I suspect that if the quality of Microsoft’s products improved, we’d overlook many of its character flaws. I’m not talking about stability, in which area Microsoft has significantly improved. I’m talking aesthetics. Superior design covers a multitude of sins at Apple. At Microsoft, inferior design accentuates its multitude of sins (Monopoly past, Millennium, Blue Screen of Death, etc.).

commentary

Why does Apple get a free pass? Because Apple makes exceptional hardware and software that is consistently beautiful. Period. It’s lock-in, but lock-in never looked so good….

Microsoft makes products that people have to use. Apple makes products that people want to use. That’s why we love Apple and deride Microsoft. It’s as simple as that.

And yet many of us, myself included, regularly deride Microsoft, not Apple, for being proprietary and greedy.

Transmeta–Valued at $11 billion in an overhyped IPO, it was all downhill from there for this low-power microprocessor company. Then it cut a licensing deal with Intel last year. Still, last quarter’s revenues were 44 thousand–that’s right, thousand–dollars.

Why bother looking at this stuff? Well, it’s fun–at least for me it is–and it’s also instructive; we can always learn from others’ mistakes. After all, companies don’t go bad, executives who run them and boards that oversee them are always responsible.

The great corporate graveyard is filled with hundreds, maybe thousands, of technology companies that managed to go public and then fizzled. Still, most of them weren’t going anywhere and never should have gone public to begin with.

Ten irrelevant technology companies

Zilog–Zilog is the poster child for great, famous companies now doomed to obscurity. Revenues have been continuously declining and the company’s been losing money for as far back as I can remember. Taking it private, taking it public again, management changes, restructurings, nothing has worked.

MIPS–Spun off from Silicon Graphics 10 years ago, this licensor of embedded processor technology is a real enigma. According to the company’s Web site, its technology is everywhere. Still, there’s no consistent profitability or growth. Revenues topped out at just $89 million back in 2000.

Vitesse–This 24-year old communications chip company was once valued at $20 billion. Now, thanks to the dot.com bust, stock options backdating and accounting scandals, and general mismanagement, Vitesse is falling apart at the seams and running out of cash.

Conexant–Rockwell didn’t just saddle its chip spinoff with a bad name. In its ten years of existence this communications chip company has lost an aggregate $4.7 billion on sales of $8.2 billion. Amazingly, its market cap was once $60 billion!

One more thing: this may raise a few eyebrows, but here are a few companies that I think are well on their way to making the list if they don’t watch it: Atmel, National Semiconductor, On Semiconductor, Pixelworks, Silicon Image, Sun Microsystems, and Virage Logic. Mark my words.

hi/fn–With a market cap of $2 billion during the tech bubble, this data security company was going places. Well, not exactly. The company hasn’t been in the black and annual sales have been stuck in the $40 million range since 2000. Dumb name, too.

While this process is admittedly subjective, it is based on metrics, primarily chronic revenue decline or stagnation, the more red ink the better.

Sigmatel–Can you say “flash in the pan”? Sales rocketed from $30 million to over $300 million in three years, then fell off a cliff the following year while swinging to a $109 million loss. Just announced a sale to Freescale for a paltry $110 million.

Cirrus Logic–There was a time when this company’s graphics chips and storage controllers were everywhere. That was a long time ago. Annual sales have declined from their peak at $1.1 billion in 1996 to $183 million last year. That said, Cirrus is profitable. Irrelevant, but profitable.

Depressing, isn’t it?

Where do these companies go from here? They’ll either get swooped up for bargain-basement prices, like Sigmatel, or die an agonizingly slow death. There’s always a slim possibility of a turnaround, but that’ll require at least a management and board shakeup. Don’t hold your breath.

But venture capitalists funded them, investment banks underwrote them, analysts wrote glowing reports about them, and you and I bought into it, gullible lemmings that we are. Sorry for being such a negatron; that’s just the way it is.

Silicon Graphics–Once a $3.6 billion computer powerhouse, last year’s sales were down to $341 million and dropping precipitously. It’s also been bleeding like a stuck pig for nine of the last ten years. One foot in the grave …

Anyway, what’s different about these 10 companies is that they were once important, maybe even exciting. And now, for one reason or another, they’re fading slowly and tediously into obscurity. Like people, most companies go out, not with a bang, but with a whimper.

The House and Senate versions of the surveillance bill–called the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Amendments Act–need to be reconciled. But politics is in the air (I know, you’re shocked, shocked.)

In his stump appearances (as well as during his Thursday press conference), the president argues that the old FISA law is out of date and fails to allow government security arms to quickly track foreign terrorists on foreign soil “quickly and effectively.”

(Credit:
White House)

Here are the relevant excerpts:

Bush made it seem that FISA requests routinely get held up by recalcitrant, fuddy-duddy judges. But if the Justice Department fails to get its way, it can always appeal to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. (They needed to go that far just once in the history of the law.) Bottom line: The Feds nearly always get what they want. So why is Bush making a big megilla out of this? Hmm, rumor has it there’s a big election in the offing.

As such, he contends the nation is in danger from terror attacks now that the temporary surveillance law has expired. If you didn’t catch the president’s morning press conference, here’s a link to the text play-by-play.

Hardly a week goes by without President Bush urging Congress to pass a law to facilitate domestic federal eavesdropping on suspected terrorists’ phone calls and e-mails.

“I guess you could be relaxed about all this if you didn’t think there was a true threat to the country. I know there’s a threat to the country. And the American people expect our Congress to give the professionals the tools they need to listen to foreigners who may be calling into the United States with information that could cause us great harm.”

“I wouldn’t put it that way, if I were you, in public. Well, you’ve been long been long enough to–anyway, yes, I– look, there’s–people who analyze the program fully understand that America’s civil liberties are well protected. There is a constant check to make sure that our civil liberties of our citizens aren’t–you know, are treated with respect. And that’s what I want, and that’s what most–all Americans want…”

The controversy centers on whether to extend legal immunity to telecommunications firms that carried out Uncle Sam’s bidding and wiretapped U.S. phone and computer lines without first getting court permission. The Senate says yes, while the House says no.

“The law expired; the threat to America has not expired. Congress understood last year that FISA did not give our intelligence professionals the tools they needed to keep us safe. The Senate understands that the FISA–old FISA didn’t give us the tools needed to protect America. The bipartisan bill it passed provides those tools our intelligence professionals need. Yet the House’s failure to pass this law raises the risk of reopening a gap in our intelligence gathering, and that is dangerous.”

Asked later if Americans are essentially being told that when it comes to their privacy, the answer was “to suck it up,” Bush responded:

George Bush

The president didn’t bother getting into the nitty-gritty. I can understand that. FISA created a secret court, which since 1978 has been able to grant wiretapping orders upon request. What’s more, during emergencies, FISA–the “old FISA, I should add–lets the attorney general to conduct wiretaps without court approval.

Even though it has plans to release a competing technology, Microsoft has agreed to license Adobe’s Flash Lite technology for its Windows Mobile operating system and browser.

The two companies early on Monday announced that Microsoft has signed a license to use Flash Lite and Reader LE in future Windows Mobile handsets as plug-ins for Internet Explorer Mobile. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, such as what the companies plan to do when Microsoft releases Silverlight for Mobile, a competing technology.

Flash Lite is a stripped-down version of the ubiquitous Flash video player that allows mobile handsets to view Web sites created with the Flash technology. Think of Flash Lite as a slightly older version of Flash; the most current version of Flash Lite can’t properly display Web sites created with the newest version of Flash, Flash 9, but it works with sites created using older versions of the technology.

As smartphones become more and more common, people are starting to get fed up with the basic Web surfing experience offered by many phones. They want something that looks more like a PC experience, with rich graphics and video. But that’s hard to duplicate on a device with a smaller screen, less memory, a slower processor, and battery life requirements.

Enter Flash Lite. “Past technologies have failed trying to get into mobile by cramming a desktop experience into a mobile device,” said Anup Murarka, director of technical marketing for mobile and devices at Adobe. “The technology has to bend to the use cases, rather than the use cases bending to the technology.”

Microsoft’s Derek Snyder agreed. “One of the hallmark experiences on any smartphone is the Web browsing experience,” said Snyder, a product manager with Microsoft’s mobile-communications business. Strengthening that experience, as well as adding support for PDF documents through the Reader LE license, was the motivation for Microsoft to make the deal, he said.

Flash Lite has several limitations compared with regular Flash, beyond the inability to support much of Flash 9. Apple CEO Steve Jobs rather emphatically declared his disdain for Flash Lite at Apple’s annual shareholder meeting, saying Flash Lite was “not capable of being used with the Web.” Murarka declined to comment specifically on Jobs’ put-down, but noted that Flash Lite ships on 500 million mobile devices.

He did acknowledge that developers using Adobe’s Flex tools can’t build Flash Lite Web pages, although the newer CS3 suite of tools does support Flash Lite.

But one huge advantage of Flash Lite is that it’s currently available for mobile devices. Microsoft’s Silverlight for Mobile is not.

Silverlight is Microsoft’s attempt to rein in on Adobe’s position in the Web development market with Flash. Microsoft is fighting an uphill battle, though, in trying to get Web developers to build sites using its technology as opposed to Adobe’s.

Earlier this month Microsoft said it wouldn’t have a mobile version of Silverlight out until later this year. A technical preview is expected to arrive in the second quarter, but no other details have been released. Snyder declined to elaborate on the time frame for a production version of Silverlight for Mobile.

With Microsoft’s Windows Mobile team now having to meet a surge in demand for Web-friendly mobile phones, led by the iPhone, licensing Flash Lite makes sense as a “for now” solution, at least until the company’s own dog food is ready. The
iPhone has been able to capture mobile Web surfers without any support for Flash technologies, something that other mobile devices running IE Mobile or Opera’s
mobile browser will likely try to exploit later this year.

Eventually, Microsoft expects to support both Flash Lite and Silverlight on its Windows Mobile handsets. “Flash is, for a lot of people, something they’ve already invested in,” Snyder said. Having support for the incumbent while it tries to get Web developers on the Silverlight team makes sense; “it’s good to have both,” he said.

Lenovo’s much-anticipated competitor to the MacBook Air finally arrived in our office this morning. The skinny ultraportable laptop may look a bit square–it is a ThinkPad, after all–but its 13.3-inch screen, full-size keyboard, and built-in DVD burner earned admiring glances from multiple passersby. We’re busy at work on the review, but in between benchmark runs this afternoon, we took some photos of this, the sleekest ThinkPad yet. Take a spin through our ThinkPad X300 slide show, and keep an eye on the ThinkPad X300 product page for the complete review and CNET Editors Rating.

The sticker that appears on Blu-ray discs.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

Sure, I and the rest of CNET’s home-theater editors think the
PlayStation 3 is the only Blu-ray player really worth buying today. But no matter how we feel, it’s easy to spot why other machines have an uphill battle trying to unseat the PS3 from its Blu-ray throne: Sony’s sticking it to the competition, literally.

Take a closer look at all those stickers on the front of all those Blu-ray discs in your local Best Buy and you’ll see what I mean. There’s the Blu-ray disc headline and then the fine print message, “For use only with Blu-ray disc players, Blu-ray disc computer drives and PLAYSTATION 3 game consoles.” Glance quickly at the sticker and all you see is Blu-ray Disc and PlayStation 3.

I asked Sony PlayStation reps about it the other day and, while they didn’t have any comment, they just smiled knowingly and said, “Yeah, we like that.”

We’re not sure how long the sticker deal is in effect but it seems that as long as it is, the PS3 is going to have a not-so-subliminal marketing edge over other Blu-ray players. How long do you think it will take for some other player to top the PS3 in terms of Blu-ray player sales? I think we’re looking at a couple of years, even if the price for standalone players dips under $200 or less. After all, the PS3 will come down in price, too.

The software maker included Windows Photo Gallery, Windows Mail, and Windows Movie Maker as part of Vista, but later chose to offer separate downloadable Windows Live programs that essentially replaced those components with versions that could connect to online services from Microsoft and others.

Microsoft told CNET News late Monday that it has decided to remove those features entirely from Windows 7 and instead offer only the service-connected Windows Live versions as optional free downloads. Earlier on Monday, Microsoft had declined to say how it was handling things.

In a follow-up interview on Monday, Windows Live general manager Brian Hall said Microsoft made the decision to remove the tools from Windows for several reasons, including a desire to issue new operating system releases more quickly than it has in the past. The move also removes the confusion of offering and supporting two different programs that perform essentially similar functions.

“It makes it much cleaner,” Hall said.

Lastly, he said, making the Windows Live tools completely separate from the operating system paves the way for Microsoft to work selectively with specific partners.

“We can do things with specific partners to enable really great experiences that might be hard in Windows,” Hall said.

Antitrust rules make it hard for Microsoft to tie operating system features to specific services.

Microsoft last week rolled out the latest “Wave 3″ releases of its Windows Live programs, adding Windows Live Movie Maker to the mix of programs, which includes Windows Live Photo Gallery and Windows Live Mail as well as blogging tool Windows Live Writer and instant messaging program Windows Live Messenger. While Windows XP and earlier releases had an instant messaging program built in, Microsoft took out that feature in Windows Vista.

Hall said it was too soon to say if the “Wave 4″ release would precede Windows 7 or be coincident to it. Microsoft has said it will have Windows 7 on the market by January 2010, while CEO Steve Ballmer has said he is pushing for a release next year.

“We’ll do Wave 3 and then we’ll figure it out,” Hall said.

It remains to be seen just how Microsoft will distribute the Windows Live programs in conjunction with Windows 7-based PCs. Presumably the company could strike deals with computer makers or retailers to include the software, or links to download it.

Click here for more news on Windows 7.

What makes the service particularly useful compared with Web sites such as Craigslist or Monster is that information about each company is a mandatory aspect of posting, making it a partial directory for all things Web 2.0. It’s also completely free to post and apply to jobs, and any job that’s been posted will respawn each month instead of expiring if no one ends up biting.

To help aid in the employment hunt, prospective job seekers have a variety of tools at their disposal, including built in maps of where each company is, along with a specially crafted search tool that separates jobs by various Web disciplines. Job posters have a little more power with a special in-box for resumes and tools to post and keep track of positions in a company that has multiple branches. They can also customize each job listing with a special area on the sidebar for leaving personal notes about the position.

Jowba is a new and pretty svelte looking job classifieds service. It’s been designed specifically to help people find and post jobs for many of the companies we blog about here on Webware. Anyone who reads this blog regularly knows I’m a sucker for well designed Web sites, and Jowba is no exception–it’s got both form and function going for it.

See also: Personforce, VentureLoop, and JobCoin (review).

Even Justin.tv is hiring, and now you can see using Jowba, a new job classifieds service for start-ups.

[via TheNextWeb]

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

Music videos from Universal Music Group’s artists are now available on social music site Last.fm, the companies announced Tuesday.

This post was updated to clarify the size of Imeem compared to Last.fm.

However, the Universal Music announcement comes just a week after Warner Music Group, another major label, pulled its catalog from Last.fm’s music service. CBS Interactive, which acquired Last.fm last year, said that a new contract is under negotiation.

“We want to offer a video library that rivals our unparalleled music catalog, as we work towards Last.fm becoming the only place you need to go to for all music-related content,” co-founder Martin Stiksel said in a statement, “and this deal marks the first step towards that goal.” Rival Imeem, a start-up that focuses more on playlist creation than music discovery and which pulls in either comparable or greater traffic than Last.fm depending on which metrics source is used, has also been inking video deals, and the far bigger MySpace offers music videos on its MySpaceTV player.

It’s the first time Last.fm is bringing music videos to its site, which began offering original video programming last month.

That will make ad-supported videos from artists like the Killers, Jay-Z, Snow Patrol, and Amy Winehouse available on Last.fm, which already had a partnership to stream Universal’s music catalog.

Clarice, who was interested in putting together a high-caliber entry for the contest, solicited her mother’s help. Falcao said she was willing, so long as her daughter and the other cast member–a friend and former boyfriend of Clarice’s–participated in the creative process. After getting feedback from the young actors on their visions for the piece, Falcao wrote a script in a day, while Clarice wrote and recorded an English language song to go with it.

But Falcao is totally new to making films specifically for the Web, as she did with Lacos (Ties), the six-minute short that not only made her the winner of YouTube’s Project Direct contest, it landed her a nine-day stay here at the Sundance Film Festival. Her expenses are being paid by Hewlett-Packard, which sponsored the contest. In addition to the trip, she’ll get the opportunity to meet with Fox Searchlight Pictures production executives.

It was Falcao’s 18-year-old daughter, Clarice, an actress, songwriter, singer, and YouTube aficionado, who first learned about contest. Project Direct is a followup to YouTube’s similar competitions in the music and comedy realms, said YouTube spokeswoman Jennifer Nielsen.

“This moved me and affected me so much,” Falcao said through Braga, adding that she’s now working on a film that relates to the way people use the Internet and is also planning other Web-based projects.

Missing from Sundance, sadly, is Clarice, who couldn’t get a visa in the month or so between when the contest results were announced and when Sundance began on Thursday.

And it helps residents of Brazil, one of Latin America’s leaders in Internet use, feel less isolated from the rest of the world, she said. As for YouTube, it started off only popular among youth in Brazil. Now, however, Falcao’s husband, a film director who is almost 50 years old, is hooked. So is her 90-year-old uncle. “His life is YouTube,” she said, adding that every day her uncle sends her a link to view.

A professional author and screenwriter in her native Brazil, she’s contributed to some 15 scripts, including A Maquina (The Machine), which screened at film festivals internationally, and Ano em Que Meus Pais Sa?ram de F?rias, O (The Year My Parents Went on Vacation), which Brazil’s Ministry of Culture submitted for the 2007 Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film.

PARK CITY, Utah–Adriana Falcao, the winner of a recent YouTube film competition, is no stranger to the film industry.

Adriana Falcao readies for a night on the town on Friday night on Main Street in Park City, Utah, amid the Sundance Film Festival mania.

Project Direct was limited to filmmakers in Brazil, Canada, France, Italy, Spain, the U.K., and the U.S., for legal and other reasons, and entries had to be films created specifically for the contest. Judges included Juno director Jason Reitman and others from Fox Searchlight.

Never in her life did she think she’d end up at the Sundance Film Festival, said Falcao, who spoke through interpreter and friend Joana Braga, who’s also involved in the Brazilian film industry. Unlike other film festivals, Sundance, she said, is considered more on the cutting edge of new media.

“The whole thing cost $500 and took three days.” And it was quite a family effort. Falcao’s 15-year-old daughter handled the very modest wardrobe.

(Credit:
Michelle Meyers/CNET News.com)

Collegue Flavia Lacerda filmed the picture in one day, and they spent one day editing.