Adobe launches Creative Suite 4

For some time now, Adobe (the maker of such softwares such as Acrobat, Photoshop and Flash) has been bundling its major softwares such as Photoshop, Illustrator, Digital Video, etc under one bundle (with variations) called the Creative Suite. As a result, when the Creative Suite is finally released, it is a major release; for some time before it is to be released, people put a slow-down on buying the previous version; they would rather get the latest and greatest.
A big part of the CS release is the release of a new version of Photoshop, and it is one of the most eagerly awaited products of the Creative Suites. Now Photoshop CS4 has been announced, and would be available in October. The major changes in this release include being able to use the GPU for greater speed, something that is eagerly awaited. Using the GPU allows the application to do its graphics processing faster (and that is typically one of the most time consuming portions of the overall time taken in the product).
Another major change in the release details support for 64 bit processors on the Windows platform, not much of a benefit for regular users, but more easily appreciable once the user starts moving onto much more memory-intensive work. Another areas where there is much better support is by making it easier for 3rd party developers to deploy extensions - they can create their own control panels in the form of Flash and just drop it in. Photoshop will also be integrating the latest Camera Raw Plugin (v 5.0) so that the latest version of RAW files from newer cameras are supported.
The upgrade price for Photoshop is $199 for the Photoshop CS4 and $349 for CS4 Extended; full purchase prices are $699 and $999.

Google's chrome - shaking the browser market

Just a few years ago, Microsoft would have thought that it had sewn up the browser market; then came Firefox (backed by Google as well). Firefox won a lot of converts, and seemed like the open source alternative to a market that Microsoft had almost totally won, and it won a significant minority of the browser market. For the first time after Netscape, there seemed like an open source alternative in the form of Firefox; and now, Google seems suddenly to buck all the open source support and launch its own browser called Chrome - in the process, it seems to have withdrawn support from Firefox.
Chrome however promises much more to people everywhere, an open source software that can actually serve as the backbone for an alternative to the standard desktop - no longer will applications have to choose between the desktop and the internet:

Far from a betrayal, Chrome represents the best possible future for open source developers everywhere. What Google has delivered is a giant-slayer, a self-contained WebOS that could one day supplant Microsoft's desktop hegemony. Chrome is the ultimate end-run -- around Windows, Win32/.Net, the whole entrenched ecosystem.
This is the future of FOSS, a future where Chrome becomes the OS and Linux is relegated to its rightful place as a glorified boot loader. You know that's where they're headed. You know that's Google's master plan. The wunderkinds envision a world where the OS is irrelevant, where everything revolves around their pumped-up browser and advertising-laced SaaS offerings.

Right now Chrome only exists for the Windows platform, but versions for other operating systems will be available; and one can bet that pretty soon we will start seeing applications that are made for Chrome, that showcase this platform and live up to all its promises.

The importance of news in today's world

Computers have been blamed for a number of problems that occur in today's world, but the malfunction of news reporting (causing an older page to appear and seem as current news) and the impact on a company's stock price is not something that we hear too often; neither would the investors who lost money on such a thing happening have imagined that they were watching a computer glitch. They did not bother to check elsewhere, and sold at panic levels, such is the dependency that people have on news items. Read on:

Information can live in cyberspace forever. And that cost some investors in United Airlines parent UAL Corp. a load of money Monday. Shares of UAL briefly plummeted as low as $3 early in the day -- from $12.30 on Friday -- after a 6-year-old story on the company's 2002 bankruptcy filing resurfaced on the Web and was reported as news by an investment letter.
But investors who sold at the day's lows are stuck: The Nasdaq Stock Market, where UAL stock is listed, said trades triggered by the erroneous report wouldn't be rescinded. What's more, shares of other carriers, including Continental Airlines Inc. and AMR Corp., the parent of American Airlines, also briefly dived with UAL before rebounding.

All this was caused by a series of events in which an old story got posted on the home page of a newspaper, and then got included in Google's automatic story picker (because the story had appeared as a top item on the newspaper site), which was then forwarded as part of an investment bulletin (where the researcher saw it on both the company page and on Google news and concluded it was authentic). By the time that UAL saw the news posted on Bloomberg and issued a retraction, the share had nose-dived and people had sold in panic.
People are too much in a hurry nowadays to be the first with the news, and traditional methods of confirming news and such data no longer seem to be in vogue.

Microsoft ropes in Seinfeld to bring more zest to advertising

The Windows Operating System is a massive money-earner for Microsoft; together with Microsoft Office, the software earns a huge portion of the total revenues for Microsoft. However, it has been 2 decades now since Microsoft rolled out the Windows brand and took a commanding share of the computer desktop software market. Users are slowly getting tired of this brand name, and seeking a cooler alternative, are latching onto the Mac platform in bigger numbers (they have not moved on in very high figures, but even a percentage decrease in Windows sales would be worrying for Microsoft). Another section of users have got introduced to the Mac through the Mac option of being able to load both the Mac and Windows on the same Mac machine; and there would be a number of such users who would find the Mac software more compelling (and of course, there are a number of Ads that show Mac users as cool, while Windows users are shown as nerdy). So what does Microsoft do ? It recruits Seinfeld to star in some ads designed to bring a cool look to the Windows platform:

Microsoft Corp., weary of being cast as a stodgy oldster by Apple Inc.'s advertising, is turning for help to Jerry Seinfeld. The software giant's new $300 million advertising campaign, devised by a newly hired ad agency, has been closely guarded. But Seinfeld will be one of the key celebrity pitchmen, say people close to the situation. He will appear with Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates in ads and receive about $10 million for the work, they say.
The attempted image overhaul comes as Microsoft executives privately acknowledge that Windows - the company's most important brand - has grown stale and has been battered by Apple's “Mac vs. PC” ads. Microsoft's immediate goal is to reverse the negative public perception of Windows Vista, the latest version of the company's personal-computer operating system.

The company must be really worried. Normally, the Mac has always been derided by Microsoft, and not worthy of attention; so the campaign to hire a popular comedian (even though his shows stopped production in 1998) along with a new Ad agency smacks of an effort to try and get back some freshness, some new enthusiasm among its market base.

Google's future besides search

Google is a company that has a lot going for it. It has a reputation of being a great place to work, the leader in the area of search (a field that it essentially took over and made it the big size that it currently is), and has some solid public relations going for it (the fact that it continues to vanquish Microsoft means that more people see it in a positive light). The stock of the company continues to remain high. But all good things have to come to an end. Slowly, the sheen is starting to wear off and there are more critical analysis of the company that are starting to emerge. One major area for critical analysis is about the success of the company in fields other than search:

Google has been the world's hottest technology company for almost six years now. The Mountain View company not only completely dominates the search engine business, but it's had an absolute lock on Silicon Valley's psychology. Every new beta product that debuts generates enormous attention and seems to promise to revolutionize one more slice of the Web and communications. Just this week came the latest numbers from comScore indicating that Google increased its search market share over Microsoft and Yahoo. And the takeover squabble between those two has just reinforced the perception that Google has an almost unassailable position as the leading technology company.
"Name me anything they've been successful in beside search," Chowdhry said. "I think the board and management of Google need a total overhaul." OK, that's harsh. On the other hand, according to Google's own securities filings, the company expects its margins on advertising to continue to shrink and its revenue growth in this area to continue to slow. In addition, all those high-profile ventures the company has launched, and the acquisitions it's made, have yet to contribute much to the bottom line. In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company noted that revenue from services such as YouTube, Google Checkout and a host of others "were not material."

Youtube in particular was much mocked (especially among the online community), since a purchase of $1.6 billion is not a small amount and a lot of analysts were unable to figure out as to how Google will make money on this transaction. It's other purchases such as Picassa, and initiatives like Google Earth, are seen as cool, and fitting into the ad space in the long term theme of things, but are a very long way away from making money. No one of its stockholders would grudge the purchase of something like Doubleclick, but stuff such as Picassa do not seem to make sense.

Apple willing to let BestBuy sell iPhones

Apple has a gold mine in the shape of it's iPhone, a device that continues to generate significant customer demand, and in fact so much demand, that if a customer wants to buy an iPhone in a AT & T store, there is a waiting time of around a week. Outrageous, some people would say, it's a device after all. But the iPhone has turned out to be such a hot device that people queue up to buy the iPhone, and Apple has sold millions of them so far. However, Apple hasn't exposed the phone in the retail market outside of the Apple and AT&T stores, and this restriction must still be limiting the number of phones they are able to sell. Well, it looks like they have re-considered; there seems to be an agreement to allow BestBuy to stock iPhones in BestBuy stores. Given that BestBuy is the largest electronics goods retailer, seems like Apple could expect a bump in the sales:

In a move that will significantly expand its retail presence in time for the holiday season, Apple has agreed to let retailing giant Best Buy sell the new iPhone 3G through its nationwide chain of Best Buy Mobile outlets starting early next month. Best Buy markets cell phones in the United States through 970 full-size stores and 16 stand-alone Best Buy Mobile shops. All U.S. Best Buy stores will carry the iPhone except for a handful of outlets located in areas where AT&T does not provide cell phone coverage.
For Best Buy, which has been angling for the iPhone business for more than a year, the deal will add Apple’s cachet to its expanding smartphone offerings and help drive traffic to new Best Buy Mobile departments within its stores. Best Buy is aggressively marketing a variety of smartphones, from RIM BlackBerry Curves to Palm Treos, and is the exclusive reseller, with Sprint (S), of the Samsung Instinct, one of the iPhone’s nearest competitors.

This will push the iPhones into the hands of a larger number of consumers, and given impulse purchases, may lead to a bump up in sales for the iPhone. After all, a consumer going to buy some other phone may come across the iPhone and decide to buy. What is not yet clear is about how the activation will be handled for these iPhones.

Yahoo shareholder meet ends tamely

With the recent agreement between the Yahoo board and the shareholder challenge of Carl Icahn which gave Carl 3 seats on the board, the issues confronting Yahoo in terms of shareholder challenge seem to have died down. Otherwise why would the proceedings from the Yahoo board meeting end like this ?

It's almost as if the past six months never happened. Yahoo's much anticipated annual meeting on Aug. 1 left its current board and co-founder and Chief Executive Jerry Yang intact, in control, and still insisting they can return to contention with runaway rival Google. Despite rampant shareholder anger that the Internet icon couldn't close any of a series of deals with Microsoft since the software giant's unsolicited $45 billion buyout bid Feb. 1, the long-delayed annual meeting was remarkable mostly for how little happened.
Nonetheless, the vote still indicates that a significant portion of shareholders remain dissatisfied with Yahoo's direction. The most pointed criticisms during the meeting came from Eric Jackson, who runs a Florida-based firm called Ironfire Capital He called for Bostock and two other directors to step down and for Yang to give up the CEO seat to a more experienced executive. "They're basically saying, 'Believe in us,'" Jackson said after the meeting. "There are too many people who have been there too long and we need new management from outside."

I don't think that this is the last anyone has heard of this entire issue. Yahoo is not likely to be able to outwit Google, and shareholders will remain dissatisfied with the performance and the share prices. Future revolts cannot be ruled out.