As CEO, Yang had the task to turn around the company’s dwindling fortunes. However, the rejection of the Microsoft offer and a failed advertising partnership with Google marred his brief tenure. Here’s tracing the rise and fall of Yang.

The company has been suffering from dropping share prices. However the news of Yang’s resignation caused shares to soar. Yang, co-founder of Yahoo!, will revert back to his previous role, focusing on development. He also will remain on the board.

In my opinion he did the right thing for open source and free software. Microsoft would not like to give anything for free. If you remember Hotmail was planning to make Hotmail paid when our beloved gmail came in and saved our souls. Had I been in Yang’s shoes, I would have done the same. Google was a better option at that time (before recession).

I think, Microsoft is not the answer, it is the question, NO is the answer

“If General Motors had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving twenty-five dollar cars that got 1,000 miles to the gallon.”

In response to Bill’s comments, General Motors issued a press release stating (by Mr. Welch himself):

“If GM had developed technology like Microsoft, we would all be driving cars with the following characteristics:

1. For no reason whatsoever your car would crash twice a day.
2. Every time they painted new lines on the road you would have to buy a new car.
3. Occasionally your car would die on the freeway for no reason, and you would just accept this, restart and drive on.
4. Occasionally, executing a manoeuvre such as a left turn, would cause your car to shut down and refuse to restart, in which case you would have to reinstall the engine.
5. Only one person at a time could use the car, unless you bought “Car95″ or “CarNT”. But then you would have to buy more seats.
6. Macintosh would make a car that was powered by the sun, reliable, five times as fast, and twice as easy to drive, but would only run on five percent of the roads.
7. The oil, water temperature and alternator warning lights would be replaced by a single “general car default” warning light.
8. New seats would force everyone to have the same size butt.
9. The airbag system would say “Are you sure?” before going off.
10. Occasionally for no reason whatsoever, your car would lock you out and refuse to let you in until you simultaneously lifted the door handle, turned the key, and grab hold of the radio antenna.
11. GM would also require all car buyers to also purchase a deluxe set of Rand McNally road maps (now a GM subsidiary), even though they neither need them nor want them. Attempting to delete this option would immediately cause the car’s performance to diminish by 50% or more. Moreover, GM would become a target for investigation by the Justice Department.
12. Every time GM introduced a new model car buyers would have to learn how to drive all over again because none of the controls would operate in the same manner as the old car.
13. You’d press the “start” button to shut off the engine.

There is a premeditated attempt by these companies to aim at Indian users with advertisements that claim to help in the selection of a child’s sex, said George, the petitioner in the case, in a telephone interview on Thursday.

Indian law prohibits tests that allow people to know the gender of an unborn child — a law designed to tackle widespread abortion of female fetuses.

“These companies are making a lot of money by doing highly targeted and selective advertising of these products,” said George, an activist leading the campaign.

“Our petition seeks to block these advertisements.”

The Act intends to forbid “the misuse of [pre-natal diagnostic] techniques for the purpose of pre-natal sex determination leading to female feticide.” In India, as in other countries, female children are often valued less than male children, a tradition that prompts some parents to terminate pregnancies that would result in the birth of a female infant.

According to a 2006 report in British medical journal Lancet, 10 million female fetuses have been aborted in the past two decades in India. The Guardian in the U.K. reports that Indian parents abort half a million female fetuses a year. The site Maps of India shows the sex ratios in different regions of India as of 2001, based on census data.

Most Indians prefer sons because they can earn more money in the workplace, while girls are seen as a financial burden because of the matrimonial dowry demanded by a groom’s family.

“The court has issued a notice to Google, Microsoft and Yahoo asking them to reply to our petition,” Sanjay Parikh, a lawyer who lodged the complaint, said in a statement.

Google said various elements go into managing ad program policy, including local legal requirements and user experience. “We review our policies regularly and make changes to keep them current and effective. We have not yet received the petition from the Supreme Court, but we take local laws extremely seriously and will review the petition carefully.”

A search for “sex selection” on Google India returns no text ads, in contrast to 63 sponsored links for the same keywords at Google.com. Yahoo India likewise returns no sponsored results for those keywords. A Microsoft Live Search conducted through MSN India returned two search ads offering information about gender selection.

Yahoo and Microsoft were unavailable for comment.

As social reformers were effectively able to stop sex selection advertising in the print medium, Indian and foreign advertisers have moved to the Internet, George said. Unlike the print medium, Internet search engines allow for highly targeted advertising, he added.

“These companies are making money by breaking Indian laws,” George said.

The country’s Ministry of Health and Family Welfare and Ministry of Communications and IT have also been made respondents in this case, as they did not take any action against the three companies, although the offenses were brought to their notice, George said.

In India, search engines, video sharing sites and social networking sites, including Google’s Orkut and YouTube have been sued for objectionable content or copyright violations.

“We do not hold the telephone company liable when two callers use the phone lines to plan a crime,” Rishi Jaitly, a policy analyst at Google India said in a Google blog post in October.

“For the same reasons, it is a fundamental principle of the Internet that you do not blame the neutral intermediaries for the actions of their customers,” Jaitly added.

Parikh said the petition had been submitted along with letters from the government in which it agrees that the Internet advertisements are illegal.

The Internet companies did not immediately respond to media queries about the case.

There is a deliberate attempt by these companies to target Indian users with advertisements that claim to help in the selection of a child’s sex, said Sabu Mathew George, the petitioner in the case, in a telephone interview on Thursday.

The three companies were unavailable for comment, despite repeated phone calls to Yahoo in Bangalore, Google in Hyderabad and Microsoft in Delhi.

The advertisement of products and techniques to aid in the selection of an unborn child’s sex is an offense under India’s “The Pre-conception and Pre-natal Diagnostic Techniques (Prohibition of Sex Selection) Act”.

In India, at least 900,000 unborn girls die each year through feticide, said George who is a social activist associated with organizations fighting for the rights of young girls in India.

As activists were able to effectively stop sex selection advertising in the print medium, Indian and foreign advertisers have moved to the Internet, George said. Unlike the print medium, Internet search engines allow for very targeted advertising, he added.

“These companies are making money by breaking Indian laws,” George said.

The country’s Ministry of Health and Family Welfare and Ministry of Communications and IT have also been made respondents in this case, as they did not take any action against the three companies, although the offenses were brought to their notice, George said.

In India, search engines, video sharing sites and social networking sites, including Google’s Orkut and YouTube have been sued for objectionable content or copyright violations.

Google has in the past objected to provisions in India’s Information Technology Act 2000 which make intermediaries like ISPs (Internet service providers), website hosting companies, search engines, email services, and social networks, liable for their users’ content.

Section 79 of the Act holds network service providers liable unless they can prove that the offense or contravention was committed without their knowledge or that they had exercised all due diligence to prevent the commission of such offense or contravention.

“We don’t hold the telephone company liable when two callers use the phone lines to plan a crime,” Rishi Jaitly, a policy analyst at Google India said in a Google blog post in October.

“For the same reasons, it’s a fundamental principle of the Internet that you don’t blame the neutral intermediaries for the actions of their customers,” Jaitly added.

A big part of Google’s rise to search engine leadership was an algorithm called PageRank that assesses a specific page’s importance by how many other Web pages link to it and by the importance of those linking pages. Microsoft researchers and academic collaborators, though, detailed an idea this week it calls BrowseRank that seeks to bring more of a human touch to that assessment.

Microsoft likes the results BrowseRank, which assigning Web page priority based on how people actually use the site.

(Credit: Microsoft ResearchA Asia)

Essentially, the researchers tested out a system that replaces PageRanks’ link graph–a mathematical model of the hyperlinked connections of the Internet–with what they call a user browsing graph that ranks Web pages by people’s behavior.

The more visits of the page made by the users and the longer time periods spent by the users on the page, the more likely the page is important. We can leverage hundreds of millions of users’ implicit voting on page importance,” the researchers said in BrowseRank: Letting Web Users Vote for Page Importance, a paper from the SIGIR (Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval) conference this week in Singapore. Authors are Bin Gao, Tie-Yan Liu, and Hang Li from Microsoft Research Asia and Ying Zhang of Nankai University, Zhiming Ma of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Shuyuan He of Peking University.

Search is of tremendous importance to the Internet for many reasons. For one thing, search engines are highly influential middlemen that steer users to Web sites they may not be able to find on their own. For another, queries typed into search engines can be powerful–and in Google’s case highly profitable–indications of what type of advertisement to place next to the search results.

But Microsoft lags leader Google and No. 2 Yahoo in search. It’s trying hard to catch up, for example with unsuccessful proposals to acquire Yahoo or its search business that would cost the company billions of dollars. And Microsoft just bought search start-up Powerset.

Google isn’t putting all its eggs in the PageRank basket, though.

“It’s important to keep in mind that PageRank is just one of more than 200 signals we use to determine the ranking of a Web site,” the company said in a statement. “Search remains at the core of everything Google does, and we are always working to improve it.”

PageRank shortcomings
The Microsoft researchers argue that PageRank has a number of problems. For one thing, people can game the system by building bogus Web sites called link farms. Those sites feature hyperlinks point to a Web page whose importance a person wants to inflate so it appears higher in search results. Another PageRank issue is that the indexing process doesn’t take into account the time a user spends on a particular site.

But user behavior, monitored in anonymous form by Web servers and Web browser plug-ins, can be better, the authors argue.

“Experimental results show that BrowseRank can achieve better performance than existing methods, including PageRank…in important page finding, spam page fighting, and relevance ranking.

The researchers gathered their data from “an extremely large group of users under legal agreements with them,” according to the paper.

There’s no denying PageRank is useful, though, and such algorithms could be added into a larger formula for determining which sites come out on top of search results.

“It is also possible to combine link graph and user behavior data to compute page importance,” the researchers said. “We will not discuss more about this possibility in this paper, and simply leave it as future work.”

Bringing research to fruition
It can be a long time before research comes to fruition, but funding a group of researchers can be much less expensive than acquiring other companies. No doubt Microsoft, especially after years of effort and its thwarted overtures to Yahoo, would like to see its in-house search efforts bring Google to its knees.

When accused of being dominant, Google representatives often argue the company could lose its search dominance if somebody else builds a better mousetrap and Internet users divert their path to that other door door. “If Microsoft or Yahoo are successful in providing similar or better web search results or more relevant advertisements, or in leveraging their platforms or products to make their Web search or advertising services easier to access, we could experience a significant decline in user traffic or the size of the Google (ad) Network,” it said in its most recent quarterly report.

The top players are a moving target, though. Yahoo is hoping to improve search with three efforts: BOSS (build your own search service), which lets others employ Yahoo search results along with its search ads; SearchMonkey, which lets content publishers build elaborate mini-Web pages into search results; and Glue Pages, which present a smorgasbord of related content alongside search results.

And Google invests heavily, too. Its biggest research team is devoted to search, and the company updated its search formula more than 100 times in the second quarter. And researchers have huge infrastructure at their disposal to try new ideas.

“My group at Google has at its disposal many thousands of machines, with storage measured in petabytes,” Udi Manber, head of Google’s search quality, said of Google’s search research infrastructure in a June talk. And, he added, engineers are empowered to try their results, with meetings once or twice a week to see how well they worked: “There is no separation of research and development. Everyone does both.”

The deal, which the firms have said would garner Yahoo at least $250 million in the first year, was widely seen as an effort by Yahoo to fend off Microsoft’s on-again, off-again efforts to buy all or part of Yahoo.

Microsoft’s most recent offer to acquire Yahoo’s search business was rejected by Yahoo. Google chief legal officer David Drummond, defending his company’s deal with Yahoo in written testimony for Tuesday’s hearing, took a shot at Microsoft’s 90 per cent share of the personal computer operating system market.

“Dominance of the desktop can let one company favor its own products and services and obstruct the interoperability of competing products or services, overriding the desires of consumers,” said Drummond in testimony prepared for the Senate Judiciary Committee’s antitrust panel.

Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith hit back, saying Google’s deal would reduce Yahoo’s incentive to compete against Google, would push Yahoo’s search advertising platform into a downward spiral and establish an illegal price floor.

“When it comes to the issues before this subcommittee, Google should not be allowed to achieve an outcome through an agreement that it would not be permitted to achieve otherwise,” said Smith in his written testimony.

The revenue-sharing deal has not been implemented by Google and Yahoo while they wait for an opinion from the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division. Several state attorney generals have expressed concern about the arrangement.

“Microsoft believes the Google/Yahoo deal harms competition in several critical ways. Advertisers and online content providers would be harmed through price coordination that will establish higher prices and limit choice,” said Smith. “Consumers would be put at risk as Google expands its ability to collect the personal information of users passing through its search gateway. On an even more fundamental level, Google’s monopoly power would increase its ability to shape what people get to see and experience online.”

Data center futures architect and distinguished database developer James Hamilton, has complemented the pimply faced social network for releasing what he said “looks like a well-engineered system.”

Hamilton spent ten years at IBM working on DB2 before joining Microsoft in 1997 to work on SQL Server, and recently collaborated with fellow database guru Michael Stonebraker on an examination of future database architectures.

Stonebraker put the cat among the pigeons by slagging off Google’s MapReduce database tool earlier this year – he called it a step backwards. Stonebraker also noted there are limitations in BigTable and its open-source equivalent Hbase.

Conspiracy theorists might find it interesting that Stonebraker’s co-author David de Witt joined Microsoft in April to head up a new research effort into large databases. They should also remember Microsoft is an investor in Facebook.

Adding insult to injury, Facebook has put its project – called Cassandra – up on Google Code. Cassandra is not alone on Google code. Another BigTable clone called Hypertable was set up on Google Code earlier this year.

Like BigTable, Cassandra is designed to get round the limitations of traditional relational databases in large-scale, online applications.

Cassandra is the work of a Facebook team led by Jeff Hammerbacher, an ex-Harvard student who was recruited by Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg from troubled Wall Street bank Bear Stearns.

Hammerbacher is now reported to have become the latest Faceboook employee to have served his notice. Can we expect this Facebook youf to show up in well-remunerated style at Redmond this Fall?

And, will all this prompt Google to put BigTable – or even MapReduce – into open source? Given it decided to release its Protocol Buffers technology to open source this week – its not beyond the bounds of possibility.

There is a precedent: Facebook released Thrift, its clone of Protocol Buffers, to open source last year.

The games continue…

The company said today that it’s putting SQL Server 2008 on its August price list, for customers and partners to begin purchases. Release to manufacturing has been promised sometime during the third quarter, which finishes at the end of September.

Ahead of release – postponed twice – customers and partners have been working with the Community Technology Preview (CTP) and release copies of the SQL Server 2008 code. Microsoft claimed it’s had more than 250,000 downloads of the CTPs and RC.

Hosting its annual partner conference in Houston, Texas, Microsoft also singled out the fact that it will be offering a version of SQL Server targeting web hosting for the first time. SQL Server 2008 Web Edition will provide “highly scalable hosting at a competitive price for developers, small to medium-sized businesses, and consumers,” Microsoft said.

Microsoft had planned on just five editions – the free-for-download Express and Compact Editions, along with Workgroup, Standard and Enterprise.

Microsoft also said its Windows Small Business Server 2008 and Windows Essential Business Server 2008 will be available next week as Release Candidate 1. Software development kits will be released this month. The final product launch is planned for November 12.

Finally, Microsoft today claimed that, after nearly two years pushing its Software + Services Incubation Center Program, 550 ISVs have enrolled. The program provides ISVs with consulting and guidance on modeling applications for delivery using on-demand. Microsoft has 20 centers worldwide

IE8, the follow-on to 2006′s IE7, was released in Beta 1 nearly three months ago. Since then, Microsoft has not specified a target for a second preview, although it has regularly posted progress notes and other information about the new browser on a company blog.

MacKechnie also told Web designers and site operators to start adding a compatibility tag to their site’s HTML code or those sites may not display properly when viewed in the new browser.

IE8, Microsoft said in early March, will default to a standards-compliant rendering of Web content — an approach that had been pushed by site developers — rather than a mode that stresses compatibility with IE7.

The new tag, which can be applied on a per-page basis or sitewide, instructs IE8 to display the content as would IE7.

“Browsing with this default setting [in IE8] may cause content written for previous versions of Internet Explorer to display differently than intended,” MacKechnie said. “This creates a call to action for site owners to ensure their content will continue to display seamlessly in Internet Explorer 8.”

The first beta of IE8 is not exactly in widespread use. According to the latest data from Web metrics company Net Applications, IE8 Beta 1 accounted for just .02% of all browsers used last month. IE7, by comparison, held the top spot with a market share of 45.9%.

IE8 Beta 1, which runs in Windows XP, Vista, Server 2003 and Server 2008, can be downloaded from Microsoft’s Web site.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the shy and retiring, softly spoken Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has been running around with money burning a hole in his ample pockets after his failed takeover of Yahoo.

Volish bankers have been having a chat with Facebook to see if it would open to a full buy-out.

Vole already has a $US240 million stake in Facebook, which is valued at $US15 billion.

Neither Microsoft nor Facebook have stood up the rumour and founder Mark Zuckerberg, has always resisted flogging it completely