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Liddell is talking about Microsoft’s approach to the recession, which is to focus on the cost savings it can offer to customers, watch its own costs, and invest for the future.

The company, in its quarterly earnings report, lowered its growth outlook for the year, but not as much as some had feared. It is now forecasting at least a mild recession, as opposed the economic growth it once saw coming in the second half of its fiscal year.

At the same time, Liddell, in a call with analysts following the earnings report, pointed out that the company may yet see double-digit growth in revenue and per-share earnings for the year.

“We feel extremely good about our relative competitive position,” Liddell said.

While its crystal ball is no clearer than anyone else’s, Microsoft Chief Financial Officer Chris Liddell told financial analysts the company is committed to faring better than the overall IT industry, whatever the economy brings.

On the
Xbox front, Microsoft said it sold 2.2 million Xbox 360s as retailers boosted inventory ahead of the holiday season.

Bill Koefoed, general manager of investor relations, told analysts the issue was that the mix of sales was far from what it had predicted, with traditional PC sales significantly slower, while low-end “netbooks” accounted for a larger share of the market.

Microsoft also addressed last quarter’s shortfall in the company’s Windows Client unit, which posted revenue growth four percentage points lower than the forecast, even though PC unit sales were in line with what the company had projected.

Update at 2:50 p.m. PDT

The company expects to spend less than it had planned in several areas including hiring, marketing, and on the build-out of its data centers. Cuts are also planned in areas like travel and vendor expenses.

The soda pop maker launched a marketing campaign in March that promised a free soda to “everyone in America” if the rock band released its long-awaited Chinese Democracy album this year. After a 17-year wait, the band finally released the album–and Dr Pepper gave fans 24 hours to go to its Web site to print a coupon for their free soda.

“When you go on the blogs and you read the responses from the fans, they associated Axl with this promotion…and blame him for the fact that they didn’t get their free soda,” Laurie Soriano, the band’s lawyer, told CNN. “We’ve gone public with the fact that we are not involved but are trying to clean up the mess.”

Despite those measures, the band is still waiting for its apology.

A Dr Pepper promotion revolving around Guns N’ Roses’ new album has gone flat–and the band is getting the misdirected static.

Dr Pepper told CNN that it had “taken great steps” to keep its part of the deal and that it had extended the window for the giveaway from 24 to 42 hours. The drink maker also set up a toll-free line to handle consumer requests for the coupons. All of those measures have since expired.

But apparently fans’ thirst was greater than Dr Pepper predicted–or prepared for. The crush of visitors to the site crashed the site’s servers, leading to a lot of angry fans, some of whom mistakenly blamed the band for their lack of liquid refreshment. Now frontman Axl Rose and his bandmates are ready to pop.

“The door to a lawsuit being filed is always open until the fans are taken care of and Dr Pepper has done the right thing,” Soriano told CNN.

I tried the software briefly and really liked the Network Map function where all devices that connect to your network are revealed, regardless if they are printers, computers, handheld, or any other types of network devices. The software even shows a message each time a new device connects to your network. Other information such as the detailed status and network advisory can also come in handy.

Cisco announced on Thursday Network Magic 5.0, a suite of network management software. This is the first product released by Cisco since its acquisition of Pure Networks earlier this year.

Network Magic comes in two commercial versions. The Network Magic Essentials ($29.99) (download free trial) is built for users who only require the basic functionality of the software, such as connecting two or three PCs to share a network connection, files, or a printer. Network Magic Pro ($49.99) provides a broader set of capabilities for managing and securing the network. The Pro version supports a
Mac Add-On client ($25) that allows for getting a Mac managed the way a PC would be via the network.

The suite provides an array of tools for people to visualize, manage, and get a variety of network tasks done. These tasks include: connecting and sharing computers’ content or printer, controlling how computers on the network access the Internet, repairing connection and performance problems, optimizing performance and reliability, and so on.

All of these versions offer a seven-day free trial time, and I really think they are worth a try.

(Credit:
Dong Ngo/CNET Networks)

One thing to keep in mind, though, the software installs a few items that run by themselves in the background each time you start the computer, including Pure Network Platform and the Network Magic front-end software. These can potentially slow down your computer.

But I didn’t believe Google could manage to shore up relations with Hollywood as quickly as it did.

For months, Google, YouTube’s parent company, has been talking to the major film companies about launching an ad-supported, streaming movie service, two execs with knowledge of the negotiations told CNET News. “It’s not imminent,” said one of the executives. “But it’s going to happen. I would say you can expect to see it, if all goes well, sometime within the next 30 to 90 days.”

“Our movies are consumed frequently and for long periods of time on the net,” said the exec whose company is in talks with Google. “We’re big believers in long-form feature film content on new media platforms.”

YouTube will begin offering feature films produced by at least one of the biggest Hollywood movie studios possibly as early as next month, according to an executive with a major entertainment company.

How far the relationship between Hollywood and Google will go is anybody’s guess. It’s going to be hard for YouTube to land Universal or 20th Century Fox because each has a parent company that owns a stake in Hulu.

In addition, Google has lamented publicly YouTube’s inability to generate significant income. Some people, including me, predicted it was only a matter of time before Google began obtaining rights to TV shows and films.

Google declined to discuss specifics, but a company spokeswoman issued this statement: “We are in negotiations with a variety of entertainment companies. Our goal is to offer maximum choice for our users, partners, and advertisers.”

YouTube’s move to join the growing number of competitors trying to deliver movies over the Internet isn’t entirely unexpected. Last month, CBS, parent company of CNET News, announced it had agreed to post full-length TV shows on YouTube. That same month, Google rolled out a new wide-screen video player built to display long-form content.

There’s skepticism in some circles about whether enough ads can be placed into a streaming movie to make it profitable without also overloading viewers with commercials. Another sticking point with some of the film companies is Google’s insistence on using a specific ad format for feature films, according to two studio sources. They declined to specify which ad unit Google prefers–whether it’s prerolls or postrolls or something else–but said some of the studios want the final say on how to advertise to viewers.

YouTube’s new wide-screen player presents video in a less pixilated 16:9 format than the site’s standard player, but it falls short of providing Hulu-esque quality.

Over the past year, Hulu’s advantages over YouTube have become clear. Hulu attracts more ad revenue because advertisers are more comfortable with full-length TV shows and films than they are with user-generated fare. Something else Hulu has going for it is a superior viewing experience. Hulu’s player offers some of the clearest images found on the Web.

Check out ZDNet’s stories on YouTube’s filtering systems. You can find the stories here and here.

“Will (Google) try to get into the same space as Hulu, of course,” said one studio executive. “Lots of people will.”

What is certain is that YouTube’s original hope of building a behemoth business exclusively around short, homemade videos is, to this point at least, a bust. The company captured the world’s imagination by showcasing 10-minute long user-generated videos but the strategy hasn’t yielded much in the way of profits. Three years later, the company is turning to professionally made content.

To be sure, not all the studios are prepared to give YouTube full-length movies. Canadian film company Lionsgate agreed in July to give YouTube access to only short movie clips. At least one other studio is trying to cut a similar deal for short-form content with Google, said a separate high-level industry insider.

Updated at 8:16 a.m. to include mention of ZDNet’s review of YouTube’s filtering system.

Google also wants to deliver all the ads and this is problematic because some other companies do a better job, according to one of the executives. He singled out Auditude, which enables a content owner to insert ads into clips wherever they might appear on the Web. This means that if someone posts a pirated copy to some blog or message board, Auditude can slip an ad within the player and allow the rightful owner to turn a buck.

A showdown between Hulu and the 3-year-old YouTube was inevitable. Consider that Hulu, the joint video venture formed by NBC Universal and News Corp., attracts only a fraction of the 80 million people who visit YouTube each month, but Hulu still managed to generate nearly the same revenue in its first year in business, according to reports.

The one thing that Google and YouTube should be encouraged about is the growing number of Hollywood executives who believe there is plenty of interest in viewing films on PCs.

Kinder, gentler relations?
YouTube was supposed to be despised by the entertainment industry. Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman last summer called YouTube a “rogue company.” YouTube became the Web’s No. 1 video site and amassed an enormous following, partly by becoming a favorite place for people to post pirated clips of TV shows and movies. YouTube got rich on the backs of filmmakers, or so it seemed to many content owners.

“We’d love to have our long-form content in front of that audience,” said an executive with a studio close to reaching an agreement with YouTube.

YouTube vs. Hulu
By choosing this route, YouTube must go head-to-head against the Web’s reigning king of streaming long-form video: Hulu.

But here’s what YouTube offers that Hulu can’t: 80 million monthly visitors. No other video site comes close to reaching an audience of that size.

Then, Google’s approach to Hollywood changed. Google actually began wooing the studios. The search company, which has said often that it doesn’t want to be a media company, won over many a bitter studio suit by developing systems that help them either thwart piracy or profit from it. Google representatives also became more flexible about sharing ad revenue, according to insiders.

It didn’t help that Google often took a hard line in negotiations with the studios, according to multiple sources. Things got hostile enough for Viacom, parent company of Paramount Pictures, to file a $1 billion copyright lawsuit against Google last year. That case continues to play out in the courts.

Yahoo’s stock on Friday closed at $16 a share, slightly up from $15.58 a share the day before.

In his research noted, Lindsay stated:

Regulators might not allow the AOL-GOOG paid-search deal to pass to YHOO, which would wipe out the other synergies–creating a large risk for both sides. We are reducing our YHOO price target to $21 but maintain TWX (Time Warner) at $18.50.

The primary source of synergies is staff reductions, where YHOO has (an) unimpressive track record. Other benefits, such as pricing power in display, and combining Advertising.com with Right Media Exchange, will not drive short-term incremental revenues.

Yahoo’s price target was snipped to $21 a share from $24 on Monday by a Wall Street analyst, following the Internet search pioneer’s confirmation that it is delaying its controversial search-advertising deal with Google.

A third point Lindsay raises:

In addition, Lindsay points out that stock transactions over $3.4 billion are dilutive to Yahoo’s shareholders and that Time Warner was likely hoping to receive $6 billion to $8 billion for AOL, which is possible only if Yahoo can gain some synergies from the transaction.

Sanford C. Bernstein analyst Jeffrey Lindsay noted in a research note that despite reports that Yahoo is in talks with Time Warner, the probability of a deal between the media conglomerate’s struggling AOL unit and Yahoo remains relatively low, in part due to antitrust regulators’ concerns about the proposed Yahoo-Google deal.

(Credit:
PandaLabs)

The daily average number of phishing attacks detected has risen from 400 or fewer in the first quarter of 2008 to more than 1,750 in the past month, the firm said. On one day the number of attacks spiked to greater than 13,000, said Cyveillance, which helps commercial customers get phishing sites taken down.

As the economy worsens and more people get laid off, online fraud and financial scams are rising, security experts say.

Meanwhile, the success rate for the money mule operations in North America was on average 66 percent higher than the success rates of such scams in other regions, said PandaLabs, which analyzed a sample population of seven large mule networks around the world. Recipients respond to about one in three of the money mule e-mails, Sherstobitoff said.

The attacks are easy to do once e-mail addresses are obtained, and the risk of getting caught is incredibly small while the payoff can be huge, he said.

“Phishers are getting rich and are very organized,” Brooks said. Meanwhile, “no one is going to jail over it.”

In the money mule scams, e-mails offer jobs as independent contractors and commissions for processing rebates that are supposedly from purchases made at legitimate companies. “Applicants” are asked to provide their bank account information and are then instructed to wire money that is deposited into their accounts to drop boxes via Western Union, said Sherstobitoff.

“None of these (technologies) is foolproof, but they’re a step in the right direction,” Brooks said.

While the U.S. unemployment rate increased by over 6 percent between August and October, reaching a 14-year high of 6.5 percent, dubious work recruitment scams rose 514 percent over that same period, according to statistics from the Honeypot Project, a security-focused research group.

Many of the scams lure people in with promises of quick and easy money. For instance, there has been a marked increase in money mule recruitment scams for people to transfer funds online between countries, and other illegal work-related spam in recent months, security firm Panda said on Thursday. Such offers promise $225 or more a day for what they call “rebate processing” work at home.

Also believed to be related to the economic downturn is a spike in phishing attempts, whereby fraudsters lure people into providing sensitive bank and personal information on malicious Web sites that appear to be legitimate bank sites. The phishing e-mails lately have been made to look like they come from banks that have been involved in mergers, such as Chase and Washington Mutual, and are preying on bank customers who may be confused.

Over the last month there has been a significant increase in phishing attacks, or malicious Web sites discovered that victims are directed to via e-mail, according to security firm Cyveillance.

“The schemes are aimed at people who are desperate in rough times and who are likely to respond as they lose jobs,” Ryan Sherstobitoff, chief corporate evangelist at Panda.

Rather than processing actual rebates, the operation is designed to launder stolen money from one country into another through legitimate bank accounts, he said. The “contractor” may or may not receive a small sum in exchange, but it won’t be enough to make up for the risk posed by participating in an illegal scheme, he said.

Firefox and Internet Explorer have built-in features that warn Web surfers when a site they are visiting is potentially harmful, and Google has a Firefox extension that alerts people when a page appears to be requesting personal or financial information under false pretenses.

This is an example of a money mule laundering e-mail, the type of which has risen along with the U.S. unemployment rate, PandaLabs says.

Those types of recruitment spam hit an all-time high as a percentage of total spam, topping 0.31 percent, up from 0.23 percent the previous month and 0.13 percent in August, according to PandaLabs, the malware analysis laboratory of Panda.

It is unknown how many people are actually falling for the phishing scams and losing money, said James Brooks, director of product management at Cyveillance.

[Microsoft senior director Bob Duffner] stressed that Microsoft by no means wants to promote the use of open-source software to its customers, and still thinks its own software is superior. However, embracing open source is about giving customers and developers the chance to make their own decisions about which software to buy, and making sure both Microsoft and open-source software can be part of the same buying decision, Duffner said.

Perhaps someone should remind Duffner that by promoting its own software to customers, Microsoft already is promoting open-source software, since open source has long been included in its proprietary offerings, a trend that is increasing. (Duffner knows this, of course - he has a deep background in open source. I suspect his comment was designed to placate internal Microsoft factions more than to convey any information to customers.)

commentary

Kudos to Duffer, Sam Ramji, and others on the Microsoft open-source team that are preaching this open-source gospel to the Microsofties. It seems to be sinking in.

Not that customers are fooled. Forrester Research recently surveyed a range of enterprises and uncovered an overwhelming understanding among IT buyers that proprietary offerings have open source inside. So, to Duffner’s point, Microsoft and open-source software already are part of the same buying decision, both in terms of separate products and in terms of Microsoft’s own products.

I read with interest this account of the Microsoft Platform Strategy Group’s efforts to steer the Redmond giant toward a more conciliatory approach to open source. One paragraph, in particular, struck me (emphasis added):

Should fit in a variety of form factors from laptops to mobile Internet devices (MIDs) to cell phones
Increased levels of integration needed
Convert more analog to digital to take advantage of Moore’s law (45 nanometer, 32nm and beyond)
Users can get 200Mb/s today will want 5Gb/s very soon
Future radios will need to automatically switch from one network to another with no negative impact to the user

On the graphics silicon front, Intel will talk about research into mobile graphics based on SIMD, in which a Single Instruction is applied to Multiple Data elements (such as all the pixels in an image). “With devices becoming smaller and applications becoming more visual, better techniques are needed to do more SIMD processing while using less energy,” Intel said in a statement. “Today’s SIMD acceleration circuits have high leakage currents and limited power management, and do not scale well to reduced voltages.”

“This paper is talking about an achievement which would specifically target small devices (i.e. laptops),” the spokesperson said. “We can do SIMD MMX on desktop today, but this research is bringing the technology to small devices.” (MMX is a type of SIMD instruction.)

At the International Solid-State Circuits Conference, Intel will present 15 papers, with a renewed emphasis on integrating more functions into one chip–and less focus on gigahertz. Intel is especially focusing on squeezing more sophisticated wireless silicon into small devices.

This will allow better microprocessor performance reliably, with multiple location hot spot temperature measurements and extend the life of processor components by maintaining lower operational stress, Intel said.

Intel will also discuss optical interconnects for chip-to-chip communications. “The idea of photonics (which is still very much a research idea) is to use optical interconnects to provide the high bandwidth that will be required for some chip-to-chip communications in the future,” an Intel spokeperson said Wednesday. This would be an example of another component that could appear in a future SOC, according to Intel.

“The key research challenge Intel is looking at is how to resolve the inherent problems with a growing number of network technologies–WiMax, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, etc.–that are landing on platforms and in computers,” Intel said Wednesday. “How can you support multiple standards in small form factor devices when you have limited space not only for the radio, but also for the antennas.”

As part of the focus on SoC, Intel is riveting its gaze on the integration of radio silicon, as mobile computers–handhelds, Netbooks, and laptops–become increasingly oriented around connectivity. Future SoCs will have “flexible” radios included on-chip that handle Wi-Fi, WiMAX, 3G, Bluetooth and other widely used standards, according to Intel.

The chipmaker will highlight research on what it is proclaiming as the “new system-on-a-chip (SoC) era,” which it describes as requiring “a fundamental shift in the way semiconductor manufacturers will innovate to keep Moore’s Law alive.” An SoC typically integrates a number of separate functions onto one piece of silicon or into one chip package.

“The trend of using smaller transistors to build larger microprocessor cores with higher operating frequency is coming to an end,” Mark Bohr, an Intel senior fellow, said Wednesday.

(Credit:
Intel)

Intel will also present a paper on a temperature sensor for processors. “Numerous remote sensors are used to measure temperature over the entire multi-core die,” Intel said in a statement. “The processor control unit can then work with these sensors and provide accurate temperature information to higher level software components for various housekeeping and optimization tasks.”

Intel spelled out some of the key radio requirements:

For the time being, Intel is not talking about graphics silicon for specific processors. “We are not talking about any specific processor or chip. This is a research effort that would eventually be a component which does the parallel processing within an SOC, CPU or GPU,” an Intel spokesperson said Wednesday. (CPU stands for Central Processing Unit; GPU stands for Graphics Processing Unit.)

Intel is focusing on getting a variety of wireless technologies onto a system-on-a-chip

House Democrats on Thursday revealed details of a massive legislative effort they said would inject new life into a flagging U.S. economy, thanks to a combination of $825 billion in tax cuts and new government spending.

State governments may apply for grants by submitting reports listing which of their areas have unserved wireless voice, underserved “advanced wireless broadband,” unserved basic broadband, and underserved “advanced broadband service.” NTIA will dole out separate funds for wireless deployment and broadband deployment.

The energy-related sections of what is tentatively called the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 include $11 billion for research and development related to the “Smart Grid Investment Program;” $8 billion in loans guarantees for renewable energy generation; $2 billion for loan guarantees to high-capacity battery makers; and $200 million for a grant program for electric vehicles.

* Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Research: $2 billion for energy efficiency and renewable energy research, development, demonstration, and deployment activities to foster energy independence, reduce carbon emissions, and cut utility bills. Funds are awarded on a competitive basis to universities, companies, and national laboratories.
* Home Weatherization: $6.2 billion to help low-income families reduce their energy costs by weatherizing their homes and make our country more energy efficient.
* Cleaning Fossil Energy: $2.4 billion for carbon capture and sequestration technology demonstration projects. This funding will provide valuable information necessary to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere from industrial facilities and fossil fuel power plants.
* Alternative Buses and Trucks: $400 million to help state and local governments purchase efficient alternative fuel vehicles to reduce fuel costs and carbon emissions.

A recent article by Greg Mankiw, a professor of economics at Harvard and former adviser to President Bush, surveys recent research and concludes that each dollar of government spending increases economic activity by only 1.4 dollars, while (according to Obama’s top economics adviser) a dollar of tax cuts raises the GDP by about $3. And Tyler Cowen of George Mason University suggests that “we are being asked to spend (untold) hundreds of billion dollars” even though the evidence it will have a positive impact “is inconclusive.”

The sprawling, 258-page draft bill includes $32 billion in electric power upgrades, sometimes known as “smart grid” technology, $6 billion for expanded broadband Internet access, and $20 billion for health care information technology.

“Advanced broadband service” is defined as at least 45 megabits per second downstream and 15 megabits per second upstream; “advanced wireless broadband” is 3 mb/sec downstream and 1 mb/sec upstream.

The House leadership has said it would like to hold a floor vote on the package by January 28 and send it to President-elect Barack Obama by mid-February. One potential obstacle is negotiations with the Senate, which is likely to have its own priorities.

Some other portions, excerpted from the summary prepared by Rep. Obey’s office:

Whether this so-called stimulus will have any positive effect on the economy is uncertain, though, because the U.S. Treasury will pay for it by running up the national debt significantly and future generations of taxpayers will be expected to pay it back.

“The economy is in a crisis not seen since the Great Depression,” said letter published Thursday by Rep. David Obey, a Wisconsin Democrat who heads the House Appropriations Committee. “Credit is frozen, consumer purchasing power is in decline, in the last four months the country has lost 2 million jobs and we are expected to lose another 3 (million) to 5 million in the next year.”

The bailout’s cost so far has ballooned to $8.5 trillion, not counting the $5.2 trillion in Fannie and Freddie guarantees, although the Treasury should eventually recover some or even much of this amount. If deficit spending were a sure way to stimulate the economy, the Treasury could simply borrow, say, $100 trillion — and the economic malaise of the last few months would evaporate.

In terms of wireless and broadband, the legislation would require the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (part of the Commerce Department) to create a grant program for “nonrecurring” costs of broadband deployment in rural, suburban, and urban areas–meaning, basically, anywhere in the country. NTIA is supposed to prioritize “unserved” and “underserved” areas, two terms that have no actual meaning until the Federal Communications Commission eventually comes up with one.

Yelp had already gained a following in the U.K., the company said, because travelers bound for the U.S. use it to look up hotels, restaurants, bars, and the like. More than 100,000 of its visitors in the past month came from the U.K.

San Francisco-based Yelp, which accepts reviews of any business in the U.S. but also clusters businesses into subdirectories by city, quietly expanded to Canada several months ago. The company raised a fresh $15 million in funding early last year.

But the site’s free-for-all, say-what-you-want nature may be under scrutiny: a Yelp reviewer was recently sued over a negative review of a chiropractor. If the lawsuit is successful, Yelp may have to crack down on particularly colorful reviews — the content that has made it stand out from other business reviews sites.

User-generated business reviews site Yelp has officially launched a U.K. edition, meaning that no business in England, Scotland, or Wales is safe any longer from the wrath of notoriously opinionated Yelpers.