I’ve found my fair share of bugs in Vista. There is one that is particularly annoying to me. Someone at Microsoft – please add this to the bug database and fix it in the next service pack – I’ve got to believe it’ll take a competent person 30 minutes from start to finish. I find the Vista Snipping Tool invaluable. It’s simple, does what I expect it to do, and is something that under older versions of Windows required at the minimum a shareware program. ...
Once again I woke up to a Saturday morning blog post flurry on Techmeme . Today’s was on the criticism by Valleywag of the Microsoft People Ready campaign that ran on the Federated Media network. It appears that everyone is talking about it – and I guess I just did also (oops.) This particular conversation made me think of a pair of blog posts that Stan Feld (my dad) wrote recently. I recommend that you – dear reader – take your brain out of the tech industry echo chamber for a moment and think about the notion of critical thinking. Let’s wander over to the health care industry for a few minutes. ...
I’ve got a large stamp collection that I’m considering selling. The obvious – but relatively labor intensive – way to do this is on eBay. I poked around looking for some other options, but didn’t come up with anything particularly credible. Any stamp collectors out there willing to give me a clue?
The Wall Street Journal has a long article today titled Microsoft Embeds Sleeper in Business Software . It positions SharePoint clearly in the collaboration battle that is emerging with Oracle, Adobe, IBM, EMC, Cisco, and Google and then goes on to mention “lesser-known players” such as Zimbra, Alfresco, Plone, and Socialtext. According to the article Microsoft has sold 85 million licenses of SharePoint across 17,000 companies. Say that again slowly: 85 million licenses across 17,000 companies. I don’t know how many are “free” (according to the WSJ Microsoft has to be careful about giving SharePoint away due to their antitrust settlement) and while I used to tease my friends at Microsoft about simply giving away SharePoint and not caring who used it, this clearly was an effective strategy. ...
I love it when a smart employee of a company calls out stupid / foolish / irrational / annoying behavior of his employers. Don Dodge – a Microsoftie who I like and respect a lot (and who has a super blog ) has a great post up titled Microsoft lawyer rips Google on copyrights – Why? I don’t have a lot to add other than “I agree – why?” and “don’t the lawyers have enough work to do dealing with their own issues?”
This is a rant – feel free to ignore if you don’t care about Microsoft. What do Vista, CRM, Sharepoint, and Outlook have in common? Yes – Microsoft. I’m using three of these every day (I dumped CRM.) I’ve been a PC / Windows user forever – always keeping a Mac nearby, but rarely using it (I like to turn it on once a week just to watch it update all it’s software automagically.) I enjoy the Microsoft upgrade cycle (of which we are once again starting a big one with Vista, Office 2007, and all the Server 2007 products that are coming.) I’ve always benefited financially from this (as I’m usually involved in companies that play around the Microsoft ecosystem). My inner nerd gets to learn lots of new things (or – at least do the old things in slightly different ways.) ...
While running on the treadmill this morning, I was flipping through the channels as I couldn’t manage to run while watching Billy Madison. Morning TV is such crap, but I’m in Cincinatti and the roads are covered with ice so I’m treadmill bound. I never stay on CNN or CNBC because watching news while running is possibly the most tedious thing I could imagine, but the CNN headline caught my eye. I can’t remember it exactly now, but the essence was “Ethanol Demand Up, Corn Supply Depleted.” I stopped and listened to the story which was a long and winding discussion where the main points were: ...
I love books. I love cool things. I love when cool things and books collide. Some folks at Google have started a fantastically neat project. They are “mapping books ” – think of the intersection of Google Maps, a book, the locations in the book, and some of the content at the various locations in the book. Here is an awesome example – The 9/11 Commission Report .
Whenever an article has the quote “it was a clusterfuck” in it, you know it’s worth reading. While Wired’s article titled “How Yahoo Blew It*”* by Fred Vogelstein is very critical, he’s got a few new nuggets in the article that I hadn’t heard before. Yahoo has a response which ends with “We know that Yahoo! had its challenges this year and we know that we’re going to continue to take bruises publicly until Panama begins to bear fruit, but we’re here for the long haul, and we’re focused to win.” In addition to the “build” of Panama, there continue to be big, interesting strategic moves (and challenges) for Yahoo – a few of which are highlighted by Vogelstein. Once again, Yahoo has the chance to try to change the game – as does Microsoft – and I’d think they would each take a shot this time at being bold (rather than just follow “slow and steady execution”) if they really want to assault Google this time around.
I’ve been enjoying my experience with Vista on my Lenovo X60 over the holidays. It’s stable, fast, and mostly behaves as expected. I’ve only had two required reboots in 10 days, which I view as a major victory. But – Vista has more than it’s share of stupid little oversights. For example, the Calculator app. Microsoft has included a Calculator in every version of Windows that I can remember. I extremely good at doing simple math in my head so I don’t keep a calculator on my desk, but I occasionally need a mildly advanced calculator to figure things out. While I could run Excel, that seems stupid (ok – it is stupid) for the type of math problems I need a calculator for. ...