microsoft

Since it decided to redirect its efforts toward the Internet, one particular company's "stock price has fallen by half, the portion of its revenue derived online has stagnated at about 5% ... and its online division has been losing money since 2005," observes Howard Weaver.

Sounds like a newspaper company? Actually, it's Microsoft.

Interestingly, both Microsoft and the newspaper industry have benefited, however temporarily, from the rise of the Internet.

If the world unfolded as predicted by Bill Gates, printed newspapers would be dead in the next four years. While he may turn out to have been directionally correct and merely wrong about the timing, it's been interesting to watch the world change around Microsoft and slowly render the software giant impotent at a time when newspapers continue to hang around and even start new print publications.

I'll leave it to others to comment on the potential impact on the newspaper industry of the proposed Microsoft-Yahoo takeover.

I'm interested in how Microsoft may be faced with a choice: Change who you are in a very fundamental way, or destroy both Yahoo and yourself in the process.

That is the very choice facing newspapers today, and we might learn something by considering how this takeover might play out.

I already hate Windows Vista, and I'm not even running it.

My mother, who lives in Missouri, has decided to finally plug into the Internet. She bought a laptop, which came with Microsoft's latest operating system, and ordered a DSL line from her local phone company. A relative managed to get the DSL modem and wireless hub configured yesterday after a bit of telephone consultation.

So today she's trying to browse the Internet, and she's having troubles.

It's been something like six months since the launch of the Times Reader, which I dissed as Microsoft's deja-vision of the future. Now Hearst, which owns the troubled Seattle Post-Intelligencer, has lined up with the dark side, announcing its own downloadable reader. Similar announcements have come from Forbes and London's Daily Mail.

I'm an RSS addict. Once you have an RSS reader set up, it's easy to get addicted. But RSS is still a fringe technology, used by a small percentage of the population. Why? Because it's broken. Getting better, but still broken.

The broken part has nothing to do with the competing standards -- RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0 (which has nothing to do with 1.0), Atom, et cetera. That's behind-the-scenes stuff and users don't need to care.

The broken part is the subscription mechanism. It's too complicated.