This is an off-topic list of items we’ve been reading about (we tune in to TechMeme for this stuff):

Valleywag is cutting staff by 60 percent – fuckin’ hell, the (assumed) hard times are hitting everyone. We aren’t entirely sure where the 60% figure comes from since the article itself refers to 19 from the 133 being cut. Whatever. It sucks. Microsoft on the other hand are still looking to grow.

Steve Jobs is fine thank you – rumours of a heart attack for the Apple CEO sent its stock price into a dive. The SEC is investigating.

Dustin Moskovitz is leaving Facebook – don’t worry if you haven’t a fucking clue who he is – we didn’t either – but we should have. He’s a co-founder of Facebook (which you may have heard of <g>) and he’s leaving, along with Justin Rosenstein, to start their own company. There’s a long, boring, marketing bullshit guff email from him about it.

Note, we don’t normally post about other non-Microsoft news, unless, like these it is reasonably interesting.

We stumbled across this research paper by Rufus Pollock where he investigates the growth of web search and advertising, and along the way asks the question of whether Google is the next Microsoft.

Here’s the abstract:

Abstract – Is Google the next Microsoft?

Internet search (or perhaps more accurately `web-search’) has grown exponentially over the last decade at an even more rapid rate than the Internet itself. Search engine providers such as Google and Yahoo! have become household names, and the use of a search engine, like use of the Web, is now a part of everyday life. The rapid growth of online search and its growing centrality to the ecology of the Internet raise a variety of questions for economists to answer. Why is the search engine market so concentrated and will it evolve towards monopoly? What are the implications of this concentration for different ‘participants’ (consumers, search engines, advertisers)? Does the fact that search engines act as ‘information gatekeepers’, determining, in effect, what can be found on the web, mean that search deserves particularly close attention from policy-makers? This paper supplies empirical and theoretical material with which to examine many of these questions. In particular, we (a) show that the already large levels of concentration are likely to continue (b) identify the consequences, negative and positive, of this outcome (c) discuss the possible regulatory interventions that policy-makers could utilize to address these.

It’s a deliberately provocative title of course, and in our opinion doesn’t really answer the question, but is still worth the read (you can safely skim read it).

You can skip the first 12 pages of preamble and history and pick up the theme from then on. Rufus reviews market share (on page 13) and it is interesting to see that Microsoft has almost 8% Search market share in the US as of September last year (we were under the impression it was much less). And interestingly Yahoo almost matches Google in Hong Kong. Elsewhere Google is creaming everyone. Also interesting to see is that Australia is included in the data but Europe is not (we’d have thought Australia was too small to be relevant).

The paper has lots of formulas, statistical deviations and other impressive looking shit, but we largely tuned out to these (apologies to any academics reading this, and admittedly it is a research paper so there needs to be heaps of substantive content!)

Section 4 of the paper (pages 15-22) covers an attempt to model the Search Engine Market. This is probably boring for most, but interesting to us, especially in terms of the capital required to support the R&D behind the engines as well as their hosting.

The market structure section (pages 22 onwards) continues with assumptions to do with the correlation between utility and quality, and then further to revenue it generates.

By page 38 we were losing our will to live due to all the formulas, but it was worth sticking with. Section 7 (p38 onwards) asks the question whether there should be regulation on the search engine industry. This is actually an important question because Rufus posits that there is good evidence to suggest that a monopoly position in Search (which is current and likely to increase), if left unregulated will cause problems. Here’s his closing statement (p42):

When monopoly, or near monopoly, does obtain it was shown that there is no guarantee that the private interests of a search engine and the interests of society as whole will coincide – and good reasons to think otherwise. It is therefore likely that search, if left entirely unregulated, will develop in ways that are not always to the bene?t of society as a whole. For this reason it is important that policy-makers start now on the process of developing their strategy in relation to this key area of the knowledge economy. The power rapidly accumulating in the hands of a few major search providers is a great one. It behoves to ensure that it is used in a way that brings the greatest bene?t to society as a whole.

Download the Rufus Pollock paper here. Check out his blog here.

[Subscribe to more posts like this here]

Another excellent interview with Steve Ballmer pops up. This time by Rory Cellan-Jones from BBC News.

In it he covers much the same ground as other interviews (Search, Advertising, Windows, Office, Enterprise, Mobile, etc), but we have to admit: the more we see Steve, the more we like him. Each day the financial state of the world dives a little more, and in the midst of it Steve is standing strong – an example for us all.

It’s been said many times that recessions are more about panic and knee-jerk reaction than anything else – a kind of mass follow- the-pessimistic-leaders off the cliff mentality. Thank fully we have optimistic and well considered leaders like to Steve to follow this time. For anyone in Technology the coming months are going to be scary alright. Just don’t lose your head.

Here’s video, courtesy of Jas at the Web Pitch (because the cockfags at BBC don’t have any embed code).

By the way, make sure you understand the David and Goliath allusions Steve puts forth – he’s saying he is the David this time, to Google’s Goliath. Something that Rory inverted at the end of his piece.

[Subscribe to more posts like this here]

Steve Gillmor’s review of Cloud and Client last week was excellent. His analysis of Bill, Steve and Microsoft in general is spot-on in our opinion. Just read it.

By the way, some people aren’t sure where to view the Churchill Club interview (from 25 September). You can view it from the TechCrunch post from the same day.

[UPDATE: We originally embedded it in this post but took it out because it had auto-play set, and that really gave us the shits.]

OK, so some of you have noticed that we are on Twitter. Yes, we did say we weren’t going to go in for any of that social networking malarky, but when we started following people (we picked on people who have something to say about Microsoft) the quality of conversation was too good to pass up.

You can follow us here: http://twitter.com/msconfidential

We’ve already had a few people DM-ing us on Twitter giving us suggestions. We welcome this (especially as it seems most people don’t want to leave comments here – we’re not sure why exactly), and due to popular demand we are probably going to expose our email address in the coming week (something we originally said we wouldn’t do).

When it comes to Twitter we are gradually following the followers of people we follow <g> attempting to build up another good source of Microsoft discussion in addition to all the blogs and news feeds we devour.

You may also notice we are active pruning the follower list every day or so too (that’s why it goes up and down) as we weed out the noise.

Someone asked if we had a Facebook page or group or fan thing – not as yet. Feel free to add one and let us know – we’ll link to it here.

Interesting to see the news that Paul Vick (long time VB guru) is moving over to the Oslo team. As Darryl Taft notes, this is telling evidence of how important the Oslo initiative at Microsoft is shaping up to be.

Oslo is Microsoft’s upcoming visual modelling tool (we covered it here a few days back).

Paul announced his move on his blog, and took pains to reassure the VB faithful that he won’t be going too far:

Even though I’ll be spending a good bit of my time on Oslo, though, I’ll still going to be an active member of the VB community. I’ll still be talking about VB on this blog, opining on the language and it’s future, and, I’m sure, continuing to answer lots of questions. I’ll be continuing to use VB and am really excited where the product is going in this release and the next one (but more about that at the PDC!).

Don Box, who looks after the Oslo team, was as succinct as ever over the announcement, providing the following sum total:

Paul just joined my team to work on the Oslo language, specifically the parts covered in this talk.

I can’t put into words how happy I am that Paul signed up to help us birth this baby.

Darryl’s analysis is excellent and there’s nothing much we can add to the subject – just go read his post here.

You can follow Paul on Twitter here.

[Subscribe to more posts like this here]

Steve Ballmer has his sights set firmly on being number 2 in search within 5 years according to the Telegraph. Good on him I say.

This might sound ambitious, but don’t be concerned. You can be quite confident in this happening because Steve has said he is ‘quite sure’ Microsoft can achieve it. That’s right. He is ‘quite sure’. Sleep easy now.

OK, so we’re piling shit on him a bit, but when you see that Live has a piss-weak 3% of the search market and Yahoo (the current number 2) has 11% you’ve gotta wonder. David and Goliath metaphors don’t really cut it.

So the question becomes, did he really state categorically that Live search would be number 2 in five years? To get the real story you should watch the interview that those reported statements come from:

In it you’ll see that Steve is being pushed for a time frame. He reluctantly agrees to the 5 year timeframe after repeated prompting by the reporter (and a pretty shit interview it was in our opinion). So, the moral of the story – it’s pretty hard to rely on anything you read these days (except of course the current blog you’re reading <g>).

Moving on, we looked at a few more of his comments. And, being a little kinder to the man we have to say that he is very down to earth when in retrospective mode. Here’s his honest response when asked about whether they missed the Search and Advertising boat:

"Sure, should we have embraced the opportunity in search and online advertising a few years earlier? The answer is yes," admitted Mr Ballmer. "But there is nothing to be afraid of. It’s all upside, we have a small market share, we are David, Goliath is out there, the opportunity is ours and we need to seize it."

We might give him a hard time here, but deep down we have a high respect for the man. He’s passionate, honest/realistic and focussed. Exactly what you want in a CEO, especially coming into some tough economic times.

Yes, we read the vague reports too – something about a Windows Cloud operating system coming. Something elsewhere about how it will ‘look a lot like a Windows Server‘. In any case it will be aimed at helping developers write internet based applications.

The funniest part about this bit-by-bit news trickle (mostly via Ballmer) Microsoft have been feeding in the last few weeks was his closing remark (noted by PC World):

"That’s all I can say on that," Ballmer said. "Otherwise, we have no drum-roll announcement in a month."

The new Windows Live Messenger Beta has some new features. One of them is the ability to set your mood. Why the fuck you’d want to do this is beyond us, but Steven has a go at explaining why it might be relevant. Yeah, possibly I guess. Oh, and you’ll need a web cam if you want to use it.

It’s all about making the IM experience more social I guess, and we can’t really fault Microsoft there with this feature.

In other news about the new IM Beta (it’s been out for two weeks or so now) the UI has had a nice revamp – it is certainly more enjoyable to use – feels like bubblegum.

Sites were awash with Dublin news today. But what is it really?

To understand Dublin you can start with Steve Martin’s post announcing the new technology, which will be (of course) covered in detail at PDC later this month. Steve’s team heads up the WCF and WF parts of the .NET Framework so he’s in a good position to explain the new Dublin codename.

In a nutshell: Dublin is about letting the next versions of WCF and WF based apps scale better whilst providing easier deployment and management functionality.

How exactly this is enabled is difficult to get a grip on from Steve, which is why we need to head over to the new Dublin site on Microsoft. Here we learn that Dublin is a server (or as Mary-Jo writes, a new distributed application server).

Actually, it’s not exactly a server, rather a ’set of enhanced Windows Server capabilities.’ that ‘.extend Internet Information Server (IIS) to provide a standard host for applications that use workflow or communications’ (from the Microsoft Dublin site). Stephen Forte probably has the good summary we came across.

It’s getting a little clearer now, but we’re still a little unsure. Thankfully a nice little table in this Dublin Overview document provides a nice little table:

Dublin will be packaged up and made available as a download for Windows Server customers, and of course included in future Windows Server releases.

The keen eyed amongst you will notice that Oslo rears its head (see Tuesday’s post for details on that front) and if you read through the doc you’ll learn that Dublin will be the first server product ot deliver support for Oslo.

But there’s others of course – further in the doc it notes that they’ll be directly supporting BizTalk and Dublin working nicely together.

Other items: Dublin will be backwards compatible and support existing .NET 3.5 WCF and WF applications.

Microsoft are touting Dynamics AX and CRM as the first products slated to support Dublin.