How’s your Friday so far?
New Windows 7 hits BitTorrent.
The ObamaBerry is almost ready.
Hollywood vs. ReadDVD: trial underway.
Google Toolbar knows your location.
“Movie Cowboy?” Love that name!
Facebook users approve new policies.
T-Mobile sells one million G1s.
Poor Salma Hayek. She may be a gorgeous, accomplished, award-winning actress, but she’s apparently not very good at keeping her online accounts secure. A post at Electronic Pulp reports that pranksters have figured out how to get into her e-mail at Apple’s MobileMe service by using the “Forgot Password?” feature to reset her password. And they’ve been sharing stuff they’ve found (nothing scandalous).
Could this have been prevented? Did Salma do anything wrong? Did Apple? If the reports are true, the answers are yes, yes, and yes.
Today, Microsoft’s released its third quarter financial reports, and for the first time, saw a decline in its year-to-year quarterly results.
The company reported that its quarterly revenues were $13.65 billion, approximately 6 percent lower than they were this time last year. That missed Thomson Reuters’ sales forecast of $14.09 billion. Its net income was $2.98 billion, earning shareholders 33 cents per share.
In its filings, Microsoft noted that its earnings per share would have amounted to 39 cents if it were not for one time charges for employee severance costs and investment impairments. That figure would have met analysts’ estimates, according to reports.
I would be hesitant to say that Microsoft’s slumping performance is indicative of any type of sea change happening in the industry. Yes, by the company’s own omission, Windows client license revenues are down, but that does not mean that netbooks loaded with Linux are going to permanently displace Windows.
It is simply too soon to begin speaking about any long term trends taking hold, and there are too many variables. Despite its lowered earnings and occasional missteps, Microsoft remains in a competitive position in a number of product categories–without having ever accrued any long term debt. It is a strong company that is making operational and structural changes to adapt to the economic environment.
PC sales will spike this fall when Microsoft releases Windows 7 in October (unless it turns out to be January). I’m prepared to be underwhelmed due to fallout from the worldwide economic downturn, but when things begin to turn around, many people are going to want to buy new PCs loaded with Windows 7 and Office 14.
As I quietly lamented (or at least noted) the impending death of GeoCities today, I wanted to double-check my memory that it was once one of the very largest sites on the Web. Yup–ten years ago, in April 1999, Web measurement company Media Metrix rated it as the sixth largest online property. Which got me to wondering: How many of 1999’s Web giants remain gigantic today–assuming they still exist at all?
That’s a relatively easy question to answer, since the Media Metrix report (which is now conducted by ComScore) still comes out monthly. In fact, Comscore released the numbers for March 2009 yesterday. So I did a comparison between the April 1999 report and the March 2009 one. Are you stunned to learn that more companies fell off the top 15 than stayed on it, and that some of 2009’s biggest properties didn’t exist at all in 1999?
Netflix it’s not, but a new mail-order rental service from Chicago-based Facets Multimedia has something for the super-dedicated indie niche.
The Facets service rents DVDs and, more interestingly, VHS tapes of independent, experimental and world films, and launched last month with little fanfare, Video Business reports. While Netflix and Facets overlap a bit on the DVD side, some of Facets’ offerings are so obscure that they only exist on VHS.
Among these films are Johnny Guitar (1954), a campy cult film about two women trying to control a frontier boom town; The Devils (1971), a film based on Aldous Huxley’s The Devils of Loudun; and The Emigrants (1971), about a young Swedish family setting out to America. Not all the picks are that obscure: The Cable Guy and Caddyshack are among the lighter fare offered on VHS. For DVDs, you’ll find import rarities such as Kinji Fukasaku’s Battle Royale (2000) along with mainstream titles like 2006’s Oscar-nominated Babel.
Facets hosts over 30,000 titles in all, 500 of which come from the 26-year-old company’s exclusive release and distribution catalog. The volume and wide appeal of the films is important, because it’s conceivable that someone with enough offbeat tastes could rely on this service instead of Netflix and still satisfy an occasional mainstream urge. Pricing is competitive at $8.99 per month for a one-movie plan and $14.99 for two movies at a time, with a variety of other packages and prepaid options available.
I’m wondering if a service like this will catapult VHS to the status of music’s vinyl records. Sure, you can’t make any arguments for video quality, but maybe there’s a tactile satisfaction to sliding one of those bulky tapes into the player and fiddling with the tracking button.
They’re out to get you: Sleaze balls writing devious, sneaky programs that load you system with junk. I’ll show you a few quick ways to protect yourself from Windows Trojans that want your credit card number, malware that slows your system, and spyware that tracks your keystrokes.
Over the years I’ve played with at least 3 million security programs–Norton, McAfee (the program that AOL uses), Kaspersky, Spyware Doctor, Vipre, Avast, AVG, and Trend, to name just a few. They all give adequate protection. (I know, I didn’t mention your favorite. Get over it.) While all these tools do the job, there are differences: For instance, I think Spyware Doctor reports too many false positives and AVG, a former favorite, gets bigger with each iteration.
If you’re comfortable with your existing protection program, and confident it’s protecting you, (read: you haven’t been infected recently), stick with it.
However, I often get e-mails asking if it’s a good idea to switch products.
There appears to be a world domination plot afoot with Nintendo’s “Wii no Ma” video service, which will launch next week in Japan.
Until now, details on the service were slim, other than an announced partnership between Nintendo and media giant Dentsu to produce original content. The full scoop, revealed on Nintendo’s Japanese Web site and conveniently translated by Andria Sang, talks of a virtual world that blends eerily with the real.
The channel places Mii characters in a living room, where time passes by in equal proportion to the outside world. This is the hub for various other services offered in the channel. Foremost is the video channel, providing paid and ad-supported shows, as previously reported. Partner companies will have their own content, accessed by clicking on a plant in the room, as well as product samples that can be delivered to a pre-entered real world address. Weirder still, celebrities will occasionally visit the virtual home as “concierges” peddling additional programming.
In addition, DSi owners will be able to sync the handheld to the channel and download virtual coupons, which can be redeemed at participating retailers.
This is all pretty wild stuff — sort of like Second Life, but much more restrained — and you have to wonder how much of it, if any, will make it out of Japan. I can see the original content coming west, as it allows Nintendo to bypass the licensing kerfuffles that are making a mess of existing online video sites. And the delivery system is smart, drawing families in with another channel for their Miis.
But samples in the mail? Celebrity avatars invading your virtual home? They could be failures stateside, or Nintendo could strike gold again. I won’t venture a prediction.
Back in the mid-to-late 1990s, build-your-own-Website services like GeoCities were the easiest way for folks without much technical expertise to get content onto the Web. So it wasn’t an utter act of insanity when Yahoo spent $3.57 billion to acquire GeoCities in 1999. Well, okay, the $3.57 billion part was irrational, but the world needed GeoCities.
By the turn of the millennium, though, GeoCities and its rivals started to be overshadowed by blogging–and today, it’s blogging services such as WordPress, Blogger, TypePad, and others that serve the purpose that GeoCities once did. I hadn’t given GeoCities much thought in years–until today, when I read on TechCrunch that Yahoo has stopped signing up new GeoCities members and will close the service altogether at some unspecified date later this year. Let’s hope that Yahoo does a better job of helping GeoCities users migrate to other options than AOL did when it shuttered its similar, similarly venerable AOL Hometown service last year–it gave users only a month’s warning, then purged their data and redirected their URLs to a terse blog post saying that Hometown was no more.
Yahoo’s GeoCities FAQ on the closure says that the service is going away “as we focus on helping our customers explore and build new relationships online in other ways.” Which is a vague way of saying “GeoCities is no longer a priority for us.” Presumably it’s part of Yahoo’s ongoing housecleaning, elimination of redundant services (it also offers Yahoo Web Hosting), and focus on core offerings with a high potential for profit.
There’s probably some alternate universe where GeoCities changed with the times and stayed popular, but it felt a tad dinosaurish even back when Yahoo bought it, thanks to a weird “homesteading” system that forced users to choose a neighborhood and street for their site, and annoyances such as a GeoCities logo that stayed on the screen even when you scrolled down on the page. On the other hand, a bunch of its 1990s competitors have managed to stick around–Homestead (now owned by Intuit and focused on small businesses), Tripod, and FortuneCity. Wonder if any of them will make a concerted effort to welcome the GeoCities residents who Yahoo is evicting?
In normal times, it’s standard operating procedure for Apple watchers to listen to Steve Jobs dismiss a product category, then come to the conclusion that his negativity simply means that Apple isn’t ready to enter it yet. At the moment, it’s acting CEO Tim Cook whose comments get parsed. As Jason Snell notes over at Macworld, Cook was pretty darn harsh about the downsides of netbooks during yesterday’s Apple financial conference call:
For us, it’s about doing great products. And when I look at what is being sold in the netbook space today, I see cramped keyboards, terrible software, junky hardware, very small screens, and just not a consumer experience… that we would put the Mac brand on, quite frankly. And so it’s not a space, as it exists today, that we’re interested in, nor do we believe that customers in the long term would be interested in.
But Cook didn’t say that Apple wouldn’t make a netbook, or something sort of like a netbook. Actually, he said that it might well do so:
That said, we do look at the space and are interested to see how customers respond to it. People that want a small computer (so to speak) that does browsing and e-mail might want to buy an iPod touch or an iPhone. So we have other products to accomplish some of what people buy netbooks for. So in that way we play in an indirect basis.
And if we can find a way to deliver an innovative product that really makes a contribution, then we’ll do that. We have some interesting ideas in this space. The product pipeline is fantastic for the Mac. If you look at the past, in 17 of the last 18 quarters we’ve exceeded the market rate of growth, and to exceed it in this horrendous economy is quite an accomplishment, especially if you look at these very low-cost netbooks that I think is a stretch to call it a personal computer, that are really propping up unit numbers as a whole.
Deconstructing all this, Cook seems to be saying that Apple won’t make a product with:
1) a cramped keyboard
2) terrible software
3) junky hardware
4) a very small screen
That would seem to rule out anything that’s an exact counterpart to today’s netbooks. But it does leave room for two other products that Apple could make:
1) The widely-rumored tablet--which, I’m thinking, would more logically run the iPhone OS than the Mac OS. No keyboard, and an interface tailored to work well on a small screen. (I like my Asus Eee PC 1000HE, but there’s no question that Windows XP is a poor match for its screen resolution–I’m reminded of that every time I press the Start button and get a warning that it can’t display all the times.)
2) A computer which I still think there’s a good chance Apple will introduce–a replacement for today’s $999 white MacBook that’s a pretty traditional Mac notebook that costs more than a netbook ($800, maybe?) but is also posher than one, with a 13-inch screen and a full-sized keyboard.
Of course, there’s no reason why Apple couldn’t release both of these products, since they’d be complementary more than competitive.
I have no inside info; I try to steer clear of assuming that Apple will make products because they seem logical to me; I know that the fact that the company’s public statements suggest that it might go in a particular direction doesn’t mean it will. But if Apple were to make either or both of these products, I think it would at least be consistent with both Cook’s comments yesterday and the company’s overall philosophies.
Hey, BlackBerry fans, good news:
Spy shots: Skyfire’s BlackBerry browser.
New Ubuntu available for download.
Microsoft: still under antitrust watch.
$9000 Leica camera: pretty, white.
MSI readying Android-based netbooks?
OQO’s future doesn’t look bright.
Trade your HD-DVDs for Blu-Ray.
Lost laptops cost $50,000. Supposedly.
