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Friday, August 14, 2009

Microsoft’s Vision of the Future–and the Inevitable Spoof

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One of my favorite “world-of-the-future” videos recently has been one done by Microsoft Office Labs, because it does not seem ridiculously fanciful or impossible to imagine actually happening sooner than much later.

But, of course, the folks at IGN.com’s Sarcastic Gamer managed to find the perfect way to poke fun at the video in a spoof that hit the target deftly.

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Friday, February 13, 2009

Law and Disorder: The Curse of the Winklevii

One thing that’s nice in these volatile times is that the Winklevoss identical twins–aka the Olympic rowing hunks whom Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg seems to have repeatedly dunked since college–can always be relied upon to create nonstop entertainment for those riveted to their increasingly kooky lawsuit against the hot social-networking site.

In any case, it’s only the legal hijinks–either via rank incompetency or, more likely, creative leaking–that I want to know more about, especially since release of heretofore confidential information seems to keep seeping out of this case like some hole-plagued rowing shell.

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Tuesday, January 6, 2009

To Err Is Human, to Live Divine: How Exactly No One Got It Right About Steve Jobs’s Health

You knew it was coming, of course.

Since the blogosphere couldn’t actually kill him off–deeply lazy and incredibly wrong in insinuating that Apple CEO Steve Jobs was dying imminently–it turned around yesterday and declared him a liar for not saying he had a “hormonal imbalance” sooner.

Of course, Apple has also played along in this bizarre game, along with its defenders, who have all tried to pretend nothing is wrong with a man who clearly looks like he has had the stuffing knocked out of him because of his long-running health issues.

Since the facts of the matter seem dead on arrival, get Marcus Welby, M.D., stat!

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Tuesday, July 15, 2008

MicroHoo: Can We All Get Along? Um, No.

Another day, another round of internecine battling among the main players of the Internet’s longest-running soap opera.

That would be Yahoo, Microsoft and Carl Icahn.

It is a tussle that will make for daily drama until Yahoo’s August 1 annual meeting, where Icahn is waging a proxy fight for the company.

For shareholders, it’s like deciding the lesser of three evils.

Indeed, this is clearly no Harry Potter versus He-Who-Cannot-Be-Named kind of battle, even though it will be portrayed like that by all sides over the next weeks.

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Thursday, March 20, 2008

Why Doesn’t Microsoft Buy Time Warner? AOL, Bebo, AIM and Harry Potter!

Yesterday, you could feel the testiness jump right over the phone from several people close to Microsoft whom I spoke to about Yahoo’s latest gambit to sell its blue-sky growth plan to Wall Street.

Like a lot of Yahoo’s various moves of late–dating promiscuously with other suitors, handing out pricey severance plans to all employees and continuing to spurn the advances of the software giant without a raise in its $31-a-share bid–the projections by Yahoo that its sunny future warranted at least $40 a share were not taken well in Redmond.

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Thursday, July 19, 2007

Harry Potter Is the New iPhone

With the mania around the iPhone subsiding a bit (and just a bit, until the memory of this David Pogue–let’s just say it plain, shall we?–Broadway music video, called “iPhone: The Musical,” for the New York Times about the Apple device also subsides), BoomTown has almost no shame in picking up on the Harry Potter phenom that is about to grip the world when books are officially for sale just after the stroke of midnight Saturday morning.

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About Kara

Kara Swisher started covering digital issues for The Wall Street Journal's San Francisco bureau in 1997 and also wrote the BoomTown column about the sector. With Walt Mossberg, she co-produces and co-hosts D: All Things Digital, a major high-tech and media conference. Read more »

Ethics Statement

Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.

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