Hasta La Gadget!

Well, it looks like the Courier’s demise could be having some far bigger implications for Microsoft than anyone had suspected. According to ZDNet‘s Mary Jo Foley, Microsoft’s Chief Experience Officer and CTO for its Entertainment and Devices division, J Allard, has been on sabbatical from the company for the past short while and is “unlikely to return” — all due to the fate of the Courier. According to Foley’s sources, Allard was “the champion” of the Courier, and had reportedly made his feelings about the device and its ultimate demise clear on numerous occasions — including, of course, directly to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. According to another of Foley’s sources, things eventually got so heated that Ballmer “showed Allard the door” because of their disagreements about the Courier’s potential. So, did he jump or was he pushed? Microsoft isn’t saying, and Allard is seemingly nowhere to be found.

J Allard leaving Microsoft over Courier axing? originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 21 May 2010 12:10:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This article was written on February 12, 2008 by CyberNet.

And the saga continues… yesterday we reported that Yahoo officially turned down Microsoft’s offer to acquire them for $44.6 billion dollars. Yahoo said that the offer undervalued them, and so they weren’t interested (typical corporate response for a first offer).  Microsoft has now responded to Yahoo and the story gets more and more interesting. The first few lines of Microsoft’s press release reads:

It is unfortunate that Yahoo! has not embraced our full and fair proposal to combine our companies. Based on conversations with stakeholders of both companies, we are confident that moving forward promptly to consummate a transaction is in the best interests of all parties.

We are offering shareholders superior value and the opportunity to participate in the upside of the combined company. The combination also offers an increasingly exciting set of solutions for consumers, publishers and advertisers while becoming better positioned to compete in the online services market.

 

Around the web, I’ve seen a few people mention that this was going to be a “hostile takeover” and now I can see why. Microsoft has set their sights on Yahoo and they are not going to be looking away any time soon.  If there was any question on whether or not Microsoft was going to turn to the shareholders, there shouldn’t be any longer.  The last line of the press release states:

The Yahoo! response does not change our belief in the strategic and financial merits of our proposal. As we have said previously, Microsoft reserves the right to pursue all necessary steps to ensure that Yahoo!’s shareholders are provided with the opportunity to realize the value inherent in our proposal.

Watch out Yahoo shareholders! Microsoft is coming after you and will probably do whatever they can until you realize the “inherent value” in their proposal. Is Yahoo fighting a battle that they can’t win? Perhaps anti-trust issues will pop-up and “save” them from Microsoft, but then what will happen to their stock? Before Microsoft announced that they were interested in Yahoo, their stock was trading at nearly 52-week lows. Post-announcement, their stock shot-up. It’s clear that Yahoo needs and probably wants to do something drastic and there are options out there. I just don’t think at this point they’re confident on which direction to take. If you were Yahoo, what would you do?

Image source

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Microsoft Kin Two gets torn apart, reveals Sony image sensor originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 18 May 2010 15:57:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We (falsely) assumed that the Windows 7 Whopper would be the last food item ever associated with an operating system, and now we’re quite literally eating our words. As the story goes, a Hot Fried 77 restaurant has opened up over in Taiwan, offering tons of “Windows-themed meals” for NTD $77 (around $3 in Greenbacks), and judging by the cornucopia of images down there in the source, we’re guessing this is no prank. We’re debating whether laughing or crying is the appropriate emotion here.

Josh T.: “While you’re throwing .bak some fries and a burger, you should enjoy a .dll pickle.”
Nilay: “This is not what we meant by Windows 7 Server.”
Chris: “I’m a PC, and putting down a pint of Beast while installing Windows 7 was my idea.”
Richard Lai: “This is the real Windows Genuine Advantage.”
Joe: “We like to believe that Microsoft started with the restaurant and then reverse engineered an OS.”
Richard Lawler: “Obviously, there’s no word for Seagrams in their language.”
Darren: “You haven’t heard? Alcohol consumption by end-user is now listed in Minimum System Requirements.”
Josh F.: “When reading ‘serve it to us on a plate’ in a literal sense goes horribly right.”
Joanna: “Everything I come up with is just wrong.”
Don: “Can you tell me where the XP Cafe is?”
Paul: “Would you like that in 32-bit or 64-bit?”

[Thanks, Chris]

Caption contest: Windows 7-themed restaurant serves 64-bit grub in Taiwan originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 17 May 2010 12:16:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This article was written on June 11, 2007 by CyberNet.

The Worldwide Developers Conference 2007 (WWDC) started today, but there weren’t many new things revealed as I had expected. A large majority of the time was spent going over features that users can expect to see in October when Mac OS X Leopard is released, but the coolest thing in my opinion is that Safari is coming to Windows. More on that below…

I listened to a streaming audio version of the Steve Jobs Keynote and was able to put things together by following Engadget’s live coverage. They did a great job snapping images and posting them as quick as they could, so all of the images below were taken from their site. Here’s the overview of what was talked about:

• EA games are coming to the Mac
• An overview of 10 features that will be found in Mac OS X Leopard
• Safari running on Windows XP and Vista
• What’s the iPhone have for developers?

–EA Games Coming to Mac–

EA is taking a big step in releasing games made for Macs, and the new selection being made available in July includes:

• Need for Speed Carbon
• Battlefield 2142
• Command & Conquer 3
• Harry Potter & the Order of the Phoenix

Then in August Mac users will see Madden 2008 and Tiger Woods 2008 being released for the Mac operating system.

–Mac OS X Leopard–

The new Mac operating system will have more than 300 new features included. Here are the 10 features that Jobs detailed at WWDC 2007:

1. Leopard has a new desktop with a 3D-looking Dock (also has a reflective appearance which is slick) and transparent Menu Bar at the top. There are “Stacks” in the Dock which are essentially folders that expand in the Dock.
   
2. New Finder that has pretty cool features like Cover Flow for your documents:
   
   The new sidebar adds built-in searching and “smart searches” that can do things like find files from today:
   
3. Quick Look lets user preview files without having to open the application, and many of the popular file formats will be supported out-of-the-box. For those that aren’t included, they can always be added by the developers of the applications.
4. Leopard is completely 64-bit! 32-bit apps will still be supported and ran side-by-side with the 64-bit Leopard. To demo the speed difference between 64-bit and 32-bit, Jobs opened a 4GB photo which took 28-seconds with the 64-bit machine and 81 seconds with the 32-bit.
   
5. Core Animation: Improved graphics and animations for the operating system make it look even more amazing. Here is a screenshot from a demonstration where he did a search for “water” as a tag on the videos, and the filtering of the videos happened instantly:
   
6. Boot Camp is, of course, shipping with Leopard which is compatible with XP and Vista.
7. Spaces…essentially virtual desktops on a Mac, except they are on steroids. You can drag things from one “space” to another, which is indeed very cool.
   
8. The Dashboard is getting some new features, including a new “movie time” widget which checks for movie times at your local theater. It also allows you to watch movie trailers right there, without need to visit a site.
   
   You can also use Web Clip to make widgets out of nearly any site, which examines the site for the content that you would be looking for. You can even customize the area that the Web Clip selects for the widget.
9. New features in iChat, such as sharing your videos or photos where they will be shown right there in iChat.
   
10. Time Machine lets you set-up backups in a single click, and it just backs up everything so you don’t have to specify exactly what you want to backup. These backups can even be done to a networked drive over a wireless connection. One of the cool things is that you can restore just a single file, and you can even find the files by searching for them via Spotlight. Alternatively you could restore your entire Mac.
    

Jobs closed up the features by making fun-of Vista, saying that the Basic version is $129, Premium version is $129, Business version is $129, Enterprise version is $129, and the Ultimate version is $129.

–Safari on Windows–

Oh, but then Jobs said there is one more thing! Safari 3 is coming to Windows! I’m really excited about this because it will make Website testing a lot easier. Jobs did say that Safari on Windows beats both IE and Firefox when it comes to rendering time, but will that be enough to attract new Safari users?

You can go ahead and download the public beta (found here) which was made available today. It will be interesting to see how people latch on to it.

Jobs did hint at distributing Safari with iTunes since they get more downloads of that in a days time than Firefox, so that should help boost their market share a little. Especially since most people will be oblivious to the fact that the software is also installing a browser, because we all know people who click right through the installation screens without reading what they say.

–iPhone–

The iPhone is coming June 29 as we all knew, and Jobs took the time to tell the attendees that developers will be able to create great AJAX apps that work beautifully on the iPhone. There is no SDK needed for developers since the iPhone has the full Safari engine in it. If it works in the newest Safari available for Windows or Mac, then it will work
on here!

Of course developers can also make Web 2.0 apps that make a phone call, check your email, or pull up an address on Google Maps.

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