Well we hear in the news today that Microsoft is trying to buy yahoo. This would be for a cool $44.6 Billion. 62% more than the current stock price.

Obviously this is Microsoft’s desperate bid to out maneuver Google. I don’t think Google has anything to worry about.

Lets look at the latest marketing campaign for Windows 2008. It is called Heroes Happen Here (HHH?).

They have released a comic strip to go along with it. Here is one of the latest comics:

HUH? What it is this? They must have a giant vat of cool aid laced with happy juice over in Redmond. How could they possibly think that this will help promote Windows 2008?

I don’t even ‘get’ the cartoon. Call me stupid.

So back to Yahoo. What could MS possibly add to Yahoo? Zip. They will systematically make it disappear. In 3 years it will look like live.com

Google will still be #1. All the while Apple will still be eating away at their declining desktop market share.

Meanwhile we need to run our businesses on the software…

Whenever you want to rename multiple files with the same piece of text and an individual number for each file, as in photo1.jpg, photo2.jpg and so on, you usually either have to do this manually or use a batch rename program. Yet, Windows has the facility to do this, albeit in a rough-and-ready way.

To rename multiple files, select all the files you wish to rename (in a previous post I looked at various ways of selecting multiple files). Then either right-click on any of the files and select Rename from the context menu (this method is demonstrated in the following video), or press F2. Type in the new name of the file - including the file extension if it is visible (eg. .doc, .jpg, etc) - and press Enter. All the other selected files will be renamed with an individual number in brackets. So, if you type in photo.jpg, the next file will be called photo (1).jpg, the next photo (2).jpg and so on.

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Everyone on the sideline seems to be very excited about possible Yahoo and Microsoft merger, but I’m not so sure it’s going to turn out pretty. Microsoft has a history of making acquisitions, and few comes to mind of anywhere close to a success. The recent exception being Bungie, and only because Microsoft left them alone.

For example, in 1997 Microsoft acquired Vxtreme Inc for their web theater technology with $75 million. What web theater?

With the help of Josh Philips from WindowsConnected.com we’ve compiled a list of existing Yahoo services and matched it with existing Microsoft offerings. It’s an astounding number of overlaps. Of course there’s many more services from Microsoft without Yahoo equivalents (ex. Office Live).

Now imagine for each and every one of these you have to make a decision - to keep it as is, integrate Yahoo’s into Microsoft’s, integrate Microsoft’s into Yahoo’s or even come up with a new hybrid. Simple branding aside, I think the developers are going to have to work quite a few late nights to integrate what I believe are two monolithic systems together.

Whatever they do, they better not ruin Flickr.

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Donavon West, whose company LiveGadgets.net was hired by Microsoft to develop the Live Search Maps Gadget originally, has announced via LiveSide that the Live Search Maps gadget is back and available for download! This awesome gadget lets you look at traffic in many different cities. I use this gadget all the time especially when traveling up to Seattle.

Donavon says work has been done “under-the-hood” so visually the gadget won’t look much different than before. He also says new cities have been added: Indianapolis, Las Vegas, Minneapolis, San Antonio and Toronto. New cities will automatically show up in the Live Search Maps Gadget when they are added going forward.

This gadget is a must-have for folks who commute and do quite a bit of traveling.

What is Eye-Fi?

The Eye-Fi Card is a wireless memory card. It automatically uploads pictures from your digital camera to your PC or Mac and to your favorite photo sharing, printing, blogging or social networking site.

No cables, no waiting, no hassles.

What have we done?

I’ve been working with the awesome team at Eye-Fi (and others from Windows Live - shout out to JP Wollersheim, Federico Raggi & YuanYuan Yu) to enable user’s photos to be seamlessly transferred from their camera into their Windows Live Space. We weren’t the first to the party here as our Photo API only came out in November, but it is awesome that any of our 100 million+ Windows Live Spaces users could use this Eye-Fi service.

Why would I publish to Spaces and not some other service?

Other people (not me, I’m a super extravert) may only want to share their photos with friends and family (i.e. the people on your Windows Live Messenger Buddy List). Using Windows Live

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