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Last week Ina Fried broke a story at CNET about a Microsoft effort to buff up Windows Vista’s image by filming Windows XP users with a bad opinion of Vista raving about a new version of Windows called "Mojave" after they were shown a demo. The trick was that Mojave was actually Vista and the test subjects were suitably gobsmacked when they found out. Microsoft apparently liked the reactions so much that they are now on the Web at http://www.mojaveexperiment.com/.
While the idea is modestly entertaining, I’m puzzled about the utility of it beyond demonstrating that the average consumer is easily deceived by both the "madness of crowds" and a slick demo that I’m sure lacked Vista’s more tedious annoyances. More to the point, consumers don’t really have any choice but Vista and it hasn’t seemed to slow Windows PC buying except for a relative few who have newly given Apple a try.
Where Windows Vista has a real acceptance problem is with enterprises who for the most part do have a choice to stay with Windows XP and many are doing so based on their technical and financial evaluations. Mojave would hardly fare so well in a similar demonstration with enterprise CIOs and their technical staffs.
Linda Buquet at the 5 Star Affiliate Programs Blog notices a part of the Microsoft Financial Analyst Day presentations which reveals that the MSN browser toolbar about to be installed on all Hewlett-Packard consumer PCs will try to entice Google searchers over to Microsoft’s own Live Search cashback deals. From Satya Nadella’s portion of Steve Ballmer’s presentation:
So the last thing I wanted to show you is one of the challenges, of course, we have, given our share position, is how do we really get more people to know about Live Search and get the taste for some of the value, like, in particular, the cashback value? So the place where we are innovating is in the toolbar. We have recently done a distribution deal for our toolbar with Hewlett-Packard. So this is the toolbar that Hewlett-Packard will carry with some customizations of their own. It’s the MSN toolbar.
And so let’s say I’m on Google and I type in Xbox. I can go ahead and search for Xbox, and automatically the toolbar detects that you’re searching for Xbox on Google and a Gleam view that there is a cashback on Live Search. And so I can go ahead and at this point click on that Gleam and it’ll take you to Live Search, or it’s supposed to take you to Live Search. Oh, it is on Live Search. See, I didn’t even notice the transfer. So it’s so seamless that now you’re on Live Search. You can get the cashback for a particular Xbox that you want to buy. So that’s just an experiment on how we get the word out, get more users trying Live Search, and getting the value of things like Live Search cashback.
Buquet’s beef is that affiliate marketers who are advertising on Google and always trying to get their sites to rank higher in the search results are going to be cut out of their commissions if searchers buy via Live Search cashback. My concern is that this seems like the most annoying sort of crapware bloat with privacy concerns to boot.
Admittedly, a “gleam” (which is a lit up marker on the toolbar) is probably the least offensive way to do this (compared to pop-ups, say), but it is yet one more piece of dancing baloney that slows down the browser. As for Microsoft getting a complete copy of your Google searching history (and what else?), that ought to be grist for the privacy advocates’ mills. Yet another thing to uninstall if you buy an HP machine, I guess, and to be wary of installing otherwise.
Ryan Paul at Ars Technica reports a shocker – Microsoft has signed up as a $100,000 per year sponsor of the Apache Foundation which produces their number one Web server competitor.
Today at the OSCON open source software convention, the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) got an unexpected new sponsor: Microsoft. The Redmond software giant, which will contribute $100,000 annually to the ASF, joins Google and Yahoo as a platinum sponsor of Apache development.
The ASF is a nonprofit group that exerts loose organizational guidance role over a sprawling ecosystem of autonomously managed software projects, including the Apache web server and a host of libraries, frameworks, toolkits, and programs. The culture of the ASF is built upon what they call the "Apache Way," a philosophy of consensus-based collaborative stewardship and volunteerism.
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I spoke with Apache Software Foundation (ASF) president Justin Erenkrantz, who views Microsoft’s sponsorship of Apache as a step forward for interoperability. He believes that this move is based on a legitimate desire by Microsoft to foster collaborative development of Apache technologies that implement Microsoft standards. In particular, he points out an ASF project called Apache POI which offers native Java libraries for reading and writing Microsoft Office file formats.
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Erenkrantz told me that Microsoft has been moving in this direction for quite some time. The company recently invited several Apache contributors to visit its Redmond headquarters for informal interoperability talks. Microsoft’s recognition of the role that open source software will play in enterprise infrastructure comes directly from the top, he says, and isn’t just confined to rogue elements within the company.
Microsoft’s Sam Ramji offers this elaboration:
It’s critical to understand two things about our sponsorship of the ASF: what it is, and what it is not.
It is not a move away from IIS as Microsoft’s strategic web server technology. We have invested significantly in refactoring and adding new, state-of-the-art features to IIS, including support for PHP. We will continue to invest in IIS for the long term and are currently under way with development of IIS 8.
It is a strong endorsement of The Apache Way, and opens a new chapter in our relationship with the ASF. We have worked with Apache POI, Apache Axis2, Jakarta, and other projects in the last year, and we will continue our technical support and interoperability testing work for this open source software.
I’m sure there will still be a certain amount of suspicion of Microsoft’s motives but customer demand for interoperability makes strange bedfellows and the lack thereof in Microsoft server products is always a prime competitor talking point.
Yesterday Microsoft held their annual Financial Analyst Meeting for 2008 and while you can view the full video and (nearly unreadable) transcripts of the presentations, it was mostly predictable fare. However, there were a few newsworthy nuggets::
Steve Ballmer (Chief Executive Officer)
"One last thing I wanted to also talk about is an extension of our Facebook relationship where we are extending it to Search and Page Search. We will be providing an API to Facebook where they will create a rich search experience, including a Web search for the Facebook users. And that’s something that they will launch in the fall, working with us, and it’ll carry both our Web results as well as our Page Search advertising."
Bill Veghte (SVP, Online Services)
We still have the possibility of doing a search transaction, which we think makes some economic sense. If I had a worry it’s the parallel paths continue, and about the time Yahoo decides that search deal makes sense for them is probably about the time that we have committed to our own plan so much that it may no longer make sense for us."
