Next month it will be precisely ten years since the US Patent and Trademark Office issued patent number 5960411 to Amazon.com.

This is the case that did more than any other to draw attention to a US patenting system run amok. It gave Amazon protection for its “1-click” check-out system. Armed with this official seal of exclusivity, Amazon quickly persuaded a judge to block a rival system used by Barnes & Noble. Continue reading "For Amazon, the patent shoe is on the other foot"

Eric Schmidt likes to claim that competition for Google’s search users is “just one click away”.

It’s easy to brush that off as a gesture to appease regulators, or just plain paranoia. But there’s a clear element of truth to it.

ComScore’s latest analysis of the US search market, released today, rubs in the point that Google’s users have already found out how to click elsewhere: they just aren’t doing it that much yet. Continue reading "Microsoft’s challenge: turning Yahoos into Bingers"

Internet filters have become more powerful and continue to be used more widely for government censorship - as shown most recently in this week’s report from the OpenNet Initiative on the state of the art in the Middle East and Africa.

So it’s worth celebrating when the rising tide of official censorship is kept at bay, even if such victories are hedged with qualifications, and are by no means certain to last.

After earlier backing off under international pressure, China has officially dropped its demand for the intrusive Green Dam software to be installed on all PCs sold in the country, though it will still be required in internet cafes. And Malaysia has apparently abandoned its plan to construct a filter at its national internet gateway, at least for now.

A mechanism to connect with your friends as you travel around the Web, a place to store and manage your network of relationships, and now… a platform for social apps.

Piece by piece, Google is building many of the core functions that define social networking. They do not all reside in one place, but as it finds more ways to link these things, the utility should increase exponentially. Continue reading "The Google social network proceeds apace"

A deliberate attempt to use its desktop dominance to protect its browser market share, or an inadvertent glitch that might have had the unintended side-effect of hurting rivals?

Whichever way you look at it, the anti-trust regulators aren’t giving Microsoft an inch in the browser wars that are now raging.

From Tuesday, anyone who uses a non-Microsoft browser on their PC, and who installs IE8,  will be presented with a very clear prompt asking them if they want to make this their default browser (see image after the break). The same will happen for people in future who upgrade to Windows 7. Continue reading "Holding Microsoft’s feet to the fire on IE8"

Overdue or not, Eric Schmidt’s resignation from the Apple board today is certainly the right move. It’s understandable that neither side wanted to look like they had been forced into this by news of a Department of Justice investigation, so it’s fitting that they used the cover of Google’s announcement of the Chrome OS - a piece of vapourware that is at least a year away - to make the necessary split.

There are still some loose ends, however. For instance, what about Art Levinson? The former Genentech CEO still sits as a non-executive director on both Apple and Google boards. The companies have never been transparent about whether Levinson ever recuses himself from discussions of strategy that touch on both companies, as Schmidt did.

Also, did the growing competitive stresses lead to any personal tension between Schmidt and Steve Jobs? Given Jobs’ famously irascible temper you have to wonder,  though Schmidt’s more conciliatory style makes it easier to imagine that what on the surface looks like an amicable parting of ways was exactly that.

The departure comes the week after news that Apple had blocked the Google Voice application from the iPhone - but we hear that that decision was actually made some weeks ago, so it sounds less likely to have been the source of an immediate flare-up between the two sides.

A week after unveiling very disappointing fourth quarter profits, and a day after pulling off a search alliance with Yahoo, Microsoft’s top executives faced analysts and investors at company headquarters in Redmond to discuss the state of the world. These were the highlights:

Yahoo. Some of CEO Steve Ballmer’s strongest words were reserved for defending someone else’s strategy rather than his own. He claimed Wall Street was dead wrong to have laid waste to Yahoo’s share price over the last two days. That’s a mark of how important it has become for Ballmer that Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz succeeds: a wounded Yahoo is the last thing he needs as he takes aim at Google. He now has a large vested interest in its success. Continue reading "Ballmer on Yahoo, Bing and higher prices in China"

Microsoft has worked out a new way to disintermediate the bloggers and get its own voice out on the real-time Web.

If you can’t attend an important event, following someone who is live-blogging it is sometimes a good way to keep up with the news (we did it ourselves yesterday for the Microsoft/ Yahoo search announcement.)

But why leave it to highly opinionated, possibly erroneous intermediaries to get your message out? “Real-time” is coming to have an increasingly important influence on shaping how major events come to be seen - not so much the first draft of history as the first quick scribble. Continue reading "Microsoft and the real-time Web"