Hal O'Brien

I've done an ego scan on Bing, and it's come up with some interesting alternate hits that don't usually show up on Google. (Don't even try to tell me you don't do the same as a search engine test.) Score one for Der Bingles.

This morning, though, I wanted to confirm the address of a Recession Camp Seattle event. Bing's first page was a group of hits about Recession Camp, but their own site was not listed. Google, OTOH, shows Recession Camp's own site as the #1 hit.

Bing appears to still need some baking.

From the original article in the New York Times on Microsoft's offer for Yahoo:

"The offer of $31 a share represents a 62 percent premium over Yahoo’s closing stock price of $19.18 on Thursday, a far cry from its peak of $118.75 right before the dot-com bubble crash."

Microsoft has since increased its offer to $33/share, a premium of 72% on the original share price at Yahoo.

Yahoo's board has always maintained that MSFT's offer was "undervalued," and repeatedly refused it. In what universe they thought making $1.72 on every $1.00 invested was "undervalued" was never explained.

Today, Microsoft has withdrawn its bid. Rightly so, in my opinion.

The next act: Watching Yahoo's board have their pants justifiably sued off by shareholders who'll never see so good an offer again. This may be the stupidest bunch of managers since Coke's "reformulation." (Or any member company of the RIAA.)

Only pecunium may fully appreciate this, but there it is.

I just wrote the following earlier tonight to James Fallows (longtime editor at The Atlantic, and author of many books, including National Defense, Breaking the News, and Looking At the Sun):

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I was recently writing a letter to the editor of my local paper. Like many papers, they have a word limit -- 200 words. In the past, I'd used Microsoft Word's Word Count feature off whichever menu. But this time I was using Word 2007, and I noticed a dynamic word count ticking away on the left-hand side of the status bar. I thought to myself, "That's a handy feature for a working writer---"

Which is when I caught myself short, and was reminded of your piece in The Atlantic years ago about working for Microsoft on Word. Specifically, about you trying to add in features you thought would be useful to writers.

So, I have to ask -- Was this one of yours? Did it really take that long to make it into a released product?

Congratulations, if so.

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Jim wrote back right away, and was kind enough to confirm that, yes, that was one of his features. Also, he's working on a piece for The Atlantic on the Giant Panda reserve in Wolong.

But this is about as cool as when I put together the meaning of the reference in The West Wing where someone from Indonesia was a Portuguese speaker.

Hey, I just mentioned Google in a post, and that reminded me of something...

The folks at The Internet Archive are doing a really amazing thing. They've archived back copies of all kinds of web sites. Which makes sense if you have any kind of historical instinct, given how ephemeral the web is.

Trick is, they don't appear to let Google spider them. Which is a shame.

But here's a story I've been reminded of, working at The Client. If you want, you can see the Archive's original source for it. It's from Jack Rickard's late, lamented magazine Boardwatch. It's a column by Harley Hahn and Wendy Murdock (as she then was -- she's now Wendy Russ). Hover your mouse pointer over those links, and you'll see just how long Harley and Wendy have been around, given their domains. It's from the March 1995 issue, and I've never seen it either verified or refuted. You'll see what I mean.

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excerpt from Anonymity:

The point is, some people have a real need for anonymity when they participate in Usenet... Say that you work for Microsoft (or any other fine worldwide operating system company with predatory marketing habits) and you want to let people know that there are undisclosed bugs in the latest mission-critical, industrial-strength, enterprise-oriented product line. If you posted such information under your own name, it might go poorly for you at the office. Being able to send anonymous messages to the world at large allows you to blow the whistle and still keep your job.

Not convinced? OK, here is an everyday example that we are sure you can identify with. Imagine that you are the co-founder and Chairman of the Board of a large, worldwide operating system company with predatory marketing habits. You are of marriageable age, but you are so shy that the only dates that you have ever had have been set up by your mother. And, you never really know if the women that you see like you for yourself or for your money.

So you decide to meet people by responding to personal ads on the Net - but you know that, as soon as a woman sees your real e-mail address, she will figure out who you are. To solve this problem, you can arrange to send and receive your e-mail anonymously and, only when the time is right, do you reveal your real identity.

In fact, one of our best friends - who happens to be a fabulously wealthy co-founder and Chairman of the Board of a large operating system company - was able to find his wife in just this manner. They met when he responded anonymously to a posting on the alt.geek newsgroup. Imagine his surprise when, after a long electronic courtship, he found out that he and she worked for the very same company (just like Jimmy Stewart in the movie "Little Shop Around the Corner").

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Aside from the alternate universe where Little Shop of Horrors and The Shop Around the Corner merged into one... I'm just really, really curious about this.

Forbes has its list of rich folks out again.

It estimates Mr. Gates as being worth US$40.7 billion.

This is interesting in a bunch of ways. First off, rooting around in MSFT's SEC filings, one sees that Bill had 651,749,668 shares, prior to the new 2-1 split. Multiply that by today's share price, US$23.58, and adjust for the split, and one gets approx. $30.7 billion. So Forbes thinks Bill is worth $10 billion without his MSFT stock.

Another SEC filing says Bill is the holder of the single largest chunk of MSFT stock, at 11% of the total company. That's interesting, because about 10 years ago I was able to back-calculate (given the share price and Bill's stated worth in Forbes at the time) that Bill used to have about 33% of the stock.

The 22% difference went to the Foundation, mostly.

But you'll notice 22% is bigger than 11%. So... Why isn't the Foundation the biggest holder of MSFT?

The answer, I learned recently in Fortune (in a wholly unrelated article about how the Packards and the Hewletts have had very different strategies in their foundataions), is that the Foundation pretty much sold off the stock as it came in, immediately buying mostly bonds. This led to a pretty graph in the article, showing how the 10 biggest foundations have mostly tanked in the past few years, as they've been heavily invested in their donors' stocks -- except for the Gates Foundation, whose worth has continued to rise, to about $24 billion.

Sounds like a mostly good deal, except...

Well, except that 22% of MSFT would be worth about $60 billion today, if they'd hung on to the stock over the long haul.

Oops.

Also, it means that if Bill hadn't gotten worried about his image serious about philanthropy, he'd currently be worth about $100 billion (90 in stock, 10 in other investments)... Even at MSFT's present relatively low prices.