In my ultimate quest for periodic pain, I’ve decided to take a page from Chris Pirillo’s Googlefasting playbook and segment my use over the next three months. Rather than using a mix of Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft I’m going to spend April with Microsoft only, May with Yahoo, and June with Google.
I’m starting the process today. I figure the first few days will be a transition from what I’m currently using to only Microsoft stuff. I haven’t yet decided how I’m going to approach the edge cases (e.g. does that mean I dump iTunes, what about all the tagging I do with del.icio.us, and I suppose I’ll have to see if I can get into the Microsoft AdCenter beta to replace my Google and Yahoo ads on my blog) – I’ll figure this out as I go.
I always learn a lot when I do something like this. For example, about a year ago I used a different aggregator each week (e.g. Bloglines one week, then FeedDemon (before NewsGator bought FeedDemon), then Rojo, then NetNewsWire on my Mac (before NewsGator bought NetNewsWire) – deep immersion with other products in my use case is very instructive to me and I always encourage the executives at my companies to actively use competitive products (Andy – that was intended for your ears.)
After spending a day at Microsoft earlier this week digging into some interesting stuff, I decided to really push each of the Microsoft / Yahoo / Google platforms and see where they took me. I imagine there will be some limitations (e.g. I doubt I’ll switch from Outlook, good luck prying my Sidekick out of my hands, and no – I’m not going to switch my feld.com blogging infrastructure from MovableType), but I’ll see how far I can take it.
Look for periodic reports from the front line. Thanks Chris for the inspiration. The IE 7 Beta 2 just finished installing on my machine at home and is telling me to reboot, so that’s all for now.