Entries from December 2006

December 11, 2006

Scoble on FrontPage

Scoble comments on FrontPage: “The thing that really killed FrontPage? Microsoft’s marketing team tested the name on a range of developers and Web designers/builders. They all derided it. The marketers learned there was no way they were going to be able to continue with the FrontPage brand. So they killed the brand. Does the code [...]

December 10, 2006

New Jon Udell blog

I just saw that Jon is going to start blogging here for a while as he makes the transition to Microsoft. Subscribed.

December 10, 2006

Issues with Toshiba bios updates for Vista?

Robert McLaws: If you’re running Vista RTM on a Toshiba Tecra M4, DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES upgrade your BIOS to either interim version 2.01 or the currently-released 3.1. Both versions are poorly designed, and will cause a catastrophic crash of the video card if you try to bring the system back from a reduced-power state. [...]

December 10, 2006

Vista- the end of an era?

Is Vista the end of an era? Probably so in many respects. There is an interesting thread on Slashdot covering this topic. The commenters focus much more on the speed of change in computing and the Internet rather than just the Windows OS itself, which obviously needs to change as the computing paradigm does the same. [...]

December 10, 2006

O’Reilly on Web 2.0 lock-in

Tim O’Reilly: “Chief among the future sources of lock in and competitive advantage will be data, whether through increasing returns from user-generated data (eBay, Amazon reviews, audioscrobbler info in last.fm, email/IM/phone traffic data as soon as someone who owns a lot of that data figures out that’s how to use it to enable social networking [...]

December 10, 2006

Overrating Simplicity

Don Norman of jnd.org: “Marketing rules – as it should, for a company that ignores marketing is a company soon out of business. Marketing experts know that purchase decisions are influenced by feature lists, even if the buyers realize they will probably never use most of the features. Even if the features confuse more than [...]

December 10, 2006

“Microsoft makes a Basic mistake with Office 2007″

Rob Griffiths in MacWorld: “Dropping support for Visual Basic scripting makes Office suite DOA”
For more information on this, there’s an interesting post from Erik Schwiebert who works in the MacBU.

December 10, 2006

New header graphic

My new header graphic is a panorama taken on the Apollo 17 mission. Check it out.

December 10, 2006

Microsoft DVR supporting targeted ads?

Engadget: Microsoft patents DVR application to provide targeted advertising

December 10, 2006

Thoughts on Zune Royalties

Stephen Levy: A Universally Bad Idea