• Senator to ISPs: "Think twice" about 'Net neutrality… or else - It's encouraging that some politicians understand the issues of net neutrality. Let's hope that there are also tech-savvy MPs here in the UK.
• Peep Show for free! - If you're in the UK this is a must-have download: the first episode of the new series of Peep Show. It's perhaps the best comedy show on British TV at the moment. Highly recommended.
• The Free Web: 15 Years Old Today - The subject line says it all! Where would we be without the web?

• An elephant never forgets? George W. Bush's lost e-mails - "The administration has chafed at external oversight and shown a tendency to come up with dubious legal justifications for ignoring laws it doesn't agree with." Just what is Mr Bush trying to hide?
• WordPress 2.5.1 - I just upgraded to the newest version of Wordpress. Looks good as far as I can see but let me know if you spot anything untoward.
• Madonna, Hard Candy - "It's about grooves rather than memorable songs, and Madonna just doesn't make for a convincing soul diva [as she] sings them with the emotional engagement of a sat-nav suggesting a right turn onto the A23."

• eBayer invites buyers to rip him off - It does seem that eBay has become a victim of its own success. Having said that, some of the ways that they're trying to tackle fraudulent users are clearly bonkers.
• Japan MPs moot halt to executions - Hopefully this will move from "moot" to law, and then from temporary to permanent.
• Designing What’s Right for Consumers - Is it really so hard to design consumer electronics? The manufacturers say it is. Everyone else seems to disagree.
• WordPress 2.3.3 - I've upgraded to the current version of Wordpress. As ever, if you spot anything amiss please let me know!

So Microsoft is trying to buy Yahoo. I’ll leave the detailed analysis to people better qualified than myself but I thought that I could add a little perspective simply by looking back and remembering something that happened less than ten years ago.

As you can no doubt guess from the title, the event that springs to my mind is the merger of HP and Compaq. The main problem with HPaq at the time was that merging HP’s loss-making PC business with Compaq’s loss-making PC business just wasn’t a good idea. Fiorina pushed the whole MBA line of thinking: being the biggest player will allow greater economies of scale, lower prices and more profit. Unfortunately, two big losses merged tends to make a big loss also, albeit perhaps smaller than the old combined total¹.

The saddest things from my perspective are that HP had a great engineering tradition and Compaq had some great technologies (Alpha for one), all of which were rapidly divested. HP traded a future for short term benefits. And, as can be seen on the above stock chart, the 2001 merger didn’t really do much for the market price.

Compare this to Microsoft and Yahoo. Yahoo have been in the doldrums for a while now. Back in ‘94 they were the Google of the day, but they fairly quickly lost their way. Their indexing method (actual people as I recall) just didn’t scale as quickly as the Internet as a whole and they were quickly outpaced by up-and-coming new, automated systems like Altavista, Hotbot and Google. Yahoo retaliated by buying wholesale into the portal phase of the dot com boom and just outright buying interesting looking technologies, everything from music to photography sites.

And that’s pretty much where they are now. Of course they’ve changed management team a few times, but the share price has been fairly flat since 2001 (not sure what that little peak in 2004 was).

Microsoft are the company that brought you Windows and Office, and don’t really need much more of an introduction. Pretty much everything else they do loses money². Or at least, any profits they do make in other divisions is line-noise compared with Windows and Office.

So if you combine Microsoft’s barely known Windows Live service³ and Yahoo’s fairly popular if not hugely profitable web sites, what do you get?

Well, like the HP/Compaq merger, you get a lot of duplication. Microsoft and Yahoo both have search, instant messenger, photo publishing and, most famously, webmail. By some accounts, if they merge they will have over 80% of the webmail market. But where do you go from there? Do you migrate all Yahoo’s Mail users over to Hotmail?

And, most importantly, do a large number of regular visitors automatically mean big bucks? Is Microsoft buying a future — by saving time developing code and attracting users — or simply buying the past?

In the end, I just can’t see what Microsoft think they’re buying. Yahoo seems not to have the technology required to take on Google and their combined page impressions have no obvious quick routes to profits. I hope it works out — a world where Google is as dominant as Microsoft is now is not much of an improvement — but I have doubts.

1. HP obviously have other areas that do make money, most notably their ink cartridge printer division.↩
2. I like this Cringely article that explains why they like to do this.↩
3. If anyone uses this it’s because it’s the default in Windows. It’s undoubtedly getting better, but then so is the Zune.↩

• Fifty years of LEGO - Best. Toy. Ever. And still going strong.
• Polish IT worker calculates exact speed of snail mail - Apparently snail mail is actually slower than a snail.
• For those who thought that the MacBook Air had no use… - It’s odd that Steve Jobs didn’t mention any of these uses though.

My first reaction was to hate it.

Actually, no. My first reaction was what a cute, almost-square book. My second was to hate it. It’s only a few pages into it and Levy is already discussing his great taste in music and disparaging mine (”… a pathetic Pet Shop Boys tune, the sort of thing that Nick Hornby would listen to on a bad day.”)

It wasn’t exactly what I was expecting. But — step back — what was I expecting? Well, the blurb on the back tells you that you can learn how the iPod became the defining object of the 21st century. Having read most of Steven Levy’s previous books, the obvious point of comparison was “Insanely Great,” the story of the Macintosh. But while the Mac took several years to put together, the iPod took only around six months. In hindsight maybe it’s pretty obvious that it’s not all the trials and tribulations of putting the machine together.

So what is it? In some ways this is the technology version of Alain de Botton’s “The Art of Travel.” It doesn’t so much talk about the making of the iPod as discuss the experience of owning and using one.

For example, one chapter is on the idea of “shuffle” and how people use it and attach super-human abilities to its ability to select the most appropriate mixes while theoretically being entirely random. Even when he talks about the design it’s more along the lines of how it makes people feel. One interesting observation was that when people speak about the iPod, they invariably reach into their bag or pocket to retrieve their machine and start touching it, pressing the controls, polishing the screen. How many other gadgets evoke this kind of sentimental reaction?

Certainly much mirrors my own experience. I remember sitting on the tube on the way home from Tottenham Court Road after buying a first generation iPod, the tiny cube¹ that it was packaged in sat on my knee, and thinking, “I can’t believe I just spent £350 on a Walkman.”² Yet when I got home and started using it, any doubt vanished and quickly it became my most prized gadget.

In fact, as I type this my fifth generation iPod is on the blink. The emotional impact of this neat pile of components being on the verge of failing is quite unlike almost any other gadget I own.

Anyway, I was writing about the book “The Perfect Thing” and not my own experience, so let’s get back to the point. If you’ve ever read any other Levy books (or his column in Newsweek) you’ll know that he has an easy, engaging style and this book is no different. He covers all the bases, touching on everything from the design to downloading music from the Internet (and the fun that Apple had making iTunes) to Podcasts.

Given that it’s more about the experience of owning an iPod the fact that it’s already dated — there’s no mention of the iPhone, the Touch or the current range of Nano’s — is less of an issue than I initially expected.

Overall it’s much more of a “fluff” piece than most of his other books, but that does not make it any less entertaining or complete. Worth a read, just not as highly recommended as “Crypto” or “Insanely Great.”

1. I suppose 2001 was when the G4 cube still held the promise of being successful.↩
2. In fact I was lucky to get away with that. A number of shops, having just one machine left, wanted to charge me more that list price. I knew I wanted one but not that much.↩