It is well known that in August 1997, Microsoft bought $150 million of Apple stock as part of a lawsuit settlement. Microsoft sold it sometime in 2001 at about a 7% profit, earning about $10 million on the investment, but losing so much more as Apple become a serious and healthy competitor. Had Microsoft held onto the shares, what would they be worth today?
Since mid-2001, Apple shares are up 1,090.57%. Not knowing the actual sale date, Microsoft did leave somewhere in the neighborhood of $1.752 billion on the table. While it is “only” a little over 1 and a half percent of Apple’s current market cap, it is a nice amount of money for anyone to have (it could have paid off the Xbox 360 warranty charge). Microsoft could have invested that money better.
$150 million plus 7.07% = $160,605,000
$160.6 million plus 1090.57% = $1,912,114,948
(inspired by a ReelSmart post with some very strange math that claims the stock would somehow be worth over $50 billion, via Bink)
Microsoft launched a third “Channel” community website, Channel 8, but I have no idea what it is supposed to be about. The site has some blog posts, a way to switch among blog categories, and an “About” page that says nothing more than, “Welcome to Channel 8″. They’re posting a bunch of videos, but I’m really confused about the purpose of the site. Anyone want to try to explain it to me?
It has something to do with academic initiatives and the Imagine Cup, but having a vague and undefinable focus makes it hard to tell people why they should use it. It would be real nice if there was a forum, which would make it a lot easier to see where all this is going. If it really is about student interaction with Microsoft, as an area of interest of mine, I’d be very interested in participating and even generating for the website, but it’s really hard to tell right now.
Two Tacoma teens, both recipients of Washington State Achievers scholarships from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, stand accused of murder and first-degree burglary in two seperate attacks. Tahoma High School students Daniel Harris, 18, and Cyril Walrond, 17, in addition to Jarrelle Marshall, 16, are said to have commited two heinous crimes about an hour apart, bludgening two men in the head and robbing them.
Prosecutors say on April 20 at Les Davis Pier, Waldron attacked Carl Schmidt from behind, striking him hard on his head with a sheet rock hammer. Marshall acted as a lookout, while Harris went through Schmidt’s car and stole several items.
Prosecutors say an hour later, the three targeted Dien Huynh when the 55-year-old walked outside his home. Walrond ran him down and repeatedly struck him in the head with a hammer.
The teens stole cash and credit cards.
A relative found Huynh about five hours later on the front porch. He died two nights later at Tacoma General Hospital.
The documents say the teens said they committed the crimes “because they wanted money.”
It’s a shame when things like this happen, but it’s almost inevitable when you are dealing with inner city youths. If you try to locate promising kids living in bad conditions, you are bound to accidentally mistake a homicidal maniac with good grades for an underpriveleged but nomal kid with good grades. Perhaps there needs to be a question on the scholarship questionairre, “Have you ever or would you ever smash a man’s head with a hammer in order to steal his wallet and completely ruin your future?”
Holmgren said Harris and Walrond, both seniors, had earned Washington State Achievers scholarships. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation offers the program to eligible students at 16 Achievers High Schools; the scholarships average about $5,000 each year for four years.
[Tacoma schools spokeswoman Patti] Holmgren said all three teens played football and ran track. She said Walrond planned to attend the University of Washington and was recently elected African American Pageant Prince for the student body’s annual festivities.
The Mozilla Foundation, makers of Firefox, have announced a renewed and altered marketing effort, due to the fact that Firefox’s marketing reaches many, but converts very poorly. Of the many people who have been inspired to download the browser due to grassroots and Google affiliate marketing, only 25% actually become active users of the browser, with others staying with their old browser and using Firefox only sparingly or not at all.
The worst part is that only half of those who download it even install it. How people download some software and never even bother to install it is beyond me. Among the changes being proposed are a clearer icon, with text that says what the application does, and more prominent placing on the Windows desktop/quick launch bar and the Mac OS dock.
While this is by no means a live product, and it doesn’t have the functionality and features to rival Gmail, it is nice to know that a developer can clone the look of the Gmail interface in just four hours using the Windows Presentation Foundation. For interface designers, this shows off a good reason to use WPF, the ease of use and speed with which you can put together interface elements. Read more at Andrew Arnott’s blog.
My hard drive is failing miserably, so I’m trying to post everything I can before a replacement drive arrives. Some of it is a week or so old, some of it deserves more detail, so I apologize.
Ford has announced the pricing of its in-vehicle Sync system, which uses Microsoft Windows Automotive technology and is available as a $395 option in Ford’s Focus, Edge, Fusion, Taurus (and Taurus X), Explorer, and Sport-Trac, the Mercury Mountaineer, Sable and Milan, and the Lincoln MKX and MKZ. Sync brings speech recognition to control music off a Zune, iPod or even a Flash drive, seemless pairing with a Bluetooth phone and switching of calls to the car system, the ability to read incoming text messages and caller ID out loud, hands-free dialing and conference calling.
He talks about the new deal with Ford, brings out a Ford exec. Called “Sync”, it works with phone and music players, completely exclusive. Integrates all electronic devices into the vehicle, accessing full voice command capability of your phone over Bluetooth, with the whole phone book and ring tones over the cards audio system. You can maintain a call when entering and exiting a vehice. It will read your text messages back to you. Accepts nearly all portable music players, portable storage devices, flash drives and zip drives. Fully upgradeable, so future proof. They’re rolling it out affordably, and on a dozen Ford cars this year, including the Ford Focus.
Microsoft and Ford are set to announce today the full details of a in-car communications and entertainment system from Microsoft to be installed in a dozen Ford, Lincoln and Mercury models starting later this year. Todd Bishop has a lot of the details, including that it will connect via USB to all sorts of portable devices, including the iPod, and through a special agreement with Apple, it will even play copy-protected iTunes music!
The system, which Ford will call “Sync”, also connects to mobile phones through Bluetooth for hands-free calling, will place microphones inside the car and broadcast calls over the speakers, show caller ID and other info (like songs or radio stations currently playing) on a display, let users browse address books and initiate calls with voice commands, among other options.
My Opera web browser, normally the king of stability, crashed and completely screwed up my saved tabs, so I’m posting everything old right now, in order to set things right.
Microsoft’s David Boschmans, a Developer Evangelist in Belgium, died two weeks ago at just 32 of an apparent heart condition, leaving behind at a tragically too young age a wife and two year old daughter. I never met Dave, but Miel (Coolz0r) knew him well, as David was the man who brought him into Microsoft, and he’s written a touching post showing his sorrow at this loss.
There’s also a Flickr group where friends can leave photos of David. Here’s the group’s description of David:
He was a kind man, a great team player, always willing to help his colleagues, always ready to solve a difficult problem. He was a real and true evangelist who exerted tremendous influence on his audience and who energized the Belgian DPE team with his energy and enthusiasm. David joined our Microsoft community two years ago in DPE. During this time he has received great recognition and admiration in the Belgian technical developer community. He was one of the visionaries behind our annual Developer & IT Pro Days. Technically savvy, he was one of the main drivers behind the successful introduction of Microsoft’s developer tools in the Belgian market, culminating in the tremendous launch of Visual Studio 2005. David also was one of our most influential bloggers. His last post dates from July 3. After this date he was optimistically caring for his health. He, sadly, lost the battle.
David leaves behind his wife Veerle and his daughter Fien.
My Opera web browser, normally the king of stability, crashed and completely screwed up my saved tabs, so I’m posting everything old right now, in order to set things right.
I love this video, which parodies Microsoft Paint as though it were somehow cool and modern:
My Opera web browser, normally the king of stability, crashed and completely screwed up my saved tabs, so I’m posting everything old right now, in order to set things right.
One Xbox 360 owner, the victim of six broken consoles, kept getting refurbished units that were of such low quality, they kept breaking before the typical overheating error could occur. When he got his latest console repaired, he wanted to get a new one, not a crappy refurbished unit. When tech support wouldn’t listen, he emailed Steve Ballmer (or Bill Gates, the article is terribly unclear) and got a shiny new 360 in the mail. See, sometimes that actually works!
My Opera web browser, normally the king of stability, crashed and completely screwed up my saved tabs, so I’m posting everything old right now, in order to set things right.
It’s been clear for a while that Peter Jackson’s Weta Digital studios are buddy-buddy with Microsoft, with the work on the Halo movie, Halo videogames, and the packaging of King Kong with 360 HD DVD drives. They’ve decided to make the partnership more official, with Weta announcing it will use Microsoft’s technology in movie, commercial and other productions.
“Last year, Microsoft showed us some new research in computer graphics that we thought would be a great addition to our toolkit,” said Joe Letteri, senior visual effects supervisor at Weta Digital. “We realised that by working directly with Microsoft Research, we could develop these ideas faster and spend more time on the creative effects.”
My Opera web browser, normally the king of stability, crashed and completely screwed up my saved tabs, so I’m posting everything old right now, in order to set things right.
Genii Software looked at the number of documents on the internet in the Office 2007 Open XML format and the competing Open Document Format and found that there are 162,700 ODF documents in Google and 1993 Open XML docs.
Of course, their methodology reveals a major flaw. Open XML is a seven month old format, while ODF has been around for years. They show 149,300 for ODF in May, 162,700 in August, while 664 for Open XML in May and 1993 in August. That means Open XML triples every three months, so…
May: 664
August: 1993
November: 6000
February 2008: 18,000
May 2008: 54,000
August 2008: 162,000
November 2008: 486,000
February 2009: 1.5 million
May 2009: 4.5 million
August 2009: 13.5 million
November 2009: 40 million
February 2010: 120 million
May 2010: 360 million
August 2010: over 1 billion
While ODF should go up less than 10% every three months. Yeah, those numbers look so terrible.
(via Slashdot)
My Opera web browser, normally the king of stability, crashed and completely screwed up my saved tabs, so I’m posting everything old right now, in order to set things right.
Halo: Uprising, a comic book miniseries connecting Halo 2 and Halo 3, has issue #1 out today. The comic is written by Brian Michael Bendis and drawn by Alex Maleev, the incredibly talented team that ran Daredevil for years, so whether you like Halo or not, it’s probably a great comic. Read an interview about the comic here.
My Opera web browser, normally the king of stability, crashed and completely screwed up my saved tabs, so I’m posting everything old right now, in order to set things right.
My Opera web browser, normally the king of stability, crashed and completely screwed up my saved tabs, so I’m posting everything old right now, in order to set things right.
Windows Live Messenger is now blocking users from receiving messages containing .info web addresses, in order to thwart spammers. They were already blocking files with a .pif extension and addresses with download.php and staff.php. Someone finally got a hand on the complete Messenger ban list, which you can see below:
My Opera web browser, normally the king of stability, crashed and completely screwed up my saved tabs, so I’m posting everything old right now, in order to set things right.
The difference is likely due to the tight hold Microsoft has over wireless on the 360. No company has been allowed to produce wireless 360 peripherals, and if Rock Band gets to, it looks like we’ll be paying a $20 tax.
Does anyone know how Gamefly handles games like this? Will I be able to rent Rock Band, peripherals and all?
My Opera web browser, normally the king of stability, crashed and completely screwed up my saved tabs, so I’m posting everything old right now, in order to set things right.
Wish a happy third birthday to Windows Live Spaces, celebrating three years in which it has become the biggest blogging service on the planet. Some stats from the blog:
Over the past 3 years, we have grown the number of visitors to Spaces from 1 visitor when we launched the Beta version in August 2004 to over 115 million monthly users worldwide
This month when one of you signed up for Spaces, you created the 100 millionth Windows Live space. This means that during the last 3 years, there have been over 100 million Windows Live spaces created for people to express themselves and share their thoughts, photos, and interests.
With the latest release, Spaces is now available to people in 55 countries and in 33 different languages. It is amazing to see that over the last 3 years, there have been as many spaces created in Turkey as in Australia, Germany, or Taiwan. Looking back three years, Spaces was only available in 1 country.
My first impressions of Spaces, back in 2004, were that “Out of the box, users can do more with Spaces than Blogger”, “new users will be thrilled”, “Spaces is more than enough for 95% of bloggers, while the other 5% can use Blogger and Typepad”, “Spaces has a good chance at actually winning”, “Maybe Google had better create a smarter and more versatile interface for Blogger before it realizes Microsoft has stolen all of its users”.
I don’t always toot my own horn, but I was 100% on the money. Spaces has been tearing up the blogging marketplace, and it forced Google to renovate blogger after Microsoft stole all their users.
