In the not so distant past I would always be pumped when Microsoft won a victory, made a big acquisition, or crushed an opponent. The reason for this is that I used to believe (for good reason) that Microsoft was the only company that was capable of moving us out of the dark ages of computing. They did in fact do just that and for the most part, they used to have a better product that Apple IMHO. I feel more confident about the future of the Internet considering the following news.

Having said that, I don’t think I’m the only one that thinks Microsoft is now holding back innovation in some ways by running the roost in the OS space, but I don't think they will continue to have a whimsical product. Vista isn’t as bad as some people say, but it’s not fantastic either.

...and Yahoo is worth a lot!

Microsoft's statement in part:

“We continue to believe that our proposed acquisition made sense for Microsoft, Yahoo! and the market as a whole. Our goal in pursuing a combination with Yahoo! was to provide greater choice and innovation in the marketplace and create real value for our respective stockholders and employees,” said Steve Ballmer, chief executive officer of Microsoft.

Without executing past bundling type activities, I don’t see how this is economically possible.

Yahoo! Issues Statement in Response to Microsoft

SUNNYVALE, Calif., May 03, 2008 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- Roy Bostock, Chairman of Yahoo! Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO), a leading global Internet company issued the following statement today in response to Microsoft Corporation's announcement that it has withdrawn its proposal to acquire Yahoo!:

"We remain focused on maximizing shareholder value and pursuing strategic opportunities that position Yahoo! for success and leadership in its markets. From the beginning of this process, our independent board and our management have been steadfast in our belief that Microsoft's offer undervalued the company and we are pleased that so many of our shareholders joined us in expressing that view. Yahoo! is profitable, growing, and executing well on its strategic plan to capture the large opportunities in the relatively young online advertising market. Our solid results for the first quarter of 2008 and increased full year 2008 operating cash flow outlook reflect the progress the company is making. Today, Yahoo! has:

-- a refined strategic focus to drive enhanced volume and yield;

-- reorganized to focus its efforts on its most promising products and services;

-- invested in innovations designed to revolutionize display advertising and facilitate closing the competitive gap in search; and

-- enhanced expense and resource management to support improved profitability."

Jerry Yang, co-founder and chief executive officer, Yahoo! Inc. added, "I am incredibly proud of the way our team has come together over the last three months. This process has underscored our unique and valuable strategic position. With the distraction of Microsoft's unsolicited proposal now behind us, we will be able to focus all of our energies on executing the most important transition in our history so that we can maximize our potential to the benefit of our shareholders, employees, partners and users."

According to a recent Millwardbrown study (PDF), Yahoo!’s brand name alone is worth over 13.2 billion. Take into consideration that the OS spaces is becoming less important, the mobile channel is becoming more lucrative, the technology sector is becoming more lucrative & advertising is going to grow into a trillion dollar industry and you can figure out why Yahoo! shareholders will be more rich if they hold onto their cash for the next 3 years than if they got attached to Microsoft. I don’t know how many people left Yahoo as a result, or how bad the poison pills taken by Yahoo have hurt the company if any, but if anything, they took my advice and opened the source to more of their products. This is great in an age of crowd sourcing.

Yahoo!, more than any other company contains user sweat & blood created semantic goodness. As we spend a great deal of time uploading our correctly tagged photos, events, and other great things. Yahoo provides an excellent way of interacting with that data in exchange for user karma. If Microsoft purchased Yahoo, it might have made Windows better, but it would have held back the other two operating systems from competing squarely perhaps and Microsoft’s efforts to provide a premium to shareholders would have to have come at the consumer’s expense.

Everyone knows that you cannot concentrate on the consumer and corporations concurrently. Your products reflect what you are doing. Microsoft wanted all of that semantic data for new emerging types of business intelligence farming to ramp up its CRM products as well as a host of other corporate products. This makes my participation in Web 2.0 feel more like I just got tricked into spending thousands of hours of my time to make billionaires richer.

When Facebook’s beacon was greeted with a wave of criticism, the company quietly changed its tactics. Instead of the program harvesting user data directly, a slew of spam “apps” were created that spread like the virus on my dad’s Vista box (not kidding) and there is so much data about people that it’s practically becoming free. It’s times like these when I’m glad that companies like Chi.mp are just around the corner. Users need to be behind the steering wheel of their own data, they need to know where it goes, what it’s being used for and how. Yahoo holds more semantic data about users and what they like that even the mighty Facebook. I’m glad Yang didn’t get yanked into becoming the next Zuckyerdataborg.

I think most of us have a special place in our hearts for Microsoft--that spot in your heart right next to hope. I do think we can respect what they have done for computing. I also understand that Windows is not a consumer OS any longer, and as I’ve said before Microsoft never said a word about how this combination was going to help either the consumer or the shareholder, not to mention how the heck on earth it could end up benefiting both at the same time.

Parenthetically, I think Microsoft has become the poster child for what’s wrong with our country lately. No transparency and no real focus on us everyday people. Each move they make is a move which will help the shareholders and their partners in the long run. As a friend of mine told me, Microsoft is a great competitor, but they don’t play the game of chess, they play the game of Go, and that makes a world of difference.

500 Internal Server Error

We are entering a new era in computing. The explosion will start this summer and is just beginning now. The Geoweb is quickly forming via the iPhone + Twitter + Twinkle. Thanks @twinkleking ! Please add pic links via tinyurl and toss out an API! :) At any rate, you will probably notice I haven't blogged much. Well, that's because I've been working my butt off and also because I've found micro blogging, or using the communication superhighway (Twitter), to be much more rewarding lately. (it took a while for me to get into Twitter so I understand if you don't "Get" it yet.)

Limitations

The limitations of Geoweb chat (Twinkle lets you set a radius around you to receive tweets on your iPhone) is that if you are responding to the local Twittersphere, there is a good chance that things are being taken out of geo-context. You don't catch all of the conversation. If you increase your radius, there is more noise, but you catch more, and you have to remember that the smaller the radius, the more geo-relevant you are tuning into. One of the problems I have is I like to have my twitter account running on many devices concurrently, and that seems to be a small problem for the time being. Another problem is Twinkle sucks up battery life, so if you own an iPhone and are thinking of upgrading when the GPS units come out, I would recommend you hold off until the Atom processor finds its way into store shelves.

It has never dawned on me, but in the last 3 or so years in which I've been a one man, happily unpaid, part time tech blogger (in addition to the 11 years I've been in technology and technology research now) I've never had an original thought, and the blogging world is better off with out us run of the mill bloggers who happily and by choice earn a living by other means than writing for public consumption.

Well, that's basically the logic behind Ed Bott's (changing) recent unfair attack on your average hobbyist blogger like myself. They always say the truth hurts, well I can honestly tell you my feelings are doing just fine and I don't think any of my fellow bloggers will loose sleep.

Check out Mark Evans take on it too, he's more down to earth apparently, and actually cares enough to give some good advice.

I want to give some more unoriginal thinking on the subject. (I really haven't had time to read a whole lot on the subject, my entire goal is to game Techmeme.com and get money and hits. (I haven't checked my hits in over a month, when my numbers start going up, I actually stop blogging for a while because I never want to change the reason why I started blogging in the first place.)

1. Diversity of thought is what's great about the Blogosphere--its pure strength--and not its weakness. If you didn't understand that, you (like myself) have a lot to learn. Many subjects don't offer a vast repository of perceptions. Does that mean some bloggers should refrain from blogging if Ed Bott has it covered already? I don't think so but I encourage you to form your own thoughts. 
2. "Me too" bloggers, cover the stories which are the most interesting or inflammatory, we do the work which brings out Mike and Scoble, and M. Kirk Patrick's (my favorite blogger lately) posts. Techmeme doesn't bring in the traffic--Google does. (Believe me)
3. Techmeme has obviously assembled the best "me too" bloggers on the web or you wouldn't waste your time complaining about it. If you have a complaint, offer a pragmatic solution, especially when the "problem" is all of these lame people. (wow)
4. Attacking people and pretty much calling them uncreative might create uncertainly in them but sure isn't going to bring out the creativity in them. If you truly cared about the quality of younger bloggers, I'd see you putting comments on people's blogs (sending them tweets) encouraging them to think a bit more critical about the subjects before they post (after pointing out a good point), and letting them in on some of your always original, never Techmeme bandwagon, not "me too" writing skills.
5. It sometimes takes a post like this to stir up the emotion inside me enough to actually fire up Vista to post but the people on the blogosphere are not here to entertain or enlighten Edd Bott, they obviously--even the most evil seemingly pointless mob of Digg--sometimes have original meaningful & insightful thoughts at times or you would still be working for a newspaper.
6. I don't have all the time in the world to read everything, but I read more than most bloggers I would assume, so I don't know if someone else has made this point. People are used to Micro-blogging now too, and the two arts are converging and having an editorially gravitational pull on each other.
7. I don't write for money, never have, most likely will never want to do so. (not that I think it's in any way bad)
8. Even though I love reading Techmeme, I don't write for Techmeme (I love the fact that Gabe was (or his algorithm) insightful enough to notice I had been blogging quality content for years happily without any readers). (I'm not saying I'm a good blogger, I'd have to spend more time to get the quality of my posts up and there are a few times that I will try to get on Techmeme when I feel what I have to say is a good point.
9. I write for myself. The moment people like me (especially the even younger people) disappear from the blogosphere is the moment it will be an outdated extension of big boring media that gets purchased, and rehashed to the lowest common denominator of what makes the most boring dollar.
10. The real blogosphere always will be just this, an extension of the each individuals online persona. This is just an extension of my passion for technology.
11. I'm not a me too blogger, I've provided "A LOT" of original thinking though the years.
12. We should all be encouraging young, inexperienced bloggers to post--indeed coaching--giving advice and be grateful that medium exists because it will become more of a long overdue democracy 2.0 over the next five years.

Update: I might have lost my ability to read a post, but I think everyone is having a bad weekend, and it looks like "The proto-blogger" Dave Winer is going to quit blogging? All of us recycled garbage speaking bloggers who have spent countless hours blogging are pretty much just worthless trash. Head for the hills guys. Invesnt something cool again Dave like you did with blogging and then when what you create so cool that a new younger, different generation of individuals look up to you and get excited about what all of the old school people are talking about, we can get reduced to just a waste of bandwidth that we really are... Just a big waste of time, why the heck does anyone blog? I am stunned that no one recognizes it's the diversity of thought which makes the whole damn think worth it.

Update2: There are a lot of people talking about these "me-too" bloggers. What everyone is missing is the fact that when people start blogging (especially younger people) it takes a little bit of time before they learn the ropes, gain resources, good reading sources and so forth. This attack is the equivalant to attacking kids as they get on the bus in the morning in some situations. 

The entry barrier is being lowered, what many of these old men don’t understand is this is a good change in the blogosphere, more people with more diversity of thought is fantastic, it helps research in many areas.

Blogging is a skill of applied research, and usually the best bloggers are the unpaid ones (IMHO). The conversational and technical nature of Techmeme is an original one, and one I'm proud to be a part of at any given time, whether in a small sub headline, or a main one. After reading a lot of these "critics" posts lately, I just wanted to say to all of you small time bloggers, you have way more potential than anyone will give you credit for! Keep blogging, let the conversation keep flowing and growing. By the time you reach the age of most of these people who are attacking you, you will have so much more knowledge and blogging skill than they ever had time to achieve in their lives.

Don't let a bunch of jaded--has been--old school paperboys make you upset about what you are passionate about. Like all places worth arriving, there are no shortcuts, becoming a blogger will take time, the problem is not you, just do your best to be a good blogger and try to think of original implications but I don't think you should worry about a bunch of old men getting upset about the way you, write, what you write about, or anything; be yourself, don't change for them.

Perhaps I'm missing something but here's something I haven't heard anyone talk about:

1. Who at comScore owns/owned stock in Google?
2. Did they sell before they released the click data?
3. Did they buy afterwards?
4. If they did, is it ethical?
5. If it's not can we call the report conScore? =P
6. By Google not providing guidance, and people in Google playing their own stock, (if that's happening...) is it possible to have "reverse insider information?"
7. Is that ethical?
8. If it's not could we call the act Scroooodue? =P
9. WTF is the transparency?

I'm just kidding with the names but I think there is something wrong with this country when the housing and markets & more and more markets seem like they are gamed and the only losers are the hard working honest aging middle class Americans who are so busy trying to make ends meet that they don't have time to pay attention to all of this stuff.

Capitalism at it's best? or Creative Capitalism? I could be off my rocker but as far as I know with the NASDAQ index, companies like comScore and others who have financial analysts and technical analysts working together producing performance information and the info seems to get out pretty quickly and seems pretty "pro bono." So pro bono infact it might add a second meaning to the word.

Who the hell are paying for these reports? This company is doing well and that company isn't, and this company has this performance. The damn things are only right half the time and there is always some lame reason why this or that was off or on.

Then right afterwards we learn more and then finally the real results come out and the market evens out for a month. To make matters worse, the one company who is most volatile--Google--is the one everyone loves to report, buy, sell, rant, rave, bitch, moan and cry about. I think the problem is two fold.

1. Insider information isn't necessarily insider information in an age of information, if you have stock and you are publishing a wide spread analysis of their performance, before they talk about their own performance, don't you think it's fair to everyone involved to let us know if you stand anything to gain from the ups and downs of a volatile stock like Google?
2. Google doesn't provide guidance: People love the fact that they can "Play the Google stock." Google hasn't provided guidance, so it's easy to suck money out of an aging middle to upper middle class America who tries their best to play these new growth companies but don't quite understand what the hell is going on. People in the green hire friends over to sign into their accounts and hit the sell button as fast as possible as soon as these metrics come out.

Disclosure: I don't own, nor have I ever own Google stock, not because I wasn't bright enough to buy at the IPO, just because I don't make enough money yet in life to play. Yet.

Update: I just read Donna Bogatin's report on this, I recommend you do as well. I wish I had time to read this stuff more, I've been so busy with everything I wish I could clone myself. Wait, that's unethical too! Especially if I patent myself!

Red Hat uses the 2,300 year old sign for infinity which is a sideways 8 to carve out the letter F for Fedora Core. Dataportability.org, the most user centric act on the Internet right now, received a C&D for having a similar logo. (they look nothing alike besides the similar use of the infinite symbol.) They use the infinite symbol to show that we will have to sign up for an infinite amount of web sites in our life time without the D in Data Portability. The only similarities are the letter usage inside the logo and the fact that they are similar shades of blue. Unreal, Red Hat just lost a fan or two I'm sure. At any rate, the folks behind Dataportabilityorg are busy trying to help us, the users, and so they have asked folks to start a logo design content. If you are handy with a Wacom tablet or love chilling in front of Photoshop or The Gimp, give it a shot! Eat that Red Hate! =P

Does this logo in any way whatsoever cause you to think of RedHat? I think not. But who am I do judge?

Update, here is my attempt. I'm not the best with logos but I gave it a shot. Tried to capture the spirit of the original and make it seem like the user is "on the go."

Microsoft says it's the engineers that are valuable to the company but would Microsoft still be willing to pay 42 billion for the company if Yahoo! opened the source to most of its services like Yahoo! Pipes for instance? Many companies operate profitably by using the community that loves them to not only monetize their product but improve it. I look at Sun Microsystems as one such visionary company who can operate under this type of license but I don't think Microsoft could. They just paid billions for MySQL.

In a world where execution, ideas, and the ability to bring it all together matter the most, what would happen if Yahoo took the ultimate Microsoft poison pill? Would Microsoft be GNU'ed off? Would Yahoo's net value plummet or would a new Yahoo! cult following gathering lift them in the air like a pillar above Google and them all? Just like the pillar of semantic goodness they currently are at this point; Yahoo makes all of it's money of the people and eyeballs who visit the sites they have created.

They probably wouldn't even have to open source their search and advertising platforms for it to make Microsoft change its mind. What are your thoughts? As I write this, I feel a bit silly, and stupid and ignorant but sometimes that's what it takes to form an answer to a problem. What would happen if Yahoo did do this? What if it stopped the buyout. What if it saved Yahoo? I might need some protection I think. $42 billion dollars is a lot of money so it will probably never happen but what the hell. Maybe they are just going to try to stall until a change at the White House happens.

XML is ten years old today. If you have a good 15-20 minutes you can learn about the thinking and a little bit about the history and the people behind the spec over at Tbray.org. I'm getting ready to fly out to Silicon Valley and I'm meeting with a fellow research person who's husband wrote something called AdXML. I'm not sure if it ever caught on, or if it's in use today. I've never had much time lately to blog or even look any of this stuff up. I've been busy inventing and innovating lately a bit myself, or trying to do the best I can to do so. I have a bunch of presentations and I've actually been working on my own XML spec which I'm not at liberty to talk about. Big companies are starting to understand the benefits of open innovation though. XML took quite a bit of time to catch on really. Much like it's going to take Data Portability, and open IM networks to catch on. If they don't provide the customers the benefits of these improvements, they will go to someone who does. Programmers want to be able to attach to services these days more than API's even. 

Today because of people like Theodore Holm Nelson, Timothy Berners-Lee, Charles F. Goldfarb,  we have a great Internet.  I'm learning with a bit of difficulty what Microsoft needs to learn, you need to be a more open company and just inspire your workforce to produce better products.

You can't innovate as a company anymore, you have to be a part of a larger group of people that help each other out these days in order to get the job done to provide customers the value they are starting to see more from machines, and less from people. (Customer Service Gets worse every year.) Speaking of ten years, it's been ten long years sense I've been to silicon valley. I have so much going on in my life right now that I can't keep up with it all. I'm surrounded by good friends and we are starting a weekend "Hobby" that we think will be pretty cool for customers. I've been laser focused on doing everything I can to change an industry. Just like these guys who were behind XML did.

Last May I was thinking that this was the end game, and now it appears as though I might not be to far from the mark. Microsoft has exceeded my expectations in the cloud since last May when I first thought about what value could be gained if all four giants merged and a new double strength war for user's hearts, minds, keyboard strokes and money began. Scoble doesn't understand yet the power of a rich client and a rich cloud. Scoble, people don't throw 41 billion at something unless they understand and believe that it is a solution to something. Not that I even understand, I have learned the dangers of hubris. (Slowly) The WSJ even thinks Microsoft stands no chance I guess.

Microsoft

You are proposing a value proposition to the many shareholders of Yahoo! as we speak. You are talking to government officials, the one most important thing you are not doing is talking to your customers and possible future customers. You need to make promises for an open future. When you reward customers with value, especially free value, they reward you, they talk good things about you, they like your products when they suck even.

When existing value that is provided by the marketplace is taken away from consumers, your brand name suffers. You can not make your products "valuable" by sucking up the competition any longer. The marketplace in the 90's was guided by your forward thinking but we are a smarter, more diverse crowd of technologists these days and many of us are futurists, we are rooting that the future is a good one and that the average Joe's benefit is at the center of every product.

What you need is to have a conversation with your customers, letting them know that you will start supporting open source products. Not sudo-source, stupid source, sloppy source, or legacy-source, open source. I'm not saying throw your cash cows in the fire but experiment with your overlap that this purchase creates. Don't throw all your eggs and chickens in the same basket. Think of all of those implications. I've realized many of them. Many of them require you opening up and letting a the competition have a shot. Your largest gain is the human capital that comes with Yahoo as I said when I first thought about this merger almost a year ago. Those in the valley are some of the smartest in the world. They are all thinking about the customers more and less about the competition.

I mean paint and Flikr combined is unstoppable in the Market. (Just kidding) There is a definite plus side to all of this you know people. First of all it will actually really get Apple fired up about moving the OS space even further forward, it will get the Linux crowed roaring because it further distinguishes Linux as an OS that mirrors consumer needs, and not marketplace power plays. What's missing isn't what Robert Scoble is talking about, he's a smart guy but he has it all wrong. Maybe your mantra could be do the right thing. Stimulate the marketplace, not destroy. Making your products work together best is no longer the best solution because you now are in a position to make the market more pleased than even Google has. Karma is true. Competition is good, complement the competition, don't call them names, respect them verbally and treat them like good people which they are and when you are all done kick their ass on merit alone.

Build your brand back up, it's your only chance at long term success.

Google:

Give Steve a call, .Mac still sucks.