Asked what makes Yahoo worth more than $40 billion, Gates pointed not to the company’s products, its huge base of advertisers, or its market share, but rather to the company’s engineers. Those people, he said, are what Microsoft needs to go after Google.

In an interview after his speech at Stanford University, Gates said that it turns out it takes a lot of manpower to build tools for advertisers, mobile, and video products as well as improving its core search algorithm and building an infrastructure for cloud computing. “The amount of computer science it is taking to do that is phenomenal,” he said. “As you get more scale of engineering you can just pursue that agenda more rapidly. Yes, the advertisers and the number of end users is good, but we’d put the people and the engineering as the key thing.”

Of course, that’s also what makes the Yahoo deal so risky. A nightmare scenario for the company would be if it succeeds in its bid to acquire Yahoo, only to see its top talent move to new ventures. Gates played down the notion of cultural differences between the two companies.

“Yahoo wants to do breakthrough software,” Gates told CNET News.com. “The engineers there want to compete very effectively against Google or any other thing that comes along, so I don’t think there is really a different culture.” Read more »

Intel let a variety of tech enthusiast sites run wild with benchmarks today showing off its forthcoming eight-core desktop platform, code-named Skulltrail. You can get eight-core computing already in the form of Apple’s Mac Pro or a pair of Intel Xeon 5400 processors, but Skulltrail marks the first eight-core platform we’ve seen aimed at high-end workstation computing and PC gaming. The Skulltrail motherboard not only supports two CPUs, but it also supports both Nvidia’s SLI and ATI’s Crossfire multigraphics card standards. The problem is that for all of Skulltrail’s power, PC gaming isn’t quite ready for it. Also, a better eight-core solution could be right around the corner.

Like all current eight-core machines, Skulltrail relies on two quad-core CPUs plugged into the same motherboard to achieve eight-way computing. The actual Intel D5400XS motherboard and pair of 3.2GHz Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9775 quad-core CPUs required to build a Skulltrail system aren’t due to market until “later in Q1,” and we have no specific prices or ship dates. Intel has acknowledged that the QX9775 CPU will be more expensive than its current highest-end chip, the $1,100 Core 2 Extreme QX9650. Read more »

Tags: MICROSOFT, DESIGN, SONY, Internet

Put together two giants like these and there are bound to be some good results and some nasty ones. Here are 11 of our dreams and nightmares.
It’s the year 2010. Microsoft owns Yahoo and has just changed the name of Flickr to Microsoft Flickr Live Photo-Sharing Service for Digital Camera Enthusiasts. The service is still free, but Windows Vista users will have to validate their copy of Vista as “genuine” first to use it. What has Microsoft wrought? Read more »