I Think, Therefore I Rant!

Microsoft used to be the first follower of the computer software.  They used to take all of the good things that were in the OS or software offerings from their competitors and put those offerings into Microsoft offerings.  Now Microsoft is so confused, they aren’t even being good followers.

I want to be fair, it is okay to be a first follower. In fact, it is often a great strategy. They can take the great ideas from the computing world and improve them to offer to their consumers at a much lower cost. This has been the modus operandi of Microsoft for decades. This must be a particular trait of Bill Gates that Steve Ballmer just doesn’t have.  Since Billy left Microsoft, Microsoft cannot even seem to copy good ideas anymore.  

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Mastering Technical Sales has a great article on their site explaining how to handle 200 emails a day. It is purposely written for suggestions to their target audience which is the pre-sales technical folks that are the brains in the IT sales world.

I pulled out a few of the more relevant paragraphs that were relevant to all regarding of profession but I suggest that you read the entire article.

I will start this suggestion list by sharing one of my habits. “Don’t file – SEARCH”.  Install one of the several desktop search indexing tools such as Google Desktop Search, Windows Desktop Search, or Copernic Desktop Search. Then, when you have read and are finished with an email, move it to a “Done” folder and forget about it.  Don’t try to figure out if you should file the email in the customer folder, the folder of the person that sent you the email, the folder for product problems or whatever.  Most people end up spending way to much time worrying about their filing system or trying to find an email in the file system.  Don’t worry about it – just search for the email in one of the above systems let the engine do the heavy lifting for you.  

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After being on an iPhone for a year, I don’t think I could ever go back to a Windows Mobile phone.  I used the Windows Mobile platform for probably 11 years (including the original Windows CE non-phone devices) and it always seemed like the NEXT generation would solve all my problems. The next generation never did come and by the time I gave up, I was in the habit of restarting the phone every morning.

I recently tried to install the desktop search tool from Microsoft.  After several tries and lots of reading online, I couldn’t get the add-on installed that would allow this tool to search my Outlook 2003 files (let alone my Thunderbird personal email).  I gave up and installed Google desktop and was completely indexed on everything in one overnight session.  

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I enjoy using Ubuntu rather than the trash that Microsoft puts out.  I have a dual boot computer so I can always go back to the evil empire if I need to but my default OS is Ubuntu.

Sadly, the tools for managing blogs in Ubuntu are a bit slim so I was excited that Qumana was putting out a version for Linux.  I tried several times to get it working and have come to the conclusion that it is not ready for prime-time.  It simply doesn’t work well in my environment.  So I am still creating posts with Scribefire or the built-in tools that WordPress provides.

Hopefully, Qumana can get this working but for now it looks like it is DOA.

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Yes, I know that I just praised the iPhone from Apple as being a great phone.  In fact, it is the best phone that I have ever owned and I have had quite a few.

However, the management of application icons leaves a lot to be desired. 

First of all, it is not possible to name the different screens.  So while it is possible to congregate all of your games onto a particular screen, there is no way to name this screen and jump instantly to it.

Second, whenever you update an application to its next revision (and at this early stage, this happens a lot) the icon will jump back to the earliest possible spot.  This means that when you do an update, the icon forgets where you first put it (as in the games screen described above) and sticks it on the very first screen of the phone.  If there are no more open spots on that first screen, it puts it on the second screen (and so on).  This makes it tedious to reorganize your applications as developers work out bugs in their early versions.  

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So why don’t iPods support WMA and similarly, why don’t other devices support AAC (Apple’s format)?

The why is simple. WMA is the format that many companies (e.g. Yahoo) use in their stores to sell music. WMA is developed by Microsoft and it is a competitor. Is it a better sounding format? For the most part, no it is not – the formats are essentially tied in audio capability for the average listener and the average audio speakers.

So it is a competitive issue. Apple makes the best device on the market with something like 90% market share. They don’t like Microsoft, so they don’t play nice to Microsoft. It definitely is not a revenue issue for selling songs on iTunes since at 99 cents per song, Apple isn’t making a lot of money on the songs. They do make a bunch of money for every iPod that is sold though.  

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