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As Microsoft’s earnings report approaches next week, here are some brief notes on the results reported this week by other industry players.
Google Inc. on Thursday posted a 92 percent jump in quarterly profit and revenue near the top end of expectations as the company tightened its grip on the Web search market, sending its shares up 6.7 percent.
Rob Hof says that’s “a whole bunch more YouTubes.” Continuing:
“It was a clean beat quarter,” said Tim Boyd, an analyst with Caris & Co. “These guys just continue to kill it. The stock should be going up from here. The number one question is what can (they) do with YouTube and how quickly it can have an impact.”
More details here including the fact that 40% of revenues come from non-Google owned sites. Maybe Microsoft will rethink their disdain for 3rd party publishers.
Apple Computer Inc. shares climbed almost 6 percent Thursday after beating Wall Street’s profit expectations for its fourth quarter on strong sales of its iPod and Macintosh computers.
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After the markets closed Wednesday, Apple said it shipped 8.7 million iPods, up 35 percent from the year-ago period. A good back-to-school season also helped Apple ship a record 1.6 million computers, up 30 percent from a year earlier, breaking its previous record of 1.38 million units in the first fiscal quarter of 2000.
The sizzling sales put Apple’s fiscal 2006 revenue at a record $19.3 billion, up from its previous all-time high of $13.9 billion last year.
Paul Thurrott notes that despite growing faster than the overall PC market, Apple’s share is still less than 3%. Regardless, you have to give Apple credit for successfully negotiating a processor architecture change.
Yahoo, the world’s largest portal, said yesterday that its profit fell sharply in the third quarter and that growth would continue to slow for two main business lines — graphic display advertising and advertising on Web searches.
The company’s chief executive, Terry S. Semel, was unusually contrite yesterday in a conference call with investors.
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Search revenue, he said, would substantially increase when Yahoo completed a long-delayed computer system called Project Panama, which will use a new way to determine how ads are placed on search result pages.
Mr. Semel announced that the first customers had started using the system. But only after all of the company’s search advertisers have converted to the new system, sometime after the end of the year, will Yahoo introduce the new auction method, which is the part of the system meant to improve revenue.
Aside from the tardy Panama, Yahoo has an antique reliance on banner ads which have been under pricing pressure.
Others:
Microsoft to buy eBay? This one has been around for a while, but yesterday traders looking for any light at the end of the eBay tunnel drove up shares over 5% based on this and other wishful thinking.
Why the PlayStation 3 Will Bankrupt Sony. Interesting assessment of the financial hurdles Sony will face in subsidizing the pricey PlayStation 3, although the suggestion that Sony may sell their videogame division to Microsoft seems a bit farfetched.
These corporate takeover rumors are a little remote, but here’s one closer to home – Microsoft May Use Incentives to Tempt Users to ‘Soapbox’. Rewarding frequent users at social networking sites seems to be the latest Web 2.0 thing. I guess it helps to break the ice.
Uh-Oh – Microsoft antivirus software gets the jump on Windows zero days:
Microsoft Corp’s antivirus software knows about in-the-wild zero-day attacks against Windows products before the company has officially acknowledged they exist.
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It’s an interesting predicament for Microsoft, which will often find itself in the position of wearing both the “vendor” and sometimes the “discoverer” hats when trying to play by the responsible disclosure rulebook.Commercial vulnerability researchers have generally agreed not to release full information about security holes until a patch is available, on the basis that the information would also be useful to would-be attackers.
One time that agreement breaks down is when the attackers already know about the vulnerability and are actively exploiting it. In this case, discoverers will often release more information, to help users protect themselves while waiting for a patch.
In this case, it appears that Microsoft knew about the zero-day attacks, but had not yet disclosed that fact.
Then there is this Neelie Kroes bait – Symantec accuses Microsoft of withholding Vista security APIs:
Symantec has partnerships with equipment manufacturers Dell, Fujitsu, HP, IBM, Sony and Toshiba, among others. The antivirus vendor is worried that Microsoft will hand over the APIs so late that Symantec won’t be able to make its antivirus software compatible with Vista in time.
“Microsoft will provide information about two days before the October shipment date, and say “We’ve given you the APIs”. Now we’re good, but we’re not good enough [to integrate Norton with Defender] in that time,” said a Symantec spokesperson.
Speaking of Neelie Kroes, she apparently spotted another reporter:
The European Commission’s Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes told a Dutch newspaper this week that she was pressured by the United States government to go easy on Microsoft. In the article, she criticized government officials for interfering in an EU matter.
Representatives have confirmed that Kroes was annoyed by the U.S. government’s attempts to intervene, although she wouldn’t say it herself. “In my work, I cannot have a preference,” she told the Financieele Dagblad. “I have, however, a personal opinion, but that is for Saturday night.”
Stunned by the thought of Neelie Kroes as a party animal, I’ll only observe that this is old news and wonder why she thinks anyone would mistake her for an impartial arbiter after all her grandstanding for the press. Maybe the EU could get her predecessor Mario Monti back and return a little professionalism to the office of Competition Commissioner?
And while we’re talking about software that won’t work on Vista, Mary Jo Foley points to an unofficial application compatibility list for Vista. It’s not bad at all, but not comprehensive at this point either.
As for Vista itself, Robert McLaws wonders What’s the deal with all these analysts? His objection is to all the various analyst theories that Vista won’t be ready in November in the USA at least.
Finally, Ed Bott spanks Microsoft’s Windows Genuine Advantage program again in Microsoft admits WGA failures “coming up more commonly now:”
Scrolling through the posts on Microsoft’s official WGA Validation Problems forum is like reading accident reports from a multiple-car pileup on Interstate 5. Many of the victims are completely innocent and have no idea what hit them, and cleaning up the mess can be a nightmare.
Maybe they can get a new product key by posting frequently on MSN Soapbox?
Microsoft’s Windows Live Expo “classified ads with a social networking twist” service was just launched in July, and already there’s an update featuring PayPal payments, improved job listings, new featured advertisments, and more. Team Expo announces the changes at the Windows Live Expo weblog:
We are delighted to announce a new update to the Windows Live Expo service which launched today!
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As part of this update we wanted to highlight the following new features:Integrated payment service: Paypal’s 150 million registered users can now easily reference their account in order to complete secure person-to-person transactions on Windows Live Expo.
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New high quality job listings: Expo now allows users to search and browse thousands of local and national job listings which are supplied by our partner CareerBuilder.
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Featured ads: The new featured ads area (provided by AdMission) allows you to generate a lot more interest in your listing by offering a fun, rich media experience that highlights your classified listing.
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Smarter search results.
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Tighter Live Messenger integration.
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Apart from the features above, we also focused on performance improvements and increasing our ranking in search engines so that your listings have a better chance of being found on the popular search engines.
Craigslist staked out this space first and Google is there too with Google Base (and Payments), so without the traffic stats it’s hard to judge how a big a threat Expo is. However, eBay has got to be nervous even if they are taking a cut via PayPal. As for the traditional newspapers with their classified ads cash cow, they have already been taking their lumps.
The eyeball auction continues apace as Yahoo signs up Acer:
Yahoo Inc. has signed a multiyear distribution deal to feature its Internet search services on all personal computers from Taiwan’s Acer Inc., the world’s No. 4-ranked computer notebook maker, the companies said on Wednesday.
Acer, which is the top supplier of PC notebooks in Europe and the third-ranked manufacturer in Asia, plans to feature Yahoo as the default way users search on the Microsoft Internet Explorer browser.
The deal, described as a strategic partnership by officials from both companies — with further ties to come — calls for Acer to distribute a co-branded Web browser toolbar and PC start page with Yahoo as the default search service.
Financial terms were not disclosed.
Meanwhile, Jupiter Research’s Joe Wilcox says, “Now Microsoft can worry,” since Google has done a deal with software vendor Intuit that has more meat in it:
Intuit and Google are making a big play for small businesses.
When QuickBooks 2007 hits the shelves later this fall, buyers will also get the Google Desktop, easy access to Google AdWords, and the ability to embed their product listings and physical locations on Google Base and Google Maps, respectively.
While Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Intuit CEO Steve Bennett positioned this as a pairing of best-in-class partners trying to serve customers, many saw it as a pre-emptive assault on Microsoft’s nascent Windows Live and Office Live franchises, which both target small-business customers.
“QuickBooks will integrate several Google services in a way that would help small business make themselves better known. For example, businesses could easily incorporate their info into Google Maps and get $50 credit to be used toward AdWords Listings,” Bennett told reporters and analysts on a call Wednesday afternoon.
The anticipated upside: Google will sell more ads, Intuit will sell more QuickBooks, and small businesses will sell more stuff, the two executives said.
But is it pre-emptive or reactive? You may recall that Microsoft’s Office 2007 Accounting (which competes with QuickBooks) just went into beta with heavy tie-ins to eBay and PayPal.
