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Comment Sounds like a big risk to me (Score 4, Interesting) 605

Microsoft already has the technology necessary in their own audio/video/text Windows Live Messenger platform. So I don't think it's about that. And yes, I feel sorry for the Skype staff today -- I don't think this move bodes well for them at all. Their competence may not be what Microsoft is looking for here.

And as for other reasons, the paying customer base (compared to the non-paying WLM user base) of Skype could perhaps be attractive to Microsoft. Keep in mind that Skype is running with losses despite all these users, though.

In the end, taking all these thoughts together, I can only imagine that this is a risky move by Microsoft. I think they are hoping for awesome synergy effects from some forthcoming integration with their products. I assume something big, and no minor idea, since it needs to pay these $8.5 billion and more.

My first idea was integrating this with Windows Phone 7 (8? 9?) to get phone calls at data rates, but I have no idea how they'll going to get the providers to accept that. That would be a feat as grand as Steve Jobs getting the music companies to sign on to iTunes back in the days, if not greater.

Otherwise... Hmm, someone mentioned Xbox or Kinect integration to communicate with others with these devices... Well that's a thought but why shouldn't they be able to just implement that feature with their Live network? Write a WLM client for these - done. No $8.5 billion wasted.

Not sure if there are other ideas about where MS may be going with this?

Comment Wait, what... (Score 5, Interesting) 575

Sony said on Wednesday that Anonymous targeted it several weeks ago using a denial of service attack in protest of Sony defending itself against a hacker in federal court in San Francisco.

  The attack that stole the personal data of millions of Sony customers was launched separately, while the company was distracted protecting itself against the denial of service campaign, Sony said.

  Sony said it was not sure whether the organizers of the two attacks were working together.

So they know Anonymous DDOS'ed them, and Anonymous have admitted this too.

They also were attacked separately where the theft took place. They don't know if these groups were working together. They blame the latter on Anonymous too. How did they draw that final conclusion??

Comment Re:Go Premium (Score 1) 257

I agree with you, except that I don't need the high bitrate and mobile support, and get away with half the price. :)

It's not that bad IMHO to pay $8/month for unlimited access to that music library. At least not enough to speak of Spotify being "killed". It's far better than anything you could get in the nineties, or even early 2000's, so I still think that this is definitely progress in the right direction. Yes, you don't get to "own" your music, but I consider it like I do with movie visits or (back in the bad old days) visits to music stores to buy CD's more or less regularly.

Similar yearly cost, but much more convenient.

Comment Re:Only half as good as Chome (Score 5, Interesting) 161

Won't happen. What *is* insanity today, however, is sticking to a yearly or bi-yearly release cycle when the HTML standards evolve faster than that. Shorter cycles implies less features indeed, but this also means that there's not as much to test before each release, so the risks of following the evolution of the web better isn't increased despite following it better.

This is basically a very simplified version of the Chromium dev's motivation to move to this.

But it's of course more fun to think it's a version number game. However, just wait 'til Chrome 27 and you'll see that version numbers will lose their meaning soon enough, just like Google and others intended.

Comment Re:Good (Score 2) 78

Maybe it will die as a product and I can go back to using something better for organising events with people. One large message box sure is fun.

Why would it die? To the contrary, even if I dislike ads as anyone else, I have to admit that a hundred million-large social networking backing an ad platform seems like a powerful weapon against AdWords. And if successful, it'll do the opposite of killing it, with even more company acquisitions, etc.

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