In a recent post David Drummond, Senior Vice President, Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer suggested that the possible purchase of Yahoo by Microsoft may stifle the openness and innovation of the Internet.
He believes the openness of the Internet is what made both Yahoo and Google possible. Now with the proposed purchase he is fearful because of Microsoft’s track record when it comes to domination of the markets it influences.
Drummond goes on to suggests if the purchase goes through they may use the same practices over the most heavily traveled site on the Internet.
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/02/yahoo-and-future-of-internet.html
Chris Flanagan, head of research in JPMorgan Chase’s asset-backed securities group, tells business week that housing prices will fall an additional 25% from todays levels before they hit rock bottom in 2010.
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Macrumors.com has preformed one of the first benchmarks on the MacBook Air standard hard drive vs SSD:
“Overall, the results of the 1.8Ghz SSD are as expected. The 1.8GHz processor gives a small boost in CPU performance. The SSD option, however, gives the most dramatic speed increases in non-sequential file reading since there is no physical drive head to move. As expected, the SSD is slightly slower at sequential file writing, but the low seek time makes up for this when performing non-sequential writes.”
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Why does everyone for some reason think this will have negative effects on Google?
Microsoft is the software giant.
Yahoo is the internet traffic giant.
Google is the search giant.
Each of the three is #1 in it’s own core competency but do have produce much in the each other’s fields. Sure Google has a document suite but I am not going to stop using Word, Excel and Powerpoint anytime soon. So do Google Docs take away from Microsoft’s sale of Office… I doubt it.
So why is it that everyone believes that some how the combination of Microsoft (software) and Yahoo (Internet traffic) some how adds up to creating a search giant?
Don’t get me wrong here, if this deal goes through it will be a great profit center for Microsoft and help boot Yahoo’s core business. Just don’t think for a second that this will change Google’s direction… taking 2 companies that neither are very good at search and combining them does not make them better than Google.
As most everyone knows by now virualization has quickly become the hot topic of last year. For those who remained unaware, IT teams everywhere have started to evaluate or implement virualization of many of their servers to safe both time and money.
Products such as VMWare or Microsoft Virtual Server will be used more heavily in the upcomming years to help cut costs and increase efficient of datacenters and server farms… but what about virtualization at home?
It is now much more common to see each family member with their own PC at home. This means in a family of 5 there could possible be 5 machines and at one more in the living room (ie. Apple TV, high powered game console, etc).
Let’s pretend just for the time that everyone uses sleep mode and power consumption is not an issue. Even then how much time is spent maintaining and upgrading theses machines? If we estimate that each PC is replaced or upgraded every 3 years, that would mean about every six months there is a machine in for repairs. Also, how many people can honestly say all of their home machines have backups regularly taken?
What if all of those machines could be replaced by 1 server class machine. This is eliminate constant upgrades, reduce the cost of owning redundant hardware, yield access to a large pool of resources, and ease the burden of backups. This would be virtualization at home and it sounds like a great plan to me…
Keep your eyes on VMWare and Microsoft, when they make their products easy for a home user to implement we may be in for a huge shift in the consumer PC market