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The hard side of Mister Softie

Ah, Microsoft. Nothing gets the knickers of Silicon Valley startup guys more twisted than signs that the world's largest software company is over-reaching again.

The latest outrage? Some of my friends at the Valley's best-known social networks and Web 2.0 companies are privately grousing that emissaries from Redmond are trying to "strong-arm" (their term) startups into giving special treatment to Messenger, Microsoft's (MSFT) answer to AIM and other instant messaging programs. The problem typically arises when a social network, say, offers its users the ability to import the list of contacts they've accumulated on Microsoft Hotmail.

Since the summer, my friends tell me, Mister Softie has been sending cease-and-desist letters to startups that try to do this. These nastygrams are typically followed up by a meeting with Microsoft reps, who then try a couple different approaches to get the startup to integrate Messenger into their service.

Leaky Apple

The Macbook Air notwithstanding, the most interesting part of this year's Macworld was that all the interesting stuff was leaked well in advance. This has rarely happened before.

Steve Jobs takes secrecy at least as seriously as he does clean design. I remember being rousted out of bed by an irate phone call from Jobs at midnight, the night before a Macworld where he was to launch the snowball iMac. I had written the cover story on that Mac for Time Magazine, and it was inadvertently published overseas on a time.com website. Ooops. We got it down, but the damage was done, and I was told later that Jobs was so upset, at one point, he wanted to call off his Macworld address.

Jobs couldn't be happy that Wired had the high points right  about the world's thinnest laptop yesterday. And I'm sure he was  displeased that details about Apple getting into the movie rental business had begun slipping out a month ago. In fact, if you read any of the top Apple fanboy sites, it was pretty clear that the Good Ship Apple was leaking all over the place.  Naturally, as is typical in such cases,  bloggers were taking great pains to claim that their predictions were based on intelligent "tea-leaf reading," as opposed to reliable tips. Given Apple's track record of shutting down unauthorized fan sites, I would, too.

A 6-Letter Word for "Hosed"

I can't tell if Hasbro (HAS), the maker of Scrabble, is the smartest company in the world or the dumbest. Over 100 million sets of the game have been sold in 121 countries, in 29 different languages, according to everyone's favorite source. What a cash cow.

So, why in the world didn't it create a free online version? And why oh why would it let someone else do it, and reap the rewards?

But that's just what happened when two guys from Calcutta, Jayant Agarwalla, 21, and his brother, Rajat, 26, created a knockoff called Scrabulous. Their site launched in 2006 and quickly signed up 600,000 registered users. Not too shabby for a year's worth of work. So the brothers launched a Facebook application in June, 2007 and the results were stunning: 2.3 million active users as of today. For those of you keeping score, the application generated 270 70 million pageviews in the past month. Not a bad deal for a two-man operation.

But all good things must come to an end, which is bad news for Scrabulous fans, and even worse for the Agarwalla Bros.: Hasbro's trying to shut the site down. "They sent a notice to Facebook about two weeks ago," Jayant confirmed to me. "The lawyers are working on it."