Tag Archives: Microsoft

Bill Gates hanging it up

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Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates announced today that he will transition from day-to-day responsibilities at the company he co-founded to concentrate on charitable work…but will continue as the company’s chairman after transferring his duties over a two-year period. That has a familiar ring to it.

Impossible not to wonder if Bill doesn’t see some writing on the wall for MS and wants to step down before the company looses it’s place in The Great Digital Scheme of Things. Or, maybe it’s just time to do something different. Why not?

While it’s difficult to imagine a world in which Microsoft isn’t a major player, I can remember watching nuke-laden B-52’s skimming over Kennett on their way to the SAC base at Blytheville, Arkansas. Couldn’t imagine a world without the USSR. Then, one day, it was just gone. Poof. What? You think comparing Microsoft and the fall of the Soviet Union is a stretch? Maybe it’s just the effect of resting my wrists on this Mac Book.

Personally, I’m grateful that Mr. Gates came along and gave us Windows. He made computing easier and more fun for smays. I wish him well.

Google spreadsheets

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When I bought the MacBook, I decided not to purchase Microsoft Office. I can’t remember the last time I felt the need to write something in Office. And few things make me go nuts faster than getting an email that says “see attached Word doc” in the body…and the Word doc has two lines of crap that could just as easily have been written in the body of the email (Get a clue you ignorant hillbilly!). What was my point? Oh yeah, MS Office…

Don’t need it. Don’t need Powerpoint. And –as of tomorrow– I don’t need Excel.
Google is set to launch a Web-based spreadsheet program that will allow people to view and simultaneously edit data while conducting “in-document” chat and supports the import and export of documents in the .xls format used in Excel and the .csv (comma-separated values) format.

I’m not a heavy spreadsheet user and I’m guessing the folks in our finance and accounting department couldn’t get by with the new Google spreadsheet. But I’m doing fine without Office and finer tomorrow.

Always connected

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Sitting in the Coffee Zone, slurping some Rocket Fuel, connected to the world. The way it was meant to be. In all fairness, I rarely lugged my Thinkpad around. Just too heavy. Not IBM’s (at the time) fault. I bought one of the heaviest models they offered. No idea why. But on the few occasions I took the thing on the road and attempted to connect wirelessly, it was usually something of a chore. Again, probably not the fault of Microsoft or IBM. I just never took the time to learn how to make it all work. It was too much trouble.

This morning I fired up the new Mac…it saw the open hotspots…I picked one…and here we are. All things in life should be so easy. Why wouldn’t a boy just keep his laptop with him all the time? Stay tuned.

Naked Conversations

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Robert Scoble and Shel Israel co-authored this excellent book on “how blogs are changing the way businesses talk with customers.” Just a couple of chapters in but finding a nugget on almost every page:

  • Tool Lust –People develop emotional attachments to things that empower new, faster, easier or cheaper activity (blogging)
  • Interruption Marketing — Unanticipated, impersonal and irrelevant ads, repeatedly hurled at involuntary audiences. (Seth Godin)
  • “First there were phone books, then web sites and [businesses] know that if they don’t have [one], it works to their disadvanatage. Blogs are just the next logical step.” — Betsy Aoki, Microsoft blogger
  • Corpspeak — An oxymoronic hybrid of cautious legalese seasoned with marketing hyperbole. Corpspeakers talk to people when they want to speak, not when people want to listen.
  • If you’re afraid to share ideas, you shouldn’t blog. One time someone asked Walt Disney if he wasn’t worried about telling so many people about his ideas. And Disney said, ‘Those were last year’s ideas.’ (pg 94) If you’re paranoid about your ideas being ripped off, don’t blog.
  • If the company culture is manipulative, employees are not treated with respect, and customers are thought of as commodity items, then that company should not blog. That company should close its doors. (pg 95)

If you’re not sure if your sales proposal or corporate brochure or news release is corpseak, stand in the middle of a room with some of your co-workers and read the copy aloud. If they laugh, it’s corpspeak.

I’ll update this post as I move through the book.

Photo Story 3.0

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Photo Story is a nifty little program that turns images and sound into wonderful little videos. It used to be part of Microsoft Plus! and cost $20 but is now free. I’ve posted a couple of Photo Story files here at smays.com but this new version is the best yet. I grabbed some pix form KBOA830.com (the first website I did, back in the day) and tossed ’em in with some jingles that Jeff Wheeler saved. The 5 min video (3 meg .mov download) could have been better if I had taken the time to try to match images to audio but I didn’t (keep your Media Player at 320×240). It’s still a nice look/listen back to the golden days of KBOA. If you don’t have a copy of Photo Story 3.0… download it today.

Bill Gates on education

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Bill Gates to the nation’s governors at the National Education Summit on High Schools: “America’s high schools are obsolete.” Some data points from Gates’ keynote: The US has one of the highest high school dropout rates in the industrialized world. Only 68 out of every 100 ninth-graders graduate from high school on time, and most need extensive remediation after that. Only 28 of the original ninth-graders make it to their sophomore year in college. “When I compare our high schools to what I see when I’m traveling abroad, I am terrified for our workforce of tomorrow,” said the Microsoft chairman, who is hiring about half of his new talent overseas.

Microsoft’s new search engine

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I took Microsoft’s new search engine for a spin tonight and can’t say I was impressed. Looked a lot like Google but it’s hard to knock them for that. And it probably does some things that Google doesn’t but I didn’t take the time to try find out what they might be. I did an image search for “Steve Mays” and came up with two photos that truly capture the real me. But I’m a Google Boy to the very end.

MSN Direct on your watch

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Beginning this fall, Microsoft plans to offer a new wireless information and messaging service that will run on evolving smart watch devices. The software company’s MSN Direct division says the service, which costs $9.95 a month, is geared to deliver customized information to a new category of watches. MSN Direct said the service would provide consumers with information including news, weather, sports scores, stock quotes, movies, dining, and games. Microsoft is expected to leverage some of its original content and existing media licensing arrangements in order to provide the data for the wireless watch information service. [InternetNews.com]