A Little Ludwig Goes A Long Way

Some interesting commentary on Google’s business model by Gruber — a total Apple fan, doesn’t view ads as inherently evil, but says you need to be very respectful of your users. And referring to an original article by Aaron Swartz who says you can’t make things worse for users just to make money.

I don’t know what evil is when applied to technology business models. I do know that I feel very comfortable with my Apple transactions — they ask me for a lot of money, in return they give me a product that is mine to own completely. They give me the option of signing up for services for more money, services where they keep data about me, but it is up to me. It feels like a transparent and respectful model. Similarly, I feel good about my Microsoft transactions — they ask me for money, in return I get a software or hardware product that is mine to do what I want with (excluding Bing which I rarely use, and excluding some of their new online service offerings).

I feel somewhat less good about my Google relationship. I do like and use their products. But the fact that they are “free” is bothering, I know that Google is making money off me somehow, but there is very little transparency around it. Who is looking at my data, what are they paying for it, are there certain things I do that are very high value, are there people using info about me that I would rather not, ?

I don’t know any of this and it makes me kind of queasy. Enough to abandon products that are actually useful? Well not yet — and for search,it is not like there are alternatives that are more respectful of me. But I can’t imagine ever having the kind of respect for and attachment to Google products that I have to products from companies with more straightforward business models.

• iPhoneTracker. Cool toy to see where you’ve been and feed your feelings of paranoia.
• Portal 2. Of course.
• Qwiki. I was kind of excited about this, but I can’t make my own Qwikis? Excitement way down.
• Acorn. Haven’t bit yet but I’d love something less obtuse than Photoshop.
• Blogsy. Seems like a brilliant WordPress front end.
• Issue Bucket. Nice little frontend to bitbucket.
• You Gotta See This. Stupid little stylized panorama camera app for the iphone. Fun.
• Office365 beta. The individual apps (word, xl, ppt) are nice and well done. The portal gluing them all together with email and calendar is strange and confusing — two URLs, yet another ID different than my existing ID used at all msft sites, an insistence on downloading software. Chalk it up to beta.

• Poor Halo play prompts stabbing threat. Doesn’t seem unreasonable. I’ve heard campers threatened with worse.
• How Secure Is My Password. No idea how accurate, but fun. 17 thousand years for my typical password.
• Rich on photobooks. I just always use the default in Aperture but perhaps I should branch out.
• AR.Drone. Why don’t I have one of these yet.
• Declining energy quality as recession cause. An interesting way to look at things. Not sure it actually makes sense tho.
• Now you can swap useless Amex reward points for useless Zynga crap.(TechCrunch)
• Snoopy themed Windows tablet. Take that, Apple.
• Spiders on Drugs(Design+Milk). We are asking for some serious payback from spider nation some day.
• Umpteenth article on the death of cable TV(TechCrunch), yawn. Until I can watch HD live sports without stuttering I am captive to cable/dish. Going to be a while.
• Charles on breaking up MSFT. Good as always.
• Habitable planet found?
• Languages you’ve never heard of(Gadgetopia). In the future, we will all have our very own programming language.
• Topologist suggests new form of matter. For most of our history we’ve used the forms of matter that nature gave us. It is interesting to observe and think about what we can create as we gain mastery over atomic organization.
• One man’s indictment of iTunes. The thing is a giant hairball of software.
• Exercise and aging. Crap I need to get after it.
• Show Me What’s Wrong. Super useful.
• User experience of F1 telemetry. Always impressed with the amount of money spent on racing.
• MacPaint and MacDraw source code. Nostalgia.

Apple’s quarter (NYTimes): “We’re making our most innovative products ever and our customers are responding”…”unexpectedly strong sales of Macintosh computers and a surge in iPhone purchases pushed Apple’s profit up 15 percent in the third quarter”…”PC shipments for the industry fell 3 to 5 percent over the last three months. But Apple said it sold 2.6 million Macs in the quarter, up about 18 percent from the 2.2 million it sold in the previous quarter”…”overall gross profit margin grew to 36.3 percent, from 34.8 percent in the year-ago quarter”…”Revenue rose to $8.34 billion, from $7.46 billion last year”.

MSFT’s quarter (NYTimes): “has been humbled, both by the recession and by problems of its own making”…”Year-over-year revenue and full-year sales of Microsoft’s flagship Windows software dropped for the first time”…”29 percent drop in net income”…”17 percent drop in quarterly revenue”…”warned that people should not expect a major bounce-back in technology spending when the economy recovers.”

Hmm. Apparently the economic downturn is worse among PC buyers than among non-PC buyers.

Proudly Serving My Corporate Masters: Goodbye Company Picnic. — the continuing transformation of Microsoft. Some of my fondest memories of the company are the events that allowed me to include family — the company picnic (the first one I went to in ’88 was kind of mindblowing for us), the holiday party (again mindblowing for the kids, the kids’ experience always makes me think of the donkey island bacchanalia scene from Disney’s Pinocchio), halloween. These events did as much to cement my loyalty to the company as 100 other benefits that the company did, they kept my family happy and positive about my job, despite the hours demanded of me. Quite a constrast from the more traditional work environment I came from prior to Microsoft.

Installed the Win7 Beta1. I think MSFT will sell a ton of this. It just seems faster and cleaner than Vista. I haven’t played with new features yet — early NYT review seems positive — but glad that it seems crisp and uncluttered.

Spent part of yesterday being deposed on a matter that I can’t talk about which happened during my tenure at MSFT. Hard to imagine that these issues are still dragging on, my remembrance of the events 10+ years in the past is pretty poor. It was kind of humorous to be reminded of issues that we fought like cats and dogs about — in retrospect none of them amounted to a hill of beans.

Doing my part to help Microsoft avoid more layoffs this week. Firstly, been working thru zune error code C00D12F5 - Google Search. Some DRM config problem and all the published KB articles and forum pointers failed. Finally contacted the Zune guys directly and they were super helpful, even took my machine into their labs for a while. Turns out that somehow I had mismatched DRM components, they aren’t sure why, but forcing them all to the same version worked. Hopefully they will write up a KB article on. Zune guys were great to work with, here’s hoping they have future success.

EA to release games on Valve’s Steam completely free of DRM. – Steam is increasingly impressive. shocked msft hasn’t purchased.

Tough observations from a MSFT insider:

Now we have this godawful concoction about experiences, be they compelling, seamless, or plain vanilla. It suffers all the flaws of the second vision, in that it is too vague and subjective, and it also throws in some buzzwords for good measure. If you dip your WTF-sized strainer in this bubbling cauldron of muck, what emerges is “create seamless experiences”. What is THAT supposed to mean? Here’s a seamless experience I just had–I put an SD card in my Vista machine to try to upload them to a website, and it completely failed to do anything at all. It did so very seamlessly, I might add. Furthermore, I was completely unable to figure out how to make it recognize the thing (a scenario which had worked the day before), so it really was a case of a sufficiently advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic (and also being indistinguishable from a kick in the crotch, which may have been the forgotten coda to Arthur C. Clarke’s famous quote). It was also a compelling experience, in that I briefly felt compelled to toss my computer out the window. So I was batting 1.000 on the vision, but I didn’t feel so hot about it. With this to guide us, our vision might get replaced with a future that looks like “a computer in every dumpster and a pissed-off user in every house, cursing Microsoft software”.

Proudly Serving My Corporate Masters: Vision Statements on the Decline.

VMware shares plunge on CEO change, slowing growth — seems like a buying opportunity to me, it is hard to imagine a better systems software CEO than Paul Maritz.

Besides, even if the deal does win federal approval, you’ve chosen to become a pawn of the most dominant company on the Internet. How exactly is that going to lead to a brighter future for Yahoo?

As a stock, MSFT is done – stick a fork in it. And not just past and present, which has seen the terrible performance mentioned and is the reason, for example, that the QQQQ underweights MSFT in favor of overweighting AAPL and others (despite its mandate to track the index). I mean moving forward. If you want dividends, there are far better plays. And if want equity appreciation instead, make a list of MSFT’s top competitors, throw a dart at it, and invest in whoever you hit.

Microsoft One-Ups Apple’s IPod Engraving — oh well that will hurt Apple share big time.

I don’t really understand what MSFT is doing. Anyone who gets a Zune instead of an iPod under the tree is going to be sad. The consumer asset MSFT has is in the gaming space, people love their XBOXes, I don’t get why MSFT isn’t starting with a mobile game device and growing from that.

Microsoft Taps Thompson to Run Zune — good luck Rick. Tough job but a great guy.

When three ex-MSFTies partner: They’re Beautiful! – istartedsomething — I’d been meaning to notice these guys, looks like they are up to some cool stuff. Not sure how they make money but nice work. Good luck guys.

Apparently it is time to renew my Microsoft Alumni Network membership. $130. The only value I get is employee discounts on software. It is increasingly hard to justify this, there is darn little I want at the store. If I view the $130 as prepay on software, I have to buy a lot to make the savings add up to more than $130. Used to be I had relatives and friends asking for software a lot but that activity has dried up largely.

BetaNews | Microsoft Names New Mac BU Manager

Microsoft Ignition Revs Up Tomorrow — clearly trying to leverage our brand success. Wait til we strike back with our big Vista initiative.

Report: Windows Live exec plans to leave Microsoft

To match my new sli pc, i updated to gaming-optimized input devices — the g5 mouse and g15 keyboard. The keyboard is cool — the little lcd display during games is very cool. I’ve seen this keyboard in action for months and finally had to get one. The mouse is also cool — the adjustable weights are awesome — i am running in the heaviest config right now but will see where i end up.

One huge beef tho — the lack of certified drivers. Not that I am anal about certification, it is just that install is a PITA as you have to wade thru a sea of warnings from MSFT that these drivers will make your PC break out in hives. Logitech is a big company, MSFT is a big company, why can’t they get their heads together and get this solved?