August 10th, 2008
I just ran across a neat little PDF showing problems in Gnumeric being fixed by their developers while the same problems in Excel not being fixed by Microsoft. Most of these are statistically related, and I do have a bit of background on them.
This is quite interesting, and in my opinion, proves the spirit of open source. ;)
June 16th, 2008
Looks like Windows Live Messenger had a smallish 7-minute outage. More info when I can see if anybody else cares.
May 16th, 2008
About half an hour ago, it has been noticed that one can no longer login to MSN Messenger from BitlBee… or Pidgin, or anything except the official clients, which don’t run on any computers in my house.
Microsoft, it’s time for you to stop doing this. I know you won’t, but if it prevails that you only allow your own clients, there will be a mass movement from the MSN network. There’s no reason to be forced to see ads just to talk to people.
(jabber ftw!)
May 5th, 2008
Just reading the comments on the Slashdot article on Microsoft withdrawing their Yahoo takeover shows how feelings on this can be mixed just because of hate towards a specific company.
Here’s a few comments that struck my eye:
On one hand, I’m of course happy I can stay with Flickr. On the other, it would have been a great deal of fun seeing Microsoft get bogged down and distracted for a good few years as it struggled to digest Yahoo (and, likely, killing any value of that company in the process).
Think of what happens now: The shareholders of Yahoo are going to go ballistic. Yahoo management just left $47.5 billion on the table! (The total at $33 / share for Yahoo.) This has to be the dumbest corporate move since Time Warner buying AOL. My guess is that the Yahoo board is going to have to fend off a shareholder insurrection the likes of which we have not seen for a while, which will serve as a huge distraction for Yahoo. I don’t think Google can get too close to Yahoo, because the DOJ (let alone the EU) will not like the concentration of search advertising in the hands of one company.
Yahoo’s market cap takes a hit, shareholders initiate lawsuits against the Yahoo board. Microsoft may be able to swoop in next quarter and accomplish this via hostile takeover for significantly less. Surprised Microsoft didn’t do this sooner.
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