Stan's List

Reuters reports that MS and Yahoo cannot agree on a sale price, and MS says it’s dropping its 3 month bid to buy Yahoo. MS sent a letter to Yahoo that increased the bid to $47.5 billion, but Yahoo countered wanting $53 billion. Apparently MS did not think a hostile takeover would succeed. More …

According to this Businessweek article, Apple presents itself as a consumer products company. The iPod, iPhone and most of the Macs are consumer level. But under the hood of all the Macs is software technology that presents a real threat to Microsoft’s dominance.

XP is now 6 or 7 years old, including the 5 years it took for Vista. The hardware most companies buy to run XP workstations ia gaining years. The expense to shield XP is enormous. My company prevents viruses and malware, including keystroke watchers, but does not prevent internet trackers, so when my system slows, I run Ad-aware and Spybot which eradicates those minor buggers. Small to medium companies cannot afford the necessary protection. Single users are likely spam conduits 30 minutes after connection to the internet.

Ripe for the plucking!!

Microsoft, admittedly unable to gain on Google, has made a hostile takeover offering Yahoo’s stock owners $31 a share, and as of Friday, a 62% premium over Yahoo’s stock price. If you cannot increase your search market share on your own, you buy it. If successful, how much of Yahoo will be left when they walk in the front door? WIRED has reactions from several Flickr members to this takeover. Flickr is the popular Yahoo site where you can manage your photos and share them with the world. Several Flickr members posted anti-Microsoft images and announced their intent to leave. Are they only the first?

On Tuesday, a federal judge extended oversight of Microsoft’s business practices.

Computerworld reports that Microsoft has confirmed Office for Mac 2008 incorrectly assigns ownership of some files.

Briefly:

Office 2008 faster than 2004?

• On Intel-based Macs: YES (nearly twice as fast)
• On PowerPC-based Macs: NO, in fact, 2008 runs mostly slower.

Does Office 2008 run faster on Leopard than Tiger?

• On Intel-based Macs: YES.

While the analysis and results will be published in the March 2008 issue ofMacTech Magazine, the MacTech web page has the preview now.

Is this an indication of where Mac software is headed? Almost twisting our arm to move to Intel Macs

Telestream’s Flip4Mac WMV Player internet plugin and components for QuickTime allows one to play Windows video files, .wma and .wmv in a Web browser as well as QuickTime Player.

Flip4Mac WMV Player 2.2.0.39 is available for download.

The preference pane in System Preferences under the “Update” tab, would only take me to version 2.1.3.10. Try it and see if it will download the latest.

According to Telestream, the new version 2.2.0.39 includes:

* Added JavaScript support to the browser plugins
* Added support for URL Stream Scripting
* Major encoding optimizations for Intel Mac
* Improved video quality when encoding 2-pass VBR
* Added support for manual Deactivation/Reactivation
* Improved ASX handling
* Improved support for MMS servers and live streams
* Improved compatibility with many different web sites
* Fixed drawing problems with Firefox
* Removed the user enabled “Create Streaming Movies” preference

MacWorld 2008? Office 2008 was due this month. Likely it was not nearly finished. InformationsWeek’s Apple Unvarnished keeps it all in perspective. Is this going to hurt any one but M$$$? More …

Apple has announced that over one-million copies of the Windows versions in its first two days of availability. Apple claims Safari 3 is the fastest browser running on Windows, rendering web pages up to twice as fast as IE 7 and up to 1.6 times faster than Firefox 2. More …

Digital Arts Online provides a detailed report for an insight into Microsoft’s and Apple long-running partnership, first in the early 1980s, and then from 1997.

Jobs also revealed that Apple sees itself as a software company. More …

Wednesday Jobs and Gates will spend 75 minutes together, taking about the past as well as the future. As pointed out by iTWire, the last time these two were “together” M$$$ was buying $150 million of Apple Stock. Reported at the time as a payment for dipping into the QuickTime cookie jar to enhance Media Player’s codec. More …