Category Archives: Microsoft

Tupperware 2.0

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This morning’s Observer column.

SOMEWHERE IN your email inbox last week you may have received from an acquaintance an invitation to a “Windows 7 Launch Party” scheduled for some time in the next 10 days. Do not be offended by this unsolicited and impertinent communication. Look at it in a positive light. The person who sent it meant no harm. He or she is offering you an opportunity to participate in an exciting new way of selling operating-system software. Its secret codename is ‘Tupperware 2.0’….

NYT discovers Tablet PC

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Yep. Here’s the evidence.

SAN FRANCISCO — The high-tech industry has been working itself into paroxysms of excitement lately over an idea that is not exactly new: tablet computers.

Quietly, several high-tech companies are lining up to deliver versions of these keyboard-free, touch-screen portable machines in the next few months. Industry watchers have their eye on Apple in particular to sell such a device by early next year.

Tablets have been around in various forms for two decades, thus far delivering little other than memorable failure. Nonetheless, the new batch of devices has gripped the imagination of tech executives, bloggers and gadget hounds, who are projecting their wildest dreams onto these literal blank slates.

In these visions, tablets will save the newspaper and book publishing industries, present another way to watch television and movies, play video games, and offer a visually rich way to enjoy the Web and the expanding world of mobile applications.

“Desktops, laptops — we already know how those work,” said Brian Lam, editorial director of the popular gadget site Gizmodo, which reports and hypothesizes almost daily about these devices. Tablets, he said, “are one of the last few mysteries left.”

The Holy Grail

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This morning’s Observer column.

The quest for the Holy Grail is generally regarded as a preoccupation of those of a religious or mystical bent. But in fact the community which suffers most from Holy Grail Syndrome is made up of geeks and early adopters who would never be seen within a mile of an altar.

For Christians, the Grail is the cup, plate or dish supposedly used by Jesus at the last Supper. For the computing community it is the Tablet, a slim, lightweight device which combines significant computing power with the convenience of a paper notebook. And sightings – or rumours – of the mythical device provoke the kind of delicious excitement so masterfully exploited by the novelist Dan Brown.

We had such a sighting last week…

Microsoft’s next Big Thing: visual search

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From VentureBeat.

Microsoft continues its attempt to unseat Google as the king of search. Today, someone from the team behind its Bing search engine took the stage at the TechCrunch50 conference in San Francisco to announce the latest feature: Visual search.

The most obvious way to use visual search is when you’re shopping for products. So if you want to buy a new handbag, you could look at images of thousands of handbags in Bing, scroll through them quickly, and narrow down your search based on brand, price, and other attributes. Unusually for Microsoft, the user experience is actually quite impressive, with the image results and the transition between search pages providing some nice eye-candy. It’s certainly a much flashier experience than Google Image Search. Bing Visual Search is supposed to be live any second now, so you can see it for yourself.

Now you see it, now you don’t.

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This morning’s Observer column about the power that Google now wields.

Most of the time we don’t think about this because the company provides such a useful service to the average web user. But if you look at it from the point of view of someone who runs an online business then you get a very different perspective. In The Search, an excellent book about Google, John Battell tells a story that illustrates this perfectly.

It concerns a small entrepreneur called Neil Montcrief, who in 2000 founded a small e-commerce business (2bigfeet.com) selling outsize shoes on the net. For a time, the business was modestly prosperous because of the traffic Google drove to Montcrief’s site. By the middle of 2003 he was shifting $40,000 of big shoes a month.

“And then, one day in November of that year, everything changed. Traffic to his site shrivelled, cash flow plummeted and Montcrief fell late on his loan payments. He began avoiding the UPS man, because he couldn’t pay the bill. His family life deteriorated. And, as far as Montcrief could tell, it was all Google’s fault.”

In a sense, it was. But Google had not targeted him: the vaporisation of his little business turned out to be just collateral damage in the ceaseless war between Google and the armies of people who try to ‘game’ its search results…

Facebook, Friendfeed and, er, Google (of course)

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This morning’s Observer column.

Google’s page-rank search technology is good, but it’s still pretty primitive – try looking for a hotel in rural France or a plumber in any UK town. You could say that search is about 5% solved, with 3% of that down to Google. With 95% still to do, many people think the next advances will come from adding social or collaborative dimensions to pure computational algorithms.

Which is where social networking comes in…

What Microsoft really thinks of Linux

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Well, what it told the Securities and Exchange Commission in its annual 10-K filing.

“Client faces strong competition from well-established companies with differing approaches to the PC market. Competing commercial software products, including variants of Unix, are supplied by competitors such as Apple, Canonical, and Red Hat.”

Translation: Microsoft for the first time acknowledges Linux as a serious competitor to Windows, especially on netbooks.

Thanks to Good Morning Silicon Valley for spotting it.

Schmidt finally ends conflict of interest. War now starts in earnest.

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From BBC NEWS.

The resignation of Google’s Eric Schmidt as a director of Apple’s board has failed to halt a government inquiry into possible antitrust violations.

Mr Schmidt stepped down because the search giant’s business increasingly competes with Apple’s.

The Google CEO recused himself when Apple’s board discussed the iPhone.

In a statement the Federal Trades Commission said “we will continue to investigate remaining interlocking directorates between the companies”.

And the NYT reminds us that Google and Apple still have one other Board member in common — Arthur Levinson, the chairman of Genentech.

So now instead of having Google+Apple vs. Microsoft we will have Google vs. Apple vs. Microsoft+Yahoo.

There ought to be a board game in this somewhere.

Round Three

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From Jason Calcanis:

And so ends the second chapter of search and begins the third.

Chapter one was inception up until the launch of Google.

Chapter two was Google’s rise and Yahoo’s death.

Chapter three will be the two-horse race of Microsoft and Google, with
the inevitable emergence of a third and fourth player.

That’s the silver lining for startups in all of this. As Google and
Microsoft lock into a dog fight for revenue and market share, leaving
the Yahoo carcass on the side of the road, the bevy of crafty startups
will get their chance to take the third, fourth and fifth positions in
this very important race.

The lesson for all startups–and BDC’s (big dumb companies)–is that
innovation is all you have. Once you stop innovating you lose your
talent and you lose the race. Never. Stop. Innovating. Never. Never.
Never.

Yup. Yahoo blew it.