Posts Tagged ‘microsoft’

Are We Going to See a Dogfight in the Web Docs Clouds?

Microsoft has finally announced formally something that we’ve all been speculating would happen for some time. Office 2010 will have not only an online version, but both paid and (the big news) a free version on the web. Microsoft is, of course, dominating the traditional ‘brick-and-mortar’ desktop-based office productivity software with their Office product already. They are entering the online document market with competitors Google and Zoho already with a decent foothold on the online market. Unfortunately for Google, Zoho, and others, Microsoft has a pretty good reputation from its Office client and anything with the Office label is probably going to be accepted by consumers.

As Matt Asay points out in Microsoft’s strategy in the virtualization market, ‘good enough’ and convenience sometimes are plenty to take over a market. Microsoft has something that Google and Zoho do not: desktop operating system market share. Just like Microsoft has done in the browser market to take over most of the market until Firefox came around (they still hold the majority), they essentially have a ‘botnet’ of users in Windows users. If the integration with Windows 7 and Office online is ‘good enough’ and integrated in the OS already, users may be drawn to it out of simplicity. Often consumers don’t care about what technology is better. In fact, I would argue that most of the time they don’t care about what’s better. They just care about what is easily available and the quickest. If Office online can meet their needs in a pinch, they probably won’t explore other options.

On the flip side of that, Google and Zoho do have a pretty good foothold in the web-based docs market. Google Docs or Zoho just might be ‘good enough’ to keep users already using their services. Plus, services like these often don’t integrate with others, so they tend to be somewhat viral in nature since collaboration with others requires those users to sign up for those services. As OS X and Linux start to become more popular alternatives to Windows, Microsoft’s advantages in integrating its OS may start to diminish, but their marketshare is still pretty high.

We still have to see exactly what Microsoft has up its sleeves for features in Office Web. Microsoft is calling their Office Web apps an “online companion” to its desktop applications, so we will see what they offer in features. Promised features so far are the ability to create documents and do basic editing, something that both Google and Zoho can blow out of the water. Only time will tell what will happen, but Google and Zoho seem to have finally brought Microsoft out of its fortified position on the ground with Office to do battle in the clouds.

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Filed under Uncategorized : Comments (0) : Jul 14th, 2009

Why Would Microsoft Not Offer Windows 7 Ultimate?

I just got done reading a post by Don Reisinger who makes a very good point that Windows 7 Ultimate (and really, Windows Vista Ultimate) offers very little in the way of features over Windows 7 Professional. Personally, I hate the idea of having several versions of the operating system, but Ultimate does add some probably useful features for consumers. The problem here is one of categorization. One really can’t compare the Professional and Ultimate editions as they are designed with different audiences in mind. True, one does have to buy Ultimate if they don’t have enough licensing to justify the volume licensing offered for Windows Enterprise and need features not available in Professional, but Ultimate really isn’t aimed to be an upgrade from Professional. It’s aimed to be an upgrade to Home Premium.

This change of perspectives gives some decent value adds to the Ultimate edition if one decides that they have to use Windows. Of course, along with these features comes a heftier price jump. Home Premium retails at $200 while Ultimate retails at $320. That’s a pretty good jump. It does, however, offer some additional features that Home Premium doesn’t, like network backups via their new “Backup and Restore Center” as well as the encryption on the filesystem, location-aware printing, and Windows XP mode. Don’t get me wrong, I am not going to be buying Windows 7 Ultimate this summer/fall, but if Microsoft can get users to pay more to add those few features, why not?

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Filed under Tech Trends : Comments (0) : Jul 7th, 2009

Yet Another Reason Not To Use Outlook

If the slow speed, virus targeting, instability, and clunky interface isn’t enough to deter you from using the trainwreck of a mail client called Outlook (I have no opinion of Outlook :) ), Microsoft has just given you another reason not to use it. Microsoft has announced that it will for sure be using its html rending engine from Word to display html emails. This means that Outlook won’t be able to render html messages using web standards. There’s even a website using Twitter to send Microsoft a message that users don’t want Outlook to break their html messages for years to come. If you don’t believe them, check out the message in both Outlook 2000 (not using Word) and Outlook 2010 (using Word).

It shouldn’t surprise us that Microsoft would pull something like this, but it certainly caught me off guard. I thought that they had learned their lesson and seemed to make progress towards using web standards with Internet Explorer 8, but apparently they’re going to keep doing their own thing. Unbelievable.

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Filed under Tech Trends : Comments (0) : Jun 24th, 2009

Free Antivirus from Microsoft: Can We Trust It?

For those who haven’t heard, Microsoft has decided to discontinue its OneCare product and release its own free antivirus. This concept of a Microsoft antivirus really has me baffled. I don’t understand why anyone would use an antivirus for Windows made by Microsoft. I especially don’t understand why anyone would pay for it, for sure. No matter how its spun by the marketing department, I just can’t believe the horrid logic happening here. Why in the world would I trust the same company that couldn’t protect the operating system to begin with to build my antivirus software? It makes no sense. I’m not even going to touch on the anticompetitive suits that will inevitably come out of this situation.

What would be an acceptable change? Why don’t we take the things learned by developing this antivirus and build them into the operating system to stop the attack before it happens instead of trying to detect and stop an attack while it’s happening. Okay, I understand that it’s slightly more complicated than that. But seriously? An antivirus for an operating system made by the same company as the operating system? Ugh. Next I think I’m going to take out an insurance policy against my insurance policy.

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Filed under Tech Trends : Comments (0) : Jun 17th, 2009

If Search Is Broken, How Has Bing Fixed It?

I really don’t mean to be one of those nay-saying Microsoft haters. Really, I don’t. But I’m still looking for that feature that Bing offers me that Google doesn’t (except of course for the cool images on the homepage). Is it the shopping? I think not. My new wife and I recently purchased a Samsung plasma tv. I decided to take Bing for a test run to see if it helped me make the decision.

First, I did a search in Google’s shopping section. We decided on the Samsung PN50A550. The model has been discontinued and the price was right at a local shop here in town. What I found was actually a bit surprising. My search on Google returned a nice little price range as well as some reviews, some technical specs, and some other related items I might be interested in.
samsung-a550-google

And Bing? Well.. it returns nothing. That’s right, I was brought to a page with two HDMI cables. No prices, no reviews, nothing.
samsung-a550-bing

Well, since my tv shopping resulted in a complete failure, I decided to check out the travel feature. Like I said earlier, I have a new wife and we just got back from our honeymoon just a few weeks ago. We decided to go to Daytona Beach. Bing hadn’t been launched yet when we were planning the trip, but I decided to go to Bing to see what the hotel selection was like.

Bing’s hotel selection was actually pretty good when going through the travel section of Bing’s site. It let me pick which features I was looking for and found the best prices. It acted much like any big travel site that you’d find around the web — pick your dates and location and it spits out the best prices. What was interesting to me was that typing “daytona beach hotels” into the search bar didn’t bring up the same interface. In fact, I couldn’t distinguish their search results from Google’s except that Google showed the suggested similar search terms at the bottom except on the top like Bing. I wasn’t necessarily looking for the cheapest hotel, so it was a great feature that I could select the features that I needed on the side.

So how did Bing work for me? Well, in shopping for my tv, it was a complete and utter failure. Google clearly took the upper hand since.. well it returned results. For the hotels, Bing clearly dominated Google – as long as I knew where to go in the interface (except, one could argue that if I knew where to go in the first place I wouldn’t need to search). In my case, Bing really was a fancy new interface for a travel site like Travelocity or some other similar site. Even then, it was an improvement. But is Bing really fixing search? I would argue not. It’s an improvement on shopping, probably. A fix for search? Well I’m not so sure it’s broken, but I honestly can’t see a difference except for the interface is slightly rearranged.

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Filed under Tech Trends : Comments (0) : Jun 16th, 2009

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