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  Software maker says economics demanded by Internet portal operator 'do not make sense.'
Microsoft Corp. said Saturday it has withdrawn its proposal to acquire Internet portal Yahoo Inc.
Microsoft said the breakdown of the proposal came despite having raised the bid to $33 a share, or $5 billion above what it said was the current value of the offer.
The offer was originally valued at $44.6 billion, or $31 a share, when it was originally made earlier this year. Yahoo stock closed Friday at $28.67 a share.
In a statement, Microsoft (MSFT, Fortune 500) CEO Steve Ballmer said "After careful consideration, we believe the economics demanded by Yahoo (YHOO, Fortune 500) do not make sense for us."
In a letter to Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang, Ballmer said Yahoo wanted at least another $4 a share, or $5 billion in value, added to the deal.
 View: Original Article
 News source: CNN |
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 The operating system is set to be pulled off shelves this year but Steve Ballmer says that could change with 'customer feedback.'
Microsoft Corp. CEO Steve Ballmer offered a glimmer of hope on Thursday to fans of the company's XP operating system, saying the company may reconsider its decision to stop selling XP soon.
But Ballmer was adamant that "most people who buy PCs today buy them with Vista."
"That's the statistical truth," he told reporters at a news conference at Louvain-La-Neuve University. "If customer feedback varies, we can always wake up smarter."
Fans of the six-year-old operating system set to be pulled off store shelves by June 30 have plastered the Internet with blog posts, cartoons and petitions recently. They trumpet its superiority to Windows Vista, Microsoft's latest PC operating system, whose consumer launch in January was greeted with lukewarm reviews.
Ballmer said the customers buying PCs with XP are IT departments who are having trouble shifting old machines to newer technology.
Some 160,000 people already have signed an online Save XP Web petition who want Microsoft to keep selling it until the next version of Windows is released, currently targeted for 2010.
View: Full Article
News source: CNN |
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On Tuesday, Chris Keroack of Microsoft announced that Service Pack 3 (SP3) for Windows XP has released to manufacturing (RTM). Windows XP SP3 bits are now working their way through their manufacturing channels to be available to OEM and Enterprise customers.
Microsoft is also in the final stages of preparing for release to the web on April 29th, via Windows Update and the Microsoft Download Center. Online documentation for Windows XP SP3, such as Microsoft Knowledge Base articles and the Microsoft TechNet Windows XP TechCenter, will be updated then
For customers who use Windows XP at home, Windows XP SP3 Automatic Update distribution for users at home will begin in early summer.
View: Original Article
News source: Microsoft TechNet Forums |
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Yahoo Inc. will begin showing homemade videos on its online photo-sharing site, Flickr, in a long-anticipated move that may be too late to lure most people away from the Internet's dominant video channel, Google Inc.'s YouTube.
Flickr's video technology, to debut late Tuesday, represents the latest example of Yahoo trying to catch up to Google in a crucial battleground.
Yahoo's inability to keep pace with Google in the lucrative online search market caused its profits and stock price to sag during the past two years, which in turn triggered an unsolicited takeover attempt by Microsoft Corp. for more than $40 billion.
While trying to fend off Microsoft, Yahoo has continued to develop and introduce services that the Sunnyvale-based company hopes will help revive its earnings growth.
Unlike Internet search, online video hasn't blossomed into a big moneymaker yet. But it's expected to turn into a marketing magnet as advertisers shift more of their spending from television in pursuit of consumers who are watching more entertainment and news online.
Yahoo already operates one of the Web's largest video platforms, but most of its content is provided by media outlets and other outside professionals.
Flickr's new technology is aimed at amateurs and hobbyists looking for a better way to share short video clips with family and friends.
Only Flickr's "pro" members--those who pay for a $24.95 annual subscription--will be allowed to transfer video clips of up to 90 seconds to the site, but anyone will be able to watch them. A privacy setting will allow videographers to limit access to the clips on Flickr if they want.
The video service will be offered in English and seven other languages: French, German, Italian, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish and traditional Chinese.
View: Full Story
News source: Yahoo! News |
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Chairman and CEO say $44.6 billion bid is too low in an open letter to Ballmer, but add that Web company is not opposed to some sort of deal.
Yahoo continued to reject Microsoft's $44.6 billion unsolicited bid for the company Monday.
The Internet company is not opposed to some sort of financial deal, but the current offer is too low, chairman Roy Bostock and chief executive Jerry Yang said in a letter responding to Microsoft chief Steve Ballmer.
Microsoft (MSFT, Fortune 500) sent a letter to Yahoo (YHOO, Fortune 500) on Saturday, threatening to offer the deal directly to stockholders if the company's board did not respond by April 26. When first put forward Feb. 1, the deal was worth about 62% above market value.
Bostock and Yang pointed to Yahoo's three-year financial plan, its new AMP advertising management platform and the fact that the company recently reaffirmed its first-quarter and year-end outlook as reasons they believe the Microsoft bid was low.
Ballmer's letter acknowledged Yahoo's search for third-party bids from other companies such as Google (GOOG, Fortune 500), News Corp. (NWS, Fortune 500) and Time Warner (TWX, Fortune 500), but questioned why the company refused to negotiate with Microsoft.
Yahoo's response also said that Ballmer's letter "mischaracterizes the nature of our discussions," and that the threat to take the offer to shareholders was "counterproductive and inconsistent with your stated objective of a friendly transaction."
The company said it was open to a transaction from any potential buyer, including Microsoft, but that it would reject anything below what it considers "full value."
View: Original Article
News source: CNN |
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 Adobe's latest upgrade offers support for massive amounts of memory, but not on Mac OS X.
For graphic design professionals it's that time again. Adobe is readying a new version of its Creative Suite, the software bundle that includes Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, and other applications for print and Web design. Only this time there's a twist: The new version of Photoshop will support 64-bit memory addressing for the first time --but only if you're running Windows.
Simply put, more bits means you can access more memory, which means you can work with bigger files. By taking advantage of 64-bit CPUs, Adobe is making it possible for designers and photo manipulators to work with really, really big images at high resolutions. Think posters, advertising displays, or even billboards.
So why not on Macs? As it turns out, Photoshop for Mac OS is written using older APIs that don't allow access to all the latest Mac OS X features. To bring the software up to speed will require a total rewrite, a time-consuming process that could leave Mac users in the cold for some time.
View: Full Article
News source: washingtonpost.com |
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 Verizon Wireless is joining Sprint Nextel Corp. in jumping on the latest craze in the wireless world: little boxes called femtocells that boost cell-phone coverage in subscribers' homes.
"Our plans are to deploy femtocells in 2008," Verizon Wireless' Chief Technology Officer, Tony Melone, said Wednesday at the CTIA Wireless industry show in Las Vegas.
Much is unclear about the plan, including how much Verizon Wireless plans to charge. But Melone said the company was gearing up for a full-fledged rollout.
Sprint is the only other carrier that is conducting more than a small trial with the technology, but it is selling femtocells only in Denver, Indianapolis and Nashville, Tenn.
View: Full Story
News source: Yahoo! News |
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 Comcast Corp., an Internet service provider under investigation for hampering online file-sharing by its subscribers, announced Thursday an about-face in its stance and said it will treat all types of Internet traffic equally.
Since user reports of interference with file-sharing traffic were confirmed by an Associated Press investigation in October, Comcast has been vigorously defending its practices, most recently at a hearing of the Federal Communications Commission in February.
Consumer and "Net Neutrality" advocates have been equally vigorous in their attacks on the company, saying that by secretly blocking some connections between file-sharing computers, Comcast made itself a judge and gatekeeper for the Internet.
They also accused Comcast of stifling delivery of Internet video, an emerging competitor to the cable company's core business.
Comcast has said that its practices were necessary to keep file-sharing traffic from overwhelming local cable lines, where neighbors share capacity with one another. On Thursday, Comcast said that by the end of the year, it will move to a system that manages capacity without favoring one type of traffic over another.
"This means that we will have to rapidly reconfigure our network management systems, but the outcome will be a traffic management technique that is more appropriate for today's emerging Internet trends," Tony Werner, Comcast's chief technology officer, said in a statement.
The company initially veiled its traffic-management system in secrecy, saying openness would allow users to circumvent it. But on Thursday, Werner said the company would "publish" the new technique and take into account feedback from the Internet community.
Comcast has been hampering the BitTorrent file-sharing protocol, which together with the eDonkey protocol, accounts for about a third of all Internet traffic, according to figures from Arbor Networks. The vast majority of that is illegal sharing of copyright-protected files, but file-sharing is also emerging as a low-cost way of distributing legal content -- in particular, video.
Peer-to-peer file-sharing "has matured as an enabler for legal content distribution," Werner said. "So we need to have an architecture that can support it with techniques that work over all networks."
Comcast now says it is in talks with BitTorrent Inc., the company founded by the creator of the protocol, to come up with better ways to transport large files over the Internet. The companies said they want to work out these issues privately, without the need for government intervention.
FCC commissioners have indicated that they take the issue seriously, and commission Chairman Kevin Martin has voiced objections to secret traffic management.
For its part, BitTorrent acknowledged that service providers have to manage their networks somehow, especially during peak times.
"While we think there were other management techniques that could have been deployed, we understand why Comcast and other ISPs adopted the approach that they did initially," Eric Klinker, BitTorrent's chief technology officer, said in a statement.
Verizon Communications Inc. two weeks ago announced the results of a collaboration project with Pando Networks, another file-sharing company. By sharing information with Pando, Verizon was able to speed up file-sharing downloads for its subscribers while reducing the strain on its own network.
AT&T Inc., the country's largest Internet service provider, has been looking at similar collaboration.
However, phone companies are in a better position than cable companies to deal with file-sharing traffic, since neighbors don't share capacity on phone lines.
Time Warner Cable is experimenting with another way of managing traffic, placing explicit caps on the monthly downloads for new customers in Beaumont, Texas. Subscribers who go over their allotment will pay extra, much like a cell-phone subscriber who uses too many minutes in a month.
View: Original Article
News source: CNN |
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 Microsoft has made available the Beta 1 release of Windows Internet Explorer 8.
Some of the end-user features that you can expect to see in Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 include the following:- Activities: Activities are contextual services to quickly access a service from any webpage. Users typically copy and paste from one webpage to another. Internet Explorer 8 Activities make this common pattern easier to do.
- WebSlices: WebSlices is a new feature for websites to connect to their users by subscribing to content directly within a webpage. WebSlices behave just like feeds where clients can subscribe to get updates and notify the user of changes.
- Favorites Bar: In Internet Explorer 7, the Links bar provided users with one-click access to their favorite sites. The Links bar has undergone a complete makeover for Internet Explorer 8. It has been renamed the Favorites bar to enable users to associate this bar as a place to put and easily access all their favorite web content such as links, feeds, WebSlices and even Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents.
- Automatic Crash Recovery: Automatic Crash Recovery (ACR) is a feature of Windows Internet Explorer 8 that can help to prevent the loss of work and productivity in the unlikely event of the browser crashing or hanging. The ACR feature takes advantage of the Loosely-Coupled Internet Explorer feature to provide new crash recovery capabilities, such as tab recovery, which will minimize interruptions to users' browsing sessions.
- Improved Phishing Filter: Internet Explorer 7 introduced the Phishing Filter, a feature which helps warn users when they visit a Phishing site. Phishing sites spoof a trusted legitimate site, with the goal of stealing the user's personal or financial information. For Internet Explorer 8, we are building on the success of the Phishing Filter with a more comprehensive feature called the "Safety Filter."
 Download: Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 (Windows XP, Vista, Server 2003, Server 2008)
View: More Information on Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1
News source: Microsoft |
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 Toshiba said Tuesday it will no longer manufacture HD DVDs, effectively ending the long-running battle with the rival Blu-ray for a dominant high-definition format.
Toshiba said it made the decision to cease developing, manufacturing, and marketing HD DVDs after "recent major changes in the market." It promised to continue offering support and service for all existing Toshiba HD DVD products.
"We carefully assessed the long-term impact of continuing the so-called 'next-generation format war' and concluded that a swift decision will best help the market develop," Toshiba President and Chief Executive Atsutoshi Nishida said in a news release.
Toshiba's HD DVD business has been suffering recently with a string of major retailers and rental companies announcing their preference for Blu-ray, developed by Sony. Video Watch video on the battle of the formats »
Last week alone, Wal-Mart and online rental company Netflix said they would abandon HD in favor of Blu-ray. Last month, Warner Brothers Home Entertainment -- which had been the largest media company releasing videos in both formats -- announced it would offer DVDs solely in Blu-ray.
The DVD battle has been reminiscent of the VHS vs. Beta fight in the early 1980s. It has left many consumers confused and waiting to see which technology will emerge as the industry standard.
Sony's Blu-ray is backed by Disney, 20th Century Fox, MGM, Dell, Panasonic, and Philips. Toshiba's HD DVD is backed by Paramount, Universal Pictures, Microsoft, Sanyo, and NEC.
Toshiba said it would continue to work with those companies and study ways to collaborate with them in the future.
Tens of billions of dollars have been at stake as major movie studios battled for a dominant format. But rival game consoles have been part of the struggle, too -- Sony's Playstation 3 plays Blu-ray discs, while the Microsoft X-Box plays HD DVDs.
Both Blu-ray and HD are high-definition DVDs, the successor to ordinary DVDs which show pictures only in standard definition. But Blu-ray and HD involve different hardware and are not compatible with each other, meaning consumers have had to decide which system to invest in.
Both formats have an excellent picture quality with a large storage space. But Toshiba has lost the battle because it lacks a retail presence in many markets, said Carl Gressum, a senior analyst at Ovum, a London technology consultancy.
"They didn't manage to bring on board some of the China vendors, they didn't bring (on board) the retailers, they've failed to develop in the European and Asian markets," Gressum told CNN.
Warner Brothers announced its decision to drop HD DVD right before last month's International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, a significant event for corporate buyers. Gressum said that led to an immediate drop in retail support for Toshiba's format.
Gressum said manufacturers of both formats have made things more difficult for retailers by forcing consumers to make a choice between the gradually-dominant Blu-ray and the much-cheaper HD.
"They're losing money in many cases because of the price war between the two formats as Toshiba -- and also Microsoft, to a certain extent -- has been playing the price card for HD DVD players," he said.
Toshiba said the company would continue to market standard DVD players and recorders.
View: Original Article
News source: CNN |
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 Today we are excited to announce that we have released Service Pack 1 for Windows Vista to manufacturing (RTM) for our first set of languages (English, French, Spanish, German and Japanese).
Service Pack 1 is a very important milestone because it addresses many of the key issues that our customers have identified with Windows Vista over the last year both, directly and through programs like the Customer Experience Improvement Program. With Service Pack 1, we have made great progress in performance, reliability and compatibility. One of the great things about my job is that I get to play with the latest builds of our products -- I've personally been running Windows Vista SP1 pretty exclusively for a few months and I've noticed that my systems run faster and more reliably than they did with the "Gold" release of Windows Vista.
News source: Full Blog Entry
News source: Windows Vista Team Blog |
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Software giant makes cash and stock offer of $31 a share, a 62% premium from Yahoo's closing price on Thursday.
Microsoft Corp. made an unsolicited $44.6 billion cash and stock bid for Yahoo on Friday, a deal that could shake up the competitive and lucrative market for Internet search.
In a statement, Yahoo acknowledged receipt of the offer and said its board would evaluate the proposal "carefully and promptly."
The deal would pay Yahoo shareholders $31 a share, which represents a 62% premium from where Yahoo stock closed on Thursday.
Microsoft's statement said the offer allows Yahoo shareholders to elect to receive cash or a fixed number of shares of Microsoft common stock, with the software giant's offer consisting of one-half cash and one-half Microsoft common stock.
Shares of Yahoo shot up nearly 60% in pre-market trading on the news, while shares of Dow component Microsoft tumbled 5%.
Both Microsoft and Yahoo have fallen far behind rival Google (GOOG, Fortune 500) in the lucrative field of Internet search. Yahoo's earnings and share of the online search market have badly trailed Google.
In a letter it sent to Yahoo's board of directors, Microsoft disclosed it had explored a Microsoft-Yahoo deal a year earlier, only to be rebuffed by Yahoo, which said at that time it was confident of the "potential upside" for Yahoo from operational changes it planned.
"A year has gone by, and the competitive situation has not improved," Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer wrote.
On Thursday, former Yahoo Chief Terry Semel, who opposed an earlier approach Microsoft made last year, resigned from the Yahoo board.
View: Full Article
News source: CNN |
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 High-technology services across large tracts of Asia, the Middle East and North Africa were crippled Thursday following a widespread Internet failure which brought many businesses to a standstill and left others struggling to cope.
Hi-tech Dubai has been hit hard by an Internet outage apparently caused by a cut undersea cable.
Industry experts are blaming damage to two undersea cables but it is not known what caused the damage.
Reports say that Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Bahrain Pakistan and India, are all experiencing severe problems.
Nations that have been spared the chaos include Israel -- whose traffic uses a different route -- and Lebanon and Iraq. Many Middle East governments have backup satellite systems in case of cable failure.
Stephan Beckert, an analyst with TeleGeography, a research company that consults on global Internet issues, said the damaged cables collectively account for the majority of international communications between Europe and the Middle East.
View: Full Article
News source: CNN |
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 eBay Inc. says it's changing its user-feedback system to keep buyers from leaving, but the plan has sellers worried they'll no longer be able to weed out untrustworthy shoppers.
Buyers and sellers have been able to rate each other at the online auctioneer since its birth in 1995, when eBay founder Pierre Omidyar envisioned a virtual marketplace built on trust among buyers and sellers.
Come February 20, a full spectrum of feedback is welcome from buyers about sellers, while sellers can no longer give buyers negative star ratings.
The shift was announced Tuesday among a complex series of pricing changes and initiatives that eBay hopes will improve buyers' experiences as it struggles with stagnant user numbers.
It's a fundamental change to create trust and tackle fraud in a marketplace where buyers and sellers never lay eyes on one another. Steve Grossberg, a Florida-based top seller of video games and president of the Internet Merchants Association, said the ban on rating buyers is a good thing.
"When the seller leaves a negative feedback for a buyer, it drives them away from the site," Grossberg said.
But eBay needs to work harder to stop bidders who don't pay up, he said. The site does not require immediate payment,and sellers complain they are just as exposed to fraud as buyers on eBay.
Don't Miss
Company spokesman Usher Lieberman said about 6 percent of auctions end in nonpayment by the winning bidder.
Sellers can require payment upon checkout for fixed-price sales, which account for 40 percent of eBay's business worldwide. But immediate payment is not required on auctions because the buyers are not at their computers when they win an auction, Lieberman said.
View: Full Article
News source: CNN |
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eBay Inc. said Tuesday it will cut by up to 50 percent the fees it charges sellers to list their goods online, in an effort to boost listings and keep pace with other burgeoning e-commerce sites.
To balance the fee cut, the company plans to increase its commission on items that do sell - a method eBay says sellers prefer because it lowers their risk if items do not sell.
eBay will also increase fees on some items, including auctioned goods selling for less than $25. EBay's fee for those transactions will rise 67%, to 8.75% of the final sale price.
Incoming Chief Executive John Donahoe told a gathering of 200 of eBay's top North American sellers in Washington that a majority of sellers will see their fees go down, and that the new fee structure is going to be driven by the success of sellers.
"eBay is at a crossroads. To maintain our leadership position in e-commerce, we can no longer make incremental changes. We need to redo our playbook and we need to do it fast. We need to take bold action to meet the expectations of buyers and sellers around the world," Donahoe said.
As part of the changes, photo fees also will disappear. The fees were considered a deterrent to sellers posting pictures of their goods, a feature buyers have come to expect on e-commerce sites.
The new fee structure goes into effect Feb. 20 in the United States. More pricing changes are coming shortly in Britain and Germany.
Along with changes to the fee structure, eBay said it will change how sellers show up on customer searches. Those with high rates of customer dissatisfaction will get lower exposure in a search, the company said.
eBay's top sellers will also receive a discount.
View: Full Article
News source: CNN |
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