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Contest
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Two of my favorite high tech CEOs sounded off on what should
happen to
Microsoft. Scott McNealy is against splitting up MS into
"Baby Bills", but
his buddy Larry Ellison has a more innovative solution.
He suggests
splitting MS in half: Steve Ballmer runs one half and Bill Gates
leads the
other half. Then, let the battle begin. This is
a pretty creative solution,
which brings up Up-To-Date's first ever contest: can you come
up with a
more innovative/creative solution on what should be done with
Microsoft?
This does not have to be plausible, just creative. Assuming
any of you
actually enter, I will probably post the winning answers (if
there are any) in
two week's time. Being that this is a not-for-profit (hell,
not for anything)
operation, I have nothing to give out except getting your name
and idea
published here. Lame? Yes. Do I care?
Not really... Send contest entries
to ms@techdirt.com.
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Say that again...
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"This is sick. This reeks of greed. Boy, these lawyers are sticking
up for
their own, aren't they? I don't think they're representing you
or me."
- Ann Stephens, President of PC Data, on the Texas judge's decision
to ban
legal software such as Quicken Family Lawyer because it amounts
to the
"unauthorized practice of law".
"It should be understood by those skilled in the art that a Web
browser,
such as Netscape Navigator or Internet Explorer ... is separate
from the
operating system."
- Microsoft’s patent lawyers in a 1998 patent application.
Aren’t lawyers
wonderful?
"It's like handing out speeding tickets at the Indy 500. You
can pull over
whoever you want to."
- Bill Burnham, Credit Suisse First Boston, on picking on E*Trade
for its
outages...
"I think I will ask my lawyer about that tomorrow."
- William Tucker, founder of The Elevator, a Garage.com wannabe,
when
asked about the fact that his site may violate SEC rules, by
not
pre-screening investors.
"My first impression of the deal was almost no impression at
all."
- Scott Smith, director of Internet business strategies at Current
Analysis on
the AOL MovieFone deal.
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Earnings Reports, IPOs and the like
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Apple cutting jobs in Ireland (that’s what happens when you
post nice
earnings that are based solely on cost cutting – to do it again,
you have to
keep cutting)... Oracle, appearing a week late in the split
announcement
business, plans a 3-for-2 stock split... Later on in the week,
Oracle Japan
had its IPO, making it the highest valued stock on Japan’s over-the-counter
market... Sprint PC lost over half a billion dollars in their
last quarter as they
prepare to go public... More IPO madness: Perot Systems had
their
impressive debut, as did ModemMedia.PoppeTyson or whatever it
they’re
called. The most impressive, though, was Pacific Internet,
a Singapore
based ISP that priced at $17, opened at $88 and spent the rest
of the
dropping to about $48 (and without the obligatory .com!)...
Cisco beats
estimates as its revenues shoot up (but investors are pissed
off that they’re
not splitting the stock)... Qualcomm has decided to lay off
almost 700
people, and “reassign” another 250... Intel to sell over 300,000
shares of
Broadcast.com... Lots and lots of problems at AMD (has this
company ever
had a good reputation?)... CompUSA earnings less than half of
last year’s,
as they announce (ooh, how original) plans to spin off their
online unit... N2K
beats estimates, but is still losing a ton of money... Infospace.com
beats
estimates, but is still losing a ton of money... Paul Allen
invests $104
million in Ziff-Davis (is there anything he hasn’t invested
in?)... Mellon Bank
has bought nearly 6.5% of Apple Computer... Microsoft planning
a
reorganization to place more focus on the Internet... NetObjects
files to go
public...
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Rumors, Conspiracies etc. of the week...
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Microsoft's plans to bring together its 9x and NT architecture
further off than
originally thought. Expect at least one more consumer
Windows not based
on NT (suggesting that NT 5.0 is more screwed up than we already
assume?)... Okay, would this one just happen already: NBC to
buy 25% of
Lycos and merge Snap! into Lycos (this has been over reported)...
Of
course, this puts the Yahoo! to buy CNet rumor into a different
perspective,
but who knows... Dell has recently registered dellauction.com...
MTV Online
is planning on buying Imagine Radio (after talks fell through
with
Spinner.com)... Compaq putting desktop AMD chips into portables
(wonder
why that laptop’s on fire? Now you know)... @Home is still
looking into the
idea of buying Road Runner (buy the competition while they’re
cheap, and
your stock is over inflated. What could possibly go wrong?)...
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News you should have read elsewhere
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AT&T in a deal with Time Warner to offer telephone service
over coax...
Microsoft admits to making a "dramatization" instead of an evidentiary
video
(say what?)... AOL bought MovieFone, leading to painful jokes
about
combining two of the world's most famous voices... E*Trade gives
the world
a little lesson on testing your software upgrades before you
release them
(three days of outages, pissed off investors, and E*Trade’s
fairly obnoxious
replies has many investors looking for other ways to piss away
their
money)... AT&T doesn’t have to open up its high speed Internet
network to
greedy other companies (go build your own, dammit)... MCIWorldcom
jumps
back into the Internet space by teaming with CompuServe (so
when do we
get the big merger of MCIWorldcom/AOL/Netscape/CompuServe?)...
US
Department of Commerce and the FTC to track e-commerce in their
monthly
economic indicators...
--------------------------
News you could do without
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ICG dumps off the Canadian bit of Netcom (as if this matters)...
TheGlobe.com buys Azazz.com (the online department store you
probably
never heard of) for plenty of inflated stock... Seems as though
CDA II (aka
COPA) is doing a repeat of CDA I... Sony and Intel, along with
Amerindo
Investment Advisors dumps $12 million into Spinner.com... TV
Guide Online
relaunches again (again)... CNet buys little known NetVenture's
for their
ShopBuilder technology... Network Solutions makes a deal with
Netcom so
that Netcom can sell domain names (yes, this is the same Netcom
that
doesn't really exist any more)... Apparently TV advertising
wasn’t the only
place that made big money during the Superbowl: SportsLine raked
in
nearly a million dollars in sponsorships for their coverage
of the game...
eBay continues to shell out cash to Netscape to be a “distinguished”
provider on Netcenter (“distinguished” meaning what exactly?)...
CDNow is
giving its one-millionth customer a free CD each day for a year...
OnSale
reaches its one-millionth registered user (but did they give
them
anything?)... Amazon.com admits that they’re not even *trying*
to become
profitable (yet)... Eolas Technologies is suing Microsoft for
patent
infringement for making “plug-ins” and “applets” (I sense quite
the uphill
battle)... Auctioning off eBay’s “Cool Shopping Site of the
Year” award
(which they couldn’t be bothered with picking up) on eBay (Todd
Levin gets
an A for concept, but a C on execution – besides, how many of
those bids
do you think are from his friends?)... First USA to pay AOL
$500 million
dollars for an advertising/co-branding partnership (um... no,
it can’t be worth
that much)... Borders.com has become the exclusive bookseller
for go.com
(wow, two sites that no one visits have found each other)...
GoodNoise feels
the pressure of the Harry Fox Agency and will start making royalty
payments for downloaded music (and reels in Rykodisc to provide
content)... Intel to work with Analog Devices on DSPs... Yahoo!
to create
co-branded home pages for members of Gateway.net (while I understand
that people are lazy, and unlikely to change their default home
page, I still
don’t see how this is that big of a deal)... FAO Schwarz’s web
site
accidentally displays personal info about customers... Sony
doesn’t get its
temporary restraining order against Connectix for its Playstation
emulator...
Companies don’t feel Priceline deserves a patent for its reverse
auction
business model... Intel is pissed off that computer manufacturers
are
already selling Pentium III based machines (get over it)...
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Surprises:
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Lycos decides to get into the MP3 portal business (and faster
than you can
download a song, the fun folks at the RIAA freak out - but it's
okay now,
because Lycos will only point to "legal" MP3 sites)... Macintoshes,
which
claim to be Y2K compliant, are only partially so: apparently
after next year it
will interpret many two-digit dates as starting with 20.
Thus, those files you
saved from 1995, are really waiting to be created in 2095...
Qwest beats out
AT&T, Sprint and GTE to upgrade the Treasury Department’s
communication infrastructure... Lycos to tie in Open Market’s
ShopSite to
their e-commerce infrastructure (Massachusetts based companies
have to
stick together, apparently)... Government lawyer in the MS trial
so
unaccustomed to techno-speak that he pronounced “log-in” as
“lojun”... Yes,
it was only a week ago that AT&T WorldNet was having trouble
handling
their load of users. Yet, this week they’re ranked the
top ISP in the country
by PC World (they say the Internet world changes quickly, but,
that’s a little
too crazy)... Sierra actually recalls NFL Football Pro 99 and
offers a full
refund, apologizing for releasing a game that’s “too buggy”
(now, you know
there’s a company that has no former Microsoft folks near the
top)... Every
time you try to like Microsoft (and, believe it or not, I sometimes
do try),
they do something like telling all their employees to fake posts
to online
forums rooting for Microsoft... Microsoft wins a patent for
stylesheets? (No, I
don’t know what the patent office was smoking)...
-------------------------------
(Mis)Uses of Technology:
-------------------------------
Building Audible's technology into WinCE machines (yet another
weird
attempt at taking on MP3)... Divx hacks (do we care that much?)...
Intel and
Mattel to work together to create new toys (but will they fight
with
Microsoft's Barney?)... Bell Atlantic and IBM to create “smart
homes”
(having once lived in Bell Atlantic territory, I can safely
suggest *not* being a
part of the beta tests for this)... My Ticketmaster (and the
fact that it took
them nearly a year and a half to actually implement the 360
degree photos
of event venues)... MIT’s Sloan School creating an Internet
Time Capsule to
record the state of the Internet for five years (as if any of
us would like to go
back 5 years and relive the fun of gopher?)... It’s been so
long since my
weekly Mir jokes: but this week they attempted use a giant mirror
to shine
reflected light on the earth (sound like the plan of an evil
genius in some bad
movie?). Of course, in typical Mir fashion, nothing worked,
and the whole
thing was aborted (keep up the good work, guys!)... Hearme.com
discovers
the wonders of party lines on the Internet... Starbucks to start
opening up
Internet cafes (but will they give confusing names to normal
internet
functions so we’ll be even more confused?)... PalmPilots being
used in
British supermarkets for personalized shopping lists...
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Studies:
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A Stanford University exercise expert has determined that if
you spend 2
minutes a day emailing colleagues instead of walking over to
talk to them,
you will add about 11 pounds over the course of a decade.
Damn, I think
that means if I stopped emailing folks at work, I'd weigh nothing
within just a
few years - what a diet...The General Accounting Office's study
of welfare
readiness for Y2K finds that Medicaid systems are only 16% ready...
According to eMarketer seven times as many emails were sent
than first
class snail mail over the past year... IDC has found that nearly
$100 million
was spent in 1998 on home banking applications, and expect that
number
to more than triple this year... A study by IDG has found that
e-commerce
sites cost an average of $6 million to build and $13 million
to maintain on an
annual basis... Demand for cable modems beating xDSL 14 to 1,
according
to Broadcom (let’s see, considering the fact that most consumers
will make
the decision based on price, and phone companies have been too
stupid to
realize this, while cable modems are being offered at reasonable
prices,
yeah, that makes sense)... Edison Media Research and Arbitron
have
released a new study showing that nearly 13% of people in the
US listen to
radio on the Internet... According to Piper Jaffray the number
of accounts at
online brokerages nearly doubled over the last year, making
1998 the year
that “individual investors discovered the power of trading online”
(and online
brokerages discovered the problems of crappy software – and
1999 can be
the year they discover lawsuits)...
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Overhype
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The Victoria's Secret fashion show webcast. No matter
if a million people
saw it or couldn't see it because the video was too choppy to
get a "clear"
picture of the material, this was talked about way too much.
How many
reporters chose to write about this, just so they could justify
their own
chance to look at half naked women on the web?...
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Predictions:
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As if this isn't obvious: but the term Portal has to start going
away. Now
that Weatherlabs has announced plans to make a "Weather Portal",
it has
become abundantly obvious that this term has outlived its usefulness
(if it
ever had any)...
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Too much free time:
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If you were a disgruntled Blockbuster Video employee with an
AOL account
and too much free time, what would you do?
http://members.aol.com/caly5150/index.html
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