Glassdoor sets up a way for people to rate the companies they work for — anonymously, of course. A Microsoft employee can respond to a survey of 16 questions about job satisfaction, enter information about his or her salary, reply to essay-style questions, and give CEO Steve Ballmer an approval rating. In exchange, the employee would get full access to the site — a “give to get” formula intended to convince people to participate.

If it works — if people enthusiastically jump in the way they do on TripAdvisor — then Glassdoor could be profound. Barton and Glassdoor CEO Bob Hohman showed me a preview. Anyone trying to decide what company to work for could get a view of the company previously only available by word of mouth.

You could starkly see how happy engineers are at, say, Google vs. Yahoo. One page Hohman showed me compared engineer salaries at Yahoo, Google, Microsoft and Apple, showing that Apple pays far less than the other three — but still woos engineers who believe in Apple’s philosophy. Another page shows that Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang has a not-great approval rating while VMware CEO Diane Greene has one of the top approval ratings in the industry.

Glassdoor won’t just be a boon to job seekers. It could become an important investment tool, helping Wall Street see more clearly into a company and its prospects — from an employee point of view. It certainly will be a resource for journalists — a window into a company almost impossible to come by otherwise.

Barton and Hohman initially funded Glassdoor, and it since raised $3 million from Benchmark venture capital firm. It plans to make money on advertising and keep the site free to anyone who contributes information. Hohman says filters will help prevent companies or disgruntled employees from gaming results.

All in all, Glassdoor struck me as one of the more important new Web ventures I’ve seen in a while.

Now, it appears, the acquired company, Fast Search & Transfer, may have some criminal matters to work out: Suspicions about the Norwegian search-engine company’s revenue reporting are now in the hands of the Oslo police.

Norway’s financial supervisory authority, Kredittilsynet, said its review of Fast Search’s previously disclosed accounting problems not only appeared to have violated accounting standards, they may have broken the law too.

The development is bad news for Microsoft, which snapped up Fast Search as a potential Google-buster. Fast Search, which for a while was also known as the Google of Norway, had search-engine technology that industry experts said was better than Google’s and could handle truly massive corporate projects.

Goldman Sachs estimated last year that the company would grow its revenue 27 percent in 2007. Over the years, Fast Search appeared to benefit from big contracts with customers such as AT&T, Comcast, and the Walt Disney Co.

At one point, Intel was interested in buying the Norwegian rising star, but Microsoft grabbed the prize. At the time, Microsoft was still digesting it $6 billion acquisition of the digital-advertising company aQuantive—a deal that came just one month after Google said it would pay $3.1 billion for DoubleClick.

In its haste to grab Fast Search, however, Microsoft looked past the company’s problems: They include, but aren’t limited to, accounting irregularities that began to appear as Microsoft began to look over its books.

In the second quarter of 2007, Fast Search reported an operating loss of $38 million on revenue of only $35 million—a full $20 million below forecasts. The loss widened in the following quarter, leading the Norwegian stock exchange to delist Fast Search on December 12.

That same day, Fast Search said it would review its accounting for all of 2006 and 2007. The latest unaudited results show revenue growth of 7 percent for last year, which is far below Goldman’s forecast.

Still, Microsoft pursued the acquisition, completing the deal on April 28.

Kredittilsynet, the supervisory agency, was equally determined. It referred Fast Search to investigators at Økokrim, the Norwegian National Authority for Investigation and Prosecution of Economic and Environmental Crime.

Økokrim last week concurred that the nature of the irregularities and the amount by which Fast Search apparently inflated its accounts were serious matters warranting prosecution. But the agency said it was too busy to open a criminal investigation.

Rather than let the matter rest, the market supervisor turned it over to the Oslo police for investigation. Aftenposten, a Norwegian newspaper, characterized Kredittilsynet’s decision to involve the police as an unprecedented step in that country.

As of now, it’s unclear what the Oslo police have in store for Fast Search—or for former company C.E.O. John Markus Lervik, who is now the vice president for enterprise search at Microsoft.

… Via Cell Tower (Aircell) Data is transmitted over a patchwork of 92 existing cell towers covering the continental US. Because there’s nothing blocking the signal, each tower offers a coverage radius of up to 250 miles. The downsides: a paltry (buffering … buffering …) 3-Mbps throughput for each plane. Plus the cost to passengers is $12.95 per flight — more than Row 44’s service — and at launch the system will work only in the lower 48.

… Via Satellite (Row 44) Signals are beamed from geosynchronous satellites orbiting 22,500 miles up. The data rate is roughly 30 Mbps per plane (expect low-end DSL speeds once a few dozen passengers log on), and the system works across international borders and over oceans (though it will be available only in North America at first). And even though it costs the airlines more than Aircell’s system to install, passengers pay less — as little as $6 per flight.

But with HP today buying EDS for $12 billion, the smart thinking goes in a different direction. It’s looking like a red-hot area going forward for IBM, Amazon and Google will be so-called cloud computing — a.k.a. hardware as a service.

If you’re a startup or a corporate IT manager, you increasingly won’t have to buy computers to run your business. You just rent capabilities from some computing giant and move the information there and back over the internet. If something crashes, the data is always backed up and stored somewhere out there in the cloud. This is the ubiquitous computing idea IBM has pushed for a decade — making computer power something like electric power.

If you tack together some of HP’s other purchases under CEO Mark Hurd — as Om Malik did — it seems even more obvious that HP is at least as interested in cloud computing as consulting. And EDS is a solid cloud-computing play because a core business is owning and running giant data centers.

As part of the interview I did with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos (the video is now on Portfolio.com), we discussed Amazon’s push into cloud computing.

“We’ve been working on our Infrastructure Web Services for four years,” Bezos said. “We launched our first one two years ago, the Simple Storage Service, and I am astonished — I rarely meet a startup company these days who isn’t using our web services and now we’re starting to get, you know, deployment inside Enterprise level data centers as well. So it’s a very exciting.”

Asked about Google’s plans to get into a similar business, Bezos said: “Well … we really do have a practice of not talking about other companies. But this, like our retail business, (there) is not going to be one winner. I think there are going to be multiple winners pursuing different flavors or strategies, different kinds of products…. I think our web services business is going to be part of what becomes an important industry. And … important industries are rarely made by single companies.”

So maybe there is room for HP, Amazon, IBM, Google and others to play in the cloud computing space. The HP deal is telling us that the concept is ready for prime time.

“We have always felt we could do very well on our own and now that’s the path we are focused on,” Gates told AP in Jakarta on Friday. “The standard strategy for us is to just hire great engineers and surprise people at how well we can compete, even with a company that’s got a strong lead.”

Actually, that may be the first bit of sense out of Microsoft since the Yahoo thing first emerged. That is exactly what Microsoft is good at: identifying market leaders in interesting new tech markets, then systematically destroying them. In fact, Microsoft is probably better at it than maybe any company in history. Netscape, Lotus, WordPerfect, Novell, Real Networks … there’s a long list of companies that invented something that Microsoft then copied and took down. And Windows, of course, was a copy of what Apple and Xerox were doing. Now Microsoft’s Zune is taking aim at the iPod.

Microsoft is at its best when it does this. It spends billions of dollars a year on Microsoft Research, but has yet to invent an entirely new business. (Microsoft did once get out in front of a tech development, creating travel site Expedia early on. So surprised was Microsoft that it did this, the company soon thereafter spun out Expedia — perhaps so Expedia would not contaminate the Microsoft culture with actual market innovation.)

The thing is, though — search so far is looking like Microsoft’s Waterloo. Yeah, it’s won every big battle so far, but Microsoft has spent vast amounts of time and money trying to crack search — and so far has failed. Can it beat Google at Google’s own game? That seems unlikely. Can it outwit Google and create an innovative new version of search that Google never thought of? That would be very un-Microsoftian.

So … now what?

IPv4 addresses look like 192.168.50.66. IPv6 addresses are longer: 2001:0f68:0000:0000:0000:0000:1986:69af. IPv4 only provides 2³² possible addresses, which we’re plowing through rapidly; IPv6 provides 2¹²⁸, which should last us rather an astronomical while.

IPv6 offers further advantages too, like built-in authentication.

Nobody wants to be the first to make the leap, but the long-awaited transition seems to be happening slowly but surely. In February, IPv6 DNS records were added to the root servers. In March, Google launched ipv6.google.com. Does that site work for you? Then your Internet provider is an unusually forward-thinking one. like Hurricane Electric.

Hurricane Electric, a hosting company I like a lot, is pushing hard for the transition. They already offer dual-stack IPv6 for their users. Here’s a PDF copy of the letter we users just got. For everyone else, they offer a free IPv6 tunnel service at Tunnelbroker.net. Try it out!

The third service pack for XP gives you all the Windows XP performance updates, security updates and hotfixes that have been released since Service Pack 2 came out way back in August 2004. While Service Pack 3 may not be as big of a change as Service Pack 2
was, there are some noteworthy features from Vista that have been
included in this release. Namely, NAP, a policy enforcement platform
for limiting network access to secure machines, “Black Hole” Router
Detection, a cryptographic module for the kernel and a new Product
Activation module allows you to install XP without a product key.

If you want to give it a try, here’s a direct link to the English download (300+ MB, EXE).

Microsoft is reporting that over 1,000 fixes have been packed into in SP3 along with some performance improvements as well. Interestingly, Internet Explorer 7 is not included as part of SP3 (could be fallout from the antitrust settlement); you’ll have to grab that separately from the Microsoft Download Center if you haven’t already.

For now, the release is just the x32 version. The release of Windows XP SP3 x64 will coincide with the release of the Windows Server 2003 update, due to arrive in early June 2008.

See Also:

• Windows XP Service Pack 3 Upgrade Coming April 29
• Windows XP SP3 Still Not Ready For Release
• Windows XP Service Pack 3 Trounces Vista In Speed Tests
• Windows XP Gets a Life Extension on Low-Cost, Low-Power PCs