Once a year, the Wall Street Journal puts on the "D: All Things
Digital" conference. This conference, created and produced by Walt
Mossberg and Kara Swisher, invites the computer and electronics top
players to participate in "informal" conversations about the impact of
digital technology on our lives now and in the future.
Last year's feature was a session with Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher
talking with Steve Jobs and Bill Gates:
VIDEO: D5: Steve Jobs and Bill Gates
This year's speakers for D6 include Facebook’s Founder and CEO Mark
Zuckerberg, Sony’s Chairman and CEO Howard Stringer, Time Warner’s
President and CEO Jeff Bewkes, IAC’s Chairman and CEO Barry Diller and
Amazon.com’s Chairman and CEO Jeff Bezos. There was also a joint
appearance by Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates and CEO Steve Ballmer. All
the video can be found at:
http://d6.allthingsd.com/
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Microsoft Windows 7 is currently scheduled to ship sometime in 2009.
"D" saw the first Windows 7 demo:
http://d6.allthingsd.com/20080528/windows-7-touch-demo/
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...from:
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/28/slow-fade-bill-and-steve-at-the-d-…
May 28, 2008, 12:37 am
Slow Dissolve: Bill [Gates] and Steve [Ballmer] at the D Conference
By JOHN MARKOFF
Bill Gates, Microsoft’s chairman, is intent on performing what must be
the world’s longest-running Cheshire Cat act.
Mr. Gates — who is reducing his role at Microsoft on July 1 and will
work only on specific projects but will remain as chairman — appeared
with his longtime friend and business partner Steve Ballmer on the
opening night of the Wall Street Journal’s “D: All Things Digital”
conference in Carlsbad, Calif.
During the 105-minute conversation, the two executives were most
comfortable chatting about the past. They were cagey when it came to
talking about the bid for Yahoo and what might happen next, and they
were generally testy when they were challenged about whether Microsoft
would continue to lag behind Apple in some areas.
The hosts of the conference, Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher, tried
several times to draw the two men out on the company’s failed effort
to acquire Yahoo, but neither man was willing to say much beyond his
previous public statements. Mr. Ballmer did reiterate that he reserved
the right to reopen Microsoft’s bid in the future, but he was
unwilling to talk about the circumstances under which that might occur.
Mr. Ballmer also repeated his recent statement that, having failed to
see eye to eye on the price of the acquisition, the two companies are
now talking about other unspecified partnerships.
Mr. Ballmer and Mr. Gates were much more willing to reminisce about
their days as college students at Harvard. Mr. Ballmer also described
how Mr. Gates attempted to recruit him to Microsoft while his former
classmate was attending Stanford Business School and living in a
“fleabag” apartment in Palo Alto.
Mr. Ballmer recalled that he had been reluctant, and that Mr. Gates
had told him, “Too bad you don’t have a twin brother.” He said he
called Mr. Gates back the next day and asked him if he would consider
him for the job.
The joint interview took a slightly odd turn when, halfway through,
the Microsoft executives consented to give the audience of computer
industry executives a “sneak peek” of the next version of Microsoft’s
operating system, known as Windows 7.
Although Windows 7 is not scheduled to ship until the end of 2009,
Microsoft has been creating some consternation in the computer
industry by talking about the new program as an opportunity to address
some of the shortcomings of Windows Vista. On stage Tuesday evening,
neither Mr. Gates nor Mr. Ballmer was willing to concede any major
shortcomings in Vista. Mr. Ballmer said the company has shipped 150
million copies of the program, but he did acknowledge that Microsoft
might have done some things differently “in hindsight.”
He blamed compatibility issues that have led to criticism of the
program on the company’s decision to focus on computer security
problems.
During the brief onstage demo of Windows 7, a Microsoft software
designer made the puzzling choice to unveil a new “multitouch” feature
by working with a paint program, evoking memories of the original
Macintosh paint program in 1984. She then used the touch-sensitive
technology with a photo collection and a mapping program, evoking
comparisons to both the iPhone and Google Maps, which already have
similar capabilities. (You can watch a video of the multitouch feature
on the Microsoft Vista blog.)
Another new feature appeared to be a circular pop-up menu that
provided a “concierge” function.
Fencing over the issue of whether Apple will get to market first with
desktop multi-touch features, Mr. Ballmer implied that the two
companies don’t compete directly.
“We’ll sell 290 million PCs, and Apple will sell 10 million PCs,” he
said. “They’re fantastically successful and so are we and our
partners. But it’s a different job. Steve can flip his hand and sell a
few models and I don’t take a thing away from him.”
In response to a question from the audience, Mr. Ballmer insisted that
Microsoft had not been damaged as a brand or in its strategy by its
failure to acquire Yahoo.
“The world recognizes even greater seriousness than when we started,”
he said. “It’s certainly something we thought about before we put in
the bid because there was no guarantee.”
Mr. Gates was the less vocal of the the company’s two largest
individual shareholders, but he did show animation at various points
during the evening. Asked if he saw himself as a businessman, Mr.
Gates responded, “Sure, sales minus costs equal profits. Is there more?”
In response to a question asked by Tim O’Reilly, the computer book
publisher and conference impresario, about whether Microsoft had a
“big hairy audacious goal,” in the tradition of its original
commitment to put a personal computer on every desk and in every home
in America, Mr. Ballmer and Mr. Gates suggested that the company now
had many big goals, but not a single overarching goal.
The industry commentator and investor Esther Dyson suggested that the
company did need a single goal, like transforming the nation’s health
care system.
Mr Ballmer responded that he wasn’t sure that tackling problems where
software wasn’t fundamental to the solution was appropriate for
Microsoft.
...from:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/10/nyregion/10laptop.html?_r=1&ref=technolog…
May 10, 2008
Stolen Laptop Helps Turn Tables on Suspects
By LISA W. FODERARO
WHITE PLAINS — The thieves were voracious, filching flat-screen
televisions and computer games, purloining iPods and DVDs, even making
off with a box of liquor and a set of car rims in a burglary two weeks
ago at an apartment three young people shared here. Luckily, they also
took two laptop computers.
One of the laptops was a Macintosh belonging to Kait Duplaga, who
works at the Apple store in the Westchester mall and thus knows how to
use all its bells and whistles. While the police were coming up dry,
Ms. Duplaga exploited the latest software applications installed on
her laptop to track down the culprits and even get their photographs.
On Wednesday, the police arrested Edmon Shahikian, 23, of Katonah, and
Ian Frias, 20, who lives in the Bronx. Virtually all of the property
stolen from the apartment was recovered at the two men’s homes. They
face charges of burglary and possession of stolen property; Mr.
Shahikian was released on $3,500 bail, while Mr. Frias was at the
Westchester County Jail, held in $7,500 bail.
“It doesn’t get much better than their bringing us a picture of the
guy actually using the stolen property,” Daniel Jackson, the deputy
commissioner of public safety in White Plains, said in a telephone
interview on Friday. “It certainly made our job easier. The fact that
they knew who these guys were certainly added solvability.”
The high-tech solving of the White Plains burglary, which was reported
Friday in The Journal News, is one of several recent cases in which
the police and crime victims have turned the keyboards on their
adversaries, so to speak, taking advantage of computer software and
other high-tech tools.
In March in Modesto, Calif., for example, the police recovered a
stolen computer containing vital personal information, including
Social Security numbers, belonging to the public school system’s 3,500
employees. Detectives used tracking software on the computer to
apprehend a suspect, who had a long criminal record. The police said
he had stolen the computer from a data processing firm, perhaps with
the intention of committing identity theft.
Here in White Plains, a break in the case came on Tuesday when a
friend of Ms. Duplaga’s sent her a congratulatory text message on the
return of her stolen computer. “She said, ‘I don’t know what you’re
talking about,’ and her friend said, ‘Well, you popped up as being
online,’ ” Mr. Jackson said.
He said that Ms. Duplaga immediately signed on to another Macintosh
computer and, using a feature called “Back to My Mac,” was able to
gain access to her missing laptop remotely. She could see that that
the person who had her computer was shopping for beds, Mr. Jackson
said. Then it occurred to her that she could activate a camera on her
laptop and watch the thief live.
At first, the photo application revealed only a smoky room and an
empty chair, Mr. Jackson said, but then a man sat down. Ms. Duplaga,
again using remote technology, typed in the command to snap a photo.
“When you take a picture with that computer, it shows a countdown, and
when it does, this guy figures out what’s going on,” Mr. Jackson said.
“It all clicks for him, and he puts his hand up to cover the lens, but
it was too late. She had already taken the picture.”
Had the suspect been a complete stranger, the photographic evidence
would have been a “great lead,” but not the decisive clue, Mr. Jackson
said. He said that when Ms. Duplaga described the tattooed subject of
the picture to one of her roommates, the roommate replied: “Oh, I know
exactly who that is — it’s Ian,” referring to Mr. Frias.
Mr. Frias and Mr. Shahikian, it turns out, had been among the guests
at a party at the apartment weeks before, and were friends of friends
of the victims, as Mr. Jackson put it. Ms. Duplaga was able to
retrieve a photograph of Mr. Shahikian from the laptop as well, but
Mr. Jackson was not aware of the circumstances. Mr. Jackson said that
Mr. Frias and Mr. Shahikian were arrested last year on a felony
marijuana possession charge, but are not career criminals. The
disposition of their cases was not known.
Mr. Jackson said that Ms. Duplaga did not wish to be interviewed. On
Friday, no one answered the door at the beige colonial-style house on
Ridgeview Avenue where she rents an apartment diagonally opposite a
church. The neighborhood is on the edge of the city’s downtown; in
recent years, many of the prewar homes have been renovated.
An Apple spokesman declined to comment on the case or on the
phenomenon of tracking criminals through computer software.
“Back to My Mac” is part of an online service that costs $99 per year
and allows users to gain access to their personal computer from any
connected Macintosh computer with the operating system Leopard. The
software that Ms. Duplaga used to take a picture of the thief, called
PhotoBooth, is standard on all newer Apple laptop models, perhaps an
unintended new frontier in crime-fighting.
“It’s certainly a great use of what was probably meant as a business
product,” Mr. Jackson said. “But if she had taken the picture and
didn’t know who he was, we wouldn’t be in the same place as far as the
investigation goes.”
...from:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/10/technology/10spam.html?th&emc=th
Spam Moves to Cellphones and Gets More Invasive
Christopher Capozziello for The New York Times
By LAURA M. HOLSON
Published: May 10, 2008
If you thought spam on your computer was a bother, brace yourself:
spammers want to find you on your cellphone.
Cellphones have become consumers’ most personal technological devices.
Some industry executives, along with consumer groups and security
experts, are concerned that unwanted text messages on phones will be
an even greater headache than unwanted computer messages.
Cellphone spam is particularly annoying to its recipients because it
is more invasive — announcing itself with a beep — and can be costly.
Taber Lightfoot, an assistant director for new media at the Yale
School of Management, is among those who have paid for the privilege
of receiving cellphone spam.
“I was at work and I got so annoyed,” she said of the first burst of
three messages she received. She got another burst two days later.
“That is when I called Verizon and demanded they reimburse me $1.60
for eight text messages,” Ms. Lightfoot said. “It wasn’t a lot of
money, but it was my money.”
American consumers are expected to receive an estimated 1.5 billion
unsolicited text messages in 2008, according to Ferris Research, based
in San Francisco, which tracks mobile messaging trends. That is nearly
double what they received in 2006.
Of course that is a small percentage of the overall number of
messages: an industry survey showed that consumers in the United
States sent and received about 48 billion text messages in December
alone. But for many people who are charged as much as 20 cents for an
incoming message or are interrupted in the middle of dinner, even one
is too many.
“The reason this really burns people up is because they have to pay
for messages they don’t want, and they shouldn’t have to,” said Chris
Murray, senior counsel for Consumers Union, a nonprofit group.
Now some consumers, like Ms. Lightfoot, are monitoring their
cellphones more aggressively for unwanted messages and, in some cases,
demanding refunds. Computer security companies have developed products
to help fight mobile spam. And AT&T, Verizon and others are making it
easier for customers to block unsolicited messages and keep spammers
at bay.
The fees that customers pay to receive messages are a source of profit
for the phone companies. It is hard to estimate how much they make.
Many consumers pay for a monthly plan that allows them to send and
receive large numbers of messages. But for those without a plan,
getting as few as 10 unsolicited text messages a month at 20 cents
each would cost an extra $24 a year.
Communications companies say they are not interested in spam as a
profit center. They want to one day exploit the power of customized
advertising on mobile phones, and tawdry spam pitches threaten to make
their customers hostile toward all commercial messages. The companies
are trying to head off the problem before consumers revolt.
The carriers regularly adjust spam filters to block offending
messages. At Sprint, more than 65 percent of all text messages sent
over its network are identified and blocked as spam before they reach
customers.
The companies use legal weapons as well. Verizon said it had filed
eight lawsuits against spammers since 2004.
“Even if Verizon or AT&T are not the ones sending text messages to
customers, there is the perception that the operator is to blame,”
said Seamus McAteer, a senior analyst at M:Metrics, which tracks
mobile phone advertising. “It is not in the companies’ best interest
to have customers calling and complaining about their bills all the
time.”
Ralph de la Vega, chief executive of AT&T’s wireless unit, said
wireless companies recently agreed to quickly share information about
the sources of spam to fight it more effectively.
Most phone spam is actually e-mail that comes through gateways linking
the Internet and cellphone networks, industry executives said.
Most wireless phones have a dedicated e-mail address. At AT&T, for
example, it is a customer’s cellphone number followed by
@text.att.net. Using computers, spammers create millions of possible
number combinations, then send messages to those addresses.
One day in March, Anthony Melone, Verizon Wireless’s chief technology
officer, began getting complaints from customers in the Northeast and
Midwest about a wave of unsolicited text messages that were flooding
its network. Mr. Melone said Verizon technicians tracked down the
source and found the messages were coming from someone using e-mail
accounts at Microsoft’s Internet portal, msn.com.
It took a day to quell the assault because the spammers kept changing
their e-mail addresses and the Web sites they were promoting. By then,
nearly five million messages had made it past the network’s anti-spam
filters, resulting in grumbling and demands for refunds from customers
like Ms. Lightfoot.
“Even when you find them, spammers know how to keep it below the
radar,” Mr. Melone said.
Christopher Siracusa, a 24-year-old medical student in Brooklyn, said
he gets about one or two spam messages a week, usually from
pornographic sites with come-ons like, “Hey Sweetie, we talked last
night.” As a result, he disregards any text message from a number not
programmed into his cellphone.
This, though, has caused miscommunication more than once with people
he actually wanted to reach. Recently, he said, he got a text message
from a female friend who wrote, “I have a new number, call me.” Mr.
Siracusa did not, thinking the message was spam, and he later had to
explain the problem to her.
But inconvenience is not the only downside; there is also the threat
of viruses as phones become more like personal computers. Some
companies are already preparing for this.
Last winter, Symantec, a maker of security software, introduced a
product for smartphones that connect with the Internet to detect
mobile threats, check for viruses and automatically delete spam or
corral suspect texts in a folder.
Khoi Nguyen, a product manager for mobile security at Symantec, said
the company developed the software mainly for Asia and Europe, where
creative spammers try to steal credit card information or banking data
through phones. He said he expected to see the same trend here in the
next 6 to 12 months.
“There has been a transition from annoying spam to threatening spam,”
he said.
Michael Zaruba, an AT&T customer who works in Chicago as an editor and
producer, recently received unsolicited texts from “Rose,” asking him
to visit a Web site. He said he did not visit the site, but it made
him question whether his 12-year-old brother, who just got a new
cellphone, would.
“Nowadays phones come equipped with access to the Internet,” Mr.
Zaruba said. “It’s another way to mess with your computer. I can see
people getting viruses on their phones.”
All major communications companies give consumers the ability to
thwart spam by changing the easily guessed e-mail addresses for their
phones, or completely blocking messages coming from the Internet. They
can do this by logging onto the company’s Web site and changing their
preferences.
“I did that six months ago and I have not received any spam,” Mr.
Melone of Verizon said. “No one, not even me, wants their cellphone to
ring at 2 in the morning.”
Just to bring you up to speed if you haven't already heard. Some
months back, Microsoft (http://www.microsoft.com) made an unsolicited
bid to purchse Yahoo! (http://www.yahoo.com).
At the time, Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer described the move this
way, "“We have great respect for Yahoo!, and together we can offer an
increasingly exciting set of solutions for consumers, publishers and
advertisers while becoming better positioned to compete in the online
services market.” “Our lives, our businesses, and even our society
have been progressively transformed by the Web, and Yahoo! has played
a pioneering role by building compelling, high-scale services and
infrastructure,” said Ray Ozzie, chief software architect at
Microsoft. “The combination of these two great teams would enable us
to jointly deliver a broad range of new experiences to our customers
that neither of us would have achieved on our own.” “The combined
assets and strong services focus of these two companies will enable us
to achieve scale economics while reaching R&D critical mass to deliver
innovation breakthroughs,” said Kevin Johnson, president of the
Platforms & Services Division of Microsoft. “The industry will be well
served by having more than one strong player, offering more value and
real choice to advertisers, publishers and consumers.”
Indeed, the letter that was sent from the Microsoft Board of Directors
to the Yahoo! Board of Directors includes, "In late 2006 and early
2007, we jointly explored a broad range of ways in which our two
companies might work together. These discussions were based on a
vision that the online businesses of Microsoft and Yahoo! should be
aligned in some way to create a more effective competitor in the
online marketplace. We discussed a number of alternatives ranging from
commercial partnerships to a merger proposal, which you rejected.
While a commercial partnership may have made sense at one time,
Microsoft believes that the only alternative now is the combination of
Microsoft and Yahoo! that we are proposing."
After much to'ing-and-fro'ing by the two companies, Yahoo!'s April 7th
response, however, was an unencouraging, "We consider your threat to
commence an unsolicited offer and proxy contest to displace our
independent board members to be counterproductive and inconsistent
with your stated objective of a friendly transaction", in a reply to
the Microsoft Board, while also saying Yahoo! is open to a deal but
only at a higher price. Yahoo's letter also said Microsoft had not
responded to requests for more information on antitrust issues since a
deal would be subject to regulators: "To date, you have still not
provided any of the requested information."
(http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/04/07/Yahoo-again-rebuffs-Microsoft-in-…
)
On Saturday (May 3, 200) Microsoft pulled the plug on the deal:
...from:
http://www.engadget.com/2008/05/03/microsoft-pulls-bid-for-yahoo/
Microsoft pulls bid for Yahoo! Microhoo will never be
by Ryan Block, posted May 3rd 2008 at 8:33PM
Well, that's that! Microsoft has officially pulled its bid for Yahoo!
-- inflated for good measure this weekend by another $5 billion --
after the company did "not move toward accepting [the] offer", asking
again for even more, another $4 bil (totaling $9b more than the
original offer). In a letter from [Microsoft CEO Steve] Ballmer to
[Yahoo! CEO Jerry] Yang, he states that Microsoft also won't be
looking at its option for a hostile takeover, stating that Yahoo!
likely "would take steps that would make [it] undesirable as an
acquisition"; Ballmer then goes on to make a few backhanded criticisms
of Yahoo's possible new partnerships with Google (which is no
surprise). Good night, Microhoo, the monstrous, hamstrung, lumbering
mega-merger that might have been.
Update: Yahoo! makes its public response here. Yang sums it up: "With
the distraction of Microsoft's unsolicited proposal now behind us, we
will be able to focus all of our energies..." etc. Alright then.
