Nov 02

Google: You too could win millions in stock

By jason IT News World No Comments »

Google is once again dangling incentives before engineers.

Google’s Chrome browser earned its developers millions in stock bonuses.

The company threw open its doors Monday to the engineering community Monday, announcing that it granted a Founders’ Prize–"a multimillion-dollar stock bonus"–to the team that developed Google Chrome. "(The) future is shaped by small teams of creative people who want to make a difference. We’re on the hunt for these kind of people — let us know if you think you’re one of them," wrote Alan Eustace, senior vice president for engineering and research at Google.

Google is still one of Silicon Valley’s most generous companies in terms of employee perks, but Google’s hiring slowed over the past year as the recession took hold and the company scaled back some of those famous extras. Google even was forced to cut employees in March, and has also suffered as a number of high-profile employees decided to seek (or expand) their fortunes elsewhere.

But CEO Eric Schmidt is ready to let the good times roll once again, announcing earlier in the year that Google was set to expand hiring and acquisitions, and backing up that confidence on Google’s most recent earnings conference call.

Google also announced that Chrome now has 30 million active users. The browser trails market leaders Internet Explorer and Firefox by a wide margin, but it’s growing faster than the competition.

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Oct 29

Music search is Google’s newest tune

By jason IT News World 2 Comments »

LOS ANGELES–Already the far-and-away leader in search, Google wants to be a big player in music discovery, too.

The pop-up MySpace player that will appear when clicking the ‘play’ button in a Google search.

(Credit: MySpace)

The search giant teamed up with News Corp.’s MySpace and streaming service Lala for the Wednesday debut of the new Google music search feature at the historic Capitol Records building in Hollywood. With the new music search, which had been internally code-named "OneBox" when news of the project broke earlier this month, search queries pertaining to something like a song, artist, lyrics, or album will bring up links to streaming songs from iLike and MySpace, as well as links to artist information on Pandora, Imeem, and Rhapsody. The lyrics search is provided through a partnership with Gracenote.

"It is directly embedded and integrated into Google search. There’s no special button to push," R.J. Pittman, director of product management for search properties, said in a phone interview with CNET News. Currently, due to licensing and availability issues, the music search is U.S.-only.

There also won’t be direct download links in Google: those will be handled through Lala and MySpace. "We push all the music engagement and commerce down through the partners," Pittman said.

Additionally, if a relevant music video is available, the MySpace window that pops up when someone clicks on the "play" button in search results will display a link to that video through MySpace’s new music video portal. That’s interesting, considering music videos are some of the most popular content on Google’s own YouTube–but YouTube video results will continue to show up independently of the new music results in Google searches.

Financial terms of the partnerships aren’t yet clear. "Everyone’s keeping their own revenues and we’re not messing with anything," Lala founder and Chairman Bill Nguyen told CNET News. But MySpace Music President Courtney Holt was a bit more tight-lipped, saying "we’re not discussing the financial details."

The MySpace deal is a little more complicated to begin with, though. Google had been in talks with music start-up iLike about integration into music search, but then iLike was acquired by MySpace in a deal that closed earlier this month. Indeed, a statement from Holt says that "this relationship was secured and implemented by the iLike team." But iLike founder Ali Partovi (who’s currently on board MySpace’s music team) explained that the partnership now has "MySpace branding, (and) MySpace content licensing." Through the integration of iLike’s technology, it’ll also have concert notifications if someone searches on Google for a band that’s currently on tour.

"I think MySpace, along with (Apple’s) iPod, is one of the most trusted brands in music, one of the most resonant to consumers," Partovi said. MySpace is also reported to be in talks with Microsoft to power a music feature on MSN.

Music search is something that Google could really dominate. According to traffic firm Experian Hitwise, 6 percent of Google’s top 1,000 search-related terms deal with music, and already 30 percent of traffic to sites that Hitwise classifies under the "music" umbrella comes from Google.

Considering Google’s reach, it’s a big win for both MySpace, currently struggling to redefine itself as a pop culture powerhouse rather than a social network through its MySpace Music service, a joint venture with major and independent record labels, and Lala, which also has a new song-gifting deal with Facebook. "We think (Google’s music search) going to have a thousand percent increase in our sales, an order of magnitude more," Lala’s Nguyen told CNET News.

This also means that music-related search results are getting a sheen of legitimacy on Google. With official partnerships, Google’s most prominent music search results will be from sites that have licensing deals in place with the major labels, rather than potentially pirated content. Google’s history with the music industry is spotty at best: it’s had to strike its own deals with the major record labels, and relations haven’t always been positive. Music search puts it all into order, partners in the deal say.

"Instead of ending up with a pirate site and a page with a bunch of ads or random lyrics sites, you wind up with a play button," Nguyen said.

Updated 4:30 p.m. Just after Google and Lala made the announcement official (in what was probably not a conincidence) Yahoo released a blog post designed to point out that they’ve been offering this kind of music search for a while. "We’ve made it easier to find music videos, artist information, and play full length songs from within the search results page. This is just one of the many ways Yahoo! is enhancing the search experience for music lovers," said Larry Cornett, vice president of consumer products for Yahoo Search.

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Oct 23

Mystery AMD executive in insider-trading case

By jason IT News World No Comments »

An unnamed executive at Advanced Micro Devices is cited repeatedly in the Galleon Funds insider-trading case, presenting a potentially awkward situation for the chipmaker as the case goes forward.

It’s not clear if the AMD executive cited in the U.S. Attorney’s complaint would be charged or even implicated by name, but government charges of insider trading have rattled Silicon Valley. Rajiv Goel, a managing director of strategic investments for Intel’s treasury group, was arrested and charged in the case and put on leave, forcing Intel CEO Paul Otellini to publicly address the case.

And a high-level executive at IBM, senior vice president Robert Moffat, was placed on leave Monday after he was charged. Moffat is accused of supplying details about IBM and Sun Microsystems earnings to Danielle Chiesi, who worked for the New Castle hedge fund.

"If it’s the top two (executives at AMD), that would be significant. But it could be anyone. Mid-level executives. We don’t know," said David Wu, an analyst at GC Research.

"We are currently reviewing the situation and we have no further comment," AMD spokesman Michael Silverman said.

The case revolves around Raj Rajaratnam, who founded the Galleon Group, a New York-based hedge fund that manages $7 billion in funds. Federal prosecutors charged Rajaratnam and five others on Friday with securities fraud, alleging they were involved in insider trading of well-known tech companies, including Intel, Google, AMD, and IBM.

In the wake of the allegations, the Galleon Group said it will close, though the firm is exploring alternatives for its business that could allow parts of the hedge fund to survive, according to the Wall Street Journal.

AMD was prominent in the complaint, filed by the U.S. Attorney for New York’s Southern District on Friday, which alleges Rajaratnam and others engaged in insider-trading activity when AMD was trying to reorganize and spin off its manufacturing operations last year–which eventually became a multibillion-dollar deal.

The U.S. Attorney’s complaint makes the first references to an AMD executive in June of 2008. At that time, AMD, seeking a buyer for its manufacturing operations, entered into negotiations with investors based in Abu Dhabi.

Throughout the AMD section of the complaint, references are made to the executive, usually in the context of an unnamed person who had spoken with the executive. For example, Rajaratnam asked whether the AMD executive would give the unidentified person "the full low down" on the reorganization, and the person replied, "Oh, yeah. Plus IBM too." IBM was involved in the deal because AMD was using intellectual property from IBM in its chip design and manufacturing processes.

And as the announcement of the spin-off got closer, the unnamed person told Rajaratnam that the "AMD executive said that the deal would be announced during the first week of October," adding that the AMD executive had described the deal as "unbelievable."

The spin-off was ultimately announced on October 6 when an investment was secured from Advanced Technology Investment and Abu Dhabi-based Mubadala Development. At that time, AMD said the new company had secured about $5.7 billion of "confirmed, pledged investment."

Though AMD’s stock price rose briefly–about 25 percent–the price then dropped precipitously because of the financial crisis on Wall Street. AMD’s stock price fell from $7 in June 2008 to $2.10 on December 8.

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Oct 19

Will Apple keep up the momentum?

By jason IT News World No Comments »

Although there are more signs lately that the worst of the recession is over, Apple is one of the few companies that has seen little of the effects of the recession to begin with.

We’ll find out if the company’s good health has remained during the quarterly checkup Monday afternoon. According to Wall Street, it’s been another good three months for the Cupertino, Calif.-based company. Apple’s stock price jumped 43 points during the quarter to close at $185.35. Because of a string of impressive earnings announcements dating back a year ago, the launch of the company’s latest operating system update, signs it gained share in the smartphone and computer markets, and a helpful accounting rule change, financial analysts are expecting good things from the company’s fiscal year fourth-quarter earnings.

Apple MacBook Pro

Did price cuts on the MacBook improve Mac sales for the quarter?

Analysts are expecting Apple to record earnings per share somewhere between $1.24 and $1.72, and revenue between $8.74 billion and $10.55 billion for the quarter ending September 30. Apple is known to provide consistently conservative guidance for future quarters, hence the wide gap in analyst estimates.

But a good way to know what’s to come can usually be seen in the unit sales reports. Last week IDC reported that Apple had amassed a 9.4 percent share of the U.S. PC market–a jump from the 8.6 percent of the previous quarter. Near the end of the previous quarter Apple offered some price cuts on most of its Mac models. The sales numbers for the quarter, whatever they end up being, will be regarded as a commentary on whether those price cuts went far enough.

Apple watcher Gene Munster over at Piper Jaffray says he’s had a peek at Mac unit sales for the quarter, and he says the company is on target to report sales of 2.8 million Macs. That would be an increase over the previous quarter’s sales of 2.6 million, and it makes sense: The third quarter is a traditional time for people to buy computers ahead of the back-to-school season, and Apple also released its long-awaited operating system update, Mac OS X 10.6, or Snow Leopard.

On the smartphone side of the business, if Apple does once again report good numbers, it’ll be one of the few in that industry. Despite constant attempts by rival handset makers to produce the "iPhone killer," Apple’s main competitors in the smartphone world have struggled during the most recent quarter–Nokia, Palm, and Research In Motion each posting disappointing results.

Piper Jaffray is estimating that Apple sold 7.5 million iPhones. Munster said inventory checks showed that demand for the iPhone 3GS is "outstripping supply," which means that iPhone sales for the next several quarters should be fairly steady. We should also get an update on the number of countries and carriers that have the latest iPhone model. Apple had said in July that it was supposed to be in 80 countries by the end of the summer.

The iPod is the only real question mark when it comes to Apple’s main revenue-generating products. The quarter ending in June was the first in which iPod sales saw a year-over-year drop. Apple acknowledged it last quarter, saying that it expected eventual declines in iPod sales, and that it was the reason it developed the iPod Touch. Chief Financial Officer Peter Oppenheimer actually broke out the individual sales numbers for each iPod model and cautioned that the company expected "to cannibalize ourselves with iPod Touch and iPhone."

A slew of new iPods–including the new camera-equipped Nano–were introduced near the end of the quarter, so the full effect of those new models probably won’t be visible until the following quarter.

Apple iPhone sales 

The biggest change during the quarter however had nothing to do with anything that had a keyboard or a touch screen. Apple was one of several companies to lobby (successfully) for an accounting rule change that, if applied to the most recent quarter, will likely show much higher revenue for the iPhone.

The practice–in which Apple has been recognizing revenue for the iPhone and Apple TV over a two-year period–was put in place to avoid charging a fee for every product upgrade. It was something Apple was told it would need to satisfy accounting regulations that require companies to establish a value for product upgrades. The new rule won’t change the amount of revenue coming into the company’s coffers, but it will provide a more accurate picture of how much money the iPhone in particular is bringing in every quarter.

Check back Monday afternoon. Apple’s results will be posted shortly after 1 p.m. Pacific.

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Oct 18

Twitter co-founder’s ‘Square’ comes into focus

By jason IT News World No Comments »

 

Well, we finally have a glimpse at "Square," the new mobile payments venture coming from Twitter co-founder and chairman Jack Dorsey. As expected, it’s a little hardware add-on that can turn an iPhone into a credit card reader.

The funny part: Details about the small-business-oriented project have been on the Web for months. It was just that nobody had put two and two together until some eagle-eyed folks at Engadget realized that a URL on a screenshot of the "Square iPhone Payments Venture" first reported by Coolhunting matched a domain registered to Dorsey.

Dorsey, who stepped down as Twitter CEO almost exactly a year ago, is headquartering the company in New York, though we hear he already has employees in both Gotham and San Francisco. Its Web site will likely be located at SquareUp.com. Currently, that site is a collection of links to a smattering of businesses, including Sightglass Coffee, a new San Francisco coffee shop in which Dorsey has invested. (Wanna bet they’re testing Square out there?)

From Coolhunting:

The innovation is in a small, plastic card reader that fits in to the headphone jack of an iPhone (or iPod Touch) and transfers the credit card’s swipe data to the app. After the employee enters the amount to charge, the customer confirms by scrawling their signature with their finger and then either one enters the customer’s email address to send the receipt to. The payment is processed by Square for a small percentage plus a fixed fee; the funds are transferred directly to the store’s bank account, cutting both time and complexity on the processing side. The customer’s receipt includes a map showing the location of the transaction which is handy for those who record, sort and file such things.

We heard that the venture is being called Square rather than "Squirrel," its originally reported name (according to TechCrunch’s MG Siegler, this is because it looks kind of like an acorn) due to some unclear legal-copyright-licensing-whatnot issue. CNET News first reported the name change along with the news that Dorsey had been an angel investor in location-based mobile navigation start-up Foursquare.

Funding a hardware venture is typically more expensive than a Web-based one for obvious reasons: the up-front cost of production and manufacturing.

But two sources with knowledge of Square’s logistics said that Dorsey believes he can keep production costs extremely low, possibly manufacturing a "square" at a cost of about 40 cents apiece. The company may then even give the devices away for free, making money instead on transaction fees. That’s the old Gillette razor business model–make the razors cheap or even free, but replacement blades more expensive.

Regardless, we hear Dorsey has been working on a funding round.

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Oct 17

Intense Intel-AMD rivalry set for light laptops

By jason IT News World 2 Comments »

The chief executives of Intel and Advanced Micro Devices indicated this week that competition will heat up in the market for sleek, inexpensive laptops running Windows 7.

Both CEOs addressed this new market during conference calls after their companies reported earnings this week. Ultrathin laptops are inexpensive, light laptops–typically between $500 and $800–that are sold in a market segment just above less expensive Netbooks.

Intel CEO Paul Otellini on Tuesday said his company is gearing up to supply more power-efficient chips that contain two processing cores for better performance. "The bulk of the units that have shipped to date were single-core versions of the products," Otellini said. "You’ll see a number of laptops show up in retail with the dual-core versions for the holiday season…more ergonomically designed, thinner, lighter," Otellini said.

HP's Pavilion dm3 starts at $549 with an AMD processor and $649 with an Intel processor.

HP’s Pavilion dm3 starts at $549 with an AMD processor and $649 with an Intel processor.

And AMD’s CEO Dirk Meyer chimed in on Thursday. "You’ll hear more…next month about the product lineup that we’ll be rolling out over the next two years, which will include increasing focus on those small form factor notebooks," Meyer said during AMD’s conference call. In the more immediate future, Meyer said AMD will have a "broader assortment of (ultrathin) platforms walking into the Christmas cycle."

To date, this new category of laptops has had a minuscule market-share impact because there was little perceived difference between a Netbook and an ultrathin, according to Bob O’Donnell, IDC research vice president. "A lot of people said this is not actually that much faster, so you’re going to see a very rapid transition to all dual-core," he said.

Windows 7 should accelerate sales too. "I think we will see better sales next year," O’Donnell said, as HP, Dell, and others bring out ultrathins with Windows 7.

The category received a boost recently with the rollout of HP’s Pavilion dm3, which starts at $549 with an AMD processor and $649 with an Intel processor. The dm3 is expected to be available starting October 22 with the launch of the Microsoft Windows 7 operating system.

Other high-profile ultrathins include the $548 Acer Aspire Timeline (at Wal-Mart) and the $549 Dell Inspiron 13.

Because ultrathins are more expensive than Netbooks, they are more profitable for Intel. "Part of Intel’s strategy is to pull people up from a Netbook," said O’Donnell.

AMD, on other hand, is focusing solely on the space "between Netbooks and mainstream notebooks," Meyer said, adding that AMD, in effect, created the ultrathin category with the introduction of the 12-inch HP Pavilion dv2 back in January. "We created that category really in partnership with the HP," Meyer said.

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Oct 16

Facebook’s Sandberg: It’s OK to turn down that friend request

By jason IT News World 1 Comment »

PALO ALTO, Calif.–"The stream of information coming at you can be overwhelming," Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said when asked in an onstage interview what she thinks of social-networking fatigue. "I think people sometimes feel uncomfortable hitting ‘ignore’ (on friend requests), but if you don’t want to connect to someone, that’s why it’s there."

Facebook, after all, is on top of the world. It doesn’t make much difference to the health of that 300 million-member user base if your "social graph" is one degree smaller.

Sandberg, who joined Facebook a year and a half ago after a high-ranking sales job at Google, was interviewed Thursday at the Palo Alto Research Center auditorium by industry analyst Charlene Li. The event had been organized by Silicon Valley networking group The Churchill Club.

Since then, she has become the company’s foremost evangelist for some of its most prominent marketing pitches: the power of connectivity, and how Facebook can give businesses a more authentic face. Sandberg had given the talk in New York to debut "BrandLift," the social network’s partnership with statistics firm Nielsen to provide audience response to advertisements.

Li’s questions for Sandberg weren’t particular hard balls. Rather, the interview followed Sandberg’s usual talking points for a corporate audience: how Facebook is an unparalleled and unprecedented hub for communication and interaction, and how in turn it has changed marketing and communication–and that there’s no other place on the Web for advertisers to get that kind of interaction with consumers.

"There are other places on the Web where you can get reach and audience. Certainly Yahoo offers that…What we have is deep engagement," Sandberg said. "We are by far the place where people spend the most time on the Web. On average, a monthly user on Facebook spends 5.75 hours on the site. No. 2 is Yahoo, and they are at 3 hours and 23 minutes. That is a really big gap."

(Ouch, Yahoo.)

Facebook might be "a marketer’s heaven," as Li put it, but Sandberg said it also takes user privacy seriously–another regular and understandable Facebook talking point, considering it’s had the occasional privacy snafu in which user backlash has reached a fever pitch.

"Why is our usage exploding, as some of the other social properties are decreasing?" Sandberg asked rhetorically, not explicitly mentioning MySpace, which recent numbers showed has seen much of its traffic eaten up by Facebook’s. "We think it’s because we made it really safe." She talked about how one of the first things she learned from CEO Mark Zuckerberg was the high number of members who put their cell phone numbers on their profiles. "Facebook is that safe," Sandberg said. "And so we take user privacy as the most important thing we do."

It obviously hopes to continue to get bigger. The company is working on "a deep integration with mobile carriers" to reach audiences that may have access to mobile devices but not PCs, and recently launched its Facebook Lite site "if you are in a country with slow bandwidth and slow loading times…we really wanted to speed it up."

Are advertisers warming up as Facebook’s membership skyrockets? "They certainly get it more than they did a year ago," Sandberg said–and indeed, Madison Avenue didn’t warm up to Facebook immediately, amid reports that social-network advertising was difficult to harness and even more difficult to profit from. "We’re growing our users, and that’s helping us a lot, and our ad products have improved tremendously…in a tough economy, advertisers and marketers are looking for value."

At least according to the Valley tech press, the biggest threat to Facebook’s dominance these days isn’t coming from Microsoft or Google, but from upstart Twitter–which Facebook famously tried to purchase and was snubbed.

She reiterated that while both Facebook and Twitter are "part of the same movement…real-time information shared quickly," that there’s room in the field for more than one player and that competition is positive.

She said, though, that she hasn’t jumped on the Twitter bandwagon because of what she considers an important differentiation between the two services.

"I don’t use it very frequently. I’ve put, like, two or three tweets up ever," Sandberg said. "I’m not trying to broadcast to the world, I’m trying to share with my friends. It’s not what I want to do. Twitter’s much more of a broadcast-to-everyone kind of thing."

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Oct 14

Microsoft eyes smart grid with utility software

By jason IT News World No Comments »

Microsoft, angling for a bigger piece of the utility business, said Tuesday that it has developed an architecture tailored for utility smart-grid programs.

The Smart Energy Reference Architecture (SERA) is meant to give utilities a blueprint for integrating and modernizing their IT systems. Microsoft said that its software will work with devices specific to the power industry and help utilities better handle an anticipated wave of real-time data.

Governments around the world are offering billions of dollars to entice utilities to upgrade their electricity distribution networks. These smart-grid programs can take many forms: smart meters that transmit information every few minutes to utilities; sensors on power lines to spot outages; or routers in substations to transmit information back to utilities.

In nearly every case, there’s a large IT component to smart-grid programs because utilities expect to collect more usage information from customers in order to run their distribution grids more efficiently.

Earlier this year, Microsoft released Hohm, a Web application aimed at helping consumer reduce their energy use at home. A component of the application was aimed at utilities, though. One business model Microsoft is exploring is aggregating customer energy usage data and providing it to utilities looking for ways to lower electricity use during peak times.

With its utility push, Microsoft joins the large IT companies–Cisco Systems, IBM, Oracle, and SAP–that have or are developing product suites aimed at grid modernization.

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Oct 09

Adobe exploit puts backdoor on computers

By jason IT News World 1 Comment »

A new zero-day exploit targeting Adobe Reader, as well as 9.1.3 and earlier versions of Adobe Systems’ Acrobat, drops a backdoor onto computers using JavaScript, Trend Micro researchers warned on Friday.

Trend Micro identified the exploit as a Trojan horse dubbed "Troj_Pidief.Uo" in a blog post. It arrives as a PDF file containing JavaScript-based malware, "Js_Agent.Dt," and then drops a backdoor called "Bkdr_Protux.Bd."

The exploit affects Microsoft Windows 98, ME, NT, 2000, XP, and Server 2003, according to Trend Micro.

The blog post provides technical details on how the malware works, specifically the activity of its shell code, the piece of code that delivers the payload. The JavaScript is used to execute arbitrary codes in a technique known as "heap spraying."

"Based on our findings, the shell code (that was heap-sprayed) jumps to another shell code inside the PDF file" before extracting and executing the backdoor, Trend Micro said. The backdoor "is also embedded in the PDF file and not the usual file downloaded from the Web."

Variants of the Protux backdoor typically provide an attacker unrestricted user-level access to a compromised machine and previously exploited vulnerabilities in Microsoft Office files, according to Trend Micro.

Adobe announced on Thursday that it would release an update to fix the hole on Tuesday, the same day as Microsoft’s Patch Tuesday.

This screenshot shows the embedded executable file in the PDF file, after it has been decrypted.

 

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Oct 07

Microsoft’s top lawyer: Relations with Europe improving

By jason IT News World No Comments »

Microsoft’s top lawyer said that a tentative agreement with Brussels announced earlier Wednesday could potentially allow the software maker to move out of the regulatory crosshairs, perhaps paving the way for regulators to shift their attention elsewhere.

"It’s important for us to get closure in Europe on issues that have obviously been controversial for over a decade," General Counsel Brad Smith said in an interview. "Today’s decision takes us an important step closer to doing that."

Smith

Microsoft initially took a much different approach to the European Commission’s assertion that the inclusion of a browser in Windows violated antitrust law. The company had initially proposed just stripping out the browser from Windows 7 entirely, leaving users the prospect of trying to get a browser on their own. The software maker eventually backed down after indications that that approach was unlikely to fly.

While not final, Microsoft’s moves would appear to resolve all of its outstanding regulatory issues with the Commission and were greeted warmly by regulators on Wednesday.

Although most of the early attention focused on the agreement around a browser "ballot screen," Microsoft also announced on Wednesday an agreement around product interoperability. Under that deal, a 10-year commitment by Microsoft, the software maker agrees to publish communication protocols and adopt certain standards as part of Windows, Windows Server, Office and other high market share products. Companies could also purchase for 5,000 euros a warranty that would subject Microsoft to court oversight and monetary penalties if it doesn’t live up to its commitments.

Smith said that the approach Microsoft took with regard to interoperability was designed to adopt methods that Nellie Kroes, commissioner for competition, had outlined in a speech last year for how companies with high market share products should behave.

"I actually think this in effect implements the model that the Commission has been advocating," Smith said. Moreover, he said it is a model that other software companies should pay attention to, he said, noting that there are lots of companies that have high market share. He noted that Google has 78 percent of the paid search market and IBM has 100 percent of the mainframe market, while Adobe also has dominant positions in certain areas, such as Photoshop.

"It is important we believe to create a level legal and regulatory playing field," Smith said. "Everyone that has a high market share needs to respect the same set of rules. I think a number of these rules are likely to be applicable to other companies and other products."

Settling now with Brussels also could help Microsoft in its effort to win approval for its search deal with Yahoo, Smith said.

"This certainly isn’t going to hurt when it comes to the Yahoo-Microsoft agreement," he said. "It’s not necessarily going to make a huge difference. We didn’t feel a particular step was needed to help it along."

Microsoft is in the process of trying to ascertain whether the deal needs approval from Brussels or from individual European antitrust authorities. It also needs approval from U.S. regulators, who have asked for more information on the deal.

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