Coop's Corner (CNET)

Blogging Adobe's AIR rollout

Good morning--belatedly, of course, to any folks living outside Pacific Time--from Adobe's San Francisco event Monday where the company is gathering developers supporting its much-ballyhooed Adobe Integrated Runtime software, or AIR. By now, all the world has read the first round of stories since the company made sure to brief everyone prior to Monday's "official" release. (Here's the link to our earlier AIR piece.)

I'll be blogging the event so tune back in for updates.

I'm looking forward to seeing what The New York Times has in store. I was talking with a couple of

Electronic Arts and Take-Two: It's war

Maybe there's something in the water but now we've got another hostile software battle under way. This time it's Electronic Arts bidding $2 billion in cash to acquire Take-Two Interactive. The sides are not exactly off to a smashing start with Take Two publicly telling Electronic Arts the offer simply ain't up to snuff.

To be continued.

(Update: Check out this piece for more context authored by my News.com colleague Daniel Terdiman.)

Here's the EA press release:

Electronic Arts Proposes to Acquire Take-Two Interactive Software for $26 Per Share in Cash, or Approximately $2.more

MIT prof's advice: Forget Yahoo, bid for SAP

Steve Ballmer's getting a lot of (unsolicited) advice these days about what Microsoft ought to do. You can find one of the more thoughtful contributions in this morning's New York Times. Check out Randall Stross's piece in the Times, where he quotes MIT professor Michael Cusumano, warning against acquiring an "old-style Internet asset, in decline, and at a premium."

Instead, Cusamano makes offers an intriguing alternative: forget about Yahoo and go after SAP.

"It's not an outlandish idea. The two companies held merger talks in late 2003, and perhaps since then, too. Microsoft is in an more

Yahoo now mirrors Lotus then

History never repeats itself exactly, but rereading Kevin Johnson's memo updating the troops on Microsoft's bid to buy Yahoo, I was struck by the contrast with another software mega-merger saga that dominated headlines 13 years earlier.

As we reported on Friday, Johnson, who heads up Microsoft's Platforms & Services division, detailed how a combination with Yahoo would have a tonic impact: Online advertising customers would gain a viable alternative to Google, while Microsoft would carve out a bigger piece of a nearly $80 billion market.

In June 1995, IBM stunned Lotus with a unsolicited $3 billion buyout more