Weekend Wrap-up: Ballmer to retire, Yahoo dethrones Google in the U.S.
It’s Sunday and you know what that means — another edition of our Weekend Wrap-up, where we look at the biggest stories from the past week. And there are definitely some big ones to catch up on.
Ballmer’s Away
Probably the biggest bombshell from this past week came from Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, who announced he’ll be retiring from the company within the next 12 months. During that time, he and Microsoft’s board will work to select a successor. There are already dozens of names being floated around by tech pundits and normal folk alike (please tell me that Ben Affleck joke again), but there’s no clear-cut front runner to the position at this point. How soon will we know? It could be in a week, it could be in a year. The 12-month window Ballmer offered up allows Microsoft to take its time and move when it’s ready.
Yahoo! Rules
Marissa, you should be smiling. The latest comScore numbers from July are out in the wild and Yahoo! has overtaken Google in the category of unique site visits. And, before you ask, no, those numbers do not include traffic from Tumblr. To knock Google from the top spot, even for a month, is a pretty great achievement and a good sign for Yahoo! Can the company keep the trend going once August’s numbers roll out? That remains to be seen.
PS4: 11/15/13
Sony’s PlayStation 4, which is expected to go head to head with Microsoft’s Xbox One this holiday season, finally has a solid release date. The console will hit the United States on November 15, 2013, and will later be released in Europe and Latin America on November 29. We already know how much the system will cost — $399 — but up to this point, we weren’t sure when exactly we’d be able to buy it. Now that we know, mark the date on your calendar and, if you haven’t pre-ordered, do so. You could always try your luck with a tent and sleeping bag outside a GameStop, but we don’t recommend it.
De-queued
If you’re a big fan of Netflix’s Instant Queue and you had your movies sorted just how you wanted them, you were probably a bit annoyed this week when the company suddenly phased out the feature in favor of My Lists. The newer list feature works sort of like the Instant Queue except Netflix takes it upon itself to sort the movies based on what it thinks you’ll want to watch first. Fortunately, if you aren’t fond of being told what to do by a computer, you can bring back the option to sort your My List movies manually on the Netflix account settings page.