Microsoft Announces 3,000 Layoffs

Microsoft has announced that it has aid off 3,000 employees from its U.S. and worldwide locations as part of a previously announced cost-cutting initiative.

From InformationWeek:

“This is difficult news to share,” said Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, in an e-mail to employees. “Because our success at Microsoft has always been the direct result of the talent, hard work, and commitment of our people, eliminating positions is hard.”

Microsoft in January said it planned to trim a total of 5,000 jobs from its workforce. Ballmer said Tuesday’s action means the company has “mostly” reached that objective.”We are moving quickly to reach this target in response to consistent feedback from our people and business groups that it’s important to make decisions and reduce uncertainty for employees as quickly as possible,” said Ballmer.

Ballmer added that Microsoft could cut more than the originally announced 5,000 jobs if economic conditions worsen or fail to improve. “As we move forward, we will continue to closely monitor the impact of the economic downturn on the company and if necessary, take further actions on our cost structure including additional job cuts,” Ballmer said.

Yahoo, Microsoft Talking Partnership

Yahoo and Microsoft have restarted partnership discussions, this time over a possible advertising agreement.

From the San Francisco Chronicle:

The discussions restarted a few weeks ago, and included a meeting between new Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, the technology blog AllThingsD said Friday.

The two companies have intermittently talked about partnering in search engine advertising since last year after Microsoft’s unsolicited $47.5 billion takeover bid for the Sunnyvale Web portal fell apart. Microsoft executives have championed a partnership as a way to better compete with search industry leader Google Inc. while underscoring that they are no longer interested in an acquisition.

Current discussions are aimed at finding ways for the pair to work together on a number of fronts, according to the report. One potential idea is for Microsoft to handle the search advertising business for both Web sites while Yahoo would handle all of the display advertising, capitalizing on its strength in banner ads.

Conficker Worm: April Fools?

We’ve heard that the Conficker Internet worm is trying to reach its creators more aggressively today.

But to this point, it appears that nothing noticeable has happened. We’ll have to keep watching to see if anything develops.

From the Associated Press:

The worm’s programming included a change in tactics on April 1. Infected computers were told to step up their attempts to “phone home” for commands. But chief research officer Mikko Hypponen at antivirus company F-Secure says that’s the only sign of life from the bug.

The worm can take control of unsuspecting PCs running Microsoft’s Windows operating system. But its creators likely want to use their vast “botnet” to send spam or perform other cybercrimes, and not to bring down the Internet.

Security companies monitoring the worm have been largely successful at blocking infected machines from communicating with whoever programmed it.

From eWEEK:

The Conficker worm’s supposed doomsday deadline has passed quietly.

According to security vendors, so far there has been no dramatic activity.

“McAfee Avert Labs has been closely monitoring Conficker-related threats and, we haven’t observed any significant activities on the domains that it is polling for thus far,” blogged McAfee researcher Shinsuke Honjo. “Even so, please remain vigilant and watch this space for any further updates to the current status.”

Conficker.c was programmed to begin contacting command and control servers in search of an update starting at midnight GMT April 1. The worm generated a list of 50,000 pseudo-random domain names and selected a subgroup of 500 to contact. Though that process has started, security researchers noted that the actual update may not even come today.

“The most likely outcome on April 1 is denial-of-service conditions resulting from increases in network bandwidth,” opined Gartner analyst John Pescatore. “The major risk of Conficker is the ongoing threat that compromised PCs present to both enterprises and home users.”

iPhone to Add Cut and Paste Features

The founder of social news site Digg Kevin Rose has claimed to have a handful of details on what Apple will announce in its iPhone OS 3.0 unveiling tomorrow.

The cut and paste features sound interesting. Let’s see what is announced tomorrow.

From Ars Technica:

Among Rose’s mentionable tidbits is that copy and paste should finally arrive, and he even offered a believable explanation, a clip of which is embedded below, of how the feature will work.

Rose explains that, in iPhone OS 3.0, double-tapping a word will display a magnifying-glass-like icon that contains two draggable quotation marks. Drag the marks around the word or chunk of text you want to copy, and a contextual menu will appear, offering options to copy or paste. This sounds fairly plausible, and at least as good of a UI implementation as any of the previous mockups of how this feature could work. It is worth noting that Rose has a pretty good Apple rumor track record, nailing some announcements like the 4G iPod nano, the original iPhone, and iTunes 8. The full Diggnation episode (number 194), recorded live at SXSW this past weekend, is not yet up on the Revision3 Diggnation site. You will have to deal with the brief clips for now. Unfortunately, Rose does not get into specifics of just how far this copy and paste functionality will reach.

Google’s Android smartphone OS, for example, only allows the feature to shuffle around words in text boxes. Will iPhone OS 3.0 allow users to copy text from a webpage and paste it into an e-mail or a text box on the page for posting to forums? What about more ad-hoc behavior, such as copying details from a profile in the Facebook app for pasting into the iPhone’s internal Address Book?

From ZDNet:

According to Kevin Rose during a segment of Diggnation (video) the long-awaited copy and paste functionality will be demonstrated at Thursday’s iPhone OS 3.0 media event in Cupertino.

The revelation occurred during Diggnation #194 which was recorded live at Stubbs in Austin, Texas, during SxSW Interactive 2009. In it Rose reveals that copy and paste will be invoked by double tapping on a word, and a magnifier bubble will appear with two quotes that you can drag around your selection. Once you make your selection, you will have options to cut, copy or paste.

In the same segment Rose says that background apps and video didn’t make the cut for 3.0 but that the iPhone would catch up with all the features coming in the Palm Pre.

MacRumors adds that Copy and Paste will be arriving in 3.0 alongside a much improved homepage/springboard with the ability to organize in categories.

Bill Gates Bans iPhone

No, not from everyone. Just from being used in his home.

According to Bill Gates own wife, Melinda,  Apple’s iPhone and iPod are two devices that are not permitted in the Gates home.

From InformationWeek:

I think the quote says it all. Speaking to Vogue magazine, Mrs. Gates said, “There are very few things that are on the banned list in our household. But iPods and iPhones are two things we don’t get for our kids.”

The iPhone and iPod, made by Apple, are products that compete directly with Microsoft’s Windows Mobile platform and Zune media player. Bill Gates’ children can no doubt get their hands on pretty much any Microsoft technology they might want.

I think it’s a fair “ban,” given Bill Gates’ career at Microsoft. My father works for Eastman Kodak. When we still shot pictures on film, Fuji film wasn’t exactly banned, but there was an unstated rule that we should buy only Kodak film. There’s nothing wrong with supporting the company that pays your bills, or rooting for the home team, in a sense.

But apparently that sense of supporting the home team doesn’t mean Mrs. Gates hasn’t been tempted by the dark side. She also told Vogue, “Every now and then I look at my friends and say ‘Ooh, I wouldn’t mind having that iPhone’.”

Kindle Application for iPhone Unveiled

Odds are that you may not have yet the latest $359 Kindle electronic book reader. But if you own an iPhone or iPod Touch, a new application will let you access the same content on your Apple device.

From the Associated Press:

In a bid to increase its slice of the e-book market, the Seattle-based online retailer plans to roll out a free program Wednesday that brings several of the Kindle’s functions to the iPod and iPhone’s smaller screen.

The program, which can be downloaded from Apple’s online application store, lets iPhone and iPod Touch users read the same electronic books, magazines and newspapers that Kindle owners can buy on Amazon.com. As with the Kindle, the iPhone app lets users change the text size on the screen, and add bookmarks, notes and highlights.

The application does not connect to the Kindle store, however, so users must access the Web browser on their iPhone, iPod or computer to buy the content.

If you happen to have a Kindle and an iPhone, Amazon’s program will handily sync the two so you can keep your place in the same book on both devices.

The Kindle program isn’t the first e-book reader for the iPhone, but it marks the first time Kindle content is available on a cell phone — a move Amazon recently said it would be making, and something that rival Google Inc. is also doing.