Today’s announcement by Microsoft that it is offering $31/share to purchase Yahoo! outright sees Microsoft doing the right thing at the right time.  Why?  For a number of reasons, not the least of which being that Microsoft has been planning …

Data portability is an idea long championed, and becoming more important all the time.  As we continue to load our online lives on to various social networking sites, the concept of making it easy to get that information back off …

Fortune Magazine’s blog post "The hard side of Mr. Softie", where some old school strong arm tactics are ascribed to Microsoft in trying to get startup  Web 2.0 companies to use Windows Live Messenger is interesting in a …

We don’t cover Xbox Live enough here on LiveSide, but we’ve been following the news of some problems in accessing Xbox Live over the holidays.  In a nutshell, apparently Xbox Live couldn’t keep up with unprecedented traffic, and connections have …

Its at this time of year that people post their yearly recaps and scorecards, whilst looking ahead to the following year. While I’ve seen a generic Microsoft 2007 scorecard and a reminder of the branding mess that Microsoft created for itself in 2006, I haven’t seen …

So yeah it’s kind of a slow news week, not much happens just before the holidays, when things will really shut down.  But there’s been quite a conversation going on among the blogs about Enterprise v. Consumer/Microsoft v. Google/Old Way …

Being in the same room with Bill Gates, while it wasn’t breathtakingly nerve-wracking (he is, after all, a geek, and we weren’t there for a performance review, we were just lucky enough to be able to ask him a few …

Some seemingly non-news coming out of the Wall Street Journal tonight, saying that Google is readying their online storage product, commonly referred to as GDrive. The Journal doesn’t offer any really new information, saying only in the publicly accessible copy:…

Conspicuously missing from all the wave 2 upgrades and marketing for the new look Windows Live has been Live.com, the one time personalized home page of the future.  Once the golden child of Windows Live, touted as the …

Hmm I seem to have created a bit of a stir over at MSN Groups.  When I posted this week on the Spaces worldwide numbers, I mentioned Windows Live Groups, and it was picked up at Managers Helping Managers, …