Now Microsoft Wants To Be In The Advertising Business Because Google Is In The Advertising Business.Or How I Woke Up To Realize That Googles PW3NES Me November 15, 2007
Posted by Mark Blei in : Uncategorized , trackbackBy Mark BleiMicrosoft wants to be in the advertising business because Google is in the advertising business. Meanwhile, it can’t do its real job.
Thats the part of John Dvorak’s latest post on PC magazine’s website that grabbed hold of me. How much suckage are we forced to take from Microsoft’s bureau of paranoia before we start to demand better service from our providers? And are we in fact on the Vista Death Watch ?
I or anyone who had the experience of buying a PC when Microsoft ME (or as it’s better known “The Mistake Version“) was the standard OS that was coming with new computers would say yes, and gladly.
Bitter me? Why yes I am thanks- I still recall the glee I had when buying my first real powerhouse PC with what was in 2000 was mind crushing speed and more Gigs of space then any human could ever conceive of using ( that would be all of 46 gigs, with my current Itunes collection in 2007 now at a conservative 270 gigs, ). I now have USB disks with more gigs then that original computer but when I bought it she was the dream system of any Griefer Gamer, Troll, or your average PC nerd. Imagine my horror when I took this other-worldy PC (which I think was also the first time I ever spent more then $50 online ) out of its box to find that the OS on it was a horrible mess of bad reg codes, wizards that popped for no reason, drives that would never see a full defrag and and Genuine ME identification codes that Microsoft wouldn’t accept as valid.
Microsoft ME has the distinction of being the cause of first time I was ever happy to get a Dell product that failed to work out of the box. Why? Because it gave me the opportunity to beg and plead with the folks at Dell to “downgrade” me to Windows 2000, which they did and for which I’m very grateful and which worked fine on my computer for near 7 years without ever giving me a BSOD notice and made me a Dell loyal customer to this day. By the way, I’m still using that box today and have XP on it so my kids can play the latest Sims. Part of me still wants to go and toss off XP and reinstall the Win2K on that system ..just in case.
Anyway, the benefit of Dell granting me the favor of “downgrading” me to the most stable version of Windows ever produced meant that by the time I was forced to buy a new box and move to XP, XP had time to get through it’s growing pains and I did not have to go through the pre-security package nonsense. If you ask me Vista is and should be another doomed MS product.
Quoting Dvorak
So what went wrong with Vista in the first place? Let’s start off with the elephant in the room. The product was overpriced from the outset. Why was it so expensive? What was special about it? All the cool and promised features of the original vision of Longhorn were gutted simply because it was beyond Microsoft’s capability to implement those features.
This failure to deliver what was promised—even after several delays in the product’s release, by the way—did nothing to excite anyone. It made the company look bad. It directly resulted in a no-confidence vote that was manifested in a lackluster reception and low sales. Microsoft should have scrapped the project two years ago and instead patched XP until it could deliver something hot.
To make things worse, there are too many versions. Exactly what is the point of that? Don’t we all just want Vista Ultimate? The other versions seem like a way to maybe save money for some users who cannot afford to get the real thing. You can be certain this version glut results only in complaints about what each variation is missing.
Microsoft’s initial approach to marketing this turkey was obviously going to be to put it on just new machines, which would eventually saturate the market, but the PC manufacturers squawked and demanded the continuation of XP sales. Though there is some chatter about how Linux could use this lull in the Microsoft juggernaut to make some real headway onto the desktop, this is unlikely to happen. But Microsoft, with all its paranoid thinking, might have believed it to be possible. So XP is still with us and will be until deep into next year.
I should mention here that much of this mess, I strongly believe, is due to Microsoft’s recent obsession with Google and online search. Now Microsoft wants to be in the advertising business because Google is in the advertising business. Meanwhile, it can’t do its real job
Read the rest of this great article HERE.
And while we’re on the subject of The Microsoft Google Cluster…
Google managed apparently to slip one by almost the entire universe the other day when they rolled out IMAP support on their popular mail product. Do not mistake me IMAP is not in and of itself a bad thing. The roll-out however happened in such a way that many of us found out that Imap was a supported system when for many of us our gmail stopped downloading from the POP Interface and was suddenly defaulted to the IMAP supported one. It was weird..I woke up yesterday morning to discover that 2 of my gmail accounts stopped popping,gmail which was up until yesterday actually my most dependable service provider and suddenly started working with all the grace of Joe Cocker after a Brain embolism . They all stopped forwarding, and they all were on the newer version.
IMAP is great but creates an issue if you work with more than one account that is POP oriented. I have two primary accounts that I use and then some sub-accounts that I use for subscriptions, blogs etc..I have many accounts that I own through Godaddy that POP, and suddenly two of my three gmail accounts decide they don’t like POPing anymore and want to be an IMAP account.
The havoc that this creates is when you’re trying to view both POP and IMAP mail. Outlook or at least the 2003 version of it that I use won’t allow you to view them both or mix the inboxes, so you end up having to tab through both the accounts which if you don’t remember to do can get you into some trouble.
Gmail is supposedly offering to allow people to use the old POP supported system but I spent most of last night trying to get that to work after deciding that the IMAP migration was one I would prefer to avoid. Eventually Gmail agreed to start popping again , after I downloaded the GMail Pop Troubleshooter application which kindly caused my Outlook to have a seizure and took an hour to rebuild itself, and at last update of this post which was updated at 3:00PM the last two hurdles to getting popping back was two updates from Microsoft that caused my Genuine Advantage Validation thingy to die, and then as a last kiss before giving me back control of my system Gmail insisted on re-downloading every email I have ever gotten on this machine duplicated 27 times. Thats 6000 emails times a factor of 27 bringing my total deletions by the end which I mercifully hope will be today (because gmail is where I have my work email forwarded to when I’m not in the office in New York and I’m not in NY much these days) to a modest 162,000 em
ails, which is more than enough to kill Outlook permanently if I’m not fast on the delete.
It seems to me that in the end Google’s going to make it hard for you not to IMAP .It’s supposedly part of their new Social Networking strategy (I’ll simply be happy if this new network doesn’t argue with me in Portuguese, about why my countries politics are flawed anymore). Hey man , you don’t have to tell me why my country is flawed. I’m married to a Canadian- if I want to hear about why my country is so flawed I only have to sit down for dinner.
Regardless, I prefer more choice in my Gmail but this is what you get when you buy into free unlimited email.
Remember, with Gmail you’re not a Google customer, you’re using a free Google product under their terms and they own you. For those of you who are dependent on a gmail free account for your primary email the question is- are you ready to migrate all those accounts you have spread through the web and are now your primary account because Google wants you to IMAP and you want to POP?
I just want to add that the irony is not lost on me that as I write this Fear Of a Black Planet started kicking on my Itunes ( it’s 5Am on a Thursday, what did you expect Chopin?) I remember all the discussions about possible theories of what life would be like under the rule of our new Google overlords . Should we be in Fear of a Google Planet? Frankly I’m more afraid of a Microsoft based planet OS then a Google one. At least a Google world would be more secure and Google doesn’t yet seem like they aim to lay claim to any of my media rights, and that’s certainly been an issue with Vista as well . I suppose all except the media which I get from YouTube or Google Video but I don’t view those as mine really- it’s theirs for as long as they choose to lend it to me.
So now the question I ask is -Can the brand that is you withstand an email address change? 10 years ago that question would have been a joke but now it’s a deadly serious question . So what is your answer…are you going to change your primary email address or are you going to learn to IMAP?
Thats right baby- we are all PW3ND by Google and we walked right into it, so you might as well just roll with it because if you are at all Gmail reliant you are already on the train .
This posting is a personal opinion article by Mark Blei who is in International Business Development for Dynamic Logic Inc and the author of this blog. None of the content of this article is meant to be an opinion of Dynamic Logic, It’s parent company Millward Brown or anybody but the writer.
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