smorg

Expect the Google/Yahoo merger any day now…

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — Microsoft Corp. said Saturday it has withdrawn its proposal to acquire Internet portal Yahoo Inc.

In a statement, Microsoft (MSFT, Fortune 500) CEO Steve Ballmer said “After careful consideration, we believe the economics demanded by Yahoo (YHOO, Fortune 500) do not make sense for us.”

via CNN

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2008/apr08/04-05LetterPR.mspx

The unmitigated gall… ‘We offered to buy you, you declined, so we will now intimidate you publicly”.

It has now been more than two months since we made our proposal to acquire Yahoo! at a 62% premium to its closing price on January 31, 2008, the day prior to our announcement. Our goal in making such a generous offer was to create the basis for a speedy and ultimately friendly transaction. Despite this, the pace of the last two months has been anything but speedy.
…
It is unfortunate that by choosing not to enter into substantive negotiations with us, you have failed to give due consideration to a transaction that has tremendous benefits for Yahoo!’s shareholders and employees. We think it is critically important not to let this window of opportunity pass.

I think that if Yahoos shareholders gave a shit about Microsoft, they would have expressed that to Yahoo management by now. Sheesh.

Bear with the few seconds of commercials at the beginning, and check out how powerful this tech is…amazing.

more:

[edit]
Holy hell, this is live. The Hard Rock is using it. For once, Microsoft does something truly innovative.

http://labs.live.com/Silverlight+2+Deep+Zoom.aspx
http://memorabilia.hardrock.com/

Office 2007 is MS’ latest and greatest version of their cash-cow Office suite. They herald it as the best and most user friendly office yet.

But still, even 30 years into personal computing, we see stupid crap like this:

In order for someone to do so, they have to navigate to C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook and find the file, which by default won’t have the extension shown.

Do you know how hard it would be for Microsoft to change that dialog to have a button that says ‘Click here to remove the .ost file now…we will rename the file to %date%-backup.ost and restart Outlook automatically’.

Not hard at all. Likely less than 5 minutes to create the custom dialog and code the rename using the FSO. At the absolute VERY least, tell the user where the damned file is located! And even more importantly, let them know that by deleting the file they will have to resynch their ENTIRE mailbox. Ugh.

Why Microsoft, why must you be so freaking antagonistic toward the end user? Why can’t you take a clue from the rest of the industry and make the technology work FOR the user, instead of AGAINST them?

This kind of crap is why I went Apple.

Creating and Deploying Outlook Web Access Themes

About Premium and Basic Clients

Outlook Web Access is optimized for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 and later. These clients are known as premium clients. Outlook Web Access also provides a basic e-mail experience for other browsers including Internet Explorer 5.01 and Netscape 4.8 and later. Unfortunately, not all basic clients fully support cascading style sheets, so for these clients you will not be able to provide rich theme support.

PS: Xbox Outlook theme. Brilliant.