Microsoft / Yahoo rumour back again
January 10, 2008
The perennial rumour of Microsofts impending acquisition of Yahoo has resurfaced in an article in the NY Post today. I last posted on this in September. See the last line of this NY Post article for the hint supposedly from an insider at MS, apparently the deal is still being debated at Microsoft.
I’m actually less unconvinced than I was about this rumour now. Microsoft are still failing to build the traction around their MSN portal and get significantly less browse traffic than Yahoo and have significantly less advertising real estate available to them. They are also lagging behind in search (although that could change soon). Yahoo would still be a great buy for them, and instantly propel them up the charts in terms of eyeballs and ad clicks.
Microsoft Surface videos
January 10, 2008
Neowin visited the Microsoft booth at CES yesterday and came back with some videos of Microsoft Surface in action. Surface is a computing interface for the future according to Microsoft which runs on (you guessed it) a surface and allows the user to interact with the surface.
Full article here on Neowin; videos below:
Water:
Photos:
Paint app:
It does look incredibly cool and very Star Trek. I can see this being the future combined with projected keyboards etc.
Microsoft looking to improve search by buying FAST!
January 8, 2008
So, yesterday Bill Gates hinted in his keynote at CES that Microsoft would improve search. It’s an area where they haven’t really shown any improvement in recent years. I thought to myself at the time, maybe they’ve finally realised that it’s all about the algorithm and the quality of results you deliver to users, not in the interface and fancy AJAX tools.
So I watched, and waited, and lo and behold they announce an offer to buy FAST Search and Transfer!
The offer comes to approx $1.2B which is a fair valuation. Rumours are that the shareholders have already approved this and it’s all a formality and will go ahead pretty quickly.
Top move Bill! FAST is a great piece of search technology with many applications. It has it’s heart rooted in providing good algorithms and tailorable search tools which is exactly where Microsoft should be pushing it’s Live Search offering.
Now you just have to integrate this with Adcentre and deliver a Google beating search engine, no small task, that should make the next year very interesting!
Google vs Microsoft… seconds out!
December 17, 2007
Great article here in the NY Times about Googles ambitions to move all computing to the cloud and Microsofts continued reluctance to cannibalise their existing revenue streams by moving away from desktop software.
I side with the people who think the future of computing will be distributed in the cloud. What’s the point of running software on the desktop when access speeds will be so quick we can all work on thin-client type terminals and access our data and applications from anywhere with any device we choose.
Of course, whether Google becomes the winner waits to be seen. Plenty of time for another entrant to make themselves known as well, so it’s still a very unpredictable future ahead.
Microsoft buys Multimap
December 12, 2007
Breaking news (courtesy of the Guardian); Microsoft have bought mapping provider Multimap for an undisclosed sum.
Great move on Multimaps behalf. They must be finding life hard with all the new mapping entrants so an exit must be right up their street! In fact Nielsen shows they only have a 1.4% reach compared to Google Maps 21.4%.
Strangely though, Microsofts own it’s Live Maps solution which gets seven times as many unique users as Multimap anyway. That said Multimap do have some great functionality and talented guys (I nearly agreed to work for them many years ago)!
The future of user experience
November 26, 2007
Smashing Magazine today has and article looking at some of the amazing developments coming in the way we as users experience interacting with technology. The list of coming interfaces includes Microsoft Surface which I’ve blogged about before. User experience could change dramatically and where we are now all thinking about a flat screen we could in the future be thinking of all sorts of 3D, multi-level, complex interfaces.
Well worth a read!
Could Microsoft ruin Gmail?
November 25, 2007
Yes they could according to this great satirical post on Google Blogoscoped! The end result is below but read the article, it’s well worth it!
New online Office competitor could hurt Microsoft and Google
November 22, 2007
A new entrant has launched in the online office product arena. This latest release into the office 2.0 world comes from someone with a heritage in making very succesful web apps. The chairman is none other than Sabeer Bhatia, co-founder of the hugely popular Hotmail. Sabeer sold Hotmail to Microsoft in 1997 for $400M, so he definitely knows what he’s doing.
Anyway, I became aware of this thanks to an article in the Times.
Interesting that they have taken the shrewd step of using the interface of Microsoft Office for their product. One of the key issues with other online office products such as Google Apps is the difficulty ordinary users have in getting used to a new interface. Live Documents promises to look and feel just like MS Office and even better it has a software plug-in so that you can continue to use your desktop software and still get the best of the online service.
With everything that is being said about Live Documents in the blogosphere it seems this could be really big with the right PR.
I’m so pleased that someone has come along and shown the right approach to online productivity. Getting both online and offline functionality with real time synchronisation and integration with desktop software in a free service has got to be a big draw. The 100mb storage limit is a little low but I’d expect that to rise if they want to compete with the established players such as Google.
Facebook to use cookies for an ad network
October 30, 2007
Both Techcrunch and Venture Beat have posts about the forthcoming (still rumoured though) ad technology from Facebook. Word is that it will use cookies to track users data and activity on Facebook and then serve them ads based on that data when they leave the social network and browse other web properties.
Sound idea! Facebook profiles carry a wealth of data that could be of use to ad serving technologies.
Now, this won’t work unless there is a third party cookie involved which is tied to the ad network and not Facebook. Otherwise the cookie would only be of use to serve ads while on the Facebook site. So will this cookie be part of Microsofts ad serving technology, another third party ad network who Facebook could sell the data to or will Facebook go it alone and set up an ad network?
It’s an opportunity for Facebook to make some serious money, although I really doubt the valuation touted by Venture Beat. $100 billion will not be seen from an online company in the near future I’d be willing to bet. The ads served through this technology will be very targetted though (potentially more than ever before), great news for those of us in online travel who suffer high CPM’s and low clickthroughs due to the lack of targetting data available currently.
Only issue with this is the prevalance of cookie blocking technology. Any ad network using this cookie will get listed on all the blocking sites and software very quickly and also the knowledge that this is happening could turn off a large amount of Facebook users very quickly.
It’s supposed to be announced on the 6th November, so I’ll reserve final judgement until then. Perhaps Double Click will be the partner of choice 
