July « 2009 « Tim Anderson’s ITWriting

After Microsoft deal, what next for Yahoo’s developer platform?

By tim, on July 30th, 2009 Follow tim on Twitter

In May I attended a Yahoo Hack Day in London and wrote it up for the Reg. Although I found the business story unconvincing, I was impressed by the technology – things like BOSS, SearchMonkey, and especially YQL (Yahoo Query Language), which lets you treat the entire Internet as a structured database.

One thing all these

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Microsoft – Yahoo search deal: 2+2 makes 5, or 3?

By tim, on July 29th, 2009 Follow tim on Twitter

Microsoft’s search deal with Yahoo makes more sense than the attempted full acquisition last year. The 10-year deal provides for Microsoft’s Bing to become the back-end search engine for Yahoo, while Yahoo becomes the exclusive sales force for premium search advertisers on both Bing and Yahoo.

Listening to today’s conference call, the rationale for the deal

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Morgan Stanley: why we didn’t use Silverlight for Matrix

By tim, on July 28th, 2009 Follow tim on Twitter

I attended an online briefing about Morgan Stanley’s Matrix [warning: lots of Flash with sound effects], a tool for financial trading which has been written in Adobe Flex. Adobe’s Andrew Shorten has more information here, and notes:

Matrix was developed by Morgan Stanley with user experience consultation from Adobe Professional Services and technical delivery by Lab

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Spotify for iPhone looks great – if Apple allows it

By tim, on July 27th, 2009 Follow tim on Twitter

I’m fascinated by the announcement of Spotify for iPhone.

Spotify lets you stream music from the company’s servers using a particularly fast and elegant user interface. The choice is huge, and of course shareable playlists are supported – I’ve had a lot of fun with these, using the desktop version.

Now here it comes for iPhone, with

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Review: Wii Sports Resort and MotionPlus

By tim, on July 26th, 2009 Follow tim on Twitter

Nintendo’s Wii Sports Resort with bundled MotionPlus accessory is just out, and I tried them out today. Sports Resort is the same concept as the original Wii Sports that is bundled with the console, with a mostly different selection of games and more advanced gameplay, while the MotionPlus accessory clips on to the Wii remote

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Microsoft’s new EU Windows 7 proposal – will IE now be the default?

By tim, on July 24th, 2009 Follow tim on Twitter

I’m trying to figure out exactly what Microsoft is now proposing to the EU in order to satisfy its concerns about the “tying of Microsoft Internet Explorer web browser with Windows”.

The EU says:

This followed extensive discussions with the Commission which centred on a remedy outlined in the January 2009 Statement of Objections (see MEMO/09/15) whereby

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Microsoft reports weak financials, still failing in the cloud

By tim, on July 24th, 2009 Follow tim on Twitter

Microsoft has reported weak results for the quarter ending June 2009.

Here’s a table which breaks down the results vs the same quarter last year, similar to one I made for the March figures. Numbers are in $millions:

Client
Revenue
% change
Profit
% change

Client (Windows)
3108
-28.7
2167
-33.32

Server and Tools
3510
-5.67
1349
-1.46

Online
731
-12.66
-732
-50.93

Business (Office)
4564
-13.33
2816
-16.17

Entertainment and devices
1189
-25.22
-130
-23.98

I am ignoring the hefty $1483 loss on “corporate-level activity” –

…continue reading Microsoft reports weak financials, still failing in the cloud

Microsoft’s limited Windows 7 offer a lesson in how to annoy customers?

By tim, on July 23rd, 2009 Follow tim on Twitter

I’ve returned from a few days away to discover that Microsoft’s special Windows 7 offer, which was meant to run from July 15th 2009 until August 9th 2009, has already in effect expired. This was the deal for UK customers (already less generous that that offered in the USA):

You can pre-order Windows 7 Home Premium

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Death of Popfly shows the dark side of the cloud

By tim, on July 23rd, 2009 Follow tim on Twitter

I am not sure what goals Microsoft had for Popfly – or whether the company itself knew them – but apparently they were not met; a week ago the team announced the closure of the service, with just one month’s notice:

Unfortunately, on August 24, 2009 the Popfly service will be discontinued and all sites, references,

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Microsoft announces Azure prices, availability, still haunted by legacy

By tim, on July 14th, 2009 Follow tim on Twitter

I attended a briefing on Microsoft Azure, its cloud platform. We were given details on Azure pricing and availability, along with brief presentations from organizations intending or hoping to make use of it. The press release is here.

Microsoft is promising commercial availability in Q4 2009, possibly at PDC 2009, scheduled for Nov 17-19. This will

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