Microsoft's new search engine, Bing, is off to a rousing start, at least according to one measure: paid clicks. Paid clicks are up some 13 percent compared to the old MSN Live Search. (Now, doesn't Bing sound a whole lot better?)
Not only that, but Microsoft's share of search moved from an embarrassing 9.1 percent into the double digits at 12.1 percent. The share is still small, but is moving in the right direction.
Posted by Doug Barney on 06/26/20095 comments
Just as we expected, the release of a beta for Microsoft's free anti-virus tool caused a firestorm, with vendors such as Symantec complaining that Microsoft has no real right to be in this market -- and that the product stinks to boot!
This argument defies logic. If the product stinks, why do you care that it exists? Meanwhile, the patch-meisters from Shavlik argue that the big security suites are big on costs and small in agility. So a small tool like the new MS anti-virus package ain't such a bad thang.
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Posted by Doug Barney on 06/26/200924 comments
George sides with most of you who wrote about the various shortcomings of the supposed "Exchange-killer," Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook:
I have to agree with (most of) the readers regarding Google Apps Sync. There are a number of issues that stand out: e-discovery, backups and the ability to restore, total control of the environment, tie-ins to CRM tools, etc. Being an Exchange admin, I have seen and heard of just about every crazy request you can imagine. Google is simply not equipped to handle it right now.
As for the one person that has replaced Exchange with Google? There is nothing that irritates me more than a business with an @gmail.com, @yahoo, @live, etc. address. It's so very unprofessional. Pay the $10 to $20 a year to register a domain and pay the extra for e-mail hosting, be it with Google, Yahoo or something else. Other than horribly bad service, there is nothing that makes me not want to do business with a company more than them not having a registered domain and/or not using it for e-mail.
-George
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Posted by Doug Barney on 06/24/20090 comments
I have to admire Diskeeper. This company thinks of one thing and one thing only: defragging hard drives.
It took me a while to understand just how important it is to organize bits and bytes on our hard drives; for our PCs, defragging gives back a little oomph. But on servers, the difference is more dramatic. And now we're asking our servers to do even more, to perform cartwheels as we virtualize the heck out of these things.
Diskeeper believes that server disks that support a bunch of VMs should be as efficient as possible, and has a new tool, V-locity, that helps do just that for Hyper-V.
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Posted by Doug Barney on 06/24/20098 comments
Money may not buy happiness, but it can buy freedom. And for Bill Gates, having billions means the freedom to invest in wild ideas that may or may not work. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is known for its disciplined approach to investing. It researches the area and puts money where it will do most good. (I'd love for the Foundation to manage our massive federal stimulus program!) I don't think we can praise Bill enough for these works.
But Gates also likes to take a risk or two, and is funding programs that most others turned down. Examples include "a magnet that can detect malaria" and "giving mosquitoes a head cold to prevent them from detecting and biting humans."
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Posted by Doug Barney on 06/24/20093 comments
As a kid, I loved Spam. In the second grade, I nicked a tin of Spam from the cupboard and put it under my pillow so it would be close all night. Of course, I'm taking about the processed pork product. Junk e-mail is a whole other story.
I know all about junk e-mail. I publish my real e-mail address in each newsletter so your mail gets to me fast and direct. That's the best part of my job. But because my address is out there, I get spam -- lots of spam. And for me, in fact for all of us, the spam just keeps on a-coming. Despite the CAN-SPAM Act, junk mail is still on the rise, and May was one of the worst months ever, according to research from Symantec.
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Posted by Doug Barney on 06/24/20096 comments
Wouldn't you know it? I just wrapped up a monster cover story about green computing for the June issue of Redmond magazine, when Microsoft released its top 10 green tips.
I won't walk through all 10, especially since the virtualization tip is rather obvious. Instead, I'll highlight a couple of surprises, such as the very first tip: Compensate IT for datacenter efficiency. Now most bonuses, raises and SLAs are based on speed and uptime. This often leads IT to overbuild, and thus wastes precious watts.
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Posted by Doug Barney on 06/22/20090 comments
Microsoft has always had an odd approach to PC hardware. First and foremost, the company doesn't want to compete with its OEMs. But Redmond wanted a few dollars so it started building mice, which in the early days Windows enabled character-based PCs. In a similar vein, Microsoft sold an add-in PC accelerator card, again aimed at running Windows.
While Microsoft has branched into Zunes and Xboxes on the entertainment side, its PC hardware business still revolves largely around mice. Not too exciting, right? Wrong!
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Posted by Doug Barney on 06/22/20095 comments
When Microsoft entered the anti-virus market, I knocked it for competing against the partners that saved Windows in the first place, and also sold something that should be part of the OS, anyway (the same way seat belts are part of our cars).
Now that Microsoft is on the verge of launching a free anti-virus tool, I have nothing bad to say. Microsoft Security Essentials will be ready for testing tomorrow. Just make sure you have a legit copy of Windows; otherwise, you're out of luck.
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Posted by Doug Barney on 06/22/20092 comments
If you've run into some problems after upgrading to IE 8, you're not alone:
I've been an IE user for as long as I can remember. I faithfully upgraded to IE 8 when it was pushed out. However, I got very frustrated at how you cannot move around the toolbars anymore, to have more than one type of toolbar per row, so there is all this lost vertical screen space. I searched for answers, but I only found long lists of people mad about the same problem, and no response from Microsoft about why they would remove the ability to customize the size and location of the toolbars.
My answer? After years of people telling me I should check it out, I finally installed and tested Mozilla Firefox. I love it. I found some extremely cool plug-ins, and I don't know how I ever lived without them now! I doubt I will ever use IE again. All because of Microsoft's downgrade of the toolbar customization, and not listening to their users.
-Scott
I have two home systems running Vista Home Premium, a desktop and a laptop. I have repeatedly attempted to upgrade from IE 7 to IE 8 on the laptop, and every time I've needed to rollback the change. The problem? IE 8 loses all connectivity to the Internet. I've researched the related Microsoft articles, bulletin boards, blogs, etc. to no avail. I also separately tried to apply the IE 7 consolidated update and it also results in a completely broken IE app. The closest approximation of the issue seems to be a known issue with Small Business Internet Servers. I don't want to try the manual registry fix that that issue calls out. Have you heard of these issues?
I've triple-checked everything -- WINS, DHCP, firewall (physical and soft), IE settings, etc. Wireless connection is fine as is local network connectivity. What is broken is the ability to access Web sites. It appears that I'm getting serious packet timeouts based on tracert results to large sites such as Google and Microsoft. Here's another funny thing: I never lose ability to connect/download from the MS upgrade site! But a simple rollback of the update back to IE 7, and I can once again connect to Web sites. I ended up installing Firefox (it seems that Chrome also would not install). This is extremely frustrating.
-John
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Posted by Doug Barney on 06/19/20090 comments
There's a fairly famous story of Bill Gates being hit in the face by a pie over in Belgium. The story drew lots of laughs, but I was appalled. To me it's assault, pure and simple.
And I feel the exact same way about the Hungarian who tossed eggs at Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer a while back. Fortunately, the Microsoft protester had an arm worse than Baba Booey and missed every time. (And if you don't know who Baba Booey is, click here.)
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Posted by Doug Barney on 06/19/20093 comments
Recently, I described a Google app that allows you to use Outlook to connect to e-mail in the Google cloud. I made the simplistic determination that if it worked, and was indeed far cheaper, then many in IT would switch. Those of you in the IT trenches corrected me posthaste (really fast!). You worried about compliance, archiving and security. This newsletter always lets me know just how little I know!
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Posted by Doug Barney on 06/19/20090 comments