Category: Technology

As a journalist, I'm always interested in knowing where the "tipping point" is on a particular trend. In other words, when did people in a particular industry, such as those I interviewed for my segment in NBR’s “A Guide to Giving” series, start noticing that "the ballgame had changed" because of the use of the Internet? It appears that the 9-11 attacks on the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon played a key role in getting people used to the idea of charitable giving through the web. The Internet was already in wide use, of course, but the idea of using it to make donations was still a largely unfamiliar to the vast majority of Americans in 2001. In the rush for funds and relief supplies following the attacks, Americans - and the larger charities - came to accept the internet as a standard fundraising technique.

PC Magazine’s Lance Ulanoff called it Microsoft’s Secret Sauce when I talked with him today. He was referring to certain parts of the Windows Application Programming Interface which Microsoft had always kept secret from other application developers, so that their products would not work as well on Windows machines as software products designed by Microsoft. Today Microsoft published those protocols and promised to make still more public in the months ahead.

Is this the start of a new era of cooperation between Microsoft and the rest of the software industry ? As the cliché goes, only time will tell.

As for the European Commission, I doubt if this will satisfy Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes, who has made it clear that she believe Microsoft’s market share is simply too large and must be reduced. There’s no answer for that.

The Yahoo! directors have now turned down Microsoft’s $44.6 billion dollar offer for their company, saying it undervalues the company. It takes guts to do that when the bid represents a more than 60% premium over the price of Yahoo! stock before the offer was made. The betting is that Microsoft will sweeten the deal a bit and Yahoo! will come around. It’s hard to see how any other bid will be a match or any other business relationship will be as profitable and still get approval from regulators.

But the bettors may be guilty of a typical Wall Street crime, looking only at the numbers and ignoring the personalities involved. Yahoo! co-founder and CEO Jerry Yang doesn’t like Microsoft. It is hard to imagine him working for Microsoft. And you can say the same for many Yahoo! employees, who have been steeped in Yahoo!’s anti-Microsoft culture. Those employees represent one of Yahoo!’s major assets, and figuring out how to retain them and keep them innovated in the Microsoft culture would be one of the biggest challenges in any acquisition.

As far as the Stock Market is concerned, there’s no longer a question as to whether the U.S. economy is in a recession. And that presents a quandary for investors: with most stock sectors moving down, where is a relatively safe place to ride out the economic downturn?

The answer may be in a largely-ignored class of stocks: education-related companies. The statistics tell the story: total education spending in the U.S. is now close to $1 trillion -- more than any other service sector except healthcare. And like healthcare, education spending is largely immune to the ups-and-downs of the economy.

Of course, education is largely dependent on government funding. And if you’re a skeptic, you’re probably saying: “but isn’t there a risk that the new President -- or Congress -- could tighten up on the education purse-strings, in the interest of fiscal responsibility?”

It has been interesting to see all the viewer comments about our Future of Television Series. Thank you all.

First a note about the Hulu web site, a joint venture of NBC/Universal and News Corp. I said in last night’s report that NBC would be selling TV shows there. In fact, the site will be ad-supported, so viewers will not have to pay to view. The site is not yet open to the public.

Also for all those who had questions about the switch to digital TV coming February 17, 2009, I’m afraid answers are not always easy to come by. The switch directly impacts only those TV sets which receive an over-the-air broadcast signal. If you are wired to a cable provider, or a central antenna system, it will be up to your provider to decide if you have to do anything to continue receiving the signal. Most likely, you will not. Nor should you have to do anything if you receive a satellite signal. As one correspondent observed, there is a whole class of “low powered” television systems which may be affected in adverse ways. This is not getting much attention because so few people are involved.

Can you name the company which sold for more than one and half billion dollars after just three years in operation? Tune in tonight for the answer in part two of our series, 'The Future of Television."

It used to take lots of expensive equipment to make television, and skilled operators to make it work. Now, just like the computer industry when the PC arrived, the television industry must face a world in which anyone with a web cam or video generating cell phone can make TV.

It's called, "Democratization," which basically means everybody can do it. Tonight we'll look at this new world, with a particular focus on companies which have, and which may soon, benefit from this developing trend.

I have a beef about Google. The company preaches “openness” for all things involving the internet. But the company doesn’t practice what it preaches when it comes to communicating. The company has gotten better in the past year. It opened a Washington, DC office and there is a person I now know there who will respond to interview and information requests. But there has never been an interview and not much information.

Analysts tell me that large investors are wary of Google because it doesn’t share financial information as openly as other companies do. I find it ironic that a company that calls for “openness” is itself incredibly closed.

So…the boss says, “How about taking a look at television?” I figured, “Why not?” I watch television. This is a good excuse to watch some more.

Of course, he had something more complicated than that in mind. Thus began a multi-month project, the fruit of which you will see beginning tonight, as I begin a four part series of reports titled, “The Future of Television.” Our goal at Nightly Business Report is to give you the information you need for wise investing and money management. So our series will be devoted to indentifying the trends and the players, information you may be able to use to your advantage.

We’ll begin tonight with a look at the technology. When I was a kid, growing up in Chicago, we had five TV stations. One each affiliated with CBS, NBC, ABC and PBS and a fifth “independent”. TV watching meant the family gathering around the big black and white set in the living room, watching what the stations were offering when the stations wanted to offer it.

It’s not often I get to call a media relations contact for a major company and be the first to inform him of a major news event involving his client. That’s how closely Microsoft’s management held its decision to make its “unsolicited” offer for Yahoo!

It was fairly well known that Microsoft had been interested in such a deal for some time. And equally well known that some of Yahoo!’s most senior managers were cool on the idea.

What’s changed?

Now that we’ve looked at some great software and computer games in our Gifts and Gadgets series, I had an idea. Have you ever wanted to learn how to program a computer yourself, to make it do exactly what you want? There are lots of good tools out there to learn and some are very inexpensive. But Microsoft, which obviously has an interest in getting would-be developers to use its systems and tools, has made powerful versions of its development languages available to single users for free. You can’t beat that. Check out the link.

http://www.microsoft.com/express/default.aspx