With the launch of Bing this week, a new search service arrived to take on Google. And, unlike other small challengers, since Bing is from Microsoft, it actually has the potential to stick around long enough to make some inroads on Google.
But how is Bing as a search engine. Since it launched on Monday, I've been using Bing heavily for nearly all of my Internet search needs. And so far, I like much of what Microsoft is doing here.
In general, Bing is more attractive than Google and has a lot of nice interactive touches. Once you've entered a search, the results page in Bing provides a variety of information.
The release this week of the Wolfram|Alpha computational knowledge engine has gotten a lot of attention from the media and Web pundits, and, strangely, lots of these people have gotten Wolfram|Alpha completely wrong.
The most common thing that people say about Wolfram|Alpha is that it is a potential competitor to Google. But Wolfram|Alpha is no more of a competitor to Google than their core Mathematica application is (or for that matter than your corporate sales database is).
First off, Wolfram|Alpha doesn't search the Web. It searches a controlled knowledge database that Wolfram maintains and is constantly updating. And most of the ways that people would use Wolfram|Alpha are different from how one would use a search engine like Google. But I guess because Wolfram|Alpha looks like a search site, some people just can't get over that.
With the Microsoft earnings report this week, the big news was the first ever year-over-year decline in quarterly revenue for the software giant.
But to me the interesting news in the report was the fact that the company's servers and tools unit surpassed the client unit (which includes the Windows OS) to become the biggest profit area for Microsoft. Servers and tools was also the only unit to post a revenue gain over the same quarter last year.
With mergers and company failures regularly in the news, the amount of healthy competition in the technology world is clearly decreasing. This, of course, means that more companies will gain a monopoly in their markets.
This got me thinking about monopolies in general and the companies that are typically seen as monopolists in the technology arena. Just which tech companies are true monopolists, and which ones fall short of being a monopoly?
My dictionary defines a monopoly as "exclusive ownership through legal privilege, command of suppy, or concerted action, exclusive possession or control, a commodity controlled by on party, one that has a monopoly".
Is the devil you know—and expect—better than the one you don't?
Consider this: You run into person No. 1—let's call her Melissa—on the street. Without warning, Melissa hits you in the face and then proceeds to beat you up as you lie on the ground.
Then, person No. 2, Michelangelo, walks up to you and calmly states that in two weeks time, at exactly 2 p.m., he will beat you up. Then he walks away.
Now, while neither is a pleasant scenario, I have a feeling that the majority of people would rather run into Michelangelo than Melissa.
Click here to see the slideshow While the varying parties in the operating system wars like to tout the advantages that each OS holds over its rivals, all of them share one thing in common. Whether it's Linux, Mac OS X or Windows, none of them are particularly quick about booting up, especially if one is using older hardware.
In fact, along with size and price, one the main attractions of Linux-based netbooks is their ability to turn on and boot up fast, letting their users get to work checking mail and browsing the web in seconds. So an operating system option that provided close to instant-on capabilities for any laptop or desktop could be an attractive option for many people.
This is the idea behind Presto, a new beta product from Linux vendor Xandros. When installed on a system, Presto gives users the option to quickly boot into a lightweight netbook style operating system that provides access to core applications such as web browsers, chat tools, and productivity applications.
According to a recent series of tests done by Microsoft, Internet Explorer 8 is the fastest browser available today. Of course, it doesn't take a lot of searching to find similar studies claiming that Google Chrome or Firefox or Safari or Opera or WebKit is the fastest browser available today.
So what do I think about all of these "fastest browser" tests? Which do I think is the most valid? Well, in the immortal words of Bill Murray in Meatballs, "It just doesn't matter!"
Click here to see screenshots When it comes to demoing a new piece of software, training users on a new application or teaching employees how to follow a business process, there's no substitute for showing them how to do these things directly.
But it isn't always feasible to be face to face in all of these situations. So the next best thing is to be able to create a video of how to use an application, Web service or process and make that available to anyone who needs to see it.
There have long been products, such as Adobe Captivate and Camtasia, that can capture a recording of an application session, record voiceovers, and add educational icons and directions to videos that can then be distributed to anyone who needs them. But these products aren't inexpensive and, since they are geared toward high-end training and testing, can be a little too complex for staff just looking to make a quick application recording.
My colleague Joe Wilcox recently posted on the Microsoft Watch blog an interesting article entitled "The Problem with Netbooks". In this article he puts forth a compelling argument why netbooks won't last as a significant segment and will become subsumed into laptops or disappear altogether.
If I had read Joe's article a week before he posted it I probably would have agreed with nearly all of his arguments. But after traveling to DEMO 09 and getting a firsthand look at how many people are using netbooks, my opinions on the category have changed a bit.
Xandros has long been a major player when it comes to taking Linux and open source technologies and making them easy for non-techie people to use. With Presto, they are taking a stealth approach to work with Windows systems but to make it more attractive to boot into Presto as opposed to Windows.
