Fud Buster Friday #51 - The Microsoft Yahoo Deal is a Winner

But for Who?

Funny how what wasn't a good idea under a previous leader is now a good idea under their replacement.

Wall Street thinks it's still a bad idea.

According to Mr. Balmer in this review

Nobody gets it. It's a little bit complicated.

If Wall Street doesn't get it, then it's not complicated, it's probably just a mistake on someone's part....but which parties?

Yahoo, in theory loses some revenue up front and in fact gets ZERO money upfront, in exchange for Microsoft to make Bing (Because It's Note Good?) the underlying search engine and supposedly improve on what the Yahoo team has not been able to do, namely beat Google in the search and ad game. And then Yahoo gets 88% of the ad revenue. While I expect some money to be made, they of course would have made more being sold to MS last year.

Microsoft gets to have Bing go beyond beta testing and start handling real world searches. Maybe MS will gain from this, but if my experience with Bing is anything to go by, this will kill Yahoo, which may be what MS wants anyway in the end. Balmer's got no qualms about keeping his enemies closer.

In the mean time IBM is NOT in the search engine game, for better or worse, and is succeeding at gaining exposure on the consumer side of their applications which we haven't seen in years.

Maybe, just maybe, Microsoft is focused on the wrong balls right now.

SnTT - Sometimes I hate AntiVirus programs

Won't say which yellow companies anti-virus product hosed my netbook, but it comes pre-installed on a 30 day trial or whatever.

I will say that the problem we saw was the following:
1) IE/FF could not surf HTTPS sites. Chrome could.
2) Then after troubleshooting more, no browsers could surf. But we could Ping the internet.

I knew in the back of my head that removing Nort, um the yellow program, was the culprit. But one must get the EXACT uninstall and cleaner program.

Found it, ran it, and now all is back to normal.

So it took a while but I eventually found this page: Full of links to uninstall Anti-Virus programs.

Or if you are lazy or they drop that page here they are:

To totally uninstall Avast have a look @ this link [www.avast.com]

To clear Avira AntiVir registry entries use the Avira AntiVir Registry Cleaner available from here [www.avira.com] ... after clearing the registry entries... restart the system and then manually remove any other Avira files that were left.

BitDefender Antivirus Removal Tool: Download the BitDefender Uninstall Tool.

First right-click on the red BitDefender icon near the system tray choose on Exit.

Wait a few seconds. Afterwards double-click on the BitDefender uninstall tool.

You will need to reboot your computer for the changes to take effect.

To totally uninstall F-Secure have a look @ this link [support.f-secure.com]

To totally uninstall Kaspersky have a look @ this link [support.kaspersky.com]

To totally uninstall McAfee have a look @ this link [service.mcafee.com]

To totally uninstall NAV (2003 & later) have a look @ this link [service1.symantec.com]

To totally uninstall NAV (pre 2003) have a look @ this link [service1.symantec.com]

To uninstall NOD32 use the Windows Add/Remove and follow up with the removal tool available here [www.betterantivirus.com]

To uninstall Norman Virus Control / Norman Internet Control use the removal tool available here [www.norman.com]

To totally uninstall Panda 2007 have a look @ this link [www.pandasecurity.com]

To totally uninstall Panda 2008 have a look @ this link [www.pandasecurity.com]

To totally uninstall PC-Cillin have a look @ this link [esupport.trendmicro.com]

Windows Live OneCare cleanup util have a look @ this link [download.microsoft.com]