Word: microsoft
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Although Facebook is expected to earn just $30 million, the three-year-old site is getting all the buzz. One reason: Microsoft recently bought a mere 1.6% of the company for $240 million, an investment that values Facebook at $15 billion, which is in the ballpark of Gap and Xerox. That's far smaller than Google, valued at about $200 billion, but both Facebook and MySpace think they are made of the same game-changing stuff. Like Google, they want to change the way you live and work online. And like Google and practically everyone else on the Internet, they...
...think there is going to be one winner or loser," says Michael Morris, a media analyst with UBS. "Both MySpace and Facebook can flourish, just like there's more than one television network." Other big players are casting their lots with one or the other. Microsoft beat Google and Yahoo! in the bidding for Facebook. News Corp. bought MySpace for $580 million in 2005, and Google hosts MySpace's ads, guaranteeing at least $900 million in revenue through...
...Microsoft knows a thing or two about the latter. The Seattle computer giant has six high-end research centers - three in the US, one in the UK (abutting the Cambridge University computer science department), and two newer outposts, in Beijing and Bangalore. The strategy is partly to go where the world's great universities are: the Beijing lab is placed squarely between Beijing and Tsinghua universities, the so-called Harvard and MIT of China. But part of it is also a recognition that as more countries move from developing to developed, with the amenities and job opportunities that used...
What do the U.S. Department of Defense, the city of Munich and the radical President of Venezuela have in common? All three are ditching Bill Gates. More and more governments are turning to open-source software like Linux as a cheaper, more flexible alternative to Microsoft's proprietary programs (Microsoft declined to comment for this story.) Linux, in particular, is proving irresistible in the developing world. In Brazil, when Microsoft offered to install Windows in school computers pro bono, Brazil's chief technology officer caused a stir by comparing the company to drug dealers giving the first hit free...
...foreign nationals. The impact of foreign workers is particularly pronounced in high-tech industries; two-thirds of electrical engineering and one-half of computer science doctoral students in the U.S. were foreign-born in 2005. When restrictive quotas are put in place, these jobs go elsewhere. This year, Microsoft opened a new research and development center in Vancouver due in part to favorable Canadian immigration policies that make it easier to bring in foreign talent. Similarly, the Internet giant Google told a Congressional subcommittee that it failed to obtain visas for 70 engineers who are currently working overseas rather than...