Check out the interesting observations made by a range of media and tech folks in a post by Technologizer titled, “The Future of Windows: 28 Perspectives and Proposals” on the 25th anniversary of the 1.0 version of the groundbreaking operating system.

The simple question being asked: How can Microsoft keep Windows relevant?

My wisecracking first answer: “Well, a more liberal policy on Windex, I suppose. Wait, you mean the software?”

Actually, I did try to recover, noting that I was not wedded to Apple (AAPL) systems, which I have mostly been using for years now, if Microsoft (MSFT) nailed touchscreen technology and worked better at innovative integration of social networking, software, Web and devices.

No surprise, blogger Robert Scoble had a laundry list of requests, such as these:

“I want everything I touch to be socialized. Why doesn’t Outlook know anything about Facebook? Why don’t my photos automatically get pushed to Flickr? Why don’t I have a news app on my desktop that brings in Tweets from Twitter? Why aren’t notifications built into the system at a deep level?”

ZDNet’s most excellent Microsoft watcher Mary-Jo Foley was more dramatic:

“But what Microsoft really needs to do to insure Windows’ continued relevance is to be unafraid of introducing a whole new operating system at some point. At some point, in the not-too-distant future, Windows is going to need to be supplanted by ‘the next big thing.’”

USA Today’s Ed Baig would not go that far:

“Now, I’m by no means suggesting that Microsoft has to start from scratch when it comes to the traditional Windows OS for computers, much less prescribing specific changes…But what I am saying is that Microsoft shouldn’t be burdened by the shackles of legacy computing as it looks ahead.”

No matter what, of this I am still certain: More Windex!

Or as Toula Portokalos said in the movie comedy, “My Big Fat Greek Wedding”: “My dad believed in two things: That Greeks should educate non-Greeks about being Greek and every ailment from psoriasis to poison ivy can be cured with Windex.”

Check out the other 24 ideas and add some of your own below.

Today, Yahoo is turning 15, which makes it approximately 105 in Internet years.

All joking aside–especially since that makes BoomTown 134 years old–reaching this mark is both an accomplishment and a burden, with Yahoo (YHOO) CEO Carol Bartz pushing forward a very deliberate transformation and employing a fix-it management style in her tenure at Yahoo of just over a year.

While the seasoned exec has most certainly gotten the trains running better, sliced off underperforming assets, mounted a new marketing and image campaign and struck several social networking deals–as well as putting an end to Yahoo’s painful turmoil with Microsoft (MSFT) by striking an online advertising and search partnership–some are now wondering if there needs to be a more dramatic facelift at Yahoo to hurl it forward at even greater speed.

It is a velocity that others have been reaching far more aggressively, from the spate of product releases and frenzy of acquisitions at Google (GOOG) to Facebook’s spectacular global growth to Microsoft’s efforts with its Bing search and mapping services.

That’s why, said several observers I spoke to this week, Yahoo’s stock has stayed squarely in a narrow range from $15 to a little over $17 in recent months–steady but without a lot of spark.

“Everyone understands the message of fixing the company and cleaning up the system,” said one person who does a lot of business with Yahoo. “What I think people want now is something more profound and clear in terms of exactly what the company is going to be in the next 15 years.”

Thus, while Bartz (pictured here) has consistently touted Yahoo as one of the most trafficked sites on the Web and as the “center of people’s online lives,” some, including major investors, think Yahoo needs an even clearer message.

One that most mention is to push its status as the premier premium content delivery site on the Web even further, differentiating it more starkly from Facebook, Google and others.

And one particular suggestion that has come up more and more frequently is for the Silicon Valley icon to dramatically demonstrate that by acquiring AOL (AOL), which is also trying to save itself by drilling down on content.

Under CEO Tim Armstrong, formerly a top ad exec at Google, AOL has been selling Wall Street on a vision of becoming a massive content machine to sell pricey ads against.

While the jury is still out on whether it will work or not, investors have been impressed with the effort.

Because of it, more of them think a melding of Yahoo and AOL is a better idea than it once was.

Yahoo made several failed attempts at merging the pair of Internet icons when AOL was owned by Time Warner (TWX). The company has also previously looked at buying Demand Media, another huge online content play.

Now, as a spinoff, AOL’s market valuation is about $2.7 billion, a little more than one-tenth of Yahoo’s.

One investor who has long been high on the idea said that Armstrong (pictured here) has the more pronounced Internet DNA needed to be CEO of the combined entity, as well as stronger talents in the online ad space, while Bartz has the critical executive discipline needed in what would be a very active chairman.

Interestingly, the combo of the two was a thought I heard yesterday from several people attending a marketing communications conference sponsored by the American Association of Advertising Agencies in San Francisco, where Bartz spoke in a session titled “Transforming Yahoo!”

While I did not attend the Bartz session, reviews were mixed, with attendees noting that they wanted a whole lot more inspiring and innovative vision from Bartz, who did mention Yahoo’s recent content deal with Hollywood player Ben Silverman.

“I kept thinking how Tim Armstrong would sell Yahoo,” said one longtime top ad exec. “I know Carol Bartz can fix Yahoo’s ills, but I want to know what she is going to do after that.”

It’ll be interesting to see if this birthday wish ever comes true or not.

In any case, I hope Yahoo enjoys its special day today–here’s a video of my fave version of “Happy Birthday,” by Stevie Wonder, which is in honor of Martin Luther King Jr.:

Sorry for the break in grading Yahoo’s Carol Bartz on her one-year anniversary as CEO.

But BoomTown was swanning around the Sundance Film Festival in Utah this weekend, went partying with those boozy Hollywood types and ended up in Provo with the crazy gals from “The Runaways”!

I wish! Actually, running away from issuing any grade for deal-making for Bartz is a pretty good way to put it.

Because today, after much thought, I have to give the Yahoo leader an incomplete for deal-making.

That’s because the only deal that truly counts–the search and online advertising partnership with Microsoft (MSFT) struck in July–has still not been approved by regulators.

More to the point, no one will really know what it means for Yahoo (YHOO) until the company finally embarks on the biggest bet of its recent history.

And that answer is many, many quarters away.

I began handing out marks to Bartz recently, after she gave herself a B- for overall performance for the year since she took over the troubled Internet giant.

But I decided to be more specific, splitting the grades for Yahoo in 2009 into five categories: Management, financials, product innovation, deal-making and moxie.

I awarded Bartz an A- for management, a C+ for financials and a C- for product innovation so far.

And as much as I would like to give a definite grade for deal-making, she has made no other deals of major consequence on which to base a grade.

The deal to integrate Facebook Connect and Twitter? A catch-up long past due and not as impressive as similar ones by Google and Microsoft. The sale of Zimbra and other assets? Essentially, cleaning up. A few minor acquisitions? No needle-movers in the lot.

Thus, the only deal has been with Microsoft, which is indeed a very big deal.

And it is, as I said, incomplete, although not to everyone.

Some thought the deal, which Bartz said she should have made sooner, was the best that Yahoo could pull off after the disastrous attempt by Microsoft to buy Yahoo for upward of $40 billion collapsed and left egg on everyone’s face.

With Google (GOOG) and Microsoft gearing up for a costly search war and no chance of Yahoo ever regaining any kind of tech advantage, the argument in favor goes, Bartz opted to get some kind of leverage while she still had some.

On many levels, that makes a lot of sense. And if it works, the deal will surely help improve Yahoo’s bottom line, cutting expenses in the search technology arena drastically and, the company hopes, giving it the ability to compete better in the marketplace by combining Yahoo and Microsoft search against the Google behemoth.

Presumably, if Yahoo can innovate in search experience and add to share, all is not lost.

But a lot of people certainly don’t like the deal, citing a variety of problems, especially the fact that Yahoo has essentially turned over all search monetization to Microsoft and traded away a big part of its business with no financial guarantees.

In fact, Bartz said in an interview with me at the seventh D: All Things Digital conference–months before she struck it–that she would want “boatloads of money” in any deal with Microsoft (see that video below).

At the time, most people thought she meant a gigantic upfront guaranteed payment for handing over search to Microsoft, which she did not get in the final deal.

Wrote one Internet exec in a long email to me, expressing a typical sentiment I have heard time and again:

She would have been much better off to simply have sold the current Yahoo search biz to Microsoft along the lines of the deal Carl Icahn tried to broker the summer after the acquisition bid was pulled. The cut over could have happened much faster (just start running Bing results on Yahoo) and Microsoft would probably have given a revenue guarantee that would keep Yahoo whole on revenue per search for the traffic they generated. That would also have eliminated the sales overhead immediately, providing greater cost savings…She chose a middle-ground (classic Yahoo) and will end up with lower returns for the declining search business than she could otherwise have had.

Only reason she doesn’t get the F that [former Yahoo CEO and Co-founder] Jerry Yang obviously earned on this topic is that she did actually make a deal.

And, indeed, Bartz had to play the cards she was handed by her predecessors, and they were not good ones.

Still, Yahoo is now depending on Microsoft to innovate in search technology. If it does not or cannot, look out below in that category, even if Yahoo recovers in its stronger display advertising arena.

So, with Yahoo’s search share declining of late, even as that of Microsoft’s Bing grows, it is right to start worrying and be nervous.

Nonetheless, as much as I like to dole out grades and as much as Bartz’s detractors would like to say it is over, it’s probably fairer to wait and see what happens.

One thing is certain: Bartz has shown either amazing guts or an astonishing lack of foresight here.

But let’s save that particular grade–moxie–for tomorrow, on the day Yahoo’s fourth-quarter earnings come out and Bartz is front and center in the earnings call.

Speaking of moxie–a.k.a. ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-cherry bomb!–here’s the trailer for “The Runaways,” which just opened at Sundance:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100125/the-one-year-report-card-of-yahoos-carol-bartz-deal-making-incomplete/feed/ 5 http://allthingsd.com/20100114/the-one-year-report-card-of-yahoos-carol-bartz-management-a/ http://allthingsd.com/20100114/the-one-year-report-card-of-yahoos-carol-bartz-management-a/#comments Thu, 14 Jan 2010 16:04:40 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=22996

Yesterday, BoomTown wished Carol Bartz a happy one-year anniversary as CEO of Yahoo.

And today, it is time to shamelessly judge her tenure!

As I noted, in an interview with Bloomberg last week, Bartz gave herself a “B-minus in her first year.”

In the Bloomberg interview, Bartz explained that she gave herself a B- because she should have moved faster to reorganize Yahoo (YHOO) and to strike an online advertising and search partnership with Microsoft (MSFT), even as she noted that the management challenge at Yahoo “was a little tougher internally than I think I had anticipated.”

But an overall grade is too easy! Instead, over the next days, it’s time to drill down on specifics: Management, financials, product innovation, deal-making and, yes, moxie.

And for management, I give Bartz an A-.

Here’s why:

Pros: There is no question that the hard-talking Bartz took charge from the get-go, expertly grabbing the reins at Yahoo and hitting targets on her very first day like some kind of digital Annie Oakley.

At her memorable press conference on Jan. 13, 2009–lasting only 15 minutes and three questions–Bartz sternly admonished everyone to give Yahoo some “friggin’ breathing room” and noted that the company “frankly, could use a little management.”

It was a refreshing statement of the obvious, especially after the tough year suffered by outgoing CEO and co-founder Jerry Yang, who was pretty spent by the end of his tenure.

Thus, any leader who had any kind of kinetic energy was going to get noticed.

And Bartz? She is–and I mean this in the nicest way–a nuclear reactor set to high.

At the press conference, Bartz also described herself a “straight shooter.”

Finally, she said she thought it “nonsense” to think that Yahoo was not feeling great about itself, spitting out the word “nonsense” in that scary-mommy, end-of-discussion way, like someone who has kids and knows a thing or two about nonsense.

And, I would have to say, Bartz has pretty much kept up the necessary take-charge tone and followed it up with action.

She has projected firm leadership internally and to Wall Street, made cuts in staff immediately and restructured her top management quickly, rendered fast decisions about cutting or selling off the hairball units at Yahoo, and struck key partnerships with Microsoft (MSFT) and Facebook.

And she has done so with little of the sentimentality that had long characterized Yahoo, going out of her way to tell people what she thought rather than doing the typical “Kumbaya” moves.

If her success in management could be boiled down, its essence would be this: Carol knows how to clean up a troubled company, Carol knows how to take charge and most of all, Carol makes decisions.

Cons: And that’s just where the minus comes in.

From the start and still today, I have heard many at Yahoo grumble that while Bartz has a terrific ability to make decisions, she might be too much about decisive decision-making than about making good decisions.

To be fair, that’s exactly what people who avoid making tough decisions always say.

Still, the worry about this has persisted, with many calling Bartz’s manner more showy than substantive, more brute force than finesse. Her tough style–especially when she starts to curse–definitely grates some.

There is obviously a whiff of sexism here–which any strong-speaking woman in tech is subject to and must find a way to completely ignore.

It is hard to do. Thus, I have heard Bartz negatively called by employees: Sarah Palin of the Internet (Maverick!), Al Haig of the Internet (I’m in charge here!) and Tony Soprano of the Internet (Badda Bing!).

Externally, while she has a lot of prominent supporters in Silicon Valley, more than enough major Internet execs have asked me sotto voce if the former Autodesk (ADSK) CEO knows enough about the Internet business–and not just software and tech, where she has loads of experience–to be an effective leader (I will get to that when I grade product innovation).

What’s interesting here is that for all those who don’t like her style, she also garners a rabid fan base at Yahoo and among investors, who are very glad someone is projecting leadership and putting the ducks in order at the company.

The bottom line, though, is that Bartz does not seem to care all that much about what anyone thinks of her.

On her first day, she said: “My focus is on turning the company around.”

And in this regard, she has most definitely kept that focus and that promise.

Of course, all of this depends on how Yahoo recovers financially and how its stock performs on Wall Street, which will be the next area to be graded.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100114/the-one-year-report-card-of-yahoos-carol-bartz-management-a/feed/ 7 http://allthingsd.com/20100113/happy-one-year-anniversary-carol-party-today-because-boomtowns-grading-begins-tomorrow/ http://allthingsd.com/20100113/happy-one-year-anniversary-carol-party-today-because-boomtowns-grading-begins-tomorrow/#comments Wed, 13 Jan 2010 16:00:38 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=22943

In an interview with Bloomberg last week, Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz gave herself a “B-minus in her first year.”

The anniversary of her arrival at Yahoo is, in fact, today. (Her first words as CEO at a press conference a year ago? “Yahoooo!” and “Friggin’.”)

In the Bloomberg interview, Bartz was less effusive, saying should have moved faster to reorganize and to strike the online advertising and search partnership with Microsoft (MSFT), even as she noted that the management challenge at Yahoo (YHOO) “was a little tougher internally than I think I had anticipated.”

Predicted Bartz about the Silicon Valley icon: “You’re just going to see Yahoo bloom more.”

That’s nice, especially since BoomTown loves getting pretty-smelling flowers!

But, ever the stickler, it is incumbent on this Yahoo-obsessed column to weigh in on grading too, starting tomorrow and drilling down a lot more specifically on Bartz’s overall performance in 2009.

Thus, I will be looking at five overall areas by which to render the CEO’s marks: Management, financials, product innovation, deal-making and, yes, moxie–or, if you want to be dull, inspirational leadership.

Until then, please enjoy the highlights video below from my most excellent interview with Bartz at the seventh D: All Things Digital conference last May, in which she both touched my knee and cursed me out.

Let me say, Bartz gets an automatic A-plus for that!

And here is the video of the full session, if you’re interested, clocking in at about 49 minutes:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100113/happy-one-year-anniversary-carol-party-today-because-boomtowns-grading-begins-tomorrow/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100105/steve-case-and-jerry-levin-look-on-our-works-ye-mighty-and-despair-about-the-aol-time-warner-merger-that-is/ http://allthingsd.com/20100105/steve-case-and-jerry-levin-look-on-our-works-ye-mighty-and-despair-about-the-aol-time-warner-merger-that-is/#comments Tue, 05 Jan 2010 10:49:23 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=22601

Since both former AOL CEO Steve Case and former Time Warner CEO Jerry Levin played such conflicting roles in my 2003 book–“There Must Be a Pony in Here Somewhere: The AOL-Time Warner Debacle and the Quest for a Digital Future”–it was odd to see the pair together on the same television set yesterday morning on CNBC.

But there they were–both looking very fit, I might add–with Case as a guest co-host and Levin as his more peaceful self.

They were on the cable network to jawbone about the disaster that was the AOL-Time Warner merger on the occasion of the deal’s 10th anniversary, since CNBC is airing a piece tomorrow night called “Marriage from Hell: The Breakup of AOL Time Warner.”

Actually, that purple title underplays just how bad it got for the doomed union.

In fact, except for the first crazy hug when the megadeal was announced in January 2000, the time they served as the combined company’s chairman (Case) and CEO (Levin) was pretty much fraught and the tensions between the pair intense.

Today, though, it is apparently sweetness and light between them, especially according to Levin, who has moved far away from his cerebral, New York, slick corporate-shark mode–which was very much in evidence when I first met him–to a man who now helps troubled high achievers find their inner happiness in Southern California at a holistic clinic called Moonview Sanctuary.

(I saw that unusual transformation up close too, spurred by the delayed impact of the tragic murder of his son, which came just as Levin was ousted.)

In fact, the now more heartfelt Levin even called the merger “some kind of transcendent concept,” although he quickly acknowledged that “I presided over the worst deal of the century, apparently.”

Levin did, and so quickly apologized for the whole mess. “I’m really very sorry about the pain and suffering and loss that was caused,” he said, although there are some at both companies who don’t believe him to this day.

Levin used that feel-good terminology to describe the merger’s failure: “Even though the stock was up at the time, there was a lot of tension, and I didn’t deal with the psychology with enough compassion. It’s a little hard to exercise compassion, connection, and love when the market is very unforgiving as it was at that time.”

And without even a raised eyebrow, Case–who has not changed his calm, aloof mode since I first met him in the early 1990s in the Washington, D.C. area–backed Levin up about the lack of execution in the deal.

Now, of course, AOL (AOL) has been spun out from Time Warner (TWX), and what the pair wrought is almost completely gone.

Or, as Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote about the “Look on my works, ye mighty and despair” statue of the great ruler Ozymandias: “Nothing beside remains. Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Well, at least Case and Levin are still standing, and this interview with them, lasting just over 22 minutes, is very worthwhile.

What’s perhaps most interesting is that the now-bearded Levin, for all the hippyish bromides–such as “Management is a humanist art”–is still as sharp as a tack in many ways, with some pretty decent observations about the Web and its players, for all his supposed beachy abandonment of it.

Check out the video:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100105/steve-case-and-jerry-levin-look-on-our-works-ye-mighty-and-despair-about-the-aol-time-warner-merger-that-is/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20091009/the-secret-of-chad-hurley-and-steve-chens-famous-two-kings-video-revealed/ http://allthingsd.com/20091009/the-secret-of-chad-hurley-and-steve-chens-famous-two-kings-video-revealed/#comments Fri, 09 Oct 2009 11:00:48 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=11917 Remember the era-defining video Chad Hurley and Steve Chen made three years ago? The one where they looked simultaneously giddy, groggy, and perhaps a tiny bit intoxicated, and announced that they had sold their video site to Google for $1.65 billion?

That clip, it turns out, is an unlikely homage to…wait for it…the artist formerly known as Puff Daddy. Really!

Go ahead and look at the first two clips at the bottom of the post. Note Hurley’s reference to “salt and pepper” and “two kings getting together.” See? In the Diddy clip, too. Who knew? (Okay, so at least one of you did).

Anyway, Hurley references both clips in a blog post he published this morning commemorating the anniversary of the sale. He also announced that the site is now serving up “well over” one billion video views per day. Last month comScore (SCOR) estimated YouTube was doing 10 billion views per month in the U.S.

And there’s also some general talk about the site’s evolution: Rather than focus solely on short clips, it’s also working to bring in movies and TV shows, etc. Nothing you didn’t know already.

Expect to hear more meaningful–but equally upbeat–talk about the site’s progress next Thursday, when Google (GOOG) announces its Q3 earnings.

Last quarter, Google executives went out of their way to talk up the site, and CFO Patrick Pichette said YouTube could start generating significant profits soon. This week, CEO Eric Schmidt also made a point of praising the YouTube deal and the site’s performance during a New York press conference.

Here, once again, is that famous clip:

And here’s the one Hurley was apparently referencing:

And here, once again, is the most popular clip in YouTube’s history:

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