Yahoo has agreed to buy the French online comparison-shopping service Kelkoo SA for 475 million EUR. Kelkoo is a fast-growing, 250-people strong, profitable company, founded in France in November 1999, with operations today in 9 countries. Kelkoo helps shoppers find what they are looking for, using Web-search technology and collects commissions from merchants for referring these shoppers. Its site is also an interesting opportunity for so-called search-generated listings (e.g. online ads related to what someone is searching for), which Yahoo's Overture unit provides, and further improved by last year's acquisition of Inktomi's search technology.
Expansion of its European revenue and operations are key to Yahoo, and it will also be able to incorporate some of Kelkoo's comparison shopping and product searching technology into its own Yahoo Shopping.
The battle for better commerce-related search services between Yahoo, MSN and Google will continue, as search is often the starting point of an online purchase. Better search leads to more visitors, and this attracts more merchants, who can be asked a higher fee to be included in the search engine.
This interesting battle will continue and it is absolutely not clear who will win it.
Microsoft has announced that it will release 2 new services later this year, one for searching through hundreds of news sites, and one to search Web logs (blogs). Later on, there will also be a service called Answerbot, that lets Web surfers type in questions rather than search terms and get natural language answers.
Steve Ballmer regrets that Microsoft has sought partnerships with competitors first, and not developed its own search technology from the beginning. This is seen as the main reason why Microsoft/MSN is behind Google, Yahoo and others in the search engines race. Google and Yahoo already have news search services, while Ask Jeeves has pioneered natural-language queries years ago.
Not so long ago, there were rumors about a possible takeover of Google by Microsoft, but this now looks further off than ever. Microsoft wants to be independent of the sudden strategy changes at its competitors, develop its own technology, and completely control the services it provides.
Call it a major strategy change. For many years, YaST (yet another setup tool) was Suse's crown jewel in its Linux distribution. It made Linux setup and configuration so much easier. After buying Suse last November, Novell shows it understands the power of open source, and hopes that its move will give YaST extra wings (and exposure) so that it gets recognized and supported by the leading system management platforms from e.g. CA, HP and IBM. So far, the only platform that supports it is Novell's very own Zenworks, but we expect others to announce support for YaST very soon.
Update: Linus Torvalds suprised everyone with his appearance at Brainshare, Novell's annual user conference in Salt Lake City, and was greeted with a thundering applause by the Novell customers. Linux hailed Novell's new strategy, and called software patents the biggest threat to software innovation. Also at Brainshare, Novell announced that it will also open-source its iFolder personal storage and filing technology, and will adopt an enterprisewide Linux/OpenOffice strategy, and throw out everything that reminds them of Microsoft. Read more at http://www.sltrib.com/2004/Mar/03232004/business/150310.asp and http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/53/36455.html
Unlike the US States and the Bush administration, it looks like Microsoft (and Steve Ballmer in particular, after staying in Brussels for over 2 days, and hence missing his keynote speech at the Microsoft Management Summit) will not be able to sway European Competition Commissioner Mario Monti.
"By setting a legal precedent in the current antitrust case against Microsoft, the commission will make it easier to pursue Microsoft in future antitrust cases", Monti added. Microsoft will probably have to pay a hefty fine of 3.5 billion USD, sell 2 versions of Windows to PC manufacturers, and open up its secret Windows code to rivals for better interaction.
In a statement following the breakdown of the settlement talks, Microsoft says that it was unable to agree with the EU on principles for new issues that could arise in the future.
New issues are already under investigation at the EU, and Monti clearly did not want to endanger such future discussions with a settlement today.
More at eWeek about the breakdown, while Gartner expects that the antitrust ruling will not have any noticeable effect on Microsoft and its customers.
J2EE application servers are an investment, some will say a big investment, but the definition of corporate application server development and deployment standards can help companies to better manage enterprisewide application delivery, increase corporate agility and lower overall application life-cycle costs by enabling server consolidation. The result is increased developer productivity, decreased time to market, and reduced application and technology sprawl by mandating application server standards and constraining platform proliferation. META Group researchers further find that during the next two years, open source application servers will gain market share in the J2EE market, and force further vendor consolidation. And by 2006, Linux will become the preferred platform for J2EE execution. Finally, they conclude that the J2EE application server software stack has solidified, with products becoming much more similar and migration of code between platforms becoming steadily easier. IBM and BEA will remain the leaders, with Oracle as the leading challenger at the enterprise level.
Read more at http://www.theserverside.com/news/thread.tss?thread_id=24501 and at http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/040310/105849_1.html...
If there comes no last-minute settlement, Microsoft's Windows client programmers will need to provide OEMs with two versions of Windows: one with Media Player bundled and one with it stripped out. However, this may be just only one of the remedies that the EU is seeking... Microsoft will probably also get a hundreds of millions of Euros fine, and will have to open up Windows to stimulate competition. More at http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1549098,00.asp.
Update: Steve Ballmer and his senior vice president for law and corporate affairs Brad Smith flew over on 16/02/2004 to Brussels to defend Microsoft's crown jewels in a discussion with EU Competition Commissioner Mario Monti . Cfr. http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1549695,00.asp.
According to a Microsoft statement, it is delaying the release of its forthcoming SQL Server database and its Visual Studio.Net development tool, in a move that could deprive customers of upgrades they already purchased.
The company said Wednesday that it has decided to push out to the first half of 2005 the delivery of the next major edition of SQL Server, code-named Yukon, and a closely related update to Visual Studio.Net, called Whidbey. Until recently, the company had said that both products would ship by the end of this year. This also strengthens the concerns that Longhorn may have slipped to to 2007...
More info at http://news.com.com/2100-1012_3-5172166.html, and also read Mary Jo Foley's analysis of the domino effect of these delays at http://www.microsoft-watch.com/article2/0,1995,1546542,00.asp
There are serious rumors that Microsoft will release an interim upgrade to XP somewhere in 2005. This would fill the gap between Service Pack 2 and Longhorn, its next-generation version of Windows, scheduled by 2006. However, the stronger the rumours about a version to bridge the gap (and to generate revenue for Microsoft), the more analysts such as Gartner think that Longhorn may be later than expected. In the meantime, the possible interim version is dubbed "XP Reloaded".
Read more at An Interim XP For a Delayed Longhorn?
and at The Register (Even Microsoft can't wait for Longhorn)