Archive for the ‘Microsoft’ Category
Microsoft launches advertisements on mobiles in battle with Google – Times Online
Posted on: May 23, 2008
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Microsoft has opened a new front in the battle with Google, the search engine group, in the increasingly ferocious struggle for control of the online services market.
The software giant has said that users of its popular e-mail and instant messaging tools on mobile phones will display advertisements for the first time. Those using Windows Live on phones will also see ads.
Mobile telephony is regarded as an increasingly important component of the digital advertising market as new devices, such as Apple’s iPhone, improve the use of web-based services.
While it represents a small part of spending on digital advertising, it has significant potential because of the ability for advertising to be coupled with location using GPS.
Microsoft bought ScreenTonic, an advertising platform, which was an early leader in delivering advertisements to mobile phones, for an undisclosed sum last year.
Microsoft, whose share of the search market has slipped as Google’s has grown, is trying to recover the initiative in the online advertising market, which is expected to double in size to $80 billion by 2010.
Google has built a $20 billion (£10.2 billion)-a-year business from online advertising, mostly from sponsored links next to search results. It began testing a mobile version of its search-based advertising service in 2006.
Mobile advertising spending in Western Europe is expected to rise from $1 billion in 2007 to $1.5 billion this year, according to eMarketer, the research firm.
Microsoft launches advertisements on mobiles in battle with Google – Times Online
Posted on: May 23, 2008
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Microsoft has opened a new front in the battle with Google, the search engine group, in the increasingly ferocious struggle for control of the online services market.
The software giant has said that users of its popular e-mail and instant messaging tools on mobile phones will display advertisements for the first time. Those using Windows Live on phones will also see ads.
Mobile telephony is regarded as an increasingly important component of the digital advertising market as new devices, such as Apple’s iPhone, improve the use of web-based services.
While it represents a small part of spending on digital advertising, it has significant potential because of the ability for advertising to be coupled with location using GPS.
Microsoft bought ScreenTonic, an advertising platform, which was an early leader in delivering advertisements to mobile phones, for an undisclosed sum last year.
Microsoft, whose share of the search market has slipped as Google’s has grown, is trying to recover the initiative in the online advertising market, which is expected to double in size to $80 billion by 2010.
Google has built a $20 billion (£10.2 billion)-a-year business from online advertising, mostly from sponsored links next to search results. It began testing a mobile version of its search-based advertising service in 2006.
Mobile advertising spending in Western Europe is expected to rise from $1 billion in 2007 to $1.5 billion this year, according to eMarketer, the research firm.
After vague statements over the last weeks about internal investments that will allow it to compete in search without Yahoo, Microsoft on Wednesday laid out more of its vision for improving on its current “underdog” position in search.
While describing some new search technologies from Microsoft and some future ideas, executives were also cautious to repeat that theirs is a long-term vision that may take a while to spell success for the company. They spoke during an annual get together for advertisers, this year hosted on Microsoft’s campus in Redmond, Washington.
“I have to say, it’s kind of fun to be the underdog,” Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates confessed. The company has put an unusual effort toward building the team that’s working on search, he said. “We’ve done more on this to build a great team then on any effort I can remember,” he said.
Users should expect to see new features every six months from Microsoft’s search group, he said. “We have a long-term commitment,” Gates said. The company is willing to experiment, he said.
Wednesday’s launch of Cashback represents the latest new feature. When Web users search for a product on Live.com, results may feature a Cashback tag. If users end up buying a product with the tag, they’ll receive money back.
Microsoft expects that the concept will create a whole new business model, though it also expects that it might take some time for it to shake up the industry. “We understand this is a journey. When you change the user experience or business model, it takes time to percolate through to behavior changes,” said Satya Nadella, senior vice president of the search, portal and advertising platform group at Microsoft.
Gates pointed out how Cashback is different than existing search advertising methods. “In search, when you get those ads, in a sense you don’t get anything back in return,” he said. That compares to other media like TV or radio, where in exchange for advertisements, viewers and listeners get content.
Cashback “gives you a reason why you should use a particular search,” he said.
Over 700 merchants including eBay, Barnes and Noble, Sears, Circuit City, Home Depot, Zappos.com, Overstock.com and Kmart have signed up to advertise as part of the Cashback program. “That confirms there is this opportunity for change,” Gates said.
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Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer reflects on Windows Vista
Microsoft’s Windows Vista operating system has been on the market for consumers for a little over a year now. During that time, the operating system has seen its fair share of both praise and criticism.
As is customary with Windows operating systems that have been on the market for roughly a year, Microsoft recently released the first Service Pack for Vista. Service Pack 1 (SP1) addressed a number of shortcomings with the operating system and rolled in a number of hotfixes and patches that have been released via Windows Update over the past year.
Now that Vista has had some time to establish itself in the marketplace and receive a fresh boost of energy with SP1, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is now reflecting on the operating system.
“Windows Vista: A work in progress,” said Ballmer to a crowd of Microsoft MVPs in Seattle. “A very important piece of work, and I think we did a lot of things right, and I think we have a lot of things we need to learn from. Certainly, you never want to let five years go between releases. Can we just sort of kiss that stone and move on?”
Ballmer went on to add, “It turns out many things become problematic when you have those long release cycles. The design point, what you should be targeting. We can’t ever let that happen again.”
Ballmer also noted that there are plenty of happy customers of the Windows Vista operating system as well as Windows XP. He remarked that he has received emails from staunch supporters of the Windows XP operating system, but declined to give any indications that Microsoft would go any further than its intention to provide Windows XP Home to ultra-low-cost PCs (ULPCs) until June 2010.
Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT)’s Live Mesh, which will be demonstrated at the Web 2.0 Expo at San Francisco’s Moscone Center West later Wednesday, is a platform. That’s what Amit Mital, Live Mesh general manager, calls his company’s new data and management service.
‘Tis the season of platforms. Facebook has one. So does Bebo and MySpace. Google (NSDQ: GOOG) too has a platform, as does Adobe (NSDQ: ADBE), and Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN), not to mention Sun’s Java.
The platforms differ in terms of scope and capabilities, but they’re all at heart places to run software.
Currently, there are a lot more places to run software than there used to be, thanks to the proliferation of mobile phones and other devices, and the simultaneous standardization that’s required for such devices to interact with the Internet.
So it is that much of the buzz about platforms at Web 2.0 has to do with defining platforms: their relation to the Web, their capabilities, and their boundaries.
Microsoft’s Live Mesh, in its current preview form, represents an effort to define the Windows operating system as a platform that spans PCs, the Internet, and Windows-capable devices. At its heart, it is a data synchronization service, but it is also a bid to define Microsoft as the source of cloud computing.
Indeed, Microsoft claims to have ambitions beyond the wedding of Windows and the Internet. “[O]ur vision of your device mesh extends far beyond this,” says Mital in a blog post. “In the near future, we’ll add support for the Mac and mobile devices, and then we’ll build upon that foundation.”
Microsoft, it seems, is embracing software as a service, rather than as a reason to commit to Windows. It remains to be seen however whether Windows users will occupy positions of privilege on Microsoft’s evolving platform.
Mital characterized the debut of Live Mesh as “the beginning of an ongoing dialog with you that spawns lots of new ideas and opportunities.”
Microsoft has appealed against a 899m euros ($1.4bn; £680.9m) fine given for defying sanctions imposed on it for anti-competitive behaviour.
The penalty – the largest ever from the European Commission – came after it failed to comply with a 2004 ruling that it abused its market position.
The ruling said that Microsoft was guilty of not providing key code to rival software makers.
Microsoft said it was appealing to seek “clarity from the court”.
The Commission said that it was confident the fine was “legally sound”.
Freezing out rivals
The challenge has been lodged with the EU Court of First Instance.
When they handed down the punishment in February, EU regulators said Microsoft was the first to break an EU anti-trust ruling.
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DISPUTE TIMELINE
March 2004: EU fines Microsoft 497m euros and orders it to release key Windows code to rival software developers
September 2004: Microsoft tries to have the ruling temporarily suspended
April 2006: Microsoft appeals against the ruling in the European Court of First Instance
September 2007: Microsoft loses its appeal
February 2008: EU imposes 899m euros fine on Microsoft for defying sanctions
May 2008: Microsoft appeals the fine, “seeking clarity”
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The fines came on top of earlier fines of 280m euros imposed in July 2006, and of 497m euros in March 2004.
An investigation concluded in 2004 that Microsoft was guilty of freezing out rivals in products such as media players, while unfairly linking its Explorer internet browser to its Windows operating system at the expense of rival servers.
The European Court of First Instance upheld this ruling last year, which ordered Microsoft to pay 497m euros for abusing its dominant market position.
Earlier this year, Microsoft announced that it would open up the technology of some of its leading software, including Windows, to make it easier to operate with rivals’ products.
Does Ballmer Need To Go?
Posted on: May 5, 2008
Microsoft’s dramatic decision this weekend to withdraw its offer for Yahoo and not pursue a hostile bid raises a whole host of questions. What happens to Yahoo now? What happens to Microsoft? Or is this just a tactic to drive down the price of Yahoo’s shares so that Microsoft can go hostile with a lower offer? And if the deal really is dead, does Steve Ballmer
need to start looking for a new job?
This last question may not be so hypothetical. Ballmer has been the big driver behind this deal at Microsoft—some would say to the point of obsession. After the disaster that has been Windows Vista (Microsoft’s core product), Ballmer may have realized he needed to redeem himself in the eyes of Microsoft’s board. And the “transformative” deal with Yahoo was the way he was going to do it.
One reading of Ballmer’s obsession with the deal is that he felt his job was on the line if he didn’t get it done. According to one secondhand account that leaked to us yesterday before the deal was called off, over the past week Ballmer increasingly has been “yelling and screaming at employees for almost no reason” and is being “more of a tyrant than usual.” One executive on the Microsoft deal team supposedly made a comment about “not having to worry about Ballmer anymore” if the Yahoo deal fell through. What the exec didn’t know, though, was that Ballmer was in earshot, and he screamed back that the deal would go through and that he wouldn’t let the board “crucify” him.
As things stand, the fact that Ballmer was not able to close the deal could put his job in jeopardy. The big questions are: If he really does walk away, can he put this distraction behind the company? Or is it too late for Ballmer? If Microsoft’s board loses patience with him, it might have to ask Blll Gates to temporarily come back as CEO until it finds a replacement. After all, Ballmer has already made a strong and convincing case for why Microsoft needs Yahoo to make its online and advertising strategy work (it needs the scale of Yahoo’s display and search advertising inventory to compete with Google). It is not clear how it can achieve its objectives on its own or through other acquisitions.
Maybe Ballmer backed down because he realized the deal was becoming too big of a distraction and he didn’t want to drag it out further given Yahoo’s continued resistance. (And save his job in the process). Or perhaps he thinks he can still get it done by making Yahoo’s stock price collapse and come back with a hostile offer. (After all, if you are going to go hostile, you’d want to drive down the stock price of the target company to make your offer look even more attractive to shareholders). We’ll find out later this week.
Steve Jobs Stakes Out the TV Den
Posted on: May 5, 2008
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A week ago, the family was stuck on I-95 between Washington and New York for seven hours. The Meatgrinder, as it is affectionately known to us, had a little case of congestion and after five hours of quality time, we were reduced to silently hating the intermittent FM signal and the brake lights that framed our existence.
But after we hooked an Apple iPod to a doohickey that works with the radio, the car suddenly filled with an hour’s worth of storytelling from a podcast of “This American Life,” followed by some quality time with Taylor Swift, an improbably gifted teenage country star. The ability to program our temporary purgatory lifted the pall and before we knew it, we were home.
But once we went inside, we hit the halt button on Apple. There was the second season of “Friday Night Lights” on Netflix, “John Adams” from HBO on the digital video recorder and back copies of “Weeds” from Showtime, there for the plucking from the on-demand service.
While a lot of us carry a little bit of Steve Jobs around in our pocket, Apple is now after the remaining bit of life-share that it doesn’t already own, the home front.
On Thursday, the company announced deals with 20th Century Fox, Walt Disney Studios, Warner Brothers, Paramount Pictures, Universal Studios Home Entertainment and Sony Pictures Entertainment, among others, to sell movies for download on iTunes on the same day they are released on DVD.
The “day and date” downloaded movies (as they are called in industry jargon) will play only on Apple gadgets, but that characteristic may finally give the company the toehold in the American den that it has been looking for via Apple TV.
The movie business, because it makes its living on big fat video files that are harder to share than audio files, was able to watch and learn as the music industry shrank under the weight of pirated downloads and then reluctantly embraced a 99-cent solution from Mr. Jobs. And now every song, now and forever, is worth 99 cents, a price that attains for both the red-hot duet by Madonna and Justin Timberlake “Four Minutes,” and the forgotten B-sides he made when he was in a boy band.
The music companies still owned the songs, but Apple owned everything else — pricing, format, distribution and the lucrative revenue stream of manufactured devices.
When it comes to video, Apple has competition. Microsoft, Sony and Hewlett-Packard are vying to offer Web-enabled TV, while Amazon, Blockbuster, CinemaNow and Netflix sell movies digitally. So unlike the music companies, the movie studios seemed to be holding most of the cards.
They still might have blown it.
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Summary Of Today’s News: Negotiations between Yahoo and Microsoft, widely expected to result in a negotiated deal by Monday, fell apart today. There were a number of statements, all summarized below. Steve Gillmor also convened a special session of the Gillmor Gang at 7 pm to analyze the news – The transcript is still being created, but the recording is now up and live.
Listen to the special Microsoft/Yahoo Gillmor Gang here, with participation from Steve Gillmor, Michael Arrington, Doc Searls, Dan Farber, Dana Gardner, Robert Anderson, and Robert Scoble.
Today’s News (chronological):
- Breaking: Microsoft Withdraws Yahoo Bid; Walks Away From Deal: Microsoft withdraws their February 1 offer, won’t go above $33/share and Yahoo wants $37. The post also includes a letter from Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang delivered today.
- Email From Steve Ballmer To All Microsoft Employees: Leaked email from Steve Ballmer to all Microsoft employees that we got our hands on. He explains the deal news to the troops.
- Yahoo’s Tough Week Ahead: Yahoo faces a bleak world next week; look for the stock price to tank. Do they have a backup deal with Google?
- Yahoo Responds: “The distraction of Microsoft’s unsolicited proposal now behind us”: Yahoo issues a press release suggesting relief that the pesky Microsoft distraction is behind them.
- Optionally, skip all the above and just read CNET’s cartoon summary of today’s happenings:
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Microsoft said Saturday that it was abandoning its blockbuster bid to acquire Yahoo after the two companies could not agree on a price.
The breakdown in the talks followed a meeting on Saturday morning in Seattle between Microsoft’s chief executive, Steven A. Ballmer, and Yahoo’s chief and co-founder, Jerry Yang, according to a person briefed on the discussions.
At the meeting, which also included Yahoo’s other co-founder, David Filo, and Kevin Johnson of Microsoft, Mr. Ballmer increased Microsoft’s offer to $33 a share, but Mr. Yang said Yahoo would not sell for less than $37 a share, this person said.
Microsoft’s decision to walk away is the latest chapter in a three-month-old standoff that began when Microsoft made an unsolicited offer to acquire Yahoo in an effort to compete more effectively with Google in Web search, advertising and services.
Yahoo rejected Microsoft’s offer repeatedly, saying it undervalued the company. Microsoft at times threatened to lower its offer, originally valued at $44.6 billion, or $31 a share.
In a letter to Mr. Yang that Microsoft released Saturday evening, Mr. Ballmer said that it would not make sense for Microsoft to pursue a lengthy proxy fight. “Our discussions with you have led us to conclude that, in the interim, you would take steps that would make Yahoo undesirable as an acquisition for Microsoft,” he wrote.
Mr. Ballmer said in a separate statement that Microsoft would continue to pursue its online efforts on its own.
“We have a talented team in place and a compelling plan to grow our business through innovative new services and strategic transactions with other business partners,” he said. “While Yahoo would have accelerated our strategy, I am confident that we can continue to move forward toward our goals.”
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