. Turnabout is fair play.
-Anonymous
This is just as ironic as when IBM got to finger-pointing at Microsoft
during the Microsoft monopoly hearings. Youngsters might not remember IBM's
own monopoly issues, but the rest of us do.
-Stan
What goes around comes around. I think Microsoft is justified using the
same arguments that have been used against it -- and the results should be
the same if the legal systems are balanced as they claim.
-Anonymous
Microsoft's enemies have used the monopoly chip against them and now they
want to turn the tables on Google. Having politicians and the courts involved
in this is not good for the consumer's pocket book or for technology innovation.
I trust the market to make the corrections needed.
-Tom
After reading your comments about Microsoft, the potential Google/Yahoo
deal and the words "monopoly" and "ironic" in your column,
another word immediately came to my mind: HYPOCRITE. Kind of like the pot
calling the kettle black. Just like a terrorist calling the United States
a bunch of murderers. Kinda of like sending a fat, overweight U.S. senator
overseas to a Third World nation to investigate their poverty and hunger.
Tennessee Williams said it best in "The Rose Tattoo," Act 3: "The
only thing worse than a liar is a liar that's also a hypocrite!"
How long before we see Microsoft changing its trademark to a guy wearing
a black hat, a tuxedo and a monocle?
-Les
More
Posted by Doug Barney on July 17, 20080 comments
The Apple crowd is a pretty loyal lot. These are the folks that line up whenever
there's a hot new Mac, iPhone or Steve Jobs sighting.
One TV reporter, though, mistook this crowd for the Dungeons & Dragons-type
folks that camp out waiting for the next PlayStation or Nintendo. This TV reporter
thought Apple fans were pimple-faced losers with no social skills -- and no
guts.
More
Posted by Doug Barney on July 17, 20080 comments
Cloud computing may not take over our entire world of computing, but it's clearly
going to represent a large chunk of how we conduct business. And that has some
rather huge
security
implications
.
For one, all these service companies need to ensure that their software --
and your data -- is safe. This means that the security software market is going
to be less about anti-virus on your PC and more about anti-hacker on huge server
farms.
More
Posted by Doug Barney on July 17, 20080 comments
On the topic of Microsoft's OOXML file format, Angus has an interesting question:
How is OOXML a standard when even Microsoft's own Office suite does not
yet fully support it?
-Angus
In the wake of the WSUS glitch that Microsoft eventually fixed, Doug asked
readers whether they value a patch's stability more than its speed. Most of
you went with the former:
More
Posted by Doug Barney on July 16, 20080 comments