Posted by Angela | 5 Comments
The Bing-Yahoo! Deal to Take on Google
Microsoft and Yahoo have finally reached an agreement on their long rumored search partnership. The 10 year deal gives Microsoft exclusive access to Yahoo’s search technologies and to the second largest pool of searchers and advertisers.
The deal will allow Microsoft’s Bing to power the joint search engines while Yahoo is the salesmen behind the two, responsible for relationships and sales. Yahoo predicts a $500 million increase in annual operating profit resulting from increase in searchers. Also, they expect a $275 million savings on expenditures every year from no longer investing in their own search technologies.
The money side gives the impression that this will be a great decision for Yahoo, who is trying to earn back losses from recently plumiting stocks. However, stocks have not responded. In fact, some may say that Yahoo’s stock disagrees with the deal between Yahoo and Microsoft. Yahoo’s stock, which you would expect to be up, is down over a dollar and a half this morning after the deal was announced. Another down side that Carol Bartz, Yahoo’s CEO, revealed this morning in a conference call with Microsoft is they will be scaling down their size and so an unspecified number of jobs will be lost.
Microsoft and Yahoo have created a joint website where they have outlined specifics of the deal and given investors a reference page and access to each company’s SEC filings.
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Microsoft Security Updates: July 28, 2009
Microsoft will be releasing two out-of-band security updates today for potential threats. Because Microsoft is releasing these two bulletins outside their monthly patch cycle, we can assume that the security issues at hand are quite severe.
The notification that Microsoft posted on Friday says the two bulletins released today will give solutions for issues within Microsoft Visual Studio product line and Internet Explorer. The bulletin for the Microsoft Visual Studio product line will address an issue that has negatively affected some kinds of applications. The Internet Explorer update will address issues deep in Internet Explorer that are independent of the Visual Studio issues. Internet Explorer’s issues have been classified as ”Critical,” and solutions will provide extra protection against the security problems found in Visual Studio. Microsoft is being very limited on details until the announcement is made later today. When you keep your system up to date (in the area of security) you will avoid attacks related to these threats.
The bulletins are set to be released on the Microsoft Security Bulletin Summary today at 12:00 noon, Central Time [Update below]. There will also be two sessions for questioning Microsoft by users later today at 3:00 P.M., CT, and 6:00 P.M., CT. Both are available online if you register.
Update [July 28, 2009, 12:30 P.M., CT]: The Microsoft security bulletins MS09-034 and MS09-035 have been released to address problems within Internet Explorer and Visual Studio Active Template Library (ATL).
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Part 2 of the Microsoft Commercial Controversy
It is no surprise that there is a very strong rivalry between Apple and Microsoft. Duh. As we have reported before, Apple did not like Microsoft’s anti-Mac commercials, with “computer hunters” looking to buy new computers at various amounts. Microsoft even claimed they had received a phone call exclusively from Apple asking them to stop running the commercials.
That might be possible, but I kind of doubt it. However, now Microsoft is making changes to their commercials to reflect the recent price cuts on MacBooks. The new commercials just phrase things differently. The buyer talks about the MacBook saying, “It seems like you’re paying a lot more for the brand,” instead of, “This Mac is $2,000, and that’s before adding anything… Why would you pay twice the price?”
Not a huge improvement, but Apple will take what they can get. The commercial only talks about Macs for 5 seconds out of the 60 second long ad. Microsoft specifically says that they changed the ads only to take into account Apple’s price changes. They still hope to maintain the message of the commercial, which is that Macs are horrible… I mean too expensive.
Read MoreWindows 7′s Release to Manufacturing!
Windows 7, Microsoft’s latest version of their operating system (OS), has passed its final tests on the road to release for manufacturing. The OS has gone through rigorous testing and quality assurance to be ready for the manufacturing stage, and the release to manufacturing (RTM) announcement was made yesterday on the Windows 7 blog. There is also video of the announcement made in Atlanta at the sales kick off celebration.
After being on Amazon UK for only eight hours, Windows 7 pre-orders had already overshot Windows Vista’s pre-order tally at 17 weeks. Microsoft says, “When you can get RTM depends on who you are.” Meaning the general public won’t get their hands on the OS until October 22 but that any partners or independent hardware and software venders will get to see the finished product as early as August 6th. They are trying to encourage anyone who has been testing Windows 7 to try out the real deal as soon as it is available.
The journey to the RTM stage has been a long one. The first developer build of Windows 7 was released last year in October, a year before the predicted release of general availability. The beta version followed with its release in January and then the release candidate in May. Now the RTM status has been achieved and the code has been sent to start working on new products for the OS to be ready by October 22nd as well. The Microsoft Windows 7 Team blog says they will be featuring many of the new products as they are released.
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Apple and Microsoft: Head to head
Trying to steal some of Apple’s “cool flare,” Microsoft has plans of opening a store exclusively for Microsoft this fall. Featuring Windows, Microsoft Office, and Zune products (among others), the stores will try to provide the customer with a luxurious experience when buying computer products. Microsoft also says that they are purposely going to open stores in locations near already existing Apple stores. The layouts of these new stores don’t seem to be anything like an Apple store, with minimal clutter. The Microsoft stores are going to resemble something like a BestBuy, a larger space with plenty of room for products and advertising. A picture of what the stores may resemble can be found here.
Microsoft has also been trying to stifle Apple’s fire with their recent commercial featuring people looking to buy computers for less than a certain amount of money. At a recent Worldwide Partner Conference, Microsoft claimed that the commercials were making Apple a little unhappy. A statement about a direct phone call from Apple asking Microsoft to stop running the commercials is included in that meeting overview near the end.
If the phone call really did happen, it probably wasn’t as animated as the speaker at the Worldwide Partner Conference made it sound. However, just the thought of these commercials hurting Apple is all Microsoft needs to be more confident in the ads.
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