Tag: microsoft

Microsoft Car

SYNC combines the often separate phone and music-player functions into one unified interface that can be controlled by a voice-recognition system that works well. You can command it by voice to play a single song out of 1000s on your iPod or other music player. With some phones, it will even read your incoming text messages to you, and properly pronounce text-message shortcuts such as LOL

cue BSOD jokes. but seriously, ford and microsoft? crappy separately, i shudder to think what the love child is like.

Microsoft Sabotage

You may have been misled, but now that everyone can see almost all of the primary sources (the remaining documents are hidden behind Microsoft, Yahoo!, and Ecma firewalls), please stop repeating falsehoods about either my conduct as TG1 Convenor, or the treatment of dissent by the majority favoring ES4 in TG1. If you have any documents to publish that shed light on Microsoft’s actions and intentions in Ecma TC39-TG1, I welcome them.

microsoft is unsurprisingly trying to block EcmaScript 4, a competitor to their Silverlight efforts

Mashing KML and GeoRSS in 3D on the Web

I took his GeoRSS feed and a KML file from KPBS showing activity around the Fires and added each of them as a distinct layer to the VE Map Control. Because Virtual Earth runs In a web browser its easy to build applications that link to and interact with other web pages and take advantage of the myriad of web development tools that are out there, while not having to sacrifice on visualization options for your geo data

haha. one of these days i will get used to ms touting kml

Private Microsoft

So who could buy it? Who has $100b of equity capital available (and the credibility to get the debt financing and spin-offs underwritten?) Clearly there are the usual suspects – the giant private equity players: Blackstone, KKR, Goldman Sachs, Silver Lake, TPG, etc. and the enormous sovereign wealth funds. (You want China to get serious about protecting software licences – give them a stake in Windows/Office…) And what about Cascade (Bill’s private investment management firm)? They might be interested (both financially and emotionally) in recycling $20b of the proceeds back into the deal. (Not to mention all the other MSFT billionaires.) Also you have to think alot of the big institutional holders of MSFT would much rather hold a lean and efficient Windows/Office company and so might well be interested in recycling their payouts into a sidecar or 144a structure to participate in the deal. And then of course there is Warren. A lean, run-for-cash Windows/Office is a company that would be right down Berkshire Hathaway’s alley, no? Basically – and even if my maths/numbers above are a bit shaky, my gut feeling is that it would stack up. It’s fundable. And the banks will fall over themselves to get it done. Think of the fees!!! (In this instance, the ‘absolute’ numbers matter more than the ratios!)

how microsoft could be taken private