Following earlier news that Microsoft was recalculating its $44.6 billion bid for Yahoo, it has become clear what the company has decided to do. Microsoft has thrown down the gauntlet, as evidenced by a letter Saturday from CEO Steve Ballmer to Yahoo’s board of directors. Here’s the quote that sums up the entire letter:

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“If we have not concluded an agreement within the next three weeks, we will be compelled to take our case directly to your shareholders, including the initiation of a proxy contest to elect an alternative slate of directors for the Yahoo! board.”

Since everything has been laid out and is now on the table, we are in for a very interesting three weeks. A hostile takeover of Yahoo would be really ugly and you can bet that Microsoft does not want to take that route, but it appears that they will if they have to.

This certainly is sending a strong message to Yahoo that almost nothing can be done to derail Microsoft’s acquisition of the company. Rubbing salt into the wound, Microsoft adds, “It is unfortunate that by choosing not to enter into substantive negotiations with us, you have failed to give due consideration to a transaction that has tremendous benefits for Yahoo!’s shareholders and employees,” in an attempt to stir up a response from Yahoo’s board.

First, Ray Ozzie’s fingerprints are all over this document. The Wizard of Oz, Microsoft’s chief software architect, may be among the savviest technologists alive today, and it’s been interesting to watch him navigate a huge, resistant bureaucracy. Since Ozzie’s arrival after Microsoft acquired his company in April 2005, he’s attempted with limited success to engineer a revolution from within.

(Credit:
Microsoft )

The pledge triggered the predictable avalanche of press coverage. On the surface, at least, this amounts to a volte-face when you consider Microsoft’s pugnacious history. So why did Microsoft conclude that it made sense to try and get along with everybody else in the big tech sandbox that is Silicon Valley?

This may be the easy part. Microsoft also wanted to send a message to European regulators that it’s a good corporate citizen. Judging from the European Union’s initial reaction, Ballmer and Ozzie will be racking up frequent flyer points to sell Neelie Kroes, the EU’s competition commissioner.

Ozzie was once described to me as a technology optimist. While Ballmer, with his more global corporate-wide responsibilities, may focus on the risks of a step like this from a business perspective, Ozzie can play the role of house technology advocate, pointing out the new opportunities by making it easier for X to talk to Y. It’s just that simple. The only question is why wouldn’t Microsoft do it?

Catchy, but was it entirely accurate? More about that in a moment. Briefly put, Microsoft promised to ensure interoperability with competitors’ offerings by publishing technical information about its own technology. At the same time, Microsoft said developers will no longer need to obtain a license or pay royalties.

In terms of vibe, at least, Ozzie has a keener appreciation of what developers and customers need than do the old hands at Microsoft. They talk the talk but still bring along a lot of baggage to any discussion about openness or interoperability. And for too long, the Microserfs’ MO was kill, crush, destroy–and then issue a press release explaining why the targeted hit du jour was a good thing for all concerned.

Maybe it’s because Ray Ozzie is at heart the developer, par excellence, that he’s pushed for a more pragmatic way to satisfy customer demands.

In a statement, the EU sniffed that while it would welcome any move toward “genuine interoperability,” Microsoft has issued four other similar statements in the past. Not a gushing first reaction. Then again, consider the rancid history between Microsoft and the EU. It was only in October that Microsoft finally agreed to comply with elements of the European Commission’s 2004 antitrust order that it had earlier termed entirely objectionable. But maybe old rivals indeed will decide to let glasnost inform their relationship, “going forward,” as the MBAs are wont to say these days.

Maybe it’s because Ozzie is at heart the developer, par excellence, that he’s pushed for a more pragmatic way to satisfy customer demands. He understands that the trend in software development is toward more composite applications. That is, programs built with feeds or the ability to be built using other apps. Along with data portability, these attributes now appear near the top of user wish lists.

As I read through Microsoft’s Interoperability Principles, I was struck by a couple of things.

Unfortunately for Microsoft, the company’s bureaucracy has been slow to grasp that, horror of horrors, customers actually may want to take data from an Excel spreadsheet and pump the information into Google Maps. But from Ozzie’s perspective, Thursday’s announcement was a no-brainer. Enterprise customers get something they crave. As for developers, they receive needed help because this is where the software industry is heading–with or without Microsoft.

Steve Ballmer: Finally getting the message?

Fortune had the best headline in the a.m. to describe the latest Redmond reversal: Glasnost at Microsoft.

For a deeper dive, here’s the URL to our special coverage. Also, Erick Schonfeld over at Techcrunch had a post worth checking out.

However the news finally gets interpreted across the pond, I wouldn’t dismiss Ballmer’s description of Thursday’s news as “an important change.” For once, he wasn’t letting hyperbole get too ahead of the reality.

LivingSocial, the parent site for six user review services including ReadingSocial, TuneSocial, and ReelSocial, is announcing two things today: First, a $5 million round of venture funding, which will be used to expand the business. And second, an interesting new strategic twist for the company: a destination Web site. LivingSocial has, to date, relied almost exclusively on its social-network apps and widgets for traffic, so this is a departure.

I expect more social-network app expansion plans that don’t rely exclusively on the social nets. LivingSocial CEO Tim O’Shaughnessy said, “We think we’ll be larger, more successful, and provide a better experience if we have both.”

Enter a review on Facebook…

…and it will show up on other social networks, on LivingSocial's own destination site, and hopefully on Google, too.

There’s no doubt that Facebook and other social networks have served LivingSocial well: The company’s services have 6.4 million users so far, who have posted over 8 million reviews. But building a business that’s beholden to the social-network platforms does have its downsides.

It makes sense for LivingSocial since the service uses the social networks as interfaces into a parallel network of its own users and their content. When you review a product on a LivingSocial site, it’s shared with all LivingSocial users, no matter what network they’re on, as long as they’ve installed the app. (The service uses OpenSocial as its platform for distributing its interface to non-Facebook sites.)

But this plan makes sense for other services, too. Social-network platforms expose apps to a lot of users, but the open Web has its own benefits. Especially since data can transcend platform, the smart developer should plan to build apps for as many of them as possible.

Chief among them is discoverability. LivingSocial is building a database of reviews, and the potential user base for those reviews eclipses the social networks. Burying content inside social networks also doesn’t do great things for search engine optimization. So all content now contributed to the services via social networks will also get presence on the LivingSocial destination sites, which Google and other search engines will be able to index more easily.

This will lead to further delays, according to Nvidia. “By then, they have become the de facto standard and we have no choice but to go back and respin (redesign) the chip, which then adds another nine months,” Nvidia says. “Effectively, Intel is building in two years of green field–of a market where they’re the sole provider and they can charge whatever they want for their chipsets.”

Nvidia counters that if it doesn’t get the specification from Intel in a timely manner–meaning now–the group members will be forced to come up with their own host controller, causing a cascade of potential delays. “Effectively, what will end up happening as this plays out (is) the rest of us launch later. But even though we’ve developed to the Intel host controller spec, we may not interpret it exactly the same way as Intel has implemented it.”

There are now four companies vying with Intel–all chipset makers: Nvidia, Advanced Micro Devices, Via Technologies, and SiS.

Intel stated emphatically that the host controller is outside the scope of the USB 3.0 specification and that the company is under no obligation to release the specification before it deems the specification ready for release. Moreover, because Intel is giving it away for free, chipset makers shouldn’t complain, the blog said.

And they’re moving quickly to establish their own so-called “host controller” specification. “We’re moving fast. We’ve already staffed it internally. We have resources submitted from all of the companies (Nvidia, AMD, Via, and SiS),” said a source from Nvidia who asked to remain anonymous.

“I think they’re overstating the resources and time required to get to a mature spec,” said the Nvidia source.

An Intel spokesperson posted a blog on Wednesday stating Intel’s position on the release of the host controller specification related to USB 3.0.

Nvidia also took exception to this statement by Intel: “Intel is investing heavily (think gazillions of dollars and bazillions of engineering man-hours) in resources to create an Intel host controller spec in order to speed time to market of the USB 3.0 technology.”

Nvidia is now firing back at Intel. The world’s largest graphics chip maker has responded to Intel’s latest statement on the USB 3.0 specification and said chipset maker SiS has also joined the group of companies at odds with Intel.

A host controller allows computer devices to communicate with the operating system and is a crucial component for implementing USB 3.0 on computer systems.

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates talked about adding a “black box” to Windows (without the video-recording ability, though). Microsoft later said it wasn’t broadly expanding the “Watson” error-reporting capabilities beyond the kinds of data it already had been collecting. It was never totally clear as to what Gates was referring to.

Mendlen said it is expected to ship in fiscal year 2010 (which runs through June 2010).

The Redmond giant is not the only company looking to transfer the TiVo notion to software development. A company called Replay Solutions launched a product in June for enterprise Java applications.

Speaking of 2005, that same year, a pair of Canadian developers created a Visual Studio 2010 concept, kicked around by a back in 2005. Since they were the first to mention Visual Studio 2010, I thought I would give them some link love.

The company is also talking about new modeling tools it says will make it easier for programmers new to a team to get a sense of how earlier versions of the software work. One of the other goals is to add more business intelligence tools–things like dashboards and cockpits–that enable the project managers to assess whether a development project is on track. “The guys that are paying the bills often get very little info,” Mendlen said.

Although the feature is initially only aimed at in-house testers, a similar feature could one day find its way into broader testing, potentially even into Microsoft beta products. “I wouldn’t be surprised at all to see this become a way that we do beta management, going forward,” Mendlen said.

Microsoft offered scant other details about Visual Studio 2010 and the .Net Framework 4.0. It’s a safe bet that better support for cloud-based services will be included, though. “That is certainly an area that Visual Studio and the .Net Framework will have to address,” Mendlen said. “As we enable service-based technologies, of course we will have to tool it.”

A Microsoft representative did say that “the two technologies are not related and that in Visual Studio Team System the ‘black box’ is only on testers machines and only turned on when the tester decides it should be turned on.”

Updated 9:56 a.m. PDT:
Added screen shot and a link to Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2010 page.

Airplanes are equipped with recorders that capture both cockpit audio and flight data, so in the event that something goes wrong, investigators can try to determine the source of the problem.

Visual Studio Team System 2010 will offer tools for managing test cases and execution, and will boost support for filing actionable bugs.

Microsoft wouldn’t get too much into other features of the product, but it outlined a few broad areas where it is seeking to improve the product, including “enabling cloud computing” and “powering breakthrough departmental applications.”

(Credit:
Microsoft)

Microsoft is aiming to give software developers the same kind of access. In the next version of its developer tool suite, to be known as Visual Studio 2010, Microsoft plans to include the ability to record the full screens of what testers are seeing, as well as data about their machine. When a test application crashes, the technology will enable developers to see the bug as it occurred.

“I can tell you it won’t ship in 2011,” he said.

In an interview last week, Microsoft Developer Division Director Dave Mendlen said the feature is designed to avoid the all-too-frequent conflict that occurs when a software tester finds a bug that the developer says it can’t reproduce. Internally, the feature has been called “TiVo for debuggers.”

Microsoft itself used the notion of a “black box” feature back in 2005.

Rogers Cable, one of Canada’s largest Internet providers, has adopted Comcast-style BitTorrent filtering, so CBC’s use of the technology is sure to heat up the debate.

CBC is conducting the entire BitTorrent effort in-house. The show will be encoded into multiple formats (including an
iPod-friendly version), Orvis said, and the BitTorrent server will be running on a CBC server.

Sadly, here in the U.S., TV networks are nowhere nearly as enlightened. NBC and Fox have some of their shows available for free via low-quality streams online. Comedy Central, seemingly tired of sending take-down letters to YouTube, made its entire archive of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report available online, via low-quality, free streams. Even PBS provides streams for some of its content.

Of course, Net users can always turn to BitTorrent for DRM-free, high-quality downloads. It’s is easy to use–easier than iTunes in many cases–and offers a wider selection. However, it remains, for now, illegal.

Update at 10:10 a.m. PDT: The titles for Tessa Sproule and Guinevere Orvis have been tweaked.

While plenty of TV networks have experimented with offering shows online for free, it is CBC’s use of DRM-free BitTorrent downloads that is the most interesting. Guinevere Orvis, one of the interactive producers on the show, told me that the motivation for this choice was their desire for the “show to be as accessible as possible, to as many Canadians as possible, in the format that they want it in.” As for DRM, she said: “I think DRM is dead, even if a lot of broadcasters don’t realize it.” She added that “if it’s bad for the consumers, it’s bad for the company.”

The only way for U.S. consumers to download high-quality shows is, unfortunately, via iTunes, which charges $1.99 for a DRM-locked copy of the show. Linux users need not apply.

Following closely on the heels of Norway, Canada’s public broadcasting service is adopting DRM-free BitTorrent distribution for a major prime-time show.

Canada’s Next Great Prime Minister, an annual competition in which young adults propose ways to improve the country in hopes of winning 50,000 Canadian dollars, attracted more than 1 million viewers in 2007. While broadcast shows in the United States regularly reach more than 8 million viewers, for a Canadian broadcast program, 1 million is a huge success.

The BitTorrent version will be available for download to anyone in the world, which is a significant change from previous online TV efforts. The iPlayer platform made by England’s BBC is only available to consumers with U.K. network addresses. Similarly, Hulu, the joint effort between Fox and NBC, blocks Net users who are outside the United States. Orvis told me that BitTorrent made the global distribution possible, as it meant that Canadian taxpayers were not subsidizing the cost of delivery to foreign viewers.

(Credit:
CBC)

On March 24, CBC will use BitTorrent to distribute this year’s broadcast of Canada’s Next Great Prime Minister. This will make Canada the first country in North America to release high-quality, DRM-free copies of a prime-time show using the popular P2P file-sharing technology.

Michael Geist, a copyright guru and law professor at the University of Ottawa, hailed CBC’s move, writing on his blog that “this development is important not only because it shows that Canada’s public broadcaster is increasingly willing to experiment with alternative forms of distribution, but also because it may help crystallize the net neutrality issue in Canada.”

When will U.S. broadcasters get a clue, ditch DRM, ditch iTunes, and adopt BitTorrent?

Tessa Sproule, the CBC manager in charge of the show’s digital outreach, is a regular reader of the BoingBoing blog, which earlier this month highlighted the use of BitTorrent by Norway’s public broadcaster for one of its most popular shows. Sproule was inspired by the Norweigan experiment and pushed for something similar at CBC.

Listen now:

New search engine takes aim at Google

Ozzie puts his own spin on ‘ThinkWeek’

MSN to follow Yahoo in issuing music refunds?

CNET News’ Greg Sandoval analyzes Yahoo’s attempts at damage control to mollify customers upset over its digital music policy. Apple has begun issuing regular status reports for its recently introduced e-mail and cloud-computing service. The good news: The situation is improving. But the company still isn’t out of the woods. And Webware’s Rafe Needleman assesses the odds for a technology start-up with an impressive pedigree to carve out a place in the increasingly hardscrabble market for Internet search.

Sophos bids on Utimaco to strengthen endpoint security

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Today’s stories:

IBM to acquire ILOG in $340 million deal

Report: FCC expected to rule against Comcast

Not hard. Not completely true either, as it turns out.

I saved the file (i320xp190usz.exe) to the root of the C disk and ran it from there. The resulting error is shown below.

1. Click the link, select “Save,” specify “Save As,” then click “Save” to download the file.
2. The downloaded file will be saved in the specified place in the self-extracting form (.exe format).
3. Double-click the downloaded EXE file to decompress it, then installation will start automatically.

Not that it mattered in the end, the printer only printed every other letter. The next day, I went out and bought a new printer. Canon was not on my shopping list. Three strikes and you’re out.

In the screen shot it looks like I first clicked on the Unzip button, but that’s not the case. As the instructions above say, the installation started automatically. The first step is an unzip to the folder that Canon pre-defined, in this case, folder dot-slash. The unzip operation found no folder named dot (or period if you prefer), tried to create it and failed.

So, when I had to print something recently and the only available printer was a Canon Bubble Jet model i320 that my laptop hadn’t seen before, I cringed. Sure enough, it didn’t go well.

See a summary of all my Defensive Computing postings.

I hate installing printer drivers. For one thing, there is no standardization, each one seems to present a new option, question or issue. Then, there is all that extra software that comes with printer drivers, installing just the driver can be quite a battle.

It turns out that Canon does not support
Firefox, something they don’t bother mentioning anywhere. Using Internet Explorer 6, the same click trail resulted in a new browser window opening for the U.S. support site. Firefox must have blocked the creation of the new browser window as part of it’s anti-popup protection.

The download instructions from Canon are:

If Canon doesn’t want to support Firefox, fine. But they should detect the browser (it’s easy to do) and warn their customers to only use Internet Explorer.

At Canon’s website, finding the Support section with drivers and downloads was easy, as was clicking on “Americas” and then “Canon U.S.A”. But then nothing. My click was ignored. Click again. Still nothing. Click, click, click. Nothing, nothing nothing. Check the Internet connection, it’s fine.

After a few emotional moments (I really wanted to print something), I guessed at the problem. DOS and Linux users may know that “..” is a reference to a higher level directory. I guessed that the dot-slash was somehow related to this dot-dot, so I moved the i320xp190usz.exe file to a temporary subfolder and it ran fine from there.

(Credit:
Apple)

Apple quickly retracted a few
Mac OS X 10.6 tidbits leaked out by its Canadian subsidiary following the Worldwide Developers Conference keynote, but the Internet misses nothing.

Apple’s Bertrand Serlet was scheduled to address Apple’s developers in a session closed to the press Monday afternoon to go over 10.6, and now we have some idea of what he’s telling them; much to the chagrin of Apple PR, I suspect. Snow Leopard will improve support for multicore processors and allow developers to exploit powerful graphics processors, as we reported last week.

Updated 3:44 p.m. PDT: Apple PR formally issued the press release in question that went out inadvertently earlier Monday.

Bertrand Serlet, Apple's senior VP of software engineering, told WWDC 2008 attendees about Snow Leopard Monday afternoon.

The release will also come with a new version of Quicktime that improves video playback, and a faster version of
Safari. According to the reports, Apple expects to ship 10.6 “in about a year.”

Scores of sites picked up on a press release that went out from Apple Canada and was pulled at some point after it went live. According to the release, Snow Leopard–which Apple CEO Steve Jobs confirmed is the code name for 10.6–will focus more on improving the basic plumbing of the operating system than adding any catchy new features, as The Unofficial Apple Weblog reported last week.

As expected, the ISO on Wednesday announced that Office Open XML (OOXML) has been approved as a standard, marking the end a long and sometimes contentious path.

Microsoft and other software companies that support Open XML in their products, such as Apple and Novell, are expected to conform to the standard as it changes over time.

The run-up to the vote was marked by intense lobbying from Microsoft, IBM, and their business partners.

The Geneva-based International Organization for Standardization (ISO) issued a press release with the details of a vote that showed Open XML receiving 75 percent approval and 14 percent disapproval. It needed two-thirds approval and not more than 25 percent disapproval to pass.

The effort to make Open XML an ISO standard did not pass a ballot in September, which precipitated a follow-on Ballot Resolution Meeting in February where, after redundancies were eliminated, over 1,000 issues were considered, according to the ISO.

It also means that development of the specification will be done through the ISO, which counts members from over 100 countries. There were 87 countries which participated in the Open XML vote.

News of the vote results circulated on Tuesday when open-document advocates released a document showing the results. Microsoft confirmed the information later in the day.

ISO standards status means that software that uses Open XML, notably Microsoft’s Office products, will be more attractive to governments and large corporate customers that prefer to purchase ISO-certified goods.

Following the BRM, delegates from participants had the option of changing their position from No or Abstain to Yes–something that enough did to have the effort pass.

Microsoft originally submitted the Open XML file formats to standards organization Ecma International in 2005. Ecma then proposed the specification to ISO in its Fast Track process, which many considered to be too fast for a complicated specification.

The entire endeavor was opposed by many, although certainly not all, open-source advocates who feared that standards status would give Microsoft more market power.

However, ISO spokesperson Roger Frost on Tuesday said that the organization has not received a complaint from its Norwegian ISO member, referring the matter to Standards Norway.

There were reports of what have been called irregularities in the vote which ended Saturday. The head of the committee which formed Standards Norway’s position lodged a complaint saying that the yes vote did not reflect the opposition of the majority of the committee.