It's Windows Vista! Only Cheaper!

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Okay, now this is unexpected: Microsoft is slashing the price of some retail versions of Windows Vista, effective when the SP1 version rolls out later this year. Vista Ultimate's full version will go to $319 fro $399 (an upgrade is now $$219, down from $259); Home Premium's upgrade is now $129, down from $159. The Microsoft site has an interview with an exec who talks about the news.

Who will benefit from this development? Basically, folks with Windows XP machines who have chosen not to upgrade to Vista until now because they found it pricey. But it's not as easy as that: Most of those people probably have PCs they bought in 2006 or before, and while some of those aging machines will run Vista well, many won't. (If you bought a Windows XP computer in 2007, I have a hunch you did so specifically to avoid Windows Vista, and therefore today's news means little or nothing to you.)

I certainly hear some grumbling about the cost of Vista--especially Ultimate, which, even at its new price, is pretty expensive compared to Apple's $129 Max OS X 10.5 "Leopard." But I'm curious whether there are really that many people out there who have been itching to buy a Vista upgrade--and have a PC potent enough to run it well--but haven't done so yet.

One also wonders what's motivating Microsoft to cut prices. The company says that research showed that a cheaper Vista would appeal to more computer users beyond early adopters and geeks. Logical enough. But did it misjudge the public's willingness to fork over $300 for a piece of software when it initially priced Vista? And is the price drop a sign of panic, or a confident statement that it thinks Vista has mass appeal?

Today's news doesn't affect the price of new Windows Vista computers. And I have a sneaking suspicion that for every Microsoft customer who's psyched by the prospect of a lower-cost Vista, there are several who'd be far more thrilled if the company undid its announced plans to discontinue Windows XP on June 30th. (I've rarely if ever run into anyone who's told me that he or she thinks Windows Vista is a major argument for buying a new computer--but a lot of folks have worriedly asked me if it's still possible to buy an XP box.)

CNET's Ina Fried has more news and analysis on all this.

Time for one of Techlog's patented Silly Little Polls(tm):

Dear Microsoft: It's Time for Internet Explorer, Powered by Firefox

Dear Microsoft,

It's been an uncommonly newsy time in Redmond. You've got the ongoing developments in Microsoft's attempted takeover of Yahoo. There's your announced intention to go gaga for open source. Then just this weekend, the blogosphere has been abuzz over your impending private beta of Internet Explorer 8.

I've been rolling all these tidbits around in my mind, along with the recent news of the five hundred millionth download of Firefox, and I've come to a startling conclusion: It might make sense for you to discontinue independent development of Internet Explorer and launch a new IE that's built on top of Firefox.

I don't mean that as a Firefox fan, I wish you'd do it--I mean that it might be a savvy move on your part. One that would make Microsoft more successful on the Web.

OK, lemme explain...

Back during Browser War I, you poured so many resources into building up IE and damaging Netscape that it got you into legal trouble. As far as any of us on the outside could tell, your motives were based on the notion--which seemed logical at the time--that the company that controlled the browser would control the Internet, or at least have an awful lot of power over it.

That turned out not to be true. At its height, IE gobbled up something north of ninety percent of the browser market. What did it buy you? Mostly heartache and pain, as far as I can tell. By taking on responsibility for most of the world's Web browsing, you bore the brunt of most of its security attacks. It hasn't been fun for your customers, or for you.

Meanwhile, dominating the browser market didn't translate into Web domination--if it had, you probably wouldn't be trying to drop a giant wad of cash to pick up Yahoo. Google, the company that does dominate the Internet didn't have to build its own browser. True, it's an enthusiastic Firefox booster, but it gets far more traffic from IE users than from Firefox types. Google has become so gargantuan in part because it hasn't tried to tie its services to a particular browser...mostly, it does stuff that works well in whatever browser people happen to use. And that turns out to be the best recipe for success on the Web.

So it's not surprising that your interest in IE faltered in recent years. After version 6 showed up in 2001, five years passed before version 7 arrived--and when it did, it was a ho-hum release that mainly caught up with features that Firefox and Opera had boasted for years. With version 8 about to go into beta, the gap between 7 and 8 shouldn't be nearly as long. That's good.

But early scuttlebutt suggests that IE 8 will focus on better support for Web standards, rather than new end-user features per se. I certainly can't squawk about you making IE more standards-friendly, but it's a strategy that smacks of continuing to play catch-up with Firefox rather than giving anyone a compelling reason to choose IE over Firefox.

Which brings me back to my crazy idea: Why not simply give us an Internet Explorer that's powered by Firefox?

Think of the multiple upsides:

You'd get a browser that's already excellent at Web standards. No Web developer would have to struggle to make a site work as well in IE as in Firefox--from a standards perspective, they'd be the same darn product. You'd benefit from this, since future Microsoft Web services are all going to be good citizens in terms of standards, right?

You'd be making a gigantic commitment to open source that everyone can see, understand, and appreciate. It would be one of the biggest Microsoft news stories of all time, and you'd be showered with praise from all quarters. Internet Explorer would benefit from the open nature of Firefox development, which has already made Firefox a better browser than anything Redmond has produced. And you would, of course, contribute your development efforts back to the community, making Firefox better, too.

You could fret a little less about security. I don't mean to be too blithe here--if IE was based on Firefox, the world's hackers might well turn their attention to attacking all Mozilla-based browsers, thereby making plain ol' IE less vulnerable and Firefox more so. But at the very least, you'd have an army of smart people--the developers who contribute to the Firefox project--on your side. It's hard to imagine that a Firefox-based IE would be less safe than plain ol' IE as we know it.

You could worry a little more about features. Like I said, IE 8 doesn't sound like it'll offer knockout new features--but to be fair, you could say the same thing about Firefox 8, which is also in beta, and which also seems centered on under-the-hood enhancements. In other words, it's a kinda quiet time for browser innovation. If Firefox and IE were the same browser under the hood, both Microsoft and the Mozilla team might be able to devote more effort to coming up with cool new features.

You can continue to try to dominate the Web via the browser if you feel like it. A Firefox-based IE could still point to a Microsoft site as its home page, sending you millions of unique visitors. You could customize it to integrate with MSN Messenger or other Microsoft services. You could do nearly anything with it you could do with your own homegrown browser, including tying the browser together with any Yahoo services you end up owning.

You don't have anything to lose. For as long as there's a Windows, you're probably going to want to ship a browser with it. But at this point in its life, IE seems to be more of a responsibility than an opportunity for you. Dump plain ol' IE for one built on top of Firefox, and you'd probably save yourself money and hassles in an era in which your ambitions lie elsewhere.

So would you give the idea some serious thought, at least?

Respectfully,

--Harry

Okay, enough with the open-letter schtick, fun though it was to write. I don't think the scenario I outline above will happen--although it's not as wildly implausible an notion as it would have been a few years ago, and if I thought the chances of it happening were zero, I wouldn't have bothered to write this post.

So what's your take?

Firefox: On Its Way to Web Domination?

According to the folks at Mozilla, the 500 millionth download of the Firefox browser happened last night. That doesn't, of course, represent a half billion people--I've probably downloaded various versions of the browser thirty times myself, for one computer or another--but it's still a whole lotta downloads, and evidence of the immense popularity of the little browser that could.

I like to do periodic reports of usage of Firefox on PCWorld.com, and these numbers too show Firefox getting more and more popular. The trend for Firefox usage is still trending upwards over time. In fact, January 2008 was the first month during which a third of site visitors--34.36 percent, to be overly exact--used Firefox. Here's a graph of its growth over the past three years:

Internet Explorer remains the most-used broser at PCWorld.com, but total usage for IE 7, IE 6, and the dregs of previous versions has fallen below sixty percent. (Back in September 2004, when Firefox was still an obscure beta, just one percent of visitors used it--and around 90 percent of visitors used IE.)

PCWorld.com users are a lot more likely than garden-variety Internet types to use Firefox--here's a report that has overall usage at around 17 percent. (Such data tends to vary a lot from source to source, though--here's another site saying that Firefox usage is around 25 percent.)

I hesitate to make any predictions here, but given that Firefox is no longer an unknown newcomer and its share is still creeping upward, and Microsoft seems to have lost the will to radically upgrade IE, here's a scenario that no longer seems wholly implausible: Firefox may eventually hit 51 percent usage, making it the Web's dominant browser by any definition.

If it happens...well, in that case I'll just pretend I predicted it rather than saying it could happen.

Meanwhile, please take my goofy little poll on the subject:

Flock 1.1 Browser: Even a Little Cooler

A few months ago, I wrote that Flock, the social-media browser built on top of Firefox, had become my new favorite browser. It still is--and today, the Flock folks released a beta of version 1.1. It's got no earthshaking new features, but is sure worth a look if you like inventive Web tools.

The big news in this version is Webmail support: You can integrate the browser with a Gmail or Yahoo Mail account (or both), whereupon an icon lets you see new messages, create a message, or use the Webmail service to share a Web page you're on. It's useful and reasonably slick, although I wonder why Flock didn't put this functionality into its sidebar--where it gives you access to Facebook, Flickr, and other services--which would have given people even readier access to their mail, without requiring them to click the icon to see new messages.

Also new in this version is support for photo albums you create with Picaso Web Albums, Google's photo-sharing service. Just as with Flickr and other photo services, you can see your Picasa photos in Flock's Media Bar even if you're not at the site in question.

One caution before you try this beta version of Flock: It doesn't bring in Favorites and other settings from earlier versions of the brower. The Flock people say that'll be fixed in the final version.

For now, Flock remains the browser I spend most of my time in--though I return pretty frequently to Firefox (and am going to check out the beta of version 3), dabble in Safari, and use IE7 when I have to. And hey, it's been awhile since I revisited Opera, a product with numerous virtues of its own.

Isn't it nice to use the Internet in an era in which multiple browsers are viable and evolving--and you can pretty much choose the one you like best without fear that you'll miss out on anything the Web has to offer?

Toshiba Pulling the Plug on HD DVD? Hallelujah!

This is still unfolding at this point, but it's a potential development that warms the cockles of my heart: Toshiba is apparently getting ready to face reality and give up on HD DVD, leaving Blu-Ray as the victor in the race to replace DVD with a high-definition format.

I'm not saying that because I have anything against Toshiba or HD DVD. Actually, the format has its advantages in terms of both features and economics. And truth to tell, I'm not itching to buy a high-def player of any sort just yet. (A lot of the sort of exotic things I like are available only on DVD.) In short, I'd have been equally content if HD DVD had been a hit and it was Sony and other backers of Blu-Ray who were crying uncle.

But in recent weeks, the news has been all good for Blu-Ray and all terrible for HD DVD, with entertainment giants such as Warner Bros., Wal-Mart, Best Buy, and Netflix all siding with Sony. You'd have to be a believer in miracles to think HD DVD could pull out a win.

And you'd have to be a masochist not to look forward to the end, at long last, of the format wars. The refusal of the various companies involved in the two camps to find common ground and agree on a single format has been a huge poke in the eye to consumers, who reasonably want to avoid investing hundreds of dollars in a device that destined to be a doorstop. And surely it's been a lousy strategy for the consumer electronics and entertainment industries, since so many smart consumers have chosen to bide their time. (If HD DVD dies, the format wars will definitely have turned out to be a mistake for Toshiba, which will have poured hundreds of millions of dollars down the drain.)

So while I'll be happy if does turn out the format wars are ending, I'm mostly irritated at everybody who chose to take either side in the m. Thanks a bunch, guys--you engineered a colossal waste of everyone's time, when you had the opportunity to agree on a single format in the first place and give consumers an easy decision rather than a headache that lasted for years.

Time for a silly little poll:

Hotel Check-In Kiosks: Broken!

I apologize in advance if you find this boring, but as someone who spends a lot of time on the road, I'm both frustrated and fascinated by the fact that automated hotel check-in kiosks--presumably designed to make it easier to get a room--rarely give me anything but heartache. (I blogged about problems with one in New York here, and woes in Las Vegas here.)

Last night, I arrived in New York and took a cab to the Sheraton Manhattan, where I arrived at 11pm. There are two kiosks in the lobby. One had a blank screen; the other had a welcoming message.

"This probably isn't going to work," I thought to myself.

I touched the screen on the one that appeared to be working. It flashed, and gave me an apology and a request that I talk to a real person.

Here, incidentally, is a New York Times story from almost three years ago about glitches with hotel kiosks, including the ones at the Sheraton New York that have personally bedeviled me. As far as I can tell, the situation has gotten no better since the Times published its story.

Which leaves me wondering three things:

1) Just how hard is it to build a check-in kiosk that can actually check me in?

2) Why do Sheraton and other hoteliers continue to waste their patrons' time with kiosks that misbehave. (That's assuming that my run of bad luck is at least kind of typical.)

3) Just how long is it going to take until they get these things right--or give up?

A Heartfelt, YouTube-Based Wake for Polaroid Instant Photography

I greeted today's news with an instinctive combination of shock, grief, and indignant fury: Polaroid has announced it's ceasing production of its instant film, which will become unavailable after 2009. What will I do when I need more film my trusty Polaroid? What will all those people buying new Polaroids do?

Then it dawned on me: While I took Polaroid photos well into the 1990s, it's been years since I last used my camera...and come to think of it, I have no idea where it is and am not positive I still own it. And reading coverage of the film plant shutdown, I learned that the company stopped making cameras a year ago. I didn't notice at the time, which is probably a sign that I don't really have the right to be livid about the film going away.

Still, it's a sad day. I don't really need to explain why the once-iconic Polaroid instant camera was rendered obsolete: When photography went digital in the late 1990s, all cameras became instant cameras in most respects that mattered. Poor Polaroid became an anachronism; thousands of people at the Cambridge, Massachusetts company that was an icon of my Boston-area youth lost their jobs.

But in the great scheme of things, it wasn't that long ago that Polaroid was the coolest consumer-electronics company going. I was eight years old when the Polaroid SX-70--the first instant camera that shot a photo out of the camera with no work needed on the part of the photographer--was released. And I have vivid memories of lusting after a family friend's SX-70. At $180, it was an extremely pricey gadget for the early 1970s, but it was a beautiful-looking piece of machinery (parts of the case were made of real leather!) and what it did felt closer to magic than any piece of personal technology I can think of.

Polaroid in its heyday reminds me of Apple--it was a company led by a charismatic, long-serving leader (Edwin Land) that made slick, innovative, somewhat pricey gadgets. And in decidedly Apple-esque fashion, it marketed them really well. So looking at a few vintage Polaroid commercials is an entirely appropriate way to mourn the end of Polaroid photography. Thanks to YouTube, we can do that right here.

Back in 2005, we named a 1965 Polaroid model called the Swinger as the 43rd greatest gadget of the last 50 years. I'm too young to remember the camera; actually, I never heard of it until we began to plan the article. But I vividly remember a coworker, about a decade older than me, passionately argue for its greatness. And it had a TV commercial that sported both a catchy jingle and a pre-Love Story Ali McGraw...

Here's another 1960s commercial, from back when taking Polaroid pictures involved peeling the print apart and (at least if you were me) accidentally getting chemcials on your hands that left your hands with a weird burning sensation...

One of the many interesting things about the SX-70 was its ad campaign, which featured the only commercial endorsement ever made by Sir Laurence Olivier. I wish I could find an example to embed here. But I can't.

So I'll skip on to the best-remembered Polaroid ads of all: The 1970s ones for the OneStep--basically, a cheap version of the SX-70--that featured James Garner and Mariette Hartley. Garner was a star, Hartley wasn't (though the commercials made her into a pseudo-celeb), and people supposedly interpreted the spots' famously influential banter as evidence that they were married to each other. Which they weren't.

Note that the following commercial touts the OneStep for features that reduced the chances that you'd waste film. Remember when we had to worry about wasting film?

Here's another. I haven't seen these in three decades, but watching them again, the rhythms of the dialog and the bouncy theme song are flooding back into my brain...

This one features Hartley sans Garner and Mentos-esque hijinks, and is neither funny nor memorable.

This one isn't funny, but I think I kind of remember it. Is that Hartley we see only in a silent glimpse, or a lookalike?

This later ad for a OneStep spinoff called the Sun camera has a slightly fantastic premise and some special effects, plus bonus 1981 commercials at the end...

The OneStep was a smash, but at the same time it was flying off the shelves, Polaroid released a product so unsuccessful it did grave financial damage to the company: Polavision, its instant movie camera. It was a great idea--except that the movies were silent. And you had to watch them on a little desktop screen. And it arrived at the same time that home video revolution was rendering it kind of pointless. At least Polaroid hired Danny Kaye to do the commercials...

Time out for a 1977 ad that isn't for a Polaroid...but is relevant o this post. It's for the Handle, one of the Polaroid wannabees produced by Kodak until Polaroid successfully sued the company for patent violation and forced it to stop manufacturing both the cameras and the film. The Handle looks pretty ungainly, and as I think about it, I seem to remember looking upon it with contempt at the time as an inferior knockoff of slick Polaroid products like the OneStep. And it looks like even the ads were kind of cheesy...

By the early 1980s, Santa had apparently left the employment of Eastman Kodak to work for Polaroid...

Here's a 1981 ad with the Muppets whose mention of the camera as costing fifteen pounds shows it was aired in the U.K. But my Muppet-expert friend Andrew Leal of Muppet Wiki tells me that it was probably originally shot for U.S. use...

Being in Polaroid commercials was apparently a surprisingly effective springboard to greater fame. We've already seen Ali McGraw and Mariette Hartley; here's Hugh "House" Laurie in a 1980s ad, back when having a computer inside a camera was something to brag about...

By the 1980s, Polaroid was slapping its name on products that didn't relate to instant photography--it eventually made (gasp!) 35mm film. Here's an ad for Polaroid video cassettes with Vincent Price, proving that stars appeared in Polaroid commercials on the way down as well as on the way up...

I think maybe the last Polaroid I owned and used was a Spectra, which, at the time I bought it, was a fairly major purchase for me. And a lot of fun...

The start of the end of Polaroid wasn't the digital camera--it was one-hour photo labs, which let you get much nicer photos than a Polaroid could produce without all that much extra wait. This 1989 commercial has a slightly defensive feel about it, I think...

In 1998, digital photography was starting to take off, and Polaroid--in what might have been an act of desperation--released the Spice Cam, a model endorsed by the Spice Girls. It used film you could draw on. And the ads starred...well, you can figure it out. (Here's Scary Spice.)

The 1999 Polaroid model called the I-Zone was a last-gasp sort of product whose name suggested an Internet angle of some sort, although as far as I remember, there wasn't one...

This at least sort-of recent Polaroid commercial (helmed by movie director Michael Gondry) was one of several in the brand's later years that tried too hard to be hip. The message is apparently that Polaroid cameras are good for offending your coworkers with...

Whew--that's a lot of commercials. Which, in total, provide a pretty good portrait of the rise and fall of a great American technology brand.

Polaroid may be out of the instant photography business, but the company lives on as a shell of its former self, licensing its name for use on products such as HDTVs and DVD players. I find most uses of the venerable, once-great brand on generic technology products to be embarrassing at best--can anyone tell me why it makes sense to sell a Polaroid GPS unit? But there's one modern Polaroid product that I can get at least a little excited about: Its pocket-sized photo printer, based on technology from a company called Zink. It's a unique way to get photos instantly--and hey, Zink was founded by refugees from Polaroid.

Still, I feel a twinge of sadness each time I see the Polaroid name on a modern product. The real Polaroid's technological innovations brought a lot of pleasure to a lot of people for several decades...and watching these commercials again sure reminded me just how much Polaroid cameras meant to me for a long time.

Once Again: Where the Heck is My OLPC XO Laptop?

I'm sorry to bring this up again, but it's becoming an obsession. On November 12th, I was among the first people to donate $400 to the One Laptop Per Child project to send one XO laptop to a deserving child in a developing nation, and have one shipped my way. The OLPC people thanked me, said they'd try to get me my machine by Christmas, and reminded me that my status as a first-day benefactor meant I'd be first in line to get an XO.

Shortly before Christmas, I got an e-mail telling me that I wouldn't get the laptop for the holidays, but that I was scheduled to receive it by January 15th. When that date came and went, I called and learned that OLPC didn't have my address. They took it down, and mumbled something about me maybe getting my system in February.

That phone call was about ten days ago. I've been checking the LaptopGiving.org tracking system periodically since then, and it's kept mentioning possible address problems, but said that if I'd called previously I should wait for the information to be updated in their system.

Then tonight, that message was replaced with one simply asking me to call OLPC for more information. Given that I was on hold for almost half an hour last time, I'll need to figure out when I can devote some time to this project.

Oh, and the tracking system still talks about machines being shipped on a first-come, first-served basis--which, if it were true, would have meant that I'd have gotten mine weeks ago.

Meanwhile, lots of other donors were wondering where their XOs were. One of them was my colleague Matthew Newton, who made his donation well after I did. As of late last week, he finally got the good word that his XO had shipped. But another friend got this e-mail just today, signed by OLPC's founder:

Dear Donor,

Please accept my apologies for the delay in receiving your XO laptop. Give One Get One was such a phenomenal success that we over-taxed our order processing and payment systems. Demand exceeded supply.

Additional XO laptops are being built now and will be delivered in 45 to 60 days. If you wish to reconsider your contribution in the face of this delay, we will issue a refund to you. We have set up a dedicated phone line for these requests. The number is 1-800-883-8102.

In the meanwhile, please know that laptops are in the process of going to Mongolia, Cambodia, Afghanistan, Rwanda and Haiti as part of the "give one" side of the equation. Fortunately, OLPC's mission of getting laptops to the children in these countries has not been delayed. In Mongolia, the children are already enjoying themselves and learning new things with their XO laptops. Please see: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Ulaanbaatar.

Eliminating poverty through learning is gaining wider acceptance thanks to support like yours.

Sincerely,
Nicholas Negroponte

Mistakes happen, but it's kind of amazing that OLPC could decide to extend the originally brief duration of the "Give One Get One" program, and then explain what's happened by saying that demand outstripped supply.

Oh, and I read this as saying that it's possible it'll be early April before my XO shows up--more than three months after the Christmas target that was a key theme in the original G1G1 pitch.

Standard disclaimer: I actually care far more about the systems going to kids than getting one myself (truth to tell, Bill Pytlovany, the author of WinPatrol, read of my woes and was nice enough to lend me one of his XOs.) I remain a believer in the OLPC vision, and if the organization turns out to be very good at getting XOs to the kids who need them and just terrible at getting them to comfortably well-off gadget freaks like myself, I'm reasonably content with the whole situation.

But it would still make me a much happier donor if OLPC would simply e-mail me to explain what's going on with my XO, rather than expecting me to call them--again and again--to ask into its whereabouts...

February 1st, 2008: The Day the Original Web Died

Back in late 1994--don't hold me to this, but I think it was November--I visited the World Wide Web for the first time. (In retrospect, that was early in the Web's history, but I felt like a latecomer, having known about it for awhile and been on various online services since 1979.) I used Mosaic, a browser written by Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina--and I used it to go to Yahoo, which was less than a year old.

If I'd done my first browsing a few months later, chances are I would have done it with Andreessen and Bina's followup to Mosaic, Netscape Navigator. In 1995, Netscape and Yahoo were pretty much synonymous with the Web. If there were two companies who did more to popularize the Internet, I can't think of 'em.

And today, February 1st, is turning out to be a sad day for both Web pioneers.

First Netscape. Back on December 28th, the company--which had long since become an atrophied limb of AOL--announced that it was ending all support for its browser as of February 1st, 2008. (t was not exactly a tragedy, since it's been eons since Netscape was relevant and Firefox, the open-source offshoot of the original Netscape browser, is flourishing. But it still made me feel like observing a moment of silence in recognition of the passing of a once-great piece of software.

(Side note: About a third of PCWorld.com visitors today came via Firefox; less than one-fifth of one percent came using Netscape.)

Then February 1st rolled around--and with it the news that the much-rumored Microsoft takeover of Yahoo is a reality...or at least will become one if Steve Ballmer has anything to say about it. Given that it's not yet a done deal, and we don't know exactly what Microsoft intends to do with the company if its $44.6 billion offer is accepted, it would be melodramatic to call this the end of Yahoo. Presumably it's going to be a very long time before the Yahoo name disappears, and many of the services will hang around, too. But name me even one challenged company that became more like its old self once someone else bought it out.

Confession time: While I was writing this post, I learned that Netscape announced a reprieve for its browser last week--it gets a whole additional month of life before it goes bye-bye. So Feburary 1st won't go down in history as the end, or at least the beginning of the end, of both Netscape and Yahoo.

But I still feel like I'm beginning February in mourning for two old friends...

Microsoft-Yahoo: My Opinion and Yours

Every once in awhile. a rumor festers for so long that it's startling when it turns into reality--as the idea of Microsoft buying Yahoo has now become. The behemoth of Redmond has launched an unsolicited $44.6 billion takeover attempt of the venerable Web portal--here's its press release, including a letter from Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to the Yahoo board. The obvious motive behind the move: to compete more effectively with Google. the company that is becoming the Microsoft of the Web age.

Yahoo has yet to be heard from, and the whole thing could fall apart, but it's not too early to ask ourselves whether this would be a positive development for consumers. And my instinct is to say there's no obvious good news here.

For one thing, Microsoft has been forced into this shopping spree in part because it hasn't been very successful--relatively speaking--at figuring out how to appeal to consumers on the Web. With certain exceptions--we like Popfly--most of its services are me-too latecomers rather than best in their categories. The Windows Live initiative seems to consist of releasing not-very-exciting services with confusing names. And Microsoft keeps not doing things you'd hope they would do, such as figure out a coherent way to bring Microsoft Office into the browser in some fashion.

Yahoo may get beat up a lot, and it's certainly struggled to compete with Google. But it's done a much better job than Microsoft of reinventing old services such as Yahoo Mail to take advantage of an evolving Web. It's made smart acquisitions, such as Flickr, Delicious, and Zimbra. And even things it does that aren't particularly successful are often interesting (see Yahoo 360, for instance).

Microsoft's announcement says that it would keep lots of smart Yahoo employees, but for now, you gotta think that it's more likely that Microsoft's bad habits would rub off on Yahoo than that the infusion of Yahoo brainpower would solve everything that's been lacking in Microsoft's approach to the Web.

It's also hard to imagine how the dozens (hundreds?) of overlapping services offered by the two companies could be melded in anything like a coherent fashion. Would both Yahoo Mail and Hotmail survive? Maybe but they wouldn't both have big development teams working to make them better. Could you use your current Yahoo login to sign into Microsoft Office Live? Possibly, possibly not. What would happen to all that competing content, such as Yahoo Tech and MSN Tech & Gadgets--both of which, full disclosure, include PC World material? Who knows? (I shudder to think about the branding that's likely to come out of this. Microsoft Yahoo Mail? MSN Flickr? Yahoo Live?)

Microsoft obviously wants a better shot of getting a bigger slice of the Web advertising pie which Google is cheerfully gorging on these days. The merger might give the company that opportunity. And as much as I like much of what Google does, I also like the idea of it facing strong competition--which, since both Microsoft and Yahoo are kinda challenged online, it doesn't really have right now.

But when I think back over thirty years of Microsoft history, and almost as many years of it acquiring other companies, there's not much reason to believe that the Web would be a better place for you and me if it owned Yahoo. So I'll be relieved if this merger, like the 1994 Microsoft buyout of Intuit, turns out to a great big deal that amounts to absolutely nothing.

Stay tuned for more coverage from PC World as events warrant. Meanwhile, what's your take?