MIcrosoft

IBM is now giving away its Lotus Symphony product for free. Not "free" as in open source, but rather as in "Please take since people won't pay for it," as only a few hundred thousand downloads have been registered since September 2007.

The gesture is intended to take away money from Microsoft - probably a losing cause going head-to-head on Microsoft's territory - but also to provide a platform upon which to sell IBM's collaboration software. This second strategy has a better chance of success, but would be much better off it didn't first require enterprises to adopt Lotus Symphony because, quite frankly, they won't.

A much better route would be to a) extend from Microsoft Office (though this is fraught with problems because Microsoft controls the platform) or b) shift the battle to new terrain that Microsoft doesn't own, as Google has.

If I were a betting man, I'd lay my money on email as the disruptive platform that IBM should build upon, and I don't mean it's widely used by hugely clunky Domino/Lotus Notes combo. I mean Zimbra or Mozilla's new email push.… Read more

Microsoft thinks it can win the hearts and minds of future developers by giving them free development tools today. This would be a noble gesture but for one, tiny little fact:

There are 150,000+ free and open-source software projects on Sourceforge (and another 80,000+ on Google Code). The day of placating developers with tools is over. Open source has raised the stakes dramatically. Forever.

Bill Gates, forever stuck in the past, declares:… Read more

Microsoft will authorize a proxy takeover attempt of Yahoo this week, according to a report in The New York Times' DealBook on Monday.

The tactic, in which Microsoft appeals directly to Yahoo shareholders to vote on its proposed acquisition, would be a cheaper alternative than raising its per-share offer, the article said.

Microsoft proposed $31 per share to buy Yahoo, which Yahoo's board said undervalues the company. Every dollar added to its per-share offer adds $1.4 billion to the acquisition cost, which is now valued at about $41 billion, according to the article.

Read more at the DealBook: &… Read more

Crises happen. They happen to all companies and to all people. They happen in our personal lives and in our professional lives. By definition, crises bring change, big change. They can change the entire trajectory of your life or your company's future. That's why how we behave in a crisis, how we manage a crisis, is such a big deal.

For example, Yahoo is going through a crisis right now. It's attempting to reinvent itself. Microsoft's bid to buy the company further complicates matters. The way Yahoo's board handles this crisis will determine the fate of the company and its thousands of employees and shareholders. That's a pretty big deal.

One company's crisis can have a ripple effect on others. You might say that Microsoft is attempting to capitalize on Yahoo's crisis. In so doing, the software giant has created its own. Negotiating tens of billions of dollars to acquire a large company and remake its Internet business is definitely crisis material.… Read more

"According to Zaobao.com, Beijing has intervened into Microsoft's acquisition of Yahoo by asking Chinese online e-commerce service provider Alibaba to provide detailed information on the acquisition and by keeping a close watch on the process of the acquisition as well as its possible influence," writes ChinaTechNews.com.

Chinese authorities have an interest in the deal partly because Yahoo is a major shareholder of Alibaba, a major online marketplace where manufacturers find customers.

Microsoft wants more students using its software tools and it thinks it has hit on the right business model.

It's going to give away its software.

Starting this week, college students in 10 countries will be able to get Microsoft's Visual Studio and several other programs for free as part of an effort dubbed DreamSpark. Over the next year, Microsoft plans to offer the program worldwide for college and high school students.

In addition to giving away its Visual Studio tools, Microsoft is also providing no-charge access to its Expression Web design tools and its XNA studio for … Read more

Now that Engadget is reporting Toshiba will wave the white flag tomorrow and finally put an end to the high-def format war once and for all, there are a whole new set of questions that must be answered.

Will Toshiba move to Blu-ray? What will the company do with the technology? Will it sell the HD DVD name to the Blu-ray folks?

But perhaps most importantly, what will Microsoft do? The company has been a staunch supported of HD DVD since the beginning and it currently offers an HD DVD add-on for its Xbox 360 console. But now that the format is dead and the rightful winner is ready to be crowned, will Microsoft ignore the format war and go about its business or try to jump on the Blu-ray bandwagon?

Trust me -- within a month, the company will announce a Blu-ray add-on for the Xbox 360.… Read more

Microsoft has given the open-source community a belated Valentine's Day present by adding its Office file formats (.xls, .doc, and .ppt) to the Open Specification Promise. It also added information on patent/copyright coverage and information on how OSP interacts with GPL-based software development. (You can see what the site looked like before the changes using the Wayback Machine.)

Good for you, Microsoft.

No, Microsoft wasn't motivated by peace, love, and Linux. Rather, the contribution of the binaries is focused on getting OOXML approved:… Read more

If ever there was a time for a famous futurist to be giving a keynote address at the Game Developers Conference, this is it.

When Ray Kurzweil, the author of The Singularity is Near and one of the most noted futurists around, takes the stage at GDC 2008 in San Francisco on Thursday to talk about "the next 20 years of gaming," he'll be weighing in at a moment in the industry's existence when the lines between games and Hollywood and advertising are blurring, when the term "gamer" encompasses 75-year-old grandmothers and when the … Read more