Outside the Lines

Yahoo's top two executives came out of their serial and secretive negotiations with Microsoft and Google to shed light on the cloudy future of the company. In an interview Wednesday at D6 with Walt Mossberg, CEO Jerry Yang and President Sue Decker did little to shed light on the negotiations or possible outcomes.

Of course, it wasn't expected that the pair would say anything revealing about the negotiations with Microsoft other than the stock answers Microsoft's Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer gave during their D6 interview Tuesday night.

Yang mostly reiterated what has been said in the … Read more

Speaking at the D6 conference Barry Diller said Google is irrelevant to his Ask.com business and explained his quest to spin off five public companies from his collection of companies and 63 brands.

As chairman and chief executive officer of IAC, as well as chairman of Expedia, Diller oversees brands including Home Shopping Network, Ticketmaster, Lending Tree, Ask.com, Match.com, CitySearch, and Evite.

On August 1, IAC will become five separate companies--HSN, Lending Tree, Ticketmaster, Interval, and a "new" IAC, which will be a series of businesses naturally related to each other, Diller said.

CARLSBAD, Calif.--Amazon.com founder and CEO Jeff Bezos kicked off the morning proceedings here at D6 after a night of polite carousing by industry luminaries. During the interview with D co-host Walt Mossberg, Bezos announced a streaming-video service and explained his foray into hardware with the Kindle e-book reader.

On the subject of video and music delivery, Bezos said, "We are working on a new version of video-on-demand, a for-pay streaming service we will release in the next couple of weeks. The streaming service will start instantly, and it's a la carte, for pay."

Regarding competing … Read more

Evri has a new twist on content navigation and discovery. Debuting Wednesday at D6, Evri is not a search engine, according to CEO Neil Roseman, but a "data graph of the Web" that leads to "incremental content engagement."

"What doesn't work well is when you get to other places on the Web," Roseman told me. "We read sentences, extracting the subject, objects and verbs, and map to other content on the Web." Evri uses entity extraction, natural language processing, statistical analysis, and other technologies to create relevant connections based on meaning … Read more

Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer reminisced about 28 years of working together and addressed a number of topics, including Vista, Yahoo, Google, Windows 7, and search, in an interview with Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher at D6.

Following are the videos from the Gates-Ballmer interview. Full coverage of D6.

Part I

Part II

Click here for full coverage of the D: All Things Digital conference.

At a reception prior to the start of the D6 conference, Bill Gates held court among a throng of reporters. He explained some of the specifics of his July 1 "retirement" from daily duties at the company he founded. Gates said he would invert how he spends time today. Instead of spending 80 percent on Microsoft and 20 percent on the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, he will spend 20 percent of his time on Microsoft issues and the remainder on his foundation work.

Gates, who will remain chairman of Microsoft, said he will spend two to three … Read more

The sixth version of the D: All Things Digital conference will begin Tuesday night with Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer onstage. The two legends of Microsoft will offer the first public peek at Windows 7, although Ballmer told me they would only show a little bit of the user interface.

It will be a very early "positioning" peek given that Windows 7 isn't due until the beginning of 2010. As CNET News.com's Ina Fried reported from her interview with Window chief Steven Sinofsky, Windows 7 is not a new kernel. Ballmer said that doing too … Read more

The obsession with the ups and downs of Twitter among my friends has generated a great deal of bloviation, including my own. On a slow news weekend, Twitter's performance problems are fodder for a bit of theater and for getting some daily keyboard exercise.

The image below is meant to bring some perspective to the Twittersphere. On one hand, Twitter navel gazing (or any other navel gazing) is a waste of resources in the context of what is going on in the world. On the other hand, Twitter and its brethren are becoming viable communications vehicles for spreading the &… Read more

Lately the echo chamber of the blogosphere inhabited by the Gillmor Gang (of which I am a member) has been caught in a loop of Twitter-FriendFeed convulsions.

Steve Gillmor believes that Twitter is the communications medium of the future. Send out a message to your followers and track (when the feature is enabled) the loosely coupled conversation as it wafts deeper into the cloud. FriendFeed, on the other hand, aggregates feeds from Twitter and many other sources, creating an index of the content (gestures in Gillmorspeak) an individual chooses to share with followers.

Twitter's friendly API allows … Read more