Once again for old time’s sake, the Yahoo-Microsoft soap opera in Digital Daily intros, with apologies to Steven Spielberg, Mel Blanc, Queen, Neil Diamond, Barbra Streisand, Tallulah Bankhead, Marlene Dietrich and the entire cast of “The Sound of Music.”
The rumors are true. Mark Lucovsky, the engineer whose departure from Microsoft allegedly sent CEO Steve Ballmer into a paroxysm of profanity and chair-tossing, has left Google for a new position at VMware, the company has confirmed.
Microsoft chairman Bill Gates is finally having his say on Google’s wonderfully overblown Chrome OS announcement.
His take: It’s just another Linux distro.
Microsoft might worry more about Google’s new Chrome OS if it knew what it was. At the company’s Worldwide Partner Conference in New Orleans today, CEO Steve Ballmer said he was mystified by the dual-OS strategy Google seems to have adopted with Chrome. “Who knows what that thing is,” he said.
Steven Sinofsky, senior vice president of Microsoft Windows and Windows Live Engineering Group, was given a bump-up in title today. He was promoted to president, joining Stephen Elop, Bob Muglia, Qi Lu and Robbie Bach as the fifth company executive with that title. The official announcement and all-hands memo, after the jump.
The long-awaited upgrade to Microsoft’s search engine will soon make its debut. Sources with knowledge of the situation said the company is expected to demonstrate it at our D: All Things Digital conference next week.
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is scheduled to appear onstage at the event, a three-day event that hosts top players from the tech and media industries in interviews by All Things Digital Co-executive Editors Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher.
Code-named “Kumo,” the search engine is Microsoft’s effort to raise its hand to table stakes in the battle for search market share with Google.
Windows Mobile 6.5 might be a necessary stopgap on the path to 7.0, if not exactly an elegant one. But what can you expect from an OS with such a hurried path to launch? Not much, according to Microsoft developers who admit that the incremental update was a rush job that suffers from all of the problems attendant thereto.
It was like a liveblogging tournament this past week–one that included a lot of the big players, but ended in a three-way tie.
According to BoomTown’s reliable sources, the elusive Microsoft-Yahoo deal is making “meaningful” progress. Accordingly, BoomTown also wondered whether Ballmer planned on visiting Carol Bartz on his trip to the Bay Area this week, or if the proximity of Stanford to Yahoo was just chance, given that Stanford was his main destination.
As if the Zune weren’t embarrassing enough… Microsoft and Verizon are reportedly discussing a touchscreen multimedia cellphone that could launch on the carrier’s network in 2010. The project is codenamed “Pink” and will apparently involve some ungodly combination of Windows Mobile and Zune software.
Welcome back to Weekend Update, where we showcase some of the highlights from this site over the past week. In the umpteenth round of the old versus new media match, the Associated Press in its annual meeting this week played into the stereotype of the grizzled no-nonsense editor who shakes his fist at the new interweb thing (or was it intertube?) and its feisty friend, Google News, who are running amok on his lawn.
Looks like Microsoft just lost the sole advantage its CEO Steve Ballmer claimed it had over Google in search: the ability to experiment. The search sovereign made two changes to its search results pages Tuesday that it says will produce better results for complicated searches.
“Apple gained about one point, but now I think the tide has really turned back the other direction. The economy is helpful. Paying an extra $500 for a computer in this environment–same piece of hardware–paying $500 more to get a logo on it? I think that’s a more challenging proposition for the average person than it used to be.”
John Paczkowski has been poking fun at the tech industry and the personalities that drive it since 1997. From 1999 to 2007, he wrote the award-winning tech news Web log Good Morning Silicon Valley for the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley's daily newspaper.
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
Best video mashup ever.
A Facebook Memorial
Wow.
Worth it for the Rickrolling photo alone.
Excellent.
Flughumor!
… you vacuous, toffee-nosed, malodorous perverts
Stephen Fry and zoologist Mark Carwardine meet the kakapo — a fat, flightless and very randy rare parrot.
Spectacular in the bellowing Russian sailor sense of the word …
“If you spell something wrong on your insurance claim, do you really deserve surgery? I don’t think so …”
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