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Latest Updates: microsoft RSS

  • fritz Says -> online collaboration heating up
    12:08 am on October 4, 2007 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , , , , microsoft, , , , ,

    Online collaboration space is all heating up with now the big players in this space being Zoho, Google with its hosted apps for your domain and now Microsoft with its latest announcements (this) of Office going Live. Well the others are not far behind even companies like AT&T (see this) and Cisco (see this) are trying to get into this space and not to forget even Intel is making a huge push into consumer internet with its investment arm Intel Capital providing funding to many consumer internet companies.

    But out of all this players there is one player which is doing this with killer technology by its side and that is Adobe yes the new owners of the Flash platform now with all the pieces falling in place it looks like Macromedia was a killer deal for Adobe to inject new DNA into itself to become part of the innovation wave that is hitting the web now and Flash is paying a key part of it. With (this) announcement they have made it clear that they are taking part in the race and they do have the technology and the resources to win the race but will they be able to do it is the multi billion dollar question.

    But The runner that will win in this might not be the one who owns the technology but the one that builds on top of it see this the company called communigate systems have built a flash client for collaborative groupware and the interface in the screenshots look killer and since Google is in the acquisition spree and so are many others this might be the perfect target for anyone who is looking at a very innovative way to get into this race with one acquisition and their management team looks good with loads of experience behind them so they will fit well in the bigger picture.

    Out of all the big guns the one that I am very interested in is Adobe with the glimpses of what they have shown of what they are cooking in their labs it looks like a good place for lots of fun work going on now. For a very long time I have not seen anything fun reported or leaked from sources from Google labs.

    The new adobe service share looks pretty impressive but the best review has been for the media player as that would be a perfect replacement for information devices on the go.
    This is the holy grail of consumer and biz tech now finding the perfect online collaboration suite so that people people can work in a decentralized environment from multiple locations in the web 2.0 world. only time will tell who will become the winner but till the time comes niche players who are solving small problems in a innovative way of the bigger collaborative pie are good targets for acquisition. So If you are working on any nifty little project in the collaboration space or you come across something nice leave a comment.

     

  • fritz Says -> Two big stories in corp world on this day
    12:33 am on July 5, 2007 | 2 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , , , , , , microsoft,

    Bill Gates one of the few business leaders I admire is no longer the richest man in the world in terms of net worth he has been overtaken by Carlos Slim a telecom tycoon from Mexico. when his firm’s share rose 27 percent over the past 12 months.
    but this is solely based on Carlos Slim’s holding in his firm Telmex and is based on the share price appreciation in the soaring markets of developing countries the price stocks are rising but you never know when they might fall and if they do then Carlos Slim wont be able to keep the mantle of being the richest man in the world
    as for the portfolio of bill gates his holdings are so diversified and somewhere it was once reported that less then half his fortune is now linked to microsofts fortune that is very smart since he is no longer part of the management that runs the company on day to day basis.

    The other news is of Hilton Hotel Corp being acquired by the buyout firm Blackstone Group for a whooping 26 billion dollars wowie Paris Hilton is now even more rich after she got out jail (hahahaha) I wonder if her going to jail got Blackstone Group’s attention to make this deal (hahahaha)
    anyway paris hilton has more pocket change now and maybe she can take a break from partying give her fortune to charity and join a nunnery somewhere who knows it might happen tomorrow and shock the world tomorrow
    Hilton is a prestigious chain of hotels I remember Jay Leno of the Tonight Show saying that Paris should have been made to stay in one of the Hilton’s instead of a jail that would have been more torturing.
    Well personally I have not stayed in a Hilton but been to one of them in a place called Fujairah in UAE nice little small property on the Shores of Fujairah facing the arabian sea. It forms a get away from the corp world for the big guns form the main commercial hub of UAE which is Dubai.

    source for the above statements are source 1 and source 2

     

  • fritz Says -> My Idol Graduates and inspires me
    10:35 am on June 8, 2007 | 2 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , , microsoft

    Finally the worlds richest man has a college degree see this and this for more info.
    Bill dropped out of college to pursue his career which has now become a global empire employing thousands globally and worth billions of $$$

    The graduation is not because of hard work bill put in to attend classes and get a degree (it is a honorary degree) but still he must be happy to finally get recognition from his alma mater for all the hard work that he put in for building a empire.
    I remember him saying that if he had continued studies he didn’t know what would have become of him but at that point of time he was so sure that he was onto something big that he realized that rest everything was immaterial and I guess he was right he turned out right in the end but not everyone can pull this off a few people who have pulled it off also but they had a dream and put in their youth to achieve it ( I totally repent not starting one of the software businesses full fledge in college I had so much enthusiasm then but could not rub it off on the others around me).

    It is very important to put in lots of hard work and when you are young you can give virtually 24hrs to your dreams that is why am very excited about the new ventures that I am entering and if i think they need my full attention I will quit my job I have already put in the word that I will be quitting am so much excited about this new venture and am also sad that I can’t blog about it but one day I will blog about it but this weekend am looking forward to discussing this venture with abhimanyu and sarvesh who will be down for the weekend.

    Like how bill gates realized that he can’t pursue his dream and study at the same time I too have a feeling that I wont be able to work at my current job and pursue my dream and if the choice has to be made I will choose my dream so. Now I put in almost 16+ hrs of work everyday and if I do too many things like how I am doing now I wont be able to push my body so much so I will have to join the entrepreneurship bandwagon when the venture is to take off (Which is soon) and move onto the unemployed bandwagon.

    I know one day I will be able to look back on my decision and say hey that was the right thing to do at that time.

     

  • fritz Says -> rss mashup game
    1:49 pm on June 3, 2007 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , microsoft, ,

    Just came across this new product from google and no points in guessing that it is still in beta status the home page of the product is here with this launch by Google the trinity competing for the online gold are all officially in the rss mashup game now.

    Yahoo has a product called pipes it is a neat little product built on top of plagger (read it somewhere cant remember where though) and YUI library for the nice ajax interface and the back end for interacting with RSS is based on plagger.

    Microsoft has a similar product called popfly which is built on top of Microsoft web 2.0 framework which some people have called flash killer silverlight it is a nice little offering but the adoption is what is the worrying factor but with this framework going into some Microsoft products even the adoption of silverlight framework will pick up slowly and reach the main stream audience.

    The latest entrant among the web trinity going for the gold pot in the online business is Google which is somewhat odd as Google is usually the first one to innovate the entry of Google also confuses because now it seems that Google can make money on monetizing this mashups with their latest purchase of feedburner as the other two in the game are giving this as just play toys to the developer communities of geeks who want a bit of extra power when dealing with their RSS feeds.

    Well this trinity is after each others market share so it makes sense for them to launch copy cat products as soon as the others in the race do it as all are sitting on a talent on some smart engineers who can innovate as well as reverse engineer and improve upon.

     

  • fritz Says -> online advertising bubble 1.0
    10:51 am on May 23, 2007 | 2 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , , microsoft,

    Is the web 2.0 hype giving rise to a bigger problem by forming a online advertising bubble 1.0 as I would like to call it onadbu 1.0 (hahahaha that is just the first two letters fo the words online advert bubble pronounced as onaddboo 1.0).

    The last tech bubble was because of unrealistic and not sustainable business models for startups and lots of money was pumped into this startups by VC’s then but now the trend is for some of this web 2.0 startups the barrier of entry is not high (in terms of manpower,infrastructure etc) like how it was in the 90’s so this startups can go to market with limited resources but most of this startups are building their services or products to have a limited monetization options for them and if they don’t have any monetization option then just join an ad network. well there is nothing wrong with this model of using ads to monetize I remember reading one of the web 2.0 startups for sale on ebay the owner said that the money made from google adsense was sufficient to cover the basic server costs ya well good but then it is only enough and not more so for more money you need to get more users and more users mean more server costs and so the income coming in is in line with the growth graph of users and consumes 100% of the income if you follow this model the break even is reached but then you have to find other ways to take it to the next level.

    With all this activity going in the online advertising space makes me really wonder is online advertising business as lucrative and sustainable as it looks look at me on an average I think I have atleast 20 queries on google every day but I never click on the sponsored links I only go to the natural search results but then again I think many many people will be there like me who dont click on the sponsored links but still google makes billions in revenue only from advertisers money yes I know they can actually help you track your campaigns  with better tools to track the ROI on your campaign but still I dont think it is for long time sustainable business for others because google has one thing till now that makes them rake in the ad revenues and that is their search technology all the ad networks sprouting around addressing niche markets or being restricted to just a small geographic section etc etc personally I dont think most of them stand a chance unless they can identify the next google killer and associate with them but then there is good hope because of the other wannabes in the ad space Microsoft, yahoo, aol and others are on the look out for them. Recent buy out of aquantive by microsoft, google buying out doubleclick, aol acquirring two firms one for the mobile ad space and one for online ads. WPP acquiring 24/7 real media, yahoo picking up stakes in ad companies etc etc.

    The deals have been huge and sure the space is booming(only because more people are coming online) but then again the online ad biz makes sense only if you have publishers who have huge huge  number of users and this is where the fight in the future will be interesting as the publishers will become more demanding and the advertisers become more choosy over their spendings once this happen I think the mad rush to buy ad companies for huge sum of money just to justify competing with google will go and sanity will return again. I just hope it is not a bubble and some sanity returns in the online ad space.

     

  • fritz Says -> Microsoft and Yahoo sitting in a tree……… kissing
    3:15 pm on May 5, 2007 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , microsoft,

    Well the rumor mills are turning again and this time it is a bit too strong (my assumption based on the fact that the Google juggernaut is rolling on and nothing can and is being done by Microsoft and Yahoo in individual capacities to stop the rolling ) Well the rumors are that Microsoft is going to offer 50 billion dollars for Yahoo

    Looking at Yahoos latest financial standings that looks like a good price for financial details see the following

    http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=yhoo http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=msft http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=Goog

    According to the latest updates Microsoft has a cash reserve of 25.48 billion at their disposal so if they go with the valuation of 50 billion and yahoo decides to accept it then they still have to raise another 25 billion more which I don’t think will be a problem for them and google also has 11.94 billion dollars in cash( I am also looking out to see who is going to be googles next acquisition target)

    Yahoo also has cash reserves of 2.35 billion but then again the other two giants are debt free where as yahoo has a debt of  749.76 million
    well I would guess that bigger question is does yahoo want to sell to microsoft??
    or the other way around does microsoft want to buy yahoo??

    Both the parties have not yet confirmed any sort of negotiations but then again this is not the sort of deal u want to put it out in the market before anything concrete happens.

    But if microsoft is willing to buy yahoo then the questions that need to be answered are

    1)How much will they pay??

    2)What will they do with yahoo (brand yahoo is one of the most recognised brands in cyberspace)??

    3)Which of yahoo offerings will survive and which ones will vanish??

    4)Will their shareholders be happy with this deal (since yahoo is almost in a coma state at present)??

    5)The mother of all questions would be will be combine entity be able to take on google (otherwise microsoft shareholders will not see any benefit of this deal)?

    If this rumor is true then I guess Microsoft’s concern is not the price tag or the debt or the usefulness of yahoo brand and access to its loyal users but the fact that integrating yahoo’s assets (IP and web properties) into Microsoft’s family of products will be a gigantic task and all the issues faced while integrating and migrating hotmail into the msn family will come back to haunt them and also the open source movement will lose one of its champions yahoo is the user of many open source offerings like php, mysql, apache etc etc

    Well only time will tell whether this is true or false but overall I dont think the merged entity will be able to give Google a decent fight why you ask? well because google does one thing well and that is search unless someone else comes up with a better search engine google will remain in the limelight (yes I have tried Microsoft search engine and it is good but then again it is not part of Firefox  and also it does not make you come back looking for more information the way Google does)

     

  • fritz Says -> bill gates’s words of wisdom
    12:23 am on July 24, 2006 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , microsoft

    “I like my job because it involves learning. I like being around smart people who are trying to figure out new things. I like the fact that if people really try they can figure out how to invent things that actually have an impact.”

    –shows that he loves his work

    At a chat show for a television channel in New Delhi in December 2005, he shared the platform with Infosys Chairman N R Narayana Murthy. When the mike was handed over to Murthy to test, he said, “One, two, three…” into it and gave it to the Microsoft czar, who promptly said, “One billion, two billion, three billion…”

    –shows that he has a sense of humour

    “Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.”

    –shows business acumen

    “I’m serious when I do my work. I’m not serious when I’m home with my kids.”

    –shows his family side and that even he has fun with his kids

    “Is the rich world aware of how four billion of the six billion live? If we were aware, we would want to help out, we’d want to get involved.”

    – shows that he is aware of the problems of the world around him

    source
    http://specials.rediff.com/money/2006/may/09sld1.htm

     

  • fritz Says -> microsoft zune vs apple (itunes+ipod)
    1:57 am on July 23, 2006 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: apple, , , , , , microsoft

    Microsoft recently made it official that they are working on a music player and a distribution platform to compete head on with Apple’s itunes service and ipod player.

    Well what can i say except that I am eagerly looking forward to this new service. When Microsoft said that they are coming out with a game console everyone said that they have lost their head and are doing crazy things but they proved them wrong and came out with a good console which is slowly but gradually finding its way in many people’s living rooms.

    What will be interesting to see is if zune lives up to the expectations of people.
    I owned a ipod shuffle it got stolen some time back and I miss it a lot sob sob sob ok let

     

  • fritz Says -> my first post (this is 1st in the series of two posts on how i fell in love with computers)
    10:56 pm on July 20, 2006 | 2 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , microsoft

    Well this is my first actual post on my new blog all the previous entries are just port of some of my old articles published at my previous home in cyberspace which will no longer be maintained

    I wanted my first post to salute the one guy who has a big role to play in my being in this wonderful industry of computing and that is one Mr. Bill Gates yes yes the chairman of Microsoft

    why you ask? Well I was first introduced to computers on a dos machine which ran qbasic and my first exposure to programming was using qbasic which I still feel is the best language to seduce people into the complex world of programming.

    This was around when I was in 5 th grade and since then I have been hooked onto computers most of my early days was in qbasic and then gradually moved into html, JavaScript, etc
    I still remember competing with all my classmates for solving problems given in class because the first person to solve it used to get to try it first on the actual pc. I had a fierce competition with this one guy in class called vineeth (now working for infosys mangalore campus)( this guys career choices were more weirder then mine at one point he wanted to become Sherlock Holmes) I still remember some of the careers I was contemplating of going into chemical engineering,aeronautics,astronomy etc etc
    I still remember spending one entire summer vacation when I was in 8 th grade designing a rocket (the blueprint of which will still be lying around somewhere)

    My education continued in UAE interacting with computers in school they were expensive monsters for people to own personally and we could not afford one at home so I used to spend most of the free time on computers in school whenever I got the opportunity then slowly the number of computers in our school increased and then this was a boon since some of the new machines came with a game called