Wolfsrealm

Microhoo?- Microsoft makes bid for Yahoo

Ξ February 1st, 2008 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Technology |

In what has been called a possible “shotgun marriage”, Microsoft has made a $44.6 billion dollar offer to Yahoo.

Microsoft has always been behind in the Internet arena due, primarily, to an earlier misplaced belief by Bill Gates that the Internet was a “fad”.
While some may tout Microsoft’s Internet Explorer as a contradiction to this, claiming it to be “the most popular browser”, in reality, it is really just the “most used”, due to it’s being bundled with the Windows operating system. Microsoft has never made a serious dent against the likes of Yahoo and Google.

Yahoo has been under a financial strain for quite a while and Microsoft is well aware of this, having made a bid for Yahoo last year. The bid was rejected by then Chairman Terry Semel. Semel has since been replaced by Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang.

The timing of the new Microsoft offers not only ties in conveniently with a management change and re-structuring within Yahoo, but also with an election within the US, a time which is notorious for lacking oversights into much of anything.
If the deal can get done by mid-2008, which is Microsoft’s hope, the political maneuvering which accompanies elections will pretty much guarantee that no one in the US would take a serious look into the merger until too late.

This possibility is disturbing and maybe even terrifying if the full implications are considered.

A successful takeover, which Microsoft is determined to see even if it becomes “hostile”, would mean we have two megaliths controlling not only the search arena, but also email, instant messaging, and, potentially, the emerging mobile market.

Yahoo also has ties into variety of other services: web hosting, domain services, ISP services, e-commerce, and others.
If past performance is any indicator, Microsoft gaining a foothold here could mean a massive move to the normal Microsoft “propriety” mode of operation for Yahoo, including enormous pressure on ISP partnerships to restructure so that only Microsoft-based platforms are supported.
While many would just say “Hell No!” and leave, for others, such as those who have invested a lot of time and money into paid yahoo services such web-hosting, paid advertising and yahoo stores, a move could place a financial burden which precluded leaving.

Most of this sounds like an extreme, but in reality, it would take very little to make it happen.
“Microhoo” would have the infrastructure, customer base, and financial backing plus a huge amount of R & D resources.

Microsoft is becoming aware that it might not have the stranglehold hold on the PC market like it once did following disastrous release fiascoes.
Vista is a flop and, with support for XP scheduled to be discontinued, people are looking elsewhere.
Microsoft needs a new “cash cow” and Yahoo may be just the bum steer they are looking for.

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Beware of MS Office SP3

Ξ January 7th, 2008 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Technology |

MS has done it again.

The new MS Office 2003 SP3 update will silently and without warning, completely remove ANY access you might have once had to certain documents.

The service pack will block access to files including some Office Excel 2003, MS Office PowerPoint 2003 and MS Office Word 2003, as well as Corel Draw, Quattro and Lotus formats.

There are no warnings, no pop-up boxes, and, until recently, no easy way to undo once the service pack is installed because this fix directly modifies your system’s registry.

Following a huge outcry from various sectors, Microsoft has issued a “fix”, in the form of a knowledge base page, which will tell those who need access to the file formats how to re-enable access in the system registry (after telling you how dangerous modifying the registry is, at the end of the instructions) using automated scripts (yes, that is plural) or manually.
Apparently Corel users were especially P.O’d about this round of anal probing as MS was even handing out apologies, along with their normal excuses.

I took a stroll over to the Microsoft page (I enjoy slumming sometimes) to see what all this involved and it was a bit scary.

In order to regain access to the older files, you will either have to manually run a separate script to regain access for each file type OR you can happily muck around in your system’s registry and attempt to manually re-enable each file format, and in some cases each version of that file format, individually.

It is well worth noting, that access to these files is not restricted in Office 2007 as a work around has been included. Co-incidence?

So they have issued a service pack which supposedly fixes a flaw in their proprietary code and completely removes access to your documents including the ones saved in their proprietary formats.
Then they issue fixes for the fix which may or may not give your system a serious anal probing.

Microsoft has maintained it’s position that the fix was necessary to fix a security issue in the way Office 2003 parses these file types.

I think what they really tried to fix was their profit margin.
If they can break Office 2003 badly enough, users will have no choice but to “upgrade” .

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