Why Microsoft *could* have taken over the Internet

Posted by multippt

Microsoft’s monopoly of the PC market can be depicted by this phrase: “All your computers are belong to us”. Microsoft has the ability to take over a market at its discretion - talk about the endless potential of money. Well it has the ability, but so far used a fraction of it on a few of it’s strengths.

Microsoft? Take over the Internet?

If Microsoft managed to nearly take over the browser market (in the process completely eradicating some of its rivals), why not the Internet? Taking over the browsers market is one step for Microsoft’s empire manipulation of the Internet - after all, to even use the net, you need an Internet browser right? Quality is not a choice, Internet Explorer was and is “bad” but people had to use it, maybe until the advent of Firefox. So, if step one was the browser market, what is step 2? Right, the Internet. Currently, the Internet is governed by the top 10, the most prominent ones are Yahoo and Google. Where does Microsoft come in? It’s still in top 10, but the top 2 are the ones who command the others, and have the ability to bend webmasters and Internet surfers to their will.

Why Microsoft could have taken over the Internet
 

1. Microsoft ain’t trying hard enough

Great! Now that Microsoft has its very own search engine, it might be able to compete with Google and Yahoo right? Wrong! Yahoo and Google are superior to Live search, simply because they are superior. Microsoft didn’t have a chance - poor marketing of Live search is a path to its demise. In addition, Microsoft doesn’t disclose a little how it’s search engine influence results so webmasters had trouble getting their sites to work well for the poor crawler (as usual, Microsoft’s proprietary work rarely gets disclosed). Money is not a problem for big Microsoft. After all, isn’t Microsoft’s earnings 9 times that of Yahoo?

2. Microsoft didn’t buy Yahoo

Yahoo is a big company. Microsoft is a behemoth. Microsoft can buy Yahoo if it wishes to, and if it did, part of the Internet will be almost in the direct control of Microsoft (or at least Microsoft has a say in it). Fortunately or unfortunately, Microsoft has no plans to buy Yahoo over. Besides, even if it did, Microsoft will be considered as attempting to monopolize the Internet (Microsoft was fined for attempting to monopolize the software market; particularly OSes, Internet browsers and music players). By acquiring Yahoo, Microsoft will be near invincible and is a direct rival to Google, that is if Microsoft didn’t screw anything up.

3. Microsoft didn’t buy Google

Google is the top Internet giant. Never mind Alexa, Google is the top - considering it’s successful sites and massive buy-overs of super sites like Youtube and Feedburner. If Microsoft acquired Google, the Internet is Microsoft’s. Well, that is “if”.

4. Microsoft didn’t support open-source

If Microsoft were to bribe support open source projects like Firefox, it may actually help Microsoft in the long run. Google for example arranged a deal to make the homepage of Firefox point to Google, thereby directly increasing Google’s popularity. If Microsoft were to do that (which is now too late of course), Live search will get a boost in user base.

5. Microsoft didn’t made Live search earlier

Being a pioneer has its advantages. Microsoft decided to make Live search (known as MSN search in 1999) much later. Again, back to point #1, Microsoft didn’t try hard enough, so MSN search lagged way behind Yahoo. Moving to Live search did give it all the hype, but Live search is treated as simply an alternative search engine rather than a main one. By making it much later, Microsoft could not implement it as a home page on it’s browsers during its peak (remember: Microsoft almost took over the browser market for a while). If it did, Microsoft had a huge advantage. Microsoft only implemented Live search as the homepage a little too late, which by then most Internet users have become loyal to Yahoo and Google.

Windows Live search: No longer indexing Google ads

Posted by multippt

Whew, sounds like Microsoft didn’t anticipate that it’s own crawler will be indexing Google AdWords ads. And no, don’t get the idea that it will help just because your ad link “gets more exposure” (oh wait, it does help). It’s pretty interesting to note that even those ads can rank up fairly well for certain terms.

The problem is this: In an attempt to increase the relevancy of the search results, Live search now includes links pointing towards pages blocked by even robot.txt files (well, it only told it to not crawl the page, but didn’t tell it to not count the stuff inside the links pointing to the page). Again, it shows that Microsoft ain’t following the robot rules completely, because those ads are only present in Google search results, which are disallowed to be indexed by the robot.txt file. Let’s hope other ads won’t pop up as well. Though, this wasn’t the first time it has happened before… :)

Well, at least those ads stopped appearing in the results for now.

Google, Yahoo,… what about Windows Live?

Posted by multippt

Google and Yahoo has always remained in the big picture. However, there is one big giant standing in the shadows. Windows Live is probably much better compared to its older precursor, MSN search, and is possibly comparable to the 2 top giants.

Though, Windows Live was not as well-known compared to Google and Yahoo. Rather than word-of-mouth, Microsoft decided to incorporate it into Internet Explorer 7 as the default search engine, which probably did not work as well as compared to Internet Explorer dominance in 2002.

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Windows service packs release dates

Posted by multippt

It’s great to know that Microsoft is going to release service packs every now and then. These service packs add bug fixes that would ruin anyone’s experience at Microsoft’s products should they come out Here are some preliminary dates mentioned by Microsoft.

Prior to Windows 2000: No longer supported, so no updates.
Windows 2000: No planned updates.
Windows XP: Currently at SP2. SP3 update scheduled at first half of 2008. Annouced on 2006. Beta available to some.
Windows Vista: SP1 update scheduled at first quarter of 2008. Beta available to some.

Microsoft aims to make Xbox more family-friendly

Posted by signup

Microsoft on Wednesday showed off a new Xbox feature that will allow parents to set the amount of time that kids can play games.

The move is part of the company’s effort to broaden the reach of the Xbox 360 to include more families. The company also recently introduced a lower-priced Xbox 360 Arcade model that skips a hard drive, but includes a handful of casual games like Pac-Man and Uno. Microsoft is also working to expand its Viva Pinata title into a franchise of products aimed at younger kids.

“All of those things are starting to make Xbox a much broader gaming world than it was even six months ago,” Robbie Bach, president of Microsoft’s Entertainment and Devices unit said in an interview.

The move comes ahead of an important holiday selling season, with consoles from Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft all now in volume production. Nintendo’s Wii has been the surprise hit, but Sony has dropped the price of the PlayStation 3 and Microsoft is counting on Halo 3 and other titles to help boost its holiday sales.

Bach said the ability to set time limits on children’s gaming should help parents feel more comfortable with having a game console in the house.

“At the same time, I think it does more than just make people feel good,” Bach said. “I think when we talk to parents, when we talk to them about things that would matter to them as a purchase criteria, family settings in general certainly make the list, and time controls has been one of the things people have been talking about for a few years now.”

The new feature, which will be available in a few weeks, is also designed to be easy for parents who may not be as technologically savvy as their game-playing offspring. “It’s really, really easy,” Bach said. “You go to family settings. You go to timer. You say daily or weekly. You pick a number of hours and you are done.”

This is just one of a number of areas in which Microsoft is hoping to make the Xbox 360 attractive to a broader range of customers than its traditional base, which Bach noted tends to be older than those that use rival consoles, such as the Wii and the PlayStation 3. There’s work that can be done in terms of game development, improvements to the console, additions to its Xbox Live online gaming as well as new types of peripherals.

Another thing Microsoft needs to do, Bach said, is find more ways to make the console cheaper to produce. “That’s something we need to do over the life cycle to continue to make the business work,” he said, “so, over time (we can) bring down prices.”

Microsoft working to get Windows on XO laptops

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Microsoft has made progress in getting its Windows software to work on a low-cost laptop computer for poor children that currently runs on rival Linux software, an executive said on Thursday.

The world’s largest software company is now working to adapt a basic version of Windows XP so it is compatible with the nonprofit One Laptop Per Child Foundation’s small green- and-white XO laptop.

“We’re spending a non-trivial amount of money on it,” Microsoft Corporate Vice President Will Poole said in an interview on Thursday.

“We remain hopeful with our progress to date, we still have significant work ahead to finalize our analysis and testing processes,” he said. “At the end of the day, there’s no guarantees.”

The One Laptop per Child Foundation, a spin-off from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, plans to start producing the $188 machines in China next month and eventually manufacture millions a year for elementary school children in developing countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

The foundation is also selling the machines in the United States and Canada for $400 apiece through a fundraising campaign.

The laptops were designed specifically to run Linux programs. If the machines run only Linux, Microsoft will lose an opportunity to expose tens of millions of children worldwide to its Windows system.

“We’ve made progress,” Poole said.

If the foundation is able to meet its goal of producing millions of laptops for school children around the world and they are all loaded with Linux software, then they would end up being more comfortable with those programs than with Windows, said Wayan Vota, who publishes a blog that monitors the project.

“People will realize there is an alternative to Windows and they might like it better,” Vota said.

But the new laptop uses some technologies developed by the foundation that haven’t previously been used in personal computers, Poole said.

“We still have plenty of work to do in determining if the highly constrained performance, power, and memory in the first generation XO laptops will be compatible with Windows and popular Windows applications,” he added.

Originally dubbed the $100 laptop, which is the group’s target price for the machine, the XO features a string pulley to charge its battery, a keyboard that switches between languages, a digital video camera and wireless connectivity.

The laptop’s designer, Mary Lou Jepsen, said in an interview earlier this month she expects the price to drop in the first quarter of next year because prices of memory tend to fall dramatically during that period.

The computer requires just 2 watts of power compared with the typical laptop’s 30 to 40 watts and does away with hard drives, relying instead on flash memory and four USB ports to add memory devices.

The XO laptop’s component makers include Advanced Micro Devices and Marvell Technology Group. Software maker Red Hat helped develop the device. Quanta Computer will manufacture it.

The foundation will start taking orders for its Give 1 Get 1 campaign on November 12 at laptopgiving.org.

PHP + IIS7 = Memory leak

Posted by multippt

Looks like Microsoft should have sticked to the good old IIS6. PHP and IIS7 (in Windows Vista) do not make good parthners. When together, expect an error message in 1.5 hours time (IIS process worker crash). Of course, other than that error message that seem to pop up every now and then, your computer will start losing a lot of usable memory (RAM) each time you see that message. More »