On Thursday, Donald Trump will walk into the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, shake Xi Jinping's hand, and declare it a great meeting. There will be announcements. There will be numbers — billions of dollars in Chinese purchase commitments, a new bilateral mechanism with an important-sounding name, possibly a joint statement on Iran. Trump will post on Truth Social. Markets will rally briefly. Pundits will argue about who won. None of that will tell you what actually happened. What is actually happening in Beijing this week is something more consequential and more uncomfortable than the summit theatre will reveal: two leaders of two deeply mutually dependent superpowers, both of whom need this meeting to succeed for entirely different reasons, sitting across a table in a world that has already moved past the assumptions that defined their last nine months of negotiations. The Iran war changed the equations. The rare earth gambit changed the power balance. Taiwan is sitting in...
Yes. Microsoft and News Corp are in discussion to start "de-indexing" web content that belongs to News Corp from Google. Which may start a president in the newspaper industry that could lead to them asking search engines to pay to index their content. As reported by FT.com . Microsoft may have approached other big publishing houses to do the same. maybe offering a lucrative deal. "Rupert Murdoch, News Corp chairman, has said that he would use legal methods to prevent Google “stealing stories” published in his papers." And "Steve Ballmer, chief executive of Microsoft, has said that the company is prepared to spend heavily for many years to make Bing a serious rival to Google." Wow. Thats some serious competition that microsoft has started to instigate. Will it pay to get De-Indexed from the world's largest and most efficient search engine? It does turn things around though. Putting new pressure on the whole business of search and indexing. Lets wait and...