12 responses so far ↓

• 1 Yahoo!/MLB.com Annouce New Partnership | Major League Baseball News // Apr 11, 2008 at 4:19 pm

  […] http://eastwindupchronicle.com placed an observative post today on Yahoo!/MLB.com Annouce New Partnership […]

• 2 westbaystars // Apr 11, 2008 at 10:20 pm

  If this helps keep Microsoft from gaining control over Yahoo!, all the better.

• 3 Shinsano // Apr 11, 2008 at 11:15 pm

  I hear that.

• 4 EW // Apr 12, 2008 at 9:27 am

  I tried out MLB TV for a year and found it to be horrible. The video would freeze on my about every 10 minutes, requiring me to log back in again. I was actually willing to put up with that, but after I re-logged in for about the eighth time, MLB TV would tell me that I’d logged in too many times that day, and that I wouldn’t be able to log back in again for 24 hours. Which meant I could never watch more than about four innings of any game. And the jerks wouldn’t give me my money back. Why is it so bad if Microsoft gains control of Yahoo, again? Just curious.

• 5 EW // Apr 12, 2008 at 9:28 am

  Erm, “freeze on me,” that is.

• 6 John Brooks // Apr 12, 2008 at 11:43 am

  Why is it so bad if Microsoft gains control of Yahoo, again?

  Many deplore Microsoft for their business practices which they call anti-competitive and the security problems that plague Windows and Microsoft products.

  As for the reported Microsoft-Yahoo deal its going to happen sooner or later. None of the alternatives for Yahoo are reasonable from a anti-trust or stockholder confidence standpoint.

• 7 EW // Apr 12, 2008 at 12:29 pm

  John Brooks,

  I’m aware of Microsoft’s history, but unfortunately, MS’s anti-competitive practices have become standard operating procedure in the tech sector of the business world. Apple and Google, in particular, have picked up the torch lit by Microsoft and run with it. I guess I don’t mind MS taking over Yahoo because it’s not like Yahoo is this awesome thing to begin with. Other than their sports coverage (which is excellent), there’s not much worth preserving. Their news pages and featured articles, in particular, have become increasingly vapid.

• 8 John Brooks // Apr 12, 2008 at 3:37 pm

  I maybe didn’t make myself 100% clear, I in no means am against Microsoft acquring Yahoo, I was more or so talking from the viewpoint from Westbay above. I agree with that Google and Apple have took the torch and ran with it.

  I’ve always been of the belief that the restrictions on the free market as in the Microsoft anti-trust lawsuit and the path the EU has took have done more harm than good, though I’m afraid I’m getting more and more off-topic.

  Though yes, Yahoo besides their fantasy sports leagues are a joke. Their news coverage and featured coverage have become a joke. Yahoo executives are clearly living in a dream world if they think Yahoo is doing something right.

  Moving back to Microsoft and what it means for the video distribution and sales advertising, they should only further help in bringing MLB to the masses and provide the finances to make MLB.TV work.

• 9 westbaystars // Apr 12, 2008 at 11:56 pm

  Going way off topic. But you asked for it.

  I’m a computer programmer first and foremost - before being a baseball fan. I went from one of the biggest proponents of Windows in our company in the early 1990s to overwriting my last Windows partition at the stroke of midnight, January 1, 2000.

  I enthusiastically filed the most bug reports in Japan for Windows 95, and one Microsoft person commented that the beta test crew had a sign on their door that it didn’t ship until Westbay was satisfied. (True or not, I have no way of knowing.) And they did a very good job, the only bug they didn’t fix was with their mailer - there was no way to quote messages with “>” characters on the left, a standard for e-mail since the 1980s - quote, reply, quote, reply, …. It was no big deal, I just used a freeware mailer instead.

  Then the whole web browser thing happened. Netscape 2.0 made it so that web pages could be dynamic, even when the pages themselves were static (nothing could run on the server side). It was so much more than FTP, GOPHER, and USENET. I learned JavaScript and started to make some really interesting dynamic HTML pages - like bilingual player pages where one could change languages with the click of a button without reloading the page. (No big deal now, but it was in 1996.)

  However, when Microsoft started pushing IE on people, IE users started complaining that my pages were crashing their browser. The reason? I put data lines into the JavaScript, and any line greater than either 127 or 255 characters (I don’t recall which any more) would crash IE. Furthermore, they screwed up their version of JavaScript (calling JScript to avoid licensing issues) by not implementing all of the functions in the ECMA standard properly. Proper functionality was well documented, but Microsoft chose to “Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish” JavaScript.

  That was the first really annoying issue. And it kept me from using IE. The next was when I was writing a dynamic web application for a customer that relied on JavaScript. I had managed to get it to work with IE 3 and Netscape 2 and above. But depending on the week that people downloaded IE 4, it would either work or not work. I had a list of build numbers and the JavaScript flaws that accompanied them. It was insane watching different parts of my application break, then work, then break again. And this continued after IE 4 was released! Did the customer every think it was a Microsoft problem? No. It was always our company’s problem - my problem.

  Then I was writing a design document in MS Word. One of the things I had to do was show the menu items in the document. Simple, right? Well, when I got to “Edit” - “Copy” it goes like this: “コピー (C)”. Do you see that “C” in parenthesis? No matter what I did, as soon as that ‘)’ character was hit, it changed it to a copyright symbol. It didn’t matter what order I entered the characters in, whether I cut and pasted any of it. It would not let me enter (C). I disabled what seemed like hundreds of “Auto-____” properties to no avail. Literally hours going through the Help mess didn’t help. In the end, I threw Word out and started using Netscape 4 to create all of my documents. It did what I wanted without getting in the way.

  However, Microsoft wasn’t satisfied driving me away from their word processor (which was never close to as good as Ami Pro or Aldus Page Maker on Windows 3.x). They then forced me to abandon MS Office all together by breaking Netscape’s TCP/IP stack on installation. Back then, MS Office didn’t even offer HTML output, let alone any kind of Internet communications built in. However, it somehow would break Netscape’s communication functionality by simply installing it. This is part of the ruthless business practices where Microsoft drove entire segments of the IT industry out of business. Well, to me, Netscape was more important than Office, so Office was gone. And I started petitioning anybody who sent me an Office document to resend in in plain text or CSV.

  By the time the Windows 98 beta program came along, I was having issues with Microsoft. Through the beta testing period, I found that the second beta was the most stable, however, its FEP (Front End Processor - MSIME) would not allow me to type using the Kana-Lock. I’m one of only a hand full of people who touch type using the kana keyboard layout. When thinking in Japanese, I think with the Japanese “alphabet,” not the Romaji (western alphabet) conversions.

  When Windows 98 was released, it ignored my selections of things not to install, my PCMCIA network card was no longer supported (it worked all through the betas), and my notebook’s sleep function would no longer work. I went out to the local bookstore and bought a book with a CD-ROM of FreeBSD 2.2.6, reformatted the hard drive, and started migrating away from Windows.

  And that was just how Microsoft drove me away personally. There were many more incidents thereafter, often where our company had to work hard to help customers due to MS service packs breaking things. Did customers ever complain to Microsoft? No. We had to stop our forward development to fix what Microsoft had broken on our older software. (By “we,” I mean our group - I had started programming in Java, developing on FreeBSD and deploying to FreeBSD, Linux, and Windows, so my code was never effected by Microsoft’s dis-service packs.)

  I’m a very forgiving guy. But Microsoft has gone beyond forgiveness. And the level of underhandedness that they went to in their recent push for making OOXML a standard is hardly a surprise any more. Just their latest acts showing that they are not deserving of ever receiving my business again.

  The day they take over Yahoo! is the day I unsubscribe to all Yahoo! groups and services. I’ve been tilting at this windmill a long time. At first, I was the only voice against Microsoft’s moves against the entire IT industry (nobody else seemed to notice). As time went on, more techies got fed up with Microsoft and started revolting. Now even non-techies are moaning about being locked in to Microsoft’s products and are trying to escape.

• 10 EW // Apr 13, 2008 at 4:16 am

  Westbaystars,

  Thanks. I liked reading that, actually. A lot of people have good reasons for not liking Microsoft, but a lot of other people seem not to like them just because it’s cool not to like them or whatever. When it comes to Internet/tech companies, I tend to think that most of ‘em are revolting behind the scenes, but Microsoft definitely has deeper roots.

  I guess with the Yahoo thing, I just don’t care. I use Yahoo every day now, but I barely tolerate. In fact, I almost hate it. (The sports stuff is honestly the only thing that really keeps me coming back.) So if another company were to come along and buy it, I think it’d be hard for them to “ruin” Yahoo or anything. And I’d rather it be Microsoft (who has at least done a few cool things online lately) than AOL/Time Warner.

• 11 Shinsano // Apr 13, 2008 at 10:19 am

  My beef with Microsoft involves IE, which I’m basically forced to use and cannot uninstall. Everytime it’s updated it takes up more space, has a few features I like and a bunch I don’t.
  That said, I hardly cherrish Yahoo! either. I use it for fantasy sports and an email acct. Its “news” content is almost insulting. It’s possible it would even get better with a Microsoft takeover.

• 12 Gary Garland // Apr 16, 2008 at 1:03 pm

  As a computer user, it doesn’t get much dumber than me. The only thing I’m interested in is being able to accomplish the most stuff with the least amount of hassle. Definitely a “plug and play or die” kind of guy. I don’t know jack about computer code, though I admire immensely people such as Michael who know it and can manipulate it like wizards.

  When I started doing a lot of work in the Japanese language in the late 1990’s, IE just didn’t get it done. I switched to Netscape and voila, no problems. I now use Firefox, which loads faster for me than IE (that just may be the way my midline priced desktop is setup, I don’t know, but why should I have to care?).

  Aside from that, I also don’t like the way Bill Gates has tried to make himself the John D. Rockefeller of the computer software market while putting out a product that is a field day for identity thieving hackers. To me, Gates is little better than the morons who run the big two American car manufacturers. Lots of arrogance and producing loads of crap that is getting its qualitative butt kicked by better companies (Firefox and Opera). So I would suggest that Microsoft deal first with its QC problems and then tone down its condescending way of dealing with consumers, the rest of the tech community and the law before it conceives of merging with another firm.

  And even that acquisition is geared to knocking out or coopting a competitor to its own struggling portal site. Bite me, Bill.

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