Blog posts tagged: microsoft

Everyone states that putting 2 companies together who are not leading will not take over the leader Google.

This is true, but only for search. Yahoo is a great company with a huge community that reaches much further than search. In many ways Yahoo beats Google, just not in search.

Most advertising money is spent on search. Even if Microsoft-Yahoo doesn't have the majority share of search, it doesn't matter. Aggregating both portals into the same advertising service, will simplify advertiser's management of their budget. It will also be a bigger market share, and so people will take more interest in advertising on Microsoft-Yahoo.

There exists a subset of users who advertise with Microsoft but not Yahoo. Likewise, there exists a subset of users who advertise with Yahoo, but not Microsoft. Putting Microsoft-Yahoo together will expand on both of these subsets of people, by broadening their advertising base.

It is a great move by Microsoft in my opinion. That is, just as long as they can properly integrate the parts of the company that should be integrated. For now, phase 1, this should only be the advertising portal.

Apple not licensing its OS to other hardware vendors, gives Apple a big advantage overall.

Anytime there is any type of hardware upgrade, Apple gets the credit (and traffic/hits/sales). When a new processor gets released by Intel (for example today's 8-core release), Microsoft will not get any new traffic from it; However, Apple will get millions of unique hits (once they release it) because of the hardware release.

The other good part, is that Apple can guarantee that anyone that has an Apple, has a good reliable, fast, non-sluggish experience. With Microsoft, they can't guarantee this since Windows runs on any PC hardware which is not sold by Microsoft.

It took Microsoft 5 years to finally release version 7 of IE.

Internet Explorer 7 has no original ideas and it is largely just copying Firefox and Opera's features. It is an improvement from version 6.0, but I'm largely disappointed overall.

You would think that a company like Microsoft would have support for emerging standards like SVG. SVG is the acronym for Scalable Vector Graphics. I remember reading the SVG recommendation which was created by the W3C almost 6 years ago. I knew that although browsers didn't have built in support for SVG, that eventually they would.

Today I see firefox and others with built in support. Microsoft decided that this extremely important technology should not be included.

Had IE7 included SVG support, the internet would be a different, better place. Microsoft has ruined that, and as usual they have shown us just how little they care bout web standards.

Does your browser support SVG? If you can't see this than go get firefox here

Note that you can get SVG plug-ins from Corel Corporation and Adobe, but IE should have included built in support for it. Maybe adobe paid them off so that SVG wouldn't be a competitor to Flash and Microsoft's newer crappier similar product to flash.

I was going to write about when people started to hate Microsoft, but I came across something more interesting... the supposed reason why people hate Microsoft.

Many people say that one of the main reasons people don't like Microsoft is because of the size of their dominance. "People simply don?t like big monopolies". On the contrary though, Apple's iPod owns a huge amount of market share for digital audio and video players, yet they are still absolutely loved by almost all. Many people find it exciting that they are so big.

I believe that it's because of perfection. Microsoft can't be bothered with perfection. Instead they focus on copying the latest features, and getting something out the door. The focus on simplicity and elegance, is simply not there. With Apple the ease of use is there, the perfection is there, the focus on usability is there. I don't believe the people who work at Microsoft want to build the best thing possible. I don't believe they are inspired to do so. I don't believe they have the drive to. I believe that the employees want to get their job done, and that's it. At companies like Apple or Google, the employee's goal is to create something great, something perfect, something that has a great ease of use. And that's why we love them.

One example that comes to mind: When Microsoft launched their Live search, it was supposed to be a Google killer :)... you couldn't middle click on links to open them in a new tab. Did Microsoft not care that just about every Firefox user uses this in their everyday use? The quality is just never there with Microsoft. It took them years to realize that tabs give a superior ease of use and that people that browse everyday can save a considerable amount of time by using Firefox. Microsoft's lack of simplicity and usability is why I personally don't like Microsoft. They don't try to make things usable. They try to make them for idiots.

One final reason that could have a lot of effect is that Apple doesn't disclose what it is releasing and when they are releasing it until it is ready (most of the time). Microsoft always disappoints all of their customer base.

Yahoo! and MSN, along with others in the search market, had the chance to buy youTube, but they let Google scoop it up for the small amount of 1.65 billion. Just another example of Google being a great company, they seen that video is becoming a huge part of the Internet and the Internet's future, and they decided to become #1 at it by buying youTube. iTV by apple is coming out first quarter of 2007, and i would bet that this has a lot to do with Google. Live streaming from Google's youTube to iTV? I think so...