Pomme::TAB

I’m quite annoyed at Microsoft’s bid to buy Yahoo!

I’m a happy user of several Yahoo services but given the services overlap between the two and what Microsoft wants Yahoo! for, I fear for future of the Yahoo services (I’m a paying customer for some of them).

I fear because I’ve chosen to use them and for the way I go about online things, I feel they are superior to the competing offerings from MS, Apple or Google (in areas like user experience, platform agnosticism, integration between services and use of open standards).

After some grumpy start following Yahoo’s ingestion of Flickr, I’ve actually started to like Yahoo! integration between web services and I like their openness (use of microformats, restful apis, recent adoption of OpenID).

Most importantly though, I’ve got quite a few former colleagues and friends working at Yahoo! and I can just imagine how p**ed off they are at the moment.

I think, in my humble opinion, part of Yahoo!’s troubles comes from not having played the openness card in all their areas of business. I’m thinking about Instant Messaging where they slept with Microsoft and Search where they stood alone. That way they let MS think that there are “synergies” possible or a common vision can be shared.

It would be different, if say, Yahoo! were part of a cloud of interacting open APIs with liberal licensing between coo-petitors, partners, clients.

Elsewhere, Daring Fireball is making a layman’s translation of a Yahoo! memo about the subject.

Also, Roughly Drafted has an article about Microsoft’s intention and why everyone is going to loose if the bid goes through. The article is interesting as it’s full of background and historic information.

In another part of the web, the TechCrunch blog proposes a solution for Yahoo! (or the new entity) to survive in the Search market.

Finally, Yahoo! has rejected (for the moment) Microsoft’s offer.

Technorati Tags:
yahoo, microsoft, search

Interesting story, Boing Boing is reporting here.

I wonder though how they can ascertain that it is (was) the oldest business out there.

There must be some medieval originated trades still in business in the old cities of Europe.

World’s oldest business ends 1,428-year run: “Mark Frauenfelder:
A Japanese temple-building company founded in the year 578 is going out of business. Here’s Business Week’s article.

The circumstances of Kongo Gumi’s demise also offer some lessons. Despite its incredible history, it was a set of ordinary circumstances that brought Kongo Gumi down at last. Two factors were primarily responsible. First, during the 1980s bubble economy in Japan, the company borrowed heavily to invest in real estate. After the bubble burst in the 1992-93 recession, the assets secured by Kongo Gumi’s debt shrank in value. Second, social changes in Japan brought about declining contributions to temples. As a result, demand for Kongo Gumi’s temple-building services dropped sharply beginning in 1998.

By 2004, revenues were down 35%. Masakazu Kongo laid off employees and tightened budgets. But in 2006, the end arrived. The company’s borrowings had ballooned to $343 million and it was no longer possible to service the debt. In January, the company’s assets were acquired by Takamatsu, a large Japanese construction company, and it was absorbed into a subsidiary.

Link (Via Japan Probe)

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(Via Boing Boing.)

The big tech news yesterday was of course the joint press conference in London by Apple and EMI. Below links cover that stunning news:

• BBC News
• Another BBC News report
• The Guardian (subscription required)
• xml.com blog
• Daring Fireball
• Tech News World
• Barrapunto (en español)
• Ratiatum en français)
• MSNBC NewsWeek
• Liberation (en français)
• International Herald Tribune(with an EU commission twist)

Technorati Tags:
apple, music, musicindustry, itunes, DRM, mp3, download, legal, emi, nodrm, pressconference

Were they so desperate to sell their stuff?

Sony gives 46″ HDTV to everyone in PlayStation 3 line in London!: “PlayStation 3 launched in Europe just a short while ago but some got a bigger surprise than others. At the console’s official launch event in Virgin Megastores, Oxford Street, London, every console buyer netted a FREE 46′ Sony Bravia LCD HDTV. Some might say Sony are finally showing Europe some love…”

(Via digg.)

The software industry is a battle field and somebody drew a map of it.

(Source:Wired)

According to Ars Technica, Ford and Microsoft are going to work together on the dashboard OS of some of Ford 2008 vehicles.

I guess we will soon have plenty of illustrations for the old joke (If Microsoft made cars…)

Fancy becoming the input data for an algorithm? In other word, do you want to apply for a job at Google?

Google’s Answer to Filling Jobs Is an Algorithm: “An anonymous reader tipped us to a New York Times article about Google’s newest HR tool: an algorithm. Starting soon, the company (which gets roughly 100,000 applications a month) will require all interested applicants to fill out an in-depth survey. They’ll be using a sophisticated algorithm to work through the submitted surveys, matching applicants with positions. The company has apparently doubled in size in each of the last three years. Even though it’s already 10,000 employees strong Laszlo Bock, Google’s vice president for people operations, sees no reason the company won’t reach 20,000 by the end of the year. This will mean hiring something like 200 people a week, every week, all year …”

(Via Slashdot.)

Few months ago, I posted an article about the misunderstandings and confusion that often occur when communicating by e-mail.

Because a picture is worth thousands words, here is a pie chart resulting from research done in the sixties:

The percentages describe the importance of the effect an attribute has on a the receiver of the communication (in a work environment). Because body language (non-verbal) and tone of voice are definitely not conveyed in an e-mail, it easy to see why e-mails are easily misunderstood (SMS is worst, but that’s another story). As a byproduct it also justify the existence of smileys.

Apple was the first to introduce digital camera (Quicktake) and PDA (Newton) to a mass audience long time before then became product of mass consumption which is why they commercially failed(can we call it The Tucker syndrome? or maybe the NeXT syndrome for the geekier of you). These products are probably the tip of an iceberg, the hidden part being all of the prototypes that they didn’t put into production like the ones described in this article by Apple Gazette (also read the comments for more):

Apple Prototypes: 5 Products We Never Saw by Apple Gazette

One can wonder what else they are concocting in their labs now given the evolution of Apple R&D budget:

Interesting article here:
Can a Manager Be a Techie and Survive?