As my Microsoft Web Only diet continues, I found myself using Live.com Image Search today to put together a presentation.  I hate text heavy Powerpoint presentations so I try to go to the Seth Godin school of Powerpoint and limit myself to six words per slide (e.g. lots of pictures.)  Historically, Google Image Search has been my friend when I put a presentation together.

I loved Live.com Image Search – it’s substantially better than Google’s.  The actual image search is about the same, but the UI is dramatically better.  It’s very Ajaxy – resize bar, mouse over to enlarge image and get image detail, drag and drop image to other apps, infinite scroll (rather than next, next, next), and overall nice / fast presentation.  Someone on the Google Image Search team needs to take a look.

After all the depressing shit that I read in the New York Times today, I felt compelled to buy a new clock.

These were on sale in the Boulder Bookstore and I couldn’t resist.  However, I’m not so sure about the “… will soon be over” thing.

Sometimes it’s best not to read the newspaper first thing in the morning.  Randall Stross has an excellent and disturbing article in today’s New York Times titled “Looking at the Free Market, and Seeing Red.” It leads with the story of Lou Dobbs bashing Lenovo and their recent deal to sell $13 million of computers to the US State Department.  Dobbs asserts that the PCs will provide spies within the Chinese government a way of conducting espionage.  His sound bite on the lead in was something like “when the State Department seeks secure network communications it turns to Communist China and thus renders the United States perhaps more vulnerable than ever.”

Give me a fucking break.  Last month this kind of xenophobic nonsense killed Check Point’s acquisition of Sourcefire.  This time around, Dobbs and some guy named Michael Wessel who is a member of the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission (an advisory body to Congress) and Larry Wortzel (the chairman on this same commission) are kicking up a bunch of dust about how dangerous it would be for the government to buy Lenovo computers.

Now – I’m not going to go so far as to say something absurd like “Lenovo is a national treasure” (I’m sure if it was still IBM’s Personal Computer Division, which is a big part of Lenovo, someone would use that argument), but given that Lenovo is a public company traded on the Hong Kong stock exchange, has an American CEO (a former executive at Dell), is partially owned by several American private-equity firms, and the computers in question are manufactured in North Carolina, my mind just boggles at the things these guys are saying.

Fundamentally, guys like Dobbs, Wessel, and Wortzel are using “security issues” and “xenophobia” to tarnish the reputation of a global company in an attempt to undermine a deal with the US government.  Maybe these guys should get focused on making sure these same Chinese that they assert are pulling all the strings would stop buying up the massive amounts of US debt that our government continues to issue – that seems like a little more “dangerous” issue to me (actually, the debt, not so much the owners of the debt.)

Maybe Penn and Teller should do an episode on Bullshit! on Dobbs and the current “security issues” running around our government that are really anti-competitiveness attacks reminiscent of the moochers in Atlas Shrugged.  Blech.

When I was at Microsoft last week, I once again noticed interesting art in the lobby of the buildings I was in.  I’ve always liked the art at Microsoft and enjoy the typical five minute wait in the lobby as the person I’m meeting with (or their assistant) comes down to escort me to the meeting.

This time I noticed a brochure titled Microsoft Art Collection: Redmond Campus: Spring 2006 Program.  I picked it up and looked through it.  While the brochure was informative, the link to the Microsoft Art Collection web site had piles of information on it. 

I’ve always loved being surrounded by art when I work.  If you’ve ever been to my office, my house, Newmerix’s office, the Nature Conservancy building in Boulder, or my family office, you’ve seen portion of my collection.  While I don’t have 4000+ pieces (like Microsoft), I’ve probably got enough pieces to put together a web site at this point.

The next time you are in a building at Microsoft, make sure you keep your eyes open in the lobby.

In my Microsoft-only web diet, I’ve been pleasantly enjoying Microsoft Search.  While some of the results are a little wacky (e.g. I was searching for the Microsoft Empower program yesterday and all I got were old links to the Irish and UK Empower pages – which were no longer active), it’s been generally very effective and I didn’t really notice any functional difference from Google.

However, Microsoft Search seems to have been down for the better part of the morning. 

So – I had to break my diet and use Google for the last few hours of searches.  Fortunately, in Firefox, it’s really easy to change the search engine used.

There’s an old joke about Microsoft that it takes them three major releases to get it right.  So – when “version 3.0 of something” comes out – it’s time to pay attention.  Microsoft shifted away from version numbers to year numbers a while ago – presumably someone in marketing figured out that the version numbering approach wasn’t effectively confusing customers about the maturity of products.

Earlier today, Microsoft announced the road map and feature set for Microsoft Speech Server 2007 which is expected to be released at the end of this year.  One of my portfolio companies – Gold Systems – has been working closely with Microsoft Speech Server over the past year and has implemented a number of projects with it.  When I was at Microsoft last week, I spent some time with Richard Bray (Microsoft GM Speech Server) and Terry Gold (Gold Systems CEO) discussing where Microsoft was going with the product and how Gold and Microsoft could expand their relationship around Speech Server, Microsoft’s upcoming unified messaging product, and Microsoft LCS.  It was a great conversation – Richard definitely gets it – and I expect Microsoft will really nail it with v3.0 of Speech Server.

I haven’t thought much about Microsoft’s Support for Linux Guest on Virtual Server 2005 yet, but it’s definitely noteworthy.  Tristan Louis wrote a long, thoughtful post on it that’s worth reading if you care about this stuff.

Yesterday I said I was going to make April “Microsoft Month” for my computers.  After installing IE7b2, a bunch of Live.com stuff, migrating my bookmarks from Firefox to IE7, and then trying to use IE7 as my primary browser, I’ve given up after 24 hours.  It occurred to me that this wasn’t going to work out the third time I had to restart my computer because something goofy was going on. 

I was determined to use Live.com and IE7 for feadreading – after watching Live.com choke on importing my OPML file (it didn’t seem to be able to handle 707 feeds that were formatted into folders), I downloaded the Live.com toolbar to install Onfolio (plus – I needed it to synchronize my bookmarks – er – I mean favorites – since IE requires the entire toolbar to do this on multiple machines.)  By this point, I had icons and buttons all over the place in IE7 and was constantly having to drop down menus for things that were one button in Firefox.  I chalked this up to my inexperience with IE7 and kept driving.

Onfolio handled my OPML file fine, but was excruciating slow refreshing all my feeds.  I managed to crash it trying to mark all feeds as read (it turns out there’s an easy way, but I hadn’t figured it out yet and had to reboot again when I hung IE7 and then had spurious issues with Outlook after shutting it down in the Task Manager.)

I woke up this morning ready to try again.  I was getting my mind around the idea that maybe I’d only run all Microsoft on my machine at home and I’d leave my laptop and work machine as is so I didn’t totally destroy their configs.  When I started getting a “The Operation Failed” message when I tried to “Send Page by E-mail” from IE7, I started realizing that basic things simply weren’t working anymore (of course, this is beta software – I know.)  I installed my del.icio.us buttons – they didn’t work (I got an IE “Internet Explorer cannot download …eURIComponent … Unspecified error” – clearly the buttons that worked with IE 6 don’t work with IE 7.

I tried a few more things with my morning routine and finally decided that I was going to modify my experiment.  Rather than view the browser as a part of the Microsoft / Yahoo / Google diet, I’m going to limit myself to web-based apps.  I’m going back to Firefox, but will continue to try to wean myself off of my.yahoo, Google’s search, and the other Yahoo / Google things I use.

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.