Also: David Einhorn squeezes Apple for cash; Twitter and Amex saddle up.
Q: What one Microsoft program or product that was never fully developed or released do you wish had made it to market?
Gates: We had a rich database as the client/cloud store that was part of a Windows release that was before its time. This is an idea that will remerge since your cloud store will be rich with schema rather than just a bunch of files and the client will be a partial replica of it with rich schema understanding.
Einhorn squeezes Apple for cash [THE WALL STREET JOURNAL]
Last week Mr. Einhorn, the billionaire manager of hedge fund Greenlight Capital Inc., proposed that Apple issue a special class of stock, which he called “perpetual preferred,” that would carry a high dividend yield.
It is a new solution to an old problem, that of cash-heavy companies. U.S. Companies have been retaining unusually large amounts of cash since 2008, in part because of lingering worries that a credit crunch could return and partly because the slow economy has made it hard to find profitable new investments.
Twitter, Amex to collaborate on e-commerce sales on Twitter [THE WALL STREET JOURNAL]
American Express card holders who connect their card numbers to their Twitter accounts can post on Twitter to trigger a purchase of select products, including discounted American Express gift cards, Kindle Fire tablets from Amazon.com Inc. And jewelry from designer Donna Karan. The program will roll out over the next few days.
In fact, he stated that 18 billion (yeah, with a “B”) hours of entertainment have been consumed on Xbox, and while Netflix is obviously the driving force, it might not be that way for much longer. He was quick to claim that Sony’s PlayStation 3 “isn’t as good of an entertainment console” — something he feels that “everybody knows” — and insinuated that the next-generation Xbox will stick to “big and premium.” In other words, don’t expect Microsoft to kick out a $50 Roku-style content box. Mehdi wants to ensure that the future of Xbox enables voice control, interactivity, and “other stuff that’s big and beautiful.”
A match made in the code [THE NEW YORK TIMES]
The more similarly that two people score in these factors, the better their chances, Dr. Gonzaga said, and presented evidence, not yet published, from several studies at eHarmony Labs. One study, which tracked more than 400 married couples matched by eHarmony, found that scores from their initial questionnaires correlated with a couple’s satisfaction with their relationship four years later.
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