Brilliant strategic move by Microsoft today – offering a price for Yahoo that is both well above the market clearing price and done out in the open. Microsoft’s Letter to Yahoo is great. It coincides with Terry Semel leaving the Yahoo board , which is a small irony. In other news, Microsoft is now the rumored buyer of the 432-acre Sun (Storagetek) campus just outside of Boulder. And apparently the bloom is finally coming off of the Google rose . ...
Great advice from Julie Alexandria on WallStrip to all the big thinkers in Davos who are Scornful of US Policies and worried about the impact of the fall of the “wounded giant.” To you, Julie says “Eh screw it. Let’s dance.” I loved George Soros’ quote: ““The current crisis is not only the bust that follows the housing boom. It’s basically the end of a 60-year period of continuing credit expansion based on the dollar as the reserve currency.” Is the US finally having it’s post-Edwardian England moment?
I’m not a macroeconomics guy – never have been, never will be. I don’t watch CNBC, Bloomberg, CNN, or even Fox News. When I was on the board of several public companies, I used to hit refresh on my My.Yahoo home page about 371 times a day – I no longer have a My.Yahoo home page (or any public company board seats – never again.) I’ve learned that the day to day macro stuff doesn’t impact what I do. It’s just noise. And I have more than enough things that I chose to focus on, so I do my best to consciously filter out the noise. ...
Yes – more Feld Job board. I just finished up a board meeting in San Francisco for a new company that I’ve invested in (they are launching next week – you’ll hear more on Monday.) We’re looking for two rock star software product managers. The company is releasing products at a torrid pace (multiple times a month) and is iterating rapidly as it builds an aggressive leadership position in its segment. Yeah – I know – all happy talk – but it’s wild and amazing stuff. ...
The Feld Job board is about to kick into high gear. Look for a handful of posts in January. The Silicon Flatirons program at CU Law School is looking for two research fellows. The first one is described on their web site. They are looking for an aspiring entrepreneur or VC who would work with the New Technology Meetup, the new Entrepreneurs Unplugged series, co-teach a class with Jason Mendelson, work with the Entrepreneurial Law Clinic, and get to know who is who in the front range entrepreneurial community. ...
Today the news started emerging that Office 2003 SP3 no longer supports older Microsoft Office file formats . When I first read this, I figured it only referred to really obscure formats. But I was wrong – it’s step 7 in trying to get everyone to use Microsoft’s OpenXML format. WTF? Has someone lost their mind?
You are an experienced software sales person. You just drained your 2007 sales pipeline and are frustrated with the lack of growth of your existing company. You want to join a well funded company with great products, loads of referenceable customers, in a market that is exploding. Plus – you want to hang with people that know how to have fun . If you fit any of the following parameters, NewsGator is looking for you. ...
My friend Ben Casnocha recently wrote a paper for school – he’s got an adapted version up on his website titled Analysis: H-1B Visa Issue in America . He dug up a deliciously moronic quote and summary from a CRS Report for Congress titled Immigration Reform: Brief Synthesis of Issue . “Those opposing increases in temporary workers assert that there is no compelling evidence of labor shortages.” Norman Matloff of UC Davis, a forceful critic of H-1B expansion, says that U.S. companies do not import foreign workers to fill a labor shortage. If there were truly a shortage, starting salaries for grads with bachelor’s degrees in computer science or engineering would be rising (they are not), and technology companies wouldn’t hire only 2% of their job applicants as they wouldn’t have the luxury to be so picky. And they don’t want more foreign workers in hopes of recruiting the best and brightest, according to Matloff. The average H-1B visa employee earns in the $65,000/yr range, far below what top talent commands. Rather, they want more foreign workers because they can pay them less to do the tasks currently done by domestic workers. (The law requiring employers to pay the “prevailing wage” is largely ignored in the industry.) In short, an increase in cheap H-1B talent would probably displace the American IT worker. ...
My IT guy Ross has been having his fair share of them lately. Ross has been blogging about silly Microsoft tricks, including Microsoft you’re about to lose me and Why Microsoft, why? Ross isn’t limiting himself to bitching about things – he’s also offering useful suggestions such as Disabling Vista auto update. Plus he’s writing about some obscure stuff such as Installing Vista on a MacBook Pro using Imagex.exe (only obscure if you don’t want to do it!) ...
I’ve been having plenty of bad Microsoft days lately. If you’ve been following the adventures of “Brad the boy who loves new toys” you know that I recently bought a new MacBook Pro to try – once again – to switch from a Vista box to a Mac. Since I’m writing this on my Vista desktop (with my beautiful 30" Apple Monitor) you can likely infer that the switch hasn’t been going very well. Yup – I’m having bad Apple days also – mostly “using Exchange and Sharepoint on a Mac sucks rocks” days, which might actually still be classified as a bad Microsoft day with Apple as the collateral damage. ...