Category Archives: Microsoft

Microsoft and Apple battle for your living room

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ms-apple.jpgI was reading one of my favorite writers, Robert X Cringely, and was reading his opinions on Microsoft vs Apple for the living room. He tends to lean towards Apple winning, but I am not so sure.

Although Apple has done a great job with the iPod, iTunes, and will release the iTV soon, Microsoft may have already won with the XBox 360. When Steve Jobs gave us a sneak peek of the iTV a little while ago, one of the things I was not hearing about was the purchase/delivery of HD movies. I think iTunes is delivering near DVD quality, but as someone that has owned a large HDTV for a couple years I want HD content.

Microsoft is already selling HD Movies on their XBox 360 and it is already integrated in to almost 10 million home theater systems. (Ok, they are close to selling 10 million of them and I am making the leap of faith that most are connected to home theaters). So Microsoft is slightly in the lead here. Apple has probably not told us everything about their iTV plans, but even though Front Row is in hot pursuit or Microsoft’s Media Center, there does not seem to be any Tivo-like capabilities. Another nod for Microsoft.

Microsoft is not perfect and they don’t win them all, but they rarely lose when it is a market they want. This seems to be a market that Microsoft wants badly. Don’t get me wrong, if you visit here often you know I love Apple and its products, but this is going to be a tough one to win. The iPod luster can’t last forever as cell phones are getting better and better at playing music. Hopefully the rumors of the iPhone come true or Apple could very well watch the market they conquered fade quickly off in to the sunset.

The very music format lock-in that people complain about could work in Apple’s favor as most are probably not willing to do the work necessary to move their iTunes purchased content in to another Vendor’s product. Apple releasing a phone could reduce the amount of devices we carry and still allow us to take our iTunes purchased content with us. We’re very close to a cell phone that not only makes calls, but has a good camera, video camera, and music player. All Apple has to do is release a phone and people will go nuts over it.

Even though we are having a blast with the Wii, the thought of owning an XBox 360 for all of its media integration is tempting. Time will tell which way we, and the rest of the market, go. I can’t speak for the rest of them, but I’ll wait and see what Apple actually releases with the iTV.

Killing time in Erie

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Spending the weekend with relatives in Erie, PA, we took a ride over to the Tom Ridge Environmental Center At Presque Isle. Very neat place. You can learn a lot about Erie and its environment. We passed a whiteboard so I had to draw a picture of my beautiful wife. It drew a pretty big crowd and was one of the more popular exhibits while we were there. People were laughing and some even took pictures of it. Not sure what they’ll do with those pictures, but I grabbed the one that you see here. The full length picture didn’t come out every well but at least I salvaged the head shot. There was a Cub Scout troop taking a tour of the place and they all made additions to the whiteboard picture.

On a trip to Best Buy we found the PS3 up and available to play. I stopped and talked to someone that was playing an NBA game and the graphics were interesting. The court, stands, crowd, uniforms, etc. looked amazing. The court looked unbelievably real. The player’s skin, however, looked plastic to those of us in the store watching. That was the only game you could demo so I have no idea how the PS3 holds up under high speed game play. What was surprising was that the PS3 locked up on us. The guy playing it mentioned that the Walmart up here has been through a dozen of them because they keep locking up. I hope he was just exaggerating because people are not going to put up with freezing and minute and a half (his comment) start times after paying $600 for a gaming device. He also mentioned that he owns a XBox 360 and that he thinks the graphics actually look better on the XBox. Interesting.

I’m just disappointed that there is a DVD format war happening between Blue-ray and HD-DVD. Sony is supporting Blue-ray and Microsoft is backing HD-DVD. I would guess the Blue-ray drive is what is pumping the PS3′s price so high. I’m one that will wait and see what the Nintendo Wii looks like. They had a space reserved for one but did not have one you could see or touch. I believe that will come out this week some time.

I did play one of the coolest video games ever while there. It’s called Guitar Hero and I had a blast playing it. If you’ve ever seen the Dance Dance Revolution games, just picture the same concept except instead of the dance mat you hold a small guitar in your hands. Instead of using your feet to land on the arrows you use your fingers and the guitar – all to rock songs. It was definitely a blast, but it looked like it was a Playstation only kind of thing. Too bad, because I don’t have a Playstation. If I did I would have bought the game. It was a blast.

Lastly, I had replaced the internal hard drive on my 15″ G4 Aluminum PowerBook a little while ago with a 160GB drive and I’ve been very happy with it. Unfortunately I didn’t test the Superdrive once I put everything back together, because I learned the hard way that I must have done something to break the drive. I tried to load a couple CDs in it yesterday and it just keeps spitting them out right away. I kept trying over and over and now it won’t even accept a disk in it anymore. I don’t have any of the necessary tools away from home, but I am hoping I can get it working again when we get home. I don’t use the drive that much, but it will be a requirement when I want to upgrade to OS X Leopard later. If you’re doing your own hard drive upgrade, be careful and take your time.

Loose ends – Vista vouchers and the startup sound

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I had posted about Vista’s startup sound here. In that post I commented that

“I’m willing to bet that before Vista ships you will be able to mute the startup sound just like I can on my PowerBook, and I’m sure they’ll expose a way to change or control it via the registry or group policy.”

I forgot the followup that you can now control the startup sound, so we’ll just let Robert explain it.

On the subject of Vista delays and the initial gloom, doom, and panic, I stated…

“All Microsoft or manufacturers have to do is one thing and the Vista slip becomes irrelevant; for all purchases made after the date that Vista ships to the enterprise, include a free upgrade to Vista when it is released. That would appease 99% of new buyers.”

Looks like I was pretty close. The internet has made gaining access to information incredibly fast. Unfortunately, negative reaction sometimes tends to spread quicker than the truth. Always do your research. And don’t forget, you can keep up with other blog posts that I find interesting by following my Google Shared Items page.

Trying to work with IE7, but…

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I think I have used browser alternatives for too long, because I am struggling with IE7.  My Gmail has a little bit of an issue, but my Google Reader is a mess.  I can’t see the next article until I have it highlighted in the reader and different articles are running together.  Firefox has spoiled me.  It lead me towards Camino and I see even less reason to ever go back.

The problem is not at home, but at work.  My team is over 10,000 desktops and 1200 servers, many of which are Citrix/Terminal Servers.  It would be a big deal to move away from IE, but my first 24 hours with IE7 is making me wonder if we couldn’t actually make that move.  We have been doing some testing with Firefox and so far we have been lucky because we have yet to run in to any ActiveX requirements.  Could we pull the switch off?  Who knows, but we could not just roll out IE7 to all of our users as it is.  Since we will need to do some kind of training for either (or at least some kind of documentation for the users) this would be the time to do it if we really wanted to.

I may feel better about IE7 once we have complete control of it with Group Policies, like we do with IE6, but right now all I see is extra work for my team that already has more than enough to do.  We’ll ride out IE6 for a long time, but eventually Microsoft is going to stop supporting it and we will not have a choice.

Microsoft Entourage – 6 months later

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Since switching from Apple Mail to Entourage 6 months ago things have been running very well. When I am working away from the office I communicate with everyone using Microsoft Office 2004 for the Mac and nobody really knows. While in the office I use Office2003, but outside of the office I rarely use anything other than my PowerBook.

Although Entourage is running very well, there are a few things that Microsoft could do to make my life a little easier. The Calendar is close, but Outlook has a couple features that I want in Entourage.

  • The first feature is the ability to look at my Calendar from a Meeting Request. Let me explain a little better – in Outlook, when I receive a Meeting Request, I can Accept, Deny, Propose a new time, or view my Calendar at the time of the meeting request. When I click on Calendar from the meeting request it will let me see my Calendar at the time of the meeting. That way I can see what else I have going on then and determine if this meeting is more important that something else I may have booked. Very handy and I’d like to see that in Entourage.
  • Letting me know if I have a conflict with the meeting request from inside the meeting request itself. In Outlook I can see this info and I’d like to see it in Entourage.
  • The ability to forward a meeting request. There are times when I cannot make a meeting, or I need someone to attend for me, so I will either ask the meeting requester to invite that person or I will forward the meeting invitation myself. I don’t see how to do that using Entourage and I would like that feature.
  • A Today button in the Calendar view. I realize I can go to the View Date button and today’s date is there, but I’m spoiled by Outlook2003 and would like 1 less click. Even though I can use the key combination of Command-T, I still want the button.
  • Lastly is the size of the cached email database. It gets pretty large quickly (well over 1GB) and things seem to get a little slower as the database grows. Not a show stopper, but something that would be nice to have.

Other than these few things I still believe Entourage is a very good email client and pretty much a must-have if you want to use a Mac in an Exchange environment.

Vista’s new startup sound freaking people out

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I read over on Robert Scoble’s blog about the new startup sound in Vista and how you cannot change or disable it.  Why shouldn’t Microsoft have their own signature startup sound?  It’s all about branding.  As an Apple user I’ve had a startup sound that happens before the operating system even starts.  So why is this a big deal?  Because the current Microsoft implementation does not let you turn off or change it.

I’m willing to bet that before Vista ships you will be able to mute the startup sound just like I can on my PowerBook, and I’m sure they’ll expose a way to change or control it via the registry or group policy.

Windows Vista Delayed to 2007 – Big Deal?

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Microsoft announced they are going to release Windows Vista to enterprises in November of 2006, but the consumer version will be pushed back until January 2007. People all over the world are pouncing on this one but I have to wonder why? It’s 2 more months. Big deal.

The only people this will probably hurt is all of the computer manufacturers that earn a large part of their revenue in the 4th quarter of the year – the Christmas buying season. This could definitely hurt the HP’s and Gateways of the world since they need to have products configured and shipped to retail stores for most of their sales. This probably didn’t mean too much to Dell since they build everything to order and can probably recover from a slip in a ship date easier than the others. This is why Dell’s model rocks.

But there are many OS X fans on the Internet (remember, I’m a huge Apple fan) that either see this as yet another opportunity to bash Microsoft or see this as Apple’s big change to make huge gains in market share. I don’t get the senseless bashing. All it really does it turn people away from it. They may even be less inclined to check out all the great things OS X has to offer. But I don’t really see this as a huge opportunity to make big gains with OS X. We *think* Apple will have the next version of OS X released by the end of the year, but there will be a surge whenever it comes out. I don’t think we can attribute that to Vista’s slip. All Microsoft or manufacturers have to do is one thing and the Vista slip becomes irrelevant; for all purchases made after the date that Vista ships to the enterprise, include a free upgrade to Vista when it is released. That would appease 99% of new buyers.

Vista for consumers slipping a whopping 2 months will not bring devastation to the computer industry. Windows will remain dominant, Linux will still chip away in the data center, and I will still be happy with my PowerBook running the latest version of OS X.