Microsoft has frequently said that it sees a world powered by software, and that it (Microsoft) wants to be the source of that software, be it for corporate servers, office workstations, home entertainment, robots, etc. Microsoft is all about software.

In the beginning, licensing that software drove Microsoft’s revenues beyond the stratosphere and into the heavenly glories. It didn’t always (or ever, for some) make the best software, and certainly placed innovation second to pushing Microsoft versions of existing technologies, but for many years it did make some of the most widely adopted technologies (Windows and Office).

That, along the way, it came under fire (and even under anti-trust) for the methods in which it sought to expand, control, and preserve it’s markets (GUI desktop, browsers, media players), will no doubt haunt them in the history books. But what they accomplished is undeniable.

And writing about it, consciously, as something that seems in the past tense seems odd. As Google and Amazon consume the cloud, as Apple takes consumer mindshare, as Microsoft comes to be perceived as too little, too late (Vista, Zune, Windows Mobile, Windows Live) or as money-bleeding (Xbox), as Allen left long ago and Gates is poised now to leave as well, and as they (perhaps smartly) seek out Danger and try to find a way into the 21st century with Yahoo, it seems not only odd, but equally undeniable.

Is it Karma as Roughly Drafted details, with unabashed bias, below? A reaping of what was sewn? Or is it all just business, and the same natural flow that saw IBM tumble and Microsoft rise during the last paradigm shift?

Lessons from the Death of HD-DVD — RoughlyDrafted Magazine

The death of HD-DVD says more about Microsoft and its future than the general media seems to recognize. It’s not a format war, its a culture war between industry players working to advance the state of the art collectively in partnerships, and one company working to own everything while contributing very little. It’s not hard to see why Microsoft’s bruised and abused former partners are working to align themselves with open solutions rather than buy into more pain with technology tied to Microsoft. That’s very bad news for a company that exists solely as a licensee of third rate product ideas.

February 21, 2008 - Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Sony - Comments (0)

50x really is astonishing.

I do notice from personal use that sometimes it’s just so much faster and easier to whip out the iPhone and check mail or search Google than powering up and waiting for my mac to boot. Some nights, I don’t even launch the laptop, I just use the iPhone.

iPod Touch will factor in there eventually (I believe the browser detects differently for the Touch, so they should be able to distinguish the figures).

AppleInsider | Google iPhone usage shocks search giant

Google on Wednesday said it has seen 50 times more search requests coming from Apple iPhones than any other mobile handset — a revelation so astonishing that the company originally suspected it had made an error culling its own data.

February 14, 2008 - Apple, Google - Comments (0)

As frightening as it is farcical…

The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs: Google is secretly praying for the Microhoo deal to go through

In ten or twenty years there will be only a handful of service providers and if youre bummed by the kind of vendor lock-in we used to see from IBM in the old days or that we see from Microsoft today, just wait till you see the lock-in that these global compute utilities will be able to get. Eric says this is going to be the golden age of cornholing. It will make the old Bell System crooks look like amateurs. The guys running the cloud will control everything: phone, data, video, television, movies, music.

February 11, 2008 - Google, Microsoft, Web - Comments (0)

Where “Don’t be Evil!” apparently doesn’t mean “Don’t accuse others of being Evil!”

Interesting first (of what will no doubt be many) salvos…

Google implies Microsoft/Yahoo hookup will ruin the Internet

“Could Microsoft now attempt to exert the same sort of inappropriate and illegal influence over the Internet that it did with the PC? While the Internet rewards competitive innovation, Microsoft has frequently sought to establish proprietary monopolies—and then leverage its dominance into new, adjacent markets,” he writes.

February 3, 2008 - Google, Microsoft - Comments (0)

Filed under things I probably should do but likely won’t until it’s too late…

Creating a Backup for Your Google Account

Using a single account for all the Google has a lot of advantages but if, for some reason, you cant access the account or Google temporarily disables it, you lose a lot of important data. Fortunately, you can set up a Google account that should give you access to some of the information from your account. You should also backup important data in other ways: download Gmail messages using POP3/IMAP in a mail client, export your documents from Google Docs, back up your Blogger blogs etc.

December 29, 2007 - Google - Comments (0)