UnixPoet

Apple is going head to head with Sony and Microsoft. Sony has had crap execution in the last few years, Microsoft has mediocre design and Apple has not yet released the iPhone. It may skip having a dedicated digital camera (Nokia is the biggest camera maker in the world) but I don’t think Apple can do without a console leveraging the iPod.

Office 2007 is nice. I appreciate the effort MS put into designing the new ribbon interface and like it.

I’ve only used Outlook so far, just explored the others. Groove is the roughest round the edges and not as in keeping with the rest of the Office. Having said that, the idea behind Groove is good even if the execution is lacking.

Outlook: junk email detection is very good, much better than Entourage which is what I use on the Mac (I know, I should Mail). Nice clean interface. RSS support is passable; won’t be changing from Google Reader anytime soon.

What instantly and immediately bugged me: a yellow bar urging me to install Instant Search aka Windows Desktop Search. I know Microsoft would really love it if people installed Windows Desktop Search but I have no intention switching away from Google Desktop.

To switch off that annoying prompt: Tools -> Options. Click on the “Other” tab, then click the “Advanced Options” button and unmark the “Annoy user into installing Windows Desktop” er… actually its the “Show prompts to enable Instant Search”.

I do not think that Google has an Office in mind. At all.

First off, Writely, even a souped up version full of Google steriods, will still remain the Wordpad to the Visual Studio that is Office. Google is not dumb enough to do a full frontal on Microsoft Office - the way to beat Office is to make it irrelevant. And Writely does not really even to begin to do that.

What Google above all is an advertising company selling targeted ads. It needs to know its users in detail - the more it knows the better. And what better way to learn about someone then looking at their email, the IM, the news they are interested, the blogs they read, and the documents they write?

Google will offer Writely and GDrive so that it has more info to analyse about the users; the aim is to not to kill Office - that’s just a nice bonus. Google does not care if you use Office Word - but it does care that you keep it on GDrive.

Indeed, in the grander scheme of things, the more important announcement from Google is not Writely but GDrive.

Is it a wonder that the latest Google Desktop (which is great btw) saves documents on Google servers? Indeed it fits in nicely with my hypothesis

Evolution of industry dynamics:
- In the 90’s Sun hyped Java.
- percieving a threat Microsoft backed Flash
- Flash shipped with IE, which means
- that nearly all PCs today run Windows, which comes bundled with IE, which includes Flash.
- Adobe bought out Macromedia, the developers of Flash, as they saw it a good fit with the other applications in their lineup
- Google buys Adobe. Instantly can bundle Google Desktop Search with Adobe Reader and Flash. That would be a lot of installs for Google.

And all because back in the day MS used its clout to back a competing technology against a percieved threat which never materialized. Oh what a tangled web we weave…

Remember, you heard it here first

Blog spam is annoying. Methods for dealing with it? CAPATCHs seem like a good way to do it. I saw a Bayesian plugin for WordPress but depending on how its implemented it will most probably need maintenance and training. Only one way to find out.

Regarding mail spam: a new form of spam has been hitting me and most people I know. The spammers have been reading up on their CSS to create what I’ve termed floating spam. Basically, the oh so clever spammers set certain tags in the email with display: float; so that while the source of the mail looks like a bunch of divs and spans with random single characters interspersed throughout, when rendered in a browser it will nicely spell viagra for you.

Traditional mail filters will be crap at detecting such spam. The only hope is a statistical filter - a bayesian should do the trick. GFI’s current shipping version will struggle a bit, but I’m working on an update. I feel our clients’ pain and an update is winding its way through testing and QA. If you want to know when its released, GFI ME12 only at the mo, then send me an email or leave a comment. Or subscribe to this blog

One final “spammer” - MSN Messenger. My ‘lil sis wanted it installed to IM her friends. I had already set the default browser to Firefox (ofcourse). So why does MSN insist on bringing IE up? No excuses - its behaviour like this which keeps getting Microsoft in legal hotwater. They don’t need the hassle and neither do I.

Microsoft just relaunched some warmed over bits of MSN sporting a new AJAX UI. The design is pleasing and overall the site is well executed. MS may have been thinking about it for some time, but I’m sure Google helped concentrate minds

From this point onwards, Google’s job just got harder, and it will be increasingly hard to make headway in gmail, talk and news usage. I have long feared that Google is more fragile than it appears. Technical improvements are great but they come at an increasingly greater cost until the next paradigm. And the financials are ephemeral - the billions have come quickly, and could evaporate just as quickly. At this point, all Microsoft has to do is to copy Google, while relying on the usual cash cows. Google doesn’t have this luxury. I think that Google declared war too early - a touch of hubris I suspect. My fear is that 5 years from now Google will have faded from view, with most using IE and live/msn. Another win for One Microsoft Way. Ah well.

Incidentally, I don’t see the same happening to Yahoo, which was always more of a portal player then Google. Its popularity as a search engine will be eclipsed by msn but it will still be a destination for all the celeb gossip / lifestyle fodder.

The Google killers are here and here.

Scoble wants Microsoft to earn our trust but the according to the latest news, it is sure not the way to do it. From MS’s own slides and IHVs it is emerging that Microsoft is intentionally hobbling one API, Opengl to favour its own home grown DirectX. Apart from all the compatibility issues, that is not the way to treat your partners. Although, seeing the way its been treating its partners and ISVs recently, Microsoft doesn’t really seem to care anymore.

and I was hooked. I’ve had a Mac mini for the last couple of weeks and I love it. Tiger is so polished; its a wonderful experience after prosaic XP and workman-like Linux. Attention to detail, polished interface, etc all been said before and all true.

A word of warning to the Linux crowd: forget it on the desktop. Not until Linux standardizes on as polished, relatively lightweight (Gnome is bloated) desktop as OSX will it gain a chance. The polish in an OS rubs off on the applications made for it. Most Linux applications have inconsistent UIs made by programmers. Most Windows apps have decent UIs but the Apple apps I’ve tried so far are well designed. A simple comparison: most people use Mirc on Windows. The IRC client I use on the Mac is Conversation and the difference between the two is like that between night and day. I really should put screens shots up so that people appreciate the difference.

I’ve tried the betas of Vista and I like it: its more polished and tries harder at looking cool. It tries too hard: at every turn it asks for meta data and every feature has a cacaphony of options. Why does Microsoft have to over engineer everything? Why the 42 buttons when 6 are enough? Yes, I’m sure the gold version of Vista will be awesome/cool/etc as Scoble keeps promising. But I don’t think Apple will have stayed still either.

Dvorak complains that Apple garners more favourable press then Microsoft and Scoble noticed that a significant percentage, 60%, use Macs at the blogging conferences he attends. Isn’t it suggestive that the well-informed turn to Apple?

Yahoo thinks Google is the enemy. Yahoo is envious of Google coz, you know, Google is cool. Which it is. And Yahoo isn’t so, along with the other envious geek, decides to gang up on Google. Oh dear!

Google and Yahoo have around 35% and 30% of the search market with Microsoft struggling behind at 15%. Teaming up with MS may seem good at first, after all, getting those 35% would be nice. What Yahoo seems to have forgotten is that Microsoft is 95% on the desktop and that if Microsoft can kill Google, it can kill Yahoo just as easily. In other words, the long term strategic threat is not from Google at all, but from Microsoft. Microsoft can’t afford to let anyone else dominate search.

Yahoo should have allied with Google against Microsoft in the IM space and in whichever space is reasonable. Yahoo and Google need to build up momentum against Redmond because otherwise they will never be truly secure.