everwas

a blog by Ian Kennedy

Tag: Microsoft

  • Microsoft, Longhorn, and RSS

    Lots of buzz around Microsoft’s announcement that they are going to bake RSS into the next generation of Windows, Longhorn. If you’ve got the time, I highly recommend you sit through the MSDN Channel 9 video interview with the Longhorn/RSS team taken the day before their announcement at Gnomedex. You can feel the energy and excitement coming out of Redmond.

    The video includes a demo of IE 7 and a hacked version of RSS Bandit on Longhorn that shows:

    • autodiscovery (no need to hunt for the little orange chicklet)
    • adding a feed populates a common list of feeds that can be shared by all Longhorn apps
    • Calendar support for RSS feeds of events (click to subscribe to events in Outlook)
    • <treat as> and <sort by> collaboration with Amazon to handle lists
    • adding feed of photoblogs to make a screensaver

    More details and pointers on MSDN. RSS Everywhere!

  • Microsoft RSS Reader, Start.com

    I first heard about this from Richard MacManus’ Read/Write Web and only now am getting a chance to play around with it. The server-based reader is part of Microsoft’s experimental sandbox area and there are two versions posted. One is a web-based RSS reader and the other is an online bookmarks list. Unless I’m missing something, there’s nothing to earth shattering here. The reader doesn’t let you search or profile against any of the feeds and the bookmarks, once you upload them (via an ActiveX control), are there to stay.

    I’m sure all this stuff will get worked out so when you try things like overwriting your bookmarks by uploading another version the browser won’t crash. It’s still the sandbox. What is more interesting is that this is the clearest indication yet that Microsoft views RSS as an integral part of any portal. It’s right there next to the Search tab so it’s only a matter of time before they extend Search to RSS feeds. Likewise with the bookmarks, the next logical step is to extend what’s on the page out to others in the MSN network as is done in de.licio.us.

    I smile when I see that it’s called these efforts two flavors of a Start Page. I have a bit of a history with this moniker as I spent many long hours debating what to call a revolutionary new section of the Factiva.com product and we ended up calling it the very same thing, the Start Page.

  • Microsoft to Acquire Groove Networks, Ray Ozzie Will Join Microsoft as New CTO

    Wow. This news took me totally by surprise. Groove is peer-to-peer collaboration software developed by the creator of Lotus Notes. What does this mean for the future of Microsoft Sharepoint?

    “Peer-to-peer collaboration solutions through Groove’s Virtual Office, which let any Windows-based PC user instantly create. ad-hoc, virtual work spaces that securely and easily span organizational, geographic and network boundaries, and allow information workers to be productive whether they’re online or temporarily disconnected from the network.”

    This doesn’t sound like the Microsoft I know. Cool!

  • Microsoft AntiSpyware

    James LaLonde, who used left Microsoft to work for Network Associates as the head of their operations in Asia, used to joke that his business was safe so long as Redmond stayed out of the anti-virus business. With all the  hubaloo over securtiy and spam, Microsoft announced plans to address it in the recent Windows XP Service Pack update and the Internet explorer browser this Summer.

    Now we see two new standalone downloads that specifically address spyware and "malicious code" which is the boldest sign that Microsoft getting into the anti-virus market.

    Malicious Software Removal Tool (sounds like a dentist’s instrument)

    AntiSpyware (click on thumbnail for screenshot)

  • Internet Explorer Update this Summer

    Microsoft announced that it will be updating their Internet Explorer browser which hasn’t had a major upgrade since they announced 6.x back in 2002. The news was greated warmly by most users commenting on the MSDN IE blog with many asking for advanced CSS, PNG, and XHTML support while others ask for features such as Tabs or integrated Popup Blockers, Microsoft is touting this release as focused on fixing security & phishing exploits.

    One thing left off the request list, and pointed out by some, is integrated Search which I personally make extensive use of in my instance of Firefox. I regularly use the Google, Amazon, and Dictionary plugins and have also installed the Wikipedia and Creative Commons plugins which come in handy. Are they leaving this out just to keep Google and Yahoo guessing?

    The release will be made available to XP Service Pack 2 subscribers and later rolled out with their Longhorn OS upgrade. Another nail in the coffin for any Windows 2000 users out there.

  • IBM

    There is a very interesting theory about why IBM shed their vaunted ThinkPad & PC hardware division to China’s Lenovo. Attributed to the Petrov Group, in a Business 2.0 article, the theory is that IBM would use it’s partnership (IBM still owns a percentage of Lenovo) to enter the China market with a low cost, Linux-based PC platform.

    As Petrov puts it, China “is a command economy and is price sensitive.” It is also projected to surpass the United States as the biggest PC market by 2010. In fact, in that year, the Chinese are expected to buy 180 million PCs, while the developed world will buy 150 million. If IBM, through its new partner Lenovo, could establish cheap Linux desktops as an acceptable alternative to Windows machines in China alone, it would cut Microsoft’s cash flow from a much-needed growth market. At the same time, it would teach a new generation of IT managers in China that since Windows isn’t a necessity, Microsoft products aren’t needed on servers either. (Subtext: Buy IBM.)

    If this is indeed the scenario that folks in Armonk have dreamed up, it’s absolutely brilliant.

  • MSN Desktop Search

    I can barely keep up! On Monday, MSN announced the beta of their Desktop search toolbar. At first glance it appears to be the re-branded version of Lookout, the desktop search tool that was purchased back in July. MSN is calling it a “suite” which kind of goes against the popular thinking of these tools as a unified, all-in-one, search utility.

    A couple of comments after playing around with it:

    • doesn’t support indexing of .pst files. Although there is a file tree in which you can specify folders you want included in the crawl, for some reason the default folder where the Outlook Archive files are stored is hidden.
    • doesn’t index the browser cache – a feature that freaked a lot of people out at first when Google Desktop Search launched but was later appreciated. Bonus points to the first Mircrosoft competitor  (Google or Yahoo) that adds Firefox cache to the index crawl.
    • doesn’t allow you to drill down to exclude specific Outlook folders from the crawl. This is a problem for anyone using add-ins such as SpamBayes to manage their junk mail. You certainly don’t want junk mail in a search index.

    Reading through the comments on the MSN Search blog, Scoble mentions that that the Lookout code was completely re-written from scratch. I wonder what they changed?

    My main nit is that now they’ve integrated search results under the Microsoft umbrella, it would be great to add drag and drop so that you can pull things out of the results window into specific folders either in Outlook or the File Manager.

  • MSN Spaces

    I’ve been staying up late playing around with Microsoft’s new blogging tool, MSN Spaces. Some pretty neat stuff that should be the buzz of the blogging world tomorrow so I’ve got to bone up.

    Here’s My Space if you want to see it.

    And let’s see what a trackback looks like by sending my Firefox post a ping.

  • The end of media as we know it

    The end of media as we know it

    The creepy tone of the background music sets the stage for this look back at the demise of traditional media as we know it from the perspective of 2014. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Friendster and the trend towards personalized and automated filters to help manage information flow pull down the Fourth Estate.

    “The New York Times becomes a print-only newsletter for the elderly and elite.”

    The ending leaves me cold. Watch the developments over at Pegasus News as they build an alternative to this algorithmic nightmare.