The blogosphere is atwitter (see Techmeme) with Mike Arrington's latest call for someone to "pony up a big round of financing around an existing blog, or perhaps a new entity, and then start rolling them up into a big fat CNET-crushing $200 million per year in revenue business."

It's pleasing to have Mike and others targeting CNET. It must mean that we are at the top of the heap. Competitive envy comes with the territory. And I admire what Mike, Om Malik, Matt Marshall, Rafat Ali, and others have done to build their networks and companies. … Read more

This week on the EIC Squared podcast, ZDNet's Larry Dignan and I discuss Yahoo's latest move to get Microsoft to cough up more cash for the company. We also talk about Facebook's new privacy options and chat service, which puts the social-networking upstart on a trajectory to collide with Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, and others who offer complete communications services.

In addition, we chat about Intel's plans to produce six-core chips in the fourth quarter, and Apple's massive security update to its operating system.

Yahoo filed a three-year plan--a set of slides originally presented in December 2007--with the Securities and Exchange Commission outlining the ways in which the company is worth more than Microsoft is willing to pay at this point. Yahoo expects growth in revenue and operating cash flow of $1.9 billion over the next three years from display and video advertising and $1.4 billion in added search revenue. Caroline McCarthy has more on this topic in her blog post.

I doubt that this regulatory filing will do much to change Microsoft's strategy, which has been to hold firm … Read more

Tim O'Brien must have one of the more difficult jobs at Microsoft. As senior director of Microsoft Platforms, he is tasked with getting different parts of Microsoft to dance to the same tune. "Part of my role in the company is to help groups understand what the paths are," O'Brien said during an interview at Mix '08 earlier this month. "If the groups are heading down random paths, at the risk of oversimplification, we try to get on a common trajectory."

It sounds like a herding cats job. Microsoft has multiple platforms and agendas, … Read more

Charlie Cooper and I interviewed Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff last week. Following is part of the exchange, where I asked Benioff for his thoughts on Microsoft. He has called Microsoft a dinosaur, incapable of innovation, and a monopolist.

Disparaging large competitors is part of Benioff's marketing offensive. He has taken shots at SAP, Oracle, Siebel, and others, dismissing them as 20th century fossils who are making feeble attempts to adapt to Web and cloud computing.

His braggadocio has garnered Salesforce.com loads of attention since its inception nine years ago. What's somewhat mystifying is how competitors have … Read more

In early February, in the midst of Microsoft's surprise bid to acquire Yahoo, I wrote about Yahoo's Flickr Video coming soon. It's been a long time coming. I first asked Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake about a Flickr video service in December 2005.

After spending a few hours at the Flickr fourth anniversary party in San Francisco on Saturday night, the "coming soon" line was uttered by various Yahoo people, including Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield. Upon further investigation, it appears that "coming soon" means that Flickr Video will debut in beta next month.

Flickr, … Read more

One of our tech journalism colleagues, Russell Shaw, passed away on Friday, March 14. He was on a reporting trip in San Jose, traveling from his home base of Portland, Ore. I knew Russell first as a blogger at ZDNet, where he covered broadband, VoIP, smartphones, and other topics.

Russell was very prolific and knowledgeable, and wrote about a broad range of subjects. In addition to technology, he covered everything from rock concerts and hotel management to politics and entertainment. He was a contributor to Huffington Post and the author of several books, including Caution! Music & Video Downloading: Your Guide to Legal, Safe, and Trouble-Free Downloads … Read more

In a research paper from June 2007, titled "Worldwide Buzz: Planetary-Scale Views on an Instant-Messaging Network (PDF)," Eric Horvitz of Microsoft Research and Jure Leskovec of Carnegie Mellon University analyzed 30 billion conversations among 240 million people using Microsoft Instant Messenger in June 2006. It turned out that the average path length, or degree of separation, among the anonymized users probed was 6.6.

Six degrees of separation posits that a person is a step away from people they know and two steps distant from people known by the people they know--thus the magic number six.

Following is … Read more

In the post I wrote about Rich Miner of Google saying that the Android mobile software stack will gain more users than the iPhone, several people commented. The general consensus is that Apple is the BMW of the personal computer industry and is the standard for innovation that its competitors, with far more market share, follow. Android is a non-factor.

The challenge for Apple is to keep coming up with proprietary products that fuel its business model, which is based on innovation and R&D around both hardware and software. Since Steve Jobs returned to Apple, the company has … Read more