Microsoft makes good on OneCare subscriptions

Monday, December 7th, 2009

Kudos to Microsoft. A year ago, I was very critical of the software giant for shutting down its rather good pay-for security product called OneCare and replacing it with a free service codenamed Morro.

This has now launched as Microsoft Security Essentials, and whilst it is a very cut-down version of OneCare, it clearly works well. My annoyance was not that Microsoft was launching a free service – cheaper is better and free is best – but I was worried about what would happen to those who had paid the annual subscription to OneCare?

Would they get dumped down onto MSE, or would work on OneCare stop? At the time, Microsoft said that OneCare customers would be looked after fully through the term of their subscription. I was sceptical, based on previous performance from software companies, including Microsoft, who have taken the easy and cheap solution of quietly dropping the product. (more…)

Live Mesh – the key to the cloud?

Friday, December 4th, 2009

About a year ago I wrote a piece about my initial experiences and first impressions of Microsoft Live Mesh. Essentially I was a huge fan and remain so. In fact I’m now even more excited about the technology and can see it playing a crucial role in the advent of, and successful transition to, cloud-based computing.

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Is the Droid really a “racehorse duct-taped to a scud missile”?

Friday, December 4th, 2009

Television advertising fascinates me. Stripped of the gloss, it’s basically street hawkers screaming for your attention while you pass through a busy market on your way to somewhere more interesting.

They’re rarely effective and often irritating, which is why an advertisement telling me that a smartphone should be faster than a “racehorse duct-taped to a scud missile” is one I take notice of.

This inspired lunacy is lifted from Verizon’s ad for the Android-powered Droid smartphone, and is worth watching before we continue. Go on, I’ll wait.

Welcome back. Now that we’re on the same Fight Club-inspired page, I think the question we’re all dying to have answered is “Should a phone be pretty. Should it be a tiara-wearing, digitally clueless, beauty-pageant queen?” After all, wouldn’t you rather have a phone that “rips through the web like a circular saw through a ripe banana”?

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Mobile voice search: Android’s killer app?

Friday, December 4th, 2009

Google invited us to its London HQ last night for a peek at what it’s up to on the mobile side of the business.

One of the features mobile product manager, Hugo Barra, was particularly proud of was voice search. Using Motorola’s spiffing-looking Droid phone, he showed us how he could dictate even reasonably complex search terms. Phrases such as “pictures of President Obama at the G8 summit” were flawlessly transcribed and producing search results within a couple of seconds – far faster than anyone could reasonably hope to tap out the same phrase using the onscreen keyboard.

All very impressive, and even more so considering that Barra hadn’t gone through an elaborate training procedure to help the phone recognise his accent. All the transcribing is performed on Google’s servers, where the software can call on a huge library of accents and contextual data to help it achieve such impressive levels of accuracy.  Far more data than could be squeezed on to a phone handset.

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Tabbed documents: Office 2007 is now great

Thursday, December 3rd, 2009

I wrote a blog post the other day whinging about the lack of tabbed documents in Office 2007. At which point, something remarkable happened. One of our readers (hello Greg, cheers) pointed me in the direction of a plugin that brings just such voodoo to Word, Excel and Powerpoint 2007. Then something even more remarkable happened. It worked, and it was bloody good to boot.

Unfortunately, this means I can’t be scathing and sarcastic – except about Microsoft which should include this feature by default, the big sillies - so I’m just going to point anybody who’s interested towards the plugin at OfficeTab.

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Saying “goodbye” to my eBay Shop

Tuesday, December 1st, 2009

After an extensive period of testing, I’ve turned off my eBay shop. In June, I created a new business selling candle-making kits to be developed alongside writing the “How to set up an online business” magbook for PC Pro. As part of that process, I experimented with selling via eBay and, to that end, set up a Basic shop at £14.99, the main benefit of which is that it offers a discount on “Buy it now” listings.

I think it’s fair to say that this particular experiment was a failure. Although we sold a number of our candle-making kits, the only real success was with the lowest-priced items and then only when offered in auction format rather than “Buy it now”.

The non-eBay version of our store on the other hand, has been very successful. Sales have been very good with a definite bias towards the more expensive items (a bias that has become progressively more pronounced as we get nearer Christmas).

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Office 2010 launch date

Tuesday, December 1st, 2009

So the word doing the rounds is that Office 2010 will launch in June 2010. There are two immediate observations that can be made about this. Either Microsoft expects to be finished early, and June is a convenient marker for all the marketing activity to start. Or it will ship in June almost irrespective of the quality of the code.

Microsoft is stuck between a rock and a hard place on this. So many thousands of people inside the company are working towards this launch, and it’s not only the desktop application coders and testers – Office 2010 reaches into all areas of Microsoft’s server and cloud technology.

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