Below are six of the biggest takeaways from the decision announced Thursday:

— Google promised to license hundreds of important mobile device patents to rivals that make gadgets such as smartphones, tablets and gaming devices, on "fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms," the FTC said. Google got the patents as part of its purchase of Motorola Mobility last year. The patents cover wireless connectivity and other Internet technologies.

— The online search leader pledged to cut back on its use of snippets of content from other websites, such as the reviews site Yelp Inc., in its search results. It had already scaled back this practice before the FTC settlement after a complaint from Yelp that triggered the FTC probe. Under the agreement, specialty websites such as those on shopping and travel can request that Google stop including such snippets in the search results, while still providing links to those websites.

Continue Reading...

"Aesthetically pleasing" is very subjective.

I was deep into the fifth page of the reader comments of the first installment of Ars Technica's excellent "The State of Smartphones in 2012," when I encountered this observation, which is simultaneously the most illuminating and worthless Internet comment of all time. It was a response to the declaration by Ars Technica's Andrew Cunningham that the "Live Tiles" user interface in the brand-spanking-new Windows Phone 8 operating system was more "aesthetically striking" than the icons of Apple's iOS or the widgets of Google's Android.

(With Live Tiles, the restless smartphone user can expand or shrink the on-screen real estate devoted to a particular app or function, providing a level of configurability alien to the straitlaced universe that iPhone lovers, in particular, are accustomed to. Remember this, for future reference: Windows: freedom! Apple: tyranny!)

Continue Reading...

In the beginning, Google preached, "Don't Be Evil" -- but that changed ... when Google Shopping announced a new initiative. Simply put, all of their shopping results are now paid ads ...

... We say that when you limit choices and rank them by payment, consumers get Scroogled. For an honest search result, try Bing.

Continue Reading...

Across the country, companies are using cookies to tailor the political ads you see online. One of the firms is CampaignGrid, which boasted in a recent slideshow, "Internet Users are No Longer Anonymous." The slideshow includes an image of the famous New Yorker cartoon from 1993: "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog." Next to it, CampaignGrid lists what it can now know about an Internet user: "Lives in Pennsylvania's 13th Congressional District, 19002 zip code, Registered primary voting Republican, High net worth household, Age 50-54, Teenagers in the home, Technology professional, Interested in politics, Shopping for a car, Planning a vacation in Puerto Rico."

Continue Reading...

They don’t care about the evening chill, or the stares of passerby, or the police. And the police don’t care about them. Because on that bright morning when the Apple store opens, they’ll roll up their blankets, strike their tents, and go home with a shiny new iPhone 5, as happy as clams and just as stupid.

To liberals of the 90s, Bill Gates was the symbol of both wealth and malevolence incarnate. Not only was he the richest man in the world, but his monolithic and monopolistic enterprise was based on a mediocre product with built in buggy obsolescence. He didn’t innovate; instead he partnered with IBM, purchased DOS, and then exploited both. And through ruthless business savvy, the narrative goes, Microsoft strong-armed the market despite a middling product, terrible customer service, and ruthless cost cutting.

But one man, one company, made a career (and cult) out of this “critique” of Bill Gates.

Continue Reading...

Politicians and corporations behaving badly: that's one theme that emerges from the latest secret State Department cables released by WikiLeaks.

The new revelations don't measure up to the seriousness of the alleged massacre of civilians by U.S. troops in Iraq that I delved into over the weekend. But they are still very much worth noting.

A cable from 2008 titled "Mayawati: Portrait of a Lady" reports that the chief minister of India's Uttar Pradesh state (the country's most populous) once dispatched an empty private jet to Mumbai to procure her favorite brand of sandals:

Mayawati's full majority victory in May 2007 UP State Assembly elections left her beholden to no one and has allowed her to act on her eccentricities, whims and insecurities. When she needed new sandals, her private jet flew empty to Mumbai to retrieve her preferred brand. According to Lucknow journalists, she employs nine cooks (two to cook, the others to watch over them) and two food tasters.

At a press conference today, Mayawati called the report "wrong, baseless, and disgusting." She also asked that Julian Assange be put "into a mental asylum."

Continue Reading...

Buying Skype would give Microsoft a potentially valuable communications tool as it tries to become a bigger force on the Internet and in the increasingly important smartphone market.

Microsoft said it will marry Skype's functions to its Xbox game console, Outlook email program and Windows smartphones. The company said it will continue to support Skype on other software platforms.

The sellers include eBay Inc. and private equity firms Silver Lake and Andreessen Horowitz.

About 170 million people log in to Skype's services every month, though not all of them make calls. Skype users made 207 billion minutes of voice and video calls last year.

Most people use Skype's free calling services, which has made it difficult for the service to make money since entrepreneurs Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis started the company in 2003. An average of about 8.8 million customers per month, or just over 1 percent of the user base, pay to use Skype services.

Continue Reading...

From Bloomberg:

Consumer PC shipments dropped 8 percent in the quarter, Microsoft Chief Financial Officer Peter Klein said. Netbooks -- the cheap laptops that became popular during the recession -- plunged 40 percent, partially because of defections to tablet computers, he said.

When Steve Jobs debuted the iPad 15 months ago, critical appraisals were all over the map, from effusive to dismissive, but I don't think even the most gaga fanboy predicted that in little more than year the tablet would have meaningfully reshaped the entire personal computing industry.

Continue Reading...

Nokia Corp., the world's largest maker of mobile phones, said Friday it plans to use Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Phone software as the main platform for its smart phones in an effort to pull market share away from Apple's iPhone and Android, Google's software for phones and tablets.

The move marks a major strategy shift for Nokia, which has previously equipped devices with its own software. Analysts said the deal was a bigger win for Microsoft than Nokia, whose CEO Stephen Elop in a leaked memo this week compared his company to a burning oil platform with "more than one explosion ... fueling a blazing fire around us."

Nokia said the partnership would "deliver an ecosystem with unrivaled global reach and scale." However, it warned that the new strategy would also bring "significant uncertainties," and said it expects profit margins to be hit by strong competition from rivals.

Nokia's share price plunged 9 percent to euro7.43 ($10.11) in afternoon trading in Helsinki.

Continue Reading...

So much for that idea. Ozzie's departure, announced today in a weirdly low-key manner, shows that Microsoft is still struggling to define itself for the Internet era.

Ozzie was the company's Chief Software Architect, a position held previously by Bill Gates after he stepped down as CEO. It was an ideal fit: Ozzie's technical talent and vision for what we could do with technology were extraordinary. At Microsoft he headed up an effort to move the company toward the era when software was more online than not, a sea change for a company that had for its entire existence been all about what amounted to packaged goods.

Continue Reading...

Microsoft's Xbox, of course, has featured disc-less streaming since 2008. The company signed an exclusivity clause with Microsoft, forcing out Sony and Nintendo of the online movie sector. Or so they thought. In a move to circumvent the legal restrictions on software sharing, Netflix provided a similar service on the PS3 and Wii but one -- and here's where Netflix got creative -- that required a disc. Different software, no legal bind. The discs were provided for free, and instantly, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings' dream of being "on all the game consoles, all the Blu-ray players, all the Internet TVs" was jumpstarted.

Continue Reading...

Microsoft clearly wants Internet Explorer 9 -- available on beta as of this morning -- to send those memories to the junkyard. This is an all new, very different Web browser. In fact, ZDNet calls it the most ambitious browser release in the company's history. The biggest difference, though, is in what you don't see. Microsoft obviously paid attention to competitiors such as Chrome and Safari and removed as much clutter on the browser window as it could. Internet Explorer 9 strips itself of toolbars, search boxes and -- gasp! -- the familiar blue "E" logo. As a result, IE9 is much faster than its predecessor, according to Engadget's review. 

Continue Reading...

The Russian government has deployed the latter tactic, the New York Times reports today, by using a law against copyright infringement to go after dissidents. That's bad enough. What should sicken Americans is that Microsoft is complicit in this campaign, according to the newspaper:

Continue Reading...

The story is getting plenty of pickup, even though other Wall Street financial institutions have had similar rules in place for years. There's something funny about the castration of tough-talking traders, although some of us are laughing through our tears as we contemplate the imposition of Emily Post rules of e-mail etiquette on the one hand while we learn that Goldman is already taking steps to circumvent the new rules of bank reform on the other.

Continue Reading...

The sales push announced Monday marks Google's latest attempt to siphon customers away from rival Microsoft Corp., whose Office suite of e-mail, word processing, spreadsheet and other programs is widely used by government agencies and businesses.

Google is hoping that more federal, state and local government agencies will feel comfortable buying its online applications now that they have the U.S. government's seal of approval. The Federal Information Security Management Act certification means that Google's system for running the online programs is considered reliable enough to store most electronic data handled by U.S. government employees. The clearance doesn't cover classified information.

It's the first time the U.S. government has certified a bundle of software programs delivered over the Internet, a trendy concept known as "cloud computing."

Google has been trying to promote cloud computing as a way for businesses and government agencies to reduce their technology expenses. At the same time, Google is hoping to reduce its financial dependence on Internet advertising, which generated virtually all of its $13.6 billion in revenue during the first half of this year.

Continue Reading...

Later that day, Microsoft reported its quarterly earnings -- $16.04 billion in revenue and $4.52 billion in profit -- handily beating the numbers reported earlier this week by Apple (and remember, that was the best quarter ever for Steve Jobs and Co.)

So what happens? The stock price declined on Friday. A share in Microsoft? 25 bucks. Apple? 259.

There are some obvious reasons why investors aren't excited about Microsoft, with the company's abysmal showing in smart phones leading the list. But still, $4.5 billion dollars in profit in a single quarter is a healthy performance, by any standard. If even that kind of bottom line keeps the sword of Damocles hanging by a thread over Steve Ballmer's head, I might almost find myself feeling a little sorry for the guy.

Almost.

Continue Reading...

The way it works is, basically, anyone who wants to can post whatever they want, and Republicans will use their comments in town halls and campaign manifestoes this fall. So far, the site has mostly been notable for two things. The first is strange comments: "Congressmen and women should wear Saran Wrap to work" was featured on the site's "Transparency/Open Government" section on Thursday morning, and the featured idea under "Constitutional Limits" was, "We should apologize to King George III. He was mentally handicapped, and he couldn't help but horribly mismanage the government." The second, of course, is the fact that taxpayer dollars are funding the whole thing. The site is being paid for out of the GOP leadership budget, despite its dot-com (not dot-gov) name.

Continue Reading...

Apple's move comes as the company's iPhone, and now its iPad tablet computer, take on more of the personal computing tasks once handled by computers running Microsoft programs.

Market cap is the dollar value of a company's outstanding shares. During afternoon trading Wednesday, Apple Inc.'s shares rose to $248.47, pushing its market cap up to about $226 billion.

Microsoft Corp.'s stock slipped to $25.49, for market cap of about $223 billion.

The only U.S. business with a higher market value is Exxon Mobile Corp. The oil company's market cap is about $281 billion.

Continue Reading...

But in light of the lively discussion inspired by my Microsoft post, I thought readers might be interested in the farewell e-mail penned by J Allard, one of the newly departed Microsoft executives after yesterday's corporate shakeup, and the guy, as I noted yesterday, who was most instrumental in getting Microsoft focused on the Internet.

Allard is classy and passionate, and I especially liked this passage, where he talks about his initial recruitment to Microsoft:

Continue Reading...

J Allard was the guy who got the Internet at Microsoft; his infamous January 1994 memo "Windows -- the Next Killer App for the Internet," made an undeniable business case requiring Microsoft to get serious about the Net. What happened next was a remarkable display of nimble corporate reorientation. Microsoft was caught flat-footed by the cyberspace explosion, but once Bill Gates and Co. decided to focus, the company was unstoppable. Microsoft blasted Netscape out of the dot-com water, and entrenched itself everywhere on the Web. Resistance was futile.

Continue Reading...