Yahoo's stock dropped roughly 19%-20% this morning at the open, shaving $8.7 billion off its value, its first installment on the price of its independence from Microsoft. Yahoo, whose position improved a couple of percentage points in the first half-hour of trading, is being held up by investor confidence that Microsoft will be back after the stock sinks, a widely held view, or alternatively that Yahoo will align with Google. At around 10 o'clock it was around $23.70.

Yahoo! founders Jerry Yang and David Filo received stupid advice from their investment bank advisers and blew their chance to close the deal with Microsoft as of this Sunday morning. Neither Yang nor Filo are experts on how to sell a company in a multi-billion dollar deal. They have relied on their investment bankers and advisers since the negotiations started with Microsoft. The difference between the offered price of $33 and the asking price of $40 per share is roughly $1.4b per share, so it's not small potatoes.

From Application Virtualization to Xen, a round-up of the virtualization themes & topics being discussed in NYC June 23-24, 2008 by the world-class speaker faculty at the 3rd International Virtualization Conference & Expo being held by SYS-CON Events in The Roosevelt Hotel, in midtown Manhattan.

The Ubuntu Linux-based gOS operating system from Good OS LLC (www.thinkgos.com) includes so many Google applications like Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar, Google News Google Maps and YouTube that it's often referred to as the Google operating system. It also includes Firefox, Skype, Facebook and OpenOffice 2.3.

'I hereby formally withdraw Microsoft's proposal to acquire Yahoo,' writes a disgruntled Steve Ballmer in this letter to Jerry Yang. Yang's tactic of cosying up to Google seems to have been the straw that broke the camel's back. As a service to SYS-CON.com readers we bring you the full text of the letter

At press time the Wall Street Journal was reporting that Yahoo! and Google think they've come up with a way around the Justice Department's anticipated objections to them climbing into bed together - one of Yahoo!'s alternatives to being acquired by Microsoft - and that a deal could be announced next week.

Despite meeting yesterday, the Microsoft Board of Directors - according to the Wall St. Journal - has not decided whether its $31 a share offer for Yahoo!, which has fallen in value to $29 a share in line with a fall in Microsoft's own stock value, should be hoisted to $33 a share in an attempt to keep alive Redmond's two-year pursuit of the Silicon Valley based search giant.

The Wall Street Journal thinks that Microsoft is about to break the break the deafening silence that has hung in the air since Yahoo! ignored Microsoft's Saturday deadline to deal or be acquired by force at a lower price. The Journal thinks that Microsoft could nominate a proxy slate of directors to replace Yahoo!'s board but hold off on going directly to Yahoo!'s shareholders and say nothing about the price, a move that could let its shares recover from their 12% decline since Microsoft went public with its Yahoo! lust.

Time is running out on Microsoft's deal-or-else ultimatum to Yahoo! Basically Yahoo! has to move off the dime by Saturday or else Microsoft could try taking the place by force, lowering its rejected $31-a-share bid in the process or - scarier still for Yahoo! - Microsoft could walk away completely, a move that will send Yahoo! stock back to the teens and could be the undoing of Yahoo!'s desperate CEO Jerry Yang.

Curl announced the beta release of Curl Nitro, the code name for an extension of the Curl Rich Internet Application (RIA) platform which offers enhanced desktop capabilities required by today's enterprises. The Nitro extension simplifies the process of installing and managing Curl applications accessed via a browser as well as directly from the desktop. Curl Nitro is the only platform for both traditional RIA and Desktop RIA that provides enterprise-level security, high performance and support for large data sets.

Zoho's resident blogger and CEO of its parent company AdventNet, Sridhar Vembu, was dumping on Salesforce - an understandable exercise since Zoho's stash of SaaS Office-wannabe productivity programs includes a Salesforce rival CRM module - when he happened to mention that Benioff, Salesforce's CEO, had tried to buy Zoho. Benioff likes to position Microsoft as old-fashioned and passé. Vembu uses the same dictionary when talking about Salesforce.

Yahoo! is reportedly getting closer to that controversial deal that would outsource its search advertising to Google. Sources told the Wall Street Journal that the limited test of Google that Yahoo! set up went well. The Google strategy, which could potentially be worth a billion dollars a year to Yahoo! but is sure to catch antitrust flak, is part of a tripartite deal that would have Yahoo! merge with AOL and AOL's owner Time Warner take a 20% stake in the combined company for some cash to fend off Yahoo!'s unwanted acquisition by Microsoft.

It looks like Google is back on track to be that $1,000 stock. Having been in the $400 doldrums since February 22, it crashed through $500 and clear into the $520s, up over 75 bucks in after-hours trading Thursday on the strength of its over-the-top Q1 results and the fact that its US paid-clicks were up 20% year-over-year.

Google has ripped a page out of Salesforce.com's handbook and has started up an AppExchange-like Solutions Marketplace site to cultivate third-party programs that complement its own widgetry, initially stuff like Google Apps and enterprise search. But Google says it expects it to 'grow to fit the needs of an expanding set of Google customers and developers.'

Well, at least somebody in the Yahoo spectacle is keeping their head. Capital World Investors, Yahoo!'s biggest institutional investor, has doubled its position to 10.1% figuring there must be some money to be made out of the fact that Rupert has abandoned Jerry to team up with Steve to gang bang Jerry, who's now sleeping with his worst enemy Eric, who - if the antitrust police catch them at it - can always claim he did it to help Steve out.

Monday evening, at a gathering called Campfire One, Google unveiled App Engine, a hosted web application platform that offers web developers free use of Google's mighty infrastructure and all the building blocks that Google uses for its own applications. Amusingly, it's as vendor lock-in and importable as anything Microsoft in its heyday ever dreamed up. That, however, didn't stop Google from immediately filling the 10,000 spaces it made available for App Engine's initial beta.

The European Commission may crack down on Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft et al and tell them they can't keep personal search data longer than six months - and even that may be pushing it. The EC's international advisory body, the Article 29 Data Protection Working Party, whose findings are usually adopted, delivered its 29-page opinion to the regulator last Friday and it ain't buying Google's dearly held arguments of better search results or custom tailored ads.

Google's paid-clicks in the US, the source of its fortune, showed weak, almost imperceptible growth for the third month in a row, according to comScore, just a couple of days before Google was scheduled to post its Q1 financial results. The tabulator says they were up only 2.7% in March and just 1.8% for the whole first quarter, a nasty, nasty drop from the 48% it supposedly recorded in the third quarter of last year or even its 25% growth in the fourth quarter.

Gomez announced support for Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) 8 beta 1. Using the Gomez ExperienceFirst platform of on-demand web application experience testing and measurement services, developers can quickly understand how existing and new applications will look and perform in IE8, as well as the impact of IE8 on their infrastructure.

The widely rumored mating of Salesforce.com and Google Apps has taken place. There is now something called Salesforce for Google Apps; Google's productivity programs have been integrated into Salesforce's CRM suite - so data in one can be moved into the other and vice versa - in hopes - or so it is said - of creating a thunderhead that eventually rains all over Microsoft's parade.

When last seen Yahoo! was experimenting with letting Google deliver ads alongside Yahoo!'s search results and trying to cut a deal to fold AOL into Yahoo!, a possibility its own people reportedly abhor, while Microsoft, which delivered Yahoo! a ultimatum that expires April 26 to submit or be taken forcibly at a lower price than offered - a threat Yahoo! called 'counterproductive' - was talking to News Corp about a joint run at Yahoo!

Yahoo! says it's going to try offloading some ad placement to Google, experimenting with using Google's AdSense for Search service to deliver relevant Google ads alongside Yahoo's search results. Yahoo made the announcement after the stock market closed. It didn't take long for Microsoft's chief counsel Brad Smith to lob antitrust claims at the unholy alliance.

Appcelerator announced that it has updated its platform to allow applications built using Appcelerator to be deployed to the free new Google App Engine. Used together, the offerings give developers a fast route to developing, deploying, managing and scaling their applications. Appcelerator is an integrated platform that fuses RIA and service-oriented architecture (SOA). With Appcelerator, developers can assemble rich, interactive web applications without the need for JavaScript or player-based plug-ins.

Microsoft and News Corp are seriously considering pairing up for a joint run at Yahoo, according to both the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. News Corp could kick in the Fox Interactive Media unit along with MySpace and some cash and Microsoft would throw in MSN. Such a deal would let Microsoft raise its bid for Yahoo, the Times said. The paper described the talks as being at 'a sensitive stage' and a ways away from anything definite. News Corp could of course always turn around and do a deal of its own with Yahoo.

Yahoo! has managed to antagonize Microsoft into considering its options - like lowering its bid and girding for a hostile takeover - by sidling up to Google in a relationship that everyone knows can't go anywhere because of the antitrust issues. Now someone's whispered in the Wall Street Journal's ear that Yahoo and AOL are on the threshold of a deal that would fold AOL into Yahoo and see Time Warner make a cash investment in the combined entity in return for about 20% of the place. AOL, without its dwindling dial-up business, would be valued at about $10 billion and Google, of course, owns 5% of AOL.

The mouse was the original idea of Doug Engelbart who was the head of the Augmentation Research Center (ARC) at Stanford Research Institute. Engelbart's philosophy is best embodied, in my opinion, in the design of another device that he invented, the five-finger keyboard - with keys like a piano, used by one hand. The problem was, Engelbart's five-finger keyboard and mouse combination was very difficult to learn.

Now, what Google announced is really exciting! I'm not kidding. It's even better than I hoped. Yes, it's only Python, but IBM's PC-DOS was only BASIC and Pascal when it first came out, and it didn't matter. Yeah, I preferred C, but I coded in Pascal because that's what you had to do to get an app running. What you're going to see here that you've never seen before is shrinkwrap net apps that scale that can be deployed by civillians. That's a mouthful, but that's what's coming. Why? Because here is a standardized platform that can be stamped out in the billions of units. Maybe Google can't do it, but the perception is that they can. Who is willing to stand up and say Google hasn't nailed scaling? What PCs did in the 80s, Google is doing now. PCs took the black magic out of owning a computer.

Google is inching toward making Google Docs, its free, webby, Office-aspiring programs, work offline as well as on. It said Monday that it's started phasing the Google Gears browser plug-in-derived facility in, beginning with a small percentage of Docs word processor users. It can't do presentations or spreadsheets yet. The process will apparently take a few weeks.

Microsoft has given Yahoo! three weeks to come to terms or suffer a proxy fight for control of its board and a hostile takeover according to a Wall Street Journal report. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer reportedly sent Yahoo's board a letter today, a few days after Microsoft's second go-nowhere meeting with Yahoo since it publicized its $44.6 billion stock-and-cash bid for the company over two months ago.

The NY Times had a story yesterday, much-written-about in the blogosphere, that said that bloggers were working themselves to death. This was one article about blogging I was glad to be left out of, even so, it could have been about me, a number of years ago, when my lifestyle almost did kill me.

Friday morning the local Fox television station in New York City broke the news - Apple was suing New York City. Six out of 100 of their viewers thought Apple had the right to sue the City, but 94 out of 100 viewers are now calling for New Yorkers to drop Apple and its products, including the iPhone and Macs. New Yorkers are pissed off! New York City, universally known as The Big Apple, is facing a lawsuit from Steve Jobs' Apple Computer Inc. for, of all things, copyright infringement.

Zimbra announced the availability of its ZimbraME (Java Mobile Edition) client and source code for businesses. Users of any Java-enabled mobile phone will have access to the industry's most complete collaboration solution. The ZimbraME client provides Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS) Open Source and Network Edition users worldwide with free access to the Zimbra experience with e-mail and calendar on mass-market Java-enabled mobile phones. This extends Zimbra's reach of services to the broadest range of devices available in the market and builds on Yahoo!'s e-mail and mobile Web services and as a key starting point for consumers.

If you're like me, you've probably been spending every waking moment you have eating, living, and breathing the iPhone SDK. Since March 6th, that's pretty much all I can think about once I get home. So, what do you do if you want to learn how to write iPhone apps, but you want to become a pro at iPhone SDK programming? Its one thing to read the SDK, page-by-page until your eyes bleed (what I do for fun), but most people like to hang out with other developers, get hands on, do labs, see demos, and generally get their hands dirty.

According to Brandon Badger, Product Manager at search engine, Google, the main goal of its AJAX APIs team is to provide developers with the tools needed to create the next generation of great web applications. The API helps developers translate content in their applications. Users on these sites will have an easier time communicating across lingual boundaries. The Language API provides both translation and language detection. It is also possible to experiment with the language detection capabilities.

'Unlocking content to be remixed into new business value' is the driver of Web 2.0 in the enterprise, says Rod Smith, IBM VP of Emerging Internet Technologies, in this Exclusive Q&A with Jeremy Geelan on the occasion of IBM's release of a new technology created by IBM researchers, codenamed 'SMash' - short for Secure Mashup.

Outbid by Verizon Wireless in the great American airwaves auction last week, Google plunked a six-page letter on the Federal Communication Commission's desk asking the government to make the 'white spaces' - the airspace between TV channels - available for unlicensed wireless data use by mobile devices. The notion is backed by Microsoft, Intel, HP, Dell and the North American arm of Philips Electronics, a k a the White Space Coalition, and opposed by broadcasters on the theory that it's going to interfere with TV reception.

'We will have worldwide coverage but are concentrating on being number one in European blog search, both by controlling spam and working with all different languages,' said Martin Källström, CEO at Twingly, the European Internet start-up, as Twingly announced today that it is launching a spam-free blog search engine.

Douglas Merrill, Google VP of Engineering, is leaving Google to become EMI Music's new President of Digital. Merrill joined Google late in 2003 as Senior Director of Information Systems. In this capacity he led multiple strategic efforts including Google?s 2004 IPO and its related regulatory activities. He holds direct line accountability for all internal engineering and support worldwide.

Service providers that use Parallels Automation software can now easily deliver real-time spam and virus filtering, attack blocking, and e-mail traffic monitoring using a Google Apps security and compliance package. Parallels Automation is integrated with the Google Message Filtering e-mail offering, so service providers can streamline delivery of hosted services to their customers and provide automated billing and provisioning of the Google services through Parallels.

Here is a question that I have been pondering on and off for quite a while: Why do 'cool kids' choose Ruby or PHP to build websites instead of Java? I have to admit that I do not have an answer. Why do I even care? Because I am a Java developer. Like many Java developers, I get along with Java well. Not only the language itself, but the development environments (Eclipse for example), step-by-step debugging helper, wide availability of libraries and code snippets, and the readily accessible information on almost any technical question I may have on Java via Google. Last but not least, I go to JavaOne and see 10,000 people that talk and walk just like me.