As its leadership has changed, so, too, has Microsoft. But I am never going to stop being skeptical of Microsoft’s motives.

Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie may profess that the company’s top priorities are transparency, standards and interoperability. But regardless of these kinds of pronouncements, the Softies seem to believe that insisting their actions are altruistic and customer-motivated — even when they are really motivated by lawsuit threats and other, less-palatable reasons — will fool its constituencies.

This is why I’ll always remain a Microsoft skeptic

Sprint's recent troubles have made plenty of investors and subscribers uneasy, which has led to a number of acquisition-related rumors and highly speculative analysis. Here are three:

Sprint to spin-off Nextel

According to a Seeking Alpha report, Sprint Nextel has hired Morgan Stanley to implement board director Ralph Whitworth's plan to spin-off Nextel. Rumor has it the spin-off will be announced within the next two to four weeks. Most of Sprint's trouble can be traced back to the Nextel acquisition in the first place.

T-Mobile may acquire Sprint

Merrill Lynch analysts told the Kansas City Star today that Deutsche Telekom, owner of T-Mobile USA, might be considering a takeover of Sprint in an attempt to prevent a price war between the mobile carriers. Sprint's low share price and the weakness of the U.S. dollar both favor the European company, but Merrill Lynch said it is not privy to any inside information--it's just speculating.

Should Verizon buy Sprint?

Last week the Wall Street Journal's deals blog considered whether Verizon should acquire Sprint. The post brings up Verizon's stellar decision not to make a bid for Sprint back in 2004.

What do you think? Do any of these ring true?

Sprint's troubles inspire rumor mill

It had been hoped members would boost the supply of oil to help prices fall from their historically-high levels.

The price of a barrel of oil reached another record of almost $104 during trading on Monday in New York.

Oil ministers from Opec member nations are gathering in Vienna ahead of their meeting which starts on Wednesday.

"I don't think Opec would consider increasing production because then we would be increasing to meet a demand that doesn't exist," Opec President Chakib Khelil said

Damit... These people with their S.E.G's are going to kill us at the pump...
"I don't think Opec would consider increasing production because then we would be increasing to meet a demand that doesn't exist," my ass.

They are going to milk the USA for every dime, every time.... period.

*EOR (end of rant) *

Opec dashes oil supply rise hopes

With no news from regulators and a merger agreement set to expire this weekend, Sirius Satellite Radio and XM Satellite Radio have agreed to buy themselves a little more time.

"The companies have agreed not to exercise their rights to terminate the merger agreement until May 1," the companies said in a joint statement without commenting further.

The $4 billion all-stock merger is still waiting on approval from the Department of Justice and the Federal Communications Commission. The two agreed to merge in February 2007 and had set March 1, 2008 as a deadline.

The companies want to merge to cut expenses and turn profitable sooner than they might alone. Critics have said the merger would stifle competition by creating a satellite radio monopoly.

"satellite radio monopoly" sounds like a buch of who-ha to me.
Hmm what was there before, FM/AM Broadcasting... Which is sorta free...
I see no real harm it them getting together....

XM, Sirius extend merger agreement

Herman Lay's first business enterprise was selling Pepsi-Colas from a makeshift stand in his family's front yard in Greenville. He was 11 years old. He was successful, charging a nickel a bottle while the city baseball park across the street was charging a dime. Ironically, just 45 years later, he was selling Pepsi-Colas again, but this time as chairman of PepsiCo, Inc., a multibillion-dollar conglomerate that he helped create.

As a young man searching for a career during the Great Depression, he suffered some lean years, but no hard-luck lessons were lost on Lay. He finally found his niche in the snack foods industry and literally wrote his own success story, making his name and Lay's Potato Chips synonymous with snack foods throughout the South and later the world, and becoming one of the nation's most successful entrepreneurs.

As i much down on a bag of chips here is the bio of 1/2 of the 2 man team who started the snack food craze ... :)

Herman Warden Lay

First up was a brief revival of last year's hit musical "Oh God, my smartphone is dead" as RIM's Blackberry network bit the big one for a second time in less than a year, leaving millions of addicts — including a certain Leader of the Free World who shall remain nameless — without their beloved Crackberries. RIM — anybody else think they should rename it RIP? — is blaming it on a routine upgrade gone wrong, but we're thinking it's time to switch to Android, 'cause everyone knows crack is wack.

Speaking of all things wack, the UK is planning an ISP-level game of Wack-A-Mole with file-sharers under a new proposal that would require ISPs to disconnect users who access pirated materials under a three-strikes-you're-out system. The ISPs say the plan just isn't cricket, as cutting off pirates could cost them billions of pounds in lost revenues. Meanwhile, New York is moving to cut off registered sex offenders from sites like MySpace and Facebook, which frequently act as an online smorgasbord for predators. The plan — which would require registered offenders to hand over their screen-names to the government so they can be blocked by social networks — seems a bit naïve given the technical loopholes available online, but if passed would be the first of its kind.

While we're on the subject of government regulation, Intel's German offices felt the sting of regulation yesterday as EU investigators raided several locations and and collected evidence for the Commission's ongoing anti-trust probe. Intel says it's "cooperating," but we suspect that means "hiding the evidence while they climb the stairs." Comcast, meanwhile, has , admitting openly to the practice in their response to the FCC's probe, despite several months spent denying the practice to everyone from customers to Congress. Here's hoping they get what they deserve.

Last but not least, it's your daily dose of Yahoo news, with the shocking announcement that the stock-picker in charge of the investment fund that owns the second-largest share of Yahoo wants Microsoft to offer more money. Gasp — how could we not have seen that coming, a stockbroker wanting to sell high? Meanwhile, Yahoo finally scored one on their arch-competitor, convincing T-Mobile to drop Google for Yahoo as fast asStarbucks dropped T-Mobile for AT&T. The day wasn't a total bust for the number-one searcher, though, as Nokia announced they still have love for Big Daddy G.

That's about all the wack we can take, so we're out.

Crackberries Go Wacked, Downloaders Get Smacked, and Intel's Been Jacked

We all thought it was time to party, that the enemy was finally vanquished, that it was time for Champagne and cigars. We learned our lesson yesterday afternoon, though, when SCO smacked us all in the face with a hundred million dollars.

That's right, SCO suddenly has deep pockets, courtesy of their friend Stephen Norris, the uber-finance geek. Norris and his private equity firm — Stephen Norris Capital Partners, LLC — have decided to buy a stake in SCO, though the exact amount won't be clear until the Utah courts decide how much SCO has to pay IBM and Novell. What is clear is that they suddenly have a $95 million line-of-credit to pursue all the litigation their cold, black hearts desire. Others have pointed out that these guys are the biggest, baddest, beat-the-crap-out-of-anyone-in-their-way-ist, and won't have a moment's pause about coming after everyone in the Linux world, from IBM and Novell right down to us, the everyday users.

As the ever-vigilant White Knights over at Groklaw point out, there's still some hope — the all-powerful Bankruptcy court can quash them with the stroke of a pen, and the European Commission not to mention the SEC may well have a thing or two to say — but the outlook certainly isn't as rosy as it was on Wednesday.

Lord have mercy..

I think i am going to vomit...

SCO is Back, and This Time It's Personal | Linux Journal

For several years, marketers have been transfixed by the possibilities of influencing and engaging large audiences via the Internet. While it's true that the use of Internet marketing has skyrocketed, it still remains (for the most part) a one-way pipe. Email marketing, paid search, banner advertising and other online derivatives of one-way, offline techniques lead the way.

New research by KnowledgeStorm and Universal McCann identifies that this may be changing. This report, the second in a series of studies looking at the impact emerging online applications have on B2B technology marketing, finds that blogs and Real Simple Syndication (RSS) are catching on more quickly than previously thought. This year, for the first time, blogs have joined top-rated communication tactics such as free-trial demos, Webcasts, and white papers as successful means for attracting high-quality technology prospects, according to MarketingSherpa's 2006 Business Technology Marketing Benchmark Guide.

The rising importance of blogs - and to a lesser extent RSS - cannot be understated, and is significant because these technologies are inherently bi-directional. They represent the core and spirit of the Web 2.0 ethos whereby millions of daily peer-to-peer conversations and dialogs occur throughout the Web. Now, instead of these conversations simply pertaining to politics or world events, they are also coalescing around topics such as CRM software and network intrusion detection and other B2B technology topics. Indeed, this report finds that the blogosphere is making inronull

How Blogs & Real Simple Syndication (RSS) Impact B2B Technology Purchase Decisions

BusinessWeek apparently doesn't need anyone to help it boost its Web traffic.

According to a blog post on Gawker, BusinessWeek not only asks people not to link to its site, it specifically directs them to its user agreement that prohibits the practice of "deep linking."

Gawker points to the example of SmugMug CEO Don MacAskill, who writes in his blog that after being interviewed for a feature story in BusinessWeek, he was expressly told not to link to the story. "Yes, that's right, an ad-driven publication doesn't want us to drive traffic to them," he says in his blog. In addition, he was urged to review the company's user agreement.

According to the user agreement on BusinessWeek's Web site, a user may not:

"use or attempt to use any 'deep-link,' 'scraper,' 'robot,' 'bot,' 'spider,' 'data mining,' 'computer code' or any other automated device, program, tool, algorithm, process or methodology or manual process having similar processes or functionality, to access, acquire, copy, or monitor any portion of BW.com, any data or content found on or accessed through BW.com, or any other BW.com information without prior express written consent of BW."

While some online publications have a policy on deep linking, it's pretty unusual to enforce it. Most sites obviously consider it a boon for page views and look on it favorably, as long as the content is credited to the correct source.

MacAskill speculates that BusinessWeek's stance is the result of corporate red tape, and not something that would be embraced by its reporters and editors. "To spend all of this time and energy on their articles, only to have the crazy business people make it impossible for people to read their work, must be incredibly trying," he says in his blog.

hmm...

'BusinessWeek': Don't link to us

Sprint Nextel Corp (S.N: Quote, Profile, Research), the third largest U.S. mobile service, said it sued four service providers for infringement of its Voice over Packet (VoP) patents and sought injunction and monetary damages.

The company alleges that each of the four companies infringed at least 6 VoP patents by selling services that utilize Sprint's patents.

The lawsuits are against NuVox Communications Inc, Broadvox Holdings LLC, Big River Telephone Co and Paetec Communications Inc, Sprint Nextel said in a statement.

(Reporting by Neetha Mahadevan in Bangalore; Editing by Gopakumar Warrier)null

can someone help me find out what these patents are? I cant seem to find any info...

Sprint Nextel files patent suits against 4 firms