Recent Stories with tag microsoft

In a live event at Microsoft's Silicon Valley campus yesterday, company officials were joined by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to announce their mash-up venture.

The two have created a new module that expands the amount of data produced on a Bing search. The module will show which results a user's Facebook friends have liked (see photo). The other add-on is in people search. Bing will lead with Facebook friends and allow messaging directly from the search engine.

Microsoft began shipping the module October 13th, and a pop-up on the Bing search page will alert logged-in users to the download. A Microsoft representative confirmed that there are further developments in the pipeline. Reps were also quick to assure the press that no data from Bing will be sent back to Facebook, and that not all Like information will be available. Facebook users will still have the ability to limit information distribution through the current privacy settings.

Representatives neither confirmed nor denied that money changed hands to cement the partnership, but smart observers might take that as an answer in itself.

Mayor McGinn announced that he'd talked the unions representing city employees into letting go of their two-percent COLA; instead they get 0.6 percent. The city's projected deficit for 2010-12 has grown by $11 million, to $67 million, since April. That kind of pressure has led the city to blackmailpressure MOHAI into giving up relocation funds won from the state, with MOHAI reaching DEFCON 1 ("We'll close, we swear it!") in short order.

Boeing got local-source religion. Microsoft worked on cementing their image as the Evil Empire. Amazon may have leaked Office for Mac 2011's ship date. Starbucks decided drive-through customers were really thirsty.

Cliff Mass says the only question is how strong our La Niña winter will be--cold and wet, or colder and snowier. While the Howard Hanson Dam situation has improved, "Now is not the time to relax," says King County Council's Julia Patterson. Wet weather isn't good news for residents of Redmond's mold-infested Riverwalk condos, but stay tuned--I hear the cavalry may be coming.

Around the neighborhoods, Capitol Hill residents learned they have deer and a start-up incubator. TechFlash took a tour of Belltown's PopCap Games. Eastlake's Floating Homes tour is Sunday, Sept. 12. "Seattle’s Landmarks Preservation Board voted to nominate the community-center building and steam plant at the 580-unit Yesler Terrace public-housing project for landmark designation."... (more)

TechFlash sees afterimages of Webvan in Amazon's new Tote delivery service, but I can't help thinking of the gold standard: Kozmo.com couriers delivering lunch half an hour after I ordered it. Tote won't be quite that fast, but from a cost perspective, Amazon has one-upped Kozmo: the twice-weekly Tote service is free, and there's no minimum spend. (You do have to complete your order two days before the next delivery date.)

If you order something from Amazon and you'd like them to deliver it the next time they're delivering in your neighborhood (the delivery days are zip code-specific), they'll truck it on over. The first zip to get Tote is 98112. The Tote bags are weather-resistant and reusable, and one way you can reuse them is to return items if there's any problem. Get the Tote FAQs here. (Perhaps you'd like to order a discounted Kindle? Even the Kindle DX has a lower price.)

Meanwhile, today inaugurates 1) a City of Seattle ordinance mandating that all single-use food service packaging at restaurants and grocery stores be either recyclable or compostable, and 2) a fully operational battlestar Starbucks recycling and composting program that incorporates front-of-store waste, too (i.e., there are more bins out front).

You've probably seen evidence of this, since Starbucks has been rolling out the new program at its 90 Seattle stores over the past month. The city's goal is to keep 6,000 tons of packaging and compostable waste out of landfills each year. Starbucks' goal is to get front-of-store recycling into all company-owned locations by 2015. (Their paper cups will head back to the plant for a second life as paper napkins.)... (more)

First it was the Kindle. After Barnes & Noble knocked the Nook down, Amazon cut the price for the basic Kindle model (not the DX) from $259 to $189, which analysts nervously noted had to be close to Amazon's cost of production. Will they make it up on the back-end, in e-books?

Now it's Microsoft's Kin. Verizon has "quietly," says PC Mag, dropped the price of the Kin One to $29.99 with a two-year contract. A Kin Two is now $49.99. (Previously the devices were $99.99 and $49.99, respectively.) So far there are over 30 stories on this quiet price cut.

Starbucks and Boeing don't seem to sell anything that begins with "kin," but Nordstrom is selling the Kinerase "Ultimate Repair" Moisture System (a $146 value!) for just $95. It's uncanny.

BNET is doing a series on ten "boom towns" across the nation where job growth is predicted to enter the double-digit range between 2008 and 2018. Jobs of the future, they say, will go "to the cities with the industries and the entrepreneurial incentives in place to support a highly educated, tech-savvy workforce."

Seattle makes that boom town list, with a 12 percent increase. We're "building on past successes":

For decades, it spawned companies that grew into job-creation machines--and stuck around the area with those jobs: Boeing, Microsoft, Amazon.com, Starbucks, Costco, Expediters International, and even retail stalwart Nordstrom, which opened its first store there at the beginning of the 20th century.

While not free of the scent of PR puffery, this is based partly on Bureau of Labor Statistics projections, with a side bet on demographic trends: right now, the largest two age groups are 50-year-olds and 20-year-olds. The hypothesis is that 50s set will come to Seattle for the pre-retirement lifestyle, while the 20-somethings will flock to the UW.

Before you yawn, and produce a thick volume of past "boom towns of the future" that are still anxiously awaiting the railroad to arrive, consider this rundown of quarterly results:

• Starbucks beat analysts' expectations
• Amazon's sales soared
• Microsoft set a revenue record
• Boeing's profit margins are up

And Nordstrom had strong March sales and Costco is increasing its cash dividend. This is exactly the kind of thing that makes Seattle seem like its own little business oasis. 

Seattle is the #2 big city for people with asthma, says Health magazine, thanks in part to our 2008 heat wave pollution, which meant the city had to work even harder to maintain clean air. And Bicycling magazine rated us the #4 best city for bicycling, after Minneapolis, Portland, and Boulder. That's thanks to our bike master plan.

Costco and Nordstrom had a good March, while Boeing reported almost an eleven percent drop in first quarter deliveries compared to last year. Starbucks was trying to get us drunk and show us a movie. Techflash reported on a UW study claiming 8.4 percent of Washington jobs rely on Microsoft. In Olympia, a sales tax increase didn't pass muster, but mass-market beer got tagged. The City Council may be near agreeing with Mayor McGinn for the first time.

Down in South Lake Union, Amazon started moving into its new digs. One Seattle real estate investor bought an infamous Orange County resort, while on top of Queen Anne, a developer put a substantial chunk of property up for sale. Over on Capitol Hill, a protest against police brutality got a little out of hand, and Sen. Patty Murray visited Cupcake Royale. In Ballard, a car accident claimed three young lives. My Wallingford was gearing up for work on the Aurora Bridge. As usual, nothing happened in Wedgwood.... (more)

(via TechFlash) "Let's Move!" is the headline for the full-page Microsoft ad in today's Seattle Times (also here). They don't mean to Reno, Nevada, where as a tax-dodge they have domiciled Microsoft Licensing Incorporated. They mean figuratively, on the construction of a new 520 bridge. Any design improvements, Microsoft says, would "cause yet more delay, increase the cost to taxpayers, and put this vital transportation and economic corridor at risk."

"Increase the cost to taxpayers"! That is pure altruism, which you just don't see a lot of these days. Thanks to their avoidance of Washington state B&O taxes, Microsoft hasn't paid upwards of $700 million on revenue from software licensing. (That's fifteen percent of the bridge's $4.65 billion price tag.) So it's hardly any skin off their nose if the cost to taxpayers goes up.

They're more concerned about the average taxpaying citizen, when it comes to funding infrastructure so that people can drive to and from their Redmond campus more quickly. I, for one, salute Microsoft for this gutsy public stand in defense of our tax dollars.

That BoingBoing headline--"Broke-ass Washington state set to give MSFT $100M annual tax cut and amnesty for $1B in evasion"--should make the people (well, Jeff Reifman) at Microsoft Tax Dodge happy--they've been wondering where the Seattle Times has been on this issue. Who needs old media? BoingBoing is here.

To catch you up, many people have long known about Microsoft's bid to avoid paying Washington state's B&O royalty tax by setting up Microsoft Licensing Incorporated in Reno, Nevada. Jeff Reifman has been reporting on that story since 2004, as he will be the first to mention, in a slightly incredulous, "Has it been that long?" way. (Reifman has worked at both Microsoft and Seattle Weekly.)

Although Microsoft makes no secret of producing its software in Washington state, the idea is that since the sales "location" is domiciled in Nevada, they're not subject to Washington state taxes. Notes Reifman:

Nevada's tax rate for licensed software is zero. Washington's is .484%, lowered in 1998 from 1.5% by lobbying from...the software industry.... (more)

The top Twitter hashtag for Seattle right now is #WP7, as the smartphone crowd hashes out what the advent of Windows Phone 7 means. TechFlash has "what they're saying," and what they're saying is very complimentary (except for the name, Windows Phone 7). Gizmodo says it's "the most groundbreaking phone since the iPhone." But don't expect to see it until the holiday season.

The short story is that Microsoft has thrown out the old WinMo experience and adopted an augmented Zune HD interface that's heavy on live animation, so that its integration with external sources like Facebook is, to the user, seamless and always-on. "You never see an annoying 'loading...loading...loading,'" says Microsoft's Joe Belfiore.

This, combined with the news that two dozen cell phone providers are forming their own mobile app store, is keeping the mobile marketplace very interesting. That next iPhone had better be a doozy.

Meanwhile, in Washington, D.C. (All photos: Michael Austin)

While Cliff Mass explains why we just had our warmest January ever recorded, enjoy a picture of the blizzard that's blanketed Washington, D.C., courtesy of our D.C. bureau. The word is that it's bad...very bad.

Closer to home, West Seattle Blog found a local Prius tie-in to the Toyotathon Recall that's been in the news all week. However, Toyotas alone can't be responsible for the four crashes in 90 minutes that WSB reported on. This is precisely why I only take the water taxi over there. Safer.

We had politics all over the place this week. A Publicola investigation resulted in the resignation of one of Mayor McGinn's top advisors. The 520 replacement "A+" design got raked over the coals by citizen groups and various politicos, while Eastsiders and business-types cried "How long, O Lord, how long?" Judges told the state legislature to fork out for education, and the Seattle School Board to reconsider those "new math" textbooks. Our homegrown pot initiative got its official name: I-1068. Tim Eyman went down to Olympia, predictably.... (more)

The rusting husk of Gasworks Park, a fitting metaphor for our elected government. Photo by our Flickr pool contributor feekner.

Late last month, I wrote about Oregon's special vote for Measures 66 and 67, two bills passed by the legislature and signed by the governor that were sent to the voters as a referendum, which raised taxes to help close a budget shortfall. One raised the minimum corporate tax for the first time since 1931, while the other was a modest increase in the income tax for high-earners (Oregon has an income tax but no sales tax). Both measures passed with substantial margins, with roughly 54 percent in favor to 46 percent opposed.

The vote was closely watched nationally because Oregon, like Washington, is a state known for its anti-tax fervor. Oregon had its own Tim Eyman, has caps on property tax increases, and has repeatedly rejected new tax increases. But faced with dramatic cuts to crucial services, Oregon voters banded together with their elected representatives and passed two very simple measures that kept the state working.

Our fearless leaders in Olympia, on the other hand, have done virtually nothing. While Gregoire has stated she wants to "buy back" some of the slash-and-burn budget cuts she originally proposed (as a matter of state law, which requires her to present a balanced budget--from the beginning, she made clear she did not support that budget), her alternate budget still relies extensively on cuts, with a large portion of new revenue expected from federal stimulus money. The House has introduced a bill (HB 3176) that would generate $210 million in new tax revenues by mostly closing loopholes, but that's a pittance compared to the overall $2.6 billion shortfall over the biennium.... (more)

(via TechFlash) All over the Pacific Northwest this morning, PR professionals glanced through the New York Times and thought, "Hey, Microsoft got a hit!" Then they realized that a hit had been done on Microsoft and they prepared for a round of stomach-churning conference calls.

Dick Brass, a VP with Microsoft for seven years, until 2004, wrote this about his former employer:

The problem comes when the competition becomes uncontrolled and destructive. At Microsoft, it has created a dysfunctional corporate culture in which the big established groups are allowed to prey upon emerging teams, belittle their efforts, compete unfairly against them for resources, and over time hector them out of existence. It's not an accident that almost all the executives in charge of Microsoft's music, e-books, phone, online, search, and tablet efforts over the past decade have left.

Apologists will have plenty of countercharges to make against Brass or his claims, but this element of Microsoft's culture is well known, and remonstrating with people who mention it is just evidence of Microsoft's inability to see and critique its behavior.... (more)

A great international tragedy has unfolded this week. Of course I refer to the tribulations of Conan O'Brien, who may soon cruelly be forced to go from making an exorbitant amount of money to host a talk show on one national television network, to making an exorbitant amount of money to host a talk show on a different national television network. I have lost much sleep over this indignation. Oooh, Jay Leno, you make me SO MAD!

Image from a tee Rainn Wilson's auctioning off

Then there's this Haiti earthquake. Thousands suffer from lack of food, clean water, and medical treatment after the quake, hundreds more are buried under rubble. Many local organizations large and small are doing what they can to support the relief effort. Thought it might be worth showing who's doing what, bless them. This is not an exhaustive list, I certainly don't intend to exclude anyone, so if you know of any other events/contributions/whatever, please add them in the comments.

Of course, as an intelligent person, you will know that the best thing you can do, even better than reading this post, is to donate what you can right now. The Mobile Giving Foundation of Bellevue has created this list of organizations you can donate to from your phone. Okay, here's the promised list:

Microsoft: Has donated $1.25M in cash and in-kind support.

Amazon: Put a Haiti donations message and link on their home page.

Pearl Jam: Has created a suggested list of organizations to donate to.

Rainn Wilson: Is auctioning off memorabilia from The Office to support a favorite organization, Planting Peace.

Seattle Symphony: Will accept donations for Haiti relief at two upcoming community concerts.

Liberty on Capitol Hill: Buy their "Help Haiti" drink for $6, 100% of proceeds go to Haiti relief.... (more)

The stars were out for Metro League Tuesday

Before we get to the whys and wherefores of how the spittle of the 14th-richest man in America ended up on my right hand, let me make one thing clear. Underemployed though I am, I did not attend Tuesday's Lakeside/Rainier Beach game with the intention of sitting next to, and eventually shaking hands with, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer.

First of all, I did not even know Ballmer would be at the game. Only when I had found my seat and noticed a "Sam Ballmer" on the Lakeside roster did I suspect any impending Ballmerness. Furthermore, I did not sit next to Ballmer. He happened to sit next to me. And, to finally get to the expectoration you were expecting: If you sit next to Steve Ballmer at a Lakeside basketball, you are going to get a little wet. And possibly go a little deaf. The man is not shy with the yelling.

I'm okay with that, because Ballmer is the best kind of parent rooter: He encouraged Lakeside's overmatched players from tip to buzzer, all the way through a 47-point loss. He laid off the referees. And he even cheered the (very many) exciting plays by Rainier Beach.

His high-energy rooting style--at times, his non-stop nervous rocking shook the bleacher bench we were sharing--made me wish heartily that he'd managed to purchase the Sonics. A courtside Ballmer would make notoriously excitable Dallas owner Mark Cuban look phlegmatic.

So, yeah, a few minutes into the game, something moves Ballmer to shout "Boom" (his favorite exclamation), and I suddenly feel a drop of wetness on my hand. Oh. That's Ballmer spit. At halftime, I'd see a Microsoft employee friend of mine who'd come to his first Metro League Tuesday.

"I'm sitting next to your boss," I said.

"I saw that," he exclaimed.

"He spit on my hand!"

"You'd better not wash it."

And I never will. NEVER! I am buying protective gloves tomorrow. AND NO MOM I AM NOT COMING OUT OF MY ROOM!

One Ballmer moment before we move on to the other famous people who were at the game. Ballmer's son Sam had the best Lakeside play of the night. Receiving the ball on the right wing, young Ballmer created space with his off-hand, stepped back and swished a 12-foot jumper. Papa rose as the shot was in the air, and unleashed a thunderous "Boom!" as the ball slid through the net. It was cute--and lest you think I'm being overly sentimental, I said as much to my ex-girlfriend, who was sitting on the other side of me, and she nodded vigorously in agreement.

Also at the game: University of Washington basketball head coach Lorenzo Romar, taking up his preferred spot behind the baseline. Ballmer and Romar had a long talk at halftime. Meanwhile, chatting next to them were Seattle city councilmember Bruce Harrell, whose son is a backup guard for Lakeside, and Husky hoops legend and former NBAer Eldridge Recasner. It was a veritable who's who of Seattle!... (more)

Over all the recent Droid smartphone hype, there is the looming shadow of Google. The idea is that Android::mobile devices is the 2.0 version of Windows::personal computer. Without realizing it, you're snug in Google's terabyte embrace. Is that so bad?

Tonight, November 9, New Yorker writer Ken Auletta talks to the Seattle Times' Brier Dudley at the downtown Seattle Public Library at 7 p.m. (listen to him on KUOW at noon). Auletta's book, Googled: The End of the World as We Know It is the "semi-official" story of Google; Auletta had access to Brin and Page, investors, and employees.

If you log in to Google and click on My Account, you'll see a Dashboard option that you can click--it assembles in one place most of the ways that you interact with Google. It's astonishing in some ways, the level of trust placed in a company that is gaining a market-spanning presence that will not need to rely on trust.

This is the dilemma Microsoft has faced for some time: How can we pretend that customers are making a choice... (more)

What's a good pictogram for the employment situation, I asked myself. Photo courtesy The SunBreak Flickr Pool shootist Slightlynorth.

I just heard via Facebook (oh, the cold blade of irony) that Classmates.com has "graduated" another round of employees, and TechFlash has the story on Microsoft's 800 layoffs, 200 from the Seattle area.

Jon Talton's timely "Sound Economy" post includes the warning: "More importantly, the holiday layoff season--when companies clear their year-end books and start serious job cutting--is only beginning. Talton observes that while we "only" lost 200,000 jobs nationwide last month, we really needed 125,000 new jobs, net, to keep up with new entrants to the workforce.

So far, as the Seattle Bubble will graph out for you, the stimulus has worked far better for financial giants and stock market profits than for job creation. Now, you have heard that employment is a "lagging indicator," but that doesn't mean it's allowed to lag to infinity--from Talton: "Rutgers economists say it could be 2017 before we recover the lost jobs."

The Tim claims (yes, there's a graph), unemployment is now one percent higher than that predicted by administration economists without any stimulus. This has to be of some consternation in the White House, as historically, high unemployment results in presidential unemployment.

In H1N1 news, two weeks ago the swine flu vaccine arrived in King County and health professionals got first dibs. This week the vaccine was publicly available...but only for a few days, before supplies of the H1N1 vaccine ran out. Replenishments are on the way. President Obama has now declared the flu variant a national emergency--it's killed 1,000 people across the U.S. so far.

Twists in the race to be Mayor of Tunneltown this week: mayoral candidate Mike McGinn said he wouldn't seek to block deep-bore tunnel construction after all, and Joe Mallahan said he was okay with building it even if Seattle was solely on the hook for any cost overruns. WSDOT was accused of being "in love" with the deep-bore tunnel nyah nyah.

Books were big news: CHS provided a round-up of discussions about the Elliott Bay Book Company's potential move to Capitol Hill: Crosscut's Knute Berger and the Seattle Times' Jon Talton took the bird's-eye view of what the move says about Pioneer Square and Seattle itself.

Then the same week that Barnes & Noble launched the Nook, Amazon puffed up its chest, put the stock market on its back, and flew off in an up-and-to-the-right direction. Jeff Bezos ended the day worth over $2 billion more than when he woke up. Microsoft still lost money, but less than expected, and besides: Windows 7! TwitterBing!

The Seattle Times shocked exactly no one this week by endorsing Susan Hutchison for King County Executive, but they did surprise me by announcing that "The days of big-ticket projects and budgets are finished." (That rules out an endorsement of Mallahan for Mayor doesn't it, given his support for the $4.2 billion deep-bore tunnel project?) KCTS broadcast a Hutchison v. Constantine debate, Publicola called it a draw, and everyone else beseeched the heavens like Job after the boils.

CHS went rumor-mill on us this week, following up on a Slog tip that Elliott Bay Book Company might become the Capitol Hill Book Company (it would be easier to get to book readings...), and dug up five named and six unnamed Capitol Hill businesses for sale. Rosebud...! My go-to Eggs Benedict purveyor.

Given that list, you'd probably feel guilty about not staying home to support local businesses, but just so you know, Amtrak has cut fares to Vancouver by 25 percent. Start camping out for the Olympics early!

At The SunBreak, we were... (more)

The tech world is all still a-twitter over the massive server failure at Microsoft/Danger that wiped out years of personal data from T-Mobile's Sidekick users. The Sidekick, developed by Danger Incorporated, which was purchased by Microsoft in February 2008, was one of the first smart-phones to successfully hit the market.

For one reason or another--suggestions range from a basic server failure to a botched upgrade--the core servers and their back-ups were wiped last week. Yesterday, TechFlash reported that Microsoft wasn't hopeful that user data could be recovered, resulting in yet another black eye for the Microsoft Corporation, who have struggled over the last few years with a series of high-profile consumer product failures.

In 2007, Microsoft spent a billion dollars replacing bricked Xbox 360s. On December 31, 2008, first generation Zunes froze due to a bug that didn't properly address leap years. And finally, the response to Windows Vista, released in 2007 to generally negative reviews, spurring the rapid... (more)

Back in April, TechFlash asked people on the street if they could name Microsoft's search engine. (Correct answer at the time: Live.)

No one could.

But they just repeated the experiment in the post-Bing era, with results more likely to make Steve Ballmer smile:

Nick Eaton at the PI has the story about the lawsuit against the ad agency hired by Microsoft to place Bing advertisements in the new NBC drama The Philanthropist. JWT and their parent group WPP are being sued by Denizen, who claim to have a patent on advertisers selling you things within the plot of a TV show. Sure thing, Denizen, even though that's how everything on TV works now. (Just joking, don't sue the site, I'm sure it's very technical and patenty.)

What's more alarming than a corporation thinking they hold claim to product placement as a plot point is who exactly is involved in this blatant shilling. Take a look at the clip above. Yep, that's right, it's actor Michael Kenneth Williams, best known as The Wire's Omar Little. Oh Omar, you should be ashamed. Acting as a modern-day Robin Hood stick-up artist and making a living stealing from low-life drug dealers is one thing, but whoring yourself out this way is inexcusable--even worse than meeting your untimely... (more)