Microsoft’s Kevin Schofield (he is an executive who works at Microsoft Research) confirmed today that China is redirecting traffic from Google and Microsoft’s search engines to Chinese Baidu.
Quote? “That really sucks.”
Google says they reached out to Facebook…
November 1, 2007 By
Google’s Vic Gundotra just told us that Google has reached out to all the major players to try to get them on board with this new platform. Including Facebook. But for now it’s clear that everyone BUT Facebook is on board.
Microsoft vs. Mozilla in ECMAScript debate, Part II
November 1, 2007 By
Words are heating up between Mozilla’s Brendan Eich (he’s the chief technical officer at Mozilla Corporation, the folks who bring us Firefox) and Microsoft’s Chris Wilson in the debate over the proposed ECMAScript 4th Edition. We haven’t heard the last of this and it’s interesting to see this play out in the public square. I’m scheduled to do some interviews already with Mozilla. Would love to have more to cover this issue more completely. I first reported on this friction on my blog last night and some of the comments there have been interesting.
UPDATE: I should have given credit to Ric of OpenAjax for starting this off and helping me see the conflict brewing here.
Blue monster visits Facebook
October 28, 2007 By
The artist, Hugh Macleod, who came up with the Blue Monster for Microsoft visited Facebook’s headquarters today and I filmed him. If you haven’t been here for long you might not realize that I love Hugh’s cartoons and have for years.
This is “micromedia.” Very short video.
I loved his thoughts on social objects so today when we went to Facebook I noted that he’s a social object producer and it was interesting that he was visiting the social graph producer.
He ended up saying “Zuckerberg, you just watch out.”
I also have a video of Hugh working his Twitter. Off camera we talked about his thoughts on advertising and its role in decommodifying things.
Heh.
Oh, NBC’s new Hula video distribution scheme is getting lots of notice over on TechMeme. I don’t know why I mention that here. I put a couple of the best articles on my link blog, but there’s a lot better stuff to read about on my link blog than the HulaHype. Look for the travel API article by ProgrammableWeb, for instance.
Microsoft wins Facebook bid? Here’s the insider scoop on why…
October 24, 2007 By
Last night I was hanging around at the Ritz near my house. That’s where Jerry Yang, CEO of Yahoo spoke yesterday, and where the Right Media conference is going on right now.
I talked with several people who didn’t want to go on the record, but who are executives at Microsoft’s competitors. They told me to “watch out for Brian McAndrews, former CEO of aQuantive.”
That’s the company that sold recently to Microsoft for a very large sum of money (around $6 billion).
They say he now is working for Kevin Johnson, president of Microsoft and is expected to make major moves on Microsoft’s behalf to get Microsoft a major position into the advertising industry.
So, what’s the rumor this morning? Microsoft wins the Facebook bid.
If this is all true, then Steve Ballmer’s promise to buy 50 companies in the advertising and Web 2.0 spaces in the next year is off to a roaring start.
Since I don’t think Steve Ballmer understands the advertising world, it sure looks like someone else is behind this move. I’d love to interview Brian McAndrews.
UPDATE: if this rumor is true, it means big revenues for Facebook. Microsoft has a world-class advertising sales team. I bet they could promise more revenues than Google could, particularly because Microsoft’s sales team is much more focused on banner advertising than Google’s team is.
UPDATE2: Microsoft’s Hank Vigil was in Palo Alto yesterday, so maybe he’s behind this. Me?
Microsoft’s new social media video…
October 17, 2007 By
Funny.
So, how is Microsoft doing on this video’s theme? That marketing is no longer one-way?
Has Microsoft done anything lately that YOU specifically asked for?
Thanks Andy Beal for bringing this to my attention. I also posted this to my link blog.
