Microsoft participated in the Miracle on 1st Street Toy Giveaway, handing out toys to 8,000 inner-city youths in East Los Angeles. Also on hand were governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and actor Tom Arnold, with a number of volunteers coming from Microsoft to help distribute the many, many toys to the many happy kids.
Microsoft founder Paul Allen, no longer with the company but mega-rich and majority shareholder of Charter Communications, has filed with the FCC to bid in the 700 MHz wireless spectrum auction, taking place in a month. Allen will be competing with lots of major telecom and other corporation, including Google and Verizon.
It’s December, and that means its prediction season. Mary Jo Foley usually knows just that much more than the rest, so be sure to check her predictions out. They include Fiji, the long (long, long, long) awaited update to Vista Media Center, which we’ll hopefully see at CES next month and get in the second half of next year, iPhone ActiveSync support, Office 14, Zune phones, and more.
Of her 2007 predictions, 1, 3 and 5 were right, 2 and 4 were wrong (Visual Studio was named 2008, but shipped last month). Not bad, and plenty accurate enough.
The NPD’s sales figures for November reveal Nintendo continuing to sell more consoles than everyone, but that consumers are spending more money on Xbox than Wii. Nintendo sold 981,000 consoles, compared to Xbox 360, which moved 770,000 units, or Sony’s PlayStation 3 and its 466,000. Microsoft is claiming an overall victory, with $763 million in total revenue, compared to $587 million for Wii and $364 for PS3.
What’s more important, installed base or money? In the long run, installed base might matter more, but in the larger picture, money is all that is going to matter. Microsoft’s console is where the money is going, Microsoft’s products are profitting, and that matters for a lot.
Something really dissapointing for Sony: At current, the PS3 is selling at a trend worse than the one by the Gamecube. If Sony can’t even outsell the Cube, it can’t compete this generation, period.
Nielsen released stats on the top social networking websites, and Microsoft’s Live Spaces moved up one spot over the last year, passing the declining AOL Hometown to take fourth place. Live Spaces’ growth was small, a respectable 8%, more than MySpace’s 7% but far below the 89% of Facebook or 245% of LinkedIn. According to these stats, Live Spaces has 9.5 million unique visitors, up 700,000.
A seperate chart shows the top blog sites. If Live Spaces is classified as a blog site and not a social network (it shouldn’t and isn’t), it would be in fourth place as well.
Microsoft has decided to call it quits, selling the entire company to whoever is interested in winning the eBay auction. The starting bid for the company is going to be one million dollars when the auction begins later today. That price seems a bit low, unless you consider that the company for sale is Microsoft Lda., a Portugese company that owns the rights to the name Microsoft in Portugal, rights that have been denied Microsoft for the last 17 years (Microsoft goes by MSFT in that country).
Should Microsoft buy it? Microsoft has wanted its own name in Portugal for almost two decades, and lost that right under the law. This is a chance to rectify that and get their name back. Microsoft should buy it unless the price is too high, or unless it thinks the eventual buyer will lose the legal right to use the name purely for squatting purposes. If they don’t buy it now, they’ll probably want to buy it for even more from the winner of the auction some time down the road.
(via Digg)
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