Author: Ed Bott

Tech journalist. Author of 25+ books. ZDNET Contributing Editor since 2006. Contact info: https://edbott.com/contact-me/

Microsoft to buy stake in AOL?

Bloomberg.com has the rumor:

Shares of Time Warner Inc., the world’s largest media company, rose as much as 2.4 percent after the New York Post said the company is in talks to sell a stake in America Online to Microsoft Corp.

To which I say: Noooooooooooooooooo!

Pressure from its customers convinced Microsoft it was a very bad idea to consider buying Claria. Time for a similar campaign here?

Update: More from the Wall Street Journal (subscription only):

The conversations have centered on whether AOL would switch to using Microsoft’s search engine, these people say. AOL currently uses Google Inc.’s search technology and was Google’s single largest source of revenue last year.

The talks, which were described as “preliminary,” have also included discussions of combining the advertising sales forces of AOL and Microsoft’s MSN, these people said.

[…]

In January, Microsoft briefed AOL executives about its new search engine, according to a person close to the situation. At that meeting, this person says, Microsoft said it would try to make it financially beneficial for AOL to switch to its technology. A person close to the discussions says the discussions have been “on and off” since January and many different proposals have been floated.

Although AOL’s Internet access business is in decline, AOL still generates a lot of traffic — making it a rich prize for search engines that thrive on huge volumes of traffic. AOL counts 110 million unique visitors to its online service and network of Web sites each month.

Since 2002, AOL has been using Google’s search engine for its properties. Under the agreement, Google pays AOL a portion of the advertising revenue generated from searches by AOL users. In 2004, AOL received about $300 million in revenues from the arrangement. Google says in filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission that AOL accounted for 12% of revenues in 2004. No other customer accounted for more than 10%, it said.

If true, this is about hurting Google, not helping customers.

Update 2: Reuters quotes the original New York Post story:

Citing two unnamed sources familiar with the matter, the Post said the talks concern Microsoft acquiring an AOL stake and then combining it with Microsoft’s Web unit MSN.

Microsoft would pay Time Warner for the AOL stake, leaving the two companies approximately equal partners in the venture, the Post said.

I’m really having a hard time seeing who this deal is good for.

More Blasted Firefox popups

In the past week or two, I’ve seen a shocking increase in popups on Firefox.

And the tweak I published a few months ago to get rid of them does no good.

The funny thing is, anyone who advertises via popups goes, immediately, on my never-buy-anything-from-these-assholes list.

The original Widget/Gadget/Gizmo

In a comment to my earlier post on the Widget- Gadget food fight, PB reminded me about Active Desktop. The linked page from Microsoft’s, dated August 2001, includes this text:

The Microsoft Investor Ticker below is just one example of Active Desktop items—live content that Internet Explorer 4.0 lets you bring from the Web to your Active Desktop. Check out the list below. You’ll find cool items that deliver regularly updated news, entertainment, tools, and more.

I remember writing about Active Desktop in 1997, when I was working on a beta copy of Windows 98 and Internet Explorer 4.0.

And sure enough, a little poking around found this October 1997 article from Microsoft Systems Journal. It contains the first reference I can remember to Dynamic HTML, plus discussions of the Channel Definition Format (a very early use of XML that was a precursor to RSS), an Information Delivery API, support for Broadcast TV, and a bunch of other stuff that today we take for granted.

The Wikipedia entry for Active Desktop notes:

Active Desktop works much like desktop widget technology in that it allows users to place customized information on their desktop. [emphasis added]

Splat!

The Widget-Gadget food fight

Oh lordy, I hate getting in the middle of Mac v. Windows food fights. I am not a Mac user, so I can’t speak from a position of authority, and the religious nature of the debate brings out trolls on both sides. But I really have to step into this one.

Yesterday, Microsoft announced the introduction of Windows Gadgets. The Gadgets Blog explains what they are:

What are Gadgets? Gadgets are a new category of mini-application designed to provide information, useful lookup, or enhance an application or service on your Windows PC or the Web. Examples might include a weather gadget running on your desktop or on your homepage, an RSS Gadget that pulls in your favorite feeds, or an extension of a business application providing just-in-time status on the pulse of your business.

This, of course, inspired guffaws, chortles, and snorts of derision from Mac experts like Dori Smith, who point out that this stuff was old news when Mac Widgets appeared in 2004. In fact, this page from Apple’s site sounds awfully familiar:

Dashboard is home to widgets: mini-applications that let you perform common tasks and provide you with fast access to information. With a single click, Dashboard appears, complete with widgets that bring you a world of information — real-time weather, stock tickers, flight information and more — instantly. Dashboard disappears just as easily, so you can get back to what you were doing.

Of course, Konfabulator fans could point out that this stuff has been available on the Windows desktop for some time.

And I could point out that I was running SideKick widgets (or whatever they were called then) on my MS-DOS PC in, like, 1987.

Now, to be fair, there are some things about the Microsoft implementation of gadgets that are genuinely new. It’s a unified development platform, not just an add-on. You can write Web-based gadgets for Start.com, which apparently will then work in any modern browser through the miracles of DHTML and Ajax. And gadgets can also be written for auxiliary displays, which will allow these mini-programs to pop up alerts in a tiny window on the outside of a notebook, or perhaps on a Bluetooth-enabled mobile phone that’s in range of a Windows Vista computer, or even over a network connection.

But still…

Microsoft, would it kill you to actually mention the source of some of these ideas? Wouldn’t it actually help people understand how this new thing is different if you acknowledged the similarities to other things that have been around for a while? I’m just sayin’.

(And by the way, Mike, pointing out the Windows Vista Sidebar was announced years ago and that Apple stole the idea is probably not the strongest argument you could make. You have to ship it before it counts.)

I will now duck as the inevitable food fight breaks out in the comments section. Please be nice.

Speed-read that license agreement

You know you should read the full text of every end-user license agreement (EULA) before you install a new program. But do you? Ha! Admit it: You rarely pause for more than a nanosecond before you click the Continue button. And you have lots of company.

Which is why JavaCool Software (makers of the superb SpywareBlaster and SpywareGuard products) have introduced EULAlyzer. If you can’t be bothered to read the full text, at least run the EULA through this utility first. It highlights any “interesting” words or phrases and gives you a chance to think about whether you really want to install that new program.

Of course, I installed it without reading the license agreement. Afterwards, I analyzed Eulalyzer’s EULA, which concluded that it only had three phrases that required a closer look. And the program crashed with a run-time error on two different computers when I fed it the Microsoft Office 2003 EULA.

Good idea, but you should still read the EULA!

(via Donna Buenaventura)

A sneak preview of Office 12

Earlier today, Microsoft gave a public preview of Office 12 at the PDC in Los Angeles. You can read a press release disguised as an interview with an Office product manager here. It includes a couple of screen shots and a fairly high-tech/low-hype explanation of the principles behind the redesign. I liked this:

The number one design goal was to make it easier for people to find and use the product features needed to get the results they wanted. As such, we set about rethinking the UI from the user’s perspective, which is “results-oriented,” rather than from the developer’s perspective, which tends to be “feature-oriented” or “command-oriented”

Office 12 interface

And from the perspective of someone who will be writing a book on this application, I really liked this:

No, we don’t have a “classic mode.” We surveyed customers to find out what would help people transition, and they told us they really wanted us to help them move forward, rather than doing any kind of classic mode. In addition to redesigning the UI, we’ve added a lot more functionality in Office “12.” Faced with the same challenge of making all this new functionality available in the old UI, we couldn’t keep the old command-oriented model and make it easier for users to find new features, so we decided to make a bolder move.

Michael Gartenberg made an initial comment that intrigued me:

I’m not sure I totally love the new Office “12” UI. There’s a lot to like about it in terms of how nice it looks and simplifies core functions but the whole design seems a little cluttered for a typical XGA resolution. It looks like to really use this stuff, you’ll need a pretty high res monitor.

That was my first reaction too, until I checked the properties of the screen shot I copied above and saw that it’s actually 1024 x 768!

I’m not going to write a whole bunch more about Office 12 until I actually get my hands on it. Any relationship between a fabulous demo and a great product is purely coincidental. But the reworking that’s gone into this revision is impressive, and I’m looking forward to working with it.

Has Blogads been hijacked?

This morning I noticed that the scripts that link to the Blogads servers weren’t working, and that page loading was being impacted severely. I commented out the script code and then started doing some investigative work.

A whois lookup shows that the domain registration for the Blogads.com servers was changed today. It now points to the parent company called PressFlex, whose main address is in Budapest, Hungary. But the ad servers themselves appear to be offline.

Henry Copeland at Blogads has done a good job at building up this service. It’s very widely used across the Internet, especially among political blogs. I hope this is just a simple DNS error and that it gets sorted out soon.

Update: Henry says it was indeed a stupid domain error:

We screwed up our domain name registry entry yesterday afternoon, which means we made our servers’ addresses invisible to much of the Internet. A stupid human error which should not have occured. I went home last night thinking everything would be ok in 30 minutes, and didn’t blog about the problem because I was unable to access the blog server myself. The error propagated very quickly, but the correction has taken longer to spread. (As my colleague noted, bad news travels faster than good news. )

I’ve now restored the Blogads strip on the right and all should be well again.