I have seen the future, or, why Microsoft needs to wake up

I hate to be a party pooper the weekend that Microsoft is finally seeing a rally for their share price. But some thoughts arise about the situation, and something new in the field has crept into view - silently in the night so to speak.

First the events that sparked this round:

Microsoft announced higher than expected earnings due mostly to Halo 3, Vista and Office 2007 -- with a dash of Windows Live and other server offerings in the mix.

Just prior to the market news, we heard that Microsoft decided not to continue any appeals to their loss in the European anti-trust cases and will settle for a cash payment (which in the broad view of things is a tiny payment indeed: only 357M!) They also settled the lawsuit against them in South Korea.

So what's really driving this rally, and will it last?

I believe that investor interest has increased because of both the above events. Either taken singly may not have spiked the rally. The trouble is, as soon as the next big lawsuit comes along we'll be back into fuzzy territory and investors will once again look elsewhere, which will drive MSFT back down at worst. At best it will hover at current prices for a long period of time until that uncertainty is resolved.

Meanwhile back at the farm:

While we've been focusing on the big news about Microsoft, their battle with the EU, the states desire to renew and extend oversight from the US anti-trust case and slipping dates for Longhorn and Dynamics NAV . . . Sun has been going open source with their operating system and file technologies. That in itself is perhaps not too remarkable. What's interesting is the way a legal fight between a patent troll company named "Network Appliance" and Sun is evolving over a file system called ZFS that Sun gives away for free.

It's my belief that Sun is in the clear in this matter. They have years and volumes of prior art for the technology. The patent troll, according to some rumors, may be a shill for Microsoft (shades of SCO vs IBM/Linux) but in the end this will not matter.

The reason this is significant may be due to the way that Sun is reacting to the lawsuit. It may change the market for us forever. And if Microsoft refuses to open their eyes it may well be the turning point and endanger their future market dominance.

Sun's CEO posted a blog entry explaining the position they will take in response to the situation at http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/harvesting_from_a_troll . . .

Notice the URL which I left unchanged instead of href'd.

Key points:

1) Sun indemnifies all its customers against IP claims like this.

2) Sun protects the communities using their technologies under free software licenses. Even Apple . . . who is using ZFS in the upcoming Leopard OS X.

Those two points are unprecedented, as far as I know. If Sun succeeds in their counter-suit and defense against Network Appliance and if they indeed make good their promises to protect their customers, the market may see a change in how business is done concerning enterprise class software and services.

Permission to speak freely

"My freedom is more important than your faith."

- Pat Condell

Thanks to fiveforfun for the heads up!

Email spam gets noisy

Stock "pump and dump" spam is migrating to audio. (Link pops)

If you see email from an unexpected sender with an attachment purporting to be elvis.mp3, ljcooldj.mp3, or "nameyourartisthere.mp3" . . . you might want to mark it as spam and delete it unheard.

Anger and dismay over the iPhone update

Seen today on the DailyTech site (link pops . . .) -- buried in the comments:

"To me, it's like GM breaking into my garage and slashing my tires and taking a baseball bat to my windshield because I put new headers on my Vette!

Voiding my warranty? Sure. Having the company purposely destroy my property that I legally purchased just because they don't like the way I use it?

No."

I don't have an iPhone. After observing Apple's treatment and attitude towards it's paying customers I am fairly sure the temptation to own one will never cross my mind again.

Upon observing traffic today while riding a motorcycle

Anger makes you smaller,
while forgiveness forces you to grow
beyond what you were.

- Cherie Carter-Scott

Anti-Phishing training

The music needs some work; but the information you learn through this interactive tutorial about Internet Phishing scams could save you from ID theft.

http://cups.cs.cmu.edu/antiphishing_phil/

Anti-Phishing Phil is an interactive game that teaches users how to identify phishing URLs, where to look for cues in web browsers, and how to use search engines to find legitimate sites.

Our user studies have found that user education can help prevent people from falling for phishing attacks. However, it is hard to get users to read security tutorials, and many of the available online training materials make users aware of the phishing threat but do not provide them with enough information to protect themselves.

. . .

Anti-Phishing Phil was developed by members of the CMU Usable Privacy and Security Laboratory with funding from the US National Science Foundation (Cyber Trust initiative) and ARO/CyLab.

I managed to get every answer correct. Can you?

Microsoft Excel 2007 flunks Math 101 . . .

I bet someone somewhere got really excited when their financial spreadsheet showed $34,465 over their bank statement.

Try this in your spreadsheet program:

Enter the formula =77.1 * 850 into a cell.

What you should see is the result 65,535.

If you're running Excel 2007 (and if you're reading this before the upcoming patch is released) then you may see the incorrect result 100,000 . . . More "accurately," Microsoft says the calculation is correct behind the scenes, but Excel is failing to display the solution correctly.

It appears that any formula that results in one of about 12 solutions triggers this calculation bug.

The specifics for you spreadsheet guru's may be perused at http://blogs.msdn.com/excel/archive/2007/09/25/calculation-issue-update.aspx .

Patch is coming, although it's a guess whether it will make this months patch cycle.

Edit: In spite of the above claim that the error is limited to what's displayed, if you reference the cell that display's the incorrect value in another calculation (this IS a spreadsheet after all, so duh, yes we're likely to do that) the secondary calculation will use the incorrect value too.

Windows XP availability extended to June 2008

Behind the scenes: Business customers (and many home user customers) demanded that they be allowed to purchase Windows XP Professional into the next 2008 fiscal budget year instead of being forced to "upgrade" to Vista. Why? Vista has much higher hardware requirements, raising costs for companies that simply want to run office applications. It also has (still) some severe compatibility issues with many older printers -- including some commercial grade printers like large scale plotters.

One case in point: last year a client of mine purchased a $50,000 plotter to print out architectural plans. Vista does not support it, and the printer manufacturer has not released Vista drivers.

So this week Microsoft announced that it will extend the deadline for XP sales to June of 2008. Even that may not be enough to satisfy some customers. There's pressure on MS to extend even further than that . . .

In my inbox today:

Integrity without knowledge
is weak and useless,
and knowledge without integrity
is dangerous and dreadful.

- Samuel Johnson

The Death of Net Neutrality?

http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D8RG2JAG0.htm

"The Justice Department on Thursday said Internet service providers should be allowed to charge a fee for priority Web traffic.

The agency told the Federal Communications Commission, which is reviewing high-speed Internet practices, that it is opposed to "Net neutrality," the principle that all Internet sites should be equally accessible to any Web user.

Several phone and cable companies, such as AT&T Inc., Verizon Communications Inc. and Comcast Corp., have previously said they want the option to charge some users more money for loading certain content or Web sites faster than others."

Not happy about this development. Not happy at all.

More info: http://www.savetheinternet.com/