Microsoft Archive

Microsoft briefly posted an Office 2010 technical preview site but quickly removed it as it appeared to be posted early in error. There’s still a Google cache of the site which you can review.

Here’s the overview of the Office 2010 Web Applications version:

Office Web Applications, the online companion to Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote applications, allow you to access documents from anywhere. You can even simultaneously share and work on documents with others online. View documents across PCs, mobile phones, and the Web without compromising document fidelity. Create new documents and do basic editing using the familiar Office interface. By offering more ways to access files from almost anywhere, Office Web Applications enable you to get things done according to your schedule.

The Microsoft employee in the video, Monica Mendoza, is very lucky it seems – first she was able to go work in Europe then take a trip to Las Vegas. If the video doesn’t work below – click here to view it.

After talking to a few of my friends who use Google Docs heavily, they say the demo video and images make Office 2010 look much more powerful. We’ve covered online office provider Zoho many times on CN – it will be interesting to get their take on the Office 2010 release.

I can only guess this is what Robert Scoble was very excited about on Friendfeed last week but said he was embargoed until today.

Last night while winding down and watching Ask This Old House, I was alerted to an important post by MG Siegler (MG writes for Techcrunch). The post noted that Microsoft Corporation is now tweeting (that means they are posting up to 140 character messages on the Twitter service). This is huge news! Microsoft’s competitors like Google and Sun and Oracle and Zappos are already tweeting so it’s huge news that Redmond is now on their game too.

MG then went all Columbo on us by explaining the stats on the Microsoft official twitter account.  He notes that only 1,000 people were following the account but as of this morning it’s up to nearly 5,000! MG also found out who is behind the account. He notes, “The account is being run by its corporate communications team, consisting of four people.”

The big news here is that since the post, Microsoft’s 4-person twitter communications team has added a third tweet. That’s right…a company with two tweets makes big headlines (the story got a lead from Techmeme ) so I figured I’d watch the account as best I could and I setup a SMS alert when content is added. So I present now, the third tweet message from Microsoft Corporation:

USA Today on Bing v Google “For a search that sings you may want to Bing it” ^JR

CenterNetworks will continue to monitor the account and will report back of any further important developments.

Update: Microsoft has since added tweets 4 and 5 to their account. We can confirm they are now closing in on Oprah’s count.

Earlier today, Allen posted a story about Microsoft releasing a chart comparing IE8, Firefox 3 and Chrome (who knows which version). Following is my response to that chart. I would say that I’m disappointed not to see Safari included in this comparison, but since much of the comparison is spin and misinformation, there wouldn’t be much point. Read the rest of this entry »

I nearly lost my lunch when I saw the chart below. It’s a comparison chart between Internet Explorer 8 (IE8), Firefox and Chrome. I should note that I am an IE user – I run different things in IE and Firefox.

Microsoft took an internal comparison look at the following categories: security, privacy, ease of use, web standards, developer tools, reliability, customizability, compatibility, manageability and performance.

I am using IE7 so I can’t comment on how good or bad IE8 is but it’s a bit odd that a company would show a chart that makes their browser look amazingly better than the competition. IE8 wins or ties in every category and some of the comments seem like an agency was involved. Here are a couple of examples, “Of course Internet Explorer 8 wins this one”  and “Neither Firefox nor Chrome provide guidance or enterprise tools. That’s just not nice.” Is there really not one area that Firefox or Chrome is better than IE8? (I have no idea so someone educate me plz)

My advice to Microsoft is to just sell us on why IE8 is great – don’t worry about comparisons – we will take care of those as users.

It looks like Microsoft is trying to come across as cutsie but it just didn’t work for me. Did it work for you? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.
Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday Microsoft sent an email to advertisers on their adCenter product. The email, copied below, explains what Bing is and how advertisers can benefit from using Bing. They call it a “search experience” and there’s no mention of the term “decision engine”. From what I can tell, the advertising options are the same as any other search engine — text ads above and to the side of search results.

Here’s the email:

So what does Bing do?
Plain and simple, it provides consumers with easy access to relevant information. With new features and more organized results, consumers can spend less time searching and more time finding what’s most relevant to them—like travel, health, cars, and shopping.

What can that mean to you as an advertiser?
Quality leads – Bing helps provide the relevant search results and ads your consumers are interested in. This means you can engage with consumers when they’re ready to research, influence or make a purchase decision.

Last week was all about Bing and Wave – both products the respective companies believe will change something about what we do online. Master search engine journalist Danny Sullivan has an indepth review of Bing which is worth reading (along with his partners comparison review).

In the ”coming soon” video, Microsoft classifies Bing as a “decision engine”. The video makes it seem like a search engine.

Whether you classify Bing as a decision engine or a search engine, whether you compare Bing to Google or any other engine, I have one question for Microsoft….

WHY NOT USE LIVE.COM?

Something tells me that Microsoft hired an expensive agency which eventually (after large payments) came up with the name Bing. I’ve sat through hundreds of these type of presentations over my career and have found it funny how many times the agency misses what’s right in front of them. Now maybe the Bing name was developed in-house. Frankly it really doesn’t matter where Bing came from (note, when I hear bing, I think of the bing-bong chime on the subway when the doors close).

Live is nearly a perfect name. All of the social media techies are in love with “real-time” and Google and other engines have talked about wanting to add more real-time activities into their results. Microsoft could have worked towards branding Live as THE real-time results/decision/search engine. Real-time = Live. Everything inside of Bing could have been included along with the real-time results.

Will Bing be the next Google or the next Cuil? Who knows at this point but what I do know is that had they used the Live name for the brand, they would have been further down the better path.

Perhaps in future ads and videos we will learn what the Bing name actually means and why it was chosen for this new brand.

The post below was originally posted on the Zoho blog and is authored by Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu.

Inevitable comparisons are made between the hugely enthusiastic developer response (including from us at Zoho) to Google Wave yesterday with the relatively tepid reponse to Microsoft’s new search engine Bing. The real interesting contrast to us, as independent software developers, is the way developers responded to Silverlight as opposed to the reaction yesterday to Google Wave. Both Silverlight and Wave are aimed at taking the internet experience to the next level. To be perfectly honest, Silverlight is a great piece of technology. Google Wave, as yet, is not much more than a concept and an announcement.

It is easy to dismiss all this with “Oh, the press just loves to hype everything Google, and loves to hate Microsoft,” but that cannot explain why even competitors like us are willing to embrace Google’s innovations, but stay away from perfectly good innovations from Microsoft, such as Silverlight?

It comes down to one word: karma. Microsoft just has so much bad karma in this industry that I cannot imagine a company like us trusting them on much of anything. Take Silverlight: Microsoft pledged that they will always support Silverlight on Mac and Linux, and on browsers other than IE. Do you really, really believe their promise? Let’s recap some ancient history here: Microsoft used to have IE for Solaris and even had a beta of IE for Linux. That was when IE was way behind Netscape and was trying to catch up. Once Netscape was safely vanquished, Microsoft’s commitment to support IE on other platforms vanished. In fact, Microsoft intentionally pulled IE on other platforms, because it was clear to them that making the web experience suck on other platforms was a way to keep Windows firmly entrenched. I am glad they adopted that strategy, because that strategy eventually paved the way for Firefox (and Safari and Chrome …), and together those browsers have rendered the operating system utterly irrelevant. Apple’s resurgence – based on design prowess, not platform dominance – and Vista’s failure, have demonstrated that convincingly.

Read the rest of this entry »