Intel Microarchitecture (Nehalem)

Intel's latest-generation microarchitecture first exemplified as the Intel Core  i7 processor, represents the next step in unprecedented processor performance and dynamic scalability. Designed from the ground up to take advantage of hafnium-based Intel 45nm hi-k metal gate silicon technology, Intel Microarchitecture (Nehalem) unleashes parallel processing performance enabled by Intel QuickPath technology providing an integrated memory controller and high-speed interconnect per independent processing core.

Maximum multitasking performance Intel Microarchitecture (Nehalem) offers the latest in processor innovation, including:

Dynamic scalability, managed cores, threads, cache, interfaces, and power for energy-efficient performance on demand.

Design and performance scalability for servers, workstations, notebooks and desktops with support for 2-8+ cores and up to 16+ threads with Intel® Hyper-Threading Technology (Intel HT Technology), and scalable cache sizes, system interconnects, and integrated memory controllers.

Intel Turbo Boost Technology delivers additional performance automatically when needed by taking advantage of the processor's power and thermal headroom. This enables increased performance of both multi-threaded and single-threaded workloads.

Intel Hyper-Threading Technology brings high-performance applications into mainstream computing with 1-16+ threads optimized for a new generation multi-core processor architecture.

Scalable shared memory of Intel QuickPath technology features memory distributed to each processor with integrated memory controllers and high-speed point-to-point interconnects to unleash the performance of future versions of next-generation Intel multi-core processors.

Multi-level shared cache improves performance and efficiency by reducing latency to frequently used data.

Intel Announces its First Home Medical Device to Better Connect Clinicians with Patients

Intel Corporation today announced its Intel® Health Guide, a care management tool designed for health care professionals who manage patients with chronic conditions. The Health Guide represents Intel's entry into a new category of personal health systems that go beyond the simple remote patient monitoring systems available today.

The Intel® Health Guide, which received 510(k) market clearance from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in July, is a comprehensive personal health system that combines an in-home patient device - the Intel® Health Guide PHS6000 - as well as an online interface - the Intel® Health Care Management Suite - allowing clinicians to monitor patients in their homes and manage care remotely.

"The Health Guide is a step forward in offering more personalized and effective management of chronic health conditions in the home," said Louis Burns, vice president and general manager of the Intel Digital Health Group. "Intel has spent years researching the needs of both caregivers and patients, and we are now moving to launch a series of products that will help extend care from the hospital to the home. Our products will help address the challenges of an aging population and rising rates of chronic disease."

Intel is collaborating with health care industry leaders around the world to validate the clinical benefits of the Health Guide for a wide range of chronic disease conditions and health and wellness applications. Pilot studies in the United States are currently planned with health care organizations such as Aetna, Erickson Retirement Communities, Providence Medical Group in Oregon and SCAN Health Plan. The goals and objectives are to assess how the Health Guide integrates with different care management models in the home. These first studies focus on the ability to demonstrate improved health outcomes for conditions such as heart failure, diabetes, hypertension and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

Customers such as Advanced Warning Systems, Inc., (AWS), a provider of health care discovery products and web-based services, monitor people for acute cardiovascular symptoms that can cause sudden death. AWS will use the Intel Heath Guide to connect with a targeted class of users, including retired athletes and post-war veterans suffering from post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), with the highest incidence of cardiovascular related illnesses.

The Health Guide promotes greater patient engagement and more efficient care management by enabling communication between patients and health care professionals and providing clinicians with access to the most current, actionable data. This solution offers interactive tools for personalized care management and includes vital sign collection, patient reminders, surveys, multimedia educational content, and feedback and communications tools, such as video conferencing and alerts. Clinicians have ongoing access to data so that they can better manage each patient's conditions while patients benefit from customized care in the comfort of their own living room.

Intel is working with leading health care organizations that have an understanding of health care delivery to develop unique patient care plans as well as multimedia educational content for chronic conditions. Specifically, Intel is working with the Mayo Clinic to have licensed educational content from MayoClinic.com made available to customers using the Health Guide. In addition, Intel is working with the American Heart Association to create care plans based on the organization's treatment guidelines for a pilot project for the ongoing management of patients with heart failure. The intent is to help health care professionals monitor patients and remotely manage their care in accordance with science guidelines and also to provide patients with ready access to credible and targeted education material. Intel has also hired a team of clinical experts to provide a range of professional services to enable health care organizations to successfully integrate the personal health system into their current disease management programs and models of care.

Additionally, Intel plans to use the core technology components of the solution to build products targeted for new areas such as independent living and programs for health and wellness management and to support new devices such as mobile phones and handhelds.

American Medical Alert Corporation, a national provider of remote patient monitoring devices and 24/7 health care communication services, will be the first U.S. market channel partner for the Intel Health Guide. By adding the Intel Health Guide to its portfolio of offerings, AMAC will be further equipped to provide its customers with the best in care management technologies. The Health Guide is designed to be used by health care professionals to manage their patients at home and is not currently available for general consumer purchase.

H.P. Expects Revenue and Profits Will Top Forecasts

Hawlett-Packard dazzled Wall Street on Tuesday by hopping over a low bar. The company said its core business was not declining as quickly as it was at other major technology companies, prompting investors to drive its shares up nearly 15 percent

In a preview of a full earnings report it plans to give Monday, the company also said that its fourth-quarter results had exceeded its earlier projections.

The relatively good news comes as the broader technology industry has started to report the effect of a worldwide economic retrenchment in recent weeks. Companies like Cisco Systems and Intel, reporting a rapid decline in consumer spending starting in October, have prepared investors to expect revenue declines of 10 percent or more.

More insight on how the tech sector is faring will come on Thursday when Dell is scheduled to release its third-quarter results.

For Hewlett-Packard’s investors, even flat financial results look like up.

“It was a relief rally,” said Brent Bracelin, a technology industry analyst with Pacific Crest Securities. “People were relieved that it wasn’t worse.”

The company did not provide details or reasons for its relative strength, saying it would not comment further until Monday. But industry analysts said that Hewlett-Packard, the world’s largest technology company, was benefiting from its geographic diversity, broad product portfolio, and, in particular, its recent $14 billion acquisition of Electronic Data Systems.

For its fiscal fourth quarter, which ended on Oct. 31, the company said net income was $1.03 a share. That figure, which excludes one-time charges, compares with analyst estimates of $1 a share. It said revenue was $33.6 billion, a 19 percent increase from the $28.3 billion of a year ago. A consensus of industry analysts had projected that its revenue would be $33 billion.

Like other technology companies, Hewlett-Packard is geographically diverse, with 70 percent of its revenue coming from overseas. But the company’s product portfolio is also unusually diversified in that it competes in computers, software and, increasingly, in services that provide recurring income. Up to 40 percent of Hewlett-Packard’s revenue and 65 percent of its profit come from long-term, steady deals, A. M. Sacconaghi, a securities analyst with Sanford C. Bernstein, said.

Mark Hurd, the chief executive, has also carried out cost-cutting.

“The strength in their results is really a testament to a highly defensive business model and a very strong focus on costs,” Mr. Sacconaghi said.

Yet the economy appears to be catching up to Hewlett-Packard, especially going toward the 2009 fiscal year.

Despite the worldwide economic uncertainty, the company forecast revenue for its 2009 fiscal year could be as much as $130 billion. On its face, that appears to be a sharp increase from the $118.4 billion in revenue for this fiscal year.

However, the company’s acquisition of E.D.S., a global computer services company, is expected to bring in $21 billion in revenue. Factoring that out, Hewlett-Packard’s year-over-year revenue from its existing core businesses will fall, or narrowly rise, depending on how currency exchange rates affect overseas revenue, industry analysts said.

In its 2008 fiscal year, Hewlett-Packard said that about $3.5 billion of its sales came from E.D.S.

Analysts said that the timing of the E.D.S. acquisition now appeared to be particularly lucky or a sign of great foresight by Mr. Hurd. The company provides not just additional revenue, but further diversification, analysts said.

“E.D.S. is so essential to H.P.’s guidance,” said Richard Kugele, an analyst with Needham & Company.

But analysts continue to cast a skeptical eye on Dell. A consensus of industry analysts projects Dell will report net income of 32 cents a share, in contrast to 34 cents last year. Mr. Kugele said the economy was eroding so quickly that Dell might well not meet those estimates.

Dell has taken steps to revive its slowing PC business. It has pushed into retail marketing, helping raise its market share in the United States; lowered costs through outsourced manufacturing; and paid closer attention to consumer tastes, Mr. Kugele said.

But Dell relies more heavily on the personal computer business than Hewlett-Packard. And that is a business under heavy pressure. Mr. Sacconaghi projects that unit shipments of PCs will grow 4.9 percent in 2009, but revenue will fall 2 percent during that period.

And Dell’s operating margins of about 5 percent are half of what they were in the late 1990s.

“Dell is doing the right things,” Mr. Kugele said. But given the economic environment, Dell’s results are not likely to offer the investor-pleasing surprise of Hewlett-Packard’s. “It’s going to be a very depressing, sloppy earnings call.”

A Gaming Rig With an Intimidating Aura, and That’s Even Before You Look Under the Hood

Gaming PCs are the gladiators of the computer world. So while most PCs look like a cross between a fax machine and a breadbox, the Acer Predator looks as if it came out of the bowels of the Roman Colosseum.

The gaming rig, which starts at $1,649 without a monitor, has an IntelCore 2 Quad 2.5-gigahertz processor and an Nvidia GeForce 9600 GT graphics card. The cheapest version comes with 2 gigabytes of memory and two 640-gigabyte hard drives. It also includes an optical disc reader and writer. Acer offers a $400 24-inch display with a maximum resolution of 1,920 by 1,200 pixels.

If all those speeds and feeds don’t catch your attention, the PC’s unique case just might. A front panel slides up like armor to reveal four U.S.B. ports and two audio ports. Front ribs mimic the radiator of a 1950s U.F.O. while the internal cooling system ensures the machine doesn’t go up in smoke. Internal colored lights add a bit of mystery to the proceedings. Most gaming PCs cost about $2,000 without monitors, making the Predator a bit more affordable than some of the other monsters out there.

Advertise on NYTimes.com From Nokia, a Cellphone With Many Familiar Features

For years, "More information about Nokia has shied away from cellphones with large touch screens. Keypads and keyboards seemed to be in the company’s DNA, resulting in a number of phones that look about the same. Now, however, Nokia is ready to expand its music line with a phone that looks suspiciously like a phone that begins with the letter “I.”

The 5800, available near the end of the year for about $300 (no carriers have been named yet), includes an eight-gigabyte memory card and is compatible with Windows Media Player and Nokia Music Store files. A resident PC application allows you to rip CDs to the phone automatically, and it includes a free year of Nokia’s Comes With Music download service.

The 3.2-inch touch screen offers both virtual keyboard and pen-input mode (included are a stylus and an accessory shaped like a guitar pick for swiping through photos and music). Also included is a 3.2-megapixel camera and a built-in GPS receiver.

The 5800 can connect to 3G and Wi-Fi networks and has special social networking features including adding “feeds” for four of your favorite contacts, allowing you to view Twitter and Facebook updates right under their pictures. As the song says: You’ll never walk alone.

NetKlix

A Printer That Won’t Blemish a Stylish Workspace

The lowly printer has long been hidden under our desks, thoroughly out of sight. Epson’s new Artisan 800, however, is easier on the eyes than the traditional gray box.


This glossy black inkjet printer looks more like a sleek piece of modern furniture than a boxy peripheral. It supports Wi-Fi printing and includes a swiveling touch panel and a 3.5-inch L.C.D. screen for viewing pictures before printing them.

The printer can produce graph and college-ruled paper on the fly and also print labels onto inkjet-compatible optical discs. It prints 38 pages a minute in black and white and can print an 8 by 10 photo in 50 seconds. It includes a scanner and copier with a resolution up to 4,800 dots per inch. The Artisan 800 costs $300 and will be available later this month. Of course, owning an attractive printer brings its own problem: do you have the desk real estate to display it?

A Magazine for the Rich (and Lucrative Ads)

SELLING any print advertising these days means sailing against the wind, but as some categories battle a gale, the safest harbor is in ads for luxury consumer products.
Enlarge This Image

Mark Lennihan/Associated Press

Removing microphones after introducing WSJ. Wednesday were, from left, Ellen Asmodeo-Giglio, its publisher; Michael Rooney, Dow Jones chief revenue officer; Tina Gaudoin, WSJ. editor in chief; and Robert J. Thomson, managing editor of The Journal.

That is the theory behind WSJ., the new magazine from The Wall Street Journal, which was unveiled to reporters on Wednesday and will be delivered to many subscribers on Saturday.

It joins an increasingly crowded field of magazines unabashedly celebrating wealth and consumption, all trying to take advantage of the healthiest part of a shrinking print advertising pool. And it is the latest in a series of bids by The Journal to capture a bigger piece of the consumer ad market and lessen its traditional dependence on ads aimed at businesses.

At just over 100 pages, the first issue of WSJ. has 51 advertisers, mostly of the type publications covet: high-end makers of clothes, handbags and other accessories, with brand names like Hermès, Audemars Piguet and Dior. Executives at The Journal said that some had signed on for two years.

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“And 19 advertisers are new to The Wall Street Journal,” said Michael Rooney, chief revenue officer of Dow Jones & Company, the division of the News Corporation that publishes The Journal.

In this climate, 51 advertisers is “a very solid number, a respectable number,” said Roberta Garfinkle, senior vice president and director of print strategy at TargetCast TCM, a media agency.

“It’s a smart move on The Journal’s part to go after that luxury retail marketplace that they really haven’t had,” she said, despite the growing number of magazines chasing essentially the same ads. “What remains to be seen is their execution.”

The Journal starts with a major advantage in that it can offer advertisers the wealthiest readership of any American newspaper. An even more affluent subgroup of subscribers will receive the magazine, Mr. Rooney said, with an average household income of $265,000.

Out of The Journal’s domestic Saturday circulation of about 2 million, 800,000 copies — those sold by subscription or at newsstands in 17 large markets — will include WSJ. In addition, 160,000 copies will be distributed on Fridays overseas. The magazine begins as a quarterly, with plans to go monthly next year.

Executives would not say how much The Journal had invested in WSJ. or when the company expected it to break even.

For several years, advertising for luxury goods has outpaced mass-market and business-to-business ads, and a number of publishers have tried to capitalize on that trend, including The New York Times, which introduced T, a style magazine, in 2004.

As the economy has struggled over the last year, the divide between high-end ads and others has widened. Ad pages in United States magazines fell 7.4 percent in the first half of 2008, according to the Magazine Publishers Association, but some categories appealing to affluent consumers — high-end apparel and other retail, and hotels and resorts — were roughly flat.

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Newspapers have fared worse, with advertising revenue down almost 8 percent last year, and about 13 percent in the first half of 2008. The Journal does not make figures public, but executives there have said that ad revenue is down sharply this year.

In this decade, The Journal has taken several steps to broaden its identity as a publication primarily about business news, read mostly by men, to win more consumer ads. It added the softer Personal Journal and Weekend Journal sections, and in 2006, began publishing on Saturdays.

Since being taken over last December by News Corporation and its chairman, Rupert Murdoch, the paper has put greater focus on general-interest news, including politics and international news.

WSJ. resembles How To Spend It, the weekend magazine of The Financial Times, a Journal competitor, with slightly less focus on consumption — though there is plenty of that, from canine couture to face cream to trench coats. It aims a bit more for features articles, with items on, among other things, business executives, philanthropy, feuding over the America’s Cup and the workout regimen of Gov. Sarah Palin, a piece planned well before she became Senator John McCain’s running mate.

Tina Gaudoin, editor in chief of WSJ., said her magazine was less about how to spend it and more about “how to live it.”

Reflecting the magazine’s high style, its unveiling was held at the Pierpont Morgan Library over a breakfast that included smoked salmon, caviar and raspberry parfait, with a digital slide show and executives reading from teleprompters.

Robert J. Thomson, managing editor of The Journal, poked a little fun at the pomp, saying, “This being convention season, histrionics are the order of the day.”

Mr. Thomson, like Mr. Murdoch, likes to take a few shots at the competition, in keeping with the rough-and-tumble of British newspapering — he was the editor of The Times of London — and Wednesday was no exception.

Referring to the industry’s woes, he said, “We don’t have the fetid air of failure at Dow Jones,” and proceeded to take a veiled swipe at T magazine. And as for the magazine of The Financial Times, he said, “How to Spend It is like a BMW 3 series, and this is a BMW 7 series.”

Yahoo to Let Users Switch Off Customized Ads

Yahoo announced Friday that it will allow users to turn off the customization of advertising on the pages of Yahoo.com. The opt-out option should be available at the end of August, through Yahoo’s privacy center, the company said.

Yahoo already allows users to opt out of customized ads that it serves on other companies’ pages. This tweak would stop the company from serving ads based on a user’s behavior on Yahoo’s own pages.

The company made the announcement as part of a response to a letter about privacy that was sent last week by four House members. The top congressmen at the House Committee on Energy and Commerce sent letters to 33 Internet and telecommunications companies, including Yahoo, Microsoft, Google and AOL, asking them to detail their privacy policies. The committee asked for responses by Friday.

Yahoo’s response to the House letter (below the press release, here) was somewhat predictable, but provided some interesting details about its behavioral targeting. It is experimenting with links on targeted ads that say things like “what is this” or “about this ad.” These take users to a page that explains the targeting. Opting out is not very common: in July, 75,000 users visited the opt-out page within Yahoo’s privacy pages (Yahoo said it could not estimate the total number of users who had opted out). And Yahoo said it has an internal group, the Ad Council, that reviews requests from advertisers to determine whether the topics they want to target are too sensitive — for example, if they include certain medical terms.

I’ll be writing more about the Congressional interest in online advertising for Monday’s paper.

Google Told to Turn Over User Data of YouTube

—A federal judge has ordered Google to turn over to Viacom its records of which users watched which videos on YouTube, the Web’s largest video site by far.

The order raised concerns among YouTube users and privacy advocates that the video viewing habits of tens of millions of people could be exposed. But Google and Viacom said they were hoping to come up with a way to protect the anonymity of the site’s visitors.

Viacom also said that the information would be safeguarded by a protective order restricting access to the data to outside lawyers, who will use it solely to press Viacom’s $1 billion copyright suit against Google.

Still, the judge’s order, which was made public late Wednesday, renewed concerns among privacy advocates that Internet companies like Google are collecting unprecedented amounts of private information that could be misused or fall unexpectedly into the hands of third parties.

“These very large databases of transactional information become honey pots for law enforcement or for litigants,” said Chris Hoofnagle, a senior fellow at the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology.

For every video on YouTube, the judge required Google to turn over to Viacom the login name of every user who had watched it, and the address of their computer, known as an I.P. or Internet protocol address.

Both companies have argued that I.P. addresses alone cannot be used to unmask the identities of individuals with certainty. But in many cases, technology experts and others have been able to link I.P. addresses to individuals using other records of their online activities.

The amount of data covered by the order is staggering, as it includes every video watched on YouTube since its founding in 2005. In April alone, 82 million people in the United States watched 4.1 billion clips there, according to comScore. Some experts say virtually every Internet user has visited YouTube.

Google and Viacom said they had had discussions about ways to further protect users’ anonymity, but as of Thursday evening the two companies had yet to agree on how to do that.

“We are investigating techniques, including anonymization, to enhance the security of information that will be produced,” said Michael D. Fricklas, Viacom’s general counsel.

Mr. Fricklas said Viacom would not have direct access to the data, and that its use would be strictly limited by the court order. Viacom would not, for example, chase down users who had illegally posted clips from “The Colbert Report.”

“The information that is produced by Google is going to be limited to outside advisers who can use it solely for the purpose of enforcing our rights against YouTube and Google,” Mr. Fricklas said.

In a letter sent Thursday, Google’s lawyers pressed their counterparts at Viacom to accept a more limited set of data. “We request that plaintiffs agree that YouTube may redact user names and I.P. addresses from the viewing data in the interests of protecting user privacy,” wrote David H. Kramer, a partner at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati.

In a response, a Viacom lawyer wrote that Viacom was “committed to working with Google” on the privacy issue.

Interestingly, Google has rejected demands by privacy groups for more stringent protections for I.P. address records, saying that in most cases the addresses cannot be used to identify users. Yet Google argued that YouTube viewing data should be kept from Viacom, in part, to protect the privacy of its users.

Judge Louis L. Stanton of the Southern District of New York, who is presiding over Viacom’s lawsuit against Google and YouTube, referenced Google’s past statements on I.P. addresses to conclude that its “privacy concerns are speculative.”

“It is an ‘I told you so’ moment,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, an advocacy group in Washington.

Other privacy advocates said they welcomed Viacom’s commitment to limit its use of the information, but they remained concerned about user rights.

“Users should have the right to challenge and contest the production of this deeply private information,” said Kurt Opsahl, senior staff lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an online civil liberties group.

That right is protected by the federal Video Privacy Protection Act, Mr. Opsahl added. Congress passed that law in 1988 to protect video rental records, after a newspaper disclosed the rental habits of Robert H. Bork, then a Supreme Court nominee.

Mr. Opsahl also said that even records that did not include a user’s login name and I.P. address might be able to be associated with specific people.

In 2006, after AOL released for research purposes the search records of thousands of anonymous users, reporters from The New York Times were able to track down one person by analyzing her search queries. Mr. Opsahl said anonymous viewing habits may similarly yield clues about the identity of viewers.

Viacom wants the viewing data in part to help it determine the extent to which YouTube’s success was built on the popularity of copyrighted clips that were illegally posted to the site. Outside experts say that without the data it would be virtually impossible to pin that down.

Judge Stanton agreed that the information could help Viacom make its case. “A markedly higher proportion of infringing-video watching may bear on plaintiff’s vicarious liability claim, and defendants’ substantial noninfringing use defense,” he wrote.

Bill Gates Is Retiring

Bill Gates is retiring, sort of. He is still only 52, and he is going off to spend more time guiding the world’s richest philanthropy, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. He will still be Microsoft’s chairman and largest shareholder, but Friday is his last day as a full-time worker at the software giant, marking the unofficial end of his career as a business leader.
Friday will be Bill Gates’s last day as a full-time worker at Microsoft, the software giant he founded with Paul Allen in 1975. He attended an event unveiling Windows 95 in August 1995.


In 1978, the original 11 members of Microsoft: standing in back row, from left, Steve Wood, Bob Wallace, Jim Lane; second row, Bob O’Rear, Bob Greenberg, Marc McDonald, Gordon Letwin; front row, Bill Gates, Andrea Lewis, Marla Wood and Paul Allen.
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And what a career it has been. Mr. Gates has been an animating force behind the personal computer revolution, helping to build a huge global industry and engineer blockbuster products like Windows and Office, used every day in offices and homes around the world.

The Harvard dropout was the wealthiest person on the planet for years — worth more than $100 billion in 1999 — though his fortune is now about half that because of the decline of Microsoft’s shares and his continued donations to his foundation, which is focused on global health and education.

Despite his success, Mr. Gates is moving on as the company he co-founded in 1975 is struggling to find its way. The center of gravity in technology has shifted from PCs to the Internet, altering the old rules of competition that were so lucratively mastered by Microsoft.

For millions of users, mobile devices like cellphones are beginning to edge out PCs as the tool of choice for many computing tasks. And Google, the front-runner in the current wave of Internet computing, has wrested the mantle of high-tech leadership from Microsoft.

Although Mr. Gates will spend one day a week at the company, it will be up to his successors, led by Steven A. Ballmer, the chief executive, to master the challenges of the Internet or watch Microsoft’s wealth and stature in the industry steadily erode. “Bill’s legacy is Windows and Office, and that will be a rich franchise for years to come, but it’s not the future,” said David B. Yoffie, a professor at the Harvard Business School.

Still, the Gates legacy is impressive. In addition to the software itself, Mr. Gates and his company have fundamentally shaped how people think about competition in many industries where technology plays a central role. Today, there are more than one billion copies of the Windows operating system on PCs around the world.

Industry experts and economists say that Windows is not necessarily the best or most admired software for running the basic operations of a personal computer — Apple’s Macintosh can claim the most devout fan club. But Mr. Gates grasped and deployed two related concepts on a scale no one ever had in the past: the power of network effects and the value of establishing a technology platform.

Put simply, the network effect describes a phenomenon in which the value of a product goes up as more people use it. E-mail messaging and telephones are classic examples.

A technology platform is a set of tools or services that others can use to build their own products or services. The more people who use the tools, the more popular the platform can become.

Mr. Gates took advantage of both notions and combined them to build Microsoft’s dominance in PCs, spreading its influence with computer makers and software developers.

Today, there are many thousands of software applications that run on the Windows platform, not just word processing and spreadsheets but also the specialized programs in doctors’ offices, factory floors and retail stores — a very broad network on a nearly ubiquitous technology platform.

“Gates saw software as a separate market from hardware before anyone else, but his great insight was recognizing the power of the network effects surrounding the software,” said Michael A. Cusumano, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management.

That, Professor Cusumano added, was the essential difference in the paths of Microsoft and Apple, the early leader in personal computing. Apple, he said, focused on making outstanding products alone, while Microsoft nurtured a growing ecosystem of outside software developers who use, and are dependent on, Microsoft’s technology.

The result, he added, is that, while Apple continues to make outstanding products, more than 90 percent of personal computers run Microsoft software.

In the early years, it was unclear how much Mr. Gates was pursuing each opportunity as it came, as opposed to carrying out a grand strategy. He certainly had large ambitions. When he was a Harvard undergraduate, Mr. Gates lamented that so many of his fellow students pursued a “narrow track for success” instead of being willing to “take big risks to do big things,” recalled Michael Katz, a Harvard contemporary who is now a professor at New York University.

In a Harvard Business School case study, published in 1994, Mr. Gates spoke of Microsoft’s strategy in terms of network effects and technology standards that, combined, enabled the company to command markets. “We look for businesses where we can garner large market shares, not just 30 or 35 percent,” he said.

In the past, Microsoft has beaten back challenges and vanquished rivals, even when it came late to markets, as it did in the first wave of Internet technology. Mr. Gates’s shrewd 1995 decision to embrace Internet browsing technology and attack the early leader, Netscape Communications, started a pitched antitrust battle with the government. “But he extended Microsoft’s hegemony for a decade,” said Mitchell Kapor, a longtime rival.

However, Microsoft is lagging badly in current round of Internet competition and, analysts say, is facing more formidable challengers this time — notably Google.

Microsoft’s share of Internet search in the United States is less than 10 percent, while Google holds more than 60 percent and Yahoo has about 20 percent. And search is only part of the new platform on the Web, which includes social networks like Facebook and MySpace and Internet-based alternatives to traditional desktop software, including e-mail messaging, word processors and spreadsheets.

Traditional desktop software — and the technology standards Microsoft controls there — matter far less when more software is accessed with a Web browser and delivered over the Internet from vast data centers run by Google and others. The new approach is known as “cloud computing,” and the business model behind it is typically to sell online advertising and software services.

At Microsoft, there is scant sign of panic, despite its trailing position and its failed bid to buy Yahoo for $47.5 billion as a catch-up strategy. Microsoft sees an evolution in computing, not a disruptive revolution that will imperil the company, said Craig Mundie, Microsoft’s chief research and strategy officer.

Mr. Mundie said Microsoft is preparing for a widening world of both cloud computing and “client” machines, not only personal computers but also cellphones, cars, game consoles and televisions, all running Microsoft software.

“The next big platform is the union of the clients and the cloud,” he said.

Smartphones Now Ringing for Women

If recent history is any guide, roughly a third of the people snapping up Apple’s new iPhone are likely to tote it in a purse.

In a big shift for the phone industry, women have emerged as eager buyers of not just iPhones but of all so-called smartphones — BlackBerrys, Treos and other models.

In the last year the number of American women using smartphones more than doubled to 10.4 million, growing at a faster pace than among men, according to Nielsen Mobile, which tracks wireless trends.

The trend is mirrored in sales of the iPhone. In October, nearly one out of four owners of the iPhone was a woman, according to Nielsen. By March that number rose to one in three. The iPhone model announced Monday, with faster Internet access and mapping features, may accelerate the shift.

Smartphones are cheaper now — as little as $99 for the petite BlackBerry Pearl — and are better designed. Women have been using them for years in business, of course, but many are finding that the phones can also help manage their families’ hectic schedules and keep them in touch with friends.

“You are not seen as a geek anymore if you have a smartphone,” said Carolina Milanesi, research director at Gartner Group, a research firm. “Women, including wives and mothers, need to keep track of their busy lives, too.”

The phone makers and service providers increasingly see women as the path to the entire household. According to Verizon Wireless, 71 percent of women make the decision about their family’s wireless choices, including phones and service plans. (Smartphones require data plans that can cost $30 or more a month.)

As a result, smartphone makers are beginning to market specifically to women. Research in Motion, based in Waterloo, Ontario, has taken out ads for its BlackBerry phones in Elle, Martha Stewart Living and Oprah Winfrey’s magazine O.

Lina Caputo, a part-time teacher from Waterloo, said her husband, who runs a networking company that is not connected to RIM, gave her a second-hand BlackBerry a year ago so they could better manage their two sons’ schedules.

“It was a nightmare with the four of us,” Ms. Caputo said, ticking off a list of her sons’ after-school activities, including soccer, hockey and swim practices. “My sons have about 10 hours of sports. It got to be too much. It was confusing.”

Ms. Caputo said she and her husband regularly sync their calendars. She uses the phone to send e-mail to her husband when she gets home safely from a snowy trip, and to keep in touch with close friends who regularly gather at a local coffee shop. When six of them went to Las Vegas for a “girls’ weekend” in February, five of them brought their BlackBerrys so they could keep track of one another and their children back home.

Ms. Caputo is no longer using her husband’s hand-me-downs. On Mother’s Day he bought her a new BlackBerry Pearl, one of the company’s best-selling phones. “I don’t equate it to getting a vacuum or a blender,” she said, when asked if she would have rather received flowers or chocolate. “Besides, my girlfriend got a red one for Valentine’s Day.”

David Christopher, the marketing chief of AT&T’s wireless division, said women were less likely to be wowed by fancy gadgets. Instead, as smartphones have become sleeker, smaller and cheaper, they have become more appealing to them.

“Now they are small enough to be in your purse or pocket,” Mr. Christopher said. “Design does matter.”

Competitors have been working hard to catch up to Apple in the design department. This month Sprint, a unit of Sprint Nextel, will begin selling the Instinct, a touch-screen device created by Samsung that shares many features with the iPhone. And this summer R.I.M. is adding the BlackBerry Bold, which, like the iPhone, runs on a faster mobile network.

Nielsen’s research shows that women are more price sensitive than men and half as likely to care about whether they have used a specific brand before. Still, more traditional pitches do have their own appeal. RIM and Verizon Wireless were successful last Valentine’s Day with promotional events for a pink BlackBerry Pearl. Even then, picking the right hue was tricky.

“We picked a shade of pink that fit in all kinds of settings — not too flashy,” said Mark Guibert, vice president for corporate marketing at RIM. “It was the only color that was purely driven by the female audience. Years ago the market was much more focused solely on function. Now there is more focus on lifestyle.”

3 Net Providers Will Block Sites With Child Sex

ALBANY — Verizon, Sprint and Time Warner Cable have agreed to block access to Internet bulletin boards and Web sites nationwide that disseminate child pornography.

The move is part of a groundbreaking agreement with the New York attorney general, Andrew M. Cuomo, that will be formally announced on Tuesday as a significant step by leading companies to curtail access to child pornography. Many in the industry have previously resisted similar efforts, saying they could not be responsible for content online, given the decentralized and largely unmonitored nature of the Internet.

The agreements will affect customers not just in New York but throughout the country. Verizon and Time Warner Cable are two of the nation’s five largest service providers, with roughly 16 million customers between them.

Negotiations are continuing with other service providers, Mr. Cuomo said.

The companies have agreed to shut down access to newsgroups that traffic in pornographic images of children on one of the oldest outposts of the Internet, known as Usenet. Usenet began nearly 30 years ago and was one of the earliest ways to swap information online, but as the World Wide Web blossomed, Usenet was largely supplanted by it, becoming a favored back alley for those who traffic in illicit material.

The providers will also cut off access to Web sites that traffic in child pornography.

While officials from the attorney general’s office said they hoped to make it extremely difficult to find or disseminate the material online, they acknowledged that they could not eliminate access entirely. Among the potential obstacles: some third-party companies sell paid subscriptions, allowing customers to access newsgroups privately, preventing even their Internet service providers from tracking their activity.

The agreements resulted from an eight-month investigation and sting operation in which undercover agents from Mr. Cuomo’s office, posing as subscribers, complained to Internet providers that they were allowing child pornography to proliferate online, despite customer service agreements that discouraged such activity. Verizon, for example, warns its users that they risk losing their service if they transmit or disseminate sexually exploitative images of children.

After the companies ignored the investigators’ complaints, the attorney general’s office surfaced, threatening charges of fraud and deceptive business practices. The companies agreed to cooperate and began weeks of negotiations.

By pursuing Internet service providers, Mr. Cuomo is trying to move beyond the traditional law enforcement strategy of targeting those who produce child pornography and their customers. That approach has had limited effectiveness, according to Mr. Cuomo’s office, in part because much of the demand in the United States has been fed by child pornography from abroad, especially Eastern Europe.

“You can’t help but look at this material and not be disturbed,” said Mr. Cuomo, who promised to take up the issue during his 2006 campaign. “These are 4-year-olds, 5-year-olds, assault victims, there are animals in the pictures,” he added. “To say ‘graphic’ and ‘egregious’ doesn’t capture it.”

“The I.S.P.s’ point had been, ‘We’re not responsible, these are individuals communicating with individuals, we’re not responsible,’ ” he said, referring to Internet service providers. “Our point was that at some point, you do bear responsibility.”

Representatives for the three companies either did not return calls or declined to comment before the official announcement of the agreements on Tuesday.

Internet service providers represent a relatively new front in the battle against child pornography, one spearheaded in large part by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Federal law requires service providers to report child pornography to the National Center, but it often takes customer complaints to trigger a report, and few visitors to illicit newsgroups could be expected to complain because many are pedophiles themselves.

Last year, a bill sponsored by Congressman Nick Lampson, a Texas Democrat, promised to take “the battle of child pornography to Internet service providers” by ratcheting up penalties for failing to report complaints of child pornography. The bill passed in the House, but has languished in the Senate.

A Network to Make an Environmental Poin

On Wednesday, Discovery will introduce Planet Green, a new cable brand promoted as the first 24-hour channel dedicated to eco-friendly living. It is the highest-profile cable channel introduction of the year, and an equally risky one. By wrapping itself in the planet, Discovery is betting that “eco-tainment” will appeal to viewers.

Planet Green will replace the Discovery Home Channel in more than 50 million homes. Eyeing the public’s increased interest in environmental issues, Discovery is confident that it can attract more viewers with green-themed programming.

“This is an eco-tainment channel,” said Eileen O’Neill, the general manager of Planet Green. “It’s a lifestyle and entertainment channel that’s designed to activate people in the green space.”

It is also intended to engage advertisers, many of whom have green-themed marketing messages to share with viewers.

“Green is a category companies want to be in,” said Gary Lico, the chief executive of CableU, an online service that analyzes cable networks. “Whether you’re an automaker or a bank or a petroleum company, somewhere in your marketing plan is something referring to the environment.”

But some of Planet Green’s advertisers could raise eyebrows. General Motors, maker of the Hummer, is the “exclusive automobile sponsor” of the channel, Discovery announced last month. G.M.’s Chevrolet brand is a “premier sponsor” of “Greensburg,” a documentary series about a tornado-damaged town that is rebuilding with an eye to the environment. As part of the deal, G.M. vehicles will be integrated into some programs, and Discovery will produce short-form videos about the company.

Ms. O’Neill said the company has “very thoughtful conversations” with any advertiser who shows an interest in the channel.

“We’re thinking about everyone being better — not necessarily perfect,” Ms. O’Neill said, noting that G.M. sells a number of vehicles that address fuel efficiency or feature hybrid technology.

David M. Zaslav, the chief executive of Discovery Communications, added: “If the standard is perfection, we’ll all fail. The journey is to do a little bit better.”

That attitude is in line with the channel’s mission, which is to “take green to the mainstream,” said Tom Carr, the senior vice president for marketing of the channel.

Underdog Taps YouTube to Make Election Close

Was Steve Novick the first major YouTube political candidate? O.K., he didn’t quite win the Democratic Senate nomination in Oregon, and there was more to his unusual campaign than YouTube — in fact, most things about it were unusual, starting with the candidate.

Mr. Novick lost the May 20 primary by three percentage points, but political pros say that for the first time in a statewide race, YouTube had the crucial multiplier effect, turning an under-financed campaign into a serious contender. His ads received far more attention on the Internet than through his few television spots, offering a new template for insurgent candidates.

“YouTube plus netroots equals Steve Novick,” said Jennifer E. Duffy, managing editor of the Cook Political Report. (Netroots fuses the words Internet and grassroots to describe a style of political activism.) “YouTube is the only way he got any traction.”

Not that this will be easy to duplicate. It worked because of a candidate, a strategy and a set of ads that were all clever, oddball and appealing.

Mr. Novick, 45, a wisecracking former government lawyer, stands 4-foot-9, his looks are something short of matinee-idol and he has a hook for a left hand. The Democratic establishment preferred a better-known candidate, Jeff Merkley, speaker of the Oregon House, who won the primary and will face the Republican incumbent, Gordon Smith.

Mr. Novick, who had never run for office, had little name recognition or money. “I said, ‘I’m a short guy with a metal hand, I don’t look like other candidates — let’s use that,’ ” he said.

His campaign put out a press release in pirate-speak, and his campaign buttons showed a hook and a Web address, votehook.com. His slogans included “the candidate with the tough left hook” and “politics as unusual.”

His media consultant, Steve Eichenbaum, made a set of quirky ads drawing attention to the candidate’s height and his hook, and they were broadcast in January, long before the campaign heated up.

That ad purchase cost just $60,000, said Jake Weigler, a Novick strategist, but the campaign posted the ads on its site and on YouTube. “We wanted to get a viral movement behind it,” he said.

The most popular ad shows Mr. Novick chatting in a bar with a man who is trying to open a beer. Mr. Novick, talking all the while, grabs the bottle, casually pops the cap with his hook and returns it to his startled companion.

Bloggers and talk show hosts praised the ads and linked to them. The beer ad alone collected more than 150,000 hits on YouTube. The most popular Merkley ad was seen on YouTube about 3,600 times.

The mainstream media started covering Mr. Novick. He rose steadily in the polls and ultimately raised more than $1 million — a respectable sum, though far short of Mr. Merkley’s.

“We don’t know how many people who saw the ads were Oregon voters, as opposed to people in Norway,” Mr. Weigler said. “But the impact on YouTube was substantially larger than people seeing them on their TV screens, and that was something new.” RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA

German Parents Offer Baby on eBay

BERLIN (Reuters) — German police are investigating a couple after their 8-month-old son appeared for sale on the auction Web site eBay.

Renee Beck, a police spokesman in the Bavarian town of Krumbach, west of Munich, said Saturday that the boy’s mother, 23, said the auction listing had only been a joke. But he said the baby had been put in state custody while the police were investigating.

A number of people called authorities across Germany after seeing the offer on eBay that read: “Baby — collection only. Offer my nearly new baby for sale because it cries too much. Male, 70 cm long.”

The opening bid was one euro, $1.58. There were no bidders during the two hours before the offer was removed, the police said.

The mother was quoted in the Bild newspaper as saying: “It was only a joke. I just wanted to see if someone would make an offer. They’ve taken my son to a hospital and I’ve got to take psychiatric tests next week.”

Global Dreams for a Wireless Web

SITTING on the porch at Finca Torrenova, his 800-acre retreat on this Mediterranean island, Martin Varsavsky ticks off the credentials of the group of Internet entrepreneurs finishing lunch at a nearby table.

“He has 40 million uniques, he has 50 million, and he has 8 million,” Mr. Varsavsky says, referring to the number of visitors to Web sites owned by his guests — many of whom are also business associates and have joined him for several days of brainstorming about the digital future.

These days, commercial victory on the Internet is all about scale, and Mr. Varsavsky, a 48-year-old from Argentina, can be forgiven for speaking longingly and in detail about his peers’ achievements. No stranger to success — he has had a tidy crop of new media and telecommunications hits since the 1990s — he is still struggling to bring his newest Internet venture to fruition.

Three years ago, aiming to create a global wireless network, he founded FON, a company based in Madrid that wants to unlock the potential power of the social Internet. FON’s gamble is that Internet users will share a portion of their wireless connection with strangers in exchange for access to wireless hotspots controlled by others.

The swaps, in theory, would allow “Foneros” to have ubiquitous, global wireless access while traveling for business or pleasure. But despite $55.2 million in backing from such corporate heavyweights as Google and BT, the former British Telecom, as well as newer enterprises like Skype and a handful of venture capital firms, FON and Mr. Varsavsky are still missing a crucial ingredient: scale.

At the moment, there are just 830,000 registered Foneros around the world, and only 340,000 active Wi-Fi hotspots run FON software. Because it’s built upon the concept of sharing Wi-Fi access, FON works well only if there are Foneros everywhere.

And as he struggles to expand the FON network, Mr. Varsavsky faces particular hurdles now that the Internet’s commercial side has reached a crossroads. Born a few decades ago as an anarchic, digital version of a barn-raising, the wireless Internet is now a battleground between two giant technology consortiums seeking to rein in the Web’s chaotic openness in favor of creating uniform, global access built upon wireless data networks.

The two camps, known as WiMax and L.T.E., for “long-term evolution,” are both top-down, highly structured approaches that will cost billions of dollars to build and may close a door on some of the architectural openness that led to the rapid growth of the Internet.

But their potential advantage is that closed standards can encourage the kind of growth that offers more access to mainstream consumers and business users, as occurred when Microsoft imposed a measure of conformity on software development.

For his part, Mr. Varsavsky hopes that FON can offer a middle ground — deploying the original, bottom-up strengths of the early Internet movement and at the same time wedding them to a more formal, corporate approach to expansion.

Although FON faces huge obstacles in realizing those ambitions, the company also has a growing number of devotees.

“The wireless Internet market today is fragmented and complex — it can be accessed through 3G operators, through WiMax, through private hotspots, through paid hotspots and through corporate networks,” said Michael Jackson, a partner at Mangrove Capital in London and a former FON board member. “In summary, it is a nightmare for a consumer. FON can and will change this.”

But others have their doubts.

“I know that the people at Google like this idea,” said John Saw, the chief technology officer at Clearwire, the WiMax start-up of Craig McCaw, which recently announced a $14.5 billion joint venture to build a nationwide WiMax network with Sprint, Google, Intel, Comcast and others. “But we’re skeptical.”

Undeterred, Mr. Varsavsky says that what he currently lacks in scale he can make up for in huge cost savings, particularly because FON avoids the expensive proposition of having to build a worldwide network of cellular towers and Wi-Fi nodes from scratch.

“Our army of Foneros is a much more efficient way of distributing a signal,” he says. “We believe WiMax operators will be happy to have some customers use their services for free and save billions in infrastructure deployment.”

MR. VARSAVSKY has worked overtime trying to line up more high-profile partners for FON. To that end, he traveled to Cupertino, Calif., last fall to meet with Steve Jobs, the chief executive of Apple.

During that 90-minute meeting, Mr. Varsavsky says, the two men discussed why a partnership might make sense.

Apple has sold millions of its Wi-Fi routers to residential customers, and its community of Wi-Fi users who share router access would be an ideal platform for FON. For his part, Mr. Jobs had developed an interest in Wi-Fi sharing because of the expanding number of iPhone users who are often frustrated by locked Wi-Fi access points.

But, Mr. Varsavsky says, from the moment that he and Mr. Jobs met, their discussion devolved into an argument. (Mr. Jobs did not respond to requests to comment on the meeting.)

Yahoo Gets Ready for Proxy Fight

Yahoo nominated 9 of its 10 existing directors for re-election to the company’s board on Thursday, setting the stage for a showdown with dissident shareholders at its annual shareholder meeting.


Yahoo also postponed its annual meeting from July 3 and said it now expected to hold it at the end of July.

The Internet media company also disclosed in a regulatory filing that shareholders other than the investor Carl C. Icahn planned to nominate candidates to its board. Yahoo said it did not believe these shareholders had complied with its company bylaws.

Mr. Icahn, who recently amassed 10 million Yahoo shares and options to buy an additional 49 million, started a proxy campaign last week to replace Yahoo’s board with directors who would reopen merger talks with Microsoft.

Microsoft walked away from its sweetened $47.5 billion offer for Yahoo this month.

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Pursuit of Yahoo Shows Microsoft Needs a Franchise

Microsoft said on Sunday that it had approached Yahoo, this time with an ostensibly narrower aim: a collaboration on Internet advertising. But it hinted that it could still seek a takeover down the road.

The renewed talks reflect both Microsoft’s fears and Yahoo’s potential ills. Microsoft wants to head off any collaboration on advertising between Yahoo and the market leader, Google. At the same time, Microsoft is seeking to capitalize on the perceived weakness of Yahoo, which is facing a proxy battle with the activist investor over the failed takeover talks.

Mr. Icahn, who has made a career out of agitating for change at some of the nation’s largest companies, bought a stake in Yahoo after the Microsoft takeover negotiations collapsed. He has named a slate of directors and threatened to unseat Yahoo’s management — or at least push Yahoo back into Microsoft’s arms.

Microsoft released a brief statement on Sunday disclosing the renewed talks, a surprising reversal just weeks after it withdrew its $47.5 billion bid for Yahoo and said it had “moved on.”

In an e-mail message to Microsoft employees on Sunday afternoon, a senior Microsoft executive seemed to acknowledge that moving on might be difficult.

In his memo, Kevin Johnson, the executive in charge of Microsoft’s Internet business, emphasized the urgency felt at Microsoft about its failure to make more progress in catching up to Google.

“Regardless of the outcome of any new discussions,” he wrote, “it is important that we continue to move forward to strengthen our online services business. The fact is that we are not where we want to be in this business yet and we’ve been in this position longer than we’d all like.”

Mr. Johnson then outlined Microsoft’s ambitious agenda in Internet search and online advertising, exploiting the company’s strengths in desktop software and newer fields like cellphone software. Among the goals enumerated in the memo are to “innovate and disrupt in search,” “win in display” ads online and “reinvent portal and social media experiences.”

Microsoft’s hastily revived effort to reach some kind of deal with Yahoo seems to suggest that the software giant has doubts about whether it can achieve those goals on its own.

Indeed, Microsoft’s on-again, off-again interest in Yahoo has raised questions from analysts, investors, customers and employees about its strategy. Amid the discussions, Microsoft is scheduled to present its online strategy to advertisers at a gathering this week.

People involved in the confidential discussions between Microsoft and Yahoo said the talks centered on a partnership or joint venture for search-related advertising to compete against Google. When Microsoft first made its unsolicited bid of $31 a share for Yahoo in February, it said it was doing so as part of its battle to increase its relatively small slice of the search-related advertising market against Google, a giant with about 60 percent of the United States market, according to the measurement firm .

By comparison, Yahoo has about 21 percent of the market, and Microsoft has about 9 percent, comScore said.

The timing of Microsoft’s new approach may be a turning point in the months-long story or just an opportunistic effort to further insert itself into a dance between Yahoo and Google. Yahoo has been racing to complete its own partnership with Google and was expected to announce a formal agreement as early as this week. A Yahoo-Google partnership, which would likely face antitrust scrutiny, could make Yahoo a less desirable partner or takeover candidate for Microsoft.

The Google-Yahoo discussions have been centered around the notion of Google delivering ads alongside some Yahoo searches. Such a deal would help Yahoo generate more cash, because Google’s search advertising technology is more sophisticated and is used by more advertisers. As a result, Google earns more on every search than its competitors, on average.

A similar partnership between Yahoo and Microsoft might not have the same effect, because Microsoft’s base of advertisers is smaller than Yahoo’s. People involved in the confidential discussions said that search advertising was certainly a part of Microsoft’s renewed interest in Yahoo, but they cautioned that any relationship being discussed might be different from the one the company had been contemplating with Google.

A Google representative did not return a phone call seeking comment.

It is unclear whether Microsoft would pursue a takeover bid again. In its statement on Sunday, Microsoft insisted it was not making such a bid, but hinted that it could be persuaded to reverse course.

“Microsoft is not proposing to make a new bid to acquire all of Yahoo at this time, but reserves the right to reconsider that alternative depending on future developments and discussions that may take place with Yahoo or discussions with shareholders of Yahoo or Microsoft or with other third parties,” the company said.

The new discussions also come as Yahoo is facing increasing pressure from shareholders, some of whom are furious that its board did not work harder to reach a deal to sell the company to Microsoft. Last week, Mr. Icahn said the directors had “acted irrationally and lost the faith of shareholders.” People close to Microsoft and Mr. Icahn say that neither has been in contact with the other.

Yahoo released a statement late on Sunday saying that it continues to explore strategic alternatives and remains open to any proposals that are good for its shareholders.

“Yahoo’s board of directors will evaluate each of our alternatives, including any Microsoft proposal, consistent with its fiduciary duties, with a focus on maximizing stockholder value,” the statement said. Yahoo also said that it had confirmed with Microsoft that the software giant was not interested an outright acquisition of Yahoo at this time.

Shares of Yahoo closed last week at $27.66, far above the $19 a share they traded at before Microsoft’s first bid, in anticipation that a deal of some sort will be reached. Shares of Microsoft closed Friday at $29.99, roughly half their peak price in December 1999.