microsoft Archives - Page 7 of 12

Steve Ballmer Receives the Egg-treatment in Budapest

Posted on May 19, 2008 ·

Just as soon as the Microsoft CEO started his speech at the Corvinus University (my Alma Mater), a protesting student wearing a “Microsoft=Corruption” shirt stood up and threw eggs at the Microsoft CEO. Not exactly a sign of the famous “Hungarian hospitality”.

(If your feed does not show embedded videos, please click through to watch it in the blog. Update: Originally I had the index.hu video here, but as it started to slow down, I uloaded it to youtube and am now embedding the youtube version. A day later this vid received over 223K views)

On second thought, perhaps it was fair enough. After all, his boss, Bill Gates received a full cream-pie in the face ten years ago in Belgium – Ballmer only got some of the ingredients.

Another ironic moment comes at 0:38m in the video: as other students stand up to give way to the departing egg-thrower, the camera closes in on one of them holding up his shiny Apple – and not the pie variety.

Update: The search is on for Ballmer’s replacement.

Another video from a different angle, and it ends with the Gates Pie Scene.

Update#2: OK, enough of the fun part. As the story circulates people start wondering what may be the background, and since the only sources are in Hungarian, here’s a summary of the circumstances:

A Hungarian Government bid, worth $25B Hungarian Forints, roughly $157M was allegedly skewed towards MS. (A ‘competitive’ bid with wording that all but ensures only Microsoft meets the requirements.) A Hungarian Watchdog Body (sort of like the FTC in the US) challenged the bidding process via the Court system, and a trial date was set for today. The trial was suddenly and unexpectedly rescheduled just as Ballmer arrived in Budapest. So there may be a perception of the Bully lobbying there.

That said, they could have protested with banners, without eggs. Or displaying more of those flashy Macbooks.

Filed Under: Misc · Tagged: Apple, bill gates, budapes, egg-throwing, gates creampie, mac, microsoft, prank, protest, steve ballmer

Gmail Faster? Are You Sure?

Posted on May 18, 2008 ·

Great performance has always been an obsession at Google and it’s something that we think about and work on everyday. We want Gmail to be really fast, and we keep working on ways to make it faster

– says the Official Gmail Blog. They go on:

One of the areas we worked on was the initial loading sequence: everything that happens behind the scenes between the time you press the “Sign in” button on the login page and the moment you land in your inbox. While the improvements we made won’t resolve every “This is taking longer than usual…” message you might see when loading Gmail over a slow connection, we’ve seen a real reduction (up to 20%) in overall load time compared to when we started.

Hm…so the initial loading sequence got faster. Great news – I have only one question: Why do I now always see this previously unknown progress bar every time I sign in to Gmail?

Btw, I created the account specifically for this test, so it has absolutely no email to be pre-processed. Truth be told the progress bar flashes up and disappears quite fast in the empty account, but it stays there long enough in my real accounts with a lot of data. Not exactly a sign of progress, if you ask me (pun intended).

Update: A sure sign that Gmail must have gone through some changes is that the very popular Gmail Manager Firefox add-on is now knocked out: it is unable to login to any Google Apps email accounts. Regular Gmail accounts appear to be unaffected.

Update#2: I guess I should point out the positive side of the story: this approach is a lot better (transparent) then the Microsoft approach to their slow copy problem, where Vista SP1 improved (perceived) performance partly by rethinking the progress-bar.

Filed Under: Personal Productivity, SaaS · Tagged: firefox, gmail, gmail manager, gmail slow, gmail speed, Google, microsoft, performance, SaaS, vista, vista sp1, windows vista

Windows Barely Live Mesh and Why TechCrunch Needs a New Tab

Posted on April 28, 2008 ·

Steve Gillmor redefined TechCrunch today with a thoughtful but loooong (1709 words!) post on Windows Live Mesh. Others come to rescue translating him:

Robert Scoble: But, let’s translate Gillmor: Microsoft Mesh is fascinating. Agreed.

Phil Wainewright: Steve turns that around and points out that what Mesh is really about is connecting the desktop into the cloud

Mike Arrington: I’m pretty sure he’s saying Mesh = good.

Even Microsoft’s Steve Clayton is lost:

I got lost about two thirds of the way in to this post from Steve Gillmor but the first third was a great read. Actually the whole thing was but I just got a bit lost as I think some of the things going on in Steve’s fast thinking brain didn’t quite make it through to the keyboard so you’re left having to assume some things. I’m assuming he likes Mesh though. I think he does.

Commenters on TechCrunch were ruthless, I won’t even begin quoting them. But don’t get me wrong: this is a good article, which would have been a great fit for ReadWriteWeb, but the TC crowd expects short, to-the-point, fairly descriptive posts. In the words of TC owner Mike Arrington:

Steve is an acquired taste. his writing isn’t efficiently packaged into bite sized chunks like a lot of people have come to expect. but if you decide to give it the attention it needs, you may find that you come away a little bit smarter after you’re finished.

Yes. And perhaps Mike is trying to redefine TC’s style himself. But you have to know your readers, Mike – perhaps a a new tab for Essays would be appropriate – or if you want Gillmor’s writing part of the main flow, a graphical “grab a coffee this is a long one” icon would help.

Now, on to the bigger question, why Live Mesh is just Barely Live. (And yes, this will be a long post, too, but due to the screenprints.)

The first leaked news declared this a solution to “sync everything with everything”. Then came Amit Mital, Live Mesh General Manager with a visionary video and announcement at the Web 2.0 Expo last week, adding towards the end: initially it will sync only Windows PC’s, adding more platforms and devices over time. Ahh! So it’s a … Foldershare for now.

Minutes after the presentation I was chatting with a startup CEO who reminded me he had seen a similar video from Microsoft years ago: kid playing, Mom capturing video on cell-phone, family watching it almost real-time on various devices, executive-type Dad watching video on his laptop at an airport feeling “almost at home”. Great video, and yes, it was conceptually familiar, but what has materialized of it?

Live Mesh will be great when it really happens, but for now it’s largely waporware: pre-announcement, typical Microsoft-style. And now, if you’re still here, why don’t you follow me through the hoops of trying to sign up for (Barely) Live Mesh.

Google Search and several Microsoft blogs point to http://mesh.com so that’s where we start:

Hm… I could never figure out why I so often get signed out of Live Network (good old passport style), and if that’s the case why can I not sign back here. But that’s OK, we just take a detour to live.com, sign in and come back to mesh.com:

I though I had just signed in, but fine, let’s do it again. Oops:

The sign-in button changes to sign up – as in sign up for a waiting list. Not fun.. but let’s do it anyway. Btw, before the wait-list screen there was another screen where I had to agree to some terms – sort of usual for actually using a service, but for getting on a waiting list?

Now we’re in something called Microsoft Connect. Is this the same thing? Who knows…let’s click Register (but why, after sign-up, sign-in, agree, now register? WTF?)

I’m starting to really not like this. So far I’ve been presented with a maze of registration, confirmation, you-name-it screens, and I don’t know where the hell I am. Let’s backtrack a bit.

Oh, several screens above, at the waiting list signup, it stated on the next screen I should click Connection Directory, a small option on the top, not the main Register for Connect link… but who reads small prints, all screens should offer enough navigational clues to not get me lost. OK, redoing, now…

This jungle is the Connection Directory. No sign of Live Mesh, at least not on the first page. Text search to the rescue: there we are… somewhere towards the bottom (scroll way down) there is Live Mesh Tech Preview! Voila! (or not). The button to click is Apply Now! As if I hadn’t done it a zillion times already…

Hm.. I can do this now with my eyes closed… click.. click..click.

Geez, this looks like a plain old BS signup form again. I’ve had it. Done. I let others experiment with Microsoft’s Windows Dead Mesh. Let me know when it’s Live. For real.

Filed Under: Personal Productivity, SaaS · Tagged: cloud computing, foldershare, live mesh, microsoft, synchronization, web apps, windosw live mesh, windows live

Free Mini-Office from Microsoft?

Posted on April 22, 2008 ·

There’s some renewed chatter about Microsoft’s plans for a subscription-based Office and even a free, ad-based alternative. Some rumors put the subscription price in the $12/ month range, which I believe is way too expensive for basic productivity tools, hence the need for another business model: offering MS Works for free, supported by advertising.

MS Works is nowadays widely considered a “dumbed down” version of its big brother, the real MS Office suite, but I beg to disagree.

Two decades ago MS Works was my main productivity suite: I was happily crunching numbers, generating charts, including them as well as data from my database in word-processing documents. In other words, I had a perfectly working and lightweight integrated office suite at the time when Word, Excel and Powerpoint were fragmented individual applications not talking to each other. For all its capabilities Works was very lightweight, I could use it on a laptop with 640K memory (that’s K, not MB!) and two 720k floppy drives – no hard-disk at all.

I can’t say this enough, Microsoft had a perfectly working integrated suite 20 years ago, which should have become what Office is today. But I guess you need bloatware to charge bloated prices, so Microsoft shoved Works aside, favoring the higher margin, high-end but fragmented products, which took years to become a true Office Suite.

The 80/20 rule applies for the MS Office Suite, in fact I’d rather say 90/10: 90% of users only need 10% of the functionality. MS Works has that – but now that it’s making a comeback (?), an ironic situation develops: the new online challengers like Google Docs and the Zoho Suite were targeting the mainstream Office Suite, and while in terms on features (needed or not) they are still behind Word, Excel..etc, the comparison to Works would quite possibly have a different outcome. I wouldn’t be surprised if Zoho Writer, Sheet and Show turned out to offer richer functionality than Works, and then we did not even look at the collaboration, mobility offered by the fact that they are Web-based.

Conclusion: MS Works should have been a winner 20 years ago, and ever since. Now it’s too little, too late.

Filed Under: Personal Productivity, SaaS · Tagged: google docs, microsoft, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Works, MS Works, office suite, web office, zoho

Windows 7 = Vista Final

Posted on April 21, 2008 ·

I like Jason Hiner’s prediction @ TechRepublik: Microsoft will leapfrog Vista, release Windows 7 early, and change its OS business:

And that’s why Microsoft will ultimately try to quell the embarrassing Windows Vista debacle by making a bold move with Windows 7 to win back customer loyalty and generate positive spin for its most important product.

What will happen next?

My prognosis is that Microsoft will use smoke and mirrors to conjure up an early release of Windows 7, the next edition of the world’s most widely-used operating system. Then they will quietly and unofficially allow IT departments to migrate straight from Windows XP to Windows 7.

Yes, we’re almost there. Except that it doesn’t take care of customers (including yours truly) royally sc***ed by Vista. I wasn’t kidding when I said:

Windows 7, whenever it comes, should be released as “Vista Final”, free to all Vista victims along with Microsoft’s letter of apology.

Filed Under: Software · Tagged: microsoft, vista, vistasucks, Windows, windows 7, windows vista

How to Make Outlook Cool. Actually, Kool.

Posted on April 20, 2008 ·

Outlook read backwards is Kooltuo. Wow, it would make a good startup name. No, I did not go crazy, but TechCrunch reports that Microsoft just signed a letter of intent to acquire Xobni. And Xobni = Inbox, backwards.

Not that it’s a surprise: I wish I could predict everything with such certainty. This is what wrote in February, when Bill Gates presented Xobni for Outlook as “the next generation of social networking” at the Microsoft Office Developers Conference:

What does it mean when Bill Gates presents your product, a super-cool Outlook plugin to his crowd of developers?

Gates’s message: now go back and copy this fast. That would be the classic Microsoft style, as many software startups can attest to. It would also put the market introduction to somewhere … around 2015? Unlikely.

Microsoft will acquire Xobni in no time. Sweet and fast deal. Congratulations to the Xobni team and investors!

So, yes, congratulations to the Xobni team! On a personal note, I regret I can’t try Xobni, as I long ago ditched Outlook along with a lot of desktop bloatware, and am in happier land now, using Web-based applications. I’m perfectly happy ( and productive) with the combination of Gmail and the Zoho apps, and if I ever leave Gmail, it will be for another web-mail, not back to the desktop. The air is fresher in the Cloud.

Filed Under: Personal Productivity, SaaS · Tagged: bill gates, cloud computing, email, gmail, Google, microsoft, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Outlook, Outlook, SaaS, xobni, zoho

YahoOL

Posted on April 10, 2008 ·

This is a shameless reprint of my post exactly two months ago:

Yahoo running to AOL to avoid assimilation by the (Micro-)Borg? Hm… I don’t know which one is worse. (Actually, I do.) The funny (actually, sad) thing is, most of my Best MicroHoo quotes apply to a Yahoo/AOL situation, you just have to replace Microsoft with AOL

Stowe Boyd:

Personally, I think the Microsoft and Yahoo matchup is like two tired swimmers who bump into each other and then wind up drowning each other in their scramble to survive. But Yahoo will be the first to go under in this embrace.

Fake Steve Jobs:

It’s like taking the two guys who finished second and third in a 100-yard dash and tying their legs together and asking for a rematch, believing that now they’ll run faster.

Imagine a circus act in which two enormous, clumsy, awkward elephants that don’t really like each other are supposed to mate while riding on skateboards.

Oh, well… a sad soap opera.

Filed Under: Business, Software · Tagged: acquisition, aol, feke steve jobs, fsj, Humor, mergers, microsoft, yahoo

DemoCrunch 2008

Posted on April 2, 2008 ·

This year’s TechCrunch 50 Conference is planned to coincide with DemoFall, the (other) premium startup Launch event.

VentureBeat attempts to (well, sort of) explain it with scheduling, but make no mistake, this is a fairly open move against DemoFall, to establish TechCrunch50 as the premier startup launch event. There’s no question that TechCrunch can pull in just about the entire VC community – in fact given the audience pricing, $2000 early bird, and $3000 regular, it’s hard to believe anyone but VCs can afford to attend. Well, VCs and students, as those with a student ID can get in for $149.

The presenting companies will not be charged – that’s a huge differentiate vs. Demo. As I said before, you almost have to be already funded to be able to afford Demo’s fees. I leave it to you to decide which one is more startup-friendly.

Of course they want a real launch show, so the one hard condition is that your product /service will have to be new (unseen) at the Conference. Several commenters are already complaining that they are launching before September, which automatically disqualifies them.

I have a solution for you “early birds”: come join us at Launch: Silicon Valley 2008 jointly presented by SVASE and Garage Technology Ventures. Five of last year’s 29 presenters received venture funding, in aggregate of $30M. That’s not $140M, but not too shabby, either.

How to participate? If by June 10th, 2008 (the day of the event) you will have a product or service available, but have not been out in the marketplace for more than a few months, then send an Executive Summary of no more than 2 pages to Launchsv@svase.org. Submission deadline: May 9th, 2008. (Garage Technology offers a useful Writing a Compelling Executive Summary guide.) Last year’s 30 (actually, 29) presenting startups were selected from 170 submissions. For details – and attendee registration – check out http://www.launchsiliconvalley.org/.

See you there!

Filed Under: Bay Area, Social Networking, Startups · Tagged: Art of the Start, auto repair, business events, DealMakerMedia, Demo, demofall, entrepreneurship, Garage.com, guy kawasaki, IBDNetwork, launch silicon valley, microsoft, Pleasanton, product showcase, SDForum, silicon valley, Social Networking, startup pitch, Startups, SVASE, techcrunch, techcrunch40, techcrunch50, Under the Radar, UtR, vc, vc Funding, venture Capital

Apple Was Just Testing You All : Lawyers Follow

Posted on March 26, 2008 ·

Oh, this is hilarious. All the brouhaha about Apple being aggressive / sneaky … trying to install the Safari browser via Apple Update:

Well, now we know thanks to The Register that it was just a test. They wanted to see if you abide by the legal terms:

Yes, you agree to only use it on Apple computers. And if you took the bait and installed Safari on your Windows PC, expect the Apple lawyers anytime. (OK, not really).

Update: The Apple Software Update points to this page, a list of all Apple software licences, where, digging a little we find these two documents:

The text in the Update program is clearly taken from the License for Mac, the Windows version of the file uses brand-neutral language, just mentioning “computer owned or controlled by you”.

Related posts: Hardware 2.0, 9 to 5 Mac, Ryan Stewart, CNet, Ars Technica and Channel Register.

Filed Under: Humor · Tagged: Apple, browser, eula, firefox, ie7, iTunes, microsoft, Safari, software update, update

Apple Sneaky, Microsoft is No Angel, Either

Posted on March 25, 2008 ·

I’ve been observing an annoying trend on TechMeme for a while now: when a good discussion happens over the weekend, obviously some writers will miss it – then they sleep on it, come back to it a few days later and TechMeme picks it up as a new theme.

That’s what we’re seeing today with ZDNet blogger Ed Bott coming back to the Apple Update brouhaha and trying to place Microsoft on a morel higher ground.

In summary, the issue was that the Apple iTunes update program all of a sudden wanted to install the Safari browser on Windows PC’s and had it as the preselected default. That’s certified bad behavior. Even worse is the fact that it’s not new at all – a fact missed by almost all but yours truly. I pointed out that:

the same update program has been trying to install iTunes on a Windows machine where I don’t have it, don’t need it forever, despite unselecting it every single time
the update runs because I do have Quicktime installed, and Quicktime itself is as aggressive as it gets, re-installing itself in the XP systray no matter how many times you remove it.

To me this was all about respecting users choice or not. But the discussion went the “wrong way”:

Apple fans are a religious cult who came in hordes to defend Holy Apple. (before you chastise me, just look at how often I point to Apple as a better choice, without becoming blindly faithful)
Most debate focused on whether Firefox or Safari is the better browser (IE dully ignored) – nice tactics to change the subject…

And now here comes Ed Bott with a provocative title: What Microsoft can teach Apple about software updates:

For the record, I think Apple is dead wrong in the way it’s gone about using its iPod monopoly to expand its share in another market.

Right.

Ironically, an excellent model for how this update program should work already exists. It’s called Windows Update, and it embodies all the principles that Apple should follow.

Dead wrong.

I can’t believe anyone in their right mind would quote Windows Update, known for delivering patches that mess up one’s system only to be patched again and again as the ideal model to follow. One does not have to go too far, just look at the reports on systems disabled by the recent Vista SP1 update. The worlds richest company could not put a decent operating system together in five years, and a full year later the best they can deliver is a botched update!

But since Ed takes the opportunity to place Microsoft on the moral high ground in general, let’s not forget about another recent Microsoft update coup:

The windows live installer, released last September while offered an opt-out screen like Apple does now, then proceeded to install Windows Desktop Search, without ever asking for permission or even notifying the user.

Not only this was outrageously bad practice, completely ignoring the users right to decide what they want on their computers, it was also performance degrading, especially on systems that already had another desktop search installed (see system bar above).

So back to Ed Bott: yes, I condemn Apple’s latest move, but please, please, never in a million years would I think of setting Microsoft as the model to follow.

Update: This window just popped up on my system:

Windows Firewall blocked Foldershare – a Microsoft product, which just got updated a few days ago. Only (?) problem is, I have (I should have) Windows Firewall turned off, since McAfee is installed, too. WTF is this message? Or has Win Firewall been turned on by some update, without asking me? And why is it my job to investigate?

Filed Under: Customer Service, Software, Technology · Tagged: Apple, browser, desktop search, firefox, foldershare, ie7, iTunes, microsoft, Safari, software update, update, windows firewall, windows update