Why Was Tucker Carlson Shot Down?

Klaatu says Carlson prided himself on a strategic use of nastiness in his journalism but insisted he was not a partisan hack in the tank for Republicans and right-wingers. When a diva like Carlson helped lose Fox News over $700M he had to go.  With his producer's suit, more bad news about Fox is about to hit the fan,  More heads at Fox are going to roll.  Carlson isn't finished. You can be sure he will pop up on some other network or internet spot.

Steve Jobs Talks…About his health, but….

According to Joe Nocera, writer for The Talking Business column of the New York Times, ‘On Thursday afternoon, several hours after I’d gotten my final “Steve’s health is a private matter” — and much to my amazement — Mr. Jobs called me. “This is Steve Jobs,” he began. “You think I’m an arrogant [expletive] who thinks he’s above the law, and I think you’re a slime bucket who gets most of his facts wrong.” After that rather arresting opening, he went on to say that he would give me some details about his recent health problems, but only if I would agree to keep them off the record. I tried to argue him out of it, but he said he wouldn’t talk if I insisted on an on-the-record conversation. So I agreed.

Because the conversation was off the record, I cannot disclose what Mr. Jobs told me. Suffice it to say that I didn’t hear anything that contradicted the reporting that John Markoff and I did this week. While his health problems amounted to a good deal more than “a common bug,” they weren’t life-threatening and he doesn’t have a recurrence of cancer. After he hung up the phone, it occurred to me that I had just been handed, by Mr. Jobs himself, the very information he was refusing to share with the shareholders who have entrusted him with their money.

You would think he’d want them to know before me. But apparently not..”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/26/business/26nocera.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1

To our readers:

It's rude of us, we know, but we've decided to take a few weeks off. We need the rest.
But we'll be back.

Bill Gates has gone, what's his legacy?

From hippy to hanger on

This week marks another first in the 33-year history of Microsoft - life without Billg. The company and the man who co-founded it and rose to become the world's richest geek have parted ways. Bill Gates is no longer chief software architect and will be checking in only as company chairman.

Gates is hailed as the visionary who changed our lives by delivering on the vision of a PC in every home. Certainly, Gates and Microsoft came along at the right time. Ken Olson, former chairman and president of computing pioneer Digital Equipment Corp (DEC), is famed for saying in 1977 he saw no reason why anyone would want a computer in their home. It was also IBM's lack of interest in building software for PCs that gave Microsoft its first break.

Had it been left to companies like DEC and IBM, computing today would likely be a different, analogue, green-screen world.

The challenge of Gates, though, is to put him - and Microsoft - into context. The dictionary defines a visionary as someone “given to fanciful speculations and enthusiasms with little regard for what is actually possible” or “a person with unusual powers of foresight”.

Gates turned computing into a mass market by his focus on “experience” on a low-priced Intel box. He had the “vision” to see what Olson couldn’t when it came to PCs: that given the accessible and affordable tools ordinary people - not just those individuals staffing corporations or the engineering and scientific communities served by IBM and DEC - could do great things with computers. His success, though, turned him into another Olson, a man whose beliefs became contained and defined by the market his company had carved out.

OK, so we all know Gates was fascinated with the idea of the computer from an early age. Before there was Microsoft, there was Trafo-data, which he started with Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen at high school to monitor traffic patterns across a roadway. The system used an Intel 8008 chip priced $360. The love affair with Intel, software and the power of what could be achieved was born.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/06/30/farewell_gates/

Yahoo reorg centralizes power

Yipes! Yahoo, under intense pressure, reorganized its upper management Thursday in a plan designed to improve its products, underlying technology, and operational execution, the company said.

The new structure leaves Chief Executive Jerry Yang and President Susan Decker at the top of the org chart. As expected, Ash Patel and Hilary Schneider will report to Decker, with Patel leading a new audience products division, and Schneider in charge of go-to-market operations for the United States region.

In addition, a third, as-yet-undetermined executive will report to Decker. That executive will run an "insights strategy team," with responsibilities for centralizing and running a Yahoo-wide strategy regarding use of data and analysis. The new executive will be named in coming weeks, Yahoo said Thursday.

The company also is forming some new groups. One, an audience technology group, will be led by Venkat Panchapakesan. Another group will focus on cloud computing and data infrastructure.

Yahoo underwent an executive exodus in the last two weeks, losing three executive vice presidents, two senior vice presidents, and others. It's not clear to what extent those departures were the cause or the result of the reorganization plan, but Decker indicated in a statement that the reorganization has been under way for months.

"The changes we're making today will help deliver superior global products for users and enable faster and better decision-making," Decker said. "This is a logical next step in light of our success last year in moving to a more centralized approach to developing world-class marketing products.

"We have planned these changes deliberately over the past several months to clarify responsibilities and to capitalize on the scale advantages while allowing for fine tuning to meet local market needs."

Yeah, but will this do it? Don't hold your breath, sports fans.....

http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9978152-7.html

Major Internet Shakeup: New top-level internet addresses come with $100,000-plus price tag

Q&A: What do the new domains mean for me?

A new land grab for internet addresses has been sparked by the governing body for domain names — but with a minimum price tag of $100,000 (£50,000) it may not be a free-for-all.

The massive shake-up in the way that web addresses are assigned, approved this evening in Paris, will mean that people can now apply for a website that ends in any collection of letters — not just the .com-type domains that have dominated the web to date.

Alphabets other than the Latin — Chinese, Arabic and Cyrillic — will also be more widely represented in websites. But the new "top-level domains" , as .com and .co.uk are known, will have a hefty price tag.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) , which oversees the way internet addresses are assigned, said that the new domains would cost upwards of $100,000 to register, and will require significant resources to run.

"We are opening up new 'land' which people will be able to go out and claim — like the United States in the 19th century," Paul Twomey, the chief executive of Icann, said. "It's a massive increase in the real estate of the internet."

Internet experts said that the main beneficiaries would be city authorities (.nyc and .berlin are among the first expected to be sold); large companies who want to protect their brands; entrepreneurs who buy and sell domains, and millionaires.

The new system is the most significant overhaul of the underlying structure of the internet in many years. Websites will now be able to be written in full in 15 languages. Foreign scripts have been permitted in parts of an internet address, but the section after the final dot — where you would typically see .com, .org., or .gov — has been able to comprise only 37 characters — a-z, the digits 0-9, and the hyphen.

The relaxation of the rules is expected to inspire a new internet land grab, as companies, organisations and wealthy individuals muscle in on territory that was previously restricted to several generic domains, such as .com and .biz, as well as country codes, such as .fr (France) and .it (Italy).

Would-be applicants are advised that the process is different from registering a regular website. Top-level domains require significant equipment — including servers, routers, and databases — to run. "These new names are not going to be for mom-and-pop businesses," Dr Twomey said.

http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article4218629.ece

Deal or No Deal? Oops, No Deal!

Look, a Yahoo-Microsoft deal could happen anytime. Just not yesterday, as it turns out.

It’s easy to be taken in by so-called “sources,” chatting up a new series of talks between Microsoft and Yahoo, either to do a deal to revisit the partial search-outsourcing partnership or to try to one-up that by claiming rather grandly that there is yet another effort to buy the company whole.

But with Yahoo’s stock dropping like a knife and hovering near the dangerous $20-a-share mark yesterday, anyone reporting on the situation should have been deeply cautious about floating rumors about renewed deal-making between the star-crossed pair.

As it is often said, there’s one born every minute, and like clockwork, Yahoo’s stock got an undeserved boost due to those unconfirmed stories.

You did not hear it here first, because BoomTown suddenly got the exact same calls too yesterday–coincidence? I think not!–from “sources” touting Microsoft-Yahoo as “back on.”

But I simply could not confirm it to our site’s standards of reporting. Which is to say, aiming for trying to report with full accuracy versus repeating errant chatter that is so typical now in this deal.

Thus, I declined to crunch on that tasty, but non-nutritious, morsel and opted instead to try to get confirmation from sources who actually knew what is going on.

And those sources at both Yahoo and Microsoft, who certainly can spin like dervishes when need be, emphatically went out of their way yesterday–which is not so typical–to deny any talks were going on or that anything had changed since Microsoft had walked away from a bid for the whole of Yahoo in May or since it had lost out on another effort to do a partial deal.

http://kara.allthingsd.com/20080625/deal-or-no-deal-oops-no-deal/

The High-Tech Job Capital Is Silicon Valley? Not. …It's The Big Apple?

According to a report released today from AeA, a tech industry trade group, New York and its surrounding metropolitan area leads the nation when it comes to the number of high-tech jobs. Rounding out the top five in order were Washington, D.C.; San Jose/Silicon Valley, Boston, and Dallas-Fort Worth.

New York had 316,500 high-tech jobs, while Silicon Valley had 225,300, according to the AeA.

The study looked at employment throughout 2006; it was the first city-level report created by the AeA since 2000, before the tech bubble burst.

Silicon Valley does have the highest density of high-tech workers, with 28.6% of private sector jobs in the high-tech field. As a much larger metro area with a more diverse set of industries, New York does not even make the top five. (The AeA defines a “high-tech” job as being in one of 49 categories culled from the standardized North American Industrial Classification System that involve creating high-tech products or services.)

If it’s money you’re after, the Valley is the best place to find the highest-paying high-tech jobs, with salaries averaging $144,800. Seattle, number five on the salary list, pays an average of $96,197, while New York–not exactly the cheapest place to live–pays its high-tech workers $91,451.

Coming in at the bottom of the tech-salary scale is San Juan, Puerto Rico. High-tech workers there make just $38,422 on average.

Not every city has the same types of high-tech jobs. Silicon Valley leads in semiconductor manufacturing, while Seattle is the software publishing capital. Computer system design is Washington, D.C.’s purview. And New York has the highest concentration of Internet services jobs.

But all is not rosy in high-tech land. The report warns that the U.S. is in danger of losing its high-tech edge due to the federal government’s policy not to grant visas or green cards to many foreign students studying here, resulting in a “tremendous number of unfilled jobs,” said Christopher Hansen, AeA’s president and chief executive officer, in an interview Monday.

At the same time, the U.S. educational system is not producing a sufficient number of graduates to fill those slots. “Our public schools are not generating the kinds of people who can go into engineering and math and compete,” Mr. Hansen said.

The result is that many high-tech companies are forced to relocate their operations abroad, where they can find the skilled help they need. Mr. Hansen said that allowing foreigners to work in the high-tech industry here would only generate more jobs. His proof: eBay, Google, Intel, Sun, and Yahoo have either a founder or co-founder who was not American-born.

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/06/24/the-high-tech-job-capital-isthe-big-apple
/index.html?ref=technology

Gates: Thanks for the memories

Co-founder shares surprises, letdowns, morsels from early Microsoft days

If you ask Bill Gates what life will be like when he stops working full time at Microsoft, he'll have to get back to you. That's because, a week away from the transition, he still hasn't slowed down his pace. If anything, things have picked up as he tries to have one last meeting with all the leaders and projects that are important to him.

Gates, who dropped out of school more than 30 years ago to run Microsoft, steps down from full-time work on Friday. He'll remain chairman and a part-time Microsoft employee.

The Microsoft co-founder did take some time out of his schedule recently to sit down with CNET News.com's Ina Fried and offer some reflections on the early days of the PC market as well as thoughts on where Microsoft is now and what technologies he will need in his new role, working full time for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

In the interview, Gates shared some little-known stories from the company's early days, including the fact that Microsoft seriously entertained combining with Lotus, but talks ended when that company's chief executive pulled out. Gates also noted that Microsoft was invited and then uninvited to the launch event for the first IBM PC.

"We'd been invited, and then they decided not to invite us," Gates said. "Well, we had been working night and day. I had told people, yeah, we had this invitation that said, yeah, we're going to go, there's going to be a big deal. And then they decided, nah, we don't want you to come to the thing. That was a little bit of a downer."

Q: As you've been thinking about the transition, what are the kinds of things that have been on your mind the most?

Gates: Well, for 33 years I've worked at Microsoft and come in every day, and thought about what are the new things we need to do, and what's my personal role in that, a lot of e-mail, lot of meetings, lot of product reviews. So, in a sense it's hard for me to project what it's going to be like for me or Microsoft when I'm not here.

As long as I'm here, I'm still sending a lot of e-mail and in a lot of meetings, and so the real change in terms of people having an opportunity to step up and do things, to some degree it's after July 1 when my involvement is only a very specific involvement on particular projects as opposed to the overall strategy thing.

Everybody likes to pick the current competitive battles that we're in, and kind of think, OK, those are the big things. For me, I'd pick like tablet or interactive TV that are, according to me--but I've been over-optimistic before--on the verge of big, big impact. So, I've been sending a lot of mail to the tablet and interactive TV team, sort of sending the mail I would have sent three months from now, now, just giving them encouragement. Because, you know, all the big successes, whether it's Office integration or Windows, it takes a long time for those things to get established.

We thought it would be a good idea for me to go to the Windows 7 group and go see the work, and I was thrilled. Steven Sinofsky took me around, showed me what they're doing.

So, you're going to product group by product group?

Gates: Well, in terms of big meetings, that's pretty much done. Like the Windows group had a meeting, and the Surface group had a meeting, but this is more just sitting down with the top executives, so Stephen Elop, Craig Mundie, Kevin Turner.

The timing is actually pretty good. We just did our business reviews. We do the business planning, which is for the next fiscal year, which starts July 1. So, we have the plans in place, and I sat through that last set of reviews, but it's a perfect example of something that as just a board member working on projects I won't sit in those business plan reviews in the future. I mean, Steve (Ballmer) may ask me to sit in on one that touches directly on something I'm doing, but the default is that I'm not there at all.

I hear search is one you're still pretty enthused about.

Gates: Yeah, that doesn't mean I'd necessarily go to their business plan review, but I've developed a relationship with them where brainstorming and thinking about what things we'd pick and how we do it.

You know, it's another good example of something that breakthrough work is not--doesn't happen in a day; it happens in many years. Now, many of those years fortunately are the years we've already put into it, but to really help that keep on track, and just to give them the positive feedback as they're going through it, that group, that's actually the only one that's truly concrete at this point where literally we've scheduled out a bit this summer and even some into the fall when and how I'm going to look at various aspects of their work.

http://news.cnet.com/Gates-big-send-off/2009-1014_3-6242276.html

Yahoo!'s Decker! defends! Goo-Hoo!

Yahoo! president Susan Decker has criticised the company’s naysayers, many of whom have protested against the fraught firm’s recent web search ad deal with Google.

In an interview with Reuters on Friday, she insisted that the new Goo-Hoo! agreement would not nullify Yahoo!’s position in the internet search market where it is second-placed behind, er, Google.

Decker said Yahoo!’s Panama search advertising system would not be hampered by the deal. Instead she reckoned the agreement would help bring in more cash off of less popular search terms.

“It’s really a back-fill in places where we’re not doing much business,” she said. “It’s our choice every day whether and how we might serve ads from Yahoo! or Google, or a third party if we opened it up further.”

But she refused to be drawn on the inner turmoil that has engulfed Yahoo! over the past week, which has seen a number of key executives scurry for the exit door.

Shares, which are currently trading at $21.99 on Wall Street, have tumbled 16 per cent since the Sunnyvale, California-based firm walked away from buyout talks with Microsoft.

Decker, did however acknowledge why many gobsmacked investors have grumbled about the company’s surprising Google tie-in.

“This is a unique deal. The market and participants are still getting their arms around what this means,” she said.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/06/23/yahoo_susan_decker_defends_goohoo/